Kotzschmar Centennial Festival

The 101-rank Kotzschmar Organ in Portland, Maine, is 100 years old, is about to undergo renovation--and Portland, Maine has ponied up $1,250,000 to care for its treasure

It was a dark and stormy night . . .¹

In the early hours of January 24, 1908, a cold westerly wind gusting to thirty miles an hour buffeted Portland, Maine. With the temperature hovering in the mid-teens, the wind chill factor was between forty-five and fifty degrees below zero. Around 2 am, two men walking up Exchange Street toward Congress Street smelled burning rubber, noticed a red glow in City Hall, and ran to the Central Fire Station.²

Ironically, the fire was caused by a short circuit in Portland’s Gamewell Fire Alarm, which was housed in the city electrician’s office in City Hall. The fire, fanned by the strong winds, spread rapidly through the building. Firefighters responded from neighboring towns, but their primitive equipment was not equal to the emergency, and by morning the grand building was a smoldering wreck encased in ice. Government records were lost and the city’s fire chief was seriously injured, but there were no fatalities and the fire was confined to the single building.³

City leaders were quick to respond. Less than six months later, Mayor Adam Leighton announced the appointment of the famed architectural firm Carrère & Hastings (designers of the New York Public Library) to design the new City Hall, which would include a large auditorium. An Australian pianist visiting Portland pointed out that many British and Australian city hall auditoriums included large pipe organs, and Mayor Leighton called on his friend, the publishing magnate Cyrus H. K. Curtis, who responded with a gift to the City of Portland for a large concert pipe organ to be installed in the new auditorium. The organ would be named for Cyrus Curtis’s namesake. Mr. Curtis set two ground rules: the organ would be built by the Austin Organ Company without any direction or interference, and the cost should not exceed $30,000.⁴

The life of  the 

Kotzschmar

The 101-rank Kotzschmar Organ is 100 years old as I write today. As the City of Portland was forced to stop funding for the organ and its programming in the late 1970s, a not-for-profit organization called Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ (FOKO) was formed in 1981. You can read about the history of the organ and of FOKO at the website www.foko.org, and you can see the organ’s stoplist at www.foko.org/stop_list.htm.  

The organ was expanded by Austin in the 1920s and physically moved across the stage by a house-moving company in the 1960s. Merrill Auditorium was reconstructed in the 1990s and the organ was removed from the hall, to be returned when the hall was ready—on a shoestring budget, through the Herculean efforts of the organ’s curator and the FOKO Board of Directors. After a century of ups and downs, it’s great to report that programming has expanded to include significant educational outreach, bringing the pipe organ to public schools in the Portland area. FOKO has even had a portable three-rank pipe organ built that travels to schools to enhance these efforts. Hundreds of great organists have played recitals on the organ, and it remains a beloved icon in the center of Maine’s largest city. If you live in one of America’s more populous states, you may imagine Portland to be larger than it is. With an art museum, symphony orchestra, municipal organ, and opera company, the city boasts an unusually rich cultural life for its population of just over 66,000 people!

Over the past five or six years, the people of FOKO have come to grips with the fact that the Kotzschmar Organ is in failing condition. It sounds great, and has been played energetically and regularly all along. But to reuse a well-worn phrase, it’s time to pay the pipers, all 6,760 of them! To shorten the long story of a complicated path, FOKO, the City of Portland, and the people who love the Kotzschmar Organ have come up with the perfect gift for the organ that has everything in celebration of its hundredth birthday—the millions of dollars necessary for a full-blown, soup-to-nuts renovation, which will take place in the workshop of Foley-Baker, Inc. of Tolland, Connecticut. The City of Portland has set a bold example for government support of artistic and cultural activities by providing a matching grant of $1.25 million toward the renovation of the organ, an amount readily matched by private gifts. 

Centennial celebrations

The new City Hall and the Kotzschmar Organ were dedicated at two o’clock on the afternoon of August 22, 1912. At two o’clock on August 22, 2012, a large gathering of pipe organ professionals and enthusiasts were gathered in a meeting room at the Holiday Inn by the Sea in Portland in a plenary session concluding a week-long Centennial Festival celebrating the Kotzschmar Organ and its role in the life of the city. Michael Barone, host of Minnesota Public Radio’s Pipedreams, was moderator. The panel included the panoply of performers assembled for the festival: Scott Foppiano, Walt Strony, Peter Richard Conte, Fred Hohman, Fred Swann, John Weaver, and Municipal Organist Ray Cornils. (Felix Hell and Tom Trenney had left the festival early because of other concert engagements.)

A couple of hours later, the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ hosted a Gala Centennial Banquet attended by about two hundred people. And on Wednesday evening, we enjoyed the Centennial Concert played by Ray Cornils, Peter Richard Conte, and the Kotzschmar Festival Brass. You can see the festival schedule, the specifications of the organ, and learn the history of the organ and of the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ at the website, www.foko.org.

I serve on the board of directors of the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ, where I am chairman of the organ committee. Seems natural enough, doesn’t it, that someone serving as a volunteer on the board of a not-for-profit organization would take a role from his professional life? But there’s something very funny about it. Throughout more than 35 years working as an organbuilder, I’ve been involved in hundreds of conversations with organ committees from all sorts of institutions, but always as an organbuilder, as a contractor, never as the “customer.” Since the conversation about renovating the Kotzschmar Organ started early in 2007, I’ve been on the other side of the table. The organ committee and I prepared requests for proposals and sent them to a list of organbuilding firms, we reviewed and compared the various proposals we received, chose the contractor, and spent many hours in conference with the staff of Foley-Baker planning the project. It was an extraordinary learning experience, rounding out my understanding of the process of conception and planning of a major organ project, and I am grateful to Foley-Baker, the organ committee, and all my colleagues on the FOKO board for this very rich experience.

Wait, wait, when can we work? 

Planning the schedule of this project has been unusually delicate. Merrill Auditorium is a grand home not only for this wonderful organ, but for many other activities as well. It is home to the Portland Symphony Orchestra, the Choral Arts Society, the Portland Opera, and the Portland Ballet. (How many cities of 66,000 people can boast such a lineup?)  Each year, many high schools, colleges, and universities hold their graduation exercises there, most of them accompanied by the organ. The City of Portland uses the auditorium for meetings and conferences, and very importantly, the hall is the premier venue in the State of Maine for all sorts of cultural activities, from rock concerts to comedians, from classical musicians to this summer’s live sell-out production of National Public Radio’s ubiquitous favorite show, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! That means two things—thousands of people throng from all over the state to hear this wide variety of events, and the rental of the hall for high-profile programs is of primary importance to the operating budget of the auditorium.

The second major factor defining the delicacy of the schedule is the fact that it’s difficult to maintain an audience in a dark hall. The Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ have cultivated an enthusiastic audience for the organ, comprising many local enthusiasts and countless tourists who plan their visits to Portland to coincide with concerts at Merrill Auditorium. How to maintain the presence of the organ and nourish the audience during its approximately twenty months of absence is the question that FOKO has been grappling with since the beginning of the conversation.

The five-week period necessary for the removal of the organ must have been the largest single block of time reserved since the hall was reopened after its renovation in 1997, for which the organ had been removed from the building.

A few paragraphs ago, I mentioned that the conversation about the renovation of the organ started in 2007, just ten years after the Kotzschmar Organ was installed in Merrill Auditorium for the second time. As the auditorium had received a thorough facelift that included new theater seats, a renewed acoustical environment, and a new and larger stage equipped with all the machinery and gear necessary to support complicated theatrical productions, you can imagine that there was much fanfare about the organ’s return to the hall having been cleaned, repaired, and modified to fit the new environment. In fact, the word “restoration” had been used.  

When early in 2007, FOKO’s organ committee reported to the full board that the organ’s condition merited a thorough and very expensive overhaul, there was an eerie silence in the room. The next sound came from a board member who correctly commented, “I thought we restored the organ when the hall was rebuilt.”

In August 2007, FOKO hosted a symposium, inviting seven acknowledged pipe organ experts to visit and inspect the organ and participate in several days of both private and public conversation. Theatre organist Walt Strony, Thomas Murray, Joseph Dzeda, and Nicholas Thompson-Allen of Yale University, Peter Richard Conte and Curt Mangel of the Wanamaker Organ, and organ consultant and historian Jonathan Ambrosino were the invited guests. Craig Whitney of the New York Times, and author of All the Stops (PublicAffairs, 2003), served as scribe for the public round-table discussion. The result of the symposium was a unanimous recommendation by the participants that FOKO commission a professional survey of the organ’s condition, which would serve as the basis for a request for proposals for the renovation of the organ. Five years later, as I write today, the organ is being dismantled for its multi-million-dollar renovation.

The tricky “R’s” . . . 

From the very beginning of five years of conversations, FOKO board members have referred to this project as a renovation. In the world of the preservation of antiquities, the word restoration should be used very carefully. The word implies returning an artifact to its condition when brand new. If the Kotzschmar Organ were being restored, the five-manual console built in 2000 would be removed and the original either repurchased and restored (with its mechanical “ka-chunk” one-level combination action) or faithfully reconstructed, and the significant voices added by Austin in the 1920s (and paid for by Cyrus Curtis) would be removed. While the original organ was a glorious instrument, the various additions and modifications have improved the instrument for modern use by myriad artists.

The current project includes a faithful reproduction of the original Austin Universal Air Chest, which was significantly modified during the 1995–97 project, replacement of pipe valves and pneumatic note-motors with authentic parts supplied by the Austin Organ Company, and the addition of two new 32-foot voices. It would be inaccurate to refer to this project as a restoration. We believe that the effect, aura, and ethic of the original Austin organ will be retained and the essential character of the organ will not be changed. 

The centennial star parade

The Kotzschmar Centennial Festival was a brilliant convocation. The array of visiting artists was inspirational. It was both fun and rewarding to meet with the visiting faithful, many of whom were not professionals, but people so dedicated to the thrill of the pipe organ that traveling hundreds of miles to spend a summer week sitting in churches, conference rooms, and a concert hall is a joy. It was both thrilling and moving to see how the people of Portland came out to celebrate and support their most visible cultural icon. And in the light of all that, enriching for me to have such a broad opportunity to visit with my colleagues who have so much to offer on stage and at table.  

Felix Hell gave us a brilliant performance of Liszt’s Fantasy and Fugue on Ad nos ad salutarem undam. After the concert I caught a glimpse of John Weaver and Felix Hell embracing, the epitome of the deep experience between mentor and student. I’ve had many conversations with great teachers about the joy of working with gifted students, and that which I had with John Weaver at breakfast a couple days later was a classic about how a great performer takes what he learned from his teachers and builds on it as he matures as a performer and develops his vision of a given piece.

Thomas Heywood (www.concert
organ.com) travels the world with his wife Simone, who assists him at the console for his performances, and manages his career. Thomas has the hands and feet of a conjurer, allowing him to play fiendish passages, especially those in his own transcriptions, with abandon and most notably, joy. He bounds onto the stage as if he were winning an Oscar, then jumps on the bench and dazzles. He tested the repetition rate of the organ’s aging action with his reading of the Overture to William Tell.

Fred Swann and John Weaver shared a recital on Tuesday night, August 21. While we celebrate the brilliant young players who are bringing new life to the pipe organ, the opportunity to hear two such masters play on the same evening is to recall the majesty, dignity, and depth of musical interpretation that can only be achieved through a lifetime of practice, study, and thousands of performances. I doubt that anyone in the hall failed to recognize the significance of that collaboration.

Tom Trenney, Scott Foppiano, and Walt Strony helped us appreciate the versatility of the Kotzschmar Organ, which presents itself architecturally as a formal concert organ, but with its array of percussions like Harp, Marimba, Glockenspiel, drums, and Turkish Cymbal, can easily jump the line between the classical and the popular. Tom accompanied the silent film, Speedy, and Scott and Walt gave varied and colorful performances that showcased the widest ranges of the organ’s resources, and their creative and colorful personalities.

Fred Hohman honored the memory of one of Portland’s early municipal organists by playing transcriptions and original compositions by Edwin Lemare, whose virtuosity impressed early twentieth-century audiences, and whose creativity in understanding the capabilities of the organ console is still educating concert organists.

I’ve written before in the pages of this journal that I suspect Peter Richard Conte to be armed with universal joints in his fingers rather than the more usual “up-and-down” knuckles that hamper the rest of us. As an audience member sitting 100 feet from the console in the Grand Tier of the auditorium, I heard sweeping performances of familiar orchestral scores. As a friend who has often stood next to Peter as he plays, I know he’s capable of playing on four keyboards simultaneously while playing two independent parts on the pedalboard. You think it’s super-human and impossible until you see it up close.

Ray Cornils has served Portland as municipal organist since 1990. He, like Hermann Kotzschmar, must be the premier musician of the City of Portland and the State of Maine. His rapport with city officials, board members, and with the audience is a joy to witness, and his approach to his role, complete with sparkling costumes and a smooth croon of a voice as he addresses the audience at Merrill Auditorium, speaks of his understanding and appreciation of the role of leader of the city’s music.

Say good night, Gracie.  

During the last piece of the centennial concert, attentive audience members noticed a light turning on inside the organ, and several people sneaking across the organ behind the façade pipes. As the audience stood in ovation, Ray and Peter slid back onto the bench and launched into a fresh four-hands arrangement of Auld Lang Syne. The entire staff of Foley-Baker, Inc., some twenty strong in suits and hard hats, walked onto the stage with a huge stepladder, and started removing façade pipes as the audience sang and wept.

All this about a pipe organ? The pipe organ is the most complex of musical instruments, the most expensive, and the most difficult to care for. Organs are subject to the whims of weather, politics, and the global economy (try to solicit a leading gift from a donor whose portfolio has just crashed). For many, they are the symbol of lost ages, the ultimate icon of the dead white man. They are the timeless symbol of the church, which compels an ever-decreasing percentage of our population.

Portland, Maine has ponied up $1,250,000 to care for its treasure. Can your town, county, state, or nation be persuaded to do the same? Never, never take pipe organs for granted.

Notes

1. Edward Bulwer-Litton, Paul Clifford (opening line), published by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, London, 1830. It is widely quoted as an example of “Purple Prose” celebrating the worst extremes in writing:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

2. Behind the Pipes: The Story of the Kotzschmar Organ, Janice Parkinson-Tucker, Casco House, 2005, pp. 2–3.

3. Lima Daily News, Lima, Ohio, January 24, 1908 (http://www.gendisasters.com/data1/me/fires/portland-cityhall1908.htm)

4. Behind the Pipes, p. 14.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Of the people, by the people, for the people . . . 

. . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

These words from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address are in tribute to those killed during the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg of the American Civil War. In the eulogy he delivered after Lincoln’s assassination, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner said, “The world noticed at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.” Sumner’s other claim to fame is as namesake of the Sumner Tunnel that connects downtown Boston to Logan Airport by passing under Boston Harbor.

Perhaps it’s rare for words like these to appear in the pages of a trade journal, and in today’s volatile political climate I know very well that I tread on dangerous ground. The relationship between politics and religion is strong and prevalent, though the United States Constitution specifically calls for the two to be separate. The differences in worship styles between Northeastern Anglicans and Southeastern Evangelicals are as vast as the wide range of styles found in the world of the pipe organ.

Like it or not, the pipe organ has been associated primarily with the church for some five hundred years. It’s hard to imagine what the pipe organ would be today were it not for the influence of the church. From the late Renaissance to the modern day, most of the music written for the organ comes from the church, and by extension, most of the organ music we might consider secular couldn’t have happened had the church not provided us with the parade of instruments that is our history. One might argue that the organ symphonies of Vierne or Widor are not ecclesiastical music, but without the Cavaillé-Coll organs in the grand churches of St. Sulpice and Notre Dame in Paris, I doubt those two masters would have gotten it together to write that music.

Some twenty years ago my friend and colleague, the widely respected organ historian Barbara Owen, commented, “We have to get the organ out of the church.” I was dumbfounded—I guess because I found I was too dumb to understand what she meant. How could the organ possibly survive without the church? It was the comment of another friend and colleague, Steven Dieck, President of C.B. Fisk, Inc., that enlightened me a little. To paraphrase Steve’s comment, large portions of modern society might never have the chance to hear a pipe organ—those people who would never be caught dead in church, or more to the point, those who would only be caught dead in church! After all, some people never go into a church unless they’re in a coffin.

The organs we find in concert halls, university auditoriums, and increasingly rarely, in municipal auditoriums are available to the general public without risk of exposure to the perceived perils of organized worship, and it’s the municipal organ that is of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The first American municipal organ appeared in 1864 when E. & G. G. Hook built a four-manual organ with 64 stops for Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts. That organ was restored by the Noack Organ Company in 1982 and is still very much in use. Records show that Roosevelt built an organ with 129 stops for the Chicago Auditorium in 1889, the year that Benjamin Harrison was inaugurated as America’s twenty-third president, and three years after the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. I don’t know how many organs that large had been built before 1889—but it sure must have stood out as one of the great cultural icons of its day. And with what I know about the organs built by Hilborne Roosevelt, it must have been a knockout.

In 1882, Thomas Edison proved the practicality of the commercial and residential use of electricity by installing electric lighting in the home of J. P. Morgan at the corner of Madison Avenue and 36th Street in New York. When the Roosevelt organ was built, the development of electrical applications was still in its infancy—the organ had tracker action. That’s a huge organ. The stoplist shows that there were indicators for low, medium, and high wind pressures—imagine the army of people needed to pump that organ.

In 1921 E. M. Skinner built a five-manual instrument with 150 stops for the new 13,000-seat Municipal Auditorium in Cleveland. Those were the days before radio and recordings, and it was expensive to hear the few great symphony orchestras across the country, so the municipal organ was the only way for many to hear live performances of great music. Accounts of the introduction of that organ give us a glimpse into the popularity of the public pipe organ. Following the dedication of the organ, Harold MacDowell, the Cleveland City Architect wrote: 

Despite the oppressive heat, the crowd which had been collecting since noon soon exceeded the capacity of the mammoth hall and long before the time set for the inaugural recital all seats were filled and more than 5000 men, women, and children were crowding the corridors of the colossal structure. The police which were out in large numbers were at first able to hold the crowd into a semblance of order, but soon gave up in despair as the eager mob swept all before it.¹

That means there were at least 18,000 people in attendance. A riot before an organ recital? Wow!

It wasn’t only big cities that had municipal organs. Melrose, Massachusetts is about seven miles north of Boston. Today there are around 29,000 residents. In 1919 when the Austin Organ Company installed the 78-stop organ in Soldiers and Sailors Hall, just over 18,000 people lived in Melrose. As we learned in Cleveland, that’s just enough to make an audience.

If you’re interested in reading more about this heritage, visit the website www.municipalorgans.net, where you’ll find a chronological list of American Municipal Pipe Organs. You can click your way further in to find stoplists and histories of most of the instruments. Thanks to the creators of that website for making so much information available. I’m sure that was a labor of love!

Two cities in the United States still have important secular organs with seated municipal organists: San Diego, California and Portland, Maine. San Diego is home to the Spreckels Organ, housed in the Spreckels Organ Pavilion at Balboa Park. It’s one of the world’s largest outdoor organs, and though it must compete with the flight paths of San Diego International Airport, it remains a popular attraction. Municipal Organist Carol Williams and visiting artists offer weekly concerts. Like so many other cities, San Diego has been struggling to manage a deficit budget, and after much well-reported arguing, the City Council voted in 2011 to renew Williams’ contract for ten years, continuing the city’s sizable contribution to her salary. You can read an article about the city’s decision in the San Diego Union Times at https://www.utsandiego.com/news/2011/aug/02/civic-organist-contract-renewed/?ap. The article cites that the city has a $40,000,000 deficit—but they approved funding of $286,000 for a ten-year contract for Williams. Compare that to Alex Rodriguez (aka A-Rod) of the New York Yankees who was paid $33,000,000 in 2009. That’s more than $203,000 per game, which is close to ten years for Carol Williams. According to www.baseball-reference.com, A-Rod’s aggregate salary as a baseball player is $296,416,252. That’s enough money for a thousand municipal organists for ten years. Play ball!

As the weather in Portland, Maine is nothing like that of San Diego, Portland’s Kotzschmar Organ is indoors, located in Merrill Auditorium of City Hall. Housed in an elegant case at the rear of the stage, and sporting a five-manual drawknob console, this grand instrument is the pride of its city. And while San Diego has just over 3,000,000 residents, the entire State of Maine has about 1,300,000 people, 64,000 of whom live in Portland, the largest city in the state. To put the scale of the state in closer perspective, the capital city of Augusta has 18,500 residents! 

The institution that was Curtis

Cyrus H. K. Curtis grew up in Portland, Maine. His father Cyrus Libby Curtis was an interior decorator and amateur musician who met the struggling immigrant musician Hermann Kotzschmar in Boston, and offered to help him establish himself in Portland. Kotzschmar became conductor and pianist for the Union Street Theatre Orchestra, in which Curtis played the trombone, and organist and choirmaster of the First Parish Church (Unitarian) where Curtis sang in the choir. Can you detect a pattern? As Kotzschmar was gaining traction in Portland, he lived with the Curtis family, and Cyrus Libby Curtis gave his son the name of his favorite musician, hence the initials H.K.

In the ensuing years, Kotzschmar founded choral societies and orchestras, performed as conductor, organist, and pianist in countless concerts, and taught a generation of the city’s musicians.

Meanwhile, Cyrus H. K. Curtis really made something of himself. He founded the Curtis Publishing Company in 1891 and subsequently launched the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies’ Home Journal. Later he founded Curtis-Martin Newspapers, Inc., whose properties included the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Evening Post. Cyrus
H. K. Curtis made a lot of money, and he carried the musical influence of Hermann Kotzschmar all his life. He purchased three pipe organs for his home in Wyncote, Pennsylvania (Aeolian, Opus 784, 943, and 1374); he donated a 160-stop Austin organ to the University of Pennsylvania where it still stands, recently renovated, in Irvine Auditorium. He gave huge amounts of money to the Philadelphia Orchestra, and his daughter Mary Louise Curtis Bok founded the Curtis Institute of Music, named in honor of her father. Hers was a particularly classy honor as the Curtis Institute was founded nine years before her father’s death!

§

At about 2:00 in the morning on January 24, 1908, a fire started in the city electrician’s office in Portland’s City Hall, ironically caused by an electrical short-circuit in the Gamewell Fire Alarm System that was housed in the office (pesky new-fangled contraptions). Because the alarm system was the first thing to go, the fire quickly went out of control and City Hall was destroyed. Coincidentally, Hermann Kotzschmar died on April 15, 1908. After plenty of discussion, the remains of the building were razed and the cornerstone for the new City Hall was laid on October 6, 1909, and on January 10, 1911, former Mayor Adam Leighton announced that Portland native Cyrus Curtis was donating a pipe organ to be installed in Merrill Auditorium of the new City Hall in memory of Portland’s most prominent musician.

The new City Hall was dedicated on August 22, 1912. Municipal Organist Will C. Macfarlane was at the organ. The program included Macfarlane’s performance of Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique, a report from the city building committee (Adam Leighton, chairman), presentation of keys to the building by Owen Brainard of the architecture firm Carrere and Hastings (designers of the New York Public Library and the House and Senate Office Buildings in Washington, D.C.), presentation of the organ by Cyrus Curtis, unveiling of the Hermann Kotzschmar bust by his widow Mary, and acceptance of the whole shebang by Mayor Oakley Curtis (no relation). Macfarlane also played his own compositions Evening Bells and Cradle Song, and a transcription of Kotzschmar’s Te Deum in F. Judge Joseph Symonds gave an oration, and representing the Catholic Bishop of Portland, Rev. Martin A. Clary gave the prayer and benediction. Must have been a lovely afternoon.²

§

In January of 2007, the FOKO board asked the organ committee to investigate the possibility of some additions and major repairs to the organ. Specialists were called in to assess the questions and replied that the general condition of the organ was poor enough to make the work feasible. FOKO responded by inviting a group of widely respected experts to participate in a public symposium in August 2007 to discuss the organ in detail and develop recommendations for the future of the instrument. The participants were Joe Dzeda, Nick Thompson-Allen, Jonathan Ambrosino, Walt Strony, Curt Mangel, Peter Conte, and Tom Murray. Craig Whitney of the New York Times served as scribe and followed the event with a written report. As chair of the organ committee, I was moderator of the event. After years of study, the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ and the City of Portland announced plans for the renovation of the organ. In September 2011, Portland’s City Council approved a grant of $1.25 million for the project. Just before the Council meeting, Mayor Nicolas Mavodone, City Manager Mark Rees, and two members of the City Council joined me on the stage of Merrill Auditorium for a tour of the organ. The mayor marveled at the thousands of pipes, took a slew of photos with his cell phone, and commented that he had stood on the stage dozens of times presiding over civic events without having any idea what was behind the organ case. He repeated those comments for the City Council and the members approved the funding unanimously. Watching both elected and appointed city officials discuss and approve the motion to care for that organ at such a meaningful level was a great experience for an organbuilder.   

FOKO is raising the balance to fund not only the organ’s renovation but to endow the positions of Municipal Organist and Organ Curator, and to extend the organization’s ambitious and effective education programs, bringing Maine’s schoolchildren together with the King of Instruments.

The renovation of the organ will be accomplished by Foley-Baker, Inc., of Tolland, Connecticut. Having completed similar projects on the organs of the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston (The Mother Church), Symphony Hall in Boston, and the Aeolian organ in the Chapel of Duke University, Mike Foley and the staff of FBI bring vast experience to this project.

To commemorate the centennial, FOKO will present a Centennial Festival of concerts and masterclasses starting on Friday, August 17, 2012, and culminating with a grand Kotzschmar Centennial Concert on the actual anniversary, Wednesday, August 22. Participating artists and presenters include Tom Trenney, Walt Strony, Mike Foley, Dave Wickerham, Frederick Hohman, Michael Barone, Thomas Heywood, Peter Conte, John Weaver, Felix Hell, John Bishop, and Ray Cornils.  

The festival will be housed at Portland’s Holiday Inn By the Bay. Details will be announced soon. Like a hawk, you should watch the website of the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ, www.foko.org. Summer in Maine is as good as it gets, the Kotzschmar Organ is a grand instrument, soon to be prepared for its second century. And you’ll never have a better chance to gather with such a list of luminaries in such an intimate city. Hope to see you there.