A second life for a wonderful organ
The crew of the Organ Clearing House started to dismantle a lovely instrument built by the Skinner Organ Company this week, Opus 635, built in 1927 for the First Presbyterian Church in Hazelton, Pennsylvania. It has been purchased by Saint Andrew Catholic Church in Pasadena, California, and we are thinking it may be restored and installed in time for the organ’s centennial. It has four manuals and thirty-four ranks, a size and scheme that Mr. Skinner repeated many times, a scheme that is especially interesting when you analyze the stoplist.
There are four 8′ diapasons on the manuals, eight reeds, three open 8′ flutes, and a total of nineteen 8′ stops on the manuals, a rich variety of tone. There are three pairs of celestes, two of which start on low C. There are no stops above 4′ pitch except a three-rank Mixture on the Swell, but Mr. Skinner compensated for that by providing super-octave extensions on all the stops in the Swell, Choir, and Solo, except of course the Mixture. In addition to all those huge ranks, there are expensive extras like four expressive divisions (Swell, Choir, Solo, and Echo), four tremolos, and a Harp/Celesta.
This organ is nothing like the ideal I cherished when I was young and in the thrall of the classic tracker-action organ. I wondered how you could play music on an organ with no 2′ stops, no mutations, no complete principal choruses? Over the years I have learned to ask likewise, how can you play music on an instrument that does not start with strong fundamental tones? Those four diapasons don’t mess around, to say nothing of the 16′ Diapason or the 16′ Trombone with wood resonators. I value the rich variety of organs I have been privileged to work with over more than fifty years. I know very well that to a violinist, each violin is something new and different, and to a pianist, each piano is something new and different, but at least most violins and most pianos have similar physical forms.
In comparison, the endless variety of forms we find in pipe organs is staggering. I wrote a month or two ago about my relationship with a three-stop organ by Bedient in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a world away from the Skinner we are tackling this week, a world away from the grand Flentrop at Oberlin I studied on in the 1970s, and a world away from the thirteen-rank Johnson & Son organ (1893) Wendy and I heard in recital yesterday afternoon in Housatonic, Massachusetts, four miles from our home. Leaf through the pages of any issue of The Diapason and you will see photos of dozens of instruments in as many visual forms, reflecting as many tonal concepts.
More than just a machine
Ernest Martin Skinner (1866–1960) was one of the great minds in the history of organbuilding. Many of us admire his thrilling tonal innovations, especially the French Horn and English Horn. It is fun to retell the story of Mr. Skinner asking a pipe maker in his shop to cut the bells off a Bell Gamba, having a listen, then asking a German worker nearby for the German word for storyteller. “Erzähler,” was the reply.
Those of us who work regularly with Mr. Skinner’s organs from the inside respect their mechanical and structural integrity. He developed the pitman chest that has been the industry standard in American electro-pneumatic organs for four generations, with their robust double primaries and precision engineering that guarantees that the stop action is exactly as fast as the key action, a desirable feature in today’s world of solid-state combination actions moving stops by the hundred between sixteenth notes. Large bass pipes are set off on separate notes whose blow-to-play actions are fed by lead tubes coming from the proper windchest positions. Whiffle-tree expression motors use the concept of harnessing multiple horses to a wagon or sleigh to connect eight or sixteen (depending on the number of stages in the motor) large pneumatics to a single lever to operate heavy banks of shutters.
The designs of the machines and actions are standardized—as we work, it is clear that each organ is designed and built to be easy to take apart. There is an important reason for that. If it is easy to take an organ apart, is easy to renovate it, to dismantle the actions so failed leather can be replaced, and to put it all back together as a solid organ, uncompromised. Mr. Skinner wanted his organs to last a long time. We marvel at the beautifully milled lumber, the thoughtful engineering, and the beautiful penmanship in India ink marking how pieces go together.
Getting it done
We have a list of chores to complete each time we prepare to dismantle an organ. Early on, when preparing a cost estimate, we look at Bonvoy, the Marriott website, to check on local room rates. We are used to prices around $300 a night, maybe $450 or more in New York City—in Hazelton it is right around $100. We favor Residence Inn because the rooms have kitchens and our crew can use their meal allowances to shop for groceries. After forty years on the road, it is tiring and expensive to eat in restaurants every night. We also favor Marriott because their system of rewards points is generous. It is usual for us to have four or more hotel rooms for up to two hundred nights a year, and we collect points by the million. Last fall I took six family members to a five-day family wedding at a swell resort in Curacao using Marriott points.
We pack organ pipes and smaller mechanical parts in pipe trays, wood crates that are eight feet long, two feet wide, and eight inches deep (actually 7¼′′ because that’s the width of a standard one-by-eight board). We also build ten-footers for the bass pipes of 8′ stops. In smaller organs with narrow pipe scales and high-pitched stops, we can get more than one stop in a single tray. A five-rank Mixture fits in one tray. Did I mention all those eight-footers in this Skinner organ? Those four diapasons have generous pipe scales, so we need three trays for each of them, the lowest four pipes (CC, CC#, DD, DD#) fit in a ten-footer; EE is the biggest pipe that will fit in an eight-foot tray. We need extra ten-foot trays for this organ because of those pesky low-C celestes.
We run down the stoplist assigning numbers of trays for each stop. For this organ we are figuring sixty eight-footers and seventeen ten-footers. I have a spreadsheet named “Tray Calculator.” I enter how many trays of each size we will need, and it calculates the number of ten-foot one-inch by eight-inch boards, the number of four-foot by eight-foot sheets of OSB (oriented strand board) that we cut in half the long way to make tray bottoms, the number of eight-foot by one-inch by three-inch slats that we cut into twenty-four-inch pieces and screw across the tops of the trays so they can be stacked, and the number of feet of twenty-four-inch-wide, quarter-inch-thick Styrofoam sheets that we use to line the tray bottoms to cushion the pipes. The Styrofoam comes in 250-foot rolls, perforated every twelve inches, three rolls to a bundle. This time the tray calculator told me to order 165 ten-foot by one-inch by eight-inch boards, forty-two sheets of OSB, forty-seven eight-foot slats, and 650 feet of foam. I add twenty-five pounds of 1 5⁄8′′ coarse thread drywall screws to build the trays, and at least one twenty-foot by 100-foot sheet of 6mil plastic to spread over the pews and carpets so a hundred years of organ dust does not go home on the seats of the parishioners’ go-to-meeting clothes.
The Styrofoam comes from an industrial packaging supply company. That order also includes boxes of twenty-four- by thirty-six-inch clean newsprint for wrapping the pipes. We never allow two pipes to touch each other directly when packed in a tray so they cannot wiggle and rub against each other, scratching them as they hurtle down the highway. We used to use newspaper for that, but when you handle printed newspapers for days, everything gets all inky, and you lose productive time as workers stumble on interesting articles or read the funnies. The same supplier provides “evidence bags,” different sizes of neat zip-lock bags of heavy plastic with a white block for labeling things; stretch-wrap, plastic film we use to fasten foam around the large metal pipes that will not fit in ten-foot trays, bundle together oddball stuff like offset zinc tubing, etc. (OCH founder Alan Laufman called that “chowder”), Sharpies and blue tape for labelling things. I call the supplier to place an order, and the operators can pretty much copy our most recent order, adjusted to the size of the organ. Sometimes we order one bundle of foam, sometimes four or five.
Parking is another variable. It is nice when a church has a big parking lot with plenty of space for whatever vehicles we bring and whatever trucks we use to haul the organs away. A fifty-three-foot semi-trailer needs a lot of space to maneuver. The church in Hazelton is right on the corner of the busiest intersection in town, so we had to go to the city parking office to purchase day passes for parking our vehicles in front of the church for a couple weeks, and eight parking spaces for the semi-trailer that will arrive next week. Our driver will have to separate the trailer from the tractor so he does not block the entrance to a parking lot for the adjacent business. It turned out that the guy behind the iron bars in the parking office is an organist at a local church and is the proud owner of a “huge” Lowrey organ. The people of the Presbyterian Church told us that before he was promoted to his spot inside the parking office, he was a parking enforcement officer who drove around town in a little three-wheeled Cushman, earning him the nickname Cushie. Small town.
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Getting started, the crew spreads plastic around, moving choir loft furniture, removing façade pipes, and starting to take things apart. The bass octaves of the two Great 8′ diapasons are right inside the façade of this organ, so they came out first, including their windchests and racks. The adjacent Pedal 16′ Bourdon came out quickly, beautiful pipes with heavy scales, and a series of reservoirs for the pedal stops with their windlines, all this while waiting for the lumber delivery so they can start building the trays. We were given a 6:00 am to 10:00 am window but by 5:00 pm we were still short about 140 of those eight-foot boards. The rest of the order was delivered early the next morning. Waiting for those deliveries is always a mystery. How many ways can a lumber order go wrong?
To save labor on site and to keep sawdust to a minimum, we ask the lumber yard to cut the sheets of OSB, remember I mentioned “the long way.” That should result in two pieces eight feet long (ninety-six inches) and two feet wide (twenty-four inches). More than once, many times more than once, we have received it cut the wrong way into two pieces that are four feet (forty-eight inches) square. Send it back. Once when dismantling another Skinner organ in Fort Washington, a neighborhood in northern Manhattan near the George Washington Bridge, the space cadets at the lumber yard had contrived to cut each sheet into pieces that were twenty-nine inches and 18½ inches by ninety-six inches. Really? Is “cut in half” such a complicated concept? In one way, that was useful to me. Ever since that bungle, I have forwarded the photo I took with a strategically placed tape measure to the people at the lumber yard, and at least that particular error has never been repeated.
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Just as a big parking lot makes our job easy, so does the church building in which the sanctuary is close to ground level. It is especially nice when there is space to place the ramp of the truck at the top of the outdoor stairs at the same level as the sanctuary floor so heavy organ parts can be placed on dollies and wheeled directly into the truck. Not so in Hazelton, the sanctuary is up flights of twenty-four stairs. What is worse, there are corners in the stairways. It will be especially difficult to carry those 500-pound 16′ Diapason pipes (which are actually closer to eighteen feet long) downstairs, and once they get downstairs, they will have a trick to make the corner out the front door. There is a tiny elevator about six feet inside the door that surely was not there when the organ was installed nearly a hundred years ago. The consolation prize is that the organ is up just a few stairs from the sanctuary floor, so its thousands of pipes and parts do not have to be lowered from a balcony.
Oranges with apples
Skinner Opus 635 has over 2,200 pipes, and remember I mentioned that most of the organ’s ranks are eight-footers or larger. It is very different when we are moving an organ in which half the ranks are smaller than 4′. Consider this familiar hypothetical specification—Great: 8′, 8′, 4′, 2 2⁄3′, 2′, IV, III; Swell: 8′, 8′, 8′, 4′, 4′, 2′, III, 8′, 8′; Positiv: 8′, 4′, 2 2⁄3′, 2′, 1 3⁄5′, 1 1⁄3′, IV, 8′; Pedal: 16′, 16′, 8′, 4′, IV, 16′. This organ has forty-four ranks, ten more than Opus 635, but twenty-four of them are smaller than 4′. At least three of the 4′ stops on the manuals are stopped pipes. If our Skinner organ weighs 1,200 pounds per rank, my hypothetical organ weighs 500 pounds per rank. I could (but I wouldn’t) hold all sixty-one pipes of the smallest rank of the Positiv Cymbal in my two hands like a pound-and-a-half of asparagus. CCC of that 16′ Diapason weighs as much as all the pipes of the Positiv division of my hypothetical organ.
People often refer to the cost of a pipe organ as “price per stop.” My comparison of Skinner #635 with my hypothetical organ clearly illustrates how useless that formula is. Though it has ten fewer ranks, building Opus 635 consumed many times the weight of materials. Its wind system has the capacity to blow at least three hypotheses. There are four sets of expression shutters with all the accompanying machinery. A 16′ Trombone with wood resonators costs more than a Tierce. Everything about Opus 635 is massive, and the price-per-stop of those two organs is wildly different.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
This was my second visit with Opus 635. I went to Hazelton last August to meet Steven Ottományi, organist at Saint Andrew in Pasadena, and show him the organ. A few weeks later, his church made the exciting decision to purchase it. I really did not have to be there this week with our crackerjack crew as they started dismantling the organ. The logistics can typically be arranged from afar, and these guys have done it hundreds of times, but this trip was fortuitous. I was thrilled to witness the beginning of the exciting process of providing a second life for such a majestic instrument, and it is just a four-hour drive from home. After a couple days, I drove another two hours south to Norristown, Pennsylvania, where we will be dismantling a three-manual Kilgen organ in a couple months, giving me a chance to meet the people and scope out what equipment will be necessary. There the organ is high enough in the building to require hoisting equipment, but it is only a few steps down from the front door to the sidewalk with no tricky turns.
I am finishing this essay and this week in Manhattan where I am meeting with a couple clients, sharing meals with several friends, and measuring an organ that is going on the market. I will be home Friday in time for a weekend with a couple of our grandchildren. It is supposed to snow a little, but I will still be able to light the grill on the patio. Who’s the lucky guy?
