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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Aeolian Organ Company established itself as the leader in the extremely high-end market for residence pipe organs. Their list of clients reads like a “Who’s Who” of wealthy industrialists and financiers: John D. Rockefeller, Charles Schwab, Frank W. Woolworth, Henry Clay Frick, Horace and John Dodge, and Louis Comfort Tiffany, to name a few. Rollin Smith’s exhaustively researched and excellent book, The Aeolian Organ, provides a wealth of information about this extraordinary company. I found the appendices to be especially good reading. One is a list of patrons, another is the opus list. I took a walking tour of mid-town Manhattan one afternoon photographing the residences that housed these fantastic organs.
I have Aeolians on my mind because I’m in the midst of installing their Opus 1014, originally built for the residence of John Munroe Longyear in Brookline, Massachusetts. We got a call from the real estate developer, who was converting that grand and opulent residence into condominiums, offering the organ at no cost providing it could be removed within the week. It could, and a purchaser appeared in short order. I have renovated the instrument, releathered the roll-playing mechanism, and I write from a California hotel room at the end of the fourth day of installation.
This is an eight-rank organ (Photo 1, half-way done). There are seven on the manual duplex chest, allowing each to be playable from either keyboard, and there is a substantial pedal Bourdon 16′. There is an ornately decorated keydesk with Aeolian’s particular style of tilting-tablet stop controls mounted obliquely on either side of the keyboards. And above the music rack is the spectacular contraption known as the spool-box. Two rows of holes in a brass bar, known as the “tracker-bar,” represent two 58-note keyboards. The bar is mounted in an airtight box with a sliding glass door. Below the bar is “take-up reel,” above it the spindles that accept the paper roll. To play a roll, you place it in the spindles, draw the paper across the surface of the bar, connect it to the take-up reel, turn on the spool-box motor, close the sliding glass door and turn on the ventil that charges the spool-box with air pressure (Photo 2, spool-box).
The pressure inside the spool-box energizes a little brass pointer that causes wonder the first time you see it, but when the blank leader of the paper has passed a red center line appears. The pointer follows the red line allowing the operator to see that the paper is tracking properly. If it wanders to one side or the other, you correct it by turning a little key under the bottom manual that moves the take-up reel to the left or right.
The next thing you see as the roll passes the tracker-bar is a suggested registration printed on the paper. You select your stops, and when the holes in the paper start appearing they allow the air pressure to pass through the holes in the tracker-bar and notes start to play. As the music progresses registration changes are suggested, and a dotted line moves back and forth across the paper indicating the position of the expression pedal (Photo 3, tracker-bar).
Behind the tracker-bar is a system of tubing that carries the little puffs of air to the spool-box contact machines, where tiny leather pouches are inflated to activate a pneumatic action that operate the contacts (Photo 4, tracker-bar tubing). The spool-box contact machines perform exactly the same function as the keyboards—both are wired in parallel to the inputs of the relay, so it’s possible to play a duet with the machine.
There’s a little lever marked “Tempo Indicator” just above the keyboards (Photo 5, tempo indicator). This is in fact not an indicator but a throttle. It operates a sliding valve that controls the amount of air flowing into the motor that turns the spindles in the spool-box. Letting in more air is the equivalent of shoveling on more coal or stepping on the accelerator—the motor speeds up and the music goes faster. Our modern ears are geared to expect the pitch to change when a recording speeds up—but not in Aeolian land. It’s a funny sensation to hear the tempo changing with the pitch staying the same. But the tempo indicator has a very important function. Of course it allows the performer to select the speed, but also gives sensitive control to the tempo, allowing ritardando, accelerando, and rubato.
If the roll is playing a piece of a significant speed that calls for frequent registration changes, you find yourself with your hands full following the leads on the paper, changing the stops, operating the swell pedal, controlling the tempo with musical sensitivity, while all the time taking care that the paper is tracking properly. If you miss the little red line moving away from the pointer you hear the music scramble as the tracking is lost.
At the risk of overusing technical jargon, here’s what happens when the player plays a single note:
1. Air blows through the hole in the paper roll, through the spool-box tubing to the spool-box contact pouch.
2. The pouch inflates, opening a primary valve that exhausts a box pneumatic.
3. As the pneumatic exhausts, it pushes up a rod that in turn pushes on a brass contact.
4. When the contact is made, electricity travels through the relay to a magnet on the windchest.
5. The magnet is energized, lifting its armature to allow a primary pouch to exhaust.
6. As the pouch exhausts, it opens the primary valve that in turn exhausts the secondary pouch.
7. The secondary pouch draws open the secondary valve.
8. The secondary valve exhausts the key-channel in the windchest.
9. As the key-channel exhausts, the interior of all the pouches for that note (one for each stop) are exposed to the atmospheric pressure.
10. A stop that is turned on has pressure in the stop channel waiting to play notes.
11. When the key-channel is exhausted, the note pouches of any stop that’s on can exhaust.
12. The exhausting note pouch opens the pipe-valve.
13. Air blows into the pipe and the note sounds.
As much as I understand how these actions work, and as much as I know that they work very fast, I’m still amazed that all of those steps working in sequence can possibly work fast enough to make any kind of musical sense—let alone work so fast as to be able produce notes repeating at 20 or 30 times a second.
An organist playing “the old fashioned way” (pushing down keys to make notes play) is limited to three or four notes in each hand and two in the pedals. And think about it, it’s not all that often that you’re really playing ten notes at a time. Turn on couplers and you might be asking the organ to produce 20 or 30 notes at once. The Aeolian player has no such limitations—some of the rolls include complicated chords and passages that could not be played by two organists at once. Stop the roll at a busy moment and count the holes in the paper from left to right—I’ve found places where there are 30 notes playing at once . . .
I’ve tried to give an idea of how the organ’s action works, but I’ve not told you anything about how the paper rolls are driven (Photo 6, spool-box motor). You know about the throttle that controls the flow of air to the motor, but the motor itself is a marvel. It contains three two-part pneumatics connected by a camshaft. On the end of the camshaft there’s a gear that drives a chain that drives a transmission that turns the spool-box spindles (Photo 7, spool-box transmission). The transmission has a feature controlled by a stopknob labeled “Aeolian Re-roll”—a rewind function that rolls the paper back onto its original spool at the conclusion of a performance.
It’s time for me to make a confession. I have added a solid-state relay with MIDI to this organ. But while confessing, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. I am not using MIDI to add voices to the organ. “MIDI Out” from the organ’s relay feeds “MIDI In” of a sequencer. Play the organ either with the rolls or the keyboards and the sequencer captures the music as a data stream that can be played back. So the organ can now be played three ways. This allows the player/operator/performer/musician to rehearse a performance on a roll, master the registration changes, the subtleties of tempo and expressions, and play back the whole performance entirely automatically. And perhaps most important, it allows essentially unlimited repeat performances without exposing the fragile 100-year-old paper to wear and tear (and I do mean tear).
This organ, Aeolian’s Opus 1014, was built in 1906. In 1906 Theodore Roosevelt was president, Typhoid Mary was exposed in New York City, six of George Bernard Shaw’s (1856–1950) plays were on stage in New York, and 400 people were killed in the great earthquake in San Francisco (Enrico Caruso was in town for that event, and swore that he would never return to a city “where disorders like that are permitted”).1 Automobiles were barely established as a significant mode of transportation, and the railroads were in their heyday. In this context we see how revolutionary was the work of Wilbur and Orville Wright—their first flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina were accomplished in 1903.
This Aeolian organ spent last summer in the workshop attached to my house, and the summer-time guests were amazed and amused as I put the organ through its paces—each time causing a “rowdy hour” in the midst of a dinner party. Imagine how it must have astounded Mr. and Mrs. Longyear’s guests in 1906. Decades before radio and television, before stereo and compact discs, and most of a century before home movie theaters, this home-entertainment system represented the very apex of technology. Those fashionable dinner guests would have had nothing against which to compare the organ. I imagine that many were simply bewildered. Some, not all, of my friends were able to follow my explanation of how the thing works. Few of Mr. Longyear’s guests would have had technical backgrounds that would have allowed them even the dimmest comprehension.
But, boy, does it work! This was my first experience with an Aeolian player, and while I had it dismantled on my workbench, while I was cutting the tiny pouches for the spool-box contacts, while I was cleaning and assembling the spool-box tubing, I had the intellectual assurance that it would work, but it seemed improbable enough that I was purely delighted when I ran it for the first time (Photo 8, spool-box contact pouches before; Photo 9, spool-box contact pouches after). And I’ve been dwelling on the mechanical. This is above all a wonderful musical instrument. The voicing is imaginative, clear, and brilliant. The selection of voices is magical. The various combinations of stops are both thrilling and beguiling. What a fabulous appliance to add to the home that has everything.■
