Schantz Organ Company, Orrville, Ohio; 150 years of Schantz organs

This year, the Schantz Organ Company is proud to celebrate its 150th anniversary. Since our 1873 founding, five generations of Schantz family members have led our staff of artisans and musicians. More than 3,000 pipe organs have been built and installed across the United States as well as Australia. They have been installed in churches of every denomination, as well as concert halls, hospital chapels, Masonic temples, sanatoriums, synagogues, orphanages, residences, and even a penitentiary chapel. 

This article will examine some of the details of how different mechanisms were developed and used, how tonal designs changed over the years, and the wide range of visual designs that can be found in our instruments. 

Evolution of Schantz action

Abraham John Tschantz¹ (1849–1921) started his company in 1873 to build “Ohio Beauty” reed organs. An unknown number of instruments were built, starting on the family farm and moving quickly to a shop in Orrville. We know of seven surviving “Ohio Beauty” reed organs, ranging from fully restored to unusable. 

After assisting with the installation of a Votteler pipe organ in 1872 (which we still care for), Abraham decided to grow his company to build pipe organs. Early records are unclear, but Schantz was building tracker pipe organs by 1891. By 1903, we began the transition to tubular-pneumatic action. In this style of mechanism, a lead tube runs from every key, pedal, and drawknob back to the chests. Pressing a key will de-pressurize the tube, which causes the chest to play a note. Most remaining contracts from this time refer to an “individual compartment for each stop” in the chest, i.e., ventil chests. Initially this was used only for pedal stops, while the manual key action remained tracker. A fine example of this is the 1904 instrument still standing in Second United Church of Christ in Tiffin, Ohio. By 1906, tubular-pneumatic key action with ventil windchests had become our standard. Trackers continued to be built until at least 1908; tubular-pneumatic actions were built until at least 1926. We built approximately 100 organs using this mechanism, and we still care for several of these instruments.

Victor A. Schantz (1885–1973) was part of the second generation, and he spent eighteen months working for Wurlitzer in North Tonawanda, New York. There he learned about building dependable electro-pneumatic chest action. In 1918, we built our first electro-pneumatic action for First Baptist Church in nearby Seville, Ohio. This was followed by electrifying two organs during the process of relocating them. By 1923, electro-pneumatic chests were our standard mechanism. This style of chest offers fast and reliable key action. It also allowed us to offer moveable consoles—quite an exciting development at the time. We continue to build pitman chests today, with subtle improvements since 1923. One important development was the Schantz cross-top pitman chest, built of laminated yellow poplar toeboards running perpendicular to the ranks of pipes. Leather gasketing between the toeboards allowed for plenty of expansion in the summer and contraction in the winter in the northern climates where most pre-World War II Schantz organs were installed.

Albert Imhoff (1898–1994) was a long-time employee who made several important mechanical developments during his time at Schantz. Indeed, we still regularly use several tools that he designed to ease production of pipes and chests. His most enduring contribution might be the tremolo device that he patented in 1959, which we still use today.

In 1980, Schantz rebuilt the 1892 Roosevelt organ at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Syracuse, New York, using slider chests purchased from Organ Supply Industries.² In the mid-1980s Schantz went further, and experimented with building tracker-action instruments again. However, we decided to continue our focus on electro-pneumatic instruments.

When Burton K. Tidwell took on the role of tonal director in 1988, he encouraged the company to explore building slider chests with electro-pneumatic key action. And so in 1993, Schantz built its first “Blackinton-style” slider chest for the Great division at the United Methodist Church in Painesville, Ohio. To maximize space efficiency and tuning stability, these chests often have pipes laid out in an M-M (or tierce) configuration. Speech is also subtly affected by the single valve and common tone channels, which operate just like a tracker. We are proud to continue to build both pitman and slider chests for clients today. 

In addition to building our own instruments from raw lumber, our team has also successfully restored historic instruments from many builders throughout the country. Major restorations include the four-manual, 94-rank Skinner built in 1929 for Severance Hall in Cleveland, Ohio.³ More recently, six months ago we completed a restoration of the two-manual, 22-rank Aeolian-Skinner that was built in 1963 for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.⁴ 

Tonal designs

As musical tastes have changed over the course of history, the tonal design of instruments has also changed. Comparing stoplists of organs built in the 1920s and 1960s by any company in the country would show a change in musical design. While some companies made dramatic shifts, Schantz was more subtle. 

Looking at stoplists from our first and second generation, an abundance of 8′ flue ranks will be seen. Upper work usually begins with a 4′ Octave and a 4′ Flute d’Amour. If the organ included a reed, it was most often a Vox Humana. The Swell would include two strings: an 8′ Aeoline and an 8′ Salicional—but no celeste to pair with them. The language used for stop names reflected an English influence with names like Open Diapason and Melodia. Often these instruments would also have a “hidden octave” to allow the effective use of super-couplers.

John Schantz (1920–2013) studied organ under Arthur Poister at Oberlin Conservatory (interrupted by military service in World War II), and visited instruments in Europe in 1950. When he took on the role of tonal director, his stoplists reflected these experiences and the Orgelbewegung (Organ Reform movement). Chorus structures included more upper work, and nomenclature reflected various national schools. Scale sizes (diameters) of principal pipes decreased slightly to increase the brightness of the sound, and wind pressures were lowered as far as 2.5 inches in a water column. All of this allowed the cut-up of the pipe mouth to be kept slightly lower. Languids and lower lips were nicked less, yielding some subtle initial “chiff” in pipe speech not found in earlier—or current—Schantz organs. Reed pipes also tended to be smaller scale, with chorus reeds primarily using parallel shallots.

Schantz has built wooden pipes in-house since we started building pipe organs. But initially, metal pipes were sourced from suppliers (Gottfried, Durst, and Schopp), as many builders do today. Shortly after World War II, Jack Cook joined the staff. A former Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner employee, Cook helped us design a pipe shop addition that was built in 1966 to allow us to efficiently make our own metal pipes, a practice that continues today. 

Following John Schantz’s retirement, Burton K. Tidwell served as tonal director from 1988–1996. Under his leadership, Schantz organs started to retreat from neo-Baroque narrow scaling and over-use of upperwork.⁵ Tidwell, an accomplished organist and church musician, insisted on spending significant time onsite doing tonal finishing. This allowed our voicers to carefully maximize the musicality of each instrument by addressing pipe speech and balance. 

It should be noted that Tidwell also designed clever unit organs for clients with limited space and budgets. These small instruments have some ranks that share bottom and top octaves to maximize budget and space, but their middle range is independent to maximize musicality. Nearly twenty of these instruments have been built.

Jeffrey Dexter joined Schantz in 1993, and quickly followed Tidwell as our tonal director. He is also a practicing church musician who continues to move us toward even more broadly voiced instruments that play a wide range of repertoire effectively. 

Visual designs

In the company’s early years, Abraham Tschantz was responsible for all design aspects of his organs, including visual design. By 1893 there were at least nine instruments by other builders within a short buggy ride of the shop that could potentially inspire his case designs. Contracts from this early time period can be subtly amusing to read:

Case of Oak or other native woods, varnished and polished, all front pipes richly decorated in gold and colors. Width about 12 feet 00 inches; depth about 6 feet 00 inches; height about 13 feet 00 inches. Style of case in harmony with the interior architecture of the Church.⁶  

Abraham’s son Edison was interested in both architectural and tonal design, and the case designs between the World Wars are likely his. 

After World War II, as Schantz became a truly national builder, Bruce Schantz (1913–2007) took on the role of foreman. One of his many developments was to establish an engineering department of three men: Chester Gable, Wilbur Herr, and Bob Romey. In addition to producing the hundreds of engineering drawings required during the post-war boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, each man developed his skills as a visual designer. 

Many instruments were installed in chambers of churches during this time, with little or nothing to be seen. But late in the engineers’ long careers, Schantz clients became more interested in seeing as well as hearing the organs they were commissioning. Bruce Schantz responded to the demand by seeking the advice of Reverend Arnold Klukas, an art historian who had taught at Oberlin College and Smith College. Klukas provided guidance for the Schantz engineers as they designed their cases. The Schantz cabinet shop began building the sort of cabinetry that had not been a mainstay at the company for decades. Our 1989 instrument at Trinity Episcopal Church in Ambler, Pennsylvania (III/49), was our first modern, free-standing case.⁷ 

In 1991 Romey, Gable, and Herr were nearing retirement.⁸ For the first time Schantz looked outside the company for one of its engineers and hired Eric Gastier, a registered architect and organist. He was mentored by Wilbur Herr and quickly designed his first case for Painesville (Ohio) United Methodist Church.⁹ With Gastier, Schantz made the transition from drafting boards and tracing paper to AutoCAD. That move was soon followed by the installation of the company’s first CNC router, a machine that allows the efficient production of casework, pipe shades, console cabinet carvings, mechanical parts, and even metal pieces to solder into new pipes. 

Anniversary celebrations

We are looking forward to celebrating our 150th anniversary over the course of the entire year. You can follow our Facebook page for some historic photos. A highlight will be our open house on Saturday, April 29, from 10:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. Our team will also be present at other local events—including sending a reed organ on a float through Orrville’s Independence Day parade! And we are proud to look to the future by sponsoring scholarships with both the Akron and Cleveland chapters of the American Guild of Organists. 

Notes

1. The spelling of the family name was officially changed in 1899 to ease pronunciation as the business was growing. Other branches of the family retained the original spelling.

2. It should be noted that Schantz provides chests, consoles, and pipes, as well as Zephyr organ blowers to almost every organbuilder in North America.

3. Featured as the cover instrument for The American Organist, January 2001, page 52.

4. For more information, see “New life for the Metropolitan Opera’s organ,” by Craig Whitney, The Diapason, November 2022, page 12.

5. For more information about his tonal design, see his article, “The Small Church Organ: A Rationale Towards Integrity,” The American Organist, April 1990, pages 95–98. 

6. From the contract for the 1903 instrument built for Grace Reformed Church in Tiffin, Ohio.

7. Featured as the cover instrument for The American Organist, October 1990, page 66. 

8. It should be noted—with deep appreciation—that many long-term employees at Schantz would “retire” to become part-time employees.

9. Featured as the cover instrument for The American Organist, October 1994, page 44. 

—Luke D. Tegtmeier, Jeffrey D. Dexter, Eric J. Gastier

www.schantzorgan.com

Emery Brothers, Allentown, Pennsylvania; Stoneleigh, Villanova, Pennsylvania

Emery Brothers,

Allentown, Pennsylvania

Stoneleigh,

Villanova, Pennsylvania

In the Fall of 2017, the Organ Historical Society moved into its new headquarters, Stoneleigh, in Villanova, Pennsylvania, the former home of the John and Chara Haas family. At the time, an Aeolian-Skinner residence organ became available and plans were made to install it in the former living room of Stoneleigh. The organ dates from a crucial period in American organbuilding when, following the Great Depression, organ business declined more than sixty percent, and it was imperative for two of the country’s prestigious organ companies, Aeolian and Skinner, to join forces and form a new company, Aeolian-Skinner.

This instrument, which began as Aeolian Opus 1790 (the company’s last residence organ), was assigned a Skinner opus number—878—and has an Aeolian-Skinner nameplate. It is not only a remarkable example of a residence organ but has survived in as perfect condition as when it left the factory three-quarters of a century ago. It is now in an ideal setting in which to introduce new generations to the organ as well as to hear the hundreds of recordings made by the world’s great organists in the early twentieth century. The installation was accomplished by Emery Brothers of Allentown, Pennsylvania, under the supervision of Adam F. Dieffenbach, a descendent of four generations of Dieffenbach organbuilders, active in Berks County, Pennsylvania.

§

In October 1931, Aeolian sold its last residence organ. The “patron,” as the company referred to its clients, was Charles Walter Nichols (1875–1963), an American chemical engineer who, with his father, William H. Nichols, organized company mergers that eventually formed Allied Chemical & Dye Corporation, a precursor of Allied Signal. Charles Nichols, a vice president and general manager, acquired forty acres in West Orange, New Jersey, that he called Pleasantdale Farm, and built a twelve-bedroom Norman-style summer house there.

As his house was under construction, Nichols signed a contract on October 13, 1931, for a 32-rank Aeolian organ, Opus 1790. According to the cost sheet, the actual price was $25,474, but Aeolian sold it for $24,775—a $700 discount—“to close the deal.” Frank Taft, Aeolian’s art director and general manager who had been with the company since 1901, handled the negotiations. Taft held a seat on Aeolian’s board of directors, would have known of the impending merger of his company with the Boston firm, and would have advised Charles Nichols that his organ would be installed by the new company.

Installation

Electricity accounted for many changes in traditional organbuilding, from pipe chests and action, to stop unification and borrowing, console design, and stop management. With electricity, the organ could be placed in multiple chambers in the front and sides of churches, moved to the opposite end of the building as an Antiphonal division, and put in a remote location as an Echo. Electricity benefited the installation of organs in private homes in the same way, allowing divisions to be placed at considerable distance from one another—the main organ in the basement, a second division over the entrance hall, the Chimes in a second-floor closet, and an Echo in the attic. The “tone chute” was devised so that the pipe chambers could be located at a distance and the tone channeled through the house, sometimes up a shaft, through a wall, across the ceiling, and down into a room.

With the private home came a new set of organ design requirements and challenges, and the Nichols organ embodied those features for which the Aeolian Company was preeminent in the residence organ field:¹

• it can be adapted to any house, large or small;

• it is unobtrusive, often occupying space not otherwise of use;

• it is built especially for the place it is to occupy;

• it may easily be made an architectural feature, or on the other hand may be entirely concealed from view;

• it is refined in quality of tone and of superior workmanship.

The organ at Pleasantdale Farm was installed in the basement with no egress whatsoever into the room in which it was to be heard. There were two organ chambers separated by a two-story shaft, roughly eight-feet square. The 26-foot high tone shaft ran to the ceiling of the vestibule, and at its right side was a 5½-foot hole in the living room wall covered by an elaborately carved wooden grille work through which the sound of the organ entered the room. The Great and Solo chambers were in a basement room to the right of the tone chute, and the Swell in a room at the left. The sound of the organ then rose to the house above and filtered into the living room. Frank Taft was aware of the potential problem with hearing the organ when he telegrammed the Aeolian-Skinner office that “Great must be voiced louder than Swell due to its location.”²

The organ

The stoplist of this, and most other Aeolian organs, was written in the “simplified” nomenclature adopted in 1907 when the company began printing registration on its player rolls. To make the names of stops as straightforward as possible for the laymen who would be operating the player mechanism, identification was reduced to tone quality. The pitch was eliminated and replaced with an adjective: a 16′ Bourdon became a Deep Flute; if it was loud, Deep Flute F; if soft, Deep Flute P. A 4′ Flute was a High Flute, a 2′ Fifteenth, an Acute Diapason. Assuming a violinist’s vibrato would be more familiar than the church organist’s Vox Celeste, Aeolian called its celeste rank a Vibrato String F or P.

Aeolian’s first organ consoles had traditional drawknobs arranged in horizontal jambs at either side of the keyboards. In 1905, stop control was changed to what has become the company’s most distinctive feature: horizontally arranged domino-shaped rocking tablets set in oblique vertical rows on either side of the keyboards. Aeolian changed their consoles in early 1924 to vertical tilting tablets set in vertical jambs at a 45-degree angle.3

Since the Nichols organ was equipped with an Aeolian Duo-Art player, the stoplist contained most of the ranks necessary for the playing of automatic rolls that reproduced the playing of live organists and controlled the registration and expression as well as all the notes. Thus, the Trumpet and Clarinet were on the Great, while the Swell had a second Trumpet (Cornopean), Oboe, and Vox Humana. The rolls did not specify either a 2′ or a mixture on the Swell (stops present on this organ), but they did call for a three-rank Echo division, and a 16′ Bassoon in the Pedal (the Echo was added five years later, and a 32′ Resultant was specified in place of a Bassoon).4 A luxurious five-rank Solo division was also provided. Aeolian economized only with the 97-pipe unit flute on the Swell, the 8′ extension of which, the Spanish Flute, was more frequently encountered as a Flute Español.5 By July 1932, when the chests were laid out, the two soft Swell strings, Salicional and Vox Celeste, had been changed to a Flauto Dolce and a tenor C Flute Celeste—the only celeste rank that does not extend full compass. This change is not reflected in the stop tablets, which still read Vibrato String P and String PP.

The five-rank Swell mixture is based on 4′ pitch, and the pipes are string scale with narrow mouths. This differs from Aeolian’s standard soft string mixture, originally called a Serafino, which was a Dolce Cornet with an 8′ (that began at tenor C) and 4′ added, and except for the Quintadena basses, were composed of Aeoline or Viol d’Orchestre pipes.6 Its composition is:

C–A 8-15-19-22-24

A#–c3 8-12-15-17-19

c#3–c4 8-10-12-15-15

From the beginning, Charles Nichols’s organ was something of a hybrid, apparently assembled from whatever was available as Aeolian-Skinner completed the unfinished installations of the two companies. The console and bench, “of Aeolian standard design,” may have already been built. The chests are Skinner, but the reservoirs are Aeolian. The swell shades are Skinner, but their motors are Aeolian. The Harp and Chimes are both Aeolian. Most of the pipework is Skinner, but we know from shop notes that the 97-pipe Swell 16′ unit flute was all Aeolian and that the first two octaves of the wooden Pedal 16′ Bourdon were Aeolian and notes 25 to 44 were Skinner.7 Not unusual, two ranks of pipes intended for other organs ended up in the Nichols instrument, in particular the Solo Gamba Celeste and Pedal 16′ Violone, both of which came from Opus 1649, owned by George Douglas Clews of South Orange, New Jersey.8 Surprisingly, the Clarinet is not the usual free reed, as specified in the contract, but a regular beating-reed rank, and the customary 1⁄4-length Aeolian Oboe is, instead, a full-length Skinner Oboe.

The organ was installed in the house at Pleasantdale Farm in late summer of 1932. It immediately became apparent that the Great division was too soft and “ineffective.” In January 1933, G. Donald Harrison ordered the wind pressure raised one inch to seven inches, four ranks replaced, and the Great Trumpet and Clarinet revoiced on the new wind pressure and made “as loud as possible.”9 The First Diapason was made the Second, with a new Diapason from tenor C (scale 40, 2⁄9 mouth), and the 4′ Octave was replaced with a new one (scale 56, 2⁄9 mouth). It was planned to change the stop wires of the Flute F and String F to make them the Flute and String P and replace them with a new Flute Harmonique and string rank, but these changes were never made.

After the 1932 volume increase, nothing further was done until five years later when, on July 7, 1937, probably at the suggestion of organist Archer Gibson who played frequently for the family, Nichols signed a contract for a four-rank Echo division: Diapason, Flute, String, and Vox Humana, plus a Tremolo. This was installed in a hall closet next to the tone chute. The three chests were stacked in order for the four ranks to fit in the cramped space, and the sound was conveyed through a two-foot by two-foot tone chute that extended some thirty feet inside the wall before exiting in the middle of the living room.

The organ received regular maintenance six times a year, every other month, until July 30, 1960, when Charles Nichols received a letter giving him thirty days’ notice that Aeolian-Skinner’s New York office was discontinuing service. “Mr. Martin Eisel of our New York staff has retired, and sufficiently-trained personnel simply is not available to handle this work.”10

After Charles W. Nichols’s death on April 26, 1963, Pleasantdale Farm became the property of Allied Signal, which used it as a corporate training retreat. In 1994, it was no longer required, and the company wanted to sell it to a developer. It being the last gentleman’s farm in Essex County, the newly formed West Orange Historic Preservation Commission tried to have the property designated a historic landmark, but Allied Signal assembled enough “authorities” to testify to the estate’s historic insignificance. At a town council hearing, Newark architect Harry B. Mahler described the house as “neo-historical eclectic with Norman overtones,” that the architect was influenced by the owner’s wishes, and that the main house lacked an overall harmony of de-sign. “It’s a mishmash or conglomeration of styles, forms, and materials which include Roman, Norman and Gothic, which are put together like pieces of a fruit salad and which the architect lost control of.”11 Failing landmark status, the property was sold to a restaurateur, who opened it as Pleasantdale Château and Conference Resort.

In the thirty-five years since Aeolian-Skinner discontinued maintenance service of the organ, the chambers had not been touched and everything remained in immaculate condition. Residence organs never had much success after the original owner died or the house was sold—if not demolished. Not only were residence organs not maintained after the house changed hands, but the console was often removed and destroyed, and the pipe chambers used as storage space, subject to water damage, and derelict. The only change at Pleasantdale was that console had been removed from the living room but stored in the basement.

Curt Mangel, the man responsible for the restoration of the great Wanamaker organ in Philadelphia, bought the Pleasantdale organ in 1995, removed it, and restored the console. He later sold it to Fred Cramer of Pittsburgh, who partially restored the organ. When Cramer decided to retire, he offered to sell it back to Mangel, at which point, negotiations were underway for the OHS to occupy Stoneleigh, and Fred Hass seized the opportunity to have Aeolian-Skinner Opus 878 installed in the family’s former residence.

Stoneleigh

The premise of Stephen King’s novel Pet Sematary is “they never come back the same” and this applies to Opus 878, but in a positive way. In its original placement, it is doubtful if twenty percent of the organ could be heard—and that at the remove of an entire floor level and a room—the tone had to make two right angles and rise 26 feet before exiting a hole in the wall. In the case of the Echo Organ, its sound was imagined traveling through a 30-foot pipe in the wall before being heard. The situation was in no way optimum for the transference of musical sound. Now, at Stoneleigh, Opus 878 is ideally situated in chambers directly under the room in which it is heard.

The installation was not without difficulties, however, and for the 81⁄2-foot-high basement to accommodate the organ chamber it had to be excavated to a depth of 141⁄2 feet. The underlying stone and granite had to be jackhammered and then the walls of the house reinforced. Each organ chamber was elegantly and spaciously laid out so that personnel can move about comfortably and all pipes are within reach for tuning. Every piece of wood was refinished and shellacked, pipes are as shiny as when new. Since its acquisition, Emery Brothers, as well as other subcontractors, did considerable restoration work to several of the organ’s components when the OHS acquired the organ. In the original installation, the metal Pedal 16′ Diapason stood upright in the Swell chamber, but at Stoneleigh the bottom octave had to be mitered, which was done by A. R. Schopp’s Sons and included reinforcing springs to reduce pressure on the joints. Schopp also mitered the wooden basses of the 16′ Violone, which are now mounted horizontally.

A large library of Aeolian Duo-Art rolls was also acquired from Curt Mangel, and the Duo-Art player has been masterfully restored by Chris Kehoe. The Concertola, the remote roll changer, is currently being restored by Kegg Pipe Organ Builders of Hartville, Ohio.

The organ is heard in the 24-foot by 36-foot living room through 4-foot by 6-foot bronze grilles in the floor at either side of the fireplace, devised by Curt Mangel. The console sits in a bay window at the right of the fireplace. Mangel also arranged for the clever installation of the Echo organ under the grand staircase in the hallways adjacent to the living room, which speaks through a grille in the side of the stairs.

Learn more about the installation of Aeolian-Skinner Opus 878 at www.emerybrothers.com.

The author wishes to thank those who assisted in the preparation of this article: Christopher Kehoe, project and site manager for the Stoneleigh organ installation; Curt Mangel, designer of the installation; and Bynum Petty, OHS archivist.

Rollin Smith is the Organ Historical Society’s director of publications and editor of The Tracker. He was awarded the Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize by the American Musical Instrument Society for his book Pipe Organs of the Rich and Famous, published by the OHS Press in 2014. The second edition of his The Aeolian Pipe Organ and Its Music has just been published.

Notes

1. Advertisement for the Aeolian-Pipe-Organ, Architecture, vol. 27, no. 1 (January 15, 1913): 22.

2. Telegram from Frank Taft to A. Perry Martin, July 14, 1932.

3. In late 1923, Aeolian had extended its pedal compass from 30 notes to what was, by then, the industry standard, 32 notes.

4. In the extant jack box, the 16′ Violone and Diapason were wired to come on together whenever the Bassoon was called for in the Aeolian Duo-Art rolls. The Violone came on alone when the Pedal String was called for. Information supplied by Chris Kehoe.

5. Its first appearance of the Flute Español was in Opus 1598, for William K. Vanderbilt, Jr., at Eagle Rock, the contract of which was signed on January 15, 1926.

6. Thanks to OHS archivist Bynum Petty for the analysis and composition of the Swell mixture.

7. Shop notes for Opus 878, July 28, 1932.

8. Ibid. George Douglas Clews (1886–1940) was treasurer of the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. and grandson of George Huntington Hartford, founder of the grocery chain. “He could play virtually any musical instrument, but the organ in his home received his particular attention.” “Kin of A. and P. Founder Dies,” Jersey Journal (December 6, 1940): 10.

9. Order from G. Donald Harrison, assistant general manager, to A. Perry Martin, January 25, 1933.

10. Letter of July 30, 1963, from treasurer of Aeolian-Skinner to C. W. Nichols.

11. Carlotta Gulvas Swarden, “West Orange Journal: Town and Company at Odds Over an Estate,” New York Times (November 20, 1994): 2.

 

GREAT (II, enclosed)

8′ First Diapason 73

8′ Second Diapason 73

8′ Flute F 73

8′ Flute P 73

8′ String F 73

8′ String P 73

4′ Octave 73

4′ Flute 73

2′ Piccolo 61

8′ Trumpet 73

8′ Clarinet 73

Chimes

8′ Harp (TC, 61 bars)

4′ Celesta (ext Harp)

Great Unison Release

Great 4

Great 16

Tremolo

SWELL (III, enclosed)

16′ Flute (ext 8′) 12

8′ Diapason 73

8′ Spanish Flute 73

8′ String F 73

8′ String F Vibrato 73

8′ String P 73

8′ String P Vibrato (TC) 61

4′ Flute 73

2′ Flageolet (fr. 4′)

Mixture V 305

8′ Cornopean 73

8′ Oboe 73

8′ Vox Humana 73

Swell Unison Release

Swell 4

Swell 16

Tremolo

CHOIR (I, duplexed from Gt)

8′ Diapason (Second)

8′ Flute F

8′ Flute P

8′ String F

8′ String P

4′ Flute

2′ Piccolo

8′ Trumpet

8′ Clarinet

Chimes

8′ Harp (TC)

4′ Celesta

Choir Unison Release

Choir 4

Choir 16

Tremolo

SOLO (floating, enclosed)

8′ Flute F 73

8′ String F 73

8′ String F Vibrato 73

8′ French Horn 73

8′ Tuba 73

Solo to Choir

Solo to Great

Tremolo

ECHO (III, enclosed)

8′ Diapason 73

8′ String 73

8′ Flute 73

8′ Vox Humana 73

Tremolo

Chimes (20 tubes)

PEDAL

32′ Resultant

16′ Diapason (ext Gt) 12

16′ Flute F 44

16′ Flute P (Sw)

16′ Violone 32

8′ Flute F (fr. 16′)

8′ Flute P (Sw)

Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co., Inc. Opus 878 (1931). 3 manuals, 49 stops, 37 ranks. Originally built for the C. W. Nichols residence in West Orange, New Jersey.

Neal Campbell

Neal Campbell is the organist of Trinity Episcopal Church in Vero Beach, Florida. He previously held full-time positions in Connecticut, Virginia (including ten years on the adjunct faculty of the University of Richmond), and New Jersey. He holds graduate and undergraduate degrees from the Manhattan School of Music, including the Doctor of Musical Arts degree, for which he wrote his dissertation on the life and work of New York organist-composer Harold Friedell. He has studied, played, and recorded on many of the organs discussed in this article.

Editor’s note: the first part of this series appeared in the February 2022 issue of The Diapason, pages 12–17.

Introduction

Based on correspondence in Barbara Owen’s and Charles Callahan’s books, we learned in the previous issue that it was Alexander Schreiner who, as the Tabernacle organ was nearing completion, asked G. Donald Harrison to have his name appear on the console in addition to the standard company nameplate. Harrison obliged by providing an ivory plate with a facsimile of his signature along with the opus number and date. In the ensuing years until his death in 1956 Harrison continued the practice of signing some organs built by Aeolian-Skinner with which he was personally involved.

Before identifying and commenting on those signature organs, a list which continues this month, I showed the progression of Harrison’s tonal ideas in the years leading up to the Tabernacle organ, based on his own words in letters to various of his associates and friends contained in Callahan’s books. In particular, GDH related that the organ for the Groton School was a turning point in the development of his tonal theories, and he considered it the smaller companion to the Tabernacle design. Also cited are several examples of both Harrison’s and Schreiner’s assessments of the Tabernacle organ in the years immediately following its completion.

Following the list of signature organs in this issue, I also comment on some organs built prior to the Tabernacle organ containing GDH’s signature plate and, assuming the Tabernacle organ to be the first organ GDH signed, I offer details as to their relative importance in the company trajectory. There follows commentary about significant Aeolian-Skinner organs of the era that do not contain Harrison’s signature, and then some brief commentary on the organs built in the era of Joseph S. Whiteford and the company’s final years.

In enumerating and commenting on the signature organs, the list and details are complete and accurate so far as I know. I have played many of the organs, but not all. I imagine there are signature organs of which I am unaware. For example, since beginning work on this article I learned via a Facebook page devoted to G. Donald Harrison and the American Classic Organ that the organ in the Worcester Art Museum bears a GDH signature plate. There likely are others, and I would be glad to hear from those with knowledge of them, preferably with documentation, and from those with additional commentary to what I provide here. Communications may be sent through the editor. Who knows, there may be an addenda or part 3 in the future!

Opus 1149: New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., 1948.

The first organ for this congregation was built by Hutchings, Plaisted, & Co. in 1873 for the original church. This was later rebuilt by John Brown and later still by Ernest M. Skinner & Son of Methuen. In 1948, the church signed a contract with Aeolian-Skinner for additions to the existing instrument, and in 1951 another contract was signed as Opus 1149-A for a rebuilding and re-installation in the present church.²⁹

This organ, now gone, was a very beautiful example of Aeolian-Skinner’s sound, even though it was of modest content and pedigree. My teacher, William Watkins, was the organist of the church at the time each contract was completed, and he and Joseph S. Whiteford did the work together on a very modest budget. Whiteford was a native Washingtonian, and he and Watkins were good friends; this was at about the time Whiteford became Harrison’s assistant at Aeolian-Skinner.

At the time, the church was famous for the preaching ministry of the Reverend Dr. Peter Marshall, who was also the chaplain of the United States Senate. Watkins at that time was a prominent concert organist, and he provided a serious program of organ music at services. The church maintained a choir of 100 singers directed by Charles Dana Beaschler. Watkins told me that he simply asked Harrison to sign the organ when they moved into the new church. At the time Watkins was probably the best-known organist in the country aside from Virgil Fox, his teacher. The organ as it turned out was entirely worthy of the Aeolian-Skinner legacy, but GDH had nothing to do with it personally. He complied with the request solely on the strength of his associations with Whiteford and Watkins. So, if it happened here, it likely happened in other places—an important clue when considering criteria that may have influenced Harrison’s decision to sign an organ.

By the time I knew the organ as a substitute in the early 1970s the signature plate had disappeared, though the screw holes where it had been were clearly visible. When the church eventually obtained a new console and made some additions during the tenure of Wesley Parrott, a replacement signature plate was made and affixed to the new console.

Opus 1150: Annie Merner Chapel of MacMurray College, Jacksonville, Illinois, 1952.

Robert Glasgow taught here before he went to the University of Michigan, and the organ was installed early in his tenure. He praised the organ in his address to the American Classic Organ Symposium in 1988. The college closed in May 2020, and the fate of the organ is still being determined.

Opus 1173: First Presbyterian Church, Kilgore, Texas, 1949.

This organ was a rebuild of a 1935 M. P. Möller, and it retained much of the pipework and structure, as well as three complete stops from the previous Henry Pilcher’s Sons organ. Nevertheless, it became one of the company’s most successful and best-known organs.

It was used for examples supporting GDH’s narration in Volume I of King of Instruments, and in Volume II played by Roy Perry, the organist of the church for forty years and one of Aeolian-Skinner’s most successful representatives and finishers. Two tracks were also played by William Watkins on Volume II, although he was identified ignominiously as the “staff organist,” owing to union regulations at the time. Volume X featured Opus 1173 in a complete issue entitled “Music for the Church,” featuring works for choir and organ. The only organ piece on the album was Bruce Simonds’s Prelude on Iam sol recedit igneus played by Roy Perry, who also played all of the choral accompaniments.

The cover photo of the new Trompette-en-Chamade for Opus 1173 was used for the first time on Volume X and continued to be featured in company brochures and other volumes of the King of Instruments series, becoming something of an Aeolian-Skinner icon. The company claimed that the stop was the first such built in America.

Opus 1174: First Baptist Church, Longview, Texas, 1951.

This organ provides an interesting contrast to its slightly older sister organ in Kilgore in that it was a completely new organ designed by Harrison for the new church, has not been altered or added to, and was placed in a strikingly modern, large edifice designed with the organ’s success in mind at the outset. The nave of the church is 92 feet high at the peak of the ceiling, and it seats 1,700 persons. The church’s pastor, the Reverend Dr. W. Morris Ford, was the driving force in both the building of the new church and the organ, and for many years thereafter musical events of significant proportions were included in the church’s program. The leading organists of the day, including Virgil Fox and Catharine Crozier, played there. An article about this organ appeared in the June 1954 issue of The American Organist stating:

Catharine Crozier made tape-recordings during the 1952 Christmas holidays for two L.P. discs [on the Kendall label]; Harold Gleason says Longview beats anything he has heard in Europe.

Opus 150-A: Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York City, 1953.

This organ is justly famous and needs little introduction, except to note that it used significant portions of the original instrument, one of Ernest Skinner’s early successes, especially structural components and orchestral stops. The organ has many unique attributes, and its success draws in large part from Harrison’s experience prior to his coming to the United States, when he worked closely with Willis on the organ in Liverpool Cathedral, a building approaching the size of St. John the Divine. For example, letters by GDH tell that in some stops the pipes for the individual notes are doubled, even tripled in the treble ranks, and that for the first time in many years Aeolian-Skinner built and voiced completely new Tuba stops for the organ.

An amusing story from the canon of oral tradition tells of Norman Coke-Jephcott, organist of the cathedral during the planning stages, and GDH visiting after dinner at Coke-Jephcott’s club in the presence of others, when Harrison asked “Cokie” if he had given any thought to what they might name the newly designed special trumpet stop at the west end of the cathedral. Cokie said that he really had not, so Harrison asked him how he planned to use it. Cokie said, “Well . . ., I suppose for state occasions.”

That is how this famous stop, voiced by Oscar Pearson on fifty inches of wind pressure, came to be called the State Trumpet. It was a major departure from the two previous horizontal reeds Aeolian-Skinner built for Opus 1173 and Opus 1208, which were essentially standard Trompette Harmonique designs voiced on moderate pressure, but mounted horizontally.

The cathedral organ is featured on Volume I of the King of Instruments in examples played by Joseph Whiteford to accompany Harrison’s narration. The instrument is again featured on Volume VI in a program played by Alec Wyton, who had recently been appointed organist of the cathedral, and on Volume VIII, played by his predecessor, Norman Coke-Jephcott.

Opus 825-A: St. Paul’s School, Concord, New Hampshire, 1953.

Opus 1196: Covenant Presbyterian Church, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1949.

This was a completely new four-manual organ for the new church building of this flagship congregation of the denomination. Richard Peek was the organist at the time, and he and his wife, Betty, directed the music here for over forty years.

Opus 1200: New England Conservatory, Boston, Massachusetts, 1949.

Originally displayed at the 1950 American Guild of Organists convention in Boston, this experimental organ saw many years of use in a studio at the conservatory. The console has three plates on it, and students recall that in addition to the company nameplate and the GDH signature plate, there was a plate identifying its use at the convention. The organ is now owned privately.

Opus 1201: St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Mount Kisco, New York, 1952.

A new three-manual organ of classic design was installed in casework designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, architect of the church, which contained the former instrument. The organ featured a divided Swell division, such as was first used in one of Ernest White’s studio organs at St. Mary the Virgin in New York City, and later at Christ Church, Bronxville, New York, Opus 1082. The Positiv division is suspended from the ceiling at the entrance to the side chapel, across the chancel from the main organ. Edgar Hilliar, organist of the church from 1948 until 1984, directed much of the design, and he recorded a complete program for Volume IV of the King of Instruments series.

Opus 1208: St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, New York City, 1951.

At the time the organ was installed, St. Philip’s was one of the largest Episcopal churches in the country and was a significant religious and political presence among the many churches in Harlem. The organ was a rebuild of the former 1943 Hillgreen-Lane organ of three manuals, reusing the console. It featured the company’s second Trompette-en-Chamade, which is similar in appearance to the one for Opus 1173 in Kilgore, Texas, except St. Philip’s is at the west end of the church.

Opus 1216: First Methodist Church, Tacoma, Washington, 1953.

Since relocated to First Baptist Church, Seattle, Washington.

Opus 1235: St. John Lutheran Church, Forest Park, Illinois, 1954. 

Photographs of the stopjambs of this organ were used as the cover of company brochures in the 1960s. The Positiv was prepared for at the time and later added by Berghaus Organ Company to a design somewhat different than the original.

Opus 968-B: Bruton Parish Church, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1955.

This was a large, four-manual organ of over 100 ranks with obvious Harrison attributes. The instrument also included an English organ from 1785 built by Samuel Green that had been donated to the church, made playable as a division of the organ. The unenclosed divisions were placed in a shallow gallery surrounding the Green organ over the altar, while the enclosed divisions were in attic chambers, including an Antiphonal division in the tower. The organ was an anachronism in the Colonial-era church, but it was very effective and saw much varied use in recitals several times a week for the many tourists who flocked to Williamsburg. The organ was replaced in 2019 by Dobson Pipe Organ Builders Opus 96.

Opus 1257: Winthrop College, Rock Hill, South Carolina, 1955.

Opus 1265: The Temple, Atlanta, Georgia, 1954.

Emilie Spivey, the organist of The Temple, commissioned Harrison to rebuild the 1931 Henry Pilcher’s Sons organ that had been installed in the new edifice. The new organ retained twenty-two ranks from the Pilcher. Virgil Fox was the consultant.

Opus 1275: Cathedral Church of All Saints, Albany, New York, 1953.

This is a rebuild of a 1904 Austin Organ Company instrument, retaining the console and some of the chests and pipework. There is a signature plate indicating that Harrison was responsible for the Great and Positiv divisions, and another indicating that Whiteford finished the Swell and Choir.

Opus 724-A: St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1956.

Significant structural portions and the three-manual console were retained from the previous organ, but little of the previous pipework was used in this rebuild, which was in the factory simultaneous with Opus 205-A for St. Thomas Church in New York City. Inasmuch as Harrison died while finishing the organ in St. Thomas, this organ may justly be identified as the last organ personally finished by G. Donald Harrison. Designed and installed during the tenure of Thomas Dunn, certain aspects of the unusual design and stop nomenclature have been attributed to him. The original Aeolian-Skinner nameplate and GDH signature plate were stolen, and the present console contains replacements.

Over the years, during the long tenure of Richard Alexander, additions to the organ included a new four-manual console built by Austin and several vintage Skinner stops, which were placed in the large ceiling chamber toward the front of the nave where most of the original Skinner organ had been located. A new Grand Choeur division built by Schoenstein was also added.

Opus 205-A: St. Thomas Church, New York, New York, 1956.

Much has been written about this famous organ, and it has become the fodder of legend, beginning with the fact that G. Donald Harrison died on the evening of June 14, 1956, after spending a day of tonal finishing on the organ as it neared completion, working against the clock to have it ready for the American Guild of Organists national convention a few weeks later. There was a subway strike in New York at the time, and GDH could not get a taxi, so he walked several blocks in extreme heat to the apartment he and his wife maintained on Third Avenue. Upon arriving home he felt poorly, but after dinner he relaxed and felt better. As he was watching Victor Borge on the television, he threw his head back roaring in laughter—and died of a sudden heart attack.

Many alterations were made to the organ over the years beginning in the late 1960s when the organ was barely a decade old. Toward the end of Gerre Hancock’s tenure he retrofitted nameplates on the right stop jamb documenting the provenance of the organ: The Ernest M. Skinner Co., Boston; Aeolian-Skinner; and Gilbert Adams. He also placed a GDH signature plate under the bottom manual near the General Cancel button.

Marcel Dupré made two stereo recordings for the Mercury Living Presence series of LPs in 1958, which assured the organ of a place in the annals of Aeolian-Skinner history. Private recordings of rehearsals and concerts by Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, Alexander Boggs Ryan, and Garnell Copeland made on the organ before the long series of alterations have recently been remastered and made available as CDs, the latter two of which are found on the Aeolian-Skinner Legacy series of recordings obtainable through the East Texas Pipe Organ Festival.

Signature organs prior to Opus 1075

Several organs built prior to the Salt Lake Tabernacle Opus 1075 also have a Harrison signature plate affixed to the console. Assuming that the Tabernacle organ was the first that Harrison signed as Barbara Owen states (see endnote #1), the exact circumstances of the placements of signatures on these pre-existing organs are subjects of further conjecture and add another layer of mystique to a subject that is inherently somewhat esoteric and imprecise.

The trajectory of Harrison’s organs culminating in the Tabernacle organ design has already been traced. That some of these organs were later given Harrison’s signature is entirely logical, as they contain many design precedents found in the Tabernacle organ that led Alexander Schreiner to ask Harrison to sign it in the first place. In that Harrison and Aeolian-Skinner later made alterations to some of these organs, it is likely that GDH himself directed his signature plate to be affixed at that time. In others the provenance is less obvious, and the exact logistics regarding their placement may be details consigned to the ages. I have attempted only to document what I know to have been in place at the time of this writing or at some point in the past. It is not difficult to fabricate these signature plates, and in several instances where the original nameplates have been stolen or broken, replacement replicas have been made available with relative ease.

Nora Williams told the story of someone in the console engraving department who would routinely make keychain fobs out of Harrison signature plates to hand out to workers and friends! So, the mystique continues.

Opus 909-A: All Saints Episcopal Church, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1933, 1940–1949.

The organ was recorded for Volume XI of the King of Instruments series played by Henry Hokans, the organist of the church at the time.

Opus 910-A: Grace Episcopal Cathedral, San Francisco, California, 1933, 1952.

Richard Purvis played a program of his compositions for Volume V of King of Instruments, although he was identified simply as “staff organist.”

Opus 927: Trinity Church on the Green, New Haven, Connecticut, 1935, 1949.

Opus 932-A: Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, Tennessee, 1935, 1952.

Harrison’s professional correspondence mentions his traveling to Memphis to work on the organ. Adolf Steuterman was the long-time organist of Calvary Church, a respected musician in that city, and was friendly with GDH.

Opus 936: St. John’s Chapel, Groton School, Groton, Massachusetts, 1935, 1945–1962.

The organ was featured for Volume VII of King of Instruments, played by Marilyn Mason.

Opus 940: Episcopal Church of the Advent, Boston, Massachusetts, 1935, 1964.

Opus 1024: University of Texas at Austin, Recital Hall, Austin, Texas, 1941.

This was a large, four-manual organ for the recital hall in the new music building, containing the usual four manual divisions, plus a Positiv, Bombarde, and floating String organ. A new console was provided in 1965 as Opus 1024-A, which does not contain a Harrison signature plate. The organ has since been installed in a new church building for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Amarillo, Texas, which has been widely documented on video, and a signature plate is not on it.

However, in a letter to Brock Downward for his dissertation about Harrison, E. William Doty, professor emeritus and long-time organ teacher at the university, wrote that:

After the College of Fine Arts had been in existence for two years, the Board of Regents authorized the construction of a music building plus an organ to go in the recital hall . . . . Its acoustics were designed by C. C. Potwin of Electrical Research Corporation. He was recommended by Paul Boner, UT Professor of Physics, who was one of several consultants on the building and the organ. Ned Gammons of Christ Church, Houston, now at Groton School was another consultant whose ideas on design were incorporated . . . . In my judgement [sic] G. Donald Harrison was the greatest artist tonal designer of the first half of this century and we are very proud that he signed the University of Texas organ because in his judgement it was one of his best.³⁰

So, the mystique continues, but there is no doubt that this organ in its new home is a success and probably far exceeds its effectiveness in its original location according to those who knew it then, including Gerre Hancock who studied on it with Doty when he was a student at the university.

Opus 1036: Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1942.

Conclusions

Beginning with the Groton organ in 1935, which Harrison himself identified as a turning point in his design of the Classic organ, it is a fairly straightforward task to identify further similar designs throughout the 1930s and 1940s leading up to the Tabernacle organ in 1945—and from thence to others in a similar trajectory, which GDH himself then signed, up until his death in 1956. Even so, if one were listening to a variety of the company’s instruments during this period, whether signed or not, there is no foolproof, obvious, definite distinction. Similarly, from a technical standpoint there are no absolute defining attributes or “smoking gun” signals that separate an organ that GDH signed from one he did not. They each bear a family resemblance in sight and sound, and some may be said to be more effective than others for any number of tangible and intangible reasons. It is, however, a given assumption that these signature organs are considered to be the best of the best that the company built.

In addition to tonal and technical attributes, however, there is another intangible aspect to the signature question that, from a purely scientific standpoint, is difficult to precisely define. Given the uniform tonal success of each of the signature organs along GDH’s developing Classic designs, I feel certain that, when all is said and done, Harrison’s reason for signing an organ also represented some very personal, quiet tribute of his own bestowing—some personal affinity GDH had for the way a particular job turned out, occasioned by its design and outcome together with perhaps some pleasant personal association with the incumbent, such as clearly was the case with Opus 1149 in Washington. Or perhaps there was the sense of a successful achievement that involved working with a collaborator on the job that reminded Harrison of his association with Schreiner and the outcome of the Tabernacle organ. There may have been some personal affinity that prompted Harrison to pronounce his own benediction on the job. And Philip Steinhaus’s letter to William Self at the outset of part 1 of this article confirms that the signature organs represent jobs with which Harrison was “deeply and personally involved.”

There certainly are wide varieties of styles to the signature organs, located in places humble and impressive, sizes small and large. Most of them are complete organs of GDH’s sole design that echo his aspirations for the Tabernacle organ, although there are obvious exceptions that contain significant portions of other builders’ work. Some signature organs are rather straightforward manifestations placed in ideal locations, and some are very unusual schemes or are the result of challenging layouts and unusual engineering solutions, such as Opus 1201 in Mount Kisco.

Some scholars and historians have posited that signature organs contain only pipework designed and finished by G. Donald Harrison. However, there are several examples that clearly suggest otherwise, such as the Washington and Kilgore organs cited previously, but also Opus 1265 at the Temple in Atlanta, Opus 1275 for the Cathedral in Albany, Opus 1208 in Harlem, Opus 1134 for Symphony Hall in Boston, and the various rebuilds of original Skinner organs that are indicated by the suffix letter “A” following the original opus number.

It is also very interesting to consider some important Aeolian-Skinner organs that were not signed by Harrison, including two of the company’s most famous: The Mother Church in Boston (Opus 1203 in 1949, the largest single organ produced by the company) and The Riverside Church in New York (Opus 1118, 1947–1955). Each is a very large, beautiful organ, in a prominent church in a major city, containing many singular attributes associated with Harrison and the American Classic Organ movement. Each possesses a sound that is unmistakable as being from Aeolian-Skinner of the era. However, each of these landmark organs was designed under the significant influence of others—in this case Lawrence Phelps and Virgil Fox, respectively. That is, their design inception was just the opposite of Opus 1075 for the Salt Lake Tabernacle where GDH was given a free hand and charged at the outset to build the organ as he saw fit. So it seems likely that GDH may not have been moved to sign organs so closely associated with others, even though they were still built by Aeolian-Skinner.

In neither case, though, can it be said that Harrison or the company in any way denigrated these organs or regarded them with less favor than the signature organs. The organ in The Mother Church was featured twice in the King of Instruments series of recordings (Volumes IX and XIII) and in reissues. GDH was quick to praise the sounds that Virgil Fox got from the Riverside organ when writing to Willis about it. When Harrison died suddenly in 1956, Virgil Fox immediately offered to play for his funeral—though in the end the small service at St. Mary’s Church in Hampton Bays, Long Island, had no music whatsoever.

The large organ formerly in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston, Massachusetts, was not signed by Harrison, for the presumed same reason, that it was the result of the collaborative design of Ned Gammons of the Groton School and George Faxon, the organist of the church. Yet, the organ contains all of the hallmarks of the American Classic movement—lavishly so in fact, and it was featured in the first two volumes of King of Instruments. There appears to be no obvious hints of pettiness or retribution in Harrison’s decisions regarding jobs that he did not sign.

St. Mark’s Church in Philadelphia is yet another example of a large, prominent organ in a notable urban parish church with the same Harrison tonal attributes as contained in its contemporary sister organs in Advent in Boston and Groton, yet it was not signed by Harrison. We know that Harrison and/or Aeolian-Skinner later made significant alterations at both Advent and Groton, and it is easy to readily assume that GDH, or someone else, added the signature plates at that time. If that be the case, it is ironic that St. Mark’s, which has received no substantive alterations, does not bear Harrison’s signature, while the other two that have been altered do!

Harder to document are instances where there exists a beautiful example of Harrison’s work without the signature, and where it is known that GDH had difficult dealings in some aspect of the job with representatives of the church and/or the incumbent organist. I personally know of a couple of likely candidates for that scenario—but it is hard to substantiate, there is little to be gained by “outing” a church in this way, and in the end it is of little consequence, except that in the process these places are permanently deprived of the intangible benefit of Harrison’s privately bestowed, yet very obvious public stamp of approval for all to see as the years pass by.

For the researcher, and especially for the player, the presence of the Harrison signature plate on the console suggests an invitation to simply consider the organ on another level, to check the organ’s provenance and files, to try to see who was behind a given project, and attempt to discover the lines of continuity between Harrison and the project, further appreciating the music the organ produces in that light. In providing commentary on the signature organs, I have been able to dig deeper in some cases than others, and in no way do I present this monograph as the end of the story on this topic.

Aeolian-Skinner after Harrison

In the years after Harrison’s death, Joseph Whiteford continued the practice of placing his nameplate on many organs, but to my knowledge it was never in the form of his signature. Although I have not researched it carefully, it also appears that a larger percentage of the company’s total output during Whiteford’s tenure as tonal director received his nameplate. Of course, the total number of organs the company built continued to decrease as the 1960s led inexorably to the company’s sad denouement in 1972.

Much has been written, and even more spoken, about Aeolian-Skinner’s demise. Twenty-five years after the company closed, Michael Gariepy, who had been on the company’s technical staff, wrote:

There were four “coffin nails” which sealed the fate of Aeolian-Skinner—

1. The death of G. Donald Harrison;

2. The Southeast Expressway, which split the operation in two;

3. The departure of Joseph Whiteford from the company;

4. The move to Randolph; such were the disruptions caused by relocating the company that it took six months to return to “normal” operational efficiency.³¹

There is no doubt that Harrison’s prestige brought credit and contracts to the company, and his death is generally thought to have been the beginning of its end—and that may be so. But there is every indication, including Dun & Bradstreet reports, that Aeolian-Skinner was never in a favorable financial position following World War II and its attendant inflation. Joseph Whiteford clearly was not the typical career “organ man” that Harrison had been. There is no doubt that many of the old-timers in the company did not resonate to his patrician ways and may have lacked confidence in his leadership. But in the post-Harrison years Joseph Whiteford designed some impressive organs, including those for the symphony orchestras in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. And under his successor Donald Gillett’s direction, Aeolian-Skinner built the organ in the new Kennedy Center Concert Hall in Washington.

Many “Hail Mary” attempts were made to keep the company afloat in its closing days, and there were valiant attempts to adapt to the changing times and tastes, such as moving to a more economical and efficient factory outside of Boston and introducing tracker-action organs. Roy Perry told me that Martin Wick seriously pursued the idea of purchasing Aeolian-Skinner and moving it to Texas, with Roy as tonal director. Martin said he had no trouble building Chevrolets in one factory and Cadillacs in another! But his board did not go along with the idea. In the end it was all too little, too late.

Having played many organs designed by G. Donald Harrison, Joseph Whiteford, and Donald Gillett over my entire professional career, I feel that many of Aeolian-Skinner’s organs built since 1956 are very beautiful indeed and are landmarks easily on a par with some of those the company built under Harrison. It is prescient to read what Emerson Richards said about Joseph Whiteford when he wrote to Henry Willis shortly after Harrison’s death:

I think that he [Whiteford] has more ability than he is given credit for but he is impatient and for some reason does not inspire confidence—just why I cannot say.³²

In considering Aeolian-Skinner after Harrison’s death, Charles Callahan’s sage advice in the introductory material to his second book is still worthy of consideration:

The pendulum of taste and opinion is constantly in motion. Caught up in the enthusiasms of a particular moment in time, it is all too easy for anyone to belittle others’ achievements. Perhaps Joseph
Whiteford and his work are overdue for a fair assessment.³³

The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Charles Callahan, William Czelusniak, Allen Harris, Douglass Hunt, Allen Kinzey, and Larry Trupiano in the preparation of this article.

Notes

1. Barbara Owen, The Mormon Tabernacle Organ: An American Classic (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1990), 43.

29. Allen Kinsey and Sand Lawn, comp., E. M. Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner Opus List (Richmond, Virginia: Organ Historical Society, 1997), 152.

30. E. William Doty to Brock W. Downward, December 14, 1974. Downward diss., 97.

31. Michael Gariepy to Charles Callahan, February 9, 1996, Callahan, Aeolian-Skinner Remembered, 372.

32. Emerson Richards to Henry Willis III, July 12, 1956. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 433.

33. Callahan, Aeolian-Skinner Remembered, xvi.

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______ . “Slider Chests?” The Organ Institute Quarterly, 3 (Summer 1953).

______ , and Emerson L. Richards. “Chorus Reeds, French, English, and American.” The American Organist, vol. 24, nos. 4–7 (April 1941: 107–108; May 1941: 141–143; June 1941: 172–174; July 1941: 203–204).

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King, John Hansen. “The King of Instruments.” The Diapason, vol. 94, no. 5, April 2003.

Kinsey, Allen, and Sand Lawn, comp. E. M. Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner Opus List. Richmond, VA: The Organ Historical Society, 1992, 1997.

Langord, Alan C. “Aeolian-Skinner: A Study in Artistic Leadership.” Bachelor’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1959.

Nies-Berger, Édouard. Albert Schweitzer As I Knew Him. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2003.

Owen, Barbara. The Mormon Tabernacle Organ: An American Classic. Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1990.

Richards, Emerson L. “Advent Organ in Boston.” The American Organist, vol. 19, no. 9 (September 1936): 304–307.

_______ . “An American Classic Organ Arrives.” The American Organist, vol. 26, no. 5 (May 1943): 104–108.

_______ . “Boston Symphony Hall’s Third Organ.” The American Organist, vol. 33, no. 1 (January 1950): 17–22.

_______ . “Curtis Institute’s New Organ.” The American Organist, vol. 25, no. 1 (January 1942): 10–14.

Schreiner, Alexander. “The Tabernacle Organ in Salt Lake City.” Organ Institute Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1 (1957).

_______ . “100 Years of Organs in the Mormon Tabernacle.” The Diapason, vol. 58, no. 11 (November 1967): 19.

Zeuch, William E. “An Appreciation of the Work of G. Donald Harrison.” The American Organist, vol. 16, no. 9 (September 1933): 438–439.

About The American Organist magazine entries: for most of the twentieth century the official journal of the American Guild of Organists was The Diapason, independently owned, edited, and published in Chicago. Simultaneous with The Diapason was an organists’ journal titled The American Organist, published by T. Scott Buhrman in New York City. These two journals coexisted until 1967 when the AGO established its independent journal, initially titled MUSIC: The AGO/RCCO Magazine reflecting that it was the official journal of the American Guild of Organists and the Royal Canadian College of Organists. After Buhrman died in the 1960s his journal continued briefly, but it soon ceased operations. The AGO soon adopted the title The American Organist for their official magazine, but it is not in any way related to Buhrman’s magazine. In this bibliography the two 1988 entries referring to The American Organist refer to the magazine’s later iteration as the journal of the AGO.

John Bishop

Designed for the space

When an organ builder accepts the challenge of creating a new instrument for a particular space, they incorporate all the features of the room: architecture, acoustics, ambient climate, and building surfaces like floors, walls, and ceilings. All are factors that influence the design of the organ. Many builders have a portable windchest equipped with blower, regulator, and sample pipes that they ship to the church, allowing them to hear and compare pipes of different scales at different wind pressures in the room where the organ will go. If the walls, ceilings, and floors are made of materials that absorb sound, the builder recommends changing them by replacing carpet with stone tiles, sealing soft ceilings with material that reflects sound, and doubling or tripling the thickness of sheetrock walls.

A formula is developed that includes the scope and content of the organ, the scales of various ranks of pipes at certain wind pressures, and the adaptation of the room that encloses it. It is both a scientific equation and an artistic composition. It is purposeful and intentional; there is no sense of “hit or miss.” Building a pipe organ is an expensive adventure, and it is important to get it right.

Perhaps I am describing an ideal. Often there are compromises because of budget limitations or conflicts with other groups within a parish about changing the look and feel of a sanctuary—a congregation that is accustomed to carpets and pew cushions may not part with them easily. In any case, it is customary for an organbuilder to spend a lot of time and effort creating the most effective equation considering the limitations.

If each instrument is carefully planned for a specific room, how can it be that we routinely relocate organs from one place to another? That has been central to my work as director of the Organ Clearing House for nearly twenty-five years. We accept as new listings those organs we judge to be good candidates for relocation, and we help guide the placement of an organ based on our sense of the same design equation used to plan a new instrument. Sometimes it is necessary to design and build a new case to get the architecture right. In other cases it helps to rescale some of the stops to increase the depth of the sound of the organ. Increasing the scale involves making the pipes larger in diameter relative to their length by adding new pipes for the lowest few notes, moving the pipes up the correct number of holes and cutting them shorter to make the correct pitch. Increasing scale along with raising wind pressure will make an organ more bold and powerful, ready to fill a larger space with sound.

§

A couple years ago the Organ Clearing House organized the relocation of Gabriel Kney’s Opus 93 (two manuals, forty ranks), built in 1980 for First Community Church of Dallas, Texas. The organ was offered for sale because that church decided to divest itself of real estate to create an endowment it could administer to meet specific needs of the community, confining the organized worship to more simple surroundings. The organ’s original home was a contemporary room with a sharp-pitched roofline, something like an A-frame. It was moved to a richly decorated chapel at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in Saint Meinrad, Indiana.

The organ has classic lines and proportions. It is housed in a free-standing “honey” oak case with a narrow lower section that spreads wider midway up to accommodate a common three-tower design. The towers have flat roofs that neatly parallel the flat but coffered ceiling of the chapel. The honey color of the case complements that of the wooden chairs, while walls and ceiling are a similar but darker hue. Someone seeing the organ for the first time in the chapel at Saint Meinrad might think it was originally designed for that room.

The bright and powerful classic tones of the organ carry effectively through the large space, which with its contoured ceiling provides a rich acoustical surrounding. Mr. Kney’s equation for the creation of an instrument for the church in Dallas transposed easily to the different surroundings.

About twelve years ago, we relocated a 1916 Casavant organ, Opus 665, from the “downstairs church” at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston, Maine, to the nave of Church of the Resurrection on East Seventy-Fourth Street at Park Avenue in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Four 16′ stops from previous organs in the church were incorporated and added to the specification. The Pedal Principal 16′ became the Great 16′ Violone; the Gemshorn 16′ extended the Postif Dulciane 8′ to play at 16′ on both manual and pedal; the Pedal Bourdon 16′ serves as an independent pedal stop with the remote Positif; and the Pedal 16′ Quintadena was cut shorter to create a 10-2⁄3′ Quinte, which effectively increased the scale of the stop by five notes. A fourth “new” 16′ stop was created with the extension of the Récit 8′ Hautbois with a new bass octave so the rank could speak at 16′ pitch on manual and pedal, making a total of four sixteens and a ten-and-two-thirds added to the already sonorous Double Open Wood, Subbass, and Trombone. Pretty good foundation for a forty-rank organ.

Originally, there were two Open Diapasons on the Grand Orgue. We left one in that division as the usual foundation of the main principal chorus, and the other, larger diapason became the base of a new Solo division, which includes a restored Skinner French Horn and new replicas of a Skinner Harmonic Flute and high-pressure Tuba.

These and other modifications transformed the organ from a downstairs small-town organ to an upstairs big-city organ. You can read about this instrument and follow links to see full specifications at resurrectionnyc.org/organ.html.

Monumental art

I am thinking about moving large objects that were made for specific places after reading an article by Hilarie M. Sheets published in The New York Times on October 13, 2023, “Moving a Masterpiece to LaGuardia is a High Wire Act.” Orpheus and Apollo is a metal sculpture 190-feet wide and forty-feet deep comprising 188 Muntz metal bars¹ suspended in a system of complex angles from 444 woven stainless-steel wires. The wires were fastened to eye bolts in the ceiling personally by the sculptor Richard Lippold (1915–2002) in the grand lobby of Philharmonic Hall in New York City’s Lincoln Center. The work was in place for the opening of the hall in 1962 (E. Power Biggs, Catharine Crozier, and Virgil Fox shared the dedication recital of the Aeolian-Skinner organ there that year), but fifty years later conservators grew concerned about the stability and safety of the massive complex work. The wires that suspended the heavy metal bars were fraying, and as a second reconstruction and renaming of the hall was being planned, Orpheus and Apollo was documented, dismantled, and placed in a storage facility in New Jersey. Just like seemingly countless pipe organs I have seen go into storage, there was little hope that the grand piece of art would ever see the light of day.

Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, lecturer at the Parsons School of Design and Pulitzer Prize winning author of the column “Skyline” in The New Yorker magazine, was serving as consultant to Lincoln Center for the selection of the architect of the transformation of Philharmonic Hall, then Avery Fisher Hall, into Geffen Hall, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for the reconstruction of LaGuardia Airport. As he followed the planning of those two major projects, he noticed similarities in the two monumental spaces and conceived the idea that Orpheus and Apollo might be installed at LaGuardia. “Lincoln Center had a sculpture in search of a space, and the airport had a space in search of a purpose,” Goldberger said of the atrium at LaGuardia. The article continues, “With the sculpture as the centerpiece of this new gathering spot with a mezzanine lounge, Goldberger feels it is ‘entirely consistent with what Lippold intended, which was to enliven an architectural space, to have people moving around it.’”

Peter Flamm, executive director of the Lincoln Center Development Project, said, “We believed LaGuardia to be the best solution that provided a manner to appropriately appreciate the piece.” Lincoln Center not only gave Orpheus and Apollo to the Port Authority but also funded the restoration and re-lacquering of the 188 metal bars. When conservator Marc Roussel dismantled the sculpture, a precise 3-D scan of the original installation was created—that was included in the gift to the Port Authority.

Frank Rapaccioli of the fine-arts mover Dun-Right Carriers was responsible for the installation at LaGuardia, converting the model into a format that mapped out the placement of the screw-eyes and the lengths of the new steel wires that determined the height of each end of the sculpture. The original layout had to be changed to accommodate the lower ceiling in the LaGuardia atrium, and conservator Roussel was charged by the Lippold Foundation to observe and approve those changes in the interest of preserving as much of the integrity of the original installation as possible.

The installation took thirty days. At the outset, there was a lot of trial and error as the installers and curators realized how easy it was to leave wires rubbing against others, and many pieces had to be cut down and moved even a few inches for clearance. As the work progressed they got the hang of it, and there were far fewer “back steps” in the second half of the project.

The article concludes, “While profoundly disappointed about the sculpture’s displacement, Anthony C. Wood, executive director of the Ittleson Foundation, which originally funded Orpheus and Apollo at Lincoln Center, is relieved that it was so well documented and hasn’t been consigned to storage, in pieces, for eternity. Putting it in a new and exciting home, where it will be seen by more people, is the silver lining,” Wood said. “But you don’t have to be an art expert to know that it’s going to be different. How could it not?”²

This story speaks of inspiration, cooperation, and flexibility. Paul Goldberger had the great idea, and officials and conservators at Lincoln Center and the Port Authority cooperated to make it happen. The fact that the iconic sculpture would not fit in the new space in its original form did not stop them. They reconfigured it to fit, retaining as much of the work’s integrity as possible. The overriding sentiment was that it is better to have the work renovated and installed in a busy public place than to have it languish in storage, never to be seen again.

§

We at the Organ Clearing House have faced just this question with numerous pipe organs. Imagine a large three-manual, nineteenth-century organ built by E. & G. G. Hook or Henry Erben. It is installed in an immense balcony, stands thirty or forty feet tall, and has a footprint thirty feet wide by twelve feet deep. (I am thinking of a particular organ I visited last week.) What newer church can accommodate an instrument of that size? But when a potential purchaser who loves the sounds of organs from that era arrives representing a church that has adequate space for this organ but would wish to equip it with electric stop action and a solid-state combination action, I would be tempted to refuse on the grounds that the historic monument should be preserved without alteration. What do I achieve? Nothing. The interested party moves on, and the organ remains dormant.

Why not consider adapting that grand organ to suit the needs of a modern congregation? After all, there would be only a few churches that could house such a massive organ. A careful restoration of the windchests, reservoirs, keyboard and stop action, and pipes could be enhanced by adding electric solenoid stop action motors to the existing mechanical stop action. The only actual violation of the original organ would be drilling piston buttons into the keyslips between the keyboards, and the original keyslips could be retained in case someone later chose to reverse the project and remove the electric action.

The organ would be used and admired, and it would sound just as it did when it was new. It would leave the vast assortment of historic organs languishing in storage or in abandoned buildings.

When conservators restore a piece of furniture owned by Marie Antoinette, they place it behind velvet ropes, keeping visitors from touching it. When we restore or renovate a pipe organ, we intend it to be used. The purpose of preserving an organ is so people can hear the timeless sounds.

§

There is a grand relief-plaster sculpture thirty feet wide called The Spirit of Transportation in a secondary waiting room in the Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia. One passes it on leaving the main concourse and heading for the public restrooms or the Amtrak first class lounge. It was created by the Austrian sculptor Karl Bitter (1867–1915) who emigrated to the United States in 1889. The Spirit of Transportation was created for the opening of Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station and depicts the history of transportation from ox carts to fanciful imaginations of air and space craft. When the Thirtieth Street Station was built, its predecessor the Broad Street Station was demolished, but curators and designers had the foresight to preserve this and several other important sculptures. One might have preferred to have the work installed in a busy central place in the new station rather than in an out-of-the-way place, but at least it was preserved where it can be freely admired by the public.

§

In the first weekend of November 2023, my colleague Amory Atkins and I attended dedication concerts of the rebuilt and reimagined 1977 Klais organ at Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church on Lexington Avenue (at the CitiCorp building) in Manhattan. I have written previously about the emergency removal of the organ a couple winters ago following a major water main break at the intersection of East Fifty-Fourth Street and Lexington Avenue. The lower levels of the church were profoundly flooded, and while there was only about a half inch of water in the organ, there was great concern about mold developing and the need to remove the organ quickly for remediation in the entire room.

There had been questions about the viability of the instrument for many years. It has an iconic case designed by Massimo Vignelli, but the windchests and mechanical action were problematic, the wind system was inadequate, and the tonal structure was substandard. The organ was shipped to the workshop of C. B. 
Fisk, Inc., in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where it was reworked with a new wind system and tracker action, several lovely replacement voices, and a general revoicing. The resulting instrument is a joy to hear. The preservation of the case and visual design of the organ was an important move, retaining the original architectural content of the striking and unusual sanctuary.

This project was a great example of how thoughtful changes can extend the life and improve the usefulness of an artwork. It is exciting to celebrate that organ’s rebirth concurrently with the installation of the restored and re-invigorated Lippold sculpture, Orpheus and Apollo. Neither project was a strict historical restoration, and both brought new life to important works of art through open-minded appraisal and thoughtful craftsmanship. There are a lot of ways to interpret the concept of historical preservation.

Notes

1. Muntz metal is an alloy of 60% copper and 40% zinc that is stronger, harder, and more rigid than other forms of brass.

2. Hilarie M. Sheets, “Moving a Masterpiece to LaGuardia is a High Wire Act,” The New York Times, October 13, 2023.

Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas

Lynne Davis

The Marcussen organ in Wiedemann Hall—The vision realized

In 1956, Walter J. Duerksen, dean of the College of Fine Arts, and Gordon B. Terwilliger, graduate coordinator for the School of Music at the then University of Wichita, envisioned the installation of a three-manual organ in the recently completed Duerksen Fine Arts Center’s Miller Concert Hall as the pièce de resistance for that attractive and functional building. Although a fund was started for this purpose, other considerations intervened, and in 1964 Dean Duerksen instead decided to use the fund for the installation of an 18-rank Casavant organ (voiced by Lawrence Phelps, then at Casavant) in the new Grace Memorial Chapel.

However, the dream of an organ for Duerksen Fine Arts Center persisted. Terwilliger, who had become dean of fine arts, invited organ builder Lawrence Phelps, who then had his own firm in Erie, Pennsylvania, to the campus in 1975 to discuss whether or not the installation of a pipe organ was feasible in Miller Concert Hall. By this time, nearly twenty years after its completion, the building had limitations that precluded the successful installation of any fine organ. Phelps reported that a new building was needed. Such a prospect seemed hopeless—or decades away.

However, the extraordinary achievements of many Wichita State organ students of that time—thirty-five students in 1965—kept the vision alive. Some reason for optimism occurred in 1979, when an organ recital hall was added to a long list of university building needs and again in 1981, when it was moved to a top-priority status.

Robert Town, associate professor of organ, was encouraged enough to consult Lawrence Phelps, who suggested shapes and dimensions for the proposed building. Also, President Clark D. Ahlberg began soliciting municipal support for what had become a most ambitious vision. By 1982 Town felt that university planning and funding were progressing well enough for him to contact nine organbuilders, both American and European, regarding an estimate and preliminary stoplist for an organ with mechanical key action.

Community philanthropist and music-lover Gladys H. G. Wiedemann was one of those who believed the dream could become reality. In 1983, as president of the K. T. Wiedemann Foundation, Inc., she pledged $500,000 for the purchase of the recital hall organ. Her single generous act provided the impetus necessary to carry the project forward. University President Warren B. Armstrong reaffirmed the plan; Mrs. Rie Bloomfield, through the Sam and Rie Bloomfield Foundation, pledged $150,000 toward the building; the Wichita State University Board of Trustees guaranteed the remainder of the financing; and contracts were signed with the local architectural firm of Schaefer, Johnson, Cox, and Frey Associates, and with organbuilders Marcussen & Søn of Aabenraa, Denmark.

S. J. Zachariassen (great-great-great grandson of the founder) of Marcussen & Søn, Kansas City acoustical consultant Robert Coffeen, the architects, and the university organ committee met in Wichita to meticulously collaborate on the building and organ dynamics. The final design of the organ and the stoplist was drawn up by Robert Town and Zachariassen, with suggestions from Lawrence Phelps and renowned concert organist Gillian Weir.

The firm of E. W. Johnson and Son began construction of Wiedemann Hall in December 1984; it was finished in the spring of 1986. Of neoclassic design, this glorious building houses a main auditorium which is 100 feet long and 40 feet high, has slightly fanned side walls, and originally sat 425 people. (In 2014, all the seats were replaced to adhere to accessibility concerns. As a result, there are now 412 seats, including twelve accessible ones.)

Neither effort nor expense was spared to ensure the ideal acoustical setting for the great Marcussen organ, the first of three installed in North America by the respected now 216-year-old firm. The auditorium walls are 26 inches thick, and the stage wings are of oak paneling. The side and rear walls are made of sealed plaster and are fitted from top to bottom with sound-diffusing panels; the ceiling’s irregularly shaped forms serve the same purpose. The seating’s terraced floor is made of glazed concrete. Two aisles are carpeted, and the stage floor, steps, and apron are of oak parquet. The result is three seconds of reverberation time. The vision, the years of hoping and planning, and the generosity and efforts of many culminated in this crucial measure of success for Wiedemann Hall.

The Marcussen organ itself is no less impressive. Entering the hall, one is immediately struck by the harmonious and grandiose focal point the organ represents at the bottom of the auditorium seats. Its case is 34 feet high, 25 feet wide, and seven feet deep, made of European white oak. The console is made of exclusive palisander, also known as Brazilian rosewood. Console measurements are a modified American Guild of Organists standard, and the tuning is in equal temperament. It took five highly skilled workers from the Marcussen firm seven weeks in 1986 to install the organ; ten more weeks were required for the voicing, which was directed by Olav S. Oussoren and his assistant, Emil Bladt.

The naturals of the organ’s manual keys are ivory covered, the sharps, ebony. The organ has three pedals: a crescendo pedal; a mechanical swell pedal, which operates vertical shutters across the entire front and top of the Swell case; and a third pedal, which mechanically opens and closes the Brustwerk doors. The pedal keys are oak, the sharps ebony capped. The stopknobs are made of rosewood, and their stems are brass. The pedal combinations are brass tongues. Upgrading the original combination action of 16 generals, Solid State Organ Systems installed a new 256-series combination action in 2007.

The Brustwerk is in its traditional location above the console. Above it are the Spanish Trumpet and Positiv organ. The Positiv is slightly recessed, with the 8′ Praestant in front. The Great organ is divided on either side of the Positiv, with the 8′ Prinzipal in front. In the absence of a Rückpositiv, the Positiv’s effect is nonetheless successful; its smaller-scale sound emanates from the very center, while that of the Great organ spans the entire front. At the top, the Swell organ extends forward. The pipes of the Great 8′ Hohlflöte are in front of it, and the Pedal, with the 16′ Prinzipal in front, is on the sides.

The front pipes are 75% tin, and their mouths are leafed in 23-carat gold, as are the interiors of the Spanish Trumpet’s flared resonators. The bass pipes of the 32′, 16′, and 8′ ranks are made of copper. The remaining metal pipes are made of tin and lead alloys. Except for the Brustwerk’s 8′ Holzgedackt, which is oak, all of the wood pipes are spruce. The low 12 pipes of the very large-scale 32′ Untersatz are behind the case on the back wall.

The principals are warm and of generous scales. The Great reeds are of German character; those of the Swell and the Positiv Cromorne, French. Single stops and small combinations are clear and distinct, and the full choruses and tutti are intense but never obtrusive. The organ’s very complete specification, including two individual-rank Cornets as well as one mounted Cornet, accommodates literature of all periods equally well.

The reason for the project’s success is both simple and complex: thirty years after a vision began, resourcefulness, expertise, talent, funds, and commitment coalesced on the campus of this university to create a recital hall designed especially for an organ and an organ specifically for a hall. Through Wiedemann Hall and the great Marcussen organ, the dream was realized. It is a truly magnificent accomplishment, to be enjoyed by countless numbers of music-lovers and dreamers.

The organ was dedicated by Gillian Weir in two recitals on October 2 and 6, 1986, followed by a year-long recital series, including an appearance by Catharine Crozier on March 24, 1987.

Perpetuating the dream

How to prolong, conserve, and sustain a dream? The desire for a lasting legacy, a way of serving the community and providing a particularly spectacular performance venue for the School of Music and other artists provoked the creation of two main recital series.

It is interesting to note that this beautiful setting of the organ and the building were almost entirely funded by two women—Gladys Wiedemann for the organ, and Rie Bloomfield for the lobby, its decoration, and the endowed series.

Rie Bloomfield Organ Series

After the inauguration of the organ, Rie Bloomfield visited Wichita for seven years from California, always asking my predecessor, Robert Town, to play the organ for her. Her love for this organ prompted her sizeable gift in 1994 of $200,000 to endow a new recital series for the great Marcussen organ in Wiedemann Hall, baptized the “Rie Bloomfield Organ Series.” Artists of national and international importance have given of their brilliant talents for over twenty-eight years.

For the first twelve years, artists signed a panel in the back of the organ! They now sign a guest book. A feature I added some years ago is the popular “Conversation with the Artist,” during which I interview the guest organist during the concert. It gives the audience a more personal view of the artist, who shares with us details of their activities, what message to give to young organists, and program notes about the pieces they are performing.

To this day, the Sam & Rie Bloomfield Foundation has always generously supported this series without reserve. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the series, celebrated with a brilliant gala in 2021 due to covid lockdowns, was in 2019.

Wednesdays in Wiedemann

In 2007, I created the “Wednesdays in Wiedemann with Lynne Davis” organ recital series, which consists of eight half-hour recitals over two semesters, each with verbal program notes. These include Christmas and year-end Pops concerts. My desire was to give the university and Wichita community the opportunity to regularly hear and see this extraordinary hall and instrument. With the advent of YouTube and live-streaming, I started video-recording the recitals and have a list of over fifty videos on the organ channel of our WSUTV, which is accessible through www.wichita.edu/organ.

Another vital reason to create this series was to give an opportunity for organ students to perform and to invite other instrumentalists, either faculty or other School of Music students, to perform with the organ. For each performer, a great advantage is that their performance is forever archived as a live-stream recording on the School of Music’s Facebook page or on the YouTube organ channel. Thus, the organ’s vast number of musical possibilities as a supreme collaborator, accompanying in a quasi-orchestral capacity, and as a solo instrument are offered to the public, nationally and internationally thanks to the live streaming.

An active organ program

The very existence of the Marcussen and Wiedemann Hall provides a singular opportunity for organ students to develop necessary traits for a variety of jobs that are proposed today in the workplace. Not everyone will make their living as a concert artist. What are the other talents, then, that one needs to develop? Technique will always have its base in the practice of playing the piano. Virtuosity and basic organ coordination in advanced organ repertoire depends on it. But then, how does one manage an instrument that is a wind instrument and not a percussive one like the piano? Singing, voice training, being in a choir, conducting, accompanying choirs and other instruments gives the student organist ammunition to be competent in a variety of ways in their future jobs. It’s a way of creating a whole and complete method to develop his/her talents.

At Wichita State University’s School of Music, we have the necessary classes and courses to address this accession to a primary level of competence. Core courses in applied organ, organ literature and design, organ pedagogy, keyboard skills are offered for bachelor’s and master’s degrees in performance (keyboard/organ) and music education (keyboard/organ emphasis). A Performer’s Certificate is also offered, which is an ideal way of taking a year following a bachelors’ degree, before or after a master’s, or just as a way of further developing one’s performance skills.

Additionally, graduate staff assistant positions are available, offering the possibility of accompanying the major choirs at the school both on the piano and on the organ. Other performance possibilities include playing for the Wednesdays in Wiedemann series and other school of music events. The extent of community involvement, becoming well known to the greater university and city audiences is significant, and there are many church job possibilities. Scholarships are important, and we have many to offer.

Great advantages are to be had with lessons taken directly on the Marcussen with added practice time available. Development in touch (mechanical action), familiarity with the inner workings of the organ, its complex electronics, mechanics, easy access to the various divisions and their pipes, even tuning, are all addressed. One of the most significant advantages of studying on this instrument is to be able to develop a qualified and serious aptitude for registration. The organ “plays” all periods very well and can be used to hone one’s knowledge of registrations of these various periods.

Pedagogical projects range from student-teaching in area teachers’ studios to researching and putting together a complete video presentation on registration and pedal technique. In 2020, the Wichita chapter of the AGO requested such a video for their programming. Two of my students and I wrote, performed, and recorded this 1½-hour video.

Other advantages of studying here at WSU include participation in organizing the different organ events. Yes, it helps to know what to do, and how and when to do it. It’s a good apprenticeship. Greeting and getting to know distinguished guest artists as well as hearing them perform is a very big perk!

Other important ways to learn

We have had quite a few special events in the past sixteen years of my tenure here at WSU. All have involved sharing with the public in an exceptional way this grand organ in its grand hall.

RBOS Organ Day. From 2008 to 2020, we hosted an afternoon of presenting the Marcussen to local young musicians, how an organ works, lectures by Bertrand Cattiaux on the organ at Notre-Dame de Paris, guest organists performing and giving a masterclass to students.

The American Alain Festival. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jehan Alain in 1911, we organized a conference in 2011 with concerts of Alain’s organ, choral, piano, and chamber music, discussions, lecture presentations (Aurélie Decourt, Marie-Claire Alain’s daughter), receptions, collective meals, and a final performance on the mighty Wurlitzer at Century II by Jim Riggs.

Thirtieth anniversary of the Marcussen (1986–2016) gala. To mark this significant date, I gave a concert including the interdisciplinary participation of students from the other two schools in our College of Fine Arts­—performing arts and art & design. Art & design created the special poster and made three sculptures to reflect the three movements of Jehan Alain’s Trois Danses: Joies, Deuils, Luttes (joys of life, death, struggles in life). Performing these dances with an organ on a stage gave me the possibility of choreographing these dances in an exceptional way: students from the school of performing arts and their teacher choreographed each of the movements, making the Marcussen also dance, using in a different way this extraordinary space.

Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rie Bloomfield Organ Series (1994–2019) gala. Two illustrious graduates of WSU gave a brilliant joint concert, Brett Valliant and Tate Addis. Each performed works as soloists, gave a joint performance on piano and organ, and presented a masterclass for organ students. In each of these events, organ students played an important part in the organization and implementation of the schedule.

The future

From the early dream to present-day activities, the great Marcussen and Wiedemann Hall continue to carry on the tradition of excellence established from the beginning. The 2022–2023 season of the RBOS continues with two distinguished guest artists, the third being our very own WSU Symphony Orchestra, Mark Laycock, director, and myself in a grand concert of organ and orchestra on November 28, featuring the Poulenc and Guilmant, opus 42, organ concerti.

From May 21–25, 2023, a special opportunity for advanced organists will take place: Masterclass on the Marcussen with Lynne Davis. Limited to ten applicants and some auditors, we will take an in-depth look at French organ music, including morning sessions and afternoon lessons, as well as a participants concert at the conclusion of the class. Further details will be forthcoming, and those interested are invited to contact me directly. Following the masterclass, a Pipe Organ Encounter (POE), sponsored by the Wichita chapter of the AGO, will take place from June 25–30, 2023.

The continuous objective of shining a light on the “organ” for all to discover or to rediscover is our ongoing theme; to do our part in promoting this exquisite and complex instrument throughout the world and to train talented students to be its unique ambassadors. We are fortunate that the great Marcussen organ and Wiedemann Hall are the ideal tools to accomplish these goals.

—Lynne Davis

Robert L. Town Distinguished Professor of Organ

www.wichita.edu/organ

[email protected]

Marcussen & Søn (1986)

GREAT (Manual II)

16′ Gedacktpommer

8′ Prinzipal (in façade)

8′ Hohlfloete (in façade)

8′ Rohrgedackt

4′ Oktave

4′ Spitzfloete

2-2⁄3′ Quinte

2′ Oktave

8′ Cornet V (from f)

2′ Mixtur V–VI

2⁄3′ Zimbel III

16′ Dulzian

8′ Trompete

4′ Trompete

Chimes (25 notes)

SWELL (Manual IV, enclosed)

16′ Bourdon

8′ Salicional

8′ Voix Celeste

8′ Flute Harmonique

8′ Flute a cheminee

4′ Prestant

4′ Flute Octaviante

2-2⁄3′ Nasard

2′ Octavin

1-3⁄5′ Tierce

2′ Plein Jeu V

16′ Basson

8′ Trompette

8′ Hautbois

4′ Clairon

Tremulant

POSITIV (Manual I)

8′ Praestant (in façade)

8′ Gedackt

4′ Prinzipal

4′ Blockfloete

2-2⁄3′ Nasat

2′ Oktave

2′ Waldfloete

1-3⁄5′ Terz

1-1⁄3′ Quinte

1-1⁄3′ Scharf IV

8′ Cromorne

8′ Spanische Trompete

Zimbelstern (6 bells)

Tremulant

BRUSTWERK (Manual III, enclosed)

8′ Holzgedackt

8′ Quintadena

4′ Koppelfloete

2′ Prinzipal

2′ Gedacktfloete

1′ Siffloete

1⁄6′ Zimbel II

8′ Regal

Tremulant

PEDAL

32′ Untersatz

16′ Prinzipal (in façade)

16′ Subbass

8′ Oktave

8′ Gedackt

4′ Choralbass

4′ Rohrpfeife

2′ Nachthorn

2-2⁄3′ Mixtur V

32′ Kontra Fagott

16′ Posaune

16′ Fagott

8′ Trompete

4′ Schalmei

Couplers

Sw/Gt, Pos/Gt, Bw/Gt

Sw/Pos, Sw/Bw, Pos/Bw

Gt/Pd, Sw/Pd, Pos/Pd, Bw/Pd

 

Solid State Organ Systems MultiLevel Capture System, with 256 memory levels (16 generals)

Brustwerk pedal

Swell pedal

Adjustable Crescendo

 

Manual compass: 61 notes

Pedal compass: 32 notes

Mechanical key action

Electric stop action

65 stops, 84 ranks, 4,623 pipes

 

Photo credit: Jeff Tuttle and Lynne Davis

Neal Campbell

Neal Campbell is the organist of Trinity Episcopal Church in Vero Beach, Florida. He previously held full-time positions in Connecticut, Virginia (including ten years on the adjunct faculty of the University of Richmond), and New Jersey. He holds graduate and undergraduate degrees from the Manhattan School of Music, including the Doctor of Musical Arts degree, for which he wrote his dissertation on the life and work of New York organist-composer Harold Friedell. He has studied, played, and recorded on many of the organs discussed in this article.

Editor's Note: Part 2 is found in the March 2022 issue.

Introduction

During their seventy-plus-year history it was customary for organs built by the Skinner Organ Company and the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company to contain an ivory nameplate bearing the firm’s name on the console, usually on the keyslip, although there was a brief period in the early 1960s when the company name was stenciled in gold letters in a way similar to that on pianos. Astute aficionados can sometimes even determine the era in which the organ was built by carefully examining the subtle differences in type styles that were used over the years.

After World War II some jobs featured an additional ivory nameplate bearing the signature of G. Donald Harrison, Aeolian-Skinner’s president and tonal director, which also gave the opus number and date. There is no definitive information to suggest why some organs received this signature plate, what criteria were used in selecting them, or what purpose it served. Much conjecture and oral tradition among enthusiasts has been promulgated to the point where there is a resultant mystique surrounding these “signature organs.”

The only thing approaching documentation on the subject that I have found is in the form of three letters, the first two written approximately twenty years before the latter. Barbara Owen writes in her history of the organ in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Utah, Aeolian-Skinner’s Opus 1075:¹

Shortly before the organ was completed, [Alexander] Schreiner wrote to Harrison, “I have long thought it would be a matter of pride to us, to have your name appear on the console name plate. Perhaps also the year, 1948. If that is possible, we should be very pleased.”² Harrison complied by providing a signature plate on the right of the nameboard [keyslip], complementing the company plate on the left. Thus originated a practice that later became customary with Aeolian-Skinner. But it is perhaps nowhere more appropriate than on the Tabernacle instrument, which Harrison himself in later years felt to have been his finest work.

Harrison replied to Schreiner:

I note what you have to say about the nameplate, and I will provide one, but I fear it will not be ready to go [be shipped] with the console. I would like to have my name in the form of my signature if I can get this engraved in Boston.³

Then in 1968 Philip Steinhaus, executive vice-president of Aeolian-Skinner, wrote to William Self, organist and master of the choristers of St. Thomas Church, New York City:

The officers of the Company would be greatly pleased if you would be good enough to help us continue to honor the work of the late G. Donald Harrison by removing his personal nametag [sic] from the console at St. Thomas Church. As you know, Mr. Harrison only agreed to using these tags [signed nameplates] on the jobs with whose finishing he was deeply and personally involved. We are in no way commenting on the present tonal characteristics of the St. Thomas organ, except in all honesty to say that its character is not recognizable as the work of Mr. Harrison, or the Aeolian-Skinner Company for that matter.⁴

From these letters we learn that: a) it was Schreiner who first brought up the idea in the form of a request; b) Harrison replied with the idea of using a facsimile of his signature for that purpose; and c) twenty years later Steinhaus summarizes that these signature plates were put on organs that were finished by GDH and with which he was personally involved. However, upon examining and analyzing existing signature organs and the documented commentary about them, certain patterns do emerge and logical conclusions can be drawn, some of which are tonal and technical, and some purely personal.

It would be a fairly straightforward enterprise to simply list the known signature organs from Opus 1075 in 1948 onward until Harrison’s death in 1956, and I have done just that later in this article. Beyond that, however, I want to set the scene and cite some examples that show the trajectory of Harrison’s tonal ideas leading up to Opus 1075, together with information about the Harrison signature organs.

Historical context

A bit of history sets the stage for the emergence of G. Donald Harrison in the Skinner organization and helps explain why Harrison’s personal involvement came to be sought after and highly prized. The complete story is best told in the letters of the principal players as contained in Charles Callahan’s first book.⁵ But the main thing to take away, as it relates to the topic of the signature organs, is that customers and the leading organists of the era began to prefer instruments that contained the classic elements Harrison gradually came to espouse, and increasingly customers specifically said so. Many of these younger organists had themselves traveled to and studied in Europe and knew some of these historic organs for themselves. They were drawn to Harrison’s concepts of classic design for the simple reason that much of the organ repertoire, especially contrapuntal music, sounded better on these instruments, as opposed to the older style of symphonic and Romantic organs. The era of the large symphonic organs, characterized by a preponderance of eight-foot tone, high wind pressures, and contrasting imitative stops, gradually morphed into organs that were eclectic and modern, which were inspired by historical precedence designed first and foremost to play repertoire written for the organ.

G. Donald Harrison came to America to work for Skinner in 1927, largely through the friendly exchanges between Ernest Skinner and Henry Willis III. Harrison worked for Willis, and it was Willis who sent GDH to Skinner, with the initial idea of his being an emissary to incorporate Willis tonal principles into the Skinner organ. It is hard to discern a precise point at which GDH’s influence began to be felt.

Among the earliest Skinner organs GDH worked on was Opus 656 for Princeton University Chapel, Princeton, New Jersey. Marcel Dupré played it while on tour in America, and he praised the organ. After the fact, Skinner wrote to Harrison:

Dear Don:

I felt some embarrassment when Marcel [Dupré] handed me that testimonial so personal to myself regarding the Princeton organ, and I can imagine you may not have been without some feeling of being left out of it, so I want to say right here that I hold your contribution to the quality of that great instrument to be such that my opinion of you as an artist, publicly and privately expressed, is more than justified.

Cordially, and with great admiration,

Ernest M. Skinner⁶

Other early organs showing Harrison’s influence include Opus 851 for Trinity College Chapel in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1931, where Clarence Watters, the college organist, was a leading disciple of Marcel Dupré in America. By the time of Opus 909 at All Saints Episcopal Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Opus 910 for Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, California, each from 1933, Harrison’s influence was clearly present, even though each of these organs, in their initial scheme, showed no radical departure from the prevailing Skinner stoplist. It was during this time that Ernest Skinner left the company to set up a competing shop in Methuen, Massachusetts. Also, the firm acquired the organ division of the Aeolian Company to become the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company in 1932.⁷

By 1935 it is clear that GDH was forging a tonal path different from Skinner, and different from Willis, for that matter! Henry Willis in England writes to Emerson Richards:

Now quite privately to you, Don is not doing what he went to Skinners for, and that was to give Skinner Organs a Willis ensemble. Don is striking out on what might be termed an individual line, obviously influenced by you in the strongest possible way [original emphasis]. You will know that Don’s Continental European experience is limited to a few French organs—he has not to my knowledge been in any other European country and most certainly has not heard the various types of German organs Baroque or otherwise. On the other hand he can visualize them perfectly well, especially after hearing Steinmeyer’s Altoona job. [The Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Altoona, Pennsylvania.]

Now you know that I appreciate your personal standpoint and ideals, even if I can’t go all the way with you sometimes. I consider that you, far more than any other man, have rescued American organ building from the romantic morass it was in when I first visited America in 1924. I consider that my own influence has not been inconsiderable for I did get Skinner interested in a decent ensemble and “sold” him mixtures, although he could not learn how to use them properly. Also if it had not been for me, Don would not have gone to Skinners, for the purpose and object I named above.⁸

As Harrison’s star continued to rise, so Ernest Skinner’s waned. In Skinner’s exit scenario from the company, there was a period of five years when Skinner continued to draw a salary, but his personal involvement in the company was limited solely to activities where the customer had specifically requested his services. He was not allowed to call on customers, solicit new business, or incur any expense to the company, and was to come to the factory only if requested for business purposes.

Attributes and examples of the emerging American Classic style

Aeolian-Skinner produced some very interesting organs during this period, and they varied enough in style and specification so as to appear to be completely different products. It is relatively easy to ascertain which organs reflected GDH’s emerging classic principles and which did not. For example, consider Opus 985 from 1938 for St. Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University, New York City, and Opus 964 from 1937 at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn, New York: with a very slight nod to progressive design, such as two mixtures in the Great, Plymouth could be mistaken for a typical four-manual Skinner scheme by comparison. Whereas the Columbia University organ featured two unenclosed divisions in addition to the Great—Positiv and Brustwerk—and a fully developed independent Pedal organ, and was heralded as a new voice for a new day, installed on the campus of a major university in the country’s largest city. It was a significant achievement that attracted considerable notice. E. Power Biggs played and recorded extensively on the organ.

The theories that Harrison worked toward in these early years of the Great Depression may have been inspired by historic principles to some extent. He was gradually developing a new eclectic type of organ comprising existing mechanical components that were excellent, together with tonal properties that blended Romantic and Classical concepts, put together into a new, entirely American product on which early, Romantic, and contemporary music could be played with artistic conviction.

Technical attributes of these new organs included low to moderate wind pressures, gentle but clear articulation, chorus structure with an emphasis on the four-foot line, carefully worked out customized mixture compositions that were attentively finished as the ascending scale approached the breaks, and customized scaling and halving ratios in different parts of the compass—generally narrower scales in the bass and gradually broader in the treble to effect a subtle gradual singing quality in the treble register, and a focused line in the bass. Where it was practical, unenclosed divisions were placed in an open location within lines of sight to the audience.

Consoles in general were of the same style and design as Skinner had developed them, with a few customized touches to suit the customer as needed, such as smaller drawknob heads, dropped sills to effect a lower profile, occasional narrow swell shoes, varying degrees of console gadget assists, and, later, tracker-touch keyboards. Harrison was in favor of simplifying console controls, and he and Schreiner tended to agree on that as their discussions for the Tabernacle organ progressed. One need only compare the consoles for the Tabernacle with The Riverside Church, New York City, each of which contained five manuals and were in the factory at about the same time. Upon seeing pictures that GDH had sent to him, Henry Willis expressed his displeasure:

The new console at Riverside for Virgil Fox is, in my opinion, the ugliest, and unhandiest, large drawstop console to which my attention has been drawn.

I say nothing of the stop grouping in threes or two as fancy—it seems to be liked in the U.S.A.—nor of the apparent lack of added vertical space between departments. Nor the row of tablets over the fifth manual . . . . But as for the arrangement of the toe pistons—help!

The swell pedals look ridiculous to me—the wide space in between reminding me of the old console at Wanamaker’s, Philadelphia.

Of course, this is Virgil Fox’s design—not yours—and I suppose you took the line that he could have what he wanted.

But I think that no organist should be allowed to impose his own pet idiosyncrasies on an instrument over which he, temporarily, presides.⁹

Harrison replied a couple weeks later:

Your criticism of the Riverside console is well taken but you might modify some of your views if you actually examined it. When you are dealing entirely with detached consoles, if you use the English two rows per department arrangement you would have to build a skyscraper. I see no point to it . . . . The number of couplers is essential when you are dealing with Chancel and West End organs plus a 15-stop Echo all in one instrument. I have no use for the double organ idea.

Regarding the width of the Swell pedals with gaps. We have built one more extreme job than Riverside in this regard, Grace Church New York [Opus 707]. With narrow shoes plus clearance you can get five in where four would normally go with equal safety in clearance.

The Riverside console is normal in most respects, the added controls can be ignored by a visiting or future organist. You should hear the results that Virgil Fox can produce with this set up.¹⁰

Beginning in the early 1930s these new classic attributes increasingly appeared in prominent organs where Harrison was able to advance his theories. Keeping in mind that there were about 100 persons employed by the company, it is clear that GDH was continually aware of the need to secure contracts to provide for his workers. He may not have been able to be so creative on each job, but all organs that passed through the factory in one way or another began to manifest these tonal properties in varying ways and degrees. But there are some jobs that obviously stand out as icons of this new style, which came to be known via Emerson Richards as the “American Classic Organ.”

One thing is certain that as soon as the war is over and materials become available, there is going to be a big demand for either rebuilds or entirely new organs, and I am hoping that we will be able to push the Classic Organ. As you may have noted in the articles on the St. Mary’s job [Op. 819-A, St. Mary the Virgin, New York, 1942], I am endeavoring to give this the name of American Classic, although it is going to be awfully hard to dislodge the word Baroque. I did tag the name Romantic on the old ones, and that has stuck, even in England, but an expressive word for the new organ which is only quasi-Baroque in principle with some French, English and American practice, makes a new word imperative but difficult to find.¹¹

In addition to the aforementioned organs for Columbia University and St. Mary the Virgin in New York, a sampling of these organs includes Opus 940 for Church of the Advent in Boston, Massachusetts; Opus 945 for Calvary Church, New York City; Opus 948 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Opus 951, the famous Busch-Reisinger Museum for Germanic Culture at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, which company records simply refer to as “Germanic” or “Experimental.” This organ was entirely unenclosed and was on loan to the museum yet remained the property of the company.
E. Power Biggs made extensive use of it for demonstrations, recitals, and his famous regular Sunday morning radio broadcasts, and it did a lot to promulgate Harrison’s new classic concept.

As the decade progressed others included Opus 981 at Westminster Choir College, Princeton, New Jersey, for Carl Weinrich, his so-called “Praetorius” organ—a near twin to the Busch-Reisinger, which happily still exists in excellent condition, having been recently restored by Stephen Emery, a WCC alumnus; Opus 1007 for Christ Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which GDH used for musical examples in 1942 in an LP album titled Studies in Tone wherein he narrates some of his developing ideas on tonal design, complete with appropriate musical examples; another organ for Westminster Choir College, and a large five-manual organ for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Opus 1022. Also, a significant summary of Harrison’s thinking during the development of the American Classic organ may be found in the article “Organ” in the 1944 edition of Harvard Dictionary of Music, an essay authored by Harrison. The article even contains a suggested stoplist for a three-manual organ that is easily recognizable as similar to some of these very organs.

However, among this pantheon the organs built in the 1930s and early 1940s leading up to his design for the Salt Lake Tabernacle, the organ in St. John’s Chapel of the Groton School, Groton, Massachusetts, Opus 936, stands out as a significant point of departure in the development of the American Classic Organ. Harrison often mentioned this organ in his correspondence in the ensuing years, particularly as he contemplated the design of the Tabernacle organ and in his reflections on it once it was finished. Writing to Alexander Schreiner, shortly after signing the contract for Opus 1075, he says:

With the location of the organ, and the magnificent acoustics of the Tabernacle I feel there is a real chance to build the most beautiful organ in the world to date, at least that is what I am going to try to do. I say this not in a boastful spirit, but rather in one of humility. I don’t suppose you have ever heard the organ built for Groton School in 1936. The next time you come East I think we will make a little pilgrimage to hear this organ. I have always felt it is perhaps the most successful organ we have built to date, and indeed it is praised alike by those who are for and aggressively against that type of a tonal scheme. This morning I was thinking about it, and it suddenly struck me that unconsciously I developed the scheme for Salt Lake as a kind of a big brother to the Groton organ. In other words, it seems to carry that tonal structure to its logical conclusion.¹²

Writing to Ralph Downes, the consultant for the new organ in Royal Festival Hall in London, in which Downes was contemplating elements of classical design, Harrison describes his experience:

In 1936 I visited Germany complete with drawing equipment. I soon gave up taking measurements and decided it was better to absorb the musical result and then reproduce them in a modern way and in a manner that would be acceptable to modern ears and in our buildings. Providing you obtain clarity in polyphonic music, what more can you ask, providing you add and blend in romantic and modern material.¹³

And, later, GDH writes to Willis, his old boss in England who had begun to question some of his ideals and goals:

I am not attempting in any way to imitate the Silbermann organ or any Baroque organ for that matter, but am merely reintroducing some of the features of the older organ which have been lost in the modern organs, and using, to some extent, the principles utilized by the older builders in the general chorus; the sole object, of course, being to make the instrument a more nearly ideal one for the playing of the best literature written for this particular medium.¹⁴

And Richards, who could always be counted on for his unvarnished opinion, says:

I agree that the Harrison work is merely based on the theories of the older organ work. Remember that Don has no first-hand acquaintance with German work whatsoever, unless we can consider the Steinmeyer at Altoona as such, and Henry [Willis] says that his knowledge of French organs is really not extensive, so that, in reality, he has been working on his own with only a hint from the older work. This is all for the best, since it results in creation, not imitation. [Emphasis mine]

In making the point that Groton is an American achievement I am not trying to overstate the facts as I see them. America has profoundly changed Harrison’s mental and artistic makeup. To some extent even Don realizes this. He knows that he now chooses to deliberately do things that he would not have dreamed of doing when he left England ten years ago. He has caught the mobility and restless drive that seems to be characteristic of America. Can’t you see this in the Groton organ? Its all-around flexibility, its readiness to take any part in the scheme of things from Scheidt to Ravel, its break with tradition, its vivacity, and its sense of driving power. Of course, it is saved from the less commendable American traits by Don’s sense of artistic restraint. It is not a Daily Mirror, but a New York Times.¹⁵

Plans emerge for a new organ for the Salt Lake Tabernacle

Beginning in the 1930s customers began to request that Harrison design and finish their organs. Even though Skinner was long out of the picture by the time GDH and Alexander Schreiner began discussions in 1945, the contract drawn up by the Tabernacle authorities still reiterated their desire that Harrison design the organ:

It is specifically agreed that a substantial and material part of the consideration for this agreement is the skill, knowledge, experience, and reputation of G. Donald Harrison in the design, construction, finishing, installation, and tuning of pipe organs; that the builder, therefore, enters into this agreement with the distinct and definite understanding that the Purchaser shall receive, without additional cost to it, the personal supervision and service of the said G. Donald Harrison in the performance of this contract and in particular in the designing, finishing, installing and tuning of said organ.¹⁶

Alexander Schreiner, chief organist of the Tabernacle, was born in Germany and had studied in France, and was one of the serious organists to emerge on the scene in the post-World War II era. He was an organist’s organist and was one of the most visible in America at the time, owing to his concert tours and weekly broadcasts of the Tabernacle choir and organ. He was the driving force in plans to rebuild the old Austin organ, even though he shared playing duties with Frank Asper, his elder colleague, who was himself a respected and popular organist in his own right. It does appear that Schreiner was the point person in all negotiations pertaining to details of the new organ and in the campaign for it, a campaign that began almost accidentally: Schreiner wrote Harrison asking his opinion about some minor improvements and additions. The idea of a completely new organ did not appear to be on either of their horizons at the outset.

Given the speculative nature of Schreiner’s request and the great distance involved, Harrison asked for a fee to visit and submit a report, not something he typically did for serious prospects. When the authorities granted his request, he had no choice but to make the trip, so he went and gave his candid opinion, which was that unless they decided to build a completely new organ, the company was not interested in undertaking makeshift alterations to the organ, which he felt was mediocre to begin with and which had already seen its share of rebuilds and additions to that point.

Schreiner’s desire for a new organ ultimately prevailed, apparently with little overt opposition. Once the contract was signed, he was effusive in his praise of Harrison as the chosen one to design the organ. In several instances he wrote for attribution that he felt that unless one person (that is, Harrison) was given the freedom to design the organ he would rather soldier on with the old organ, even with its faults. After the job was announced and as work progressed, inquiries for testimonial solicitations and advice began to arrive at Schreiner’s desk. Typical of his response is this reply to my predecessor at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, where Aeolian-Skinner ultimately installed its Opus 1110 in 1951:

The reason the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company was chosen for the new work in the Salt Lake Tabernacle was merely because this company does by all odds the finest work. That we have not been disappointed in the results achieved is clearly shown in the letter which I wrote to the company recently, signed by myself and fellow organists, and published in the recent Diapason.

I wish you well in your efforts to have your contract awarded to this company. In our case we did not even consider any competing bids. Also we did not ask for any reduction in the prices which were quoted. I would always prefer an Aeolian-Skinner organ to any other, even of twice the size.¹⁷

In the early stages of designing the Tabernacle organ there flows a great deal of correspondence between Harrison and Schreiner, and every detail was considered carefully. It was agreed that Schreiner would be the spokesperson in corresponding with GDH, although there is considerable documented input from Frank Asper, often on seemingly inconsequential matters such as “Will the strings be soft enough?,” what to do about harp and chimes, and whether to retain the old Vox Humana or build a new one. In the end they did both!

Through the correspondence it is clear that Schreiner had an above-average understanding of the principles of organbuilding, just as did Harrison of organ playing. Their discourse is thorough and often detail laden, but always courteous and respectful—and helpful in coordinating the many logistical details of the complex job, one of the most vexing of which was that part of the organ was to remain operational at all times for the weekly choir rehearsals and Sunday broadcasts. Phone calls appear to have been rare, and written correspondence was the main medium of communication.

During World War II organ companies were severely limited in their ability to undertake new construction, and basically no new organs came from the Aeolian-Skinner factory during this time. In addition to rebuild and service work, Harrison spent the war years developing new sounds inspired by classic antecedents, and stops such as the Rohr Schalmei, Cromorne, and Buccine were born. Some of these began to be incorporated into schemes for new organs once production resumed after the war, including for the Tabernacle. Harrison proposes one such:

One other thing that has worried me a little bit is the absence of any reed on the Positiv, and I remember being considerably intrigued by the 16′ Rankett as made by Steinmeyer during my visit to Germany. I have never made one to date, and as it is good in an organ of this size to have some novelties, I have taken the liberty of adding a 16′ Rankett to the Positiv.¹⁸

Once the contract was signed, Harrison began to share the news with his friends and colleagues, in each case describing the unique circumstances of Aeolian-Skinner’s selection being without competition and commenting on the remarkable acoustical properties of the Tabernacle. His report to Henry Willis is the most complete account:

In my last letter to you I hinted that I was on the track of a very interesting and important deal. It has now been signed, and is for a completely new organ for the Salt Lake City Tabernacle. The present organ is a typical Austin which has been gingered up from time to time, the last work being carried out in 1940 when Jamison put in some Chorus Mixtures, which by the way are exceedingly poor.

Last spring I was invited to go out there and look over the situation to see what could be done to further improve the organ, but being skeptical about the whole thing I demanded [an] $800.00 fee, which I thought would probably close the matter as far as we were concerned. To my great surprise they accepted the proposition, so I had to make the trip. I gave a written report which, to put it shortly, condemned the present instrument, and told the authorities that we would not touch the job unless a completely new organ was built, with the exception that we were willing to include three original wood stops which were placed in the Tabernacle when it was built. These pipes were made on the spot by Bridges, who was an English organ builder who had been out to Australia, and had become converted to the Mormon faith, and finally wound up in Utah. I think he was trained with the Hill outfit. These pipes are the lower 12 notes of the 32′ Wood Open, which by the way, has an inverted mouth, and the famous wood front pipes which look exactly like a 32′ Metal Open. They are built up in strips triangular in cross section all glued together, and they appear to be as good as the day they were installed. Even the foot is built up in this way, and the tone is surprisingly good. The other stop we are incorporating is a wooden Gedeckt, which is also excellent. What happened to the original metal pipes in the organ is a mystery. Nobody seems to be able to account for the fact that there are none of them in the present instrument. All of the metal stops that are there now are Kimball 1900 vintage and Austin 1915–1940 . . . .  With these magnificent acoustics and the super location of the organ in the open it gives a real chance that one rarely gets. I was given a free hand with the specification after being told of the requirements that the organ must meet, so that I was able to work out something which more or less carries the ideas on which I have been working to their logical conclusion.¹⁹

Giving Harrison this degree of independence was really an extraordinary gesture on Schreiner’s part, especially when compared to the very intense, hands-on requirements that clients and their consultants place on organbuilders today. I can think of several instances where the builder was so obligated to accommodate that the builder’s own identity is hardly discernible in the finished product. Here was Schreiner, one of the finest, best-known organists of the day who was not only comfortable with but insisted upon totally giving over to Harrison the design of this highly visible organ, and in the end acknowledging Harrison’s work by asking him to sign the organ.

In this case the results are as unique as the circumstances surrounding its inception, but it was by no means unique for clients to place this sort of complete trust in Harrison. Writing to Brock Downward for his dissertation about Harrison and the American Classic Organ, Alexander McCurdy said:

At the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia [Opus 1022 in 1941], when the rebuilding processes were going on (we had three of them during the tenure of Mr. Harrison with Aeolian-Skinner) I spent much time with him. I made it a point to discuss with Mr. Harrison the particular needs of the organ department at the Curtis Institute of Music, then went off to California and let him BUILD the organ—I did not devil him! During the year in the period when the instrument was built, I spent a little time checking a few details in the factory in Boston, but for the most part I let him alone. During some of the discussions he loved to talk about some of the organs we both liked such as the Father Willis organ in Salisbury Cathedral—he seemed sure that another one couldn’t be built quite as fine as that one but he certainly did indeed try in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. He always made much of the fact that his ideal in building an organ was to have it so that MUSIC could be played on it, not just one period but the complete organ literature.²⁰

The completed Tabernacle organ

In Opus 1075 for the Salt Lake Tabernacle we have then an example of a very complete, large organ in a prominent and famous location that was completely Harrison’s design without a lot of outside interference. It certainly has stood the test of time. We know from several letters that he felt this was his greatest work, and it is worth taking the time to consider his own descriptions and reflections on his work once it was complete:

The enclosed photographs are of the console of the new Tabernacle organ at Salt Lake City. I have just returned after spending a couple of weeks on the job and I am returning after Christmas to see the finish. It is by far the finest organ in the United States. It has the advantage of a perfect location and ideal acoustics.

You will be interested to note that there are no coupler tablets. The fact that there are comparatively few couplers for so large an organ and that the intramanual couplers are with their own departments, it was decided to use drawknobs for all of them. The pedal couplers form the inner group on the left jamb and the intermanual occupy a similar position in the right jamb. There are 20 general pistons. The fifth manual plays the Antiphonal organ only.

The console case is of solid walnut and was designed and built in our shop. The motifs follow those found in the organ case. It is unnecessarily large [as] the couplers and combinations are remote. They wanted an imposing appearance, hence the size and fifth manual! Believe it or not, but a million visitors pass through the Tabernacle each year and must be suitably impressed. The organ contains Great, Swell, Choir, Positiv, Bombarde, Solo and Pedal divisions, plus a small Antiphonal. The Great, Positiv, Bombarde and Pedal are all unenclosed. There are about 190 independent ranks counting a four-rank mixture as four.²¹

Another to the workers back in the factory:

It has proved my theory that the complex sound composed of many elements, all mild but different, build up to a sound of indescribable grandeur . . . .

The strings are good but not so soul stirring as I had hoped for; a trick of the acoustics, I feel, because all are modified.

Please tell the voicers of the great success of their efforts. There is not one regret in the job.

I don’t believe anyone will say the job is too loud. It excites the nervous system without permanent injury.²²

A summary to Henry Willis:

A descriptive folder is being prepared and I will forward a copy shortly. It carries my tonal ideas which started in 1935 in the Groton School instrument, to their logical conclusions. I was given my own way in everything and had to contend solely with two sympathetic organists. The organ does really sound superb, and I have never heard anything quite like it. Of course, it is of its own particular type. Although the full organ is tremendous, it is very easy on the ears, and you can play it for long periods of time without fatigue. This is due, I think, to the fact that there are no very loud stops, the effect being obtained by the 188 ranks, all of which add one to another. The large-scale Mixtures give quite a powerful resultant effect, which in the resonant hall gives quite a lot of body to the tone, but it is a kind of transparent body, as you can well imagine. No, I wouldn’t say that the organ sounds anything like a Cavaillé-Coll. It is less reedy than a French ensemble as the balance between full flues and reeds is entirely different.²³

A similar summary to Ralph Downes in London, who was working on his own project for Royal Festival Hall, which was to reflect some classic elements in its design, stated:

Nice to hear from you, interested to hear of your project. I am in Salt Lake putting the finishing touches to the “giant,” see specification enclosed. It is somewhat larger than yours but along the same lines.

Musically speaking it is the most beautiful organ I have ever heard partly due to be sure to the superb location and acoustics. What you are proposing to do I have been experimenting with since 1936 at Groton School. That is a modern organ in which the old (classical) and new are so modified so as to blend into one whole so that any worthwhile organ music can be played properly. Salt Lake Tabernacle represents the fruit of all my labors rolled into one organ. I can assure you it does something to the nervous system!

Salt Lake has proved to me a theory I have had for a long time, namely that the finished ensemble is produced by many ranks none of which are loud in themselves. Final result by these means is terrific and yet does not hurt the sensitive ear.²⁴

And, finally, an account by Alexander Schreiner himself after having played the Tabernacle organ for almost a decade stated:

No one stop, though it be of dominating quality, is allowed to blot out the whole sections of weaker voices, so that when the last Tuba is added, the sound is still that of a large organ and not that of one stop accompanied by all the rest. Naturally, there are delicate flue and reed stops which cannot be heard in the full ensemble, but the foundation stops, mixtures, and reeds, which are the backbone of the organ, are so well balanced that each contributes to a “democratic” ensemble of sound.²⁵

With this in mind, I think the Tabernacle organ is a good benchmark to consider in understanding what Jack Bethards means when he says that the Tabernacle organ has a “signature sound,”²⁶ the sounds Donald Harrison had in mind for this, the closest thing to his ideal organ, and of the organs to which he similarly affixed his signature plate.

Organs containing G. Donald Harrison’s signature plates

Opus 1075: The Mormon Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1948.

Opus 1082: Christ Episcopal Church, Bronxville, New York, 1949.

Shortly after this organ was built it was featured prominently in the company’s new King of Instruments series of recordings, appearing on Volume II in selections played by Robert Owen, the organist of the church for over forty years and a well-known recitalist at the time. It was again featured in a full program on Volume III, again played by Robert Owen. Owen also made recordings on the organ for the RCA label. The instrument was later altered by Aeolian-Skinner and again by Gress-Miles. It was replaced entirely in 2009 by a new Casavant organ. At that time the history of the church’s organs was memorialized in a plaque placed near the console, which includes Robert Owen’s own signature facsimile.

Opus 1100: St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, Newport, Rhode Island, 1950.

This is a three-manual design in a large, reverberant church, with obvious French inspirations in nomenclature and voicing that is very bold. The Great manual is placed on the bottom of three.

Opus 1103: Methuen Memorial Music Hall, Methuen, Massachusetts, 1947.

Much has been written about this unique organ, the design of which was entirely driven by the desire to keep the original slider chests that were built by James Treat to accommodate the organ when it was moved from the old Boston Music Hall and installed in this new hall in Methuen, designed by Henry Vaughan in 1899 specifically to house the organ. After almost a half century it was rebuilt by Aeolian-Skinner. It was nearing completion when work commenced on the Tabernacle organ, and GDH makes reference to it in his correspondence with Schreiner, almost to the point where it was used as a laboratory to experiment with possibilities for the Tabernacle.

Harrison makes this interesting comment about the Methuen organ:

Finally I would like to tell you that I greatly enjoyed doing this job as I was able to renew my acquaintanceship in a big way with slide [sic] chests. They have one advantage in regard to the initial speech for it is possible to voice with a higher position of the languid when a slide chest is used . . . . On the other hand, there are so many disadvantages with this type of chest that I have felt no temptation to return to the sliders. There is no doubt in my mind that the modern chest we use gives an attack and cutoff which enables much finer degrees of phrasing to be accurately performed . . . so that the result in the long run is more musical, which after all is the real test.²⁷

Opus 1134: Symphony Hall, Boston, Massachusetts, 1950.

Essentially a new organ but using some existing Hutchings pipework, it was built on a very tight budget. For example, the combination action was via a setter board in the back of the console. Albert Schweitzer signed the console frame of this organ when he visited the factory in 1949 on a trip organized by Édouard Nies-Berger.²⁸

The organ was used for examples to complement GDH’s narration in Volume I of King of Instruments and for pieces played by Thomas Dunn in Volume II, though he was identified only as the “staff organist,” and for a recital on Volume XII played by Pierre Cochereau. Virgil Fox also recorded a series of LPs on it for the Command label in the 1960s, and Berj Zamkochian played it in a memorable recording of the Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Munch.

Opus 1136: Chapel of Westminster Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York, 1951.

This is a two-manual organ with the Positiv division on the back wall. A photograph of it was used prominently in Aeolian-Skinner brochures, even following Harrison’s death. The organist of the church at the time was Hans Vigeland, and Harrison’s business correspondence corroborates his respect for him and his playing.

To be continued.

Notes

1. Barbara Owen, The Mormon Tabernacle Organ: An American Classic (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1990), 43.

2. Alexander Schreiner to G. Donald Harrison, August 29, 1948. Owen, 43.

3. G. Donald Harrison to Alexander Schreiner, September 1, 1948. Jack Bethards, “The Tabernacle Letters, Part 3,” The Diapason, 81, 8 (August 1990), 10.

4. Philip Steinhaus to William Self, March 21, 1968. Charles Callahan, Aeolian-Skinner Remembered: A History in Letters (Minneapolis: Randall Egan, 1996), 355.

5. Charles Callahan, The American Classic Organ: A History in Letters (Richmond, Virginia: The Organ Historical Society, 1990).

6. Ernest Skinner to GDH, November 23, 1929. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 44.

7. In an email message to me dated April 14, 2012, Allen Kinzey tells the exact transaction:

On January 2, 1932, the Aeolian Company and the Skinner Organ Company formed a new, third company called the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company. Aeolian owned 40% of the stock in Aeolian-Skinner, and the Skinner Organ Company owned 60%.

Aeolian closed its operations in Garwood, New Jersey, and sent uncompleted contracts, the glue press, some material, and one employee (Frances Brown, who was a young lady then, and she worked for A-S to the end, or almost the end) to Aeolian-Skinner. The Skinner Organ Company deeded its property and turned over contracts, employees, materials, machinery, etc., to Aeolian-Skinner.

8. Henry Willis III to Emerson Richards, July 8, 1938. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 132.

9. Henry Willis III to GDH, December 31, 1948. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 269.

10. GDH to Henry Willis III, January 16, 1949. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 278.

11. Emerson Richards to Wm. King Covell, November 29, 1943. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 194.

12. GDH to Alexander Schreiner, December 10, 1945. Bethards, “The Tabernacle Letters, Part 1,” The Diapason, 81, 6 (June 1990), 16.

13. GDH to Ralph Downes, January 14, 1949. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 277.

14. GDH to Henry Willis III, August 21, 1935. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 144.

15. Emerson Richards to Wm. King Covell, November 26, 1935. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 151.

16. Contract in church archives. Owen, p. 38.

17. Alexander Schreiner to Granville Munson, April 26, 1949. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 299.

18. GDH to Schreiner, November 29, 1945. Bethards, “The Tabernacle Letters, Part I,” The Diapason, 81, 6 (June 1990), 16.

19. GDH to Henry Willis III, December 19, 1945. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 222.

20. Alexander McCurdy to Brock W. Downward, September 18, 1974. Brock W. Downward, “G. Donald Harrison and the American Classic Organ,” D.M.A. diss., Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY, 1976, 97.

21. GDH to Henry Willis III, December 21, 1948. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 167.

22. GDH to Joseph S. Whiteford, December 1948. Owen, 43.

23. GDH to Henry Willis III, March 18, 1949. Bethards, “The Tabernacle Letters, Part 3,” The Diapason, 81, 8 (August 1990), 11.

24. GDH to Ralph Downes, January 14, 1949. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 276–277.

25. Alexander Schreiner, “The Tabernacle Organ in Salt Lake City,” Organ Institute Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1 (1957). Owen, 43.

26. Owen, 47.

27. GDH to Wm. King Covell, June 25, 1947. Callahan, The American Classic Organ, 253–254.

28. Nies-Berger, Schweitzer As I Knew Him (Hillsdale, New York, Pendragon Press, 2003), 10.