The convention of conventions
Conventions are big business. Tens of thousands of like-minded people gather in huge hotels and exposition halls for orgies of sales, parties, seminars, and exhibitions. Poking around the Internet, I found that the Specialty Equipment Marketing Association expects about 130,000 attendees at their 2007 convention to be held ten days from now at the Las Vegas Convention Center. SEMA (serving the specialty automotive industry since 1963) deals with custom equipment for cars and light trucks. They are planning a seminar for the 2007 convention titled Mean and Green: Bio-fuel Hummers, Fords, and off-road machines, where they will be exhibiting a 700-horsepower Hummer powered by bio-fuel. They’re not telling what the fuel mileage will be—500 bushels-per-hour? It isn’t easy being green.
In early December, the Las Vegas Convention Center will host the NFR (National Finals Rodeo) Cowboy Christmas Gift Show. They expect 20,000 attendees. Last March the Nightclub and Bar Convention & Trade Show attracted 38,000 people, and in August 13,000 people attended the convention of the American Pool Players Association at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas.
Given Las Vegas hotel prices, the cost of travel and food, and the propensity of conventioneers to consume various commodities with unusual gusto, the amount of money involved in these huge shows is incomprehensible. How do they manage the logistics? Imagine the swirl at the hotel check-in desk when 50,000 people are trying to check in on the same day.
Last week the American Institute of Organbuilders gathered at the Valley Forge Conference Center and Radisson Hotel in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. The Specialty Equipment Marketing Association has about a ten-year head start in membership development. Founded in 1963, their convention is now among the largest in the country. The AIO was conceived in 1973 and chartered in 1974. I don’t know the exact count, but I believe that around 250 of us attended, and to be truthful, I doubt we’ll get into tens of thousands any time soon.
This seems like a small group, but friends who are not involved in the organ world are amazed when I tell them I’m going to a national convention involving several hundred organbuilders. These are the people who say, “I didn’t know there were any of you left.” I’m feeling pretty good, how about you?
Any convention has an exhibit hall in which vendors show their wares to members of the trade. There were almost 25 firms exhibiting at the AIO convention, including companies that provide leather, specialty tools and hardware, keyboard restoration, organ pipes, console parts, and of course, solid-state control systems. The exhibits hall is open for several hours each day, especially in the evening when it becomes the locus for the convention’s social life. After dinner people swirl through the exhibits, run into old friends, make new friends, and head off to the hotel bars in small groups.
One benefit of this tradition is the dispelling of myth—I’ve been doing business with suppliers to the organbuilding trade for 30 years, and it’s fun to meet those with whom you’ve spent countless telephone hours. You get to form a personal connection with the person who answers the phone at the order desk, and to discuss technical problems in detail with the engineers who design and build the equipment. Over the years I have found great value in knowing the people I talk with on the phone. These relationships are unspeakably valuable when I’m calling from a job site where wedding limos are showing up outside and the organ is acting up.
I got active in organbuilding in the late 1970s just as solid-state controls for pipe organs were entering the market. I had my start in workshops that specialized in tracker-action organs, and my immature understanding didn’t allow much space for digital equipment. I knew many people who resisted or ignored using it. I was fortunate to work for several years along side an old-timer who had worked personally next to Ernest Skinner (in fact, I assumed the care of two Skinner organs he had helped install in the 1920s and had maintained ever since!) who said, “that stuff is for you young guys.”
In the ensuing generation, many if not most organbuilders have had at least some experience with solid-state equipment, and many use it exclusively. Years ago, I remember being easily bewildered. I would stand trembling with my hand on the switch before turning on a system for the first time and would be looking for smoke, unfairly (to both the supplier and myself) assuming that there would be smoke to see. I handled the circuit boards as though they were poisonous, and while I understood what they were supposed to do, I had no idea how they did it.
Enough time has passed that we’ve been through generations of solid-state equipment. Looking back, the earliest systems seem pretty primitive. The companies offering them went to great trouble to make the pin-boards (rows of pins where you connect the wires from the console controls to the system) look as much like traditional pipe organ equipment as possible. Later, multiplexing was introduced—logic-based systems that reduce organ music to data streams that allow the information to be passed from console to chamber using a single wire. In my memory, multiplexing was the first scary leap. Simply put, the system is based on a clock that scans all the console outputs a prescribed number of times per second and sends a code along the wire to the chamber where it is “unscrambled” by another clock. For someone who started with trackers, it was hard to imagine that it would work or that it could be reliable. At about that time, there was a Star Trek movie during which the USS Enterprise was under reconstruction and the famous Transporter was malfunctioning. When a crew member was “beamed” up or down, the machine failed to unscramble the molecules accurately, resulting in horrible scrambling of human tissue. Would this happen to our organ music?
At first bad things did happen. One system I worked with had a clock that was going too slow, resulting in herky-jerky organ music. And lightning strikes were death. I was caring for a couple large organs that had new multiplexing systems, and I sweated out thunderstorms with good reason.
Now we are getting used to software-based systems in which the organbuilder connects the console controls (keyboards, stop knobs, piston buttons, swell shoes) to rows of pins, and using software determines which pin does what. After the organ is finished, you could decide to change divisional pistons into generals by updating the software through e-mail.
It’s fun to think back a few generations to the time when electro-pneumatic combination actions and pitman chests were introduced. Any good modern organ builder knows the symptoms of trouble in a pitman chest. But when those chests were first being perfected, technicians must have sweated out mysterious problems the way I have with solid-state gremlins.
In the exhibit hall of the AIO convention, I was most impressed by the sophistication of new developments in solid-state pipe organ controls, and even more impressed by the sophistication of my colleagues, the organbuilders, who in the last 30 years have worked hard to understand the function, uses, and benefits of this equipment. I joined in conversations in which organbuilders were suggesting improvements, offering solutions to problems, and describing innovative ways they’ve found to use existing controls. I saw an institutional comfort level that can only be to the benefit of our clients. We’ve come a long way, baby.
Because I’ve been involved in some very large organ projects in recent years, I’ve noted an important way in which organ organbuilding industry has changed. Seventy-five years ago, when American organbuilders were producing thousands of organs each year, there were a number of companies that had hundreds of employees. It was much easier for such a large company to marshal the forces to erect a 32-foot Principal, or just to transport an organ of 100 ranks or more. They had people employed in experimental roles, developing combination actions, relays, and new types of voices. Today it’s rare to find a company with 100 employees, and most companies employ fewer than ten people. In this environment, the importance of the supply house is increased as we can decide independently whether or not to build pedalboards “in house,” or which solid-state control system best fits the design and function of the console we design.
I thank the people from the companies who exhibited at the AIO convention. I appreciate the hard work you’ve done developing new products. The American organ industry is strengthened by your efforts. The fees you paid for exhibition space helped make this valuable experience possible. And thanks for the candies, wine, keychains, and door prizes you provided!
Earlier this year I wrote a two-part essay about the new life of the famous, enormous, and almost indescribable organ in the former Wanamaker’s Department Store (May and June 2007, “Size Matters”). In it, I wrote that Philadelphia boasts an unusual array of very large organs. The Wanamaker organ (6/462), the Austin organ (4/167) at Irvine Auditorium of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Dobson organ (4/124) at the Kimmel Center (home of the Philadelphia Orchestra) add up to 753 ranks in three organs that are within a few miles of each other. The Wanamaker Store and the Kimmel Center are within walking distance. The participants in the AIO convention had a wonderful opportunity to hear these three giant and wildly diverse instruments in two successive days.
While organ-people will no doubt always refer to the Wanamaker Store in Philadelphia, credit must be given to Macy’s Department Store, now the proprietor of this most grand of retail spaces. Robin Hall is an executive vice-president in charge of Macy’s Department of Annual Events, the group that produces the Thanksgiving Day Parade and July Fourth Fireworks along with numerous flower shows and musical reviews. There can be no division of a modern American corporation more enthusiastic or better equipped for the care of this most singular of pipe organs. In the brief period since their occupation of the store, they have funded extensive and expensive long-needed repairs, provided a large amount of space in the building dedicated to an organbuilding workshop, and established a collegial relationship with Curt Mangel, curator of the organ, and Peter Conte, Grand Court organist. To hear Peter and Curt talk about the people of Macy’s is to hear a gushing exceeded only by the amazing sounds of the organ itself. (Please refer to this column in the May and June issues of The Diapason for more about the Wanamaker Organ.)
Anyone who has attended an organ convention knows the bus rides—hundreds of like-minded people rattling across the countryside on a tight schedule to hear and see organs. Along with the organ demonstrations, there were workshop tours (Patrick J. Murphy & Associates and Nelson Barden at Longwood Gardens), workshop seminars on mounting toe-studs, stenciling façade pipes, and rebuilding Spencer organ blowers, and lectures in a large conference room at the convention hotel. Those lectures were on subjects as diverse as rebuilding and repairing Möller pitman chests, recovering keyboards, and conflict resolution.
Patrick Murphy, whose organbuilding workshop is in Stowe, Pennsylvania, was the chair of the convention, and the staff of his company was present throughout answering questions, guiding us as sheep on and off the buses on schedule, and providing a cheerful and welcoming presence. Randall Dyer (Randall Dyer & Associates of Jefferson City, Tennessee) is the chair of the AIO’s Convention Overview Committee. These folks deserve the gratitude of America’s pipe organ community for their contribution to the education, celebration, and advancement of American organbuilders.
I have always thought that organbuilders are a collegial bunch. Although we are competing with each other in a small market, we are typically willing to assist each other with advice and exchange of ideas, and even by sharing workers when projects get larger than a small staff can handle. But during most of the working year, we are buried in organ chambers in our own areas, seemingly out of touch with what our colleagues are doing. In King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, we came out of our holes blinking in the sunlight, and shared a wonderful week of professional growth and companionship. Nice to see you all. See you in Knoxville next year.■
