The Sleeping Giant
         by Jonathan Ortloff

[Note: this lecture was delivered following a lecture given by Jonathan Ambrosino on Aeolian-Skinner Opus 936 at St. John’s Chapel, Groton School, Groton, Massachusetts, and his tonal reworking of the much-altered organ back towards something G. Donald Harrison might recognize.]

One month after the contract for the Groton organ was signed, G. Donald Harrison wrote to Henry Willis III and succinctly described his rapidly developing thoughts on tonal design saying, “I’m after a really satisfying full organ without reeds and one on which counterpoint stands out clearly as it does in an orchestra” His subsequent organs can rightly be called experimentation in an attempt to prove his hypothesis – organ chambers were his laboratory, and his results were well documented in the nearly uniform glowing praise his new organs received. One would expect that with each new organ, as he honed his style a little more, that there would be a steady supply of reports on the success (or not) of each instrument. It is surprising then, for a documentary point of view, that the organ we talk about today, the largest and most complete to date in 1937 received comparatively far less press than the Groton, Advent, or St. Mark’s organs. And in general, there is disappointingly less documentation about the genesis, construction, and initial reaction to Opus 953 than its predecessors, at least to the extent our research has taken us. So we come from opus 936, a tremendously altered organ with an immense body of documentation to opus 953, an organ as best preserved as any we have, but missing much of the documentary evidence Jonathan Ambrosino unearthed in his work at Groton. Where does one begin, then?

My research on this organ began immediately after a phone call from my father alerting me, after a visit to the campus, that there were organ chamber grills in Strong Auditorium, and that I should see what I could find out about an instrument there My first step was a visit to the wonderful resource in the online Skinner and Æolian-Skinner opus list, maintained by Jeff Scofield and Jordan Simmons. 953 was clearly a large and impressive instrument, and obviously quite important in the Harrison lexicon. And yet nobody at Rochester could tell me anything about it when I arrived to begin school in the Fall of 2003. Upon seeing no sign of the organ in the auditorium, I asked a facilities worker here about it. He responded by saying, “Yeah, the organ’s all gone, but there are some tubes up there you might be interested in.” Little did he know…
Thus began my in depth research. Several people in Rochester were instrumental in providing me with information on this forgotten instrument. Kim Kowalke, the chair of the River Campus music department knew little, but shared what he knew freely. David Higgs knew some more of the history of the organ, and had a few documents for me to see. David Craighead, legendary Eastman organ professor who actually played the organ offered some remarks about it, specifically that it never sounded very good at the console.

The most help in Rochester, however, came from Nancy Martin, the University archivist who opened up all the files she could lay her hands on, including some of the Presidents’ files, which required permission from the University counsel for me to peruse. From the archives I got some letters, a version of the contract, some ancillary mentioning of the instrument, but not much more. Some real archival fruit came from Allen Kinzey, former Æolian-Skinner employee, who sent another version of the contract, closer to the final specification, and head reed voicer’s sheets which would prove invaluable. Frustratingly, the papers of Harold Gleason, the founder of the Eastman Organ department and co-designer with Harrison of the organ, do not exist in the University or Eastman School archives. At the time of my initial research, they had not yet found their way to the Boston University library, leaving the gestation period of this important instrument undocumented at present.

This organ was not a 100% Harrison instrument, and Gleason’s input could only be conjectured. For instance – what did he want out of that independent 8´ Bassoon in the Pedal? The head reed voicer’s sheets tell us that despite its name, it was a standard Fagotto, so we see the organbuilder’s side of it, but not its raison d’etre. A most surprising aspect of this instrument is the complete lack of reeds with French shallots as seen at Groton and previous and subsequent ‘new’ jobs. We see in head reed voicer Oscar Pearson’s notes that they were to be decidedly English. Was this Harrison accounting for the dry room, or a personal taste of Gleason’s? You being to sense my frustration as I tried to piece together the organ’s history pre-1937.

Despite the holes in the timeline, I had collected enough information at the end of my freshman year for a preliminary written report. This eventually took the form of a 13-page article in The Tracker, published in the Summer of 2005, with a definitive, yet incomplete history of the instrument. The response to the article from past U of R and Eastman students has filled in many gaps in the history, so that today, from the organ’s dedication up to the present, the history is know with some certitude.

Before talking about the documentation aspect, I will share briefly that history with you. Strong Auditorium was built between 1929 and 1932 as a memorial to Henry Alvah Strong, the first president of Eastman Kodak. The $250,000 to build the building was given by his widow, Hattie. Though an organ was planned, the money ran out, and the chambers and console elevator shaft in the orchestra pit remained unoccupied. Three years later, Mrs. Strong was asked about completing the building with an organ, and donated an additional $25,000 to the cause. Again, we know little about the builder selection process, except a chance mention in a letter by Gleason saying, “the letter from the Wurlitzer company has been answered.” The contract with Æolian-Skinner with a slightly different specification than as-built was signed in December of 1935. The organ was installed by May of 1936, giving a clue to how little work was running through the plant at this point. The price, also, is surprising. Given that the Kilbourn Hall Skinner, Opus 325, built 14 years previous cost $50,000, it’s clear the company wanted and needed the work.

In October 1936, the instrument was dedicated by none other than Marcel Dupré, and a continuing series of monthly recitals brought all the big names in organ of the day (read: Gleason’s friends) to Strong Auditorium to perform. The instrument was also used for weekly chapel services, as no building dedicated to worship was built at George Eastman’s specific demand. Though I’ve yet to find programs specifically mentioning the organ, we can assume it was used with University instrumental and choral ensembles. We also know through anecdotal evidence that the instrument was a favorite of Catherine Crozier’s, this being in the days before Kilbourn had been rebuilt. Toward the middle of the century, however, use of the organ declined as heating and humidity problems made it increasingly unreliable, though it was still used for chapel. In 1970, with the construction of the interfaith chapel, the organ’s use was discontinued altogether, and the console was lowered to the bottom of its shaft by a block and tackle, as no elevator had ever been installed.

Just five years later, the organ was all but forgotten until a group of students under the direction of Eastman organ technician David Andrews got the organ going again. Switches were releathered, wiring was checked, and even some rudimentary bellows repair was undertaken. By 1978 the organ was mostly playable again, at least enough for David Craighead to perform the Saint-Säens organ symphony with U of R orchestra to a packed house. With the graduation of these interested students, however, the lack of money for proper repair, and the untimely death of David Andrews, the organ was shut off again, and the console once again lowered to the bottom of the shaft. In 1998, when a renovation of the basement of the building needed the space occupied by the bottom of the elevator shaft and the blower room, Eastman’s current organ technician Rob Kerner was called in to remove the components, which he wisely placed in storage.

This organ has a bad habit of being forgotten about. As I said, when I got here, nobody could tell me anything about it. But as I asked more and more people for all they knew about the organ, some interest began to grow, and Dr. Kowalke suggested I apply for a grant from the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship to stay another year at the University and plan for the organ’s restoration. After successfully getting the grant, it became apparent that the original plan to have the organ properly restored and playing before I graduated was a little ambitious, and so we devised to lay out a report on the instrument, and suggestions and plans for its restoration. And part of that plan meant…documenting the organ.

Clearly documenting an organ as large as this is a daunting task, and one on which I’ve just embarked. Something I have purposely left until now to discuss about the instrument is that all the historic documentation and interviews I have conducted have suggested, and quite strongly, I might add, that this organ was unaltered: a gem among Harrison’s instruments. This makes the job of the documenter simultaneously easier and more difficult. If you go into the organ assuming nothing has been changed, you have to make very few judgments as to what you are looking at, and the reporting is straightforward. On the same token, if you go into the organ assuming nothing has been changed, you have to make very few judgments as to what you are looking at, and you may miss what would normally be obvious clues to an alteration.

Once I got a key, and we all know how important that can be, though organbuilders often have a knack for getting through locked doors, I ventured into the chambers to take a look. The most basic of documentation can be simply asking the question, “what’s there?” So…what’s there?

What’s there is a very large, yet fairly straightforward, organ. In fact, at 88 ranks, it is the largest organ in Rochester. All windchests, in their original positions, the whole of the wind system, and what should be 5,198 pipes are present. Glaringly absent, however, are the console, blower, static reservoirs, and combination machine, though all are carefully and safely stored thanks to the foresight of Rob Kerner. More disappointing, however, are 124 missing pipes, and 22 severely damaged pipes.

On the whole, however, what is there is an organ that, given its lack of proper attention, is in fairly good shape. It is generally clean, especially the Swell and Choir organs, whose shutters closed rather than opened when the organ was shut off, sealing them off from the dust that covers much of the rest of the instrument. With two exceptions, the organ has been free from water damage, and for the most part, it has not been seriously messed with.

As Jonathan made plain, getting back to the original Harrison sound with any of the other early organs is impossible given their long history of alterations, many times by Harrison himself. This makes the pipework and wind system, and really, the whole organ here in Strong so important. As such, the level of detail of our documentation here is commensurate with the value of the instrument. At the same time, it is acknowledged at the outset that the purpose of this documentation is most certainly not to be able to reproduce the same sound, as we admit the folly of that notion, but rather to inform what Harrison was really doing in terms of a complete organ, rather than having to piece together unaltered bits from other instruments. In addition, we can answer the question of whether or not the evidence here corresponds with what he was writing generally about his new thoughts on tonal design.

The pipework documentation varies with the needs of each rank, but incorporates all the pertinent construction and voicing details. So far, simply dealing with flue ranks has produced up to 17 measurements per pipe. I must take this opportunity to thank two people without whom we could not have produced so much information. Jonathan, who spent two days with me last May initiating the documentation parameters and taking measurements of the Pedal Chorus and part of the Great, and Edward Landin who has given much of his time in the last few months listening to me shout out numbers and writing them down for hours on end, including much of his Fall break last weekend.

Even with only 17 ranks of pipes completely documented, the results of the work have yielded surprises and raised questions. For instance, as I was measuring the toes of the 2’ Blockflöte in the Great, I noticed a variation in the luster and width of the toe chamfers of a few pipes, leading me to believe they had been changed. Given the abuse the pipes had taken in the form of cone tuning at their tops, it was logical that this trauma had impacted the toes enough to close them down, and what appears to be an alteration may in fact just be a practical regulation issue of getting the pipes to go again at the proper volume. But without somebody’s having documented that treatment, we cannot be sure.

The mixtures of the Great, so important in Harrison’s quest for chorus and clear counterpoint have revealed a few surprises as well. While there is no evidence of the voicing’s having been changed, there is definite evidence of a new tuning method’s being applied. Upon our initial inspection, we noted that all of the Great mixtures were fitted with tuning sleeves. The sleeves, however, concealed an important original feature of the instrument. For when the sleeves were removed to measure the thickness at the top of the pipe, what started out as a hunch increasingly became a fact that the pipes were indeed originally cone tuned, matching the choruses in the Swell and Positiv. We don’t yet know when the pipes were sleeved or by whom, or the rationale behind it. It is apparent, however, that given the damage to other coned pipes in the organ, this sleeving probably saved the Great chorus and its valuable historic voicing from further damage.

These added sleeves raise even further questions. Were further changes made to the pipes during the sleeving process? We know that Aeolian-Skinner added sleeves to other organs, and in fact there exists no originally-coned Great chorus still coned. Further, that the Swell and Positiv choruses remain coned is puzzling. Assuming the need for sleeves was simply because the organ needed to be tuned more often given the move away from constant heating, why would the Swell and Positiv mixtures not have been altered so? And the conflicting evidence of whether or not the pipes were cut down (see photos) makes us ask, if they weren’t cut down, how was the organ ever in tune? Scot Huntington will speak about the need for documentation of subsequent treatments after the initial installation of an instrument, and the sleeving of the Great here is a perfect example of why treatment documentation is essential – it provides answers to the questions we raise in these situations.

So crucial to these organ’s unique sound is the wind system under the pipes. While playing in the same sandbox as Hope-Jones, American organ builders had forgotten how to build an organ on less than 6” wind. Harrison writes in great detail of his problems with getting “rock steady” wind at low (i.e. 3 inches and less) pressure. In a letter to Henry Willis III in 1935, he writes of his many problems with achieving this, his many experiments to steady the wind, and eventually tells Willis, “Our jobs are absolutely perfect as regards wind sag.” While we can certainly take this with a grain of Harrison’s pushing Willis’ buttons salt, it suggests at least some satisfaction on his part in his wind systems, and here at Strong is one in near-original condition.

How ‘perfect’ was the wind? Clearly perfect enough for Harrison to call the organ finished, but was it acceptable to modern ears? A report from David Peckham, one of the students who worked on the organ in the 70s tells of dissatisfaction with the original wind system. “There had been problems with the original design (of the wind system), and the cone valves were removed from the static regulators to correct the situation,” which explains the renegade cone valve stashed in the chamber. There is more evidence here of dissatisfaction with the wind. Every pitman chest, and even some offsets has a winker applied to it. These tunable bellows with their light-resistance and oddly-shaped coil springs were essential to removing the sag Harrison writes about. On every pitman chest they exist attached to the stop action with two exceptions. On the Pedal chorus pitman chest in the house left chamber, there is an additional winker attached directly to the bottom board. In addition, witness marks on both units show that they had been previously tuned in a different position. Upon initial inspection this added winker did not seem out of place until it was noticed that the upper Great pitman chest’s winker was absent, and in its place was screwed a crude cover plate, leading us to believe the winker had been moved subsequent to the organ’s finishing, and probably in the 1970s. It will take some careful sleuthing to figure out what went where and when so that we may restore Harrison’s wind.

All of the wind system documentation, and indeed, all the documentation of the organ is frustrated by the inability to turn the organ on and hear it. This is no more true than with regards to the wind pressures employed in the instrument. In the nominating process for the OHS Citation, the question of pressures plagued the committee and me in a large batch of emails back and forth. The pressures I had sent with the specification, while matching those in the version of the contract I had, did not match the head voicers’ sheets (which I did not have at the time). The committee asked, “had they been changed?” And if so, had the pipes, especially the reeds, been revoiced on the new pressure?

Without being able to turn on the blower and measure the pressure, we turned to documentary evidence to answer the question. Aeolian Skinner, in theory, wrote the output pressure of each reservoir on the bellows top, but in practice, at least in Strong, this evidence was not present 100%. While one sometimes finds clear indications in India ink, other times the notes are scrawled lightly in pencil. This investigation is further made difficult by the introduction of weighted reservoirs, as the weights cover up labels. In the end, we still did not completely answer the question, as a pair of reservoirs in the organ remain unlabelled, and at best, we can set the pressure at that of the head reed voicer and listen to the results.

While just beginning the process of documentation, one definite and painful conclusion can be made. And that is that this organ is not the unaltered Harrison instrument we thought it was when first venturing into the organ chamber. It’s clear even from just the rudimentary evidence I have presented that the organ has indeed been changed, though for reasons I outlined above, we don’t know exactly the extent of the changes. But at the same time, more of this organ than any other Harrison instrument is, I think we can safely say, preserved as he left it. It’s the closest we’re going to get to the source.

We are now just at the outset of a long process to extract the data from this primary source. Over the next two years, in addition to continuing documentation, we will be working with the College music department, the University administration, and the Eastman organ department to ensure that this organ is eventually restored and made to play again. With a major renovation of the building coming up within the next few years, the University has an excellent opportunity to breathe new life into this instrument (at the correct pressure, of course), as well as improving the acoustics in the auditorium, and in the end, making sure this instrument, which, because of its habit for being forgotten, has become a rare and important specimen, is not forgotten again. Thank you.

© 2009 Jonathan Ortloff