In the Wind: from Nelson Barden to Dobson Pipe Organ Builders

John Bishop

Humble π

Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BC) lived in the ancient Greek capital of Syracuse, located on what is now Sicily. He was one of the great mathematicians, engineers, inventors, and astronomers of his time, even of all time. He imagined and recorded the origins of calculus and pioneered the concept of applying mathematics to physical motion, the applications of a screw, and the multiplication of pulleys and levers to allow the lifting of heavy objects. He is the source of the quote, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the earth.”

Among his many achievements was the realization of π (spelled pi), the mathematical constant that defines the properties of a circle and all shapes that are related to circles. ∏ is an irrational number—it cannot be expressed as an exact number. We round it off at 22/7 or 3.14, so we actually arrive at approximations of the exact number. It is a little like figuring a third of a dollar: $0.33 + $0.33 + $0.34 = $1.00. Because it cannot be expressed in an exact way, we use the symbol π to indicate the exact number. Around 600 AD, Chinese mathematicians calculated π to seven digits after the decimal, and with modern computing power it has been calculated to trillions of digits. It is infinite. Let’s stick with 3.14 to save time. ∏ is known as Archimedes’ Constant.

RELATED: Read "The Life of Pi" here

In the June 2021 issue of The Diapason, pages 12–13, I wrote about an encounter I had with a twenty-something kid in a local lumber yard as I was buying material to make a circular baffle to keep squirrels off one of our birdfeeders. I was planning to fasten aluminum flashing to the circumference of the circle, so I rattled off thirty inches (the diameter of my circle) times π to get a little under eight feet, so the ten-foot roll of flashing would be enough. The kid did not know about π (didn’t know about π?) so I gave him a primer. ∏ times the diameter of a circle (πd) is its circumference. ∏ times the radius squared (πr2) is its area. I suggested that we could compare the area of a twelve-inch pizza with that of a sixteen-inch pizza, and using the calculator in my phone, I rattled off the two areas, and he was impressed by how much difference that four inches made to the size of the pizza.

But when I recreated the exercise while writing the June column, I mixed up the formulas and used πd for the area rather than πr² (circumference rather than area) and triumphantly reported the difference between a twelve- and a sixteen-inch pie as about twelve and a half square inches. Had I used the correct formula, I would have found that the sixteen-inch pie is larger by about 88 square inches, or 44 two-inch bites, over six times more than my published result.

Two readers caught my mistake and wrote to me and to the editors of The Diapason. Nicholas Bullat is a retired organist and harpsichordist and former chair of the organ department and head of graduate studies at Chicago’s American Conservatory who also worked as a corporate and securities counsel. Nicholas carried the pizza story a step further using prices from a local pizzeria. Their $12.50 twelve-inch pie costs about $0.11 per square inch while the $18.00 sixteen-inch pie comes out at $0.09 per square inch. If I am right estimating a bite at two square inches, then those 44 extra $0.18 bites seem quite a bargain.

Glenn Gabanski, a retired high school math teacher in the Chicago area, also caught my mix up of pizza recipes, adding that the sixteen-inch pizza is 1.78 times larger than the twelve-inch. I will never buy a small pizza again. If the large one does not get finished, we will have leftovers for breakfast.

Achimedes’ mental model

Glenn found another significant error in what I wrote for the June 2021 issue. Remembering long-ago visits to Boston’s Museum of Science, I wrote:

When I was a kid on school field trips, I was interested in an exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston that showed a perfect sphere and a perfect cone on a scale. Each shape had the same radius, and radius and height were equal. They balanced. My old-guy memory of my young-guy thinking had me wondering, “Who figured that out.” You can prove it by using π to calculate the volume of each shape.

The last time I was in that wonderful museum would actually have been when my sons were teenagers, more than twenty years ago, and I have since learned that the exhibit was installed around 1980, long after my field-trip days. I should hesitate to guess because I am apparently often wrong. Glenn pointed out that my memory of the cone and sphere could not be correct because the cone would have to be four times the radius of the sphere for the masses to be equal when the radii were equal. The volume of a sphere is V = 4/3 πr³. If r = 1, V = 4/3 π. The volume of a cone is V = πr²h/3. If r = 1, then V = π/3, ¼ the volume of the sphere. Using 1 for the radius made it easy to understand.

My foggy senior-citizen memory needed a boost, so I called the Museum of Science and was connected to Alana Parkes, an exhibit developer. When I described the volume-balancing exhibit she knew exactly what I meant and responded with a photograph reproduced here showing the balance beam with a cone and sphere on one side, and a cylinder on the other. If the radius of the sphere and the radii of the base of the cone and the cylinder are all equal, the volume of the cone plus the sphere equals that of the cylinder. I shared that with Glenn, and he whipped out his pencil and responded with a sketch, also reproduced here, a lovely piece of teaching with the reduction of the equations explaining the properties of the drawing. I am sorry the fellow in the lumber yard did not have Glenn as a teacher in high school.

I had engaging conversations with Nicholas and Glenn on Zoom, and I am grateful to them for reading carefully enough to catch my errors and respond. When I told Glenn that he was one of two who had written, he responded, “Only two?” And many thanks to Alana Parkes of the Museum of Science in Boston for her cheerful willingness to correct my faulty memory and provide this fine photograph.

Glenn mentioned that he had always been troubled by the moment at the end of The Wizard of Oz, when the Wizard confers a “ThD” degree on the Scarecrow, a Doctor of Thinkology, he explains. The Scarecrow instantly responds by misquoting the Pythagorean theorem. Humbug. (You can watch that scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxrlcLktcxU.) And remember that bird feeder baffle? The thirty-inch plywood circle with less than eight feet of flashing around it? It didn’t work. The squirrels “took the hill” within an hour.

A life’s work: remembering Fritz Noack

Forty hours a week times fifty weeks is 2,000 hours in a year. Maybe you took three weeks of vacation, but I bet you worked more than eight hours a lot of those days. At that rate, there are 100,000 working hours in a fifty-year career. Did you use them all wisely and productively? Professional accomplishments add up over a long career. I started writing this column in April of 2004 so this is the 208th issue at an average of 2,500 words, well over half a million words. When you visit, I will show you my pitchfork, um, I mean tuning fork. In twenty years, a church organist playing one service a week for fifty weeks each year plays at least 3,000 hymns, 1,000 preludes, 1,000 postludes, 1,000 anthems, and 1,000 dramatic lead-ups to the Doxology. Did you do that without repeats? Oh, right, you played a certain “Toccata” on twenty Easters.

If your life’s work was a billion bits on a hard drive or 250,000 emails, you cannot stand them in a field and review them, but when you walk into the workshop of the Noack Organ Company you see photos of 160 pipe organs on the wall leading up the stairs to the office. Fritz Noack founded the company in 1960 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, moved it to a larger workshop in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1965, and in 1970 purchased an old school building on Main Street in Georgetown, Massachusetts. A tall erecting room with a voicing balcony was added, and the Noack team has been producing marvelous organs there for over fifty years.

Fritz Noack passed away on June 2 at the age of 86. He leaves a vast legacy that stretches from the infancy of the “Tracker Revival,” the renaissance of American organ building, to the present day. He apprenticed with Rudolf von Beckerath, and worked for Klaus Becker, Ahrend & Brunzema, and Charles Fisk (at the Andover Organ Company) before starting his own firm.¹ The nascent company was home to a host of apprentices who have had important and influential careers in the business including John Brombaugh and John Boody.

An American renaissance

As a teenager in the Boston area in the 1970s, I was swept up in the excitement of that renaissance. My mentors took me to concerts, workshop open houses, and parties, and I soaked it all in. I remember a moment in the Würsthaus in Harvard Square, a long gone but much-beloved haunt for the organ community. We had come from a recital played by Fenner Douglass on the Fisk organ at Harvard Memorial Church and were gathered around a large round table. It must have been around 1973 or 1974, because I was thinking about applying to Oberlin and was excited to meet Fenner for the first time. Someone at the table noticed that there were nine people present who were organists for churches that had Fisk organs. The guest list would have included John Ferris, Yuko Hayashi, John Skelton, and Daniel Pinkham. (If anyone reading was there that night, please be in touch and fill in my erstwhile memory.) That has stood out for me as an indication of just how much was going on in the organ world there and then. C. B. Fisk, Inc., was founded in 1961, and barely a dozen years later there were nine Fisk organs in the Boston area alone.

There is quite a list of adventurous instrument builders who opened workshops in the 1960s and jump-started that renaissance, including Fisk and Noack, Karl Wilhelm, Hellmuth Wolff, and John Brombaugh. Fritz Noack’s career was the longest of all these. It is hard to think of any field of endeavor that was affected by a renaissance as profound as the pipe organ. Comparing the organs built by these firms in the 1960s with those built at the same time by the long established companies like Möller, Reuter, and Aeolian-Skinner is like comparing chalk with cheese. The combination of research and imagination that went into that was dazzling. People were traveling to Europe to study ancient instruments supported by Fulbright scholarships and Ford Foundation grants and experimenting with their findings after returning to their workshops.

During the 1980s and 1990s, I maintained over a hundred organs in New England, and I was familiar with many of the earliest organs of that renaissance. Some of them could truly be described as experimental organs, prototypes that combined newly formed interpretations of ancient techniques with the practicality of creating a complex machine with an experimental budget, and some could be honestly described as not very good. There was a lot of plywood, contrasting with the opulent hardwood European cases. There were primitive electric stop actions using automotive windshield-wiper motors to move the sliders. The noise of those motors was a noticeable part of the experience of hearing the Fisk organ at Harvard.

A common flaw of organs of that time was “wind-sickness.” American builders were not used to working with low wind pressures, and there was much to do to develop the ability to deliver sufficient volume of air pressure to larger bass pipes. Lifting a pipe of a 32′ rank in a Skinner organ and playing the note will blow off your topknot. Visiting the famous five-manual Beckerath organ at the Oratory of Saint Joseph in Montreal while Juget-Sinclair was renovating it, I was struck by the two-inch paper tubing used to supply wind to the massive 32′ façade pipes. That one-inch radius squared times π equals 3.14 square inches. The largest Skinner toehole is at least five inches in diameter. The two-and-a-half-inch radius squared times π is 19.625 square inches. I will take the large pizza, thanks.

In a nutshell

The Andover Organ Company and Otto Hoffman of Texas were among the earliest American builders of modern tracker-action organs. Hoffman was building organs in the late 1940s, but the activity centered around Boston was the biggest concentration of the start of the renaissance. Four significant Beckerath organs were installed in Montreal in the 1950s including the five-manual behemoth at the Oratory. That inspired the leadership of Casavant to quickly branch out into mechanical-action instruments to establish a foothold in their own country.

In 1964, Casavant installed a three-manual tracker organ with forty-six ranks (many of them 2′ and smaller) at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Opus 2791, and Karl Wilhelm and Hellmuth Wolff were among the Casavant employees present. Shortly thereafter, both established their own firms. (That organ has subsequently been moved through the Organ Clearing House to Holyoke, Massachusetts, and replaced with a new two-manual instrument by Juget-Sinclair.) That same year, Fisk built the thirty-eight-stop organ (Opus 44) for King’s Chapel in Boston where Daniel Pinkham was the organist, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ. The first modern American four-manual tracker was built by Fisk in 1967 for Harvard, Fisk’s forty-sixth organ in the company’s first eight years.

Fritz Noack’s first large organ was the three-manual instrument for Trinity Lutheran Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, built in 1969, the fortieth Noack organ in the company’s first nine years. Those two small workshops produced close to a hundred organs in a decade. By 1980 when both firms were twenty years old, they had produced a combined 170 organs including the ninety-seven-rank Fisk at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota. That’s what I mean when I mention the tremendous amount of activity in Boston in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, sixty years into the renaissance, we have a raft of firms to choose from, many of which are led by people who started in the Noack shop. It is fun to trace the genealogy of the American pipe organ business to understand how the histories of the companies intertwine.

I know others will write Fritz Noack’s biography, telling of his personal history and family. I am happy to point out the significance of his diligence and imagination, the extraordinary number of excellent instruments he produced in a workshop that I am guessing never had more than twelve people working at a time, and how I valued him as a friend and mentor as I made my way through life. I maintained perhaps ten of his organs, including the big one in Worcester (there was a swell Mexican restaurant nearby), and we had lots of close encounters when problems arose that we solved together.

He had a positive outlook, charming smile, and a twinkle in his eye. He carried the wisdom of the ages, always remained an avid learner, and helped raise the art of organ building in America for all of us. He gave the art a further great gift, ensuring his company’s future by bringing Didier Grassin into the firm to continue its work. With Fritz’s support and encouragement, Didier has added his style of design and leadership and has produced two monumental organs in his first years after Fritz’s retirement, Opus 162 in Washington, D.C., and Opus 164 in Birmingham, Alabama.

I salute Fritz Noack for all he has added to the lives of organists around the world. I am grateful for his friendship and wish him Godspeed as he assumes his new job, tuning harps in the great beyond.

Notes

1. noackorgan.com/history.

Lost arts

The stone carvings in an ancient cathedral, the sparkles of light on Rembrandt’s tunic, the deep colors of a Tiffany lampshade, the intricacies of a Renaissance tapestry. These are all experiences available to us as we travel to ancient sites and visit museums. They are living testaments to the skills of artists and artisans, expressing their visions, observations, and thoughts in physical media. Did Rembrandt mix his paints from gathered materials as observed in artworks already old when he viewed them? Did he know that his paints would retain their colors and stay on the canvas for 350 years? Visit a modern artists’ supply store, and you will find rack upon rack of tubes of pre-mixed paints from different manufacturers. Do they expect that their products will last on canvas until the year 2352? Do the artists who buy and work with those paints trust that a glimmer of light on the nose of a subject will beguile viewers three centuries from now?

We play and listen to centuries-old organs, experiencing the same lively sounds that musicians and congregations heard over 600 years ago. We marvel at the monumental organ cases, knowing that they were built without the aid of electric milling machines. Perhaps some of us have tried to saw a board from a log by hand. I have. I can tell you it is hard work; it is tricky to produce a board that is anything like straight; and it takes a long time. We read that eighteenth-century organs took eight or ten years to build. Even so, Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) produced ninety-five new organs, forty-eight of which survive. Multiply that by the number of boards sawn by hand—case panels, toeboards, rackboards, keyboards, stop action traces, and hundreds of thousands of trackers. That many organs is a significant life’s work for a modern organ builder. And remember, delivering a pipe organ in those days involved oxcarts and rutted dirt (or mud) roads. Or did Mr. Schnitger set up a workshop in each church, casting metal and soldering pipes on site? That would simplify the logistics.

Something like 2,500 “Hook” organs were built between 1827 and 1927 by E. & G. G. Hook, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings, and Hook & Hastings. Organs were shipped from the workshops in Boston to churches below the Mason-Dixon Line before the Civil War, to California, and throughout the Midwest. By then, steam ferries and railroads were available to make shipments easier—the tracks ran right into the workshop. During the same period, builders like Henry Erben, George Hutchings, George Stevens, and George Jardine, among many others, combined to build thousands of organs across the United States. With the introduction of electricity to pipe organ keyboard and stop actions, Skinner, Möller, Austin, Schantz, Kimball, and others combined to build as many as 2,500 new pipe organs a year in American churches during the 1920s.

Here’s to the crabgrass, here’s to the mortgage . . . .

So sang Allen Sherman in his 1963 smash hit recording, My Son the Nut, the same album that included “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh. . . .” The song was about the migration from cities to suburbs in the 1950s: “walk the dog and cut the grass, take the kids to dancing class, Jim’s little league got beat again.”1 During the 1950s and 1960s, suburban churches blossomed. The populations of towns surrounding Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and countless other cities exploded. Twenty years ago, I served a church as music director in a suburb of Boston that never had more than 2,000 residents until the circumnavigating commuter highway Route 128 (now I-95) was built around 1960. Within ten years, there were 15,000 residents, and the little country Congregational church built an impressive new sanctuary with an extensive parish house and a three-manual organ.

Many if not most of those powerful suburban congregations commissioned new pipe organs. Where I grew up, the ubiquitous New England town square had two or three competing churches. One town near home had two three-manual Hook organs built in 1860 and 1870. Another had three Aeolian-Skinners. And by the time I graduated from high school, my hometown had two organs by Charles Fisk, one of which has its fiftieth anniversary this year.

A new wave

Through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, hundreds of American churches committed to commissioning new organs built by “boutique” builders of tracker organs, many of which replaced impressive and valuable electro-pneumatic-action organs. Of course, many of those organs had in turn replaced impressive and important nineteenth-century organs. The Andover Organ Company, then led by Charles Fisk, was among the first of the new wave of organ companies. Charles Fisk spun off to start what became C. B. Fisk, Inc., along with the founding of, in no particular order, eponymous organ companies such as Noack, Roche, Brombaugh, Bozeman-Gibson, Bedient, Taylor & Boody, Dobson, Visser-Rowland, and Jaeckel. Casavant started building tracker organs and firms like Wilhelm, Wolff, and Létourneau spun off from there in the following years.

As some of the “older” new firms began “aging out,” a new wave of impressive companies came along such as Juget-Sinclair, Richards, Fowkes & Co., and Paul Fritts, and companies like Nichols & Simpson and the revitalized Schoenstein & Co. started building new electro-pneumatic-action organs of high quality inspired both by the electric-action masterpieces of the early twentieth century and by, I believe, the increasingly high standards of the boutique organ movement. Toward the end of the twentieth century, American organbuilding was a vital, if small industry producing beautiful instruments of all descriptions at a rapid rate.

American organbuilders gathered in Washington, DC, in September 1973 to discuss formation of a new professional organization that would take the name American Institute of Organbuilders. This purpose statement was published in the program book for that gathering:

• to be the first such convention in recent times in North America and to be a model for future conventions of this type to be held regularly;

• to promote the exchange of principles and ideas among established organbuilders to aid in the improvement of the instrument while lowering its costs and ensuring the security of our future;

• to educate ourselves in potential new technologies and construction procedures, some of which are being employed by other industries and arts but perhaps not yet fully realized and exploited by organbuilders;

• to provide the many suppliers of organ parts and materials, many of which are new to our field, with the opportunity to display and demonstrate their developments and ideas where many builders may jointly view and discuss these products;

• to study some general business problems of concern to the organ industry, and to propose courses of action that might be taken by organbuilders, both individually and collectively, to alleviate these concerns;

• to enable social exchanges between organbuilders and their families; to provide families of organbuilders with the opportunity to share in the appreciation of the greater glories of the profession through mutual enjoyment of a convention environment and its program of entertainment designed for all.

The last decades of the twentieth century were very productive for American organbuilding, and we must not forget the vast number of European organs imported to the United States. E. Power Biggs famously purchased an organ from Flentrop that was installed in the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Busch Hall) at Harvard University in 1957. He made it instantly famous with his fabulously successful series of recordings, Bach: Great Organ Favorites. Many of my friends and colleagues, myself included, cite those recordings as influential to devoting a lifetime to organbuilding. That organ was followed by a flood of Flentrops crossing the Atlantic, a wave greatly advanced by Fenner Douglas, professor of organ at Oberlin in the 1960s and early 1970s, whose influence led to at least dozens of Flentrops installed in American churches and universities, notably those at Oberlin College and Duke University. Also in 1957, Trinity Lutheran Church in Cleveland, Ohio, installed a four-manual, sixty-five-rank Beckerath organ, three years before the monumental five-manual Beckerath organ was installed at Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal.

As the twentieth century came to a close, a significant decline in church attendance was well underway. Churches continue to close at an increasing rate. And toward the end of the last century, there was a dip of interest in playing the organ. When I was a student at Oberlin in the 1970s, there were over fifty organ majors in four bustling studios. Fifteen years later, there were fewer than ten. Several colleges and universities closed their organ departments, churches with traditionally active music programs began having trouble filling empty jobs, and for a while things were looking pretty grim for the American pipe organ.

I am carving time into rough blocks for my own convenience, but as the twenty-first century got underway, a fresh wave of brilliant young organists appeared. Stephen Tharp and Ken Cowan, now in their late forties and early fifties, led the pack forging virtuosic concert careers. They were followed in no particular order by Paul Jacobs, Isabelle Demers, Nathan Laube, Katelyn Emerson, and many others, raising the art of organ playing to unprecedented heights. Concurrently, especially following economic lows following 9/11 and the near collapse of the American economy in 2008, noticeably fewer churches embarked on expensive organ renovation or new organ projects. Many of us in the organbuilding trade wondered silently and increasingly out loud if we were heading toward the end of the pipe organ industry.

Convention

The American Institute of Organbuilders held its annual convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, October 8–12, 2022. More than 300 members gathered in a convention hotel there to be immersed in the work of the Historic Organ Restoration Committee that is more than halfway through the herculean task of restoring the legendary Boardwalk Hall organ with seven manuals and 449 ranks. Built by Midmer-Losh, Inc., between 1929 and 1932 (Opus 5550), the Boardwalk Hall organ is the largest in the world, not by ranks (The Wanamaker Organ has more), but with 33,112 pipes. Many of the ranks have eighty-five pipes or more. The committee is about eight years into the project and anticipates completion in 2030. I will bet we will have another convention there then. (See the cover feature for this organ in the November 2020 issue.)

A convention of the AIO typically includes a lot of time riding buses to see organs throughout an area. Because of the huge attraction at the center of this convention, we had just one day of bus travel to visit three marvelous organs in the Philadelphia area: C. B. Fisk, Inc., Opus 150 (2016) at Christ Church, Episcopal, Philadelphia; Aeolian-Skinner Opus 948 (1936) at St. Mark’s Church, Episcopal, Philadelphia; and the instrument by Kegg Pipe Organ Builders (2014) at Bryn Athyn Cathedral, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. These are three very different and very distinguished organs, all beautifully demonstrated, and all terrific examples of the art of American organbuilding. At the convention hotel, perhaps the only large hotel in Atlantic City that does not boast a casino, we heard lectures about the history of the Boardwalk Hall organ, the economics of refurbishing rather than replacing damaged old organ pipes, and the art of structuring a contract to define an organ project, among others. Nathan Laube, the brilliant recitalist and teacher I mentioned earlier, lectured organbuilders about his ideal of the modern organ console—his conclusion, keep it simple.

In the past, I have written in detail about the organs we heard after attending a convention. This time, I want to celebrate the trade. I have related an off-the-cuff bird’s eye view of American organbuilding over the past century to put in context what I am observing now. In addition to our work aiding the sales of vintage pipe organs and dismantling those organs to be delivered to workshops for renovation, the Organ Clearing House is privileged to work with many of our admired companies, assisting with the shipping, hoisting, assembly, and installation of their new organs. This allows us intimate exposure to the methods and practices of a variety of firms and close associations with their largest organs.

While varying styles of worship and the proliferation of digital instruments has consumed much of the market for simple pipe organs, it is clear that we are in an age of monumental new instruments. Noack, Fritts, Fisk, Schoenstein, Richards, Fowkes, Létourneau, Buzard, and Parsons, among others, have built exceptional new organs in the last five years. All of them carry forth the 500-year tradition of organbuilding, many aided by Computer Numerical Control (CNC) routers. These expensive but efficient machines use computer programs to interpret an organbuilder’s drawings to produce repetitive parts automatically, to drill windchest tables, to make toeboards, rackboards, skyracks, and countless other organ parts with precise perfection. Ten years ago, only a few shops had them, now some have two that grind along in the corner of a shop while the organbuilders are free to do the interpretive work that a machine cannot do.

A couple important firms have recently closed. After a century of work and producing more than 2,500 organs, the Reuter Organ Company in Lawrence, Kansas, stopped most operations on December 1. While they remained profitable until the end, as the senior staff reached retirement age, other administrative staff chose not to step in to continue the business. The closure of August Laukhuff GmbH, a huge and important organ supply firm in Weikersheim, Germany, is having a profound effect on American companies. Many organbuilders have long relied on Laukhuff for organ blowers, electric parts like slider motors and pull-down magnets, keyboards, polished façade pipes, action chassis, and countless other widgets essential to the trade. Other firms are working to fill in the gaps, but this remains an important loss.

The AIO has a relatively new tradition of having a special dinner for members under thirty years old. Since the conventions in 2020 and 2021 were postponed because of covid, this year’s dinner included all members under forty, and there were more than thirty in attendance. I was thrilled to realize that in a trade heavily populated by older people, more than ten percent of those attending this convention were under forty. I had wonderful conversations with many of them and was heartened by their excitement and commitment to continuing the art.

This year’s AIO Convention was particularly high-spirited with enthusiasm for our trade abounding. Nathan Bryson, convention chair and curator of the Boardwalk Hall organ, was an enthusiastic and welcoming host. His excitement for his job is evident in the attitudes of the members of the Historic Organs Restoration Committee, both staff and volunteers. My many conversations with our younger colleagues were highpoints of the week for me. I was happy to hear their enthusiasm about their work. Some newcomers to the trade expressed to me their amazement at the rich history of the organ and the complexities of building, restoring, and repairing them. A couple of the younger participants were in the process of starting new workshops, and their excitement was infectious. Many of the younger members are women, bringing lively diversity to our gathering.

Whenever I am with colleague organbuilders, I hear stories of how they got interested in the organ when they were kids, how the first years of learning piqued their interest enough to devote their lives to the trade. I love comparing notes about solving problems. I love hearing about new materials, methods, machinery, and tools that save time and money, and I love the comeradery of spending time with like-minded people.

Above all, I celebrate what seems to be a bright future for American organbuilding. Churches are investing in large expensive projects, and many of our colleague firms have years of contracted work spreading ahead of them. Perhaps most important, I believe that American organ playing is the best it has ever been. As long as there are brilliant, compelling musicians to play on the instruments we build, there will always be new organs to build. Keep working hard, my friends. ν

Notes

1. In fact, the couple singing that song winds up fleeing the suburbs to return to the city: “Back to the crush there, hurry let us rush there, back to the rat race, don’t forget your briefcase, back to the groove there, say, why don’t we move there, away from all this sweet simplicity.”

John Bishop

Connectivity

It does not seem that long ago that packing a briefcase for a business trip meant gathering file folders and notebooks. Today, all my files are digital, and my briefcase is full of chargers for iPhone and iPad and the power cord for my laptop. I admit to carrying an HDMI cord with adapters so I can plug into the television in a hotel room and watch movies or other good stuff using laptop, iPad, or phone, and I carry an extension cord to be sure I can set up camp comfortably. I add to all that a Bluetooth speaker so I can listen to music and NPR programs with rich sound. There are a lot of wires in my wireless life.

My desk at home similarly includes wires that make the essential connections of my life, and I had to add one more yesterday. The printer in a drawer under my desk, happily connected to Wi-Fi, suddenly went hermit on me and refused to perform. I ascertained that the Wi-Fi connection had failed and spent most of an hour mucking around with passwords, straightened paper clips, and reset buttons . . . to no avail. If this had happened at our home in Maine, I would have jumped into the car (it was snowing) and driven forty-five minutes to Staples to buy a cord. Luckily, I was in New York, where Staples is immediately across the street from us. The only door I have to pass is an ATM. Even though it was snowing, I did not bother with a jacket and ran across to get the cord. I fished it through the hole I had made for the printer’s power cord, and I was back in business.

I suppose I will want to renew the Wi-Fi connection sooner or later, but as I only paid $125 for the printer, I may just buy another one rather than spending more time trouble-shooting. Wendy’s printer is working fine, as is all of our other wireless gear, so I feel safe assuming that the printer is the culprit. It is not all that long ago that I put paper directly into a typewriter, and there was no question about the need for connectivity.

§

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, scientists and engineers were racing against each other to perfect the harnessing and application of electricity for everyday life. J. P. Morgan’s mansion at Madison Avenue and East 36th Street in New York City was illuminated by Thomas Edison in 1882. There was a fire that spoiled Mr. Morgan’s expensively appointed study that necessitated replacing a lot of wiring, but he was very proud to be on the forefront of that revolution and invited hundreds of people to parties at his home, encouraging them to marvel at the new equipment.

Three years earlier, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings had completed a 101-rank masterpiece of an organ for the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Massachusetts. I have not done the research, but I feel safe guessing that it was the largest organ in the United States at that time. (https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=7254) Just look at that Great Chorus! Though the organ now has electric action opening the pallets, it was built without electricity, with mechanical key and stop action and a human-powered wind system.

Within ten years of the completion of the organ at Holy Cross, organbuilders were experimenting with electric power in pipe organs. Builders like George Hutchings and Ernest M. Skinner were developing the electro-pneumatic actions with which we are familiar today. In 1906, Mr. Skinner completed his massive instrument (Opus 150) for the newly unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. With four manuals and eighty-four ranks, it was among the first really large fully electro-pneumatic organs in the world, completed just twenty-four years after the Holy Cross organ. (http://aeolianskinner.organhistoricalsociety.net/Specs/Op00150.html) And by the way, it had electric blowers.

That was quite a revolution. It took barely a generation to move from tracker action, proven to be reliable for over five hundred years, to electro-pneumatic action—that new-fangled, up-and-coming creation that provided organists with combination actions, comfortable ergonomic consoles (decades before the invention of the word ergonomic), myriad gadgets to aid registrations, and, perhaps most important, unlimited wind supplies. Many organists were skeptical of the new actions, thinking that because they were not direct they could not be musical.

In spite of the skepticism, electro-pneumatic organs sold like fried dough at the state fair. Before the end of 1915, the Ernest M. Skinner Company produced more than 140 organs (more than ten per year), forty-six of which had four manuals. (Who would like to go on a tour of forty-six pre-World War I four-manual Skinner organs? Raise your hand!) The negative side of this is the number of wonderful nineteenth-century tracker organs that were discarded in the name of progress, but it is hard to judge whether the preservation of those instruments would have been advantageous over the miracles of the innovation of electro-pneumatic action.

And a generation later, what went around came around when the new interest in tracker-action organs surged, and scores of distinguished electro-pneumatic organs were discarded in favor of new organs with low wind pressure and lots of stops of high pitch.

§

Early electro-pneumatic organs relied on elaborate electro-pneumatic-mechanical switching systems for their operation. Keyboard contacts operated matrix relays to control keyboard and stop actions. Consoles were packed full of coupling and combination machines, inspired along with the development of the vast multiplication of switching systems that supported the spread of the telephone. The wiring diagram of a Skinner organ is remarkably similar to the old telephone switchboards where operators inserted quarter-inch plugs into sockets to connect calls.

Along with “traditional” organs for churches and concert halls, the advance of electric actions fostered the theatre organ, a vehicle that allowed a musician to rollick through the countryside along with the antics and passions of the actors on the screen. The invention of double-touch keyboards expanded the scope of organ switching, as did the ubiquitous “toy counters” that duplicated the sounds of cow bells, train whistles, sleigh bells, thunder and lightning, car horns, and dozens of other sound effects that might have a use during a movie. Those novelty sounds were not synthesized, but produced by the actual instrument being manipulated, struck, shaken, or stirred by an electro-pneumatic device. Push the button marked “Castanets,” and a half-dozen sets of castanets sound across the Sea of Galilee. Ole!

The original switching system of a big electro-pneumatic organ is a thing to behold—electric relays in rows of sixty-one, seventy-three, or eighty-five (depending on the number of octaves in a rank, a windchest, or a keyboard). Each relay has a contact for each function a given key can perform. In a big four-manual organ with sub, unison, and super couplers every which way, multiple windchests for each division, and unified stops around the edges, one note of the Great keyboard might have as many as twenty contacts in various forms. Sometimes you see that many contacts physically mounted on each key, with miniscule spacing, and tiny dots of solder holding the connections fast. Spill a cup of coffee into that keyboard, and your organ technician will spend scores of billable hours cleaning up after you.

One organ I worked on for years was in fact two. The organ(s) at Trinity Church in Boston included a three-manual instrument in the chancel and a four-manual job in the rear gallery. Of course, both had pedal divisions. The console functioned as a remote-control device, its keyboards, stopknobs, pistons, and expression pedals operated a complex relay in a basement room directly below. The outputs for seven keyboards and two pedalboards (491), 175 stop knobs, 45 coupler tabs, 7 pistons, and 4 expression pedals (48 for shutters, 60 for crescendo) were in the cable going to the basement, a total of 826 conductors. But wait, there’s more. Since the combination action was also in the basement, the conductors from the combination action that operated the drawknobs and couplers were in the same conduit, bringing signals up from the basement. Drawknobs and couplers totaled 220, and each needed three wires (on coil, off coil, and sense contact)—660. All together, the console cable comprised 1,486 conductors.

When my company was engaged to install the new solid-state switching and combinations in that organ, we wired all the equipment to the existing relays in the basement and chambers, bought an orphaned console for temporary use and equipped it with new stop jambs with knob layout identical to the original, and set everything up with plug-in connectors. After the evening service one Sunday, we cut the console cable, dragged the original console out of the way, placed the temporary console, and started plugging things in. With just a little smoke escaping, we had the organ up and running in time for the Friday noon recital. One glitch turned up. One of my employees consistently reversed the violet/blue pair of conductors in our new color-coded cable so throughout the complex organ, #41 and #42 (soprano E and F) were mixed up!

When something goes wrong like a dead note or a cipher, physical electric contacts are fairly easy to trouble-shoot. Once you have acclimated yourself to the correct location, you are likely to be able to see the problem. It might be a bit of schmutz keeping contacts from moving or touching, it might be a contact wire bent by a passing mouse. Organ relays are often located in dirty basements where spiders catch prey, stonewalls weep with moisture, and careless custodians toss detritus into mysterious dark rooms. Many is the time I have seen the like of signs from a 1963 rummage sale heaped on top of delicate switching equipment.

Oxidation is another enemy of organ contacts that are typically made of phosphorous bronze wire that reacts with oxygen to form a non-conductive coating, inhibiting the operation of the contacts. Also, in a simple circuit that includes a power supply (organ rectifier), switch (keyboard contact), and appliance (chest magnet), a “fly-back” spark jumps across the space between contacts as a note is released. Each spark burns away a teeny bit of metal until after millions of repetitions the contact breaks causing a dead note. You can see this sparking clearly when you sit with a switch-stack with the lights off while the organ is being played.

You can retro fit a switching system by installing diodes in each circuit (which means rows of sixty-one) that arrest the sparks. You can replace phosphorous bronze with silver wire that does not oxidize, but you still have to keep the whole thing clean and protected from physical harm.

§

Just as the telephone companies have converted to solid-state switching, so has the pipe organ industry. Solid-state equipment is no longer new; in fact, it has been around as long as electro-pneumatic organs were before the revival of tracker organs. But perhaps some of you don’t actually know what “solid-state” means. A solid-state device controls electricity without any physical motion. Circuits are built using semi-conductors. What is a semi-conductor? A device that conducts electricity under certain circumstances or in particular ways, less fully than a standard conductor. A piece of wire is a conductor. Electricity travels freely over a piece of wire in any direction.

A great example of a semi-conductor is the diode I mentioned earlier that contains “fly-back” sparks when a circuit is broken. The diode can do this because it conducts electricity in only one direction. It has a wire on each end to connect to a circuit, and power can flow from the switch through the diode to the magnet (if you have installed it facing the right way!). When the contact is released, the power cannot come back through the diode from the magnet to the switch. Semi-conductor.

Some semi-conductors are in fact switches (transistors) with three legs. Apply power to one leg, and power flows through the other two. Integrated circuits are simply little gadgets that contain many transistors. Resistors are gadgets that reduce the flow of power by resisting it. The advance of electronics has been enabled by the reduction of size of these components. I have transistors in my toolbox that are replacements for common organ controls that are each the size of my pinkie fingernail. Huge! I have no idea how many circuits there are in my iPhone, but it must be millions.

I first worked with solid-state organ actions in the late 1970s. One job was in a rickety Anglican church on East 55th Street in Cleveland where we were installing one of the earliest Peterson combination actions in an old Holtkamp organ. The church had a dirt crawl space instead of a basement, and as the apprentice, it was my job to crawl on my belly with the rats (yup, lots of them), trailing cables from chamber to console. We followed the directions meticulously, made all the connections carefully, crossed our fingers, and turned it on. Some smoke came out. It took us a couple hours to sort out the problem, and we had to wait a few days for replacement parts, but the second time it worked perfectly. I do not believe we were very sure of what we had done, but we sure were pleased.

In around 1987, I became curator of the marvelous Aeolian-Skinner organ (Opus 1202, 1951) at the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston. With over 230 ranks and 13,000 pipes, the instrument had heaps of electro-pneumatic-mechanical relays. As I came onboard, wire contacts had started to break at a rapid rate, and as the switches were mounted vertically, when a contact broke, it would fall and lodge across its neighbors causing cluster ciphers. Ronald Paul of Salt Lake City, Utah, had been contracted to install a new solid-state switching system, and I was on hand to help him with many details. I was assuming the care of the organ from Jason McKown who had worked personally with Ernest Skinner at the Skinner Organ Company and cared for the Mother Church organ since it was installed. Jason was in his eighties and still climbed the hundreds of rungs and steps involved in reaching the far reaches of that massive organ.

Jason looked over all the shiny gear, bristling with rows of pins and filled with those fiberglass cards covered with mysterious bugs, shook his head, and said, “this is for you young fellows.”

Swing wide the gates.

Over the past fifty years, most of us have gotten used to solid-state pipe organ actions. In that time, we have seen the medium of connections go from regular old organ cable to “Cat5” to optical fiber. I know that some of the firms that supply this equipment are experimenting with wireless connections. I suppose I may be asked to install such a system someday, but while I am committed to solid-state switching and all its benefits, I am skeptical about wireless.

Forty years ago, I was organist at a church in Cleveland that had a small and ancient electronic organ in the chapel. I was happy enough that I almost never had to play it, but there was one Thanksgiving Day when the pastor chose to lead an early morning worship service in the chapel. Halfway through that service, human voices blared out of the organ, decidedly irreverent human voices. The organ was picking up citizens band radio transmissions from Euclid Avenue in front of the church. I dove for the power cord. “Roger that, good buddy. Over and out!”

We have wireless remote controls for televisions, receivers, radios, even electric fans, and it is often necessary to punch a button repeatedly to get the desired function to work. And there was that printer yesterday, choosing idly to skip the bounds of our Wi-Fi router and booster, requiring the introduction of a new wire.

When I think of a wireless connection between the console and chambers of a large pipe organ, I imagine sweeping onto the bench, robes a-flutter, turning on the organ, pushing a piston, and garage doors throughout the neighborhood randomly opening and closing. Swing wide the gates, I’m coming home.

John Bishop

“Just can’t wait to get on the road again.”¹

For over fourteen months during the extraordinary time of Covid, Wendy and I stayed at our house in Maine, leaving our apartment in virus-rich New York City vacant. Until late in 2020, Lincoln County where we live in Maine was counting fewer than twenty new cases each week, and we figured we would stay there until vaccinated. Like so many people around the country, we altered our working lives using Zoom and FaceTime instead of meeting in person. We set up our offices as “Zoom Rooms,” sometimes wearing “go to office” tops over jeans or shorts.

I received my first vaccination shot on my sixty-fifth birthday in mid-March. Once I was on the schedule, I started planning a trip, and I hit the road sixteen days after my second shot. I visited three organ building workshops, a half-dozen organs that were coming on the market, a couple iconic organs (one can never see enough of them), and a church where my colleagues are helping install an important new organ. I drove south on a western route through Virginia and Tennessee to Birmingham, across to Atlanta, and north on an eastern route home through North Carolina and Virginia to meet Wendy for a few days on the Jersey Shore. It was my re-immersion in the craft I have been working in for more than forty-five years, and I came home refreshed and newly inspired.

Variety is the spice of life.

Pipe organs come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. We have organs that are large and small, electric and mechanical, freestanding in cases and enclosed in chambers. We have organs based on ancient European concepts and models, and organs that are purely American, and my trip spanned the far reaches of the organ world. I visited the workshops of Noack Organ Co. (Georgetown, Massachusetts), Taylor & Boody Organ Builders (Staunton, Virginia), and Richards, Fowkes & Co. (Ooltewah, Tennessee), each of which works with a small staff of dedicated artisans building hand-crafted organs in free-standing hardwood cases. Noack is currently working on an organ with sixty stops, and I was lucky to see it being loaded on a truck at the workshop followed by the beginning of its installation at the Catholic Cathedral of Saint Paul in Birmingham, Alabama. Taylor & Boody’s current project is a thirty-eight-stop job for Wheaton College in Illinois, and Richards, Fowkes & Co. is working on a thirty-one-stop organ for Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan.² Besides a tour and rich conversations in their workshop, Bruce Fowkes and Ralph Richards took me to see the spectacular four-manual organ by John Brombaugh at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, Tennessee. I am heartened that during this uncertain time, these three outstanding firms are all building substantial instruments at the same time. You can see details about each organ on the builders’ websites.

These three builders are known for building tiny organs as well as instruments with sixty or more stops. Continuo or practice organs with three or four stops are the hummingbirds of pipe organs, and modest instruments with fewer than twenty stops are little gems with gorgeous, intimate voices and carefully balanced choruses, but the big bird of my trip was the behemoth all-American organ in Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, an organ with single divisions that include more than thirty stops. (See the cover feature of the November 2020 issue of The Diapason.)

In the May 2021 issue of The Diapason, pages 12–13, I wrote about the efforts of curator Nathan Bryson and his staff of assistants and volunteers to protect the organ during the recent demolition by implosion of the adjacent Trump Hotel and Casino, so the organ was fresh on my mind when I started planning my trip, and I invited myself for a visit. Nathan was the consummate host for my day in the largest organ in the world.

The organs at Boardwalk Hall and the Wanamaker Store (now Macy’s) have each been considered the largest in the world. Now that I have visited both with their curators as my guides, I will take the plunge and explain how an organ earns such a title. At the moment, the Boardwalk Hall Organ is about 53% playable, so the Wanamaker Organ can safely claim to be the largest fully playable organ in the world. The Historic Organ Restoration Committee that oversees the organ in Boardwalk Hall has ambitious plans to bring the organ to fully functional condition. Stay tuned. I will report it when it happens.

The Wanamaker Organ has 464 ranks while Boardwalk Hall has a mere 449, a difference of fifteen ranks, the size of a modest organ, so it wins in the category of most ranks. The Wanamaker organ has 75 independent pedal ranks with 32 pipes (29 notes fewer than manual ranks), while many of the ranks in the Boardwalk Hall Organ have up to 85 notes, accounting for extensive unification and making use of the extended lower three keyboards which have 85, 85, and 75 notes, giving the organ a total of 33,112 pipes compared to the impressive 28,750 pipes in the Wanamaker Organ. That’s a difference of 4,362 pipes, or the equivalent of a seventy-rank organ!

An 85-note rank of pipes allows a continuous scale from low CC of 8′ to high c′′′′′′ of 2′, or as in the case of several ranks in Atlantic City, from low CCCC of 32′ to high c′′′′ of 8′. Unbelievably, there is a 64′ Dulzian Diaphone with 85 notes that goes all the way to the top of 16′. Scrolling down the endless stoplist, I count one 64′ rank (85 notes), eight 32′ ranks, and sixty 16′ ranks. A count like that makes a big organ. You can count for yourself. There are comprehensive lists of ranks, stops, console layout, and pistons and controls at www.boardwalkorgans.org. It would be difficult to calculate accurately, but it is my gut feeling that the Boardwalk Hall Organ weighs a lot more than the Wanamaker Organ.

Vulgar or beautiful?

I have had a number of encounters with the Wanamaker Organ over the past twenty years, both in intimate, personal, and comprehensive visits, and in swashbuckling public performances. This was my fourth visit to Boardwalk Hall, but the first time I heard the organ.³ I was aware of both organs when I was growing up, long before either had any meaningful restoration, but as I was in the thrall of the “Tracker Organ Revival,” dutifully learning early fingerings at Oberlin, I was not creative or open-minded enough to make space for them in my musical comprehension. I assumed that they existed to take part in the biggest-loudest-fastest competitions that lurk throughout our society. How could something with more than four hundred ranks be anything more than the pipe organ equivalent of a freight train? Artistic content? Musical sensitivity? Phooey. I was wrong.

I was fortunate to have experience renovating larger electro-pneumatic organs early in my career, and when I became curator of the organs at Trinity Church Copley Square and The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), both in Boston, I was immersed in the grandeur of super-sized organs. The Aeolian-Skinner organ at The Mother Church is huge (237 ranks and 13,500 pipes), but less than half the size of those in Boardwalk Hall or the Wanamaker Store. While the organ at Trinity Church (actually two instruments, Chancel and Gallery, playable from one console) was smaller in number of ranks, it was an important part of my understanding of large organs because of the weekly recital series there. Each Friday, I heard a different organist play the instrument. Some were bewildered, bamboozled, even defeated by its complexity, but those organists who could make it sing taught me how a large and varied organ with divisions in four separate locations could combine to produce expressive sweeps, from thundering fortissimos to shimmering echoes that melted away into the frescoed walls.

If a finely crafted organ with mechanical action brings the intimacy of chamber music to the fingers of the organist, the large romantic organ allows the musician to paint majestic landscapes. And the mega-monumental symphonic organ allows expression ranges unheard of otherwise. What do you do with an eighty-rank string division? Paint pictures.

In the arena

When I first arrived at Boardwalk Hall, Nathan “fired up” the organ using files made by Peter Richard Conte, the Grand Court Organist of the Wanamaker Organ, along with several other creative players, and stored in the playback system. Peter is unusual among organists because of his affinity for these exceptional organs. While most of us are used to registering a chorale prelude with a cornet for the solo line and a few soft flutes and a Subbass for accompaniment, Peter is a sonic wizard with thousands of stop tabs and hundreds of other controls that allow him to command the dozens of divisions scattered about in the vast room. Sometimes he throws on a big row of stop tablets as if he was playing a glissando on the keyboard, but more usually, he programs pistons with intricate combinations using stops by the hundreds.

Boardwalk Hall is 456 feet long and 310 feet wide with a barrel-vaulted ceiling that peaks at 137 feet. Its seating capacity is over 15,000, and it is regularly used for rodeos with bull-riding competitions (they truck in enough dirt to simulate a prairie), indoor auto racing, ice hockey, basketball, soccer, and even college football. It was the site of the first indoor helicopter flight, and it is home to the Miss America Pageant. It was surreal to stand alone on the empty floor of the semi-lit hall listening to the organ do its thing with the help of Peter’s bytes. The two main organ chambers are separated in space by the hundred-foot-wide stage. The chamber lights were on, and great swaths of expression shutters were in full view, swishing and fluttering like sensuous thirty-foot eyelashes. This was not “All Swells to Swell.” The many sets of shutters were moving in contrary motion, each responding to the rises and falls of individual voices in the complex arrangements. Waves of sound ebbed and flowed like the surf on the sandy beach on the other side of the iconic boardwalk, cascades of notes morphed into fanfares, melodies were “soloed out” as if by a platoon of trombones or by four dozen violinists playing pianissimo in unison. This is the very essence of the symphonic organ, its dazzling array of controls allowing the single musician to emulate the actual symphony orchestra.

Sweeping a beach

The Aeolian-Skinner at The Mother Church taught me what is involved in caring for a large organ. “Touching up the reeds” can take all day—there are forty-one of them. But that organ lives in a building with perfect climate control. When you have more than 450 ranks in a building that is also home to rodeos and auto racing, you have a hefty tuning responsibility. Curator Nathan Bryson manages a team of professionals and volunteers who are methodically moving through the organ rebuilding blowers, releathering windchests, refurbishing organ pipes, while maintaining the organ for daily recitals and many special events.

The Boardwalk Hall Organ was built by Midmer-Losh of Merrick, Long Island, New York, during the Great Depression at a cost of over $500,000 and was completed in December of 1932. It is housed in eight chambers: Left Stage, Right Stage, Left Forward, Right Forward, Left Center, Right Center, Left Ceiling, and Right Ceiling. You can see the layout in a photo accompanying this column in the May 2021 issue. Getting a handle on which stops and which divisions are located in which chamber is the first challenge of learning one’s way around the vast instrument. The two Stage Chambers comprise what I perceived to be the main organ. They are huge and jammed with some of the largest organ stops in the world. There are stops on wind pressure of 100 inches on a water column, an absolute hurricane of air.

When the organ blowers are turned on and the instrument fills with wind, windchests expand visibly, as if the doctor told you to “take a deep breath.” The fifteen-foot-long walls of the pressurized room that houses the organ’s main electro-pneumatic switching equipment move so dramatically that I squinted, wondering why the thing does not burst. During renovation, several of the windchests on 100-inch pressure were replaced using more robust engineering, informed by the difficulty of building a wooden vessel to contain such high pressure.

Tuning those gargantuan ranks is a three-person job, one at the console, one in the middle of the hall where it is possible to hear pitches and beats, and the third (with industrial hearing protection and audio headphones) manipulating the pipes. You could try using a starting pistol to signal “next,” but you wouldn’t be able to hear it.

Beyond the endless work of restoring, renovating, tuning, and maintaining this organ, perhaps the most difficult and important work has been reintroducing the city and state governments to the ongoing stewardship of the instrument. A vast auditorium with such an unmusical array of uses seems an unlikely home for a pipe organ, and the people who have been working with and on the organ have been effective ambassadors, sharing the unique qualities of the largest organ in the world. If you would like to help, visit that website and look for the “Donate Now” button.

Look to the future.

After fourteen months at home, it was a joy to be back on the road. My thanks to Didier Grassin of the Noack Organ Company, Ralph Richards, Bruce Fowkes, John Boody, and Nathan Bryson for sharing their work and philosophies with me, and above all, for sharing the joy and pleasure of “knocking around about pipe organs.” Three cheers for all the wonderful work underway on organs both old and new. If this is a taste of the new normal, I am ready to ride.

Notes

^1. Willie Nelson.

^2. By coincidence, one of Wendy’s cousins is on the organ committee at Saint Andrew’s.

^3. In 2010, the Organ Clearing House built the “Blower Room” set for the Saint Bartholomew funeral scene in the spy-thriller movie, Salt, starring Angelina Jolie and directed by Philip Noyce. All the sets including the barge, the presidential bunker, and the CIA offices were constructed in retired Grumman aircraft hangars in Bethpage, New Jersey, where the Lunar Excursion Module was built. Our set included a couple big Spencer blowers that we had in stock and a huge electro-pneumatic switching machine borrowed from the “other” organ at Boardwalk Hall (a four-manual Kimball in the adjacent theater). I transported the machine in both directions in rental trucks. The set decorator thought the rig was complicated enough that I should be present for filming. I stood around while Ms. Jolie jumped through walls dozens of times, until I heard over the PA system, “Organ guy to the crypt, organ guy to the crypt.” The leading lady greeted me with hand outstretched, “Hi, I’m Angie.” I described that she should shoot the regulating chain to make the bellows go haywire and cause the mass cipher that would disrupt the funeral. (We provided the hardware, and special effects provided the action.) She said, “I can’t shoot that.” I replied, “I’ve seen you shoot.” I watched the single take on Mr. Noyce’s monitor and had the honor of shouting “Action!” at his signal, my twelve seconds in Hollywood, another chapter from the life of an itinerant organ guy. Curious? You can stream it on Netflix. And the nice thing about building a movie set? They don’t require a warranty.

Photo caption: Seven keyboards and 1,235 stop tablets, as big as they get. Midmer-Losh organ, Boardwalk Hall, Atlantic City, New Jersey. (Manuals I and II have 85 notes, Manual III has 75 notes, and manuals IV, V, VI, and VII have the usual 61.) (photo credit: John Bishop)

Joyce Johnson Robinson

Joyce Johnson Robinson is a past editor of The Diapason.

More than a century and a half after his birth, Ernest Martin Skinner (born January 15, 1866; died November 27, 1960) is still acknowledged to be one of the most innovative of American organbuilders. Skinner created instruments that emphasized orchestral-imitative stops (such as the French Horn and English Horn), with consoles that were models of practical design. He created exquisite and colorful soft stops, including the Erzähler, the Orchestral Oboe, and the English Horn. His innovations also include the pitman windchest, and he perfected the electro-pneumatic motor for swell shutters.¹

Skinner began his career in 1886, working for George H. Ryder in Reading, Massachusetts, north of Boston. Skinner worked there for four years, and in 1890 after being fired by a new foreman, was subsequently hired by George S. Hutchings, for whom he worked for eleven years.

Skinner founded Ernest M. Skinner & Co.—the firm changed names several times before becoming known as the Skinner Organ Company in 1919—and his career lasted a good four decades, with 1910 to the early 1920s being its heyday. The Great Depression greatly reduced the market for Skinner’s instruments. Furthermore, staff changes in the company resulted in Skinner losing control of his own firm, and through a merger, a new entity emerged, the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company, in 1932. The factory that Skinner opened in 1936 (when he was 70!) with his son Richmond, when the company was known as Ernest M. Skinner & Son Organ Company, was destroyed by fire on June 17, 1943. Changes in musical tastes also eventually led to a diminished market for Skinner’s instruments. By the time of Skinner’s death in 1960, his style of organbuilding had gone out of fashion, with orchestral color and tone being de-emphasized in favor of clarity and brightness.

From 1911 to 1961, news of the life and work of Ernest M. Skinner was reported in The Diapason. The announcements, advertisements, letters, and features that appeared in The Diapason illuminated the great scope of Skinner’s work and personality, along with the waxing and waning of his company and career, and the occasional glimpse into his personal life. Over the course of fifty years there were dozens of announcements and articles that documented the instruments in the Skinner opus list and traced the arrival of G. Donald Harrison in 1927, the 1932 merger with the pipe organ division of the Aeolian Company, Skinner’s establishment of his own factory and company in 1936, and his joining the staff of the Schantz Organ Company of Orrville, Ohio, in 1947.

This article offers a brief summary of Skinner’s life and history as revealed in the pages of The Diapason. By no means will it present every reference that can be found in the journal; it is intended to give a flavor of the life, times, and work of this important organbuilder.

Skinner instruments

We first read of Skinner in January 1911, when The Diapason reported on the near-completion of the new, “monster” Skinner organ at New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The next month, the journal published a letter from Skinner in which he complains about inaccurate reporting in a letter discussing that organ; Skinner’s letter also touches on the question, “what makes an organ modern?”

To the Editor of The Diapason. Dear Sir:—One of the reasons why I usually decline to give information to newspaper reporters is the fact that they are not satisfied to take the facts as submitted, but have to enlarge upon them and indulge in flights of imagination, which makes a farce of most accounts of church organs.

I note an article in the January number relating to the organ being installed in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in which it is stated: “The thirty-two foot pipe at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine gives the same tone because it has a sixty-four foot stop.” I do not know where the reporter got this information, nor am I able to comprehend its meaning. There is certainly no stop in this instrument of sixty-four foot pitch, nor have I heard of a stopped sixty-four in any other. The reporter is pleased to call this tone a “gusty rumble.” He vaults from this to the “shrill singing of a tea kettle just beginning to whisper to itself about boiling,” which makes a paragraph rich in metaphor, and is about as rational as the average article of this description.

I note a letter from James E. Dale, in which he says the organ for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine will not be the largest and most modern ever built. I was particular to state in such information as I gave the reporter that the organ was not the largest ever built. I wish Mr. Dale would inform me upon what he bases his conclusion that the Sydney organ, built twenty-one years ago, is more modern than the organ going into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

What makes an organ modern? Is it the character of its resources or the number of stops? Also, allow me to say that the Sydney organ is not the largest in the world. The organ built by Murray M. Harris of California for the St. Louis Exposition, and being installed in Wannamaker’s store in New York city [sic], has that distinction to the best of my knowledge and belief.

The organ in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine has three thirty-two foot pedal stops, an open, violone and reed, all of which are the full thirty-two feet in length at low C and are open pipes. The organ is guiltless of a sixty-four foot stop of any description.

Yours very truly,

ERNEST M. SKINNER

The June 1911 issue reported on Clarence Dickinson’s opening recital at the cathedral.

Other 1911 announcements mentioned new Skinner instruments and contracts: Asylum Hill Congregational Church, Hartford, Connecticut; Sts. Peter and Paul’s Cathedral (the National Cathedral), Washington, D.C.; and Church of the Holy Communion, New York City (April 1911); and the completion of a large four-manual organ in the Grand Avenue Methodist Church, Kansas City, Missouri (September 1911).

The October 1912 issue noted the contract and stoplist of a four-manual organ for Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, along with the dedication of a three-manual instrument in the First Methodist Church of Muscatine, Iowa—played by Mrs. Wilhelm Middelschulte.²

In October 1917, it was noted that Gordon Balch Nevin (probably best known to us as the composer of Will o’ the Wisp) had joined the company (having left his position as organist of Second Presbyterian Church of Cleveland), to arrange musical scores for the “Orchestrator”—a player organ using rolls (“which Mr. Skinner has invented and perfected after twenty years’ work”). The Diapason reported that:

The new instrument contains many of Mr. Skinner’s inventions whereby the tones of the orchestral instruments are faithfully reproduced. In addition the instrument contains a full size concert grand piano, and it is possible to reproduce a concerto for piano with complete orchestral accompaniments.

The Ernest M. Skinner company is erecting a special laboratory building for this branch of the work, containing rooms for cutting work, a studio for the head of the department, and a fine concert hall—equipped with a large “Orchestrator.”

By the way, a player mechanism using perforated rolls was also to be part of the Skinner Organ Company’s organ for the auditorium in St. Paul, Minnesota, mentioned in the April 1920 issue (“City raises fund of $61,000”). This four-manual, 105-stop instrument (stoplist given in the article) would also include a concert grand piano that could be played from the organ keyboard, “as it is in the case of the Skinner organ in Carnegie Hall, Pittsburgh,” along with a new feature, a 16′ Heckelphone in the Solo division (“which will resemble an English horn, but six or seven times as powerful”), and a six-rank string division.

The Diapason’s office was located at that time in Chicago, Illinois; naturally, local instruments would certainly be noted. It was reported in March 1921 that St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in nearby Evanston would have a great organ, designed by Herbert Hyde and Joseph Bonnet:

The Chicago district is to have another notable organ—one which probably will be the largest in any church of the city or suburbs. The Skinner Organ Company has been awarded the contract for a four-manual instrument for St. Luke’s Episcopal Church of Evanston. It will have a total of 78 speaking stops. The instrument is to be completed early in 1922 and will be the crowning feature of the new edifice under construction. The present chapel organ is to be used as an echo division for the new organ. The specification is the work of Herbert E. Hyde, organist and choirmaster of St. Luke’s, in consultation with Joseph Bonnet.

The front page of the October 1921 issue of The Diapason was virtually dominated by Skinner. There was a notice of the dedication of St. Paul’s new municipal organ, with recitals by H. Chandler Goldthwaite, the city organist, who declared the Skinner instrument to be “the best in the country, bar none,” and that “visiting organists are going to discover that compositions may be played here that will be almost impossible” on other organs. The center of the page shows Skinner at the organ console, and Arthur Marks standing by the organ built for Marks’s country place in Westchester County. And the right-hand column provided details on the two “wonder organs” for the Eastman School—one an Austin, and the other a 4-manual Skinner, every division of which was enclosed, including the entire pedal, which possessed a 32′ Bombarde. This organ also featured a full Dulciana chorus (16′, 8′, 4′, 2′, and a Dulciana Cornet), and on the Great, a complete harmonic series, including a Septieme.

The Skinner Organ Company’s New York office, located at 677 Fifth Avenue in New York City, also had an organ studio. The December 1925 issue of The Diapason lists the 36 “noted men” who would play a series of “great artists” Friday evening recitals at the studio, to be broadcast on radio station WAHG. The list is worthy of a Who’s Who: Lynnwood Farnam, T. Tertius Noble, Albert William Snow, Hugh Porter, Edwin Arthur Kraft, Palmer Christian, Charles Heinroth, Harold Gleason, W. A. Goldsworthy, Maurice Garabrant, Marshall Bidwell, Louis Potter, Gordon Balch Nevin, Guy C. Filkins, Rollo Maitland, John Priest, Chandler Goldthwaite, Alexander McCurdy, George Rogers Pratt, Alfred Greenfield, Arnold Dann, Walter Hartley, Warren D. Allen, Allan Bacon, Walter P. Zimmerman, Herbert E. Hyde, G. H. Federlein, William E. Zeuch, Henry F. Seibert, Edward Rechlin, and Clarence Dickinson. A photo of six of the recitalists gathered around a Skinner console graces the top of the issue’s front page.

The lead news article on page 1 of the April 1931 issue of The Diapason was the signing of a contract by the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles for “a large four-manual Skinner organ.” William H. Barnes, the consultant, and Stanley W. Williams, Skinner’s Pacific coast representative, prepared the stoplist for the sixty-rank (plus Harp/Celesta and Chimes) instrument.

The April 1931 issue also mentions the dedication recital of the four-manual, eighty-nine-stop Skinner organ at Severance Hall in Cleveland, played by Palmer Christian, noting that, “In spite of the fact that the event was held on Friday—a rehearsal night for church choirs—many organists and other church musicians were present. It is presumed that a number of choir rehearsals in town were curtailed to enable interested members to attend.” The organ’s console had three terminals for the cable—one so that it could be in the center of the stage, a second so that it could be at the side, and a third so that it could be in the sunken pit. “The tone is characterized by great beauty of individual solo registers. The ensemble is of the English type, with great prominence of chorus reeds and brilliant mixtures. These features were sufficiently outstanding to cause comment from the musical critics, one calling it a present-day ‘fashion’ in organ design.” (The stoplist was published in the February 1930 issue.)

The front page of the January 1932 issue featured a large portrait of Arthur Hudson Marks, “head of new organ company,” which is to say the new Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company, Inc., the combining of Skinner with the pipe organ division of the Aeolian Company. Marks was president, with W. H. Alfring, Aeolian president, and Ernest Skinner as vice-presidents, along with George Catlin of Skinner and Frank Taft of Aeolian. It was noted that 85% of Skinner’s business had been for churches, colleges, and institutions, and 15% for residences, while Aeolian’s was almost the reverse—80% residential and 20% institutional.

One early deal that resulted for Aeolian-Skinner was the 1933 order for a four-manual organ for the W. K. Kellogg Auditorium in Battle Creek, Michigan. The instrument and the auditorium were to be a gift to the Battle Creek public schools from Mr. Kellogg, “the breakfast food manufacturer whose products are known throughout the world.” The February 1933 issue’s front page gave the announcement and listed the specification, of sixty-five ranks plus Harp/Celesta and Chimes; an Echo organ was playable from the Solo manual. The specification included a 16′ Ophicleide (Great), 8′ Flugel Horn (Swell), 8′ Corno di Bassetto (Choir), and in the Solo division, 8′ Orchestral Oboe, French and English horns, and a heavy-pressure Tuba Mirabilis.

In February 1936 we read Skinner’s announcement that he established, with his son Richmond, his own organbuilding plant at Methuen, Massachusetts, under the name of Ernest M. Skinner & Son Company. The announcement is brief; Skinner “will engage in the designing and construction of instruments that are to embody his principles of tone and that are to be like the large organs in America on which his reputation is based.”

From this point on the number of new Aeolian-Skinner instruments far exceeded those of Skinner’s company. New organs were few and far between: First Church of Northampton, Massachusetts (three manuals, November 1936); First Baptist, Jackson, Mississippi (four manuals, 1940); St. John’s Lutheran, Allentown, Pennsylvania (April 1940); the reconstructed/enlarged organs at Brick Presbyterian (June 1940) and First Presbyterian, Englewood, New Jersey (three manuals, October 1946).

Skinner’s writings

Skinner’s own writings appeared throughout the years in The Diapason, from letters to the editor to feature articles. In 1919 Skinner was elected president of the Organ Builder’s Association of America. The September 1919 issue noted: “Ernest M. Skinner of Boston was elected president of the association, as the successor to John T. Austin, the first president. W. E. Pilcher of Louisville was made vice president; Farny R. Wurlitzer was re-elected treasurer and Adolph Wangerin was chosen again to be secretary.” At the organization’s first annual meeting, a motion for the association to declare itself in favor of the eight-hour day was voted down. In 1920, along with his report, Skinner gave an address on the importance of such an organization, noting how it could build respect and collegiality, in “a field that offers no one an easy road to success either artistically or financially.” The year 1920 looked rosy indeed. Note Skinner’s optimism (and mourn the passing of this era):

It looks to me as though from now on the organ builder were to become a decidedly necessary citizen. The organ is becoming immensely popular. The church no longer appears to have an exclusive ownership of the instrument. The auditorium, residence, motion picture theater and even the great municipal art museums are finding it worth while to give the king of instruments a place of honor in their activities. Let us make the most of our association for whatever it may do to insure the future for us.

At this meeting, the association drafted a uniform contract for purchase of new pipe organs, with a payment schedule set at 10% down, 55% at shipment, and the balance upon completion.

Also in 1920, in October, The Diapason printed Skinner’s lecture, “The Organ in the Home,” delivered before the National Association of Organists in New York. It offers an entertaining look at Skinner through his whimsical writing:

When the handle is turned on to let on the water for the morning tub, what is more fitting than Handel’s water music played on the unda maris? A little later we are led to the breakfast table and hear sweet discourse on a stop voiced smooth and round, to picturize a grapefruit, or a bald head.

But the essay focused on player organs:

. . . The present popularity of the residence pipe organ was brought about by the application of the perforated roll mechanism . . . . It satisfies an inherent craving for self-expression common to every living music lover.

Skinner was addressing organists, and he was discussing the organist who would be employed to play an organ in a wealthy home, noting that sometimes the performer would not be listened to:

The client and one or two friends carried on an animated conversion and paid no more attention to the organist than they would have paid to a yellow pup—in fact, I think the pup might have had the best of it. An artist will in this case be hammered into a mere mercenary . . . . The client knows there is, apart from the sound heard, more class to an actual organist than to a machine, and the organist undoubtedly wears this halo, whatever it amounts to.

The organ in the home necessarily has a much smaller public than elsewhere, but it certainly presents, particularly with the perforated roll adjunct, wonderful opportunities for an intimate acquaintance with whatever kind of music one is interested in . . . . The future for the organist looks wonderful to me . . . . But you can do more than anybody else to better the conditions of public music. A given plane is raised from a higher one, never from below.

The early 1920s were prosperous for the Skinner company. The April 1921 issue of The Diapason reports that the Skinner Organ Company would combine with the Steere Organ Company, to handle a large amount of new work. The Steere plant would operate as a unit of the Skinner organ company:

The two factories have been consolidated, but the plant of the Steere Company at Westfield, Mass., will be operated and the entire staff of that concern will be retained. The addition of the Steere forces to the facilities of the Boston plant of the Skinner Company will make it possible to take care of the large amount of new work, orders for which have been received by the Skinner Company. The deal therefore does not actually remove any factor from the organ business, but serves to make for better results through a combination of interests.

The announcement includes Skinner’s letter to the editor, detailing the consolidation, noting that George Kingsbury, Steere’s president, and Harry Van Wart, superintendent (who had previously worked for Skinner), supported “high standards of excellence.” Skinner had written that:

There has been a tremendous demand for Skinner products during the past year, which can be satisfied only by an organization expert in organ building and familiar with the technique and rigid inspection requirements of the Skinner Company. The Steere plant will operate at capacity as a unit of the Skinner Organ Company making standard Skinner parts under our standard specifications and inspection.

Skinner commented on whiffle-tree swell shade action in The Diapason Forum of the February 1922 issue. He explains his preference for it: “The whiffle-tree engine will move the shades about twice as fast as in the old mechanical action without slamming.” Skinner was responding to a previous letter that had criticized the whiffle-tree, and did not spare feelings in doing so: “Except for the fact that M. E. Hardy has overlooked everything of importance relating to the whiffle-tree swell shutter action, his article on the subject is very well expressed.”³

In a letter in May 1945, Skinner explained why organ pipes go sharp when temperature rises, what a temperament is, and what a “wolf” is. The first: As temperature rises, pipes contain less air than formerly, as some has left, due to expansion. Thus less air is excited by the same amount of force. The second: The wolf is the dissonance remaining in one interval of a perfectly tuned or untempered octave. Setting a temperament consists in tuning an octave so that the wolf is distributed equally throughout its twelve intervals.

Later that year, Skinner defined a “classical” organ: “Generally I have regarded it as the type represented by the French organs in Notre Dame and San [sic] Sulpice, and perhaps by the Roosevelt, Johnson and Hutchings organs in America . . . .” He felt that the “so-called romantic organ is the type developed here in the United States” and that its characteristics were “strings of warmth and prompt speech, the new orchestral voices, and unfortunately the Philomela, heavy claribel flutes and fat diapason.” He concluded by saying that since Webster defines classical as “a work of the highest class, of acknowledged excellence,” then the organs of Washington National Cathedral, Girard College, or Bruton Parish Church should be considered so.

In July 1949, Skinner complained about William H. Barnes’s Contemporary American Organ. Barnes claimed, based on letters he had received, that Skinner was not the inventor of certain stops. Skinner’s letter to the editor disputes this, demanding some proof: “Will Mr. Barnes please give in these columns a single instance where any one of these stops was placed by another organ builder, of a character authentic to an equal degree with those designed by the undersigned, and where they were placed, previous to the dates named?” The battle of letters continued, with Mr. Maclean of Toronto and Edwin D. Northrup joining in (September 1949). Skinner clarified that his contribution was the stop’s tone, not merely a stop name.

Please tell Mr. Maclean of Toronto that I did not refer to engraving the name English horn or cor anglais on a stopknob. I have seen many such, but the authentic English horn tone was not heard when the stop was drawn. I have been in England, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany several times, but never once heard the tone of an orchestral English horn, regardless of the name. Also in my sixty-five years as an organ builder I have seen organs of all makes in every state in the Union, but never once heard an authentic English horn, except my own.

. . . I invited Willis to America and gave him my French horn, personally, likewise men from Cavaille-Coll of Paris. I also gave many builders my pitman windchest and whiffletree swell engine; so now I suppose the logical thing to do is to try to do me out of their invention. I invented a contre bombarde and other stops. That doesn’t prevent others from designing other forms of the same name, does it?  . . . Cancel “inventions” to please Mr. Maclean, substitute “developments.” Moral: To avoid criticism, do nothing.

In 1951, when the organbuilder turned 85, the journal published “Ernest M. Skinner recalls the past” in the March issue. Later that year, Skinner’s wife Mabel died, and the grieving Skinner stayed with his daughter Eugenia in Reading, Massachusetts. In this article, Skinner summarized his life, beginning with a description of his limited education—“high school for a while”—and his on-the-job training, beginning with George H. Ryder, for whom Skinner swept the shop and wound trackers. He taught himself tuning (both piano and organ). He worked at George S. Hutchings in Boston, moving up to foreman, and then struck out on his own.

Skinner cited his organs at City College in New York, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Washington National Cathedral, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, Girard College Chapel, and Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. He described operatic and symphonic inspiration for his French Horn (Strauss, Salome), Bassoon (Zarathustra), and Orchestral Oboe and English Horn (Wagner, Parsifal), noting that “every improvement I ever made in the organ was opposed by somebody.” He concluded noting that Hutchings turned down a half-interest in Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone—for $50.

In July 1952, Skinner’s “Principles of Tonal Design” was a feature article. Skinner began by explaining that the electrically driven fan made subsidiary wind pressures possible. He suggests five-inch pressure “satisfactory for general purposes, except on large organs.” The article presented the characteristics of different stop pipes, where to locate their ranks in the organ, and tuning.

Skinner advertisements

The Skinner company was a regular advertiser in The Diapason. Skinner’s advertisements provide a view of the progress of Skinner’s business, and also his philosophies. Those from the 1930s after his separation from the company that he founded decades earlier are particularly telling.

One of the earliest advertisements appeared in August 1917, simply stating that “It isn’t what you Pay; it what you Get for what you pay. Buy by the tone, not by the ton.” The advertiser is the Ernest M. Skinner Company, Church Organs, Boston, Massachusetts.

An advertisement in February 1936 announces that “Ernest M. Skinner is established at Methuen, Mass., where organ building, as exemplified by the instruments at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, St. Thomas’ and St. Bartholomew’s churches, New York City, and similar examples elsewhere, will be continued. The traditional ensemble, enhanced by Mr. Skinner’s orchestral and tonal inventions . . . will ensure the character of these instruments. Their beautiful tone and uncompromising fidelity to quality are acknowledged by American and foreign artists alike.” This advertisement emphasizes what Skinner would be forever remembered for: orchestral and tonal inventions in the ensemble, with beautiful sound quality in a well-made instrument.

An April 1936 advertisement with the title “A Personal Word from Ernest M. Skinner” emphasizes that “Tone production, of distinction, is as individual and personal as handwriting, and even more difficult to copy. It is the product of personal musical experience, taste, research, technical skill and sense of hearing” and that Skinner’s company is the only one from which one can purchase instruments having “tonal characteristics of breadth and splendor.”

In another 1936 advertisement, this from May, Skinner writes that an organbuilder must have a musical imagination, so that the tone he creates would have “an artistic character, of poetic implication. . .”
and that “tonal charm is a fundamental requisite of every musical instrument.” In July, Skinner’s advertisement reaffirms that his work in Methuen, with his son Richmond, produces “beautiful orchestral voices, original and eloquent colors of the Erzahler type, the Trumpets, Diapasons and Mutations . . . all . . .
in just proportion.” Skinner explained in October the workings of his electro-pneumatic key action.

It consisted of a high resistance magnet, operating at a low voltage and controlling an armature of fixed movement. This armature commanded a pneumatic key action having a double motor—a primary and secondary—which operated at great speed, making it the most responsive and reliable of all organ mechanisms, which it remains to this day.

In December Skinner touted his ability to improve an existing instrument through “a few judicious touches:” “Skinner experience will find and eliminate the weak spots and for some of the present indifferent stops, the old organ may be improved to an unbelievable degree.”

In his 1937 advertisements, Skinner took to including testimonials. An ad that appeared in April and July quoted Louis Vierne, from a letter to an unidentified third party:

When you shall see Mr. Skinner tell him that I should be delighted if my opinion of his organs could be of any use to him. It is already ten years since my American tour, and . . . I still have, in my ears, the memory of those magnificent timbres and in my fingers that of the marvelous touch of the instruments of this very great builder. I have retained an unforgettable joy in them, and he can proclaim this publicly in reproducing this passage of my letter.

Vierne also was quoted remarking after hearing a Skinner organ, “If I had had an organ like that when I was a young man, it would have changed the whole character of my compositions.”

In September of that year, The Diapason published an advertisement that contained a letter from Virgil Fox to Skinner. The letter was dated July 21, and one wonders whether Skinner actively solicited the letter:

Dear Ernest, How proud you must feel about your organ we played Monday—the one just completed at Northhampton! Your action will take any tempo, however fast, and any phrasing. And, you’ve built pipes that sing! The ensemble is clarity personified.

Though only a three-manual organ, the real 32-ft tone in the pedal makes it a distinguished one.

Your new 4-ft Swell Flute deserves to stand with your other contributions to the pipe organ. Don’t ever doubt that the world is grateful to you for the beauty you have given thru your invention of the Flute Celeste, French Horn and those other well-known voices.

Congratulations on Northampton! Congratulations because you are even more interested in music than you are interested in organ.

Yours in all sincerity,

Virgil Fox

Letters in 1938 include an announcement that the temporary organ in the choir of Washington National Cathedral was for sale at “about half its cost.” The instrument was of nineteen ranks and included a 32′ Fagotto (optional). Other advertisements announced work booked, in progress, and on hand; others reprinted more letters, from satisfied customers or those who had just approved a contract. One charming advertisement from the August 1938 issue beckons travelers, in those pre-Disney World days, to consider Skinner’s workplace as a vacation destination.

The completion of the organ in Washington National Cathedral was a landmark in Skinner’s career, and he continually trumpeted it, calling it a “masterpiece” that “will stand as a supreme example of the art of organ building for the next century.” He quotes Robert Barrow, organist and choirmaster of the cathedral, who calls the new organ “the greatest instrument as yet produced in this country, and one of the really great organs of the world . . . an organ designed by a musician, for musicians.”

Another advertisement quotes the Washington Herald’s article reporting on the dedication recital. Three thousand attendees “heard one of the greatest instruments in the world today in so far as its capacities, ordinary and unusual, could be demonstrated in a program of less than an hour’s duration . . . .”

In January 1939 Skinner’s advertising quoted T. Tertius Noble, the organist of St. Thomas in New York City, who praises the “superb instrument” there and to the new Washington instrument, with its full and rich Diapasons, which “may be compared with the finest to be found in the great English cathedral organs,” the reeds—“rich in tone, brilliant where needed, and full of character,” and above all the voicing of the mixtures, “so full of sparkle and clarity, without the horrible harshness which seems to be so much the fashion today.” In the following year Skinner printed testimonials from Clarence Dickinson regarding the organ in the Brick Presbyterian Church.

Other advertisements in 1930 and 1940 mentioned new instruments that were being built, and what Skinner could do for an old organ—that is, a slider chest tracker organ, a Johnson, Hutchings, or Hook & Hastings: electrification, curing sticking slides, guaranteeing steady wind and pitch integrity, a silent and instantaneous stop action, a silent high speed key and pedal action. And “by substituting a few stops we can give a substantial factor of modern tonal beauty. All the above under control of a modern Skinner console, at something less than half the cost of a new organ.” (June 1939)

Some of Skinner’s advertisements were pithy, such as May 1940: “Faith without works is dead. A like condition attends theory without ears.” Or March 1940: “Stradivarius, Steinway, Skinner obviously have something in common. In all three, beauty of tone is the first objective.”

While some of the letters quoted in The Diapason give one a sense that they were actively solicited, a letter from Thomas H. Webber, Jr., writing from Idlewild Presbyterian Church in Memphis (January 1941), has a personal and friendly tone:

I am very sorry the rush of the Christmas time has kept me from writing you before this in regards to the beautiful organ you recently finished in the First Baptist Church of Jackson Mississippi. It was a joy and privilege to play the dedicatory recital on this magnificent instrument . . . .”

[The writer goes on to praise the responsive action, diapason chorus, and especially the 32′ Fagotto.]

I am delighted that there is another fine Ernest Skinner organ here in this section of the South. The Idlewild organ is a constant joy to me in every respect. . . . More than ever, I am convinced that people want beauty in tone as well as beauty in other things and you surely create that beauty in these fine organs.

It was very nice to see you and Richmond again. I think he did an excellent piece of work in the Jackson organ.

In March 1941 Skinner’s advertisement was headlined “The Original Skinner Quality Still in Demand!” as though he felt the need to convince the reader of such. The advertisement listed “recent installations and work in process”—16 instruments, of which one was a rebuild, a second received a new console and electrification, and a third new pipes. All were on the Eastern seaboard, except for one in Mississippi and one in Ohio.

The entry of the United States into World War II at the end of 1941 did not immediately affect organbuilding, but it was inevitable that the industry would see changes. The July 1942 issue of The Diapason reported on the order from the War Production Board, which required that the entire organbuilding industry be converted to defense work after July 31. This order forbade the manufacture of musical instruments containing more than ten percent by weight of “critical materials”—metals, cork, plastic, and rubber. The report explained that “the part assigned to the organ manufacturers is to produce blowers for link trainers used in ground training of pilots.”

In July 1943, The Diapason reported that the Skinner factory in Methuen, Massachusetts, was destroyed by fire on June 17.

The origin of the spectacular blaze has not been established. The three-story wooden structure was razed, only the frame front remaining. Serlo Hall, adjacent to the factory and nationally famous because it houses the great organ that originally stood in the Boston Music Hall, being later acquired by Ernest M. Skinner, was saved from the flames by a fire wall . . . . The factory was operated by Mr. Skinner and his son until organ manufacture was suspended and the property was under the control of a bank.

Following this event, Skinner was largely absent from mention in the pages of The Diapason.

About Skinner’s life

Skinner was of sufficient importance that he and his family were worthy of note. The September 1914 issue quotes an article that appeared in the Boston Post in August, of how eighteen-year-old Eugenia R. Skinner saved her “chum” from drowning, “nearly a mile” (!) off shore at the beach. The journal also reported on Skinner’s own health. A February 1915 announcement mentions that Skinner broke a rib in a collision of his automobile with a tree in Cambridge.

In March 1951, The Diapason published a piece in which Skinner reminisced, by the editor’s request; this was on the occasion of his 85th birthday. Skinner tells the story of his life, how as a twelve-year-old he attempted to build an organ of wooden pipes—they did not speak—and how he began working for George H. Ryder, sweeping the shop and winding trackers. He designed a machine that could wind the trackers better and faster than by hand. He next taught himself tuning and moved on to work with George S. Hutchings. Skinner eventually went out on his own. He mentions his landmark instruments, and cites operatic and symphonic works as the inspiration for his French Horn, Orchestral Oboe, and Contra Bassoon.

The May 1951 issue reported on page 1 of the death of Mrs. Ernest M. Skinner (nee Mabel Hastings) in her sleep on April 14. The Skinners had been married for 58 years. “Mrs. Skinner had not been ill and she enjoyed a chess game with her husband the evening before her death. She is survived by her husband, two daughters and a son.”

In January 1956, The Diapason reported that Skinner, “who still enjoys good health and takes a lively interest in musical matters,” would turn 90 on January 15. It also reported his home address, presumably so greetings could be sent. (How times have changed!) It noted that Skinner was “a household word in the organ world,” that Skinner “built many of the notable organs in this country,” and that “he is credited with inventions which have become standard equipment on modern instruments.” This notice was followed by a reprint of Skinner’s autobiography, first presented five years earlier.

Skinner fell in the spring of 1957, as reported in the June 1957 issue, tripping over a small podium in a church aisle, resulting in a broken right shoulder. He spent ten days in the hospital and then was moved to a nursing home, “where he will be staying for at least the next month.” On the front page of its January 1961 issue, The Diapason reported the death of Ernest M. Skinner, “America’s most widely known builder of pipe organs,” age 94, on November 27, 1960, in Duxbury, Massachusetts. The headlines called him a “renowned organ builder” and the “most influential designer of American instruments in first half of the century.” The journal reprinted Skinner’s reminiscence article of ten years prior, noting that “Though most of his best known organs have been rebuilt and greatly changed in the last two decades, many of them retain some of the stops which he originated and perfected and which were most characteristic of the great Skinner organs of a generation ago.”

Notes

1. For a fine summary of Skinner’s career, see Craig R. Whitney, All the Stops (New York: Public Affairs, 2003). For more on Skinner instruments, see Dorothy J. Holden, “The Tonal Evolution of the E. M. Skinner Organ,” The Diapason, July 1977, February 1978, June 1978, March 1979, January 1980.

2. Wilhelm Middelschulte married Annette Musser on June 29, 1896. Prior to their marriage she was a prominent organist, pianist, and teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. In Chicago, Illinois, where they resided, she served as organist at St. Paul’s Universalist Church. See www.wilhelm-middelschulte.de/biographie.htm (accessed August 22, 2017).

3. For a brief definition of the whiffle-tree and a photograph, see John Bishop, “In the wind . . .” in The Diapason, June 2008, page 14.

John Bishop

I remember when . . .

Leading up to Christmas of 2019, I decided to stop maintaining organs so I could concentrate more on the administration of the Organ Clearing House, especially the management of organ sales. I met with several colleagues asking if they would be able to take on more maintenance customers, and I wrote to my clients recommending those technicians for the care of the organs I thought they would be best suited for.

As the winter started winding down in early 2020, I was looking forward to missing the first holiday tuning season since I was a teenager, only to find that leading up to Easter of 2020, no one was tuning organs. Like pretty much everything else in our world, the whole business shut down as covid spread virulently around the world. 

No one has pronounced that the pandemic is over, and we are still hearing about spooky outbreaks, especially in big cities. But with a few reservations, life seems to have returned to something like normal. This past March, the organ tuners were out and about like never before, documenting each lapsed thermostat, each shallot-encased moth carcass, and each insistent vacuum cleaner on social media. I especially enjoy the posts of Richard Pelland, the prolific organ technician based in New Hampshire, who at my recommendation took on many of my former maintenance clients. His habit of posting videos of his assistant playing freshly tuned organs brings back memories of my mad dashes around the countryside, of the many lovely organs (and a few not so lovely), and of the satisfaction of completing a good tuning.

Would the average parishioner identify that great tuning as integral to the celebrations during Holy Week and Easter? Not likely. But they would go home after church with a tune in their head, and I always knew I was part of that. I believe that a well-tuned organ brings a smile or a raised eyebrow that sour notes cannot.

The body of Christ

Carolyn Manning of the Red River Organ Company in Norman, Oklahoma, posted a photo taken during an Easter tuning from high in the rear of the lofty sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church of Corpus Christi, Texas. The longest resonators of the Trompette-en-Chamade were visible in Carolyn’s photo, as was the console I helped build around 1986. I was working for Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and we rebuilt and expanded the four-manual Reuter organ there. Dan Angerstein, a terrific voicer, was in the thrall of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, and Lawrence, Kansas, became something close to Paris on Shoreline Boulevard in Corpus Christi, across the street from the Gulf of Mexico.

We did our best to reconstruct the classic shape of Cavaillé-Coll’s grand consoles. My shopmate, pal, and wicked wag Jack Carr built the cabinet, and I built the curved and terraced stop jambs and the four keyboards. I do not remember the exact dates, but I sure remember that the installation trip was in the heart of summer, a big deal for this life-long northerner. The church’s vacation bible school was going on while we were there, and I have a hilarious memory of the church’s organist, wearing a “coat of many colors,” having been put in charge of a live camel. This had not been his first choice, and he was not mincing words.

A local electrician was on the job with us, ostensibly helping identify the many cables running from the two organ chambers in the front of the church to the Antiphonal organ and the Trompette-en-Chamade. He was using live current to “ring out” the different cables. It turned out that there were speaker wires from the PA system in the same conduit that looked just like organ cables, and when he touched those with his hot wire, we heard such a sound. I am pretty sure that was the end of those speakers. The big reed had been given in memory of a young parishioner who was killed in Vietnam. The drawknob is engraved “Trompette Boyd.”

Our flight from Boston to Houston at the beginning of that installation was my first trip in first class. My coach seat had been double-booked with a guy who was refusing to move. I was rewarded for my ambivalence, and I took full advantage of the perks of first class even though it was a morning flight.

It was fun to see Carolyn’s post, reminding me of that job from so long ago. It’s nice to know that the organ is still being used and cared for.

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I do not have a tally of how many organs I have maintained, but I know it is in the hundreds. My tuning career started in Oberlin, Ohio, when I was working for John Leek. John was the organ and harpsichord technician for Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music and had a healthy side business of maintaining instruments in that general area. I worked with John part time and summers while I was student and shifted to full time after I graduated. During my junior year, John left the school to concentrate on his business. Altogether, I worked with John for about seven years, during which time we built several new harpsichords and two organs together. We renovated and releathered a small fleet of organs and went on hundreds of service calls together. We took care of organs in big city churches and in tiny hamlets far out in farm country. We covered an area from Toledo and Cincinnati to the west, to Erie and Pittsburgh to the east.

The biggest trip I took with John was to deliver a harpsichord we built for a woman in Oakland, California—she had been a student at Oberlin and admired John’s instruments. It was the summer after I graduated, and John proposed the trip to me saying it would take two weeks. I would not get paid (I suppose he was not getting paid either), but we would stay in nice hotels and eat in good restaurants. We would gamble in Reno, see the Golden Gate Bridge, and swim in the Pacific Ocean. Of course I’d go.

We loaded his butterscotch-colored Dodge van and headed west. It is about 2,500 miles from Oberlin to Oakland, and we drove 500 or 600 miles each day. We marveled at the open spaces, hunkered down under bridges to sit out thunderstorms, and drove all day from Salt Lake City with the mountains of Nevada dead ahead that never seemed to get closer until we reached them. When we stopped for gas after crossing into Nevada, I put a dime in a slot machine, received a little cascade in return, and was all ready for Reno. We stayed overnight in Elko, Nevada, and ate dinner in a Basque restaurant recommended by Oberlin voice professor Howard Hatton. And we got creamed in Reno. My meager cash supply disappeared, and John played a few hands of blackjack—it was remarkable how often the dealer got twenty-one.

Arriving in Oakland, we carried the harpsichord into the house, and unpacked and set it up. John tuned it and fiddled with the voicing. We went outside for a cigarette and were admonished by the client’s physician husband about the dangers of smoking. The next evening, he brought home a cancerous lung in a jar for our viewing pleasure.¹ That jaunt with John was the first of many cross-country trips I have made carting about instruments.

One summer, John and his wife Maria wanted to add a large screened porch to their house, and he flung the resources of his company at the job. He made a nice drawing of a post-and-beam structure, and off we went. There would be a lofty pitched ceiling, stained and varnished plywood wainscoting, and a floor of wide pine planks. We cut mortises and tenons on the machines in the workshop and assembled the frame and shingled the roof. We made screened frames to fill the window openings, and we painted everything. Painting the floor, I had my back to John, but heard a big increase in his industry. I turned to find him rushing to paint me into a corner.

John Leek passed away in the fall of 2019, and I drove to Oberlin for his funeral. It was wonderful to see Maria and their children Paula, James, and Peter. A week later, Maria wrote me a note thanking me for coming, which inspired another flood of nostalgia—her handwriting had been on my paychecks for seven years.

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Dan Angerstein had a large stable of service clients, and when he closed his business in 1987 to become tonal director at M. P. Möller, I assumed most of those accounts—that was the foundation of the Bishop Organ Company located in North Reading and then Wakefield, Massachusetts. When I joined the Organ Clearing House in 2000, I continued the care of most of those organs as the BOC morphed into the OCH. By the time I stopped doing service work in early 2020, there were still seven organs I had been caring for since 1984—thirty-five years. There were six instruments built in the late 1980s whose care I assumed when they were new. I was the only technician to work on them for the first thirty-plus years.

Shortly after I started the Bishop Organ Company, I became curator of the huge Aeolian-Skinner organ (four manuals, 237 ranks) at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (the Mother Church) in Boston, and of the double Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organs at Trinity Church on Copley Square. Jason McKown had cared for the Mother Church organ since its installation in 1952 and had worked for Trinity for over fifty years. He was in his mid-eighties when I met him, and he introduced me to many of his clients as he was finally ready to retire. Jason’s tenure at the Mother Church was extended so he would overlap with me for six months to show me the ropes of caring for such a large organ. We tuned there every Wednesday, and Jason’s countless stories were an important part of my education.

As a young man, Jason had worked personally with Ernest Skinner installing his Opus 692 at the West Medford Congregational Church in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1928 and had maintained it ever since. I worked there until 2009 when the church closed and the building was sold.2 Between us, Jason and I maintained that organ for eighty-one years.

Less is more.

When I mention Skinner Organ Company Opus 692 (1928) in West Medford, Massachusetts, I remember the pristine interior of the instrument. It was still playing on its original leather and had never been altered. This reminds me of another Skinner organ less than ten miles away that I have written about recently, Opus 459 (1924), which was sold through the Organ Clearing House to Galilee Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Both organs had been regularly maintained and well used, and neither show the familiar wear-and-tear damage of stretched tuning scrolls, out-of-round pipes, cotton balls left in mixture pipes, or spare wires looping about.

The only other century-old organs I have known in like-new condition are those in small remote churches that had never seen organ technicians. The organs might be full of spider webs and coal dust from obsolete heating systems, but the pipes and interior components could be straight from the factory. Ironically, organs that have never been maintained are the best candidates
for restoration.

I offer a challenge to all my colleague organ tuners and technicians. Leave each organ looking as though no one has been inside. Do not harm the organ in the interest of forcing it into tune. Do not leave little piles of your rubble. Do not leave obvious evidence of quick-and-dirty repairs. I know this is a tall order. I know that many churches are struggling financially and are unable to fund proper repairs. I am sure you will often have to take my admonition with a grain of salt, but I encourage you to respect the instruments you work on and the people who built them.

Those of you on social media, please keep sharing your experiences with the organs in your care. 

Retirement project

Retired organbuilder Gene Bedient has set about building a new two-manual tracker organ for his home and has documented the process intricately and intimately on Facebook. Starting with making open 8′ bass pipes from wood and progressing through building windchests, keyboards, actions, bench, and lately moving the completed base of the organ into the house with the help of neighbors, he has posted hundreds of photos with colorful descriptions of each step in the process. Every now and then, he posts a photo of the drawings so we have an idea of what the finished organ will look like. I recommend you follow Gene’s page and scroll through the last couple years of his documentation. This is a much more creative use of Facebook than photos of your cats or your savory breakfast.

Gene discusses the materials he is using, shows photos of complex gluing setups, and acknowledges the occasional need to “split the difference” to make something line up perfectly. His workshop is in the garage that adjoins the house, and while it is a tiny space and this is not the tiniest of residence organs, Gene’s photography provides a fascinating educational experience for anyone interested in how a pipe organ is built. I am eager to follow the continuation and culmination of this project.

As I write, I have been corresponding with Gene about his project, and he offers this statement about “Bedient Opus # Undecided”:

This home organ is for practice purposes and has only two stops—the lower manual, Principal 8, and the upper manual, Flute 4. Each manual couples to the Pedal. No manual to manual coupler. The lower manual is suspended action. The upper manual keyboard pivots in the center and pushes the top-of-grid pallets up to play, like the French Positif and Echo actions. It is the hope that two beautiful stops and two contrasting but light and responsive key actions will make the organ a pleasure to play.

Thank you, Gene, for sharing your exciting project so generously.

Notes

1. I stopped smoking two years later, on New Year’s Eve, 1981, when my first wife Pat was pregnant with our first child. Michael was born the following March into a smoke-free home.

2. I was in touch with the new owners of the building asking if they had plans for the organ. They replied that they did not plan to use it but did not want to remove anything original from the church building. I check in every now and again.