Pipe Organs of La Grange, Illinois, and the Architectural Edifices That House Them, Part 1: Emmanuel Episcopal Church

Frank Rippl

Chicago? Again? A third OHS national convention in the Windy City? What else was there to see and hear in the way of the pipe organ? There was a great deal—and splendidly presented with grace, good humor, brilliant scholarship, and midwestern charm. Chicago has world-class museums, architecture, shopping, dining, magnificent Lake Michigan—and stunning churches and pipe organs!

 

Sunday, July 8

Jonathan Ryan played the opening recital at St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church on Chicago’s North Side, on the fine 2m Fisk Op. 123 (2005) that stands on the floor in the rear nave’s left corner. Things got off to a lively start with Dupré’s transcription of Bach’s Sinfonia from Cantata 29. This robust Fisk has strong, dark, full-bodied reeds; clean, striking mixtures; singing flutes and strings, warm foundations, and a powerful fortissimo. Ryan’s playing had great drive; he saved the mighty reed sounds for a dramatic conclusion. In Sweelinck’s Balletto del Granduca, I liked hearing the full-bodied Trompette, flutes accompanying a Cornet and a jolly Zimbelstern, and a nice organo pleno to close. Fine playing.

Francis Jackson’s Prelude on East Acklam featured some very British sounds: celestes accompanied the 8′ Octave in the tenor register; I believe we heard the 4′ Open Flute. The organ more than held its own in the hymn “For the fruit of all creation.” How I love hearing OHS hymn singing! I was seated next to Stephen Schnurr and Dennis Northway, leaders of the convention. Their faces expressed great pleasure. That first hymn is always a wonderful affirmation for convention committee members—a moment of satisfaction after years of hard work. I was happy for them, and all who made this moment possible. This was indeed “the fruit of their creation.”

In György Ligeti’s (1923–2006) Étude coulée 1969 a busy, repetitive pattern of phenomenally fast notes in the flutes flew out over sustained pedal notes, then suddenly ended, flitting off to the upper reaches. A few chuckles were heard. 

Herbert Howells’ Rhapsody in C-sharp Minor, op. 17, no. 3, started big and then presented typical Howellsian dynamic and tonal variations. I liked the Hautbois 8′ as a chorus reed. The Great Prestant 16′ in the tenor range was grand. Ryan had a very fine sense of this piece’s architecture.

In No. 4 in A-Flat Major from Robert Schumann’s Six Canonic Etudes, op. 56, Ryan showed the rich foundations, ending with Viole de gambe 8′; No. 5 in B Minor offered pluck and life. George Baker’s Berceuse Paraphrase (1992) was a lovely combination of Vierne’s Berceuse with Away in a Manger—easy on the ear with celestes, solo flute, and soft pedal.

Jonathan Ryan closed with Dupré’s Prelude and Fugue in B Major, op. 7, no. 1—its lively toccata and angular fugue formed a test for hands and feet that he passed well! This excellent recital was a great start to our convention.

Buses took us downtown, where we had our choice of restaurants, then walked to Holy Name Cathedral for a recital by Wolfgang Rübsam on the 1989 4m, 117-rank Flentrop. With mechanical stop action and very deep mechanical key action, it is not for the faint of heart. Following a recent fire, the cathedral was closed for a time. The organ suffered only minor damage, to the Positief; building repairs, with a new terrazzo floor, improved the acoustics. The organ stands proudly in the rear gallery: its elaborate casework, in light-colored French quarter-sawn oak, starkly contrasts with the dramatic dark wooden ceiling. Herr Rübsam’s all-German program began with Bach’s partita Sei gegrüßet, Jesu gütig. Registrations were perfectly proportioned: cornets sang with grace and conviction, beautifully supported by foundations; the full plenum was rich and clear. Elegant playing throughout.

Chorale preludes followed: Helmut Walcha’s Jesu, deine Passion (canon at the sixth) in trio texture; Rübsam’s own Wie soll ich dich empfangen used an 8′ Principal with tremolo, a lovely pastel; Walcha’s Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott offered wonderful counterpoint against a sturdy pedal cantus firmus. Walcha (1907–91) was Rübsam’s teacher; Rübsam is recording Walcha’s complete organ works on the Naxos label. We then sang the hymn “A mighty fortress is our God.” Our singing that night was some of the week’s best!

Walcha’s Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ presented effective combinations of 8′ and 4′ flutes, Cornet with tremolo, and a pedal-reed cantus firmus. Rübsam’s own O Heiland, reiß die Himmel auf: Entrée opened with a grand ff; Communio was a continually moving trio followed by a lush passage on strings and flutes; a lively Toccata followed, including the pedal 32′ Bombarde. This thrilling and joyful piece is a first-rate addition to the repertoire. 

More Walcha followed: an introspective Der Tag ist hin, mein Jesu, bei mir bleibe. Usually I’m pretty good at identifying registrations, but not with this organ and organist. Rübsam drew forth a fantastic variety of color—the Dutch reeds were so subtle.

Rübsam closed this perfect recital with Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. Dynamics began softly but built quickly; tempo was langsam at first, but built momentum and energy. The fugue’s familiar melodies were given their due in perfect balance. I’ve never heard it played better. Rübsam’s wife, Jan, told me that he had had rotator cuff surgery on his shoulder in April. Only three weeks prior to the convention did he know he could play for us! The audience’s roar called him back to the balcony railing countless times. This was a memorable OHS evening.

 

Monday, July 9

Monday dawned bright and sunny. Cooler temperatures followed weeks of horrendous heat. With perfect weather, we were eager to get started. 

We divided into two groups. Mine went to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Valparaiso, Indiana to hear James Russell Brown play the 2m Hook & Hastings Op. 1417 (1889). The Atlas contains Stephen Schnurr’s two-page essay about this organ and Scot Huntington’s 16-page description of his firm’s work restoring the instrument. It stands at the back of the church resplendent in a beautiful oak case and painted façade; the 16′ Bourdon pipes form the sides of the case. One of our Biggs Fellows hand-pumped the organ for the recital. Brown began with Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba (from Solomon). The organ’s sound was clear and warm. In Bach’s Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr, BWV 662, the Melodia accompanied the (partially new) 16′ Contra Fagotto played one octave lower, along with (I think) the 4′ Violina, a lovely sound. Brown played with great sensitivity and sweetness. Sur “La, mi, re,” by an anonymous 16th-century English composer, was played on an 8′ flute. 

Chorale Variations on St. Elizabeth (Crusader’s Hymn), from Frank Ferko’s (b. 1950) Music for Elizabeth Chapel (2001), is charming and would please your congregation. I was eager to see how Brown would bring off the late-romantic Elgar Nimrod from “Enigma” Variations (op. 36), arranged by William H. Harris, on a small tracker organ without stop pullers. He did reasonably well, using the piano and forte ventil-like toe studs, but it was ultimately awkward. Parry’s hymn “O praise ye the Lord!” (Laudate Dominum) was a good follow-up, in a fine demonstration of a very beautiful 19th-century organ.

A pleasant walk through a park-like setting complete with pond and fountain took us to First Presbyterian Church for our choice of lectures, one on the restoration of a 1926 Casavant that will be moved to Chicago’s St. John Cantius Church, about which we had received a DVD. I attended the other, “Issues in Restoration,” by Keith Williams of Buzard Pipe Organ Builders, a fascinating consideration of “Why do we do what we do the way we do it,” that also explored the words “conservation” and “restoration”—entertaining and enlightening, with plenty of photos. 

We then drove to Gary, Indiana, once home to U.S. Steel. It has stunning views of Lake Michigan, and an attractive English Gothic-style Catholic cathedral, built and dedicated in 1950 to the Holy Angels. The 2m, 33-rank Phelps Casavant, Op. 2769, installed in 1963, stands in the rear gallery on either side of a large window, and speaks clearly down the nave in a grand acoustic. This was a much-anticipated recital—word was out that this organ was exceptional (it was), and we all love Derek Nickels’ playing (he did not disappoint!). Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 549, sounded clean and polished. The fugue began on the 8′ Krummhorn—an unexpected surprise—and built to a blazing full-organ finale. We were all smitten with this instrument; music by Ernst Pepping perfectly suited it: Wie soll ich dich empfangen (Grosses Orgelbuch, 1941), Vorspiel I, Andante cantabile showed the beautiful 8′ and 4′. Vorspiel II, Allegro Scherzando leapt about; a fine reed carried the tune. William Albright’s ever-charming Sweet Sixteenths—A Concert Rag for Organ (1975) was very well played with loads of wit. As it was about 90 degrees outside, and we were packed in the church without A/C, who knows how warm the church was, nor how warm Derek was up in the loft, but it never showed in his playing!

After “Father, we praise thee” (Christe Sanctorum)—brilliantly played and vigorously sung—Nickels closed with Dupré’s Variations sur un Noël, op. 20 (1922), a dazzling performance that lifted us out of the pews roaring our approval for this superb recital. (Derek was also in charge of the buses, and did his work very well, indeed!)

Next was Christ Temple Cathedral—Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A. in the Roseland neighborhood. The present building was dedicated in 1926. Originally a Dutch Reformed church, in the 1960s and ’70s it and the neighborhood became largely African-American. The church is a well-maintained part of the community. Its 3m, 39-stop electro-pneumatic 1926 Hinners—the largest surviving Hinners in the Chicago area—stands in the front of the church in chambers on either side of the seated choir. Chicago organist and composer Clarence Eddy played the dedication recital. In 1954 Austin replaced the console. The organ fell silent in recent years, but was brought back to life by the Chicago-Midwest OHS chapter especially for our convention. Recitalist Mark Sudeith began with Wilhelm Middelschulte’s (1863–1943) Canon in F Major, dedicated to Clarence Eddy—cheery music using the foundation stops. Schubert’s Am Meer, arranged by Eddy, showed the beautiful soft strings and Vox Humana; the tone is warm and luxurious. Sudeith then played (from the original manuscript) Variations on a Folksong, “Peter, Go Ring Dem Bells,” by Florence B. Price (1887–1953), which displayed the solo reeds and ended with a lively toccata. The hymn “I’m happy with Jesus alone,” by Charles P. Jones Sr. (1865–1949), founder of the Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A., was a rouser in the best sense—we loved it. The playing was first rate, and our voices filled the 1,150-seat church with joy.

Our buses took us to Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, on the University of Chicago campus, to hear the massive 72-bell carillon, the world’s second largest (the largest, also a gift of the Rockefeller family, is at New York City’s Riverside Church, with 74 bells). John Gouwens played a stunning program as we sat in the grass beneath the chapel’s soaring tower: Dave Grusin’s On Golden Pond (1981); John Courter’s Suite No. 4 (2009); an improvisation on a submitted hymn tune; and Roy Hamlin Johnson’s Victimae Paschali Laudes (1986).

My group had dinner at Augustana Lutheran Church; organist Daniel Schwandt allowed us access to the church’s new handsome 2m tracker built by Wahl Organbuilders of Appleton, Wisconsin. We took quite a shine to its clear voicing. Wahl reused pipework from an old Lyon & Healy organ as well as newly made pipes—a very successful blend. 

On to the First Unitarian Church, completed in 1931 in the English Perpendicular Gothic style, to hear three historic organs from Stephen Schnurr’s collection. There was also a Hammond player organ performing: another treat! Who knew there was such a thing? Gregory Crowell, making his ninth appearance at an OHS convention, began on a Henry Willis “Scudamore” organ (ca. 1857–1860) with Gottlieb Muffat’s Overture, Suite 1 in C Major. The one-manual, 54-note organ had two ranks: Open Diapason 8′ and Principal 4′, with a permanently coupled 25-note pedal. The pleasing sounds graced the early evening. Crowell then moved to a sweet-toned little George Jardine & Sons (ca. 1850s) (“the oldest American-built pipe organ in the Chicago metropolitan area,” according to the Atlas). He gracefully played Handel’s Voluntary in C Major, movements III and VI from Ernest Chausson’s Vêpres des Vierges, op. 31 (I enjoyed the flute in movement VI), and his own transcription of Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Wörte, op. 67, V. Moderato. 

A two-rank (no pedal) Hilborne L. Roosevelt, Op. 297 (1885) looked like an upright piano, having a reed organ’s foot-pumping pedals. It was meant to be portable. We heard Voluntary by Samuel Jackson (1818–1885), then some elegant Elgar: Vesper Voluntaries, op. 14, I. Andante and IV. Allegretto piacevole, with an effective Stopped Diapason. Praeludium in F-sharp Minor by Ernst Friedrich Richter (1808–1879) was interesting and well suited to the Roosevelt. Crowell concluded on the Willis, with Eric Thiman’s Postlude on “Nun danket alle Gott” and I. Allegro from Sonatine for Organ by Eberhart Egermann (b. 1933), good demonstration pieces, well played. We were grateful to Stephen Schnurr for making these instruments available (and to those who helped transport them!).

We returned to Rockefeller Memorial Chapel to hear Nathan Laube; the performance was broadcast over the Internet (available at: http://news.uchicago.edu/webcast/nathan-laube-live-2012-ohs-chicago-con…), an OHS first. The chapel is vast: long, wide, and high, with the main organ in front and a substantial gallery organ in the rear. The front 4m console plays both organs; a 2m gallery console controls just that organ. The room’s windows were never properly finished, so it lacks color, but is still quite impressive. The 132-rank Skinner Organ Company Op. 634 was built in 1928—a period in which Ernest Skinner built his magnum opus at Yale University’s Woolsey Hall, and huge organs at the University of Michigan and Princeton. This organ suffered some rebuilding efforts in the 1970s and later; several ranks were dispersed. In 2005 the Schantz Organ Company returned old ranks, replicated others, and replaced some with vintage Skinner pipework. Rededicated on June 7, 2008, the organ, while not exactly as Skinner left it, is once again a major part of the Chicago organ scene. 

OHS executive director Jim Weaver welcomed the audience, including those on the World Wide Web, then Nathan Laube opened with Allegro vivace from Widor’s Symphonie, op. 42, no. 5 (1878). This familiar music moved over us gently at first, followed by a good deal of aggression. Laube kept things in proportion, giving each melodic line its due, ending on full organ with those fabulous reeds. Laube spoke about growing up in Chicago; as a young boy he was taken to hear the E. M. Skinner organ at St. Luke’s, Evanston, and to Rockefeller Chapel, where he heard Wolfgang Rübsam play. He fell in love with these instruments and knew that playing the organ would be his career.

Mendelssohn’s Sonata in A, op. 65, no. 3 (1845), first movement ended in a blaze of glory, followed by the lovely Andante tranquillo. Laube’s transcription of Mendelssohn’s Variations serieuses, op. 54 (1841), with passages of great wit and virtuosity, wonderfully displayed this huge organ’s colors. Though young (he turned 25 the day before this recital), Laube is a master of the art of transcription. He reached deeply into the vast Skinner tonal palette, and brought us to places we might not have gone before—a brilliant performance. 

After intermission, he played Saint-Saëns’ Fantaisie in D-flat, op. 101 (1895). Its quiet opening showed beautiful strings and a solo flute that was to die for. A gentle reed chorus punctuated the flutes and strings, then stronger reeds were in dialogue with the foundations. A swelling crescendo then arose. Laube played it beautifully, announcing the ff section on a powerful reed, then slowly drifted back to quiet strings. 

In Funérailles (d’après Lamartine) from Laube’s transcription of Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, S. 173, no. 7 (1849), thunder-like pedal rumbles gave an ominous start, followed by a smashing fanfare played on the gallery organ’s horizontal trumpet. This piece is full of foreboding darkness, and Laube summoned forth remarkable color. A riotous pedal solo accompanied the active manual work, which featured a few blasts from a strong reed, and then gave way to a single flute. In two Brahms settings of O Welt, ich muß dich lassen, no. 3 employed a quiet 8′ Diapason on the choir, and no. 11 drew especially gorgeous foundations. Laube’s tempo was a bit restless, as though the soul longed to leave the body and journey heavenward. 

The world premiere of Laube’s transcription of Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture, op. 80 (1880), featured melodic lines and rhythmic passages carefully delineated, and blended into a musically rich and full whole. The concert concluded with Gaudeamus Igitur, so fun to sing in this full chapel, ending a wonderful day. 

 

Tuesday, July 10

In the suburb of Downers Grove we visited the charming Tivoli Theatre, where house organist David Rhodes played its 3m, 10-rank Wurlitzer, Op. 942. The third organ to grace this theatre (it was preceded by a Barton and a Wurlitzer), this instrument is owned and maintained by Chicago Area Theatre Organ Enthusiasts (CATOE). We munched on popcorn as Rhodes entertained us with Richard A. Whiting’s Hooray for Hollywood (1937), and Charles Chaplin’s Smile, then accompanied a hilarious 1915 Chaplin short film, In the Park (possibly filmed in the Chicago area). Rhodes seemingly caught every nuance. In a hot dog-eating scene, he slipped in the “Oscar Mayer Wiener Song”—very clever playing and a fun start to the day.

Our next stop was very sentimental for me: the beautiful Noack organ, Op. 44 (1969) at the Convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph in La Grange Park. Installed the summer I graduated from college, this organ became a place of pilgrimage for us “Tracker Backers” on our visits to Chicago. It stands in a balcony in the rear of the nave of this handsome modern chapel. Originally the room had all hard surfaces, but now carpet covers the concrete floor, and padded chairs have replaced wooden seats. Though the acoustic is not as beautiful as it once was, the organ still sounds great. 

Thomas Wikman began with Buxtehude’s Partita on “Vater unser im Himmelreich”; I especially enjoyed the 4′ flutes with tremolo. In Antonio Cabezón’s Tiento del quinto tono, Wikman’s well-chosen registration—reeds and Sesquialtera II—led the way. This organ’s Italian accent spoke in Girolamo Cavazzoni’s Canzona sopra ‘Il e bel e bon’, played with good style. The sounds were as beautiful as I remembered. The music was cleanly and sensitively played. 

After the hymn “Alleluia! Sing to Jesus” (Hyfrydol), Wikman gave us a sweet performance of Robert Lind’s Prelude on ‘Love Unknown’, then Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue, BWV 572, which worked quite well. The brilliant closing section brought this outstanding concert to a fine conclusion.

Emmanuel Episcopal Church in La Grange is the city’s oldest congregation, founded in 1874. The present French Gothic-style church was built in 1926. (Our Atlas noted that it was featured in the 1995 film While You Were Sleeping.) The 1970 electro-pneumatic Phelps Casavant, Op. 3062, 3m, 46 stops, 63 ranks, stands in a chamber to the right of the chancel. Stephen Schnurr, author of the OHS Organ Atlas 2012, began with the hymn “Lo, he comes with clouds descending” (Helmsley),  followed by Buxtehude’s Praeludium in A Minor, BuxWV 153. Schnurr used the Krummhorn to good effect. Flutes led to the final fugue and a fantasia presenting the full plenum and pedal reeds—a wonderful sound, in a fine performance. 

Next came the premiere of Variations on Hyfrydol, written by convention chair Dennis Northway. At one point the tune appeared in the tenor with imaginatively placed fast notes up top. Another movement used a canon between a trumpet and pedal foundations. After a beautiful movement with sweet strings and soft foundations, a fugue brought this very good new piece to a close. Well done!

A hallmark of Stephen Schnurr’s OHS recitals is the showcasing of young musicians and friends. This recital featured a mother and her children. Tenor Willson Oppedahl, a junior at Lawrence University Conservatory of Music in Appleton, Wisconsin, movingly performed Thomas Matthews’ (1915–99) The Lord Is My Shepherd, beautifully sung with sincere conviction. Elegy for violin, harp, and organ, by Harold Friedell (1908–58), featured violinist Allison Alcorn, Willson’s mother; her daughter Kiersten Oppedahl played harp. This enchanting piece, very well presented, cast a spell over all of us. 

Horatio Parker’s Allegretto, from Sonata in E-flat, op. 65, was a good contrast. The Phelps Krummhorn was playful, especially in the lower register, while flutes 8′ and 4′ scampered above. Stephen closed with the Allegro from Widor’s Symphonie VI, op. 42, a fine choice for this outstanding exemplar of the Organ Reform Movement. This organ has a lot of oomph, and Dr. Schnurr used it to good effect, playing with marvelous style and color. 

La Grange’s First Presbyterian Church was organized in 1890. The present church was built in 1962. Its 1962 3m, 46-rank Aeolian-Skinner stands in a gallery at the rear of the long, narrow nave. David Jonies and Jay Peterson shared the concert. Peterson opened with Rheinberger’s Sonata No. 8 in E Minor, op. 132, Introduction and Passacaglia, which sounded very good, with clear sounds in every dynamic range. They then joined forces for Handel’s Organ Concerto in F Major, op. 4, no. 4. Jay Peterson played the four-stop 1981 Brunzema Op. 3 portative organ from the front, while David Jonies played the orchestra bits on the main organ in the gallery. The organs were well matched, and the performance spirited. 

Jonies then played Andantino from Vierne’s Pièces de fantaisie, op. 51, no. 2, showing the beautiful strings, and Naïades, op. 55, no. 4. Next, both played the Skinner: John Rutter’s Variations on an Easter Theme (O sons and daughters), featuring a fine solo on the Oboe. The hymn was: “O sons and daughters let us sing!” (O filii et filiae).

On to Oak Park, to the beautiful St. Catherine of Siena–St. Lucy Catholic Church, a Tudor Gothic-style building dedicated in 1934. Casavant Op. 1467, built in 1932, stands in the rear gallery in two chambers that frame a large Tudor-style window. A modest 3m instrument, it has everything you’d need to be its happy player. The lucky person playing for us was Rhonda Sider Edgington, who opened with Percy Whitlock. In Pastorale, Psalm 23:1 from Seven Sketches on Verses from the Psalms, a solo on the Clarinet was accompanied by flutes, a great choice that slowly revealed the organ’s beauty. Folk Tune, from Five Short Pieces, used what I believe was the Cornopean in the tenor range. The beautiful strings crept in—still fresh after 80 years.

The hymn Picardy (“Let all mortal flesh keep silent”) was a joy to sing in this resonant room. We then heard our first music by Chicago composer Leo Sowerby: Picardy from Meditations on Communion Hymns. Edgington knew just how to express Sowerby’s marvelous harmonic sense. Her closing selection displayed this organ’s strong foundation tone: August Gottfried Ritter’s (1811–85) Sonate Nr. 2 in E Minor, op. 19.

We went to Oak Park’s Grace Episcopal Church for our Annual Meeting, followed by dinner; some explored the neighborhood, with its historic and architectural sites. 

At nearby First United Methodist Church, Ken Cowan played the splendid 4m 1926 Skinner. The console stands in a front balcony behind and above the altar, with pipes in chambers on either side of the chancel; a two-rank Echo division is in the ceiling above the rear gallery. A division of select stops from the main organ speaks into the chapel, where the division has its own 2m console. 

Cowan began with Liszt’s arrangement of Otto Nicolai’s Festival Overture on the chorale “Ein feste Burg is unser Gott,” op. 31. This organ was completely restored without alteration in 2005–6 by the Spencer Organ Company of Massachusetts and Jeff Weiler & Associates; except for an added stop in 1937, it is as it was when Skinner delivered it, producing powerful foundation tone and floor-shaking pedal notes. Cowan’s arrangement of Liszt’s Consolation No. 3 in D-flat featured lush strings and flutes, and a Skinner French Horn, played with his usual sensitivity.

The hymn was “When the morning stars together” (Weisse Flaggen). Ken Cowan’s hymn playing, like everything else, is done with great art and grace.

John Ireland’s beautiful Elegiac Romance began with a sweet Oboe solo followed by a wonderful section with celestes—perfect for a summer evening. It included the French Horn, and then built to a mighty roar; the plaintive Oboe returned, and it ended with quiet strings. Cowan closed the first half with a blazing performance of Dupré’s Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, op. 7, no. 3. I liked the Clarinet’s clear, round sound. The playing was precise and yet supple, with the musical line clearly shaped. That fantastic fugue really galloped along.

This organ had been restored but not modernized: it lacks levels of memory. So, as in the good old days, Cowan had to come out during intermission and reset his pistons. He chuckled about it, but went about his work good-naturedly. 

Cowan then returned to his perch high above us to perform Rachel Laurin’s Étude Héroïque, demonstrating the assertive Gamba Celestes on the Solo division, and a sweet 2′ in a French Tambourin section of this piece. He closed with Guilmant’s Sonata No. 1 in D Minor, op. 42, giving this well-known work a new sheen through his musical creativity. The Pastorale showed the Clarinet again, the beautiful Vox Humana, and the Chimes. The Finale swept us along for a gleeful ride, with our pilot Ken Cowan giving the OHS another brilliant and memorable concert! We returned to our hotel fired up for the instrument we love, having just heard one its finest champions.

 

Wednesday, July 11

We began at Chicago’s Carl Schurz High School. The 1910 building is a masterpiece, incorporating elements of both Chicago and Prairie School styles. The 1925 Waveland Avenue wing included an auditorium seating nearly 1,800 and boasting three seconds of reverberation. The 4m Richard O. Whitelegg Möller proved to be one of the favorite instruments heard at this convention. The console abuts the front-left of the stage on the auditorium floor; pipes stand on a wide shelf at the back of the stage. We were told that this organ was delivered seven weeks after the contract was signed; the high quality of the work tells a great deal about Möller’s vast resources. (See Dennis Northway, “A new four-manual pipe organ in seven weeks: Möller Opus 6373 at Chicago’s Carl Schurz High School,” The Diapason, May 2012, pp. 26–29; audio file available at www.thediapason.com.) 

John Sherer, organist at Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church, presented a “Concert to Commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Sinking of the Titanic.” “Music of 1912” began with Elgar’s Imperial March, brilliantly played. The instrument has an English town hall organ’s power and grandeur. In Edward Bairstow’s Elegy, gorgeous strings and flutes were played with just enough rubato. The pedal part rumbled quietly as though it were a creature of the deep ocean. 

In “Music Heard Aboard the Titanic,” John Philip Sousa’s rousing and entertaining El Capitan was followed by Edwin H. Lemare’s transcription of Barcarolle, from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, said to have been played one hour before the ship sank. Next came Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band, which was played as the ship sank. Sherer played it very well. 

“Music to Honor the Titanic Victims” began with Joseph Bonnet’s touching In Memoriam. The organ gave us deeply moving sounds of sadness, grief, and horror, and images of the deep, cold ocean. The piece ended with a quiet farewell to the victims of this tragedy.

This beautiful organ is in need and most worthy of a complete restoration, but was made to sound quite fine this day. Sherer closed with The Navy Hymn, “Eternal Father strong to save.” Here the too-brisk, march-like tempo seemed to not match the words. An over-busy accompaniment threw us off the pulse, and twice Sherer modulated up. The rest of the concert, however, was lovely and inspiring. 

We then went to Glencoe and the beautiful North Shore Congregation Israel. It was a thrill to enter this holy space, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki (who designed the Oberlin Conservatory of Music). A peaceful study in white overlooking Lake Michigan, the sanctuary is shaped like praying hands. Narrow windows start just above the floor and rise to form ceiling arches, allowing light to fill the space. The 3m, 46-rank electro-pneumatic Casavant, Op. 2768 (probably the largest untouched early Phelps Casavant in the Chicago area), perches on a free-standing rear balcony.

The recitalist was H. Ricardo Ramirez, director of music/organist at Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral. Jehan Alain’s Les Fêtes de l’Année Israelite, AWV 85, in the style of Hebrew chant and song, began quietly on the Krummhorn and gradually grew to a Trumpet fanfare. This very approachable music was so appropriate to the space, with clear and refined sounds. We sang the hymn “God of might” (Adeer Hu) in both Hebrew and English. In Bach’s Trio Sonata in G Major, BWV 530, the third movement showed the organ’s Sesquialtera. Ramirez closed with Duruflé’s Suite, op. 5. The Fagott 16′ played one octave lower was a very fine sound. The Toccata was thrillingly played.

In the leafy suburb of Winnetka, we visited Winnetka Congregational Church and its landmark 3m Martin Pasi tracker, Op. 18 (2008). Established in 1869, the church’s present building, Colonial with Art Deco and Egyptian touches in its lovely white interior, was built in 1936. The ornate North German-style case in front commands the eye with the Great in the middle, the Swell above the Great, and the Positiv cantilevered in front of the Great with the keydesk below, similar to John Brombaugh’s Op. 33 organ at Lawrence University in Appleton. The Pedal is in towers at the sides of the case; the 32′ Subbass is in the old chambers above and to the sides of the altar, where the previous Austin once stood. 

Nicholas Bideler, a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas, began with Bruhns’s Praeludium in G Major, which sounded wonderful on this organ. Bideler’s playing had clear direction and he used the organ’s many colors very well. Next was Bach’s Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele, BWV 654. One tremulant affects the entire organ, and it was fine, although it did create a bit of a stir on that low pedal E-flat that starts the piece. I think Bideler used the Vox Humana with a 4′ flute as the solo line. His performance was imbued with the inner joy expressed in the chorale. 

In Karg-Elert’s Trois Impressions, Op. 72—I. Harmonies du soir, Bideler showed this versatile organ’s romantic voice. I enjoyed the Krummhorn and strings. “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” (Repton) was followed by Impromptu from Vierne’s 24 Pièces de fantaisie, 3^ème Suite, which worked quite well. Bideler closed with Duruflé’s Prélude, adagio et choral varié sur le theme di Veni Creator, Op. 4—III Choral varié. The triumphant ending was riveting. 

Grace Presbyterian Church in Winnetka had been First Church of Christ, Scientist, built in 1938—a white Colonial-style church, whose pewter and crystal lighting fixtures were imported from Czechoslovakia prior to World War II. The church was sold to Grace Presbyterian Church in 2012. The 1938 tonally and mechanically unaltered 2m W. W. Kimball Co. organ, Op. 7238, stands at the front. Both Swell and Great are enclosed in separate chambers. The first recital was given by William H. Barnes, of Evanston, on August 21, 1938. Our recitalist, Elizabeth Naegele, who, among other things, has the distinction of being Nathan Laube’s first organ teacher, opened with Lefébure-Wély’s Sortie in B-flat Major—jolly music, played with great spirit and flourish. In a salute to this building’s long history as a Christian Science Church, the hymn was Mary Baker Eddy’s 1896 “Saw ye my Saviour?” (Laundon). We sang it well, and she played it with great sensitivity to the text, using the organ’s colors nicely. 

Naegele then played five of the “versets” from Léon Boëllmann’s Heures mystiques, ending with Entrée III. I particularly liked the Oboe. Sonata II—III Seraphic Chant by Lily Wadhams Moline (1862–1966) was lovely music, beautifully played. Naegele ended this fine and well-chosen program with Let Us Break Bread Together from Communion Hymns for Organ, Vol. I, in a quite inventive setting by Edwin T. Childs (b. 1945). 

Our next visit, to Techny’s Chapel of the Holy Spirit, Society of the Divine Word, was highly anticipated as we had seen stunning photos of its interior. A huge complex, its property adjoins St. Joseph’s Technical School, whence the “Techny” nickname originates. The large Romanesque chapel, adorned with beautiful carvings, statues, chandeliers, and sconces (forged in the Techny shops), opened in 1923. The second-story gallery runs the entire perimeter of the chapel, and our musicians took full advantage of it. Acoustics were generous and rich. The 4m Wiener organ, some of whose ranks are reused from other instruments, stands in the rear gallery in an attractive case. Its condition is not great, but it was shown to its best advantage. 

We heard The Madrigal Choir of Grace Episcopal Church, Oak Park, led by Dennis Northway, along with young organists Madeleine Woodworth and Charlie Carpenter. Now in its twelfth year, the choir, made up of mostly high school students, is dedicated to singing music of the Renaissance. Mr. Carpenter began, playing Vierne’s Carillon sur la sonnerie du carillon de la chapelle du Château de Longpont (Aisne) from 24 Pièces en style libre, op. 31, no. 21, with skill and aplomb. 

The choir sang Kyrie Eleison from William Byrd’s Mass for four voices very well, in proper Anglican style. They surprised us by singing not from the rear gallery where the organ was, but from the perimeter gallery above the high altar. After Madeleine Woodworth played Divertissement from Vierne’s 24 Pièces en style libre, with plenty of drive from this powerful organ, the choir offered Blessed Are the Pure in Heart by Eric DeLamarter (1880–1953), a beautiful setting sung and conducted with great sensitivity. Woodworth led the hymn, Leo Sowerby’s “Come risen Lord, and deign to be our guest” (Rosedale). The choir moved to different places along that perimeter gallery each time they sang, slowly making their way to the organ loft—a magical effect. Northway led these well-trained students beautifully in Peter Lutkin’s The Lord Bless You and Keep You. 

A new setting of Ave Verum Corpus was by a familiar figure: 20 year-old Adam Gruber, an alumnus of this choir and organ student of Dennis Northway, who has played for us many times and is now a student at Oberlin. The piece was well constructed and showed that Gruber has a future in the art of composition. Charlie Carpenter, a current Northway student, played the Widor Toccata. Great job, Charlie! Kudos to Dennis Northway for giving these young people a chance to perform at the convention!

Buses then took us to Evanston, for dinner at the North Shore Hotel downtown, and then the treat of several neighborhood open consoles. Some of the young, fast-moving types, led by Nathan Laube, made it down to St. Luke’s Church and its magnificent E.M. Skinner. It was a grand, fun, free time. 

The day concluded at the Music Institute of Chicago. This building, a former Christian Science church, retained its 1914 E. M. Skinner organ, Op. 208 (the oldest functioning Skinner in Illinois, according to our Atlas), a modest 3m instrument whose pipes stand at the back of the platform in front of the 900-seat auditorium built in the Neoclassic style favored by Mary Baker Eddy. The console is on the stage. Recitalist Scott Montgomery began with Saint-Saëns’ Fantaisie in E-flat. The forte sections demonstrated the sturdy foundation stops echoed by the Cornopean—a great sound. Montgomery played Bach’s transcription of Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Minor, BWV 596, in the Romantic tradition, with shades and all. I loved the ppp strings in the second movement. It worked surprisingly well.

In the Choral of Widor’s Symphony No. 7, op. 42, no. 3, Montgomery captured the mood nicely, alternating string, flute, and foundation tone. Scherzo from Vierne’s Symphony No. 2, op. 20, was an audience favorite; Montgomery did a fine job, and so did the Skinner. Huge flute sounds crowned the ensemble. Dudley Buck’s Variations on Home, Sweet Home, op. 30, displayed the big, bold Cornopean, Vox Humana, Flügel Horn, and the Great Philomela. The Swell Aeoline and Unda Maris closed the piece—wonderful sounds that made my mouth water. One young member was heard to say, “I want an E. M. Skinner in my church!” In a beautiful calm Calvin Hampton Lullaby, Montgomery summoned all of the organ’s softest sounds. The Swell Gedackt accompanied the Clarinet in the tenor range; the Vox Humana was heard again as a solo with a 4′ flute. Unda Maris and Aeoline were a great combination. This is a piece your congregation would love!

In Guilmant’s Caprice in B-flat, op. 20, no. 3 from Pièces dans différents styles, Book VI, there was a good deal of playful shifting of manuals—welcome after the Hampton’s quiet gentility, and very well played. This organ has no general pistons, so Montgomery employed two very skilled stop pullers. The hymn was Mary Baker Eddy’s “It matters not what be thy lot” (Gloaming). Montgomery closed his fine program with John Knowles Paine’s sturdy Concert Variations on the Austrian Hymn, op. 3, no. 1—always a good tour of an organ. We returned to the hotel tired but exhilarated. 

 

Thursday, July 12

Thursday dawned bright and sunny. At Chicago’s Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Luke (ELCA) we heard Erik Wm. Suter play the large 1963 3m Schlicker. The church’s long, high nave offers wonderful acoustics. The main organ stands in the rear gallery, with a Positiv mounted on the railing. The clear, refined sound includes marvelous mixtures that were like cooling drops of water. A smaller unit organ is in front of the church. Suter opened with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV 541; he has a fine and clean technique, and tempos were perfect for both music and room. 

Dale Wood’s gorgeous setting of In Thee Is Gladness began with strings and a 4′ flute. We also heard lovely solo reeds. In “Come down, O love divine” (Down Ampney), Suter showed brilliant hymn leadership. His time as organist at Washington National Cathedral was evident in a grandiose and thrilling style of playing; his last verse reharmonization was a thing of wonder.

In Peter Eben’s Nedelní Hudba (Music for Sunday), Finale, Suter put the blazing reeds on full display. After a quiet section with strings, solo flutes, and quiet solo reeds, some growling and menacing pedal sounds took us back to the louder, livelier music. Organ and organist were a fabulous combination; this fantastic concert was a great start to the day. 

We proceeded to the huge and imposing St. Josaphat’s Church in Chicago, in Romanesque style with massive stone walls, blessed in 1902. The first organ in the rear gallery, built by the Wisconsin Pipe Organ Factory in 1902, was replaced in 1924 by a 3m Kilgen, Op. 3386, which used some pipes from the previous instrument and retained its case. In 2004, the Bradford Organ Company installed a “much traveled” 1872 2m Johnson Organ Company Op. 386 in the nave on the right side. Our recitalist Bernadette Wagner earned her bachelor’s degree from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University; she is now a graduate student at Arizona State University. Wagner began with two Brahms settings of O Welt, ich muß dich lassen on the Kilgen; diapasons were warm and rich in the reverberant space—nicely played. She then came downstairs to the Johnson organ for the hymn “Creator spirit, by whose aid” (Surrey). Bernadette Wagner and the room-filling sound of this 14 stop-organ were quite up to the task of accompanying us. 

Movements II and III of Mendelssohn’s Sonata No. 4 in B-flat, op. 65, featured the organ’s beautiful Clarinet, Oboe and Bassoon, and lovely flutes—very pleasing playing with a well-developed sense of musical line. Wagner closed her fine recital with Daniel Pinkham’s The Book of Hours, a nice demonstration of the various combinations on this well-made treasure from another century. 

Chicago’s Wicker Park Evangelical Lutheran Church, ELCA, was formally organized in 1879; the present Romanesque church was finished in 1907. The 1907 Möller tracker is still in use; sadly, however, only part of the Swell division was operable, so much of the program was compromised; at times it was difficult to even hear the organ. Our players were Dennis Northway and Adam Gruber. Northway opened with a very soft Clarence Eddy Prelude in A Minor, using the Möller’s beautiful strings very well, then played Harrison M. Wild’s ironically named hymn “Softly fades the twilight ray.” Adam Gruber played two selections from Bach’s Orgelbüchlein, and Northway played Pachelbel’s Aria Sebaldina from Hexachordum Apollinis (1699). I felt sorry for these gentlemen having to play an instrument not up to convention standards. We had to listen very carefully to hear anything, but I must say that it was always worth the effort. 

During free time downtown, we could either visit the Chicago Cultural Center in the grand old former public library, or, as I did, cross Michigan Avenue and visit Millennium Park with its fantastic Frank Gehry-designed bandshell, and the three-story Anish Kapoor “Cloud Gate” steel sculpture (known locally as “The Bean”). The entire complex is brilliant.

A problem arose, beyond the convention leaders’ control. The 1927 3m Estey at the John Murphy Auditorium of the American College of Surgeons was unable to be played. So our brave recitalist, Cathryn Wilkins, moved to a quite different venue and organ—the huge 4m Aeolian-Skinner in the Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan Avenue, across the street from the 100-story John Hancock Center—and very quickly adapted her program. Designed for a very different instrument, the program did not make full use of this organ’s range, but was nevertheless entertaining. Wilkins played some waltzes by Brahms for piano, Vierne’s Scherzetto from 24 Pièces, and Le Cygne from Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. She ended with three movements from In Fairyland by Roy Spalding Stoughton (1884–1953)—a pleasant recital. 

Our buses took us to Navy Pier—a huge place with a highly charged carnival atmosphere. We boarded “The Spirit of Chicago” for a late-afternoon harbor cruise and buffet dinner. The dramatic Chicago skyline was very beautiful. We enjoyed each other’s company and the tasty food. 

As we were downtown at 6 pm, when traffic was busy (with numerous street carnivals), our buses got snagged—the only bus problem all week. Our evening recital was at St. Pauls United Church of Christ, founded in 1843 to serve German-speaking Protestants. In 1959 the present English Gothic-style building was completed and the 4m Aeolian-Skinner, Op. 1328, installed. Its main pipe chambers are situated above and on either side of the chancel. In 1998–2000 the Berghaus Organ Company completed the organ as originally planned, updating some of the mechanical features of the console, located at the front. 

Our performer was well-known Chicago organist David Schrader. It took about 40 minutes for everyone to arrive, and bless his heart, Schrader entertained us early arrivals with an impromptu performance, from memory, of Bach’s Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major. It was delightful. 

When the audience was finally in place, Schrader began with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548 (“The Wedge”). Some of the playing was rushed, which took away from the towering majesty of Bach’s music. The organ was more than up to the style, and Schrader used it quite well. In Commotio, op. 53 by Carl Nielsen (1865–1931), we heard mixture tone for a very long time, which, right after the Bach, grew tiresome. Finally, some flute sounds were heard, leading to contrasting dynamics in another section. A fugue began—Schrader’s tempos were just fine. We then heard what I believe was the lovely Gedeckt in the Antiphonal division, located high in the rear balcony—imaginative and colorful use of contrast. He used dramatic moments to good effect. The piece was OK, but it seemed to be longer than needed. Although Schrader played it well, my ears could have done with less mixture tone; at the end, he drew all of the high-pitched mixtures, bordering on painful after such a long piece.

After intermission, the lovely hymn “O blest Creator of the light” (Lucis Creator) was followed by Frank Ferko’s Symphonie brève (1987). The opening Andante had a running bass line in the pedals, with foundation stops and reeds in chords on the manuals. Attractive flute sounds accompanied a Cornet. The pedal motion returned with punctuations from those singular A/S reeds. The Toccata began on strings and flutes with fast figures. A bonny solo flute sounded out a tune in the pedal’s tenor range. We heard wonderful colors in this very appealing work. In the final Chorale, the use of mixtures and reeds was startling. The writing was fresh, sort of Messiaen or Langlais “lite”. 

Schrader closed with Reger’s Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, op. 135b. Plenty of contrast is called for and we got it, in a fine tour of this noble instrument’s fine solo voices and choruses. It was all beautifully played with great attention to the rhythmic and thematic structure.

 

Friday, July 13

The final day, devoted to regional organbuilders, began with Sebastian M. Glück’s lecture on “Innovation, Adaptation, and Stagnation: The Tonal Trajectory of the Roosevelt Organ.” Hilborne and Frank Roosevelt, aristocratic æsthetes as well as businessmen, were interested in organbuilding. Glück discussed their life and work, people who influenced them, and how their work still influences American organ building over a century after their deaths—most interesting.

We then were bused to Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest. Founded in 1902, the present English Gothic-style building was dedicated in 1931. The organ began as Skinner Organ Company, Op. 833, a 3m, 36-rank organ, rebuilt in 1956 by Schlicker. In 1987, it was rebuilt and enlarged to its present size by the Berghaus Organ Company of Bellwood, Illinois. The pipes are in twin chambers on either side of the altar, the console in a balcony over the left transept. The church has beautiful carvings and a live acoustic. 

Organist Karen Schneider Kirner began with a hymn: “As daylight steals across the skies.” Kirner wrote the tune, Morning Hymn, which was quite good. Eugène Gigout’s Grand Chœur dialogué made good use of the reeds. I could have done with less mixture tone. Kirner’s steady playing gave this majestic piece its just due. After Gigout’s Scherzo, from Dix Pièces, we then heard Variations sur un Noël bourguignon by André Fleury (1903–95), which showed some of the organ’s softer stops as well as fuller sounds. The music was attractive—like an updating of Dandrieu. 

This is a very loud organ. Seated in the front row, I wished that I had sat further back because Kirner may have crossed a line with overuse of tutti. Mixtures and reeds together over a long stretch of time is tiring.

A Gigue for the Tuba Stop by Donald Stuart Wright (b. 1940) was next—a thrilling piece, but again loud. My ears longed for strings and flutes played with the shades closed. Chicago composer Keith S. Kalemba’s (b. 1972) Toccata was also a loud piece. Kirner is a fine organist, but her programming choices were not wise. We did not hear any of the soft solo reeds. Another hymn followed: “Sing the Lord a new song,” to a tune written by Ms. Kirner. One final blazingly loud piece brought her program to a close: Marcel Dupré’s Carillon, from Sept Pièces, op. 27.

OHS convention recitalists usually take great pains to show the entire range and color of the organs to which they are assigned in thoughtfully and carefully chosen pieces. Sadly, this was not the case.

On to Wilmette, and St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church ELCA, to hear William Aylesworth, former organist at that church, long-time and well-loved performer at OHS conventions, and past OHS president. The church, founded in 1903, built its present English Gothic red brick worship space in 1923. Aylesworth told us that he was approached in the late 1980s by the Bradford Organ Company, offering to build an organ as an example of what they could do with recycled materials from other organs. The result was Bradford’s Op. 6 from 1990, a very successful 2m instrument. It stands in a small transept, with pipework in a chamber to the left of the altar, using a space formerly occupied by a Wangerin organ. 

Aylesworth began with “O God, our help in ages past” (St. Anne). Bill was organist here for 38 years, and knows how to lead a hymn in this space. It was beautifully played. Bach’s Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott, BWV 680, wonderfully showed this organ’s great clarity. Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 639, demonstrated the lovely Oboe with tremolo. In Dandrieu’s Trio avec Pédale, we heard the warm Clarinet, which came from a Hutchings organ. The beautiful Great 4′ Gedeckt, and the Swell 4′ Flute d’Amour (from a Johnson & Son organ, Op. 389) worked very well. Dandrieu’s Duo en cors de chasse sur la trompette used, I believe, the Great Trumpet, which came from a 19th-century organ. It had a surprisingly robust sound.

Aylesworth ended his fine recital with Guilmant: Three Nöels, op. 60, demonstrated more solo stops; Marche sur un thème de Hændel, op. 15, no. 2 was very well played and sent us out on a high!

At Glenview Community Church (UCC), we heard young organist Stephen Buzard in music for organ and brass quintet. The organ was built by Stephen’s father’s company: John-Paul Buzard Pipe Organ Builders, Champaign, Illinois, Op. 21 (1999). In the Colonial-style church the organ is in three chambers behind the altar; a rank of Principal pipes provides façades for each of them. The center chamber’s façade is of polished tin, while the flanking chamber façades are flamed copper. The console is in the French style; the organ as a whole is highly eclectic, speaking with a sturdy sound and a wide range of color and tone on its 69 ranks.

Bach’s Concerto in C Major after Johann Ernst, BWV 595, was a clean, spirited performance with just the right amount of rubato, followed by Buzard’s own transcription of Schubert’s Du bist die Ruh, D. 776, displaying strings and several beautiful solo stops (my favorite was the Great 4′ Open Flute with tremolo), played with sweet sensitivity. Duruflé’s Scherzo, op. 2, showed more of this instrument’s variety and range.

In Percy Whitlock’s Five Short Pieces, the Allegretto used the many flute stops. The Great Harmonic Flute was featured as a solo accompanied by the Choir strings. We also heard the Swell Trompette in the tenor range. Paean featured the Major Tuba 8′ stop (on 15 inches of wind), quite thrilling. We then sang Stephen Buzard’s arrangement of the hymn “How shall I sing that majesty” (Coe Fen, a marvelous tune). The time he spent in England was very much evident in his style of playing. Prelude, Elegy and Scherzo by Carlyle Sharpe (b. 1965) was commissioned for this convention by Rodney Holmes. Stephen used many beautiful solo stops in Elegy, beginning with a sad little song on the Choir’s Cor Anglais, then a tiny Cornet, the Corno di Bassetto, and this organ’s beautiful strings. The lively Scherzo for organ and brass is a good addition to the repertoire. 

Stephen Buzard ended this superb recital with Jeanne Demessieux’s Te Deum, op. 11, easily communicating the profound nature of this music, all very splendid. We heard this fine organ play music from many different periods and national styles with ease—and Stephen Buzard is someone to watch!

The grand finale of the convention was a visit to the Place de la Musique in Barrington Hills, Illinois. It has the world’s largest collection of restored automatic musical instruments, the largest theatre organ in the world (5m, 80 ranks), and is also the private residence of Mr. and Mrs. Jasper Sanfilippo. The 46-acre complex includes an enormous shed that houses most of the mechanical instruments and a huge carousel. We ate a picnic supper amidst this collection, then soon made our way to the 44,000 square-foot house with its huge theatre organ in a massive auditorium big enough to hold the entire convention. The organ comes from many sources—some new, some vintage. There are four 32′ ranks; the massive 32′ Diaphone and Bombarde pipes line the walls on either side of the stage, as do the countless percussions, including a set of 32 Deagan Tower Bells, the largest of which we were told weighs 426 pounds! 

Our multi-talented recitalist, Jonathan Ortloff (looking quite snappy in his bright red socks), presented a highly entertaining program of mostly familiar music played with great style and good humor. We heard the theme from Family Guy, some sweet salutes to the late Henry Mancini (Charade and Moon River), a bit of nostalgia for those of us of a certain age, “Puffin’ Billy” (or as I remember it, the theme from Captain Kangaroo). The Trolley Song used all manner of percussion sounds, which raised the roof! Ortloff’s transcription of Stravinsky’s L’Oiseaux de Feu (Tableau II) showed great skill. I really admire his generation of organists who have become so adept at the art of transcription. He ended with An American in Paris, which was great fun. But the part of the recital that left us all in pain with laughter was the hymn “Earth and All Stars” (Dexter), one not exactly on my list of favorites. The text is unintentionally humorous—I cannot get past “loud boiling test tubes” with a straight face. On this huge organ, Jonathan was able to illustrate each turn of phrase in sound effects that were hilarious and a perfect end to the evening. 

This was a very good convention. Instruments, recitals, performers, lecturers—the great variety never left us bored. Buses were agreeable, respectful of our needs, on time, and quiet during recitals. Food was filling and good, and the publications (Atlas, Handbook, and Hymnlet) were beautifully produced, with wonderful content. (Good companions to the above would be Pipe Organs of Chicago, Vols. 1 and 2, by Stephen Schnurr and Dennis Northway. Gorgeous photographs, specifications, and histories of each building and instrument will keep you entertained for hours.) This was the third OHS convention in Chicago; we certainly saw and heard a breadth and depth of pipe organ beauty that other cities would be more than pleased to have. We were treated with great humor and kindness all week long. The committee did an outstanding job! Bravo, Chicago! “It’s my kind of town.” 

The 2013 convention is in beautiful Vermont: http://www.organsociety.org/2013/. See you there!

 

 

Photo credit: William T. Van Pelt, III

John Speller

The Organ Historical Society’s 60th Annual Convention took place in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, with the Marriott Hotel in central Springfield as the convention headquarters. I arrived on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited on Saturday, June 27, and found the hotel conveniently located a short walk from the railroad station. Pre-convention events offered on Sunday morning and afternoon included visits to the Norman Rockwell Museum and the Daniel Chester French Estate, and a walking tour of the Springfield Quadrangle, though I opted instead to attend the Sung Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) in Springfield, again conveniently located a short walking distance from the hotel.

 

Sunday, June 28

The convention proper began with Choral Evensong at Christ Church Cathedral, with an augmented Cathedral Choir directed by David Pulliam, in which we were treated to the John Sanders Responses, Sumsion in G, and Stanford’s Te Deum in B-flat. Evensong was rounded off by a spirited performance of the Allegro from Mendelssohn’s Sonata No. 5 on the fine 1953 Austin Opus 2195, rebuilt as a III/54 instrument by Theodore Gilbert Associates in 1985. 

Another short walk took us to St. Michael’s Catholic Cathedral, where we heard the first recital of the convention, given by Christopher Houlihan on the rebuilt 1929 4-manual Casavant organ, comprising a gallery organ in the fine Gothic case of the previous 1862 E. & G. G. Hook organ, and a chancel division in cases designed when the present organ was installed. This is the largest organ in Western Massachusetts. The program included the Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Minor by Henry Martin (b. 1950) of Rutgers University, commissioned by OHS member Michael Barone and previously given its première performance by Christopher Houlihan in New York City. Houlihan also treated us to one of Brahms’s earliest works, the Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, WoO 9, and one of his latest works, the chorale prelude O Welt, ich muss dich lassen, op. 122, no. 11, effectively sandwiching the chorale prelude between the prelude and the fugue. Houlihan’s performance of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548, was masterful, and indeed I think this was the best performance of the “Wedge” Fugue I have ever heard. The other major work in the recital was Vierne’s Symphony No. 4 in G Minor, op. 32, in which Houlihan effectively demonstrated the large mood swings that characterize this work. After this, it was a short walk back to the hotel for drinks and to explore the books, music, and recordings in the exhibit hall.

 

Monday, July 29

We boarded the buses early Monday morning for a day looking at organs in and around Westfield, Massachusetts. The day began with a recital given by Patricia Snyder on the 1977 C. B. Fisk organ, Opus 71, in First Congregational Church. This splendid little organ was ideally suited to the program of de Grigny and Bach that Ms. Snyder played. Next was a recital by Caroline Robinson on the 1897 Casavant tracker organ, Opus 78, relocated in 2008 from Pittsfield by the Czelusniak firm.to St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Westfield. The organ is situated in a divided case in the gallery at the west end of the church, with the console on the north side, and is believed to be the second oldest Casavant organ in the United States. It has a warm, bold tone with rolling diapasons, but is brilliant enough to be effective in classical as well as romantic music. Ms. Robinson’s recital consisted of music by Brahms, Widor, Schumann, and Boëly.

Following these recitals, founding OHS member Barbara Owen gave a lecture on organ building in the Pioneer Valley. Three important organ builders had their workshops in Westfield—William A Johnson/Johnson & Son, Steer & Turner/J. W. Steer(e) & Son, and Emmons Howard. The Steere company was purchased by the Skinner Organ Company in 1921; the Westfield factory continued to run as a branch of the Skinner firm until 1929. The lecture was accompanied by slides illustrative of the history of all these companies.

After lunch we went to nearby Lenox, Massachusetts, for a recital on the famous Aeolian-Skinner, Opus 1002 of 1940, at the Serge Koussevitzky Music Shed of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. The “shed” is a fine semi-outdoor concert hall designed by Joseph Franz. James David Christie, who is the resident organist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, gave an interesting concert, assisted by two members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Robert Sheena, English horn and oboe, and Cynthia Meyers, flute. The program included music by Johann Sebastian and Johann Bernard Bach, Georg Böhm, Marguerite Roesgen-Champion, Charles Callahan, Jacques Berthier, and Jean Langlais. The J. S. Bach piece was the Sonata No. 1 in B flat, BWV 525, transposed to G major and transcribed for organ and flute, a very interesting change from the usual version.

We then moved to the Church on the Hill (United Church of Christ) in Lenox for a recital played by Peter Crisafulli on the I/9 William A. Johnson organ, Opus 281 of 1869. In 1988, Andover Organ Company releathered the bellows and in 1991 carried out a thorough historically informed restoration. Crisafulli’s eclectic program ranged from No. 5 of the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues, attributed to J. S. Bach but probably by Johann Tobias Krebs, to a modern piece, the Sonatina by Robert W. Jones. Altogether this was a pristine and delightful little organ. Next was a recital given by Adam Pajan on a later Johnson instrument, Johnson & Son Opus 805 of 1893, at the Unitarian-Universalist Meeting of North Berkshire in Housatonic, Great Barrington. The music included works of Arthur Foote, J. S. Bach, Brahms, and Mendelssohn.

The day culminated in the evening recital given by Bruce Stevens on the Hilborne L. Roosevelt organ, Opus 113 of 1882, at First Congregational Church, Great Barrington, an organ I have been longing to hear since I first heard of it around thirty years ago. I was not disappointed: it is a wonderful mellow, cohesive instrument. The chorus was perhaps a little lacking in brilliance for the Bach Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV 541, though Stevens’s performance was nevertheless very effective, and the instrument later proved more than capable of softer baroque effects in the Pachelbel Partita on ‘Christus, der ist mein Leben.’ The organ was at its best, however, in the performance of Max Reger. We heard both Reger’s Scherzo, op. 65, no. 10, and his Introduction and Passacaglia in D Minor, op. 96, in which the organ sounded absolutely magnificent. We then heard the suite In Festo Corporis Christi by Bruce Stevens’s former teacher Anton Heiller, and finally Wilhelm Middelschulte’s transcription of Bach’s Chaconne for Violin Solo from the Partita in D Minor, BWV 1004. A feature of the Great Barrington Roosevelt is the striking façade of pipes stenciled in blue and brown on a background of gold. Small chunks of wood and plaster were glued to the pipes under the paintwork to create a rich three-dimensional effect that is most unusual and possibly unique.

 

Tuesday, June 30

We began the day with a recital by Michael Plagerman on the 1907 Emmons Howard organ in South Deerfield Congregational Church. If anyone thought that Johnson and Steere were the important organ builders in Westfield and that Emmons Howard was an “also ran,” this instrument and the other Emmons Howard organ we heard would definitely give the lie to such a thought. Emmons Howard may not have had quite such a large output as the other Westfield builders, but his instruments were certainly of equal quality. The conventioneers began by singing the chorale Vater Unser, after which Plagerman played Bach and Pachelbel chorale preludes on this hymn. We then heard a voluntary by the eighteenth-century English composer Maurice Greene, Franck’s Cantabile, and the Allegro from Mendelssohn’s Organ Sonata No. 2. The organ produced a grand effect—rich and powerful—and Plagerman brought forth some very pretty effects in the Greene.

We next heard an organ—perhaps the only surviving organ—built in 1868 by William Jackson of Albany in Holy Name of Jesus Polish National Catholic Church in South Deerfield. Jackson was the son of an organ builder in Liverpool, England. Jackson’s father was chiefly memorable for having built the first organ in England with a 1-1/7 foot stop. William Jackson trained with Gray & Davison in London before coming to the United States, which is evident from the Gray & Davison-style console of the South Deerfield organ. The recitalist, Larry Schipull, began with Niels Gade’s Three Tone Pieces, op. 22, and then—appropriately for an ethnically Polish church—played a transcription of a Chopin Fugue in A Minor. The Chorale Prelude on ‘Wie schön leucht die Morgenstern’ by Johann Christoff Oley featured the labial oboe on the Swell, perhaps the earliest stop of its kind in North America. We also heard the Andante with Variations in D of Mendelssohn and the Finale in D by T. Tertius Noble. The organ sounds grand yet bright and has a particularly beautiful Melodia.

Gregory Crowell then played the early William A. Johnson organ, Opus 54 of 1856, in First Congregational Church, Montague. Works of the eighteenth-century English composers Jonathan Battishull and Henry Heron were followed by Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 870, from Das wohltemperierte Klavier II, together with an Adagio by nineteenth-century German composer E. F. E. Richter and a Maestoso by an anonymous German composer of the same period. This is quite a charming little instrument with a very substantial Pedal Sub Base [sic]. We also took in a recital by Don VerKuilen at the First Congregational Church of Sunderland, home of an early Odell organ, Opus 109 of 1871, a relatively rare example of a New York-built organ in the Pioneer Valley. The program consisted of nineteenth-century American music and Seth Bingham’s Fughetta on ‘St. Kevin.’

Following lunch at the same church, we boarded the buses for a recital at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Springfield. This for me was one of the highlights of the convention. The church was built in 1962 during the pastorate of Father Basil J. Rafferty, who spared no expense to make sure that it was an outstanding example of modern architecture, with excellent acoustics and built from the finest materials. Much of the building is lined with marble in various hues, including a striking emerald green marble reredos. The stained glass is also extremely beautiful. The organ is a three-manual electro-pneumatic Lawrence Phelps Casavant, Opus 2750, built in 1963. The church was threatened with closure in 2005, but following the appointment of Father Quynh D. Tran as pastor in 2006 has taken on a new lease on life as a predominantly ethnically Vietnamese congregation. One would hope that this fine Casavant organ might inspire some parishioners to learn the instrument. The recital was given by Joey Fala. Fala, a native of Hawaii, has completed two degrees at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Albany, New York, and is now undertaking graduate work in organ performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Fala promises to be one of the outstanding organists of the upcoming generation. His varied program included Marcel Dupré’s transcription of the Sinfonia from Bach’s Cantata 29, the Prélude from Franck’s Prélude, Fugue, and Variation, and Hyfrydol from Vaughan Williams’s Three Welsh Hymn Preludes. Fala’a program continued with Miroir by Dutch composer Ad Wammes and ended with the Te Deum, op. 11, by Jeanne Demessieux. The Casavant is a wonderful organ in excellent acoustical and architectural surroundings.

The evening recital featured Peter Sykes, assisted by his wife Victoria Wagner, playing the four-manual E.M. Skinner organ, Opus 322 of 1921, in the United Congregational Church of Holyoke. This is a very forthright Skinner organ—I found it a little brutal in the bass at times—in a vast and very beautiful church. Following an American folk tune, White’s Air, arranged by William Churchill Hammond, we heard Peter Sykes’s fine and now well-known transcription of Holst’s The Planets, op. 12. I have now heard Sykes’s transcription of The Planets on several organs in several states, but I thought this was the best performance I have heard. Sykes was able to produce some almost magical effects on the Skinner organ in the quieter passages.

 

Wednesday, July 1

The first recitalist on Wednesday was Monica Czausz, a young woman who also promises to be one of the outstanding organists of the upcoming generation. A student of Ken Cowan, she has already received several awards in organ-playing competitions. The organ was Johnson Opus 424 of 1874 in Wesley United Methodist Church, Warehouse Point, Windsor, Connecticut, a lovely little organ in a very well-kept church. Ms. Czausz played selections from Widor, Schumann, and Saint-Saëns, as well as a haunting Adagio by Charles-Valentin Alkan and Will o’ the Wisp by Gordon Balch Nevin.

Next we travelled to Somers Congregational Church (United Church of Christ), Somers, Massachusetts, for a recital by Christa Rakich, organ, with cellist Jeffrey Krieger of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. The recital included Ms. Rakich’s own composition, Hommage à Pachelbel: Eleven Variations on ‘St. Anne,’ three pieces for cello and organ by Edward Elgar, and the Ricercar à Trois from Bach’s Musical Offering, BWV 1079. The organ is a fine new tracker instrument by Richards, Fowkes & Co., Opus 21 of 2014. 

We then went to St. Theresa’s Catholic Church, South Hadley, Massachusetts, for the OHS Annual Meeting followed by a hymn sing led by Patrick Scott and featuring the church’s 1964 Casavant tracker organ, Opus 2791. At the meeting, we heard the exciting news that through the generosity of the Wyncote Foundation, founded with monies from the late Otto and Phoebe Haas Charitable Trusts, the Organ Historical Society offices, library, and archives are all to be housed in Stoneleigh, a 35-room mansion built in 1901 in Villanova, Pennsylvania. A presentation showing the plans for the new climate-controlled OHS headquarters was given by OHS member Fred Haas, son of Otto and Phoebe Haas, and also the chair of next year’s OHS convention in Philadelphia. I was particularly interested in the organ at St. Theresa’s used for the hymn sing, a Lawrence Phelps Casavant tracker originally built for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. My late mother-in-law was for many years a member of St. Andrew’s, and so I knew the Casavant organ in its original location well. It was far from satisfactory, being architecturally out of keeping with the building, too loud, and excessively bright and screechy. The church put up with the instrument until 2005 when the then organist and choirmaster, OHS member Harry Kelton, persuaded them to buy a new Juget-Sinclair organ, which is as perfect an organ for the church as one might imagine. The Casavant organ was secured for St. Theresa’s in South Hadley through the Organ Clearing House and was installed in 2005 by Czelusniak et Dugal of Northampton, Massachusetts. Bill Czelusniak told me that no changes were made to the voicing apart from raising a few drooping languids and note-to-note regulation. The Casavant organ fits St. Theresa’s as though it had been built for it. The casework that was so out of place in Wellesley looks just right in the fine modern architecture of St. Theresa’s and the volume of the instrument is just right for the spacious acoustics of the church. Furthermore, the acoustics of the building boost the bass frequencies and absorb some of the upper frequencies, so the organ is perfectly balanced for the room. So now St. Andrew’s, Wellesley, and St. Theresa’s, South Hadley, both have ideal tracker instruments in their buildings. As I asserted above, it is as though the Casavant organ was built for the South Hadley church: the organ has at last found its true home.

The next venue was the South Congregational Church of Amherst, where Christopher Marks gave a recital on Casavant Opus 74 of 1896. This is believed to be the oldest unaltered Casavant organ in North America and was relocated to the Amherst church by Czelusniak et Dugal. The stoplist is interesting in being somewhat similar to many Cavaillé-Coll orgues de choeur, with a small Grand-orgue to 4 foot and a larger Récit to mixture and reed. The recital consisted of works by Pierné, Ropartz, and Widor. 

After this we made a short trip to the Jewish Community of Amherst for a recital by Vaughn Watson. The organ, a splendid little instrument, was built by Emmons Howard in 1900. The synagogue inherited the organ in 1976 when they purchased the building from the Second Congregational Church of Amherst, which had merged with First Congregational Church in 1970. Although the Jewish Community used the organ for a time, they had not used it recently and were excited to discover that it might still be played. Several members of the community were present and expressed interest and enthusiasm for the recital, so one hopes they may make more use of the instrument in future. The recital consisted of works by Bach, Schumann, and Mathias, after which the congregation sang “The God of Abraham Praise,” and Watson rounded off the program with Louis Lewandowski’s Prelude ‘Rosh Hashanah.’

For the evening concert we went to the First Church of Monson (United Church of Christ) for a concert on the organ, Johnson & Son Opus 781 of 1892, played by Rosalind Mohnsen. I suspect that the convention committee’s choice of Mohnsen to give a concert on the Johnson in Monson may have been a little tongue-in-cheek, but it proved to be an excellent pairing. The organ is a fairly comprehensive three-manual and includes—unusually for the period—a soft yet very effective 32-foot Pedal Quintaton. In addition to some well-known works such as Saint-Saëns Fantaisie, the recital included a number of interesting works that are not often played. These included Albert W. Ketelbey’s Sanctuary of the Heart, Karg-Elert’s concert arrangement of Handel’s The Harmonious Blacksmith, Alfred Hollins’s Concert Overture in C Minor, Toccata from Sonata No. 1, op. 40, by René L. Becker, and the Concert Sonata No. 5 in C Minor, op. 45, by Eugene Thayer. Of particular interest was Zsolt Gárdonyi’s playful Mozart Changes.

 

Thursday, July 2

We began the day with a visit to Heath Union Evangelical Church for a program given by Frances Conover Fitch on the very early William A. Johnson two-manual organ, Opus 16 of 1850. The instrument is interesting in that it appears to have been constructed as a G-compass organ but changed to C-compass during installation. Ms. Fitch demonstrated this very attractive little organ with a selection of works by Percy Buck, John Stanley, John Zundel, and Samuel Wesley. 

The next organ we visited at First Congregational Church in Shelburne was an eye-opener for me in a number of ways. The instrument was J. W. Steere & Son Opus 681 of 1915, an early example of a pitman electro-pneumatic action Steere. The first thing that impressed me was the quality of the work, both tonally and mechanically, every bit as good as the best work of Ernest M. Skinner during the same period. But what was also really impressive was that the organ is a hundred years old and still operating on its original leather, which as yet is showing no signs of giving out. This can be attributed to three factors—the use of very high quality vegetable-tanned (or perhaps even mercury-tanned) leather, the careful sealing of the leather against the atmosphere, and the absence of air pollution in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. The only changes ever made to the organ were the addition of an electric blower and the replacement of the original dry batteries for the action current with a rectifier. I was further impressed by how laid back the organist Carol Britt was about her recital. Unlike the other organists who spent the first few days of the convention frantically practicing for their recitals, Dr. Britt had practiced the previous week and came along on the bus with the rest of us and enjoyed listening to all the organs. She gave a faultless recital consisting of the Pastorale from Guilmant’s Organ Sonata No. 1, David Dahl’s Suite Italiana, and Lefébure-Wély’s Sortie in E-flat.

One of the little-known gems of the Pioneer Valley is the village of Florence, now part of Northampton, Massachusetts. The Victorian Annunciation Chapel was formerly a parish in its own right, but is now part of the consolidated St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish and is only used for one Mass each week. The organ, Steere & Turner Opus 305 of 1890, is the oldest organ in Northampton. It is a surprisingly powerful organ for its size. The recitalist was Grant Moss, organist of nearby Smith College in Northampton. The last time Dr. Moss gave a recital at an OHS Convention, our bus driver got hopelessly lost and we missed the recital, so I was delighted that I finally got to hear him this time. The program consisted of works by Healey Willan, Nadia Boulanger, Joseph Jongen, and Alexandre Guilmant.

We then travelled into the center of Northampton for a recital at the First Churches of Northampton, affiliated with both the United Church of Christ and the American Baptist Church. The church is a fine Victorian brownstone building with cast iron pillars and an outstanding Tiffany glass window. The celebrated preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) was once the pastor. The organ is E. M. Skinner & Son Opus 507 of 1936, which retains the case and 16 ranks from the previous Johnson & Son organ, Opus 718 of 1889. Lorenz Maycher was intending to give the recital but had to withdraw owing to indisposition, and Charles Callahan graciously agreed to come down from Orwell, Vermont, and step into the breach. He played the Bourée in D of Wallace A. Sabin, Adoration by Florence Price, Nevin’s Will o’ the Wisp, and two pieces of his own composition, Folk Tune (1994) and Hymn-Fantasia on ‘Melita’ (2013)—altogether a very interesting and varied program that showed off the lovely voicing of the Skinner organ to good advantage.

We then returned to the United Congregational Church of Holyoke, where we had heard The Planets on Tuesday evening, for a recital by Christoph Bull in the monumental Skinner Chapel, an amazing neo-Perpendicular building with a vaulted apse. As a chapel, it is much larger than most people’s churches! Unlike the main church, the chapel has air conditioning, so the congregation has the main worship service there during the summer. The organ was Ernest M. Skinner Organ Company Opus 179 built in 1910–12. It was rebuilt in 1972–74 by the Berkshire Organ Company, and reconstructed again, more in keeping with the original design, by Czelusniak et Dugal in 1990–92. Christoph Bull began his recital with one of his own compositions, a rather exciting piece named Vic 1, short for Victimae Paschali Laudes, the Gregorian chant upon which it is based. He followed this with Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582, an Invention in C Minor by William Joel, and a transcription of Ravel’s Boléro. Bull’s program continued with another entertaining piece composed by the recitalist, When Felix met J. S.—Mash-up of Mendelssohn and Bach. The organ retains much of its E. M. Skinner sound, but as this recital demonstrated it can handle many varied styles of repertoire well.

The convention proper ended with the evening recital on Thursday, although there was an additional optional day on Friday. The Thursday evening recital was given by Nathan Laube and was streamed live on the Internet. The webcast will be available on the OHS website under “Conventions” at www.organsociety.org. The recital featured the two organs of the Abbey Chapel, Holyoke College, South Hadley. Laube played the first half of the program on the large two-manual C. B. Fisk organ, Opus 84 of 1986, in the west gallery of the chapel. The program reflected Laube’s recent research in early European styles of music and included works by Buxtehude, Cabanilles, Poglietti, Rossi, and van Noordt. These came off extremely well on the organ, which I think in some ways is the best Charles Fisk organ I have ever heard. 

The second half of the concert was performed on the Abbey Chapel’s magnificent four-manual chancel organ, built by George S. Hutchings, Opus 436 of 1896, rebuilt by the Skinner Organ Co., Opus 367 of 1922, and again rebuilt by E. M. Skinner & Son, Opus 511 of 1938. Restoration work was subsequently carried out by William Baker in 2001 and Czelusniak et Dugal in 2013. The second half of Laube’s program included a transcription for organ of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G, op. 23, no. 5, Lynnwood Farnam’s transcription of Dupré’s Cortège et litanie, op. 19, no. 2, the third of Herbert Howells’s Three Psalm Preludes, op. 32, Joseph Jongen’s Sonata Eroïca, op. 94, and the Andante Sostenuto from Widor’s Symphony No. 9 (Symphonie Gothique). The program provided a very fitting close to a great convention.

 

Friday, July 3 

More than half of us were still around to board the buses for the optional extra day of the convention on Friday. We began the day with recitals on two early E. & G.G. Hook organs. The first of these was Opus 93 of 1849 in First Congregational Church, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. The recitalists were David and Permelia Sears, organ, and their daughter, Rebecca Sears, violin. Permelia Sears played a suite by Jacques Boyvin, which came off very well since the surprisingly complete specification of the organ includes a Tierce, Cremona, and other stops suited to eighteenth-century French organ music. Next Permelia and Rebecca Sears played a transcription for organ and violin of Arthur Foote’s Cantilena in G, op. 71. Permelia Sears’s final offering was the Introduction and Passacaglia from Rheinberger’s Eighth Sonata. Then, in honor of it being the day before July 4, David Sears played his own transcription of Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, specially written to exploit the G-compass of the Hook organ. The organ was originally built for the much larger First Congregational Church in Springfield, where it may have been used to accompany Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” when she visited the church in 1851. It makes a very grand sound in the rather smaller church in Hinsdale, New Hampshire.

The second early Hook organ we visited was also located in a rather smaller building than the one for which it was originally constructed. This was Hook Opus 48 of 1842 in the First Parish (Unitarian) in Northfield, Massachusetts, originally built for Third (later Unity) Church in Springfield. Lubbert Gnodde gave a short recital of works by Franck, Dupré, and Sweelinck. The instrument, though smaller than the Hinsdale one, again produced a rather grander sound than one might
have expected.

We had lunch on the attractive grounds of the Northfield Mount Hermon School in Gill, Massachusetts, with lovely views of the surrounding hills. After lunch it was only a few yards to the school’s Memorial Chapel, built in 1901. Here we heard Rhonda Sider Edgington give a recital on Andover Organ Company Opus 67 of 1970. The program was made up entirely of works by composers born in the last century—Adolphus Hailstork, James Woodman, Margaret Sandresky, Daniel Pinkham, and Libby Larsen. The organ is a fine instrument in fine acoustics and though now 45 years old has weathered well. There is something to be said for the view that a good organ will never really go out of fashion.

Next we proceeded to the First Church of Deerfield, affiliated with both the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association. Here there is a 2003 organ by Richards, Fowkes & Co., Opus 13, which was designed to be similar to the small village church organs in Thuringia that J.S. Bach would have been familiar with, by builders such as Trost and Hildebrand. The builders have done a remarkable job of fitting a II/22 organ into a case in the relatively shallow gallery that is a mere fourteen feet high. Margaret Irwin-Brandon gave a recital of works by J. G. Walther and J. S. Bach that was well suited to the instrument.

The final recital of the post-convention day was given by Daniel Romero on the organ of Our Lady of the Valley in Easthampton. The J. W. Steere & Son organ, Opus 504 of 1902, originally had a Weigle membrane tubular-pneumatic action that was never satisfactory, but this has now been replaced with an electro-pneumatic action by Czelusniak et Dugal, who also made additions, including a mixture, using Steere pipework. The organ has a rich, warm sound, not unlike a Skinner organ. The program unusually included a plainsong Credo sung by the congregation and accompanied on the organ. Also included were Duruflé’s Choral varié sur le thème de ‘Veni Creator,’ Philip G. Kreckel’s Silent Night, Harold Darke’s An Interlude and Charles Tournemire’s Improvisation sur le ‘Te Deum’ as reconstructed by Maurice Duruflé. And so back to the hotel for drinks and a dinner together before parting homewards by our several ways, God willing to meet again at the Philadelphia convention, June 26 to July 1, 2016.

Jay Zoller

Jay Zoller is organist at South Parish Congregational Church in Augusta, Maine, where he plays the church’s historic 1866 E. & G. G. Hook organ. He holds degrees from the University of New Hampshire and the School of Theology at Boston University. 

A retired designer for the Andover Organ Company, he currently designs for the Organ Clearing House and for David E. Wallace & Co. Pipe Organ Builders of Gorham, Maine. Zoller resides in Newcastle, Maine, with his wife Rachel.

In addition to writing several articles about Heinz Wunderlich for The American Organist, Choir & Organ, and The Diapason, he has played in all-Wunderlich recitals in Hamburg, Germany in 1999, 2004, and 2009. His article, “Heinz Wunderlich at 90,” appeared in the April 2009 issue of The Diapason, and his article, “An Organ Adventure in South Korea,” appeared in the December 2011 issue of The Diapason.

The Steer & Turner Company

John Wesley Steer (1824–1900) (he later changed the spelling to Steere) was born in Southwick, Massachusetts, and had apprenticed to a cabinetmaker. He later started his own cabinet shop in Tariffville, Connecticut, and barely two years later saw his entire shop destroyed by fire, an event that he would see repeated several times during his life. Needing work and the income to support his bride of two years, Ruth Johnson Steer, he sought employment with his father-in-law in the Johnson Organbuilding firm in Westfield, Massachusetts. It was not long before the cabinetmaker had mastered the craft of voicing and he soon found himself in charge of installation and finishing.

George William Turner (1829–1908) from Dedham, Massachusetts, apprenticed with a Boston cabinetmaker at the age of sixteen. With some indecision about his career, he left to study telegraphy in Philadelphia, but six months later he was in New York working for another cabinetmaker. In 1852 he opened his own shop, which proved to be successful, soon employing 25 men. In 1854, he sold the business and worked for a year with the reed organ builder, Mason & Hamlin, before joining the Johnson Company in Westfield. His duties there included both cabinetmaker and action mechanic.

Steer left the Johnson factory in 1866 to begin building organs on his own. He built two organs—one a large instrument for the Third Presbyterian Church in Albany, the other for a church in East Albany—before George Turner left Johnson to join him and the firm changed its name to Steer & Turner. In 1868 Steer & Turner bought a lot on the corner of Elm and Meadow Streets in Westfield, and in the late spring began clearing it in preparation to building a new factory. Steer sold a farm he owned in West Springfield at this time, probably to help in the financing of the new building.

The new firm built six organs in 1867, all but one for churches near Albany, and in 1868 increased that to ten. The year 1869 saw the number drop to eight, but the list included the building of two of the firm’s first three-manual organs, as well as the organ that later I played and that made a transatlantic journey. When Steer & Turner moved into their new building, they employed 12 workmen; soon thereafter it was increased to 25. 

 

Grace Methodist Church, Keene

It was during this year of 1869 that Steer & Turner built one of their finest and most representative instruments for Grace United Methodist Church in Keene, New Hampshire. Opus 14, costing $3,000, was considered the best organ in the city when it arrived and, in the opinion of this author, remained the best in the city until its removal in 2011, a hundred and forty-two years later! The organ was installed originally in the rear balcony and was moved to an alcove in the front by the J. W. Steere & Son Company in 1907. In the Victorian taste of the time, the Swell Cornet Dolce III was removed and an 8′ Aeoline put in its place. At the same time, a rank of the Cornet Dolce was added to the two-rank Great Mixture (probably the Tierce set) and the Great Mixture grew to three ranks. One of the two sets of swell shades was also removed.

In 1968, during Edward Boadway’s tenure as organist, an organ vandal whose identity remains unknown hit three area churches. The Congregational, the Episcopal, and the Methodist church organs all sustained pipe damage. Insurance money paid to have the three reed stops in the Steer & Turner cleaned, undented, and resoldered. Thad Outerbridge from Beverly, Massachusetts replaced the 1907 “nearly useless” Aeoline with the 2′ and 11⁄3′ stops that remain today. According to Ed Boadway, the façade was painted “a high-school cafeteria green” during the 1907 move, a redecoration of the room that included a baby blue arch over the organ. The façade was painted gold at a later date, at which time a huge wooden cross was hung on the case. It was removed a short time later. 

An elderly female organist at one point complained of the cold air about her ankles, so the swell pedal and combination pedals were detached and stuck inside the case and the knee panel covered over! Fortunately, this too was soon corrected, but it goes to show what travesties are committed on organs for the silliest of reasons.

The dedication recital program may be of interest. It seems that the concert was a community event, as many (apparently local) musicians took part. William A. Briggs, a Keene native who for years played a three-manual 1868 Johnson organ at Bethany Church Congregational in Montpelier, Vermont, was the principal organist. In addition to the description of the organ, complete with a stoplist, which accidentally left off the Pedal 16′ Double Open, the program reads: 

 

Part I

1. The Chromatische Fantasie – L. Thiele

Mr. Briggs

2. Chorus “O How Beautiful”

Choir

3. Organ, “Andante” – Mendelssohn

Mr. Gerrish

4. Improvisation (exhibiting the Principal Stops)

Mr. Briggs

5. Solo “Eve’s Lamentation” (from the Intersession)

Miss Mason

6. Organ Fantasie – Meyerbeer

Mr. Briggs

 

Part II

7. Fugue in g minor No. 2 – Bach

Mr. Gerrish

8. “Adagio,” Symphony in C – Haydn

Mr. Briggs

9. Ave Maria (with violin obbligato) – Gounod

Miss Mason

10. Christmas anthem

Choir

11. Organ solo

Mr. Gerrish

12. Concert Variations “Pleyel’s Hymn” – Briggs

Mr. Briggs

 

The original stoplist included a three-rank Cornet Dolce on the Swell rather than the later string or the even later Fifteenth or Nineteenth. However, the stoplist as it appeared in 1975 when I became organist was as follows:

GREAT

16′ Bourdon 

8′ Open Diapason

8′ Dulciana

8′ Melodia

4′ Octave

4′ Flauto Traverso

22⁄3′ Twelfth

2′ Fifteenth

Mixture III

8′ Trumpet

8′ Clarinet

SWELL

16′ Bourdon t/b

8′ Open Diapason

8′ Stopped Diapason

4′ Octave

4′ Flute a Cheminee

2′ Fifteenth

11⁄3′ Nineteenth

8′ Basson Bass

8′ Oboe

Tremolo

PEDAL

16′ Double Open Diapason

Swell to Great

Swell to Pedal

Great to Pedal

The year 1869 also saw some of Steer & Turner’s instruments being sent further distances. By the end of the year they had installed organs in Ohio and South Carolina, despite a flash flood in October that washed away a corner of the factory’s basement. Then, in 1871 the Johnson factory was completely destroyed by fire in April. Fire also destroyed the Steer & Turner factory in September. Five completed organs were demolished in the blaze, but Steer and Turner decided to rebuild immediately in the same location, a structure that was twice as large. The five organs burned were replaced, making a total of 16 organs for the year 1872. 

Steer & Turner, with insufficient insurance, had a difficult time with deep financial problems in 1877, which resulted in auctioning the factory for back taxes. However, during this time they continued to receive contracts and build organs. They were still building organs in that location until March 1878, when another disastrous fire destroyed the factory, this time with the loss of only one organ. Transferring production to a nearby whip factory and rebuilding again, they produced ten organs in 1878. No sooner had they moved back into the new building than a dike broke upstream in December 1878 and washed away the new shop. A local paper described them as “having as many lives as a cat, and a singed cat at that.” Despite all this, they managed to complete a large organ for the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Washington.

It is no wonder, though, that they decided to move from Westfield to a new plant in Springfield. It was about this time that Steer altered the spelling of his name, adding an “e” to the end. The move improved their luck and the company began to recover, building organs for churches as far west as Minnesota and Wisconsin. Steere & Turner had a good decade in the 1880s and built their 300th organ in 1890. In 1891 John Steere and George Turner decided to part ways, and John took his sons into the partnership to become J. W. Steere & Sons. Turner spent a few years as president of the Bigelow Lithographic Co. By 1894 he had returned to form a partnership with John Wesley Steere’s son, John S. Steere, to form a new Steere & Turner in competition with his old partner whose company then became J. W. Steere & Son! The history makes for interesting reading, but we also are going to part ways with the firm at this point. I don’t imagine that Steere or Turner ever dreamed that one of their organs would travel as far away as Cologne, Germany!

 

My story at the church

My part of the story begins when I became the organist and choir director of Grace United Methodist Church, 106 years after the organ was built. The pastor at the time was a friend of mine, Rev. C. Edward Claus, and I was fortunate to have a small choir to work with in addition to this magnificent instrument to play. The church was located in a college town and seemed, in 1975, to be holding its own, although it was not wealthy by any means.

Since the church did not have much of a budget for organ maintenance and seemed indifferent to the quality of the instrument that they had, I often put my background in organbuilding to good use, performing much of the maintenance on the organ during my six-year tenure. When the old Spencer blower, located in a restroom off the downstairs kitchen, gave out, I installed a new Laukhuff blower in the organ chamber. In so doing, I enclosed it in a blower box and added a short windline in which I glued my business card and the date of the work. I mention this because it becomes important later in this story.

My real fun was working with the choir and of course playing the organ. I still have programs from two of the recitals I gave at Grace Methodist. In one program, which I played in October 1976 during the Bicentennial year, I began with Bach’s E-flat-major Prelude, followed by James Hewitt, Battle of Trenton; John Knowles Paine, Concert Variations on the Star Spangled Banner; the Toccata, Aria, and Fugue by Jan Bender; Triptych by Noel Goemanne; I Make My Own Soul from All the Elements of the Earth (for organ and electronic tape) by Richard Felciano; my own Passacaglia in D Minor; and ended with the Bach Fugue in E-flat Major. Very patriotic!

A Christmas concert that I played in December 1979 included, along with congregational singing of each of the carols played, Noël, D’Aquin; Greensleeves, Searle Wright; Variations on Silent Night, Jay Zoller; Adeste Fideles, Charles Ives; two settings of Vom Himmel Hoch, Pachelbel; and ending with Bach’s Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C Major. It is interesting to see what music I included so long ago!

One other event really stands out in my mind because it is so unusual. This incident seems humorous now, but at the time was on the scary side and must have happened in 1977 or ’78. I commuted some in those days to get to the church, and so on Sundays I often had lunch at the parsonage with my friends, the minister and his wife. We were having lunch on Sunday afternoon at the parsonage when we got a phone call from the Keene police. An inmate from the State Youth Correctional Facility had escaped and was spotted inside the church, apparently entering when the congregation was departing. They needed the minister to come and open the building so they could go in and arrest him. This sounded too exciting to miss so I tagged along. 

The police explained that while searching for the escapee, one officer had seen him peek out of the church kitchen window. They had surrounded the building while waiting for us. We unlocked the front door and in they went, guns drawn. We waited while they searched each floor, with one officer even crawling through a dirty crawl space under the kitchen. No trace of him was found. An officer came to where we were waiting and asked if there was anywhere else where someone might hide. Literally, the only place left that we could think of was inside the organ. 

I told the officer and we proceeded upstairs to the front of the church with him. He looked on both sides of the instrument and inside the front doors of the case. I knew that someone could climb up into the innards, but since the officer was a big man with his gun belt and two-way radio with handcuffs hanging off of it, I didn’t want him to climb up. The fragile Swell tracker run was right next to the Great walkboard and a scuffle could destroy the key action or pipes. In any event, he didn’t see anything and after some more looking around and discussing the matter, they concluded that the escapee must have gotten out of the building somehow. 

As it turned out, he got out of the church after the police left and was picked up a couple of blocks away. He admitted to the police later that he had, indeed, been hiding in the organ. I can just imagine him laying on the Swell walkboard hoping he couldn’t be seen through the façade. To his credit, in climbing up and back down again, he didn’t do any damage to the organ.

In 1983 I moved on to a new position and didn’t think much about the Steer & Turner until late 2009, when I got a call from one of my former choir members informing me that the remnants of the congregation had put the building up for sale. My first thought was that the bank across the street might buy the building and tear it down for a parking lot. I made some calls to determine what was going on, and then called John Bishop of the Organ Clearing House, who subsequently listed the organ on the OCH website. 

 

Orgelbau Schulte

Oliver Schulte of Orgelbau Schulte in Germany knew of a church in Cologne looking for just such an organ. Schulte ran across the name of John Bishop and the Organ Clearing House while doing work in England. An organ from the USA seemed too far away to be possible, but when the archdiocese of Cologne asked him for an organ, Schulte turned to Bishop for possibilities. The parish of St. Maternus had been saving for years for a new organ, but the actuality kept looking further and further away. When John Bishop showed him pictures, stoplist, and measurements, the Steer & Turner from Grace Methodist in Keene, New Hampshire was a perfect match. Schulte and a committee from St. Maternus examined the organ in May 2010 and a contract was signed in July. Schulte and his colleagues Sonja Füßmann, Viktor Repp, and Martin Ommer arrived in November to dismantle and ship the organ. Oliver’s father Siegfried Schulte ran the shop in the absence of the crew. The instrument arrived at the Schulte shop on a snowy December 28th and work began on the restoration immediately in January 2011. 

I am pleased to report that Orgelbau Schulte has kept the organ virtually intact. It is one of the earliest examples of Steer & Turner and a prime example of their tonal and mechanical work, and Schulte has made every effort to keep it in the same excellent condition as Steer & Turner left it. Because of its new location, however, some alterations had to be made. Since the organ had sat in an alcove in Grace Methodist, new matching sides for the case had to be made. To make it look right in its new setting the 16′ Open Diapason in the Pedal was moved from the sides to the rear of the organ, making the silhouette narrower. At the same time, to make the Pedal division more complete, three new stops were added and placed on an electric chest to the rear of the manual chests: 16′ Subbass, 8′ Stop’d Diapason, and 8′ Horn (reed). New matching drawknobs were made for these stops and room was found where the old electrical switch had been drilled into the stop jamb. Slider seals were added to the manual chests for greater stability. 

Everything in the instrument was meticulously cleaned and repaired. Tracker ends, where needed, were made just like the old ones. Any old parts that were not needed in the organ, such as the Pedal tracker run, were carefully recorded and stored in a room behind the organ. Even the little windline that I made so many years ago with my business card and note inside now resides there as a small part of the organ’s history.  

The dedication at St. Maternus in Cologne was held on Sunday, September 11, 2011—coincidently, but unintentionally, the tenth anniversary of the 2001 attack. A Mass was held in the morning at which a Mass by Gounod was sung, followed by a dedication recital in the afternoon. Professor Jürgen Kursawa played music of Franck, Mendelssohn, and the Americans Matthews, Coerne, and Parker to a full church. The audience was enthusiastic and excited about the new instrument, which looks spectacular in its new home.

The Steer & Turner that was at Grace Methodist Church has always been one of the favorite organs in my career. I had enjoyable times in that position, and it was with alarm that I later watched as the church sank into financial difficulties. Those same difficulties may have saved the organ from extensive disfigurement or some sort of “modernization,” but it also made real the possibility that it would be destroyed at some future date. Both the organ’s new home as well as its old home are brick buildings and look remarkably alike on the outside. 

I am glad that my phone call was able to set the Organ Clearing House in motion and ultimately provide for a new home in a new country, saving the instrument. I am looking forward to the day when I can travel over to visit my old friend!

 

Author’s note

I would like to thank Oliver Schulte whose willingness to answer my questions and provide a chronology as well as photos, has proven to be invaluable. Oliver is the second generation in the company founded by his father, Siegfried Schulte, in 1978. He apprenticed with his father, spent a year away learning about restoration of early-romantic instruments and since 2006 has been a principal in the company. Orgelbau Schulte is located in Kürten, Germany and is responsible for about 35 new organs from I/3 to III/45, as well as a number of restorations. 

I wish to thank Barbara Owen who answered my questions and generously helped provide information from her files. I would also like to thank Ed Boadway, the organist in the late sixties and up until 1972, who was also most helpful with verbal and written information.

 

Bibliography

Owen, Barbara. The Organ in New England. Camp Hill, PA: The Sunbury Press, 1979, ISBN 0-915548-08-9.

Ochse, Orpha C. The History of the Organ in the United States. Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1975, ISBN 0-253-32830-6.

 

 

Cathryn Wilkinson

Cathryn Wilkinson holds an Associate certificate from the American Guild of Organists and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa School of Music. She has published articles on opera and hymnody of Slovakia, where she worked as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer, and most recently on American and Slovak hymnody in Companion to the Lutheran Service Book (Concordia Publishing forthcoming). From 2004–2011, she was the organist at First United Church of Oak Park, in the 1917 building of First Congregational Church on land from the Scoville family of Oak Park.

 

A musical village on the edge of a metropolis

From 1920–1940, the organists at churches in Oak Park, Illinois distinguished themselves, certainly by talent, but also by hard work and a vision that went beyond playing hymns for their congregations. With the resources of Chicago just a few miles away, Oak Park might not be classified as a typical town. But recounting the contributions of a generation of Oak Park’s organists shows the extent of the opportunities that were open to professional musicians of this era. In small ways, their legacy lives on in today’s churches; in larger ways their musical accomplishments are an inspiration for our generation.  

In the mid-nineteenth century, visitors journeying across Illinois by horse and wagon often overnighted in Oak Ridge, about 15 miles from Chicago’s bustling commercial district. At this crossroads, on the site that grew into the village of Oak Park, the welcoming home of Joseph Kettelstrings had served as an impromptu tavern and hotel from the mid 1830s. Beginning in the 1840s Chicago emerged as a mecca for city dwellers, who could obtain the latest innovations from the east coast on the edge of the prairie via the city’s burgeoning freight networks. In a pattern that retraced itself all across the Midwest, the Kettlestrings family gradually divided and sold off property to new settlers. In the case of Oak Park, sales were restricted to those “people who were against saloons and for good schools and churches.”¹ By 1851, the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad line connected Chicago southwest to Joliet and soon extended on to the Mississippi River. Hospitality and convenience steadily attracted more residents with a can-do spirit to Oak Park, with the population reaching 4,600 in 1890.   

In the early years of the 20th century, Oak Park mirrored the progress that swept across the quickly industrializing North American landscape. By 1940 the village population had reached a high of 66,000, growing more than 100% in the years between the wars. The former settlement earned the nickname “The World’s Largest Village,” and it could have been, in political jurisdiction and in mindset. However, these villagers were not a common lot; among them are counted many innovative and enterprising scions: Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Doris Humphrey, and Ray Kroc. In the economic recovery after the Great Depression, a euphoria of success seemed to waft all across American society, spurring innovation and business growth. The aura of achievement was embodied in Chicago’s centennial celebration in 1933 with a hugely popular and privately financed world exposition, “A Century of Progress.”

Chicagoans formed and supported an extensive variety of professional and amateur musical organizations. Some were based on ethnic identities, such as the Chicago Welsh Male Choir, and others on business connections, such as the Illinois Bell Telephone company chorus. Organists were connected through the Chicago Choir Directors’ Guild, the local Organists’ Club, the Chicago Club of Women Organists, and the Illinois AGO chapter, founded as the Western Chapter in 1907.  

Although overshadowed by Chicago’s museums, cultural centers, performing arts, and industry, Oak Park developed a significant cultural identity in its own century of progress. The Scoville family donated land along the main thoroughfare and funds to construct a public library in 1888. William Corbett conducted a village orchestra in the 1880s, and at about that time, the Congregational Church hosted concerts by the Rubenstein Club. Dr. Methven, as president, and Mrs. Clarence Hemingway, conductor and mother of Ernest, produced concerts with the Oak Park Choral Society in 1897. Oak Park and its eastern neighbor Austin formed a local chapter to support the vision of Edward and Marian MacDowell’s newly conceived colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. By 1935, 100 years after its settlement, Oak Park boasted a semi-professional Civic Symphony Association, the Warrington opera house, several movie theaters open even on Sundays, and a Civic Music Association organizing local concerts.   

 

Home to good churches

Central to Kettlestrings’s vision and the community-building ethic that shaped the village was the establishment of churches. The first makeshift church building was an unassuming 1855 frame structure known as “Temperance Hall,” shared by several dozen worshippers of varying denominations. Dora Kettlestrings, the daughter of Joseph, led a cappella singing for services in this hall. A memoir of early days recounts that Mr. Blackner ran a New England-style singing school in Oak Park and his wife played a parlor organ in Temperance Hall.² The first denominational building constructed in Oak Park was Emmanuel Lutheran Church in 1867, a German congregation. 

With the construction of the landmark stone edifices of First Congregational Church in 1873 and First United Methodist in 1874, several congregations anchored Oak Park’s central commercial district, just two blocks from the train line to Chicago. The saying went, “When you get where the saloons stop and the churches begin, you are in Oak Park.”³ Modeled on European cathedrals, these buildings accommodated several hundred worshippers and symbolized the key role that religion played in the village. By the 1930s, at least seven congregations in the village registered memberships above 1,500. Perhaps largely due to the immigrant population, which in the 1920s and 30s hovered around 50% non-natives mainly from northern Europe, a commitment to maintaining churches in the European style was unquestioned.  

Fine pipe organs were de rigueur in these churches. E. M. Skinner, Austin, and Casavant each installed large showcase instruments in Oak Park in the first decades of the 20th century. Many of these organs served well into the 1980s. The organists who played them, along with school and private music teachers, provided musical experiences for the whole village. Some of the organists were heard nightly at Oak Park’s movie theaters as well as Sundays at the church.  

 

Radio is king for the 

King of Instruments

Edwin Stanley Seder (1892–1935), First Congregational Church

Seder served as organist at First Congregational Church in Oak Park from 1921 to 1935. This congregation built on the site of the Scoville family’s apple orchard in 1873 and in the 1890s they hosted the MacDowell Society’s concerts. By Seder’s time, the first church had been replaced with a spacious English Gothic revival building.  

Seder held a music degree from the University of New Mexico, where he also taught before moving to the Chicago area. His musical accomplishments show him to have a broad command of organ and choral repertoire. At First Congregational, he maintained a choir skilled and balanced enough to present Bach cantatas and Messiah. He also accompanied the Chicago Bach Chorus in many Bach cantatas. With this group he performed the Christmas Oratorio at Orchestra Hall on Michigan Avenue. In one program of extreme dimensions, the Chicago Bach Chorus performed the Magnificat, five cantatas, and the Actus Tragicus, according to the Tribune’s Douglas, “both ardently and with respect.” Seder played Bach’s Prelude in E-Flat and the St. Anne Fugue at one Bach Chorus concert. For the Chicago
Singverein he accompanied Bruch’s Das Lied von der Glocke, op. 45. He frequently accompanied his wife, soprano Else Harthan Arendt, in recitals of Baroque music, both in Oak Park and throughout Chicago venues. Upon Seder’s untimely death in 1946, Arendt became the music director at the church.    

A regular feature of The American Organist in the 1920s and 1930s was a listing of service music submitted by members. There is no indication on what basis these lists were selected; many of the submissions are from the same organists on a regular basis. They worked in congregations with some of the country’s better-known music programs, such as Lynnwood Farnam at Holy Communion in New York and Ray Hastings at Temple Baptist Church in Los Angeles. From a review of several of the service music submissions, character music and opera excerpts from concert venues were quite commonly heard during worship services, and hymn-based voluntaries only on occasion.

In 1922, Seder reported having played Festival Toccata (Fletcher), Allegro in F (Guilmant), Largo from the Ninth Symphony (Dvorák), Grand Choeur Dialogué (Gigout), Sunset and Evening Bells (Federlein), and “March” from Tannhäuser (Wagner) at First Congregational Church. On Palm Sunday in 1923, he performed “The Palms” (Faure), “Jerusalem” (Parker), Prelude to Parsifal (Wagner), and “Palm Sunday” (Mailly). He performed these works on the church’s 4-manual Skinner organ (Opus 274) of 69 ranks, which was situated in the front of the nave high above the altar with the console hidden by a carved wooden screen.    

Seder played, not only behind this screen on Sundays, but also out of sight for many radio listeners. The advances in broadcasting and electronic technology in early 20th-century America strongly impacted the organ world. Chicago radio station WLS, funded by Sears, Roebuck (the World’s Largest Store), began broadcasting in 1924 and from day one employed theatre organist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Early rival WGN (the World’s Greatest Newspaper) was financed by the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune’s reviewer Elmer Douglas wrote a daily review of radio broadcasts, which were the new sensation. The public considered musical broadcasts on the airwaves just as much a performance as a live concert. Douglas was particularly enamored of the playing by organist Edwin Stanley Seder, who began playing for WGN radio broadcasts in 1924. Douglas wrote in great detail about each work—for example, singling out some of Seder’s improvisations and the beautiful Sanctus from Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass, presumably transcribed by Seder for organ. On nearly any given day at 6:30 p.m., listeners throughout Chicago could tune in to WGN and hear a live organ recital by Seder.  

Seder performed upwards of 1,000 concert broadcasts, first on an Estey organ at the station, and later on a Lyon & Healy organ constructed specifically for the WGN live broadcast studio in Chicago in 1924. The radio organ was played in a studio designed by acousticians with walls covered in silk brocade to provide optimal tone quality. Reportedly in December 1925 Seder reached the mark of having broadcast his 1,000th piece without ever having repeated a work on the air.

His radio presence certainly brought recognition. He had gained the post of professor in the organ department at Northwestern University in Evanston in 1919 and also taught at Chicago’s Sherwood Music School. In 1934, he joined the music faculty at Wheaton College Conservatory, in the far western suburbs of Chicago, where he taught history, organ, and conducting.   

In addition to his teaching, broadcasting, and service playing, Seder earned the FAGO certificate and became president (dean) of the Chicago AGO chapter. During his tenure he led the chapter in planning for a series of weekly noonday recitals in Chicago venues. He concertized frequently in Oak Park and Chicago. He was once presented by the Chicago AGO chapter in recital at St. James Cathedral. He was invited to perform at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, home to a 4-manual Skinner, Opus 327, and at the dedication of the 121-rank Kimball organ at New First (Union Park) Congregational Church of Chicago in 1927. Two representative recitals at First Congregational in Oak Park reveal that much of his repertoire showed off the orchestral organ through recent character music and opera transcriptions:  

 

Concert Overture in B Minor (Rogers)

“Allegro” from Sonata I (Guilmant)

Danish Song (Sandby)

March of the Gnomes (Stoughton)

Serenade (Rachmaninov)

Rhapsody (Cole)

A second program opened with a repeat performance of Stoughton’s March of the Gnomes, followed by:

 

Overture to Der Freischütz (Weber)

Minuet (Zimmerman)

Bells of St. Anne (Russell)

Brook (Dethier)

Concert Overture (Hollins)

Seder’s concerts often featured complex works by Bach, such as Komm Gott, Schöpfer from the Leipzig chorales, which he played along with one of the few works he composed, The Chapel of San Miguel, on a program in Winnipeg in 1929.⁴  

 

Music for the masses

Edgar A. Nelson (1882–1959), First Presbyterian Church

Philip Maxwell of the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote often about Edgar Nelson’s many performances for very large audiences in Chicago. He mentions that one of Edgar Nelson’s favorite passages in the Bible was “Sing unto him a new song:  play skillfully with a shout of joy” (Psalm 33:3).⁵ Maxwell did not document Nelson’s shouts of joy, but Nelson’s skillful playing is well documented. His career was centered around First Presbyterian Church in Oak Park, in the “church corridor” of the city’s commercial district, but his impact went far beyond.  

Nelson was born into a musical family of Swedish heritage and followed in his father’s steps as a church musician. Beginning in 1909 and continuing for 47 years, he was music director at First Presbyterian Church, playing an organ by the Hall Company, with whom he may have consulted on the design. Hall had also installed an organ for the Bush Temple of Music, a well-known piano store in Chicago.  

While he was working at First Presbyterian in Oak Park, Nelson was also a student at the Bush Conservatory in Chicago, one of several prominent private music schools established in the early 20th century. Nelson later joined the faculty there. As church music director, he presented organ concerts and conducted musical revues, such as a musical arrangement of The Thurber Carnival. He also directed children’s and adult choirs and composed incidental music for the church’s Christmas pageants, which were remembered later by church members as being fabulous. The church music budget provided for a paid quartet of local professional singers, which Nelson conducted for Sunday services. Not until the early 1950s with new pastoral leadership was a volunteer choir and a handbell ensemble formed.  

Dr. Nelson played Sunday mornings in Oak Park for a congregation of 1,600 and then for 40 years headed into Chicago each afternoon to Orchestra Hall, where he conducted a choir of 125 voices at the Chicago Sunday Evening Club until 1956. The club was a source of pride for the greater metropolitan area and eventually drew a national audience through radio broadcasts. Every Sunday night local businessmen and travelers would fill the 2,000-seat concert hall for a nondenominational Christian service featuring prominent religious speakers such as Henry Sloane Coffin from Union Theological Seminary and W.E.B. DuBois from Atlanta University. Founded in 1908, the Chicago Sunday Evening Club still produces a weekly cable TV broadcast. “30 Good Minutes” is aired on WTTW, where production moved from Orchestra Hall in the 1960s.

The club’s leaders, who included Rev. Clifford W. Barnes, an internationally known church activist and Chicago philanthropist, offered an additional level of status to the CSEC, as did Daniel Burnham’s beautiful Orchestra Hall venue from 1904. Dr. Nelson played the Lyon & Healy organ there, Opus 164 also from 1904, which at 4 manuals and 56 ranks was reported to be the largest instrument the Chicago-based company ever built. The CSEC services included performances by the club’s own chorale, which pre-dated the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s resident chorus by several decades.    

Dr. Nelson was respected and well known in Oak Park through his long tenure at First Presbyterian Church. Also, due to his post as conductor, and from 1938 until shortly before his death, general choral director for the annual Chicagoland Music Festival, his reputation extended much further. Beginning in 1930, the Chicago Tribune Charities sponsored this event annually for 35 years, reportedly attracting more than 10,000 singers at a time to Soldier Field. The outdoor stadium was usually home to the Chicago Bears football team, but for a few days each August, in Chicago’s sweltering summer heat, a musical crew headed by Nelson organized singing contests and performances for choral ensembles from as many as sixteen states. On one occasion, more than 80,000 people were expected in the audience, purchasing tickets at $1.50 each. Participating choirs were auditioned because the number of choirs that wished to perform was far greater than the organizers could accommodate. The festival presented not only classical choirs, but also represented Chicago’s varied ethnicities with African-American gospel choirs, accordion ensembles, and popular country vocalists as well.   

When he was only 28 years old, Nelson was honored by King Gustaf V of Sweden with the Order of Valhalla, during a tour of Scandinavia with the Swedish Choral Club of Chicago, which he directed.⁶ In 1930, he became president of Bush Conservatory of Chicago. Two years later, when the Bush Conservatory was subsumed under Chicago Musical College, Nelson continued on as president of the merged school. His legacy was such that the Chicago Conservatory of Music dedicated a concert hall in his honor after his death, naming it the Edgar A. Nelson Memorial Hall.  

In addition to his teaching and administrative roles, for 44 years Nelson conducted the 200-voice Marshall Field Chorus, associated with Chicago’s landmark department store on State Street. For more than ten years, Nelson was the accompanist for the prestigious Apollo Musical Club. This independent auditioned chorus of about 80 voices sold standing subscriptions to its concerts of oratorios, cantatas, passions, and other large choral works such as Bach’s B-Minor Mass in Orchestra Hall. A Chicago Tribune reviewer referred to Nelson’s accompanying there and for numerous vocal recitals as consistently ideal. The Apollo Musical Club’s director in the early 20th century was Harrison Wild, notably also a founding member of the American Guild of Organists in 1896 and the Chicago (originally the “Western”) chapter in 1907. When Wild retired from the Apollo Club in 1928, Nelson took on the role of conductor and held that post until 1951.  

In 1937, living in the technological age that followed the century of progress, Nelson was among the musical experts chosen by the Federal Trade Commission for a panel to review the issue of a new organ. The panel was to advise on the validity of claims by the Hammond Clock Company of Evanston, Illinois that its electronic instruments were organs. No doubt many organists saw the clock company’s invention as a threat. Nelson joined the majority opinion of the panel, which concluded that the so-called electronic organ did not meet the accepted definition of an organ. This verdict did not hold back the Hammond Clock Company, nor did it intrude on Nelson’s indefatigable musical activity or impeccable musicianship.

 

Casavant makes their mark 

in Oak Park

George H. Clark, Grace Episcopal Church

In the early years of the 20th century, Mrs. Linda Holdrege Kettlestrings, who married into Oak Park’s founding family, served as organist at Grace Episcopal Church. The building was a gracious English Gothic revival structure completed in 1905 on the “church corridor.” Mrs. Kettlestrings also accompanied silent movies at Oak Park’s Lamar Theater two blocks away.⁷ In 1922, just a few years after the firm of Casavant Brothers of St-Hyacinthe, Quebec celebrated their 40th anniversary, they installed Opus 940, a 65-rank, 4-manual organ for Grace Episcopal Church. Chicago was already home to a dozen organs by Casavant, but this was only their third in Oak Park, and by far the largest in this village, which The Diapason had declared to be a prominent organ center. The Chicago Tribune reported the cost of Grace’s new instrument at $50,000.⁸ In 1947, Marcel Dupré performed a solo recital to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the instrument. 

At the time of its installation, the church’s organist was George H. Clark. Born in England, Clark was raised in the English choirboy tradition of London’s smaller parishes. He studied with Joseph Bonnet—for how long and where is not known, but Clark often included works of Bonnet on his recital programs.  

Clark kept good company. He was chosen to be one of three organists performing for a festival AGO service on April 24, 1928 in celebration of the new Möller organ, Opus 5196, at nearby Austin Congregational Church. The other performers were William H. Barnes, the noted author, organ designer, and past dean of the Chicago AGO chapter, and Harold B. Simonds, organist of St. Chrysostom’s Church in Chicago.  

Clark had a 2-manual organ installed in his Oak Park home in 1926. Opus 1162 was the fourth Casavant organ in Oak Park and featured a 16′ Bourdon in the pedal division. Whether Clark was duly impressed with Casavant’s work or due to some other circumstance, he became Casavant’s Chicago sales representative in 1932. His first instrument was purchased by Saint Catherine of Siena Roman Catholic Church in Oak Park. This was Opus 1467, a 3-manual instrument of 24 ranks. Clark played the inaugural organ recital featuring repertoire that frequently appeared on concert listings of the period: an excerpt from
Tannhäuser, Borodin’s “At the Convent,” an unnamed work by Guilmant, and a transcription of the “Hallelujah” chorus. 

 

A dean and director from 

Chicagoland’s best  

Raymond Allyn Smith and Theodore Kratt, First Baptist Church

Just two blocks from the principal church corridor of Lake Street stand the First Baptist and First United Methodist churches. The Methodist congregation was Oak Park’s first, formally organized in 1872 as the First Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1925 the present building, designed by noted Oak Park architect E. E. Richards, was completed and the Skinner organ company installed a pipe organ in the same year. This was Oak Park’s third Skinner, Opus 528, with four manuals and 43 ranks—all three organs within three blocks of one another.  

The nearby First Baptist congregation housed the second Skinner in the village, a 4-manual organ of 38 ranks, Opus 358, dedicated on April 25, 1923. This organ replaced the small pump organ that had been donated to the Baptist church by the pastor in 1882. In 1922, the congregation, which had grown to a membership of nearly 1,600, called Raymond Allyn Smith as organist. Smith was a graduate of the University of Chicago and conductor of glee clubs at both Beloit College and the University of Chicago. A native of Ohio, he studied organ, piano, and composition, first at Oberlin College and then with organist Robert W. Stevens in Chicago.⁹ Smith most likely would have been close to the installation of Skinner’s gargantuan 110-rank organ in Rockefeller Chapel on the University of Chicago campus. He consulted with William H. Shuey, who had preceded Edwin Stanley Seder as organist at First Congregational Church and knew its 1917 Skinner organ well, on the specifications for First Baptist in Oak Park.  

According to the account of the organ’s installation in The American Organist, First Baptist Church completed its red brick building with English Gothic features, purchased the organ, and installed ten tower chimes, all without carrying forward any debt.¹⁰ The chimes were a memorial in honor of George H. Shorney, some of whose descendants are still active in this congregation today. Smith planned a series of recitals and choral events throughout the year to celebrate the acquisition of the new organ. He collaborated with Theodore W. Kratt, the church’s music director. Kratt had graduated from the Chicago Musical College in 1921, later joining the faculty at Maine Township High School, and serving First Baptist Church until 1928. He conducted a Sunday choir of sixty voices at First Baptist. He founded an Oak Park choral society of 100 augmented with approximately fifty singers from a junior choral society for special concerts, given in the sanctuary that seated nearly 1,000.¹¹ The choir’s repertoire included cantatas and oratorios, one example being Elijah by Mendelssohn.  

A celebratory program one month after the organ’s installation, most likely with Kratt conducting and Smith accompanying, included a mix of vocal, choral, and piano repertoire by contemporary composers (Amy Cheney Beach, Sergei Rachmaninov, Camille Saint-Säens), chorus excerpts by Gounod and Sullivan, an organ work by the ever-popular Pietro Yon, and the “Hallelujah Chorus,” which frequently appeared on concerts during this era. The final work was an organ transcription of the March from Verdi’s Aida.  

Smith not only performed in the Chicago area; he was invited elsewhere as a soloist. His program in 1923 for the ongoing recital series at the University of Illinois, home to a 4-manual, 59-rank Casavant, follows:

 

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (Bach)

Sonata No. 4 in D Minor (Guilmant)

Echoes of Spring (Friml)

Notturno (Mendelssohn)

Am Meer (Schubert)

Au Convent (Borodin)

Toccata from Symphony No. 5 (Widor)¹²

 

Smith’s colleague and music director at First Baptist, Theodore Kratt, completed his Mus.D. at the Chicago Musical College in 1932. He moved on to other positions, first as orchestra conductor at Miami University of Ohio, incidentally a position organist Joseph W. Clokey had formerly held, and then as Dean of the School of Music at the University of Oregon. Later music directors at First Baptist of Oak Park were Herbert Nutt (1930–34) and Robert MacDonald (1935–39).  

 

Let the organist do it!

Miss Etta Code (d. 1953), St. Edmund’s Catholic Church 

This Catholic parish, one of two established in 1907 in Oak Park, was served for 49 years by its founding priest, Monsignor John Code, with the help of his sister Etta Margaret, who played the organ. Miss Code, after 46 years as organist, was remembered at her funeral for her love of God and her zeal for His church. She is quoted on her guiding philosophy as having said, “The purpose of church music is to pray in song, not to entertain. It is an office once entrusted to priests. To make it an occasion for mere artistic display is to insult the God who is on the altar.”¹³ 

As a child, Etta grew up with John and five other brothers in a musical family in Chicago’s St. Columbkille parish, one of many Irish enclaves that yielded generations of successful Americans. The matriarch of the family was Mary Code. With her children, she formed a family ensemble in the home, playing mandolins, harps, and guitars for the neighborhood.  

Miss Etta Code studied piano, harp, and organ at the Chicago Musical College. After graduating, she moved to Oak Park in 1907 to help her brother John nurse along the new Catholic parish in the village’s commercial district. The congregation first met in a barn on the old Scoville property in the center of town and then in 1910 moved into a stately English Gothic building about three blocks from Oak Park’s “church corridor.” Miss Code’s duties included managing the parish office, teaching at Chicago’s historic Ogden School, directing the catechism classes for the parish school, and helping the needy callers who appeared at the rectory. In a more unusual role, at an outdoor parish fundraiser on the lawn of one of Oak Park’s baron-era mansions, Miss Code was described as one of the “Oak Park beauties” who set up the “cigar booth” for entertainment on the lawn.  

The parish Mass schedule found Miss Code at least once a day in the organ loft, playing for the liturgy and singing the solo parts while accompanying herself on the church’s Casavant organ, and sometimes on harp. The size of the parish, which grew beyond 2,000 in the 1930s, dictated that there would be frequent named Masses and on many weekdays the organist had to accompany as many as three of them. When the church acquired a 16-rank Casavant pipe organ in 1913, Miss Code most likely consulted on this project. That year the church made a partial payment of $1,155 on the instrument. Casavant installed two instruments in Oak Park in 1913. The other, at 53 ranks, was built for the First Congregational Church but sadly lost when lightning struck the church’s steeple four years later. St. Edmund’s Casavant, now the oldest remaining in Oak Park, was refurbished in 1952, just one year before Etta Code’s death.

Miss Code organized a number of ambitious musical celebrations to commemorate events in the parish’s life. She was frequently noted as an accompanist and organ soloist outside of regular Masses. In honor of a parish member who donated extensive decorations for the building’s interior in 1920, she arranged a sacred concert, featuring William Rogerson and Vittorio Arimondi, soloists from the Grand Opera Company (later the Chicago Lyric Opera). Other performers came from the Theodore Thomas Orchestra in Chicago (later the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) and St. Edmund’s choir of 34 voices. Miss Code accompanied and played a “Finale” by Guilmant, presumably from an organ sonata. The male chorus of the Catholic Casino Club sang sacred excerpts in Latin by Gerasch and Kreutzer. The repertoire spanned from Mozart and Haydn to Gounod. A reviewer in the local Oak Leaves reported that the church was packed that evening, and “not the least convincing contribution was Miss Etta Code’s organ accompaniment of the intricate and exacting scores and her rich and voluminous interpretation of Guilmant’s organ recessional.”  

Miss Code seemed to show an affinity for opera, having directed at the Warrington Opera House in Oak Park, where there was a resident orchestra. The Warrington billed itself as “the only legitimate theater outside of the Chicago Loop” and it was large enough to seat 1,500 people. The following year, since the first sacred concert was so well received, Miss Code organized a repeat performance, again with Messrs. Rogerson and Arimondi of the Chicago Grand Opera Company, and noted Chicago organist Adalbert Hugelot. Hugelot played Gesu Bambino by Pietro Yon, many of whose works are frequently found on recital programs of this era. Several vocal solos from Handel (“Where’er You Walk”) to Verdi (Ave Maria) contrasted with Grieg and Tchaikovsky transcriptions played by a string quartet from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  

The sacred concerts did not continue on this scale in future years. The church’s annual expense for parish music was $415 in 1921, on a par with the amounts given for European sufferers and Irish relief. This was sufficient to sustain a choir, which met regularly every Friday night, even throughout Oak Park’s hot summers. During the school year, students at the parish school presented musical plays and concerts by the student band. Miss Code served both students at the school and friends throughout the parish and the village. Father Code referred to her as his “first assistant” at St. Edmund’s. At her death, 95 parishioners and local church and community groups requested memorial masses for her. 

 

Value added

The careers of Edwin Stanley Seder, Dr. Edgar Nelson, George Clark, Raymond Smith, Theodore Kratt, and Miss Etta Code spanned an era in which the organ’s standing was as solid as the pillars surrounding their churches. In spite of economic hardships and the staggering scale and speed of world events from 1920–1940, these musicians held on to a constant discipline of planning, practice, and performing that enriched their communities with live music. They may have worked in a village, but they worked at a level that rivaled larger urban centers like Chicago. Their legacy shows that the society that heralded the era of radio, streetcars, Gershwin, and Guthrie also valued the centuries-old tradition of organ-playing in its churches.

 

 

Foley-Baker, Inc.,

Tolland, Connecticut

St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, 

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Foley-Baker, Inc.,

Tolland, Connecticut

St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, 

Minneapolis, Minnesota

 

From the builder

The Welte name is mostly known for its roll-player mechanisms, the Mignon reproducing piano, and their Orchestrion. However, as builders of traditional pipe organs, Welte’s output was small; organs were but one in a family of Welte “products” typical of the era’s massive instrumental output. In 1912, Welte opened a factory in Poughkeepsie, New York, but their earliest organs were purchased from other builders and fitted with Welte players. Since Welte was of German ownership, the First World War threw things into disarray, and after the war, ownership changed hands. A larger reorganization in 1925 by former Kimball man Robert Pier Elliot had Welte building its own organs of fine quality and for any venue: residence, theater, or church. But the firm struggled to gain a strong financial footing. It suffered a setback in 1927, repurchase and relocation in 1929, and finally absorption by Kimball of Chicago in 1931. Today, there are few surviving examples of Welte organs, and, even after our 42 years in business, we had never worked on one. St. Mark’s Minneapolis would be a new experience. 

The cathedral’s consultant was David Engen of Maple Grove, Minnesota. His request for proposal offered a general description of the organ’s overall condition. Our assumption was that we would see huge diapasons, pencil-scale strings, and tibia-like flutes, all on a massive chassis. In fact, the St. Mark’s Welte had been tonally and mechanically modified on two different occasions by M.P. Möller. Much of the Welte material was long gone, although the organ remained capable of producing an impressive volume of sound.

But it was clear the various rebuilds had compromised the instrument. The chamber was packed with non-Welte chests, flexible wind lines, dangling wires, and a chamber entrance door that barely opened, due to added ranks and equipment. There were reservoirs everywhere, fully 17 in the main organ. Tuning access was bad enough, while actual service work required unnecessarily heroic effort. One reason the organ continued to generate an impressive sound was the chamber’s placement and hard walls. More than projecting sound, the chamber almost seemed to amplify it. The cathedral’s impressive acoustics certainly helped as well. 

The organ was on its third console and had a dated relay system spread throughout four different areas of the building. In the basement, the large Spencer blower’s motor needed all new bearings. Adding insult to injury, HVAC ducts installed in the 1950s had seen the removal of the organ’s important static reservoirs, further compromising the wind supply.

At Foley-Baker, we love to save old organs. However, it was clear that at St. Mark’s, there wasn’t an old organ to save, just parts of one. Trying to determine what was possible and affordable would take both positive and practical thinking. If the organ were to be rebuilt, the results had to be worth the investment. 

We spent days measuring pipe scales and gathering details. There were interesting finds, such as high in the tower, where the Möller crew had stored some of the 1928 Welte pipework. There was much damage; some ranks were incomplete, while others were beyond repair. Our tonal director Milovan Popovic laid out rank after twisted rank on the large tower room floor. Out of this survey we found three Welte stops to reclaim: the Swell 4′ Clarion, Great 8′ Second Open Diapason, and the large-scale Swell 8′ Vox Humana. All three became valuable additions. 

As our familiarity with the cathedral’s music program and organ grew, so did our concepts for the renewed instrument. Tonally, we had 1920s Welte mixed with 1980s Möller. In 2012 it is perhaps too easy to criticize Möller’s radical changes as heavy-handed; they were in the spirit of the time, and had introduced a variety of useful colors, including mutations, large-scale strings, and solo reeds. In time, we decided just where and what reused ranks would work and what new ones had to be added to create a bold, cohesive American sound to fill the cathedral’s large nave.

The chamber size and shape dictated the same stacked layout as had existed from the beginning. For us, multi-level organs raise red flags for service accessibility. Without careful design, the new and larger instrument had the potential for being another service nightmare. Our solution was to start from scratch, using a new chassis designed and built at Organ Supply Industries. The elegant simplicity of their slider chests promised minimal maintenance and assurance of accessibility. Their built-in schwimmer-regulators greatly simplified the winding, adding space for more stops and wider passage boards.

Given the scales and pressures, effective swell boxes would be essential. The original Welte shades were rebuilt and fitted to new boxes of 11⁄2-inch-thick medium density fiberboard. The combination of the two makes for a marvelous range of expression; massive ensembles can whisper or roar.

In addition to restoring the 1928 Spencer blower, we were able to find and install appropriate static reservoirs. Unlike 1928, however, this equipment now stands in separate rooms dedicated for the purpose. The result is that, despite wind pressures from five to 20 inches, an indicator light is necessary to know that the wind is on. As we have done elsewhere, we designed and installed an automatic, in-chassis humidity system that requires minimal service attention and combats Minnesota’s problematic humidity swings. 

The low-profile Schantz console dating from 1990 was reused, with modified stop jambs, new drawknobs, and burled mahogany jamb faces for a sharper appearance. (Schantz graciously provided and installed new, easy-to-read piston buttons.) We installed a new electronic relay that is easily accessed by simply raising the now-hinged console lid.

Years of change had seen many stops swapped between divisions. The Choir Diapason had been moved into the Solo as a 4′ Octave. We returned it to the Choir at 8′ with a new bass octave. The Welte Second Open found in the tower became our Great Diapason. Other stops were also returned to their original 1928 locations. The renewed instrument is a blend of remaining Welte pipework, selected Möller ranks, and important new registers. All retained ranks were cleaned, repaired, and revoiced, perhaps none more important than original large pedal basses and their Welte chests. These provided the weight and heft we envisioned as a foundation for the new instrument. 

The reed stops presented their own challenge, with ranks by five different builders and, in some cases, using scales and pressures dictated by available—or unavailable—space. Working with Chris Broome of Broome & Co. LLC, we examined the potential of each rank for our new scheme. In the end, we designed and had built an all-new Great reed chorus. Having found the original 1928 Welte 4′ Clarion, we were able to use it to recreate Welte’s original Swell reed chorus; industrial strength pipes with a just-right massive sound. A small-scale yet piercingly loud Möller Trumpet, which had been taking up valuable room in a corner of the Great, was revoiced into an ideally scaled Choir Trompette. Chorus reeds now serve to cap wonderful choruses, enriched by solo stops such as the Skinner Clarinet or Kimball Corno d’amour. 

The new organ’s sound ties together all the good qualities that go into creating it: the new specification, high pressures and large scales, the chamber’s ability to project sound and the swell shutters’ ability to contain it, and the new layout and chassis, which provided optimal placement for all stops. As the bottom photo on the front cover clearly displays, even 1928 pipes can look (and sound) like new. We were really thrilled to hear Canon Musician Ray Johnston play the “new” organ at the inaugural concert on May 18, an outstanding program that included brass and the cathedral’s choirs. To him and David Engen we owe thanks for supporting us in this challenging and rewarding project.

Upcoming concerts involving the rebuilt organ are posted on the cathedral’s website. All photos of the cathedral and reconditioned instrument are by Mark Manring (www.manring.net). All other photos are from Foley-Baker, Inc. files.

—Mike Foley

 

From the canon musician

St. Mark’s Cathedral has long been known for its various music programs and concerts. Built as a parish church in 1910 and designated a cathedral in 1941, it has during that time seen six directors of music as well as a number of rebuilds and additions to the original four-manual Welte installed in 1928. As musical tastes changed throughout the century, the tonal plan of the organ became distorted, becoming a combination of classical and romantic sounds, leading to a loss of identity for the instrument. 

The various additions also led to a chronic lack of space within the organ chamber, preventing access for tuning and repair to pipes bending over with metal fatigue. Equally worrying was the damage done to the winding as abundant leaks had resulted in pressure drops throughout the organ. 

In 2010 the cathedral launched a capital campaign, included in which was repair to the organ’s winding. However, on closer inspection it soon became apparent that problems ran very deep and fixing the leaks would in fact be a waste of money. Major action was required. The choice was stark—total reconditioning or a new instrument. This was an easy decision: much of the original Welte chorus was in good condition and had such quality and character that it could become the basis of a major overhaul. 

Next came the biggest challenge—persuading the vestry and the congregation that a lot of money needed to be spent to keep the organ in working order. To many, of course, the organ sounded just fine, as it always had. As is often the case, organists’ abilities to mask faults and ciphers go unnoticed by the majority. However, thanks to many organ tours and presentations by both committee and builder, and the fact that music and the pipe organ are such an integral part of worship at the cathedral, we were able to reach our target of $1.2 million.

In consultation with our selected firm, Foley-Baker Inc., a new specification was drawn up that necessitated replacing one-third of the pipework and relocating ranks from the gallery to the main organ. Of primary concern was an instrument to accompany the liturgy, from providing subtlety and color for the cathedral choir’s large repertoire to giving stimulating leadership to congregational hymnody. If the organ could do both those things well it would surely prove to be an admirable recital instrument also. 

While not a particularly large four-manual instrument, at least by American standards, it has exceeded all expectations as a concert instrument: almost endless color, a vast dynamic range, and a character that is totally suited to the building, all exquisitely voiced. It is unashamedly in the English romantic style, and, having played many of the great cathedral organs in the U.K., I am delighted that we now have such a fine instrument in that tradition, as well as an organ that is true to its original intention.

—Ray Johnston

 

From the committee chair

In May 2012, the refurbished St. Mark’s organ was inaugurated for concert audience and worshipers. Those were thrilling experiences, the result of meticulous planning and craftsmanship by Canon Musician Raymond Johnston and Foley-Baker, Inc.

I was privileged to chair the organ planning committee during the last phase of its pre-construction work. This was undertaken in the context of St. Mark’s “Opening Our Doors” capital campaign, which, by any standard, was a clear success, raising over $3 million. I was also privileged to co-chair the capital campaign with Inez Bergquist, Doug Eichten, and Courtney Ward-Reichard. The capital campaign had three highly visible purposes: restore the exterior of the 100-year-old building to stop leaks and deterioration; improve a long list of interior infrastructure items; and repair/restore the pipe organ. The first two of those purposes were easy for members and contributors to see and understand, especially when ice formed inside the church and fell on folks in procession during Sunday worship. The organ was a different matter.

Even though much of the organ was well beyond maintenance and some of it dead or ciphering, it still sounded pretty good much of the time. Most of this was attributable to Ray Johnston’s talents and the marvelous acoustic characteristics of the St. Mark’s Cathedral space. We conducted behind-the-walls tours of the chambers to show potential donors the points of failure and the grossly antiquated control mechanisms, leaking air handlers, and failing wiring. We were also careful to explain that much of the tuned pipework and blower could be restored and would be maintained.  At the end of the many days, the congregation did contribute and one very generous, anonymous donor provided most of the funds needed for the more than $1 million organ project.

While Foley-Baker did their work, the entire instrument was removed and a digital organ was rented and used with speakers around the cathedral. Many regular attendees commented that they could “hear the difference” and had come to understand why it was appropriate to rebuild a fine pipe organ. That was brought home once again to me on Sunday last, when Ray Johnston offered Samuel Sebastian Wesley’s Choral Song and Fugue as the service postlude. Most of the congregation stayed to hear it and to celebrate the glory of the rebuilt organ.  

—Fred Moore

Allison Alcorn

Allison A. Alcorn received her PhD from the University of North Texas, Denton, in 1997 and is now professor of musicology at Illinois State University, where she is active in the Honors Program, Study Abroad, and Faculty Development and mentoring. Alcorn served as editor of the Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society from 2012–2017 and joined the AMIS Board of Governors in 2017. She has previously served as councilor for research for the Organ Historical Society and on the governing board of the American Organ Archives. Publications include articles for the Grove Dictionary of American Music and the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments as well as articles in a variety of national and international journals.

A unique figure in the story of the American organ is John Leonard Hinners (1846–1906), who perhaps epitomizes the late nineteenth-century entrepreneurial spirit in the face of the closing frontier (Figure 1). He is something of a musical amalgam of Henry Ford and Montgomery Ward: Ford brought the passenger car to the common man and Hinners brought the pipe organ, and just as Montgomery Ward successfully reached the isolated Midwestern farm house with its mail order merchandise, Hinners reached out to the isolated Midwestern country church with his mail order pipe organ business. Although Hinners was not the only company to use the mail order idea, he seems to have been at least among the most successful with it. In fact, the Hinners Organ Company never extensively employed outside salesmen. All preliminary business was conducted by catalog and letter, the organ was crated up and shipped by rail, and the first time the buyer had any real contact with the company was when an employee, whose expenses were included in the contract, arrived to direct the parishioners in installing the new instrument. John Leonard’s entrepreneurial ambition was clearly shaped by the experiences of his entire life, combining to formulate his ideas about meeting the musical, religious, and social needs of rural churches.

 

Family background

John Leonard Hinners was the son of German immigrants who set out from Hanover, Germany, with a group of Pietists seeking religious freedom. In 1849, Peter Hinners (1824–1887), John Leonard’s father, was accepted as a missionary of the German Methodist Episcopal Church. Peter and his family left Wheeling, West Virginia, to work a circuit in the Midwest, locating variously in Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana for the next number of years. Unlike the English-speaking Methodist circuit riders, the German missionaries tended to use river transportation, traversing north on the Mississippi to visit German settlements scattered across the Midwest, particularly along the line of St. Louis-Chicago-Milwaukee, each of which was home to more than 10,000 Germans in 1860. Peter’s particular skill was constructing churches, and many of his assignments involved mission sites in which he erected a church before moving to the next site. With Pekin located as a major port on the Illinois River, the decision to move the John L. Hinners family to Pekin in 1879 may have been related to the work of the Methodist missionaries, among several other factors. 

John Leonard, therefore, spent his childhood in any number of small, rural congregations throughout the Midwest, shaping his future in profound ways. As a musician deeply involved with these churches, he certainly would have felt the limitations of the typical church reed organ from both a musical and an aesthetic/cultural point of view. Moreover, he would have been intimately familiar with the frustration of these rural congregations who struggled to pay their ministers, much less find additional cash for a pipe organ. Peter, known for his skills as a church builder, must have provided John Leonard’s basic woodworking skills, since one might reasonably expect that Peter’s sons would have assisted him with his building projects. Music occupied a central position in the Peter Hinners household as well and so, as Peter’s son, John Leonard was reared with his hands on a hammer and his feet on the pedals, learning skills of building and music that he would later combine into a business that produced nearly 3,000 pipe organs and approximately 20,000 reed organs in its five and a half decades of existence.¹

 

Marketing and sales models

John Leonard accepted a position with Mason & Hamlin in Chicago in the 1870s, a time when reed organs were rapidly gaining popularity throughout America. Music was seen as a worthy pastime, one that was integral to a happy home. Further, owning a reed organ signified a measure of prestige that was second only to the piano, the latter more of a “citified” instrument and the former more of a status symbol in rural areas. Reed organs were such a desirable commodity that in the mid-1880s, a small reed organ was offered by the Ladies’ Home Journal as a premium for submitting 350 one-year subscriptions at .50 each (Figure 2).

The sales techniques of reed organ companies are particularly important, because it appears that John L. Hinners modeled his pipe organ enterprise, both target audience and sales approach, directly on that of the reed organ business. Advertisements in periodical literature were ubiquitous. Everything from popular magazines and newspapers to church journals ran the advertisements of dealers or manufacturers hawking their particular brand of organ. Some ads were a full page, but many were no larger than an inch square, squeezed in among advertisements for women’s shirtwaists and Calumet Baking Powder.

A common technique of these ads was to include an “inquiry address” to which one could write for a free catalog. Often these catalogs—such as the Hinners catalog from 1895 in Figure 3—were not much more than testimonials from satisfied customers, and occasionally the accounts were somewhat improved in the editing process, and some were probably entirely fabricated. Catalog houses such as Montgomery Ward and Sears carried entire lines of musical instruments, including reed organs. The catalog houses’ sales philosophies were followed almost to the letter by John L. Hinners in his pipe organ business.

 

The move to Pekin

Why John Leonard chose to move his family to Pekin, Illinois, in 1879 is a subject for speculation. Pekin is located on the banks of the Illinois River about 50 miles due north of present-day Springfield and was organized under a city charter dated August 20, 1849. It is said that the town was named after Peking, China, when Ann Eliza Cromwell, wife of one of the original town title-holders, pushed a hat pin through “Townsite” on a globe and it came out on the opposite side at Peking, China.² Because of the town’s prime location on the river and its status as a terminal railroad station, numerous industries developed in Pekin. More than that, however, if one conjectures that John Leonard had the rural church market in mind right from the start, a Midwestern location was desirable as an effort to gain the trust of an Eastern-wary rural Midwestern clientele. Because the first settlers in Pekin were primarily native-born Americans, the earliest churches in each denomination were English-speaking, but when the Germans began to arrive in large numbers in the 1850s (attracted initially by the T. & H. Smith Wagon Company), German-speaking congregations were established. The first German congregation in Pekin was the Methodist Episcopal, building a small frame structure in 1850 and becoming a leading congregation in the St. Louis Methodist Conference.

Undoubtedly, the Hinners family had contact with that congregation through their strong involvement with the national German Methodist Episcopal denomination. After his years as a circuit rider, Peter Hinners, John Leonard’s father, functioned as a financial agent for the denomination and traveled frequently to the regional German Methodist Episcopal churches, surely visiting Pekin on a regular basis. Pekin’s congregation even hosted the 1875 Conference of the German Methodist Episcopals, which John Leonard may well have attended, probably then meeting Fred Schaefer, for whom he initially manufactured his reed organs. Schaefer was a member of the church, and as a musical instrument dealer, he certainly would have spoken with an employee of Mason & Hamlin who happened to be visiting his church. In the course of conversations, it would have been quite natural for John Leonard to voice his frustrations with hopes of advancing within the Mason & Hamlin operation as well as his desire to build his own organs. The scope of Schaefer’s businesses shows him to be nothing if not enterprising (Figure 4), and it is easy to picture the wheels turning in his mind at the idea of enticing a young organbuilder to manufacture reed organs for him right there in Pekin. The city did offer a small amount of competition for the Hinners organs. In an 1878 Pekin newspaper, Geiger & Thompson’s Sewing Machine Exchange also advertised “the Matchless Burdett Organ” (Figure 5).

After Chicago, however, the competition in Pekin offered little intimidation or resistance for the ambitions of John Leonard, though some even continued to offer Mason & Hamlin organs, like the local musical merchandise dealer in this advertisement in Figure 6. Another competitor, however, succumbed to the offer of employment by the Hinners firm, as is documented in the 25th anniversary booklet listing Gilbert Skaggs as a 14-year employee. Skaggs is cited in the 1905 Pekin City Directory as an independent organbuilder and may have been one of the men recruited to help get the pipe organ enterprise underway, as his tenure coincides with the beginning of pipe organ production.

Regardless of the impetus, John L. Hinners’s Perfection Organ Manufactory in Pekin began a new era of industry for the region. He set up shop in a back room of Schaefer’s new building on Court Street, across from the courthouse and spent the next ten years building reed organs, perfecting the skills and techniques he would then apply to the manufacture of pipe organs. Specifically, in addition to the marketing and sales acumen modeled on the reed organ trade, John Leonard brought to his pipe organs an understanding of compactness, mechanical reliability, and superb carpentry that he had learned in reed organ construction.³ Perhaps the most important entrepreneurial application, later seen as a defining characteristic of the pipe organs, was his standardization of the reed organ. In an 1895 Hinners Reed Organ catalog (in English and German) he lays out just five action types and ten cabinet styles. By strictly controlling variations, he was able to produce them literally by the dozens. When he turned this idea to pipe organs, such standardization permitted him to offer quality instruments at significantly lower prices.

 

Hinners & Albertsen

Schaefer sold his instrument manufactory and musical merchandise business in early 1881. John Leonard took the opportunity to cash in on the reputation he had built for himself in the previous year and recruited a group of local investors to back the Perfection Organ Works as a private reed organ factory. Ubbo J. Albertsen (Figure 7) purchased the interest of the original investors in 1885, and the company became Hinners & Albertsen.⁴ With the infusion of Albertsen’s capital, the firm expanded once again and reed organ sales soared. The turn to pipe organ production was announced in a special catalog that was written in German and English—with a sketch of the Boston Music Hall organ on the cover. These Hinners & Albertsen organs had one manual and pedals, available in three ranks for $375, four ranks for $485, five ranks for $575, and six ranks for the bargain price of $635. The 1890 catalog introduced “Our New No. 5 Pipe Organ” for $485 with economical specifications:

 

8′ Open Diapason (metal, 61 pipes)

8′ Melodia (wood 61 pipes, enclosed)

8′ Gamba (metal, 61 pipes, enclosed)

4′ Principal (metal, 61 pipes)

 

16′ Pedal Bourdon (wood, 15 pipes)

 

Super Coupler

Manual to Pedal Coupler

Swell Pedal

The three-rank organ included two 8′ ranks and one 4′ rank; for the five-rank instrument, they added a 2′ rank to the No. 5 specifications, and the six-rank organ added two 2′ ranks to the No. 5 specifications. Churches close to Pekin could reduce the cost by sending members of its congregation to the factory with their own wagons, handling drayage and set-up themselves. In this case, the organ would cost only $75 a rank, which amounts to a significant savings for budget-minded congregations.

If shipped, the swell box served as the shipping crate, and many of these still have the shipping labels nailed to what is now the inside of the box (Figure 8, nailed on the far back side). In the early years, all of the non-local organs were shipped via the railway. The pipes and components, all numbered, were placed in numbered crates and loaded into the boxcars. When the organ arrived at its destination, church members retrieved the crates from the depot along with the company representative who directed the organ’s installation. The numbering system (cf. Figure 9) made installation quick and easy, usually requiring only one company man to oversee the operation, though larger organs sometimes required teams of two or, rarely, three. The Hinners representative’s signature and the installation date is often found penciled somewhere inside the instrument, frequently somewhere on or in the swell box. Trucks eventually replaced the horse-drawn wagons, and organs within an eleven-state radius of Illinois were delivered by truck, which drove at a top speed of 25 miles per hour. The Hinners firm managed to keep even the switch to motorized drayage within the family—or at least within the extended organ family—when Philip Kriegsman, a 13-year tuner for Hinners, purchased the drayage company that had been handling organ shipping and became the contractor who moved the organ business from horse-drawn wagons to motorized vehicles.

The 1898 Hinners & Albertsen organ built for the St. Peter Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church in Red Wing, Minnesota, exemplifies the typical smaller two-manual organ (Figure 10). Like the reed organs, the one-manual pipe organs had a keyboard divided at middle C, each half controlled by a treble and bass knob. Most often, the Hinners & Albertsen pedal ranks encompassed only the lower octave, and the second octave was supplied as a pull-down. The catalogs claimed that the notes above the lower octave were only very rarely used for church services, and so they were omitted “as a needless expenditure.”

 

To be continued.

 

Notes

1. Cf. Allison Alcorn, “A History of the Hinners Organ Company of Pekin, Illinois,” The Tracker, vol. 44, no. 3 (2000): 13–25. The Tracker article provides a more detailed account of the complete company history, though much in the present article’s overview is indebted to that work. This article provides a simple company overview up to the date of the Red Wing organ and then a focus on the story of that Red Wing, Minnesota, instrument.

2. Louella Dirksen, The Honorable Mr. Marigold (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 1. Mrs. Cromwell must have had a rather crooked pin, actually, because the direct antipode of Pekin is in the Indian Ocean off the far southwestern tip of Australia.

3. Unfortunately, the only Hinners organ remaining in Pekin is at St. John Lutheran Church. In 2014 it was rebuilt by the Buzard Organ Company of Champaign, Illinois. The original console was gone, so they used a 1927 console from the Hinners built for Hope Reformed Church in Chicago plus a number of other console materials from the Hinners that had been built for the Pekin Elks Club Lodge (the last Hinners pipe organ built before the company closed). Some odds and ends were used in the interior from the 1913 organ built for the Hinners’ family church, which assumed the non-Germanic name of Grace Methodist Episcopal Church when it rebuilt in 1914 after a devastating 1911 fire. That organ is now completely dismantled, with only the façade pipes remaining as visual display to house an Allen electronic organ. 

4. An unfortunate typographical error in the 2000 Tracker article (op. cit., 15) cites “Uddo” J. Albertsen as John Leonard’s partner. Some confusion had already existed about Albertsen, as early sources sometimes incorrectly reference Urban J. Albertsen as the partner in the organ business. Urban, however, was not born until 1887, and it was his father, Ubbo J. Abertsen (1845–1926), who bought into the Hinners organ enterprise.