"The world's most famous bell foundry"

Community Bell Advocates, LLC, advises Village of Niles, Illinois, on restoring the bells of the Leaning Tower

Kim Schafer, founder and partner of Community Bell Advocates, LLC, is a bell performer, researcher, and advocate. She has performed on the carillon since a college student in residence at universities across the country and in recital in the United States and Europe. She plays regularly for Sunday services at St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church, Chicago. She studied bell instruments as part of her musicological dissertation research, and she now serves as the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin, the journal of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America. She advises institutions on the repair, installation, performance, and programming of tower bells and bell instruments in North America and coordinates events to promote them.

Photo: The Leaning Tower of Niles, Illinois (photo credit: Kimberly Schafer)

The village of Niles, Illinois, on the northwest border of Chicago, has invested in their Leaning Tower, especially in its bells, to renew its status as a central landmark for the village. Originally constructed to conceal water tanks for adjacent pools, this half-size replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa was built in 1934 as part of Ilgair Park for employees of Robert Ilg’s Hot Air Electric Ventilating Company. The tower and surrounding land were donated by the Ilg family to the YMCA in 1960, and the tower declined in use and purpose as the area transitioned from a recreational park to commercial corridor.

In 1995 the village leased the tower from YMCA, renovating the building and improving the landscaping. Andrew Przybylo, the current mayor of Niles, has bigger plans for the tower and the entire area now that the village has purchased it from the YMCA. He intends to turn the extended site into a vibrant, walkable district for the village with the tower as the renewed icon. Towards this effort, the tower bells at the top of the Leaning Tower of Niles, which have been silent for decades, have been restored to ring out the time and melodies to build and project a sense of community below.

In early 2017, Steven Vinezeano, village manager, contacted Community Bell Advocates (CBA) for their help in researching and restoring the Leaning Tower of Niles bells. The village had five bells at the top of the tower, but they were no longer functioning, nor was their history known. CBA was hired to answer questions about their origins and provenance. Furthermore, CBA was to guide their many options in restoring the bells, including determining which bells could be rung, how they could be remounted, and whether new bells could be added.

By June 2017, CBA had researched and written a full historical report on the five tower bells. Using empirical and archival research and calling on experts in North America and Europe, CBA was able to uncover surprising information. The three largest bells date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Furthermore, archival research revealed that these three bells, while from disparate sources, were all located in Saint Giles (Egidio) Church of Cavezzo, Italy, before they arrived in Niles. This same church in Cavezzo had desired new bells to replace theirs in the early 1930s. The Barigozzi foundry in Milan, hired to cast the new bells, had taken the old ones in exchange. Rather than melting them down for their bronze to cast the new bells, the foundry likely sold the bells to Robert Ilg or a middleman. The details of this transfer are unknown. The ecclesiastical and city archives of Cavezzo are still in disarray after the 2012 earthquake, which damaged the historic Saint Giles Church as well as many other buildings, and thus these important resources are inaccessible indefinitely.

The other two bells were cast in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. The fourth bell has no identifiable markings on it save two simple bands at the top. The cast-in clapper staple suggests a casting date prior to 1900, but this mounting technology was so prevalent in the nineteenth century that it could have been cast nearly anywhere in North America or Europe. The fifth bell was cast by the Pacific Brass Foundry of San Francisco in 1912, as noted by the inscription at the very top of the bell. CBA was unable to determine if all five bells were bought as a set or if these two were acquired separately from the three Italian bells. The provenance of these two bells is unknown.

CBA worked with Niles leaders to envision a renewed set of functioning bells that would honor Niles’s historic past and serve its future. The original bells were rung manually via clocking, a method that the village decided to maintain for ceremonial purposes. The village also wanted the bells to be played automatically via computer control, so that they could be heard more frequently. To fill in two empty niches in the tower, create more melodic possibilities, and complement the set of their existing bells, the village decided to order two new bells. Two of the original bells were already known to have cracks, including the largest Italian bell, so the village wanted these repaired. To highlight the Italian provenance of the three bells and the inspiration behind the tower, the village desired to keep the Italian headstock design for the remounted bells

After considering proposals from four different domestic bell firms, B. A.
Sunderlin Bellfoundry in Virginia was chosen for the job in spring 2018. Sunderlin recommended changes to the initial plan that were adopted by the village. The damaged bell four—because of its unknown origins, discordance with the other bells, and difficulty of repair—was put on outdoor display near the Leaning Tower. Unfortunately, the small crack on the largest Italian bell wended through the bell’s interior, making its repair difficult and uncertain. A replica of the bell was cast for functional use, while the original was mounted on display in the tower’s indoor visitor area. All of the bells—of different profiles and founders—were re-tuned to better complement each other. Given the space availability for three new bells instead of only two, the melodic possibilities for the set increased. Sunderlin recommended that the composite set follow a major scale (absent the sixth scale degree), rather than forming a pentatonic scale as originally planned. In effect, Niles found a way to have their cake and eat it too—they were able to maintain the unique soundscape of their bells by keeping three original bells (plus a replica) in their tower, and they were also able to keep two original bells, one of them gorgeously decorated, on display for visitors to view from ground level. Visitors will experience the bells both visually and audibly.

CBA contributed to the project to further distinguish the bells as unique symbols of Niles. CBA arranged many recognizable tunes for use throughout the year, including patriotic tunes, pop tunes, and holiday favorites. In recognition of the village’s prominent Korean population and the desire to make the Leaning Tower of Niles a site of multicultural diversity, CBA arranged a popular Korean folk song, “Arirang,” for automatic play. CBA also composed melodies for their exclusive use, including two clock-chime melodies and a wedding peal for visiting newlyweds. CBA and Sunderlin worked together to design inscriptions and decorations on the three new bells that resembled those on the historic Italian bells, thus revering the history of the original bells while binding together the old and new.

The tower is nearly ready as a public landmark for visitors to explore up close. By January 2020, all seven bells were installed in the tower, and two display bells were installed onsite. Although fully functional, the bells will remain silent until the grand opening ceremony for the tower in spring 2020 (date yet to be determined; for updates, visit: www.vniles.com/883/Leaning-Tower-of-Niles). Other improvements to the tower have been completed: the outside railings have been upgraded to allow visitors to safely climb the tower and lighting is improved to illuminate the tower at night. CBA has provided a programming road map to integrate bell ringing into local events and community life, such as weddings, school science research, and memorial tributes. As a testament to the importance the village places on the tower, the village secured its listing in the National Register of Historic Places in 2019.

The village leaders aspire to transform the area surrounding the Leaning Tower of Niles into a community destination with the tower as the singular centerpiece. The village, CBA, and the Sunderlin Bellfoundry have collaborated to make the bells a critical aural dimension of this vision. Truly, Niles has embraced the historic function of the bell tower representing and projecting community for modern times. CBA was honored to help bring this vision to fruition, making tower bells relevant and dynamic fixtures for the community today.

Embracing new, creative approaches, a groundbreaking initiative, “Playing and Preserving: Saving and Activating Philadelphia’s Historic Pipe Organs to Advance Music and Community,” aims to generate public support for the preservation and active use of the organ heritage of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The initiative, already underway, builds relationships among congregations, artists, music lovers, organbuilders, and the broader public. Partners for Sacred Places is spearheading the Playing and Preserving venture, supported through a collaborative effort with a team of interdisciplinary partners, including Astral Artists and the Curtis Institute of Music.

Philadelphia’s organs and the sacred places that contain them are some of the city’s greatest treasures—yet, with ever-changing religious landscapes, musical tastes, and technology over the last twenty to thirty years, these buildings and historic organs are at risk. One Philadelphia organist estimated that nearly half of the instruments featured during the Organ Historical Society’s 1996 national convention in Philadelphia are potentially partially destroyed, dormant, or unplayable.

“Our project will turn this problem into an advantage, by leveraging the organ and will amplify one of the most important but typically unappreciated characteristics of sacred places—their auditory and aural qualities—to provide a rich, multi-sensory context for individuals, families, and artists to experience historic places in a powerful way,” said Bob Jaeger, president of Partners for Sacred Places. “This experience will be supported by, among other strategies, place-based storytelling and interactive conversations around what place means to each of us and how it defines our sense of identity and community, as well as engaging history through art.” Playing and Preserving is actively identifying historic organs at risk, activating these instruments through technical assistance and support to the congregations who steward them, and working with project partners and artists in developing concerts that engage the community’s interest in historic preservation through the experience of music.

Assessing the vulnerability

Partners for Sacred Places is collaborating with organ performance students from the Curtis Institute of Music and conducting surveys of approximately fifty historic organs, including many that are at risk in historic sacred places outside of Philadelphia’s urban core. A large part of this process comes with the extensive data being collected on instrument construction, condition, and age.

Also, information is being collected about congregational health, collaborative readiness, openness to the arts, and other key factors. The data—along with audio recordings of the pipe organs and photos of the site—will eventually be available to the public through collaboration with the Organ Historical Society. With this information, artists, performers, and curators can use the database to find venues and instruments that are resources for their practices. Already, the program and its Curtis student partners have visited over forty sites, which have been documented in photographs by a separate team of photographers.

Building capacity to Play and Preserve

Partners for Sacred Places is providing a training and capacity-building program for congregations to help them gain knowledge and skills to better care for their instruments, fundraise for maintenance and capital investments, and develop relationships with artists around mission and vision alignment. Through this program, each congregation is given a complete, professional assessment of their historic organ and technical assistance to promote repairs, conservation, and fundraising help for ongoing maintenance. Technical assistance is provided to help congregations make key, strategic repairs that have helped to make their instruments playable and even more useful for future performances and events.

The training draws on Partners for Sacred Places’ capacity-building programs, including “Making Homes for the Arts in Sacred Places,” which assists congregations in making the most of their properties as assets for ministry. The content is customized to focus on sound stewardship of these instruments, community-partnership building, and community-wide fundraising. In addition to training, this program provides grants to congregations to support the preservation and repair of their historic organs. Each church that receives a grant will match the award with funds they raise using new tools and resources gathered during training, which will help them reach out to a wide network for support.

Pilot performances at St. Mary’s Church, Hamilton Village

Partners for Sacred Places, with Astral Artists, has organized a series of performances and events that highlight historic organs in ways that juxtapose and combine genres and styles of music to engage the local community in preservation and involve musicians of all ages. All concerts welcome families and community members and encourage them to embrace their curiosity about the organ and classical music. These events create a space that allows the organ to return to the center of music making—but with a modern twist. Musicians of all ages perform together with the organ, building community through art and personal connection.

Each performance integrates the story of the historic sacred place, the community content, and the instrument, encouraging audiences to move beyond passive participation toward personal engagement and to reflect on what they hear, see, feel, and how music and storytelling affect their perception of the place. The concerts are all preceded by child-friendly “Experience Stations” that cover topics like organ education, performance practices, rehearsal techniques, and cross-genre program planning.

Further, Astral Artists have begun mentoring students at Play On Philly during four short residency visits, building musical skills as well as vibrant relationships between young musicians and world-class musicians. The first concert featured Astral Artists and Play On Philly musicians, drawing a diverse crowd that enjoyed the hands-on approach to learning about historic organs. Artists involved included Project Fusion, a saxophone quartet; Michael Lawrence, director of music/organist/choirmaster at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Hamilton Village; and the Play on Philly Wind Ensemble. Another program featured Thomas Mesa, cello; Greg Zelek, organ; and the Play On Philly Cello Ensemble. On December 21, a concert is planned featuring Mesa and Zelek again, joined by Chrystal E. Williams, mezzo-soprano, and the Play On Philly Symphony Orchestra.

All of these concerts occur at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Hamilton Village, a historic congregation that completed the present Gothic Revival structure in 1873. Following a fire in 1936, several alterations were made to the edifice, including installation of the present organ, Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company Opus 963, finished in the fall of 1937. The church, still an independent congregation, is now surrounded by the University of Pennsylvania campus.

“The initiative will allow Partners for Sacred Places and its collaborators to advance their work by bringing the performing arts into preservation as a new way to offer sensory experiences that increase the appreciation of historic architecture and create a model for other regions to follow,” said Bob Jaeger.

The Playing and Preserving project is led by a committee including Jonathan M. Bowen, organist, St. Luke & the Epiphany Episcopal Church; Michelle Cann, pianist and educator, Keys to Connect; Frederick Haas; Roy Harker, executive director, First Baptist Church of Philadelphia; Dustin Hurt, director, Bowerbird; Dr. Martha Johnson, organist, choirmaster, educator; Alan Morrison, professor, Curtis Institute of Music; Patrick J. Murphy, organbuilder, Patrick J. Murphy & Associates; James Straw, AIA, preservation architect; Dan Visconti, artistic director, Astral Artists; and Karen Whitney, organist and choir director, Salem Baptist Church.

Major support for Playing and Preserving has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from the Wyncote Foundation and The 25th Century Foundation. Learn more about this initiative and upcoming events: sacredplaces.org/playing-and-preserving.

Photo: St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Hamilton Village, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company Opus 963 (photo credit: Joseph Elliott)

John Gouwens began his study of carillon at Indiana University with Linda Walker Pointer. He continued his carillon activity when he transferred to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree in organ. He earned his master’s degree in organ at the University of Kansas, though his main priority in that choice was to pursue carillon study with Albert Gerken.

He served for thirty-nine years as organist and carillonneur at Culver Academies, Culver, Indiana. His musical activities continue today as organist and choirmaster at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church and as organist, choirmaster, and carillonneur at The Presbyterian Church, both in La Porte, Indiana. Throughout his career, he has been active as a performer in North America and in Europe, as well as being a composer of carillon music. His method book, Playing the Carillon: An Introductory Method, is in use throughout North America and abroad.

The idea for the carillon

The idea of having a carillon on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington was the inspiration of Herman B. Wells (1902–2000). Wells was the eleventh president of Indiana University, serving from 1938 to 1962; thereafter, he became the first chancellor for the university, serving from 1962 until his death in 2000. During his presidency, the student body of the university nearly tripled in size. Among his many accomplishments were putting an end to segregation and racist practices at the university, staunchly defending academic freedom in research (including some highly controversial but groundbreaking studies), establishing a system of extension campuses of the university throughout the state, and building what became one of the foremost schools of music in the country.

Dr. Arthur R. Metz (1887–1963), Class of 1909, became a prominent surgeon in the Chicago area, serving as personal physician to Philip Wrigley (of the Wrigley Corporation) and team doctor to the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Dr. Metz was a generous donor to the university, establishing a foundation at Indiana University that created substantial scholarships for outstanding students. Well after Dr. Metz’s passing, Herman Wells, in his position on the board of the Metz Foundation, proposed that the time had come for a beautiful, tangible contribution to the campus that could be appreciated and enjoyed by all.

By this time, the Metz Foundation was secure in its ability to fund very generous scholarships. Over the years since, the investments have grown, and what was once a single scholarship now amounts to more than 40 scholarships, as well as funding a number of other programs and facilities on campus. Mr. Wells enthusiastically advocated for the foundation to donate a carillon as a memorial to Dr. Metz, and the foundation agreed.

A committee of select School of Music administrators traveled to Europe to visit several carillon installations and came away particularly impressed with the 61-bell carillon in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, built by Royal Eijsbouts Klokkengieterij, bell foundry of Asten, the Netherlands. The committee heard it demonstrated by the young Dutch carillonneur Arie Abbenes, who made a strong impression on them as well. They ordered essentially an identical carillon, 61 bells, starting from a low B-flat of 7,648 pounds and a diameter of 69.3 inches. The inclusion of a low B-flat, without a low B or low C-sharp, follows the European tendency to favor including the B-flat as an extra bass note, in the manner of the carillon of Saint Rombout’s Cathedral in Mechelen, Belgium, which to this day remains an important center for the carillon profession. The majority of “concert-sized” carillons have a range of four octaves, often still including the low B-flat: a 49-bell instrument, or 50 if a low C-sharp is also included. The fifth octave of bells is called for far less often. An unusual feature of the Metz Carillon is that every bell, even the smallest one (weighing 17.8 pounds), has an inscription with a quote from a noted philosopher, poet, or other prominent thinker.

The original tower

A freestanding 91-foot tower was built on the northeast side of the campus, overlooking it at the highest point in Bloomington (Picture 1). The tower of poured concrete reflected the “brutalist” style of architecture of the era, with large openings on all sides of the stairway. As part of that look, the imprints of the concrete molds and metal portions of the rebar used were visible throughout the tower. The carillon had a roof and corners, but otherwise was completely open to the elements. The arrangement of bells favored visual effect, rather than musical results.

There was a “façade” of six bells on each of its four sides, thus making up most of the bottom two octaves of the carillon. The transmission (mechanism) was situated toward the west side of the tower, and the remaining 37 bells were arranged in rows—essentially a “wall” of bells all in one plane—situated very close to the transmission. The upper bells therefore had a minimum of excess movement in the wires when they were played, but the lower bells, especially those situated on the east face of the tower, had horizontal wires up to ten feet in length. Playing one of the bells on that side often resulted in the wire oscillating up and down for more than 30 seconds after a note was played. This made the bells on that side unwieldy to play. Furthermore, the bells on each of the façades tended to “stick out” when heard from that side, and bells on the opposite side were, while not muffled outright, certainly not balanced in effect.

The frame was treated with a heavy galvanization that served well in the long run for preserving the structural beams, but it was not common practice at the time to use stainless steel (or otherwise rust-resistant) bolts to hold the structure together. As bolts deteriorated and as the pads between the bells and the framework compressed over time, moisture easily made its way into the crownstaples (clapper assemblies) and into the bolts holding up the bells as well as bolts holding the beams together. By the time the instrument was just ten years old, the threads on the tops of bolts had worn away to the point that one could no longer undo any bolts to replace isolation pads between the frame and the bells. With no screening to keep out birds, there were also issues with bird droppings, sometimes quite an accumulation of them on certain bells (Picture 2).

While the high placement of the tower made it visible over nearly all of the campus, it actually did not serve music well. Even when the air was calm on most of the campus, the area around the tower was subject to wind gusts, to the point that the effect on the action was noticeable to the player, and the listener on the ground had much interference with the dynamic effect of the instrument. The gusts often created Doppler effects, as the changes in wind direction distorted the perceived pitch of the bells. The only buildings close by were those devoted to married student housing and several fraternity and sorority houses. Such a location was too obscure to have much impact on life in the center of campus.

The Music Addition carillon

When the Metz Carillon was installed, Eijsbouts offered to provide a higher-pitched, smaller carillon at a very reasonable price. At that time, the Eijsbouts company had a practice of keeping a three-octave carillon of a standardized design in stock, with a layout that was particularly suited to being installed on a truck bed as a traveling carillon. This enabled them to fill requests for such instruments quickly and easily. To enable a considerably larger amount of repertoire to be playable on it, Eijsbouts offered to provide such a carillon, but with the range expanded from the standard 35 bells (three octaves with no low C-sharp or D-sharp) to 42 bells, 3-1⁄2 octaves. All of this was pitched a full octave above concert pitch.

This instrument was installed at the same time as the Metz Carillon, placed on the roof of what was then known as the Music Annex, a large addition (from 1962) to the main building of the Indiana University School of Music. Two practice consoles were also provided at the time, but they were so poorly constructed that in short order many notes would not play. Both teaching and practicing ended up happening live on the bells of the carillon of the Music Annex (now known as the Music Addition). The framework of this carillon did not have the galvanization treatment that had been applied to the Metz Carillon, and with no roof or protection of any kind it deteriorated severely over time. Over the years, this carillon, despite the decay that was happening, remained remarkably playable, mostly because it was played often enough to keep its transmission limber (and due in particular to considerable wear on the nylon bushings holding the roller bars in the carillon transmission). Because that carillon is situated near most of the university’s performance halls, it is to this day frequently played prior to operas and symphony concerts happening nearby. That instrument has also been recently enlarged and fitted with a new console, transmission, and clappers, but the details of that project fall outside of the scope of this article.

Dedication and ongoing activity

While the tower was completed in 1970, it was not until the following year that Arie Abbenes played the dedication recital for the completed carillon. The program included a four-movement work by Dutch carillonneur-composer Wim Franken, which had been written for the dedication of the Eindhoven carillon, thus using the fifth octave of bells actively. Mr. Abbenes was engaged to serve as university carillonneur for the school year 1971–1972, but returned to his positions over in the Netherlands (having been on leave of absence) the following year.

In the years that followed, there was sporadic activity. For a while, former students of Abbenes were paid a stipend to present weekly recitals on the carillon. In the school year 1976–1977, another of Abbenes’s former students, Linda Walker (now Pointer), returning from a scholarship for overseas study, resumed her doctoral studies in organ, and was hired as a graduate teaching assistant, with her assignment being to teach carillon students and continue presenting weekly recitals during the school year. In Europe, she studied at and graduated from the Royal Carillon School in Mechelen, Belgium. She continued to serve Indiana University as teacher and carillonneur from 1976 to 1983, thereafter moving to positions in Alabama and Florida, where she continued her activity as a carillonneur for several years.

Over the years, former students of Linda Walker Pointer were engaged as graduate assistants while pursuing graduate degrees in organ, first Tony Norris (1984–1985) and then Brian Swager (1987–1996). Like Pointer, Brian Swager was returning from European studies, graduating from the Royal Carillon School in Mechelen in 1986. He, too, was initially resuming doctoral studies in organ, completing that degree in 1994. He continued as carillonneur and teacher in what was elevated to a faculty position (lecturer).

Since Brian Swager’s departure, carillon activity at Indiana University has been intermittent. Starting in 2003, I was brought in occasionally, sometimes several times per year, chiefly to play on the Metz Carillon, but also to teach any students who were interested, and to play somewhat informally on the Music Addition carillon. On all of those visits, I carried out what might best be termed as “life support” maintenance on both carillons, keeping the action limber, regulating the touch on both instruments, and reshaping clappers as needed to address the harsh sound that comes from long-term wear.

Concerns about the integrity of the concrete in the Metz Carillon tower were raised in 2013, but on inspection, university architects raised greater concerns about the low railings and the openness of the stairway, which were not in compliance with Occupational Safety and Health Administration requirements, and activity at the Metz Carillon was brought to a halt until the facilities department of Jacobs School of Music (as the school was retitled in 2005 after a very large gift from the Jacobs family vastly expanded the school’s resources for scholarships, endowed staff positions, and overall programming) installed far better screening and railings to the stairway. Carillon recitals resumed in the fall of 2015.

A bright prospect at last

Indiana University was founded on January 20, 1820. By 2015, Michael McRobbie, eighteenth president of Indiana University, was formulating plans to celebrate in numerous noteworthy and tangible ways the impending bicentennial of the founding of the university. He had been familiar with the impressive carillon of Canberra, Australia, and was aware of the host of problems surrounding the Metz Carillon at that time. He envisioned placing the carillon in a new tower at a central location of campus, where it could be an integral part of daily life. This vision included expanding it to a “grand carillon.” (See below on that topic.)

The old IU stadium, dating from 1925, was in a central location on campus, but for football games was replaced in 1960 with a new stadium on the far north end of campus. The old stadium site, situated just west of the main library (now dubbed Wells Library), was relegated to lesser events, such as the “Little 500” annual bicycle race. That stadium deteriorated to the point that it was ultimately demolished. In the 1980s, work began on building a beautiful arboretum in its place. (The building devoted to health, physical education, and recreation, along with some playing fields, is still situated just west of the arboretum.) Since this mostly tranquil spot still has much foot traffic going from place to place on campus, it was an obvious location to put a carillon, at a considerable distance from automotive traffic but within hearing of a great deal of the university community.

Grand carillon?

While there is not a formal definition of the term “grand carillon,” a particularly impressive repertoire emerged, particularly in the 1950s and beyond, for carillons possessing bells extending to a low G of approximately five to six tons. To be a proper “grand carillon” for that repertoire, the instrument must be pitched in “concert C” or lower and must be chromatic down to that low G (with the possible exception of the low G-sharp), and from low C up must have at least four octaves. The grand carillon repertoire was created especially for the carillons at the University of Kansas, the Washington National Cathedral, the University of Chicago, and Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales, Florida, among a few others. The Canberra instrument was essentially a twin to the Kansas instrument, so indeed President McRobbie had heard just how impressive such an instrument can be. Worldwide, there are presently twenty-eight “grand carillons,” nineteen of which are in the United States. Heretofore, there were none in Indiana, although there are three in Michigan and four in Illinois. An additional octave of treble bells above the usual 53–54-bell grand carillon range is not essential to that repertoire, but it is worth noting that just under half of the above grand carillons (14) have a full octave or more of additional treble bells.

Defining the project

With President McRobbie’s backing, funding was arranged, and the planning of the project moved forward. The Eijsbouts bell foundry has over the years dramatically improved the design and durability of its instruments, and as the largest bell foundry, they were clearly in the best position to undertake a project of this scope. Naturally, they were also the bell foundry most able to add new bells compatible with the existing instrument.

The design of the tower and overall coordination of the project was entrusted to Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf Architects (now Browning Day) of Indianapolis, Indiana. Jonathan Hess, principal and chairman of the board of the company, has served as official architect for building projects at Indiana University for many years. Dave Long, senior project manager, took the lead on coordinating the design of the tower. Architect Susan T. Rodriguez of New York City also participated in the design team at President McRobbie’s request, particularly to provide innovative ideas for the tower and its setting. I was hired by Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf (BDMD) as consultant to the project to ensure that the tower itself would provide for an ideal facility for the carillon, and at the same time to work with the bell foundry to create an outstanding example of the bell founders’ art. The Eijsbouts team and I were overjoyed that we got to have much input into the design of the tower. Opportunities to provide such an ideal design and situation for a carillon are rare indeed, and we are all very glad it was possible!

Discussion of the range of the enlarged carillon was undertaken with the administration of the Jacobs School of Music. The resulting decision was to cast four new bells, providing the low C-sharp, B, A, and low G needed for the grand carillon repertoire. The only missing chromatic note in the range would be the low G-sharp, which indeed is very rarely used and would have added considerable expense to include. This brought the instrument to a total of 65 bells. The low G weighs 12,381 pounds and has a diameter of 82.8 inches. It was noted that the inscriptions on the original 61 bells were all quotations by men. The new bells are inscribed with quotations from Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Emily Dickinson, and Maya Angelou.

As recommended by Eijsbouts, we determined that the best results would be obtained by having all the bells of the existing instrument shipped back to the Eijsbouts bell foundry for the project. Doing so ensured that the tuning and character of the new bells would be an ideal match for the existing instrument. Also, this ensured that all clappers and fittings for hanging the bells would fit as anticipated. The opportunity was taken to clean and buff the bells at the foundry, so that the entire instrument would have a “like new” look when completed.

On September 23, 2017, I gave a farewell recital on the instrument in its original tower and setting. By this time, there were problems with chunks of concrete falling from the tower, and the tower was surrounded by a construction fence for the protection of the public; indeed, the concerns that had been raised about the integrity of the concrete proved to be well founded. In October 2017 Eijsbouts staff came to dismantle the instrument and ship the bells to Asten. With the bolts holding everything together so severely rusted (Picture 3), the efficient way to take the instrument down was to cut sections of beams and take the bells and the beams holding them down together. The tower itself was demolished in April 2018.

Design and mechanical considerations

For many years, it was common for carillon bells to be hung on straight, horizontal beams, often resulting in fairly long rows of bells (20 feet or more). When the transmission (mechanism of the instrument) is centered in the frame, it is possible to arrange the bells so that all but the largest few are close to the transmission, and the movement is transferred to the bells through roller bars. Roller bars (heavier duty, but otherwise similar to roller bars in tracker organs) provide a solid means of conveying movement. In contrast, when horizontal distances are handled with long wires, the wires tend to sag and to allow a considerable amount of excess movement. As installed in 1971, the upper 37 bells were less than two feet away from the roller bars. Since the transmission (along with the upper bells) was situated on the west side of the tower, there were some very long and quite problematic horizontal wires going to the larger bells that were hung on the north, south, and especially the east sides. Inevitably, roller bars add to the mass of the transmission to each note, considerably increasing the inertia the player must manage. An additional disadvantage is that roller bars can also bend and twist when their notes are played, though this is less of a problem for the player than long horizontal wires.

It is far more common today to build a carillon with few or no roller bars, relying instead on directed tumblers, placed just above the vertical wires. That solution does not work very well if the bells are still arranged in long, straight beams because the horizontal wires to the bells on the far ends must be excessively long, allowing much extraneous motion. When the bells are arranged in a radial (circular or hexagonal) configuration (Picture 4), so that all the bells are close to their tumblers, horizontal wire lengths and the overall mass of the transmission can be kept to a minimum, and the instrument is much more responsive to play.

In Picture 5, one can see how the directed tumbler is designed. The stalk to the right is inserted into the mounting block above it. The pivot (using in this case a sealed ball-bearing unit) is held out away from the stalk, so that the latter is directly in line with the vertical wire coming up from the console below. As the instrument is assembled, each tumbler can be easily turned so that it is directly pointing toward its bell. From the vertical arm of the tumbler, a horizontal wire connects to the tail of the clapper. Whichever way the tumbler is turned, the hole on the horizontal arm to which the vertical wire connects will be in the same place, centered below the mounting stalk. The five holes on the vertical arm allow some adjustment to the leverage, the second hole from the top being exactly equal in travel with the connection point on the horizontal arm.

Great care was taken in the design of this carillon to keep the horizontal wires as short as possible. The smallest bells are the ones most sensitive to any factors that might cause the clappers to dwell too long on the wall of the bells (potentially dampening the ring of the bells considerably), and in smaller bells (with lighter clappers) the added weight of long vertical wires considerably aggravates that problem. Therefore, it is best practice to place the smallest bells closest to the console, but it is important to have them high enough above the roof of the playing cabin (the room in which the player is seated at the console) so that the sound is not blocked from any direction. The ideal is to have a direct line of sight from every bell—especially from every small bell—to the listener below.

It is desirable to avoid having any of the bells at great vertical distances from the console, both for mechanical reasons and because it becomes challenging for the player to determine balance when some bells are significantly farther away. The engineer’s drawing (Picture 6) shows the arrangement of treble and midrange bells. Nineteen of the smallest trebles are hung below the floor level (open grating) on an elliptical frame, toward the east side of the console, since that is where the keys and transmission are for the smaller bells. Above that is a hexagonal frame with 34 midrange bells, arranged in three tiers, the largest being on the top tier.

Major revision to the tower design

The original plan was for the tower to reach a total height of 162 feet, with the 12 largest bells placed at the bottom of the instrument (78 feet above ground level), the playing cabin being above (at 96 feet), and the treble bells above that, starting 113 feet above ground level. Due largely to a change in tariff laws that impacted importing some of the building materials, contractors’ bids for building the tower came in considerably higher than expected, leading to major changes in the design and layout of the tower.

The architects kept the elegant proportions of the original design while making the tower shorter overall and engineering several changes to reduce costs. The expense of providing a stairway to the playing cabin was a significant consideration, and at the request of the architects, the design of the carillon was changed, placing the playing cabin at the bottom of the instrument. (All access above that level is by means of permanently installed straight ladders.)

Because it was critically important to keep the distances between the smallest bells and the console to a minimum, the design of the framework and transmission for bells 13 through 65 (counting from the bottom) was unchanged; therefore, the largest 12 bells then had to be placed higher in the tower than the rest of the instrument. With the larger, heavier clappers in those largest bells, the longer vertical wires are far less of a problem than they would have been with smaller bells, but it is definitely more difficult for the carillonneur to judge the balance when playing the bass bells than it would have been with those bells being just below the playing cabin.

On the positive side, this redesign placed the whole instrument close enough to the ground that very soft playing may be heard clearly, and fortissimo playing is indeed impressive, though never overbearing. The bells are situated from 68 feet to 103 feet above ground level, rather than 78 feet to 124 feet. Picture 7 shows the original plan, with the bass bells occupying a lower belfry level. Originally, the wires for the bass bells were either going to be run around the exterior of the playing cabin (somewhat visible in the middle of Picture 7) or through the floor of the playing cabin. The floor opening and the space in the center of the hexagonal frame in the hub above the playing cabin would easily accommodate the wires for the 34 bells placed on that frame. With the larger bells now going above that level, an additional set of roller bars was needed to bring the wires for the bass bells into that same space allocated for the wires and mechanism for the midrange. (That frame is visible as the multi-colored structure just above the playing cabin in Picture 8.)

In Picture 9, the frame of the tower is shown under construction. A relatively compact central spiral staircase runs from ground level to the first structural hub at 33 feet above ground. A wider, sweeping circular stairway connects from that hub to the level of the playing cabin at 51 feet. A smaller frame, not extending all the way to the exterior framework, is for the roof of the playing cabin (at 59 feet). The next hub, at 69 feet, is where 19 small bells are hung just below it and 34 midrange bells are arranged in a hexagonal frame atop that hub. In the revised design two more large bells are placed above the midrange frame, with the remaining ten large bells in a larger hexagonal arrangement above the hub at 87 feet. The second hub from the top (at 105 feet) holds the ceiling above the bells, with reflective panels above the bell frame itself and a membrane roof above the center. The space from that roof to the top hub (at 123 feet) is open. The tips of the six piers are 127 feet, 9 inches above ground.

Carillons are in general well served by being enclosed in louvers, which blend the sound of the bells, helping the bells on all sides to be heard in an even balance from any side of the tower. The combination of the new clappers and the acoustics of the tower produces a much richer, warmer sound than the carillon had previously. (In the 1971 installation, the sound of the carillon was notably “cold” and “glassy” in effect.) Louvers also reduce the amount of water that reaches the frame and the transmission. Furthermore, louvers help direct sound better toward good listening areas.

So successful is that aspect of the acoustics that the carillon may be clearly heard even when standing just two feet from the walls of the base of the tower, and there is no point on the surrounding lawn where any bell is either stifled or over prominent due to its position in the tower. The original plan for the tower was to make the louvers of strong glass, also mounting them so that they could be opened and closed electrically. When the tower plan was revised to reduce costs, that idea was abandoned in favor of fixed, aluminum louvers, at approximately a 45-degree angle.

Finding a better way to build a carillon

For all of us involved in the project, we were determined to seek out new and often innovative ways to build a carillon that reflected the best design, materials, and results possible. The Eijsbouts bell foundry is by far the largest bell founding company worldwide, and their staff includes six design engineers. For this project, I expressly requested to work with Matty Bergers. Matty had been the sole design engineer with Petit & Fritsen. When the Petit & Fritsen bell foundry in Aarle-Rixtel closed in 2014, Eijsbouts acquired the company, and Matty was one of several from Petit & Fritsen who then joined the Eijsbouts company in Asten. I was impressed by his practical, innovative designs, as well as his tenacious dedication to finding the best possible solution to the technical challenges of building a fine carillon. A project of this magnitude presented an opportunity to make many improvements to how a carillon is built, bringing together my lifelong study of best practice for carillon building, Matty’s ideas and meticulous work, and input from sales representative and engineer Henk van Blooijs as well as others on the Eijsbouts staff.

In recent years, Eijsbouts has made many improvements in the quality of their building. For a long time, Eijsbouts, and to a lesser extent Petit & Fritsen, tended to make their crownstaples with the pivot of the clapper being quite close to the (side) wall of the bell. In fact, at one point, one of those founders used to employ an adjustment to the position of that pivot as a means to reduce or increase the weight the player encountered when playing it. As a result, the clapper travel tended to “scrape” and reiterate as it contacted the bell, making for a dull, “thuddy” sound. That issue was aggravated by the fact that gravity exerted relatively little pull on the clapper to drop back away from the bell.

Ideally, having the clapper pivot more toward the center, and in some cases lowered a bit from the inside top of the bell, positions a clapper to contact the bell at a right angle, making a quick contact, then bouncing off the bell. At my request, we had the clappers designed so this would be the case. Pictures 10 and 11 show the contrast between the original installation and the new one. Also, the newer photo shows the return spring positioned just behind the clapper. The installation was designed so that with the entire instrument, it was possible to install either a return spring or a “helper” spring to every bell. The return springs are used mostly on smaller bells and are necessary to compensate for the weight of the transmission (often heavier than the smaller clappers), ensuring that the note (and key) will quickly return to a “ready” position. In the lower range, “helper” springs are placed near the transmission (in this case, tumblers), pulling in the same direction that the player is pulling, to make it easier to play bells with heavier clappers and particularly to overcome inertia to set the clappers in motion.

In the late 1990s, Eijsbouts began making clappers in which the shaft of the clapper is threaded and screwed into a socket in the crownstaple assembly. This design permits fine height adjustments to where the clapper contacts the bell on installation, but more importantly, when the clapper wears from use, it is possible to rotate it a few degrees to get a fresh strike spot. (The alternative is using a metal file to reshape the clapper in its fixed position. When done repeatedly, a flat area eventually becomes large enough that it is impossible to reshape enough to recover the original, mellower sound.) Various adjustable clapper designs have been used somewhat experimentally since the early 1950s, though the majority of bell founders active today incorporate this feature into their carillon clappers as a standard practice. The threads and the locknut are visible in Picture 11.

Starting in 2017, Eijsbouts began using heavier clappers, having observed that a clapper with more mass brings out a fuller, warmer sound from the instrument. To illustrate the difference, the original clapper for the largest bell in 1971 was 165 pounds. The same bell is now struck with a clapper where the weight of the clapper ball (not counting the weight of the shaft) is 238 pounds. Low G is struck with a clapper where the ball is 326 pounds. Eijsbouts also long ago stopped using the manganese alloy they used in their older clappers in favor of cast iron clappers, a more traditional material that has stood the test of time well. As late as 2003, Eijsbouts and Petit & Fritsen were both still using nylon as bushing material at many points where clapper pivots and wire connections were made. I actually had a role in changing that.

When the Petit & Fritsen carillon for the Presbyterian Church of La Porte, Indiana, was under construction (I was consultant), I asked Matty Bergers and Frank Fritsen why they were still using nylon rather than Delrin®, another DuPont self-lubricating plastic, as a bushing material throughout their instruments. I pointed out the way nylon bushing blocks on both IU carillons had cracked over time and shown a great deal of wear. Delrin® is less prone to absorbing water, is more resistant to temperature variations and sunlight, and tends to show far less wear, while still making for a smooth-running surface. (The durability of the material has certainly proven itself over many years as a material for harpsichord jacks and plectra.) The La Porte carillon was the first to have Delrin® used throughout. Eijsbouts followed suit, as Delrin® is now in use for all sorts of connections, including bushings on the coupling between pedals and manuals.

Some Dutch carillon consultants require that the horizontal wires for larger bells be nearly parallel to the floor, making an obtuse angle between the clapper tail and the wire. Throughout this instrument, we arranged for all wire connections to be at right angles—clappers at a right angle to the surface of the bell upon contact, and the levers on the tumblers at right angles to the wires halfway through the stroke, so the player has good, nuanced control over the behavior of the clapper throughout the stroke. In those details, the configuration of the transmission resembles the principles followed by the English bell founders Taylor and Gillett & Johnston, as well as the American companies Verdin, Meeks & Watson, and Sunderlin.

Not surprisingly, the larger clappers and the positions of clappers and tumblers considerably changed where the transition was made between return springs and helper springs. In a typical Eijsbouts installation, with the wire angles conforming to modern Dutch norms, helper springs are normally needed only up to the “middle C” bell (bell #13 in a C-compass carillon, bell #17 on the Metz Bicentennial Carillon). We ended up using helper springs all the way up to bell #30 (c-sharp more than an octave above “middle C”). Some extra-sturdy brackets had to be added to the pedals and the tumblers for the largest bells in the carillon, but even so, we also had to compromise a bit in the position of the clappers on the six largest bells, which are a bit closer to the bell wall than I consider ideal. That said, the clapper positioning, and even more, the clappers themselves and the sound they produce are greatly improved compared to the original configuration of 1971.

New developments introduced in this carillon

When bells are mounted on metal framework, it is necessary to pad them, both to allow the bells to vibrate more freely and to prevent highly undesirable extraneous vibrations that can happen when the bells directly touch metal framework. In recent decades, many bell founders including Eijsbouts have used neoprene padding for this purpose. Neoprene offers the desirable amount of softness while still being sufficiently firm to be effective, but the problem with that material is that in cold weather, it deteriorates quickly. That point was particularly driven home on a carillon I encountered in Pennsylvania about two years after a major renovation had been done on it—more than 20 of the neoprene washers used to isolate the bells from the heads of the bolts holding them had already split and dropped to the floor!

Needing to find a pliable but more durable material to pad the feet of the framework, where it rested on the floor, and to pad the heads of the bolts and crownstaples up inside the bells, we (Eijsbouts, the architects, and I) conducted some research and ultimately settled on my suggestion of using EPDM rubber. EPDM is a synthetic rubber, made mostly from ethylene and propylene, derived from oil and natural gas. EPDM rubber is used as gasket material in bridges, in liners for swimming pools, and for rubber roofing, where it has a life expectancy of 50 years, so it is made to endure moisture, sunlight, and wide variations in temperature. It turned out that when Eijsbouts ordered the rubber, it was no more expensive than the neoprene they had been using. Eijsbouts has continued to use EPDM rubber in all their carillon work since this project.

For padding between the bells and the framework above them, I had specified a time-honored, traditional solution of using wood pads; European oak was used for this purpose. Matty Bergers designed a special way of mounting the wood that would hold it in place effectively over the long run. Picture 12 shows the beam for holding one of the larger bells (shown upside down for easy viewing). The wood pad is drilled to accommodate the bell suspension bolts and crownstaple, mounted beneath a metal plate, with a metal rim around the outside. With that design, even if the wood at some later date splits, it is nevertheless held in place and still serves its function isolating the bell from the framework. As the wood pad is on the bottom (with only the bell below it), moisture can freely drain from below it. Picture 13 shows a similar beam (still upside down), demonstrating how the wood pad is contained. As can be seen in Picture 13, the rim around the oak pads is vented, so that water is not trapped on top of them, either. Further noteworthy in Picture 13, where the beam joins the plate (which is where sections of the hexagonal frame are fastened together) there is an open space in the beam to facilitate the process of galvanization of the frame. The metal easily flows around the interior as well as the exterior of each beam when it is dipped.

A special challenge with the 1971 treble bells is that for those high-pitched bells, the profile (shape) of each is unusually squat and thick walled, leaving almost no space for a crownstaple inside. (It bears mentioning that in newer Eijsbouts carillons, the bells for such high notes are more traditional, “campaniform” in shape.) In the 1971 installation, the six smallest bells were fitted with clappers that were not inside the bells at all, but rather, came up from below to strike the bells. Picture 14 shows that arrangement, and Picture 15 shows the drawing in which a special crownstaple was designed to fit in that tiny space, with the pivot and the clapper itself positioned lower, so that, unlike the original arrangement, the clappers of even this smallest bell would travel and operate normally. The tight space is noticeable in Picture 16, and Picture 17 shows the bell as installed in the tower. The wooden bell pad and the vented bracketing holding it are visible just above the bell.

While tradition and practice have both demonstrated that the best tonal results are obtained from iron clappers (heat treated, so that the clappers will wear from use without introducing such wear on the bells), I was aware that some bell founders (though not the Continental European ones) had made clappers using a spheroidal graphite (SG) iron. SG iron is more ductile (more elastic in shape), offering the advantage of being less brittle and less likely to deform from use. It was likely to hold its shape better than conventional “gray iron” without injuring the bell, since the clapper in fact would be absorbing the impact and returning to its original shape immediately. This theory had been tested in a project on the carillon at Culver Academies, Culver, Indiana, in 2016, where we replaced the original one-piece (non-adjustable) bass clappers with new, rotatable clappers of SG iron, heat treated to the desired level of softness. Remarkably, it had not been necessary, so far, to turn those clappers at all, so the field test had already proven that superior results were possible with that material. Eijsbouts studied this idea also and discovered that SG iron is also less prone to rusting, so they agreed to use it for this carillon. In fact, they indicated at the time that they might continue to use SG iron in future projects. (Whether that has actually happened, I do not know.)

The practice console

It is very important for a carillonneur—for a seasoned professional, but even more, for a student—to have a good practice console, making it possible to master notes of a composition without broadcasting the process of working out errors and repeating particularly difficult passages to the neighborhood. We ensured that a practice console was included with this project.

Bell founders and companies that specialize in building the hardware for carillons still offer traditional all-mechanical practice consoles with tone bars, but it is more common today to build practice consoles that play through computer-sampled sounds. Having seen well-made older practice consoles (mostly from English bell founders), I knew that a sturdy tone bar console, with occasional upkeep, could give reliable service 60 to 70 years or more after it was built. It is a significant understatement to say that no synthesizer or computer-operated instrument will come close to that life expectancy. Also, though no practice console will ever feel exactly like a carillon, the carillonneur is able to engage the mass of the keys and the hammer assembly in a way that no digital practice console, acting only on a contact (usually a pair of optical contacts), can do. A digital practice console, when built well, offers some dynamic sensitivity, but not in a way that reflects the technique the player is using to depress the key.

Having Eijsbouts build it to the standards they apply to their work now ensured that we would have a console where the keys, pedals, and position of everything would be an exact match for the console of the Metz Bicentennial Carillon. (The manual and pedal keyboards were designed according to standards proposed in the United States in 2000, subsequently adopted by the World Carillon Federation. Within those guidelines, there is still allowance for significant variation in key fall, height of sharp notes on pedals, and other details, and we needed all this to match.)

This was the largest tone bar practice console Eijsbouts had built in many years, and it incorporated a sturdy new action that is likely to give many long years of dependable service. Miguel Carvalho, the new campanologist at Eijsbouts, developed a new way to tune the tone bars so that they produce an overtone of a minor third. (In all honestly, that is really only noticeable in the lower range, but the idea is certainly an interesting one.) Matty Bergers was heavily involved in the design and construction of the practice console, the building of which received special attention by the entire Eijsbouts team. The back ends of the keys are made of metal stock (visible in the lower right of Picture 19) that is heavy enough to give some “mass” to the action, and the piano hammers used to strike the bars are sturdy and produce an agreeable sound. (Note also that some extra mass has been added to the hammers in the bass range.) Since many carillonneurs employ playing techniques that involve using momentum to complete many keystrokes (particularly in rapid playing at soft dynamic levels), this is a highly desirable though rare feature on a practice console. The special tuning cuts on the tone bars to produce the minor third overtones are visible at the bottom of Picture 19.

The clock chiming system

The automatic chiming system does not represent a new development, but it is interesting enough to warrant some explanation. In 2002, Paccard Bell Foundry of Annecy, France, developed an automatic playing system in which pneumatic pistons were fitted onto the console of the carillon, and the instrument was then played automatically using the keys, transmission, and clappers that the carillonneur would use to play manually. Naturally, other companies worked out their own variations on this system, including Eijsbouts.

The hardware for this system (clock computer, air compressor, circuitry, and the pistons) is all contained in the playing cabin, out of the elements. Picture 20 shows the pneumatic equipment placed just behind the music rack atop the console; Picture 21 shows the plungers (black pads with white tips, just right of center) that push down on the keys.

The purpose of the clock is to sound the time and occasionally to play melodies significant to the university, not to replace the carillonneur. Therefore, the chiming system is connected to just two octaves of bells.

We anticipated having a clock chime tune on the quarter hours and an hour strike, with a school song playing after the hour strike at 6:00 p.m. Because using the manual playing clapper for striking the hour would have caused a great deal of wear on it, we did opt to use an external hammer on that one bell, which also makes it possible to get a more commanding low hour strike than would have been possible through the pneumatic system. The low G hour strike would naturally lead into a melody played in G, so the pneumatics were fitted to the dominant notes, from D1 to D3. Indiana University is one of many universities to use the 19th-century tune “Annie Lisle” as the music for its alma mater, “Hail to Old IU,” which was first used in 1893. (Cornell University’s use of that tune appears to be the first, in 1870.) The class of 1935 commissioned songwriter Hoagy Carmichael (IU Class of 1925) to write a song with the intention of presenting it to the university to use as an alma mater. Though the resulting song, “The Chimes of Indiana” (which refers to the small chime of bells in the Student Building on the west side of campus), was presented to the university in 1937, and did indeed become part of IU’s musical tradition, it wasn’t until 1978 that the Alumni Association officially adopted it as another alma mater. The lowest note in both songs is the dominant, and with the melody being played following an hour strike on low G, the range of the pneumatic system was fitted to play from D1 (D being the dominant note in the key of G) to D3. After the striking of 6:00 p.m., the clock today plays “The Chimes of Indiana” several days a week, with “Hail to Old IU” playing on other days. (Since late March, the mechanism has been playing the Ukrainian National Anthem in lieu of the alma mater songs.) For some special occasions, such as New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Day, and Kwanzaa, other songs are played after the 6:00 p.m. hour strike instead. The clock is also set up to play either alma mater or the university’s fight songs at the push of a button. (This has been used on occasion when football touchdowns are scored, though the stadium is well out of earshot of the bells.)

Inaugural activities

For the official celebration of the university’s bicentennial on January 20, 2020, I was brought in to play both alma mater songs officially and to host a series of interested parties (including students and faculty from the organ department, university officials in charge of construction projects, and, of course, President McRobbie) who came up to see the instrument, and each took a turn sounding one of the four new bass bells. The Covid 19 pandemic put most other plans on hold, but Lynnli Wang began her time as associate instructor (graduate assistant) in carillon in the fall of 2020, performing, coordinating playing by others, and teaching many students.

The tower and carillon were officially accepted by the university on May 27, 2021, during an event including speeches, but also including a brief but elegant performance by Lynnli Wang. Belgian-American carillonneur Geert D’hollander, carillonneur of Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales, Florida, was brought in to play the first official public recital on October 3, 2021. That program included a piece that the university commissioned from me, Landscape for Carillon, opus 35, which D’hollander and I premiered as a duet. I played a second dedicatory recital on March 26, 2022.

Looking to the future

Whether the university continues to employ graduate teaching assistants to teach and play or eventually puts a permanent faculty position in place remains to be seen. The present graduate assistant, Lynnli Wang, has done an outstanding job of organizing an enthusiastic group of students and has offered a variety of special programs, formal and informal, that have attracted the interest of the campus community at large. The potential is great, with two fine instruments, both using very durable materials and construction methods, and a superb practice console. Students and concert artists now have the facilities to make great carillon music at Indiana University.

All mechanical drawings were produced by Matty Bergers at Royal Eijsbouts Klokkengieterij. All photographs were taken by John Gouwens.

American Organ Institute, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma

R. Jelani Eddington has been an international theatre organist and concert artist for over thirty years. During his career, he has performed in theatre organ venues throughout the world and has over forty albums to his credit. With degrees from Indiana University and Yale Law School, Jelani Eddington also practices law in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

A revolution in Norman: how a visionary idea is transforming the organ industry

Many in the organ community have likely heard about the American Organ Institute (AOI) at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Fewer have had the opportunity to experience the institute first-hand. For many years, I have had the privilege of knowing the faculty and staff of the AOI personally and professionally and am grateful for the chance to share some thoughts about this visionary program.

In December 2017, I spent several days on campus at the AOI and conducted a series of interviews. While I have always held the people at the AOI in the highest of regard, I was nevertheless deeply touched by the fervent passion with which the goals of the institute were shared among all. From the director of the program to students just beginning their musical journey, there was a unanimity of purpose and an understanding that the AOI offers something truly exceptional: the opportunity to be part of a family that, by providing a far-reaching and all-inclusive educational experience to its students, is helping to transform the organ world.

At its core, the AOI is one of the largest and certainly most stylistically diverse organ music programs in the country. Although the institute was founded at the University of Oklahoma in 2006, its bedrock principles began to take shape many years earlier in the mind of Dr. John Schwandt. For too long, he had watched as the various traditions within the organ world operated largely independent of one another. Dr. Schwandt viewed this compartmentalization as tribalism that could threaten the very industry we all seek to promote.

In 2005, Dr. Schwandt, then comfortably ensconced in a faculty position at Indiana University, became aware of a unique opportunity at the University of Oklahoma. The university’s president, David Boren, circulated a letter soliciting applicants to develop an organ program within the school of music, and Dr. Schwandt seized the opportunity.

Among his most important purposes, Dr. Schwandt wanted to unite the often-disparate communities within the organ world. To achieve that goal, the institute would need to offer the rigorous discipline of a traditional organ program, but also offer students the ability to pursue the heretofore unconventional, including concert and symphonic organ playing, theatre organ styling and silent film accompaniment, and organ building and technology.

I asked Dr. Schwandt the obvious question: why was it so important to include all of these various disciplines within a single organ program? Beyond the academic answer, that “knowledge is power,” he had a more immediate and practical response, focusing on providing students a more complete skill set to meet the challenges of being an organist in the twenty-first century. A student who could play a Bach trio sonata flawlessly—but not a hymn—would be ill equipped to serve the liturgical needs of many churches. An organist without basic skills of improvisation would be challenged to segue seamlessly from one musical theme to another or to remedy a situation in which a prepared offertory was 45 seconds too short for the service. And, a student without basic training in the art of theatre organ would surely struggle if asked to accompany a praise band on a Sunday morning. Dr. Schwandt perceived an opportunity to offer a broader spectrum of skills to today’s students, and through the pioneering spirit that is so often associated with the state of Oklahoma, the American Organ Institute was born.

The plans were admittedly ambitious, but, in Dr. Schwandt’s words, “why not?” In 2007, shortly after the AOI opened its doors, the vision of integrating a fully functioning organ shop into the curriculum of the institute became a reality. Shop director John Riester describes the shop as an “education laboratory” with its primary purpose to provide students with projects and opportunities for broad understanding of the mechanical and technical aspects of a pipe organ. This includes work in the shop as well as regular opportunities to work in the surrounding community with service manager Nathan Rau.

The practical knowledge gained at the shop is important because it gives the student a basic understanding of what to do if an organ has a technical problem—whether during a worship service or during a concert or other public presentation. Mr. Riester also emphasized the importance of organists having that basic knowledge in order to be effective advocates on organ committees and to understand how to better understand organ proposals. Importantly, every student at the AOI, regardless of degree program, must spend a certain amount of time in the shop.

The initial funds designated by OU were originally intended to purchase an organ for Sharp Hall of Catlett Music Center. Instead, these funds were utilized over ten years to develop the shop, hire staff, as well as install an organ in Sharp Hall. One of the shop’s first projects was the creation of Mini Mo—the “miniature” core of M. P. Möller Opus 5819. It was procured almost by chance, before its imminent demolition. OU and University of Pennsylvania reached an agreement, and by February 2007 the Möller pipe organ began to arrive in Norman. Completed in 2009, a smaller version was created first so that a working hybrid concert/theatre organ could be used pending the restoration of the complete instrument. AOI students were involved in every aspect of the project, including rebuilding of chests, winding, and installation of the fourteen ranks that now serve as the concert organ for Sharp Hall.

Mini-Mo, an incredibly versatile instrument, complements the more classical C. B. Fisk, Inc., Opus 111, known as the Mildred Andrews Boggess Memorial Organ, in the cathedral-like Gothic Hall of Catlett. Thanks to the work of students and staff at the shop and tireless development efforts by associate director Jeremy Wance, the number of instruments available to students in the program has doubled. With these instruments in the talented hands of the students, a wide range of music is interpreted credibly and, most importantly, musically.

Work at the shop is complemented by degree and course offerings that range from sacred music and classical organ performance to organ technology and theatre organ. While throughout its long history the craft of organbuilding has been passed from generation to generation, often through apprenticeships, no other program exists that offers the credibility and indeed gravitas of a recognized formal degree. The number of organ companies currently in line to hire one of the organ technology graduates from the AOI—37 firms as of February 2019—speaks to the changing nature of the industry and the necessity of this program.

While accredited degree programs existed for theatre organ in the 1920s during the original silent film era, the study of theatre organ has since that time been the nearly exclusive province of private instructors and oral history. In 2016, Clark Wilson joined the faculty to teach theatre organ as part of the curriculum of the AOI. Under his tutelage, students can learn the fundamentals of theatre organ history, playing, as well as silent film accompaniment. And, as with the focus on organ technology, this knowledge has important practical applications, given the growing interest within the larger musical world in theatre organ, orchestral music, and silent film accompaniment.

One of the unique aspects of the program is that it is home to its very own archives and library. In 2012, the AOI acquired the complete archival materials of the American Theatre Organ Society (ATOS), consisting of a treasure trove of materials such as scores, blueprints, stoplists, correspondence, photographs, and recordings. Currently, more than 350 cubic feet of those materials have been carefully preserved, with inventory lists available online.1 The large collection of glass slides from the silent film era has been a particularly fertile area for research.

In addition to the ATOS collection, the archive houses other significant materials that have been donated to the institute, including the Mildred Andrews Boggess collection, the papers of Dr. Larry Smith (including materials from his teachers Arthur Poister and Russell Saunders), and the complete collection of Möller master player rolls. In 2012, Bailey Hoffner became one of the first graduate assistants to work with the collections, and in October of 2016, she returned to serve as the full-time curator and archivist. She projects a discernible passion for outreach and encourages anyone with questions about the materials to contact the archives and library.2 In Ms. Hoffner’s words, “you don’t have to be a researcher” to take advantage of these special collections, and the wide range of research requests, from students in the program to organ enthusiasts from around the world, is testament to that.

Dr. Adam Pajan, instructor of organ and AOI shop technician, described the institute as the “Willy Wonka” of the organ world, offering the ability to explore virtually anything within the greater organ culture. And that very openness is what has attracted so many students to the institute.

In the years since the AOI welcomed its first students, there has been tremendous growth. Since 2006, the number of students has increased from five to twenty-six, with a current count of eighteen majors (four are doctoral candidates) and eight non-majors. Faculty and staff positions have grown to accommodate the students, with the addition of assistant professor of organ, Dr. Damin Spritzer, and three full-time shop staff. Along with that growth has blossomed a shared passion that the vision of the AOI is helping to ensure that future generations have a thriving organ industry within which to practice.

The AOI has its own goals for the future, and two to three times each year the faculty participate in retreats to revise the one-year and five-year strategic plans, always with the aim of ensuring that everything they do is for the betterment of the students. This includes continued expansion and evolution of the curriculum to address the needs of students in the broadest way possible. The AOI shop looks to continue to expand its education of students on the technology of the organ through apprenticeship programs and through pedagogically significant projects. The archive will continue to preserve, catalogue, and strategically digitize as many parts of the collection as possible, not only to protect the material but also to ensure access to those materials for generations to come.

“This industry is not dying,” observed shop manager and instructor of organ technology Fredrick Bahr. “People are coming along with the same passions that we had, and that generations before us had.” The key is to ensure that our educational institutions are equipped to give students the skills they need to thrive in today’s often-changing musical world. That is, indeed, the true vision of the AOI, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to experience that vision first-hand through the eyes of the students, faculty, and staff.

My visit left me both grateful and inspired. It was clear that the future of the organ industry was in capable hands, both with the talented faculty and staff and exceptional students. But I was also inspired by the talent, camaraderie, and supportive atmosphere that pervaded all aspects of the AOI experience.

In my discussions with the people of the AOI, one word kept coming up repeatedly—family. The students and faculty were passionate in their commitment to the inclusion of everyone within their extended family, and these were not just platitudes offered to an outside observer. To the contrary, the inclusivity, support, and caring was palpable among all of them.

I close by sharing the observations of Dr. Schwandt, whose vision, along with the help and dedication from so many, has created something truly special in Norman. In contemplating what he hopes the legacy of the institute will be, Dr. Schwandt candidly observed:

What I hope we can achieve is to train legions of students who learned how to play music in every way possible, and who learned that they can be greater than they thought. And, I hope that, in whatever way they can have an impact, they leave the world a better place than how they found it. Whether it’s working in an organ shop, playing in a church, teaching, or whatever they may do, I hope they always understand that diligent, hard work will produce excellence. And, excellence will always succeed.

The first squadrons have already left the doors of the AOI and are fulfilling its mission, and many more will follow over the coming years and decades. The diligent, hard work of those who have helped to create and develop the AOI has already paid dividends as seen in the lives and achievements of the students that have been part of the program, as well as the impact the students have had in the industry.

The words of Dr. Schwandt could not ring truer. Excellence will always succeed. It already has, and there is much more to come.

Website: www.ou.edu/aoi.

Interested individuals should contact [email protected] for more information on audition dates, visits, etc.

The author thanks the University of Oklahoma and the American Organ Institute, as well as the many people who gave of their time and shared of their experiences, including Dr. John Schwandt, Dr. Damin Spritzer, Dr. Adam Pajan, Clark Wilson, Jeremy Wance, John Riester, Fredrick Bahr, Nathan Rau, Bailey Hoffner, and Paul Watkins.

Notes

1. http://www.aoi.ou.edu/aoial (last visited February 10, 2019).

2. [email protected].

In memory of Alan Laufman: the birth of the Organ Clearing House

I have written often about the dynamic renaissance that dominated the history of the pipe organ in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, E. Power Biggs toured Europe, bringing home recordings of distinguished historic instruments, catching the ears of the listening public. A large, four-manual tracker organ by Rudolf von Beckerath was installed at Trinity Lutheran Church in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1957, the same year that Biggs arranged for the installation of the iconic Flentrop organ in the museum formerly known as the Busch-Reisinger at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. American organbuilders and organists developed a renewed interest in organs with mechanical key actions and low wind pressures because of the clarity of tone and sensitivity of touch. Many new firms devoted to building tracker-action instruments were established, and with that came renewed interest in nineteenth-century American organs with their mechanical action and low-pressure voicing.

The change of direction affected electro-pneumatic instruments as well. In June 1956, G. Donald Harrison was hurrying to finish the new Aeolian-Skinner organ at Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City, a substantial “American Classic” rebuild of the original Skinner organ built in 1912. The national convention of the American Guild of Organists would be held in the city later that month, and Pierre Cochereau, organist of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, was scheduled to play the new organ for the convention. There was both a heat wave and a taxi strike in New York, and after working into the evening on June 14, Harrison had to walk home to his apartment on Third Avenue. After dinner, while watching Victor Borge on television, G. Donald Harrison died of a massive heart attack. He was sixty-seven years old.

By coincidence, John Scott, the brilliant British organist whose tenure as organist at Saint Thomas ended with his untimely death in 2015, was born on June 18, 1956, four days after the death of G. Donald Harrison.

On June 27, less than two weeks after Harrison’s death, with the AGO convention in full swing, a group of ten people interested in historic American organs gathered in the choir room of Saint Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue to discuss the possibility of forming an organization for like-minded people. Present were Horace Douglas, Dorothy Ballinger, Robert Clawson, Albert F. Robinson, Barbara J. Owen, Donald Paterson, Kenneth F. Simmons, Charlene E. Simmons, Homer D. Blanchard, and Randall E. Wagner. They discussed the possibility of maintaining a list of endangered instruments and publishing a newsletter for the exchange of information of interest to members, and the Organ Historical Society was born. Barbara Owen and Randy Wagner are the two survivors of that group.*

One of the many reasons why historic organs were being threatened came from an act of Congress. The Federal Aid Highway Act passed in 1956 led to the creation of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (the Interstate Highway System). As commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower had been impressed by the importance of the German autobahn system in the mobilization of the military, and building highways was a priority of his presidency. It is difficult to imagine the United States without interstate highways, but their construction caused significant collateral damage as rights of way were carved through American cities causing the destruction of countless buildings, including churches and their pipe organs.

Barbara Owen was the first keeper of the endangered organ list. She solicited information from colleagues around the country and published the list in the mimeographed (remember that smell?) newsletter of the foundling OHS. Within a couple years, the newsletter was replaced by the society’s professionally printed journal, The Tracker, and Alan Laufman became interested in the movement to preserve historic organs. Around 1960, Alan assumed responsibility for the list of endangered organs; in 1961, he petitioned the board of the OHS to allow him to spin “The List” into an independent company, and by 1962, Alan Laufman was listed as director of the Organ Clearing House on the masthead of The Tracker.*

Alan Miller Laufman (1935–2000)

Alan was born in Arlington, Massachusetts. He taught English at Saint Thomas Choir School and later at the Thomas More School in Harrisville, New Hampshire. He was interested in the organ as a child, an interest that was surely nurtured during his time at Saint Thomas. In the early days of the Organ Clearing House, Alan was able to turn the list into action, finding homes for organs slated for destruction. He organized deals between churches that would cover moving costs and solicited thousands of hours of volunteer labor from organbuilders, organists, and enthusiasts. Parishioners provided lodging and meals, and organs were moved by the dozen at low cost.

Decades before the introduction of cell phones, Alan would commandeer the phone of the church where he was working, calling all over the country to arrange the next deal. Gradually, the operation became professional. Organs were delivered to organbuilders’ workshops for restoration. A permanent, paid crew was established, many of whom joined the company because they happened to live near where a project was underway. Alan would approach a group of kids, asking if they wanted to “earn some money over the weekend.” Amory Atkins, who first worked with Alan in 1978, and Joshua Wood, who joined in 1986, became Alan’s business partners and are officers in the company today.

Dozens, then hundreds of wonderful organs of all sizes by such builders as Hook, Hook & Hastings, Hutchings, Stevens, Erben, Jardine, Barckhoff, and Appleton were given “second wind” through Alan’s efforts. Organs facing demolition typically were moved without purchase price; so, from the beginning, the OCH charged a finder’s fee to the recipient of an instrument rather than receiving a sales commission.

Alan maintained the list of available organs in large, three-ring binders, typically one page per organ. He called the binders “The Family Album.” There would be a snapshot, a stoplist, and a brief description of the organ, its location, and situation. In the late 1980s and through the 1990s, I was running the Bishop Organ Company in the Boston area, and I was able to sell several organs to my clients through OCH with Alan’s help. I recall the lengthy phone calls as I described the buildings where an organ might be installed. Alan was often casually munching on something as he rifled through those binders. I would hear the click as he snapped the rings open and the creak of his desk chair as he swiveled toward the fax machine. Through the miracle of then-modern technology, I would receive pages describing a few organs Alan thought might be good candidates. The snapshots were taped to the three-hole page and showed up on the faxes as black blobs. “Laufman and his black blobs” was a common snicker between organbuilders. Looking back, it seems primitive, but it sure was effective, and I know many other organ guys listened to the munching and creaking as they received their black blobs.

A few examples

In 1981, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City acquired an organ built in 1830 by Thomas Appleton through the Organ Clearing House. Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Plains, Pennsylvania (near Wilkes-Barre), was closing, and the OCH removed the organ and delivered it to the workshop of Mann & Trupiano for restoration. It was installed in the balcony in the grand acoustic of the marble Equestrian Gallery of the Pierpont Morgan Wing where it joined the museum’s iconic collection of musical instruments. The organ has more recently been removed for cleaning and renovation and returned to its lofty location concurrent with the renovation of the gallery. The oldest organ in the United States was built by Snetzler of London in 1762—it is located in the Congregational Church of South Dennis, Massachusetts. There are a few British-built instruments in the Boston area dating from around 1800, and there is a two-manual organ built in 1800 by David Tannenberg at Old Salem, North Carolina. With those, the Appleton organ at the “Met” is one of the earliest extant American-built organs and perhaps the second oldest with two manuals.

One of the grandest OCH relocation projects involved the 1871 organ with three manuals and fifty-four stops built by E. & G. G. Hook of Boston for Saint Alphonsus Catholic Church on West Broadway in New York City, near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. The church was to be demolished to make space for a parking garage. There is a luxury apartment complex at that address today. This massive organ is over fifty feet tall, including the seven-foot-tall angels perched high atop the pedal towers. Ithaca, New York, area organbuilder Culver “Cullie” Mowers told of transporting those angels from New York to New Haven in his “Beech Wagon.” Driving through a toll booth on Interstate 95, the toll-taker took a look and asked, “Where are you taking them?” Alan gathered a large crew to remove the organ from its original home and created a consortium of organbuilders to renovate the instrument and install it at Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in New Haven, Connecticut. The project started in 1981, the same year as the relocation of the Appleton organ, and was completed in 1982.

Transitions

In July 2000, the Organ Historical Society held its convention in Boston at the Park Plaza Hotel. Though he was suffering from cancer, Alan addressed the convention, traveling across town from the hospital to speak about the history of the Organ Clearing House. During that lecture, he estimated that in nearly forty years he had been involved directly or indirectly in the relocation of more than two thousand pipe organs. Later that week, Amory, Joshua, and I met with Alan in his hospital room to discuss my succeeding Alan as director of the OCH, allowing the company to continue supporting their families and to continue the work that Alan had started and nurtured. We all shook hands, and Amory made the quip that has defined my life since, “Okay John, you kill ’em, and we’ll skin ’em.”

As Alan’s condition worsened, hospice care was set up for him in the front room of Amory’s house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where friends and family, colleagues and associates traveled from far afield to visit Alan. The number of people who passed through that house during the fall of 2000 is tribute to Alan’s influence on the world of the pipe organ and the wide reach of his professionalism and friendships. Amory, his wife Virginia, and children Ty and Sydney gave Alan a profound gift by making the farewell procession possible. He passed away during the evening of November 30, 2000.

Alan’s memorial service was held at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, the Jesuit Urban Center in Boston, home of the monumental four-manual 1902 Hook & Hastings organ, created by the rebuilding of E. & G. G. Hook’s Opus 322 (1863). Thomas Murray played the organ, and I’ll not forget the experience of singing ST. CLEMENT (“The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended . . .”) with the vast, musically sophisticated congregation.

Alan lived in Harrisville, New Hampshire, for many years, a community he served as a selectman. He brought a one-manual Hook organ to Saint Denis Catholic Church, which he played for services when he was at home. His ashes were interred in Saint Denis Cemetery, enclosed in a box made by a colleague organbuilder from an old bass Bourdon pipe.

Among his many accomplishments, Alan was especially proud of the twenty-seven issues of The Organ Handbook he produced annually as editor from 1972 until 1999. Those publications were the program guides for conventions of the Organ Historical Society, and along with schedules and recital programs, they included organ specifications and historical essays about each instrument visited. Alan spent months in each convention city, visiting each instrument and researching the history of the organs and their buildings. Each volume was scholarly, comprehensive, and impeccably accurate. Complete sets of these vital books documenting hundreds of organs are to be seen in the offices of organists and organbuilders all across the country.*

Organbuilder David Wallace of Gorham, Maine, first met Alan at the 1963 OHS convention in Portland, Maine, and has been associated with the Kotzschmar Organ (Austin Organ Company, 1912, five manuals, ninety-six ranks) in Portland’s City Hall since he was a child. David tells of a conversation with Alan at the 1983 OHS/AGO convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, that has helped guide his career. Alan was asking David about the efforts to preserve the Kotzschmar Organ that was by then in poor condition having fallen victim to municipal budget cuts a few years earlier. A passerby cut in, “Why don’t they get rid of that piece of junk and get something decent in there.” After a stunned silence, Alan replied, “Because it is a noteworthy instrument on a global basis that significantly merits preservation.” Now David was stunned, “. . . here was the sacrosanct nineteenth-century organ hero Alan Laufman advocating for an over-the-hill twentieth-century orchestral organ.” Alan went on to say that each individual organ should be looked at with an eye for what it has to offer, not only its past but also what it can carry to the future. Recently, the organ has been thoroughly renovated and is in terrific condition well into its second century.

And the rest is history.

Since Alan’s death, the Organ Clearing House has continued the work of maintaining information about available organs, placing instruments in appropriate new homes. The pace has slowed to an average of about fifteen sales a year, and the emphasis has changed from the ubiquitous ten-stop Hook & Hastings organ to three and four-manual electro-pneumatic instruments. With organists’ renewed interest in orchestral transcriptions and complex Romantic music, the organs most likely to sell are those with lots of solo voices and fundamental tone, at least two expressive divisions (preferably more), and state-of-the-art consoles with the latest of whizbang solid-state gadgets allowing hundreds of registration changes at the speed of light.

The company has evolved to offer new services. With the experience of dismantling hundreds (thousands?) of pipe organs, we are specialists in hoisting and rigging delicate and heavy components inside ornate buildings chock full of precious artworks, and we are frequently engaged to assist organbuilders in the installation of new organs, erecting scaffold towers with hoisting equipment that rolls along I-beams on trolleys, and engaging truck transportation and overseas shipments. We have sent organs to Madagascar, Bolivia, New Zealand, China, Australia, Great Britain, and Germany. We cover organs for protection during building renovation, and we provide consultation services, advising owners of organs about their care, improvement, and replacement.

We prepare empty organ chambers for the installation of an organ, building level floors, repairing leaking gallery windows, plastering and painting, and working with HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and fire protection contractors to ensure a safe home for the organ. And we have enhanced, renovated, and installed organs under our own name. We are especially proud of the three-manual 1915 Casavant organ we moved from Maine to the Upper East Side of New York City, transforming it from a country organ to a city organ, and from a “downstairs church organ” to an “upstairs church organ.”

I have been director of the Organ Clearing House for twenty years, and I’m the new guy. Amory Atkins, Joshua Wood, Terence Atkin, and I all worked with and for Alan, and his influence is very much alive in our work. I was invited in 2008 to visit Madagascar by the country’s Federal President, Marc Ravalomanana, who was also an official of the national Protestant Church, to study the possibility of bringing American organs to Malagash churches. My “cold call” came from Madagascar’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Zina Andrianarivelo. Zina took me to the Presidential Palace in Antananarivo, the capitol city. Sitting in an upholstered chair waiting for my meeting with the president, I thought, “Alan would have loved this.”

* Thanks to the Organ Historical Society Library and Archives and archivist Bynum Petty for supplying and confirming this historical information.

Photo: Alan Laufman in 1979 at a Stevens organ, Blue Hill, Maine (photo credit: William T. Van Pelt)

Designed for the space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monumental art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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