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Glorious Organ
In Columbia's High auditorium, a great instrument awaits resurrection
by John Elwood
Article is from Matters Magazine
Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, Rutgers, Princeton, and Wellesley are more than just
Maplewood street names. Along with Cornell, Colgate, University of Virginia,
Williams and Mt. Holyoke, these schools all have, or had, Skinner pipe
organs. So does Columbia High School, right here at home, where a Skinner
organ was installed 81 years ago.
At that time, the pipe organ served a wider purpose than keeping you awake at church. They were in concert halls, museums, private homes, synagogues, department stores, and sometimes, yes, public high schools. No fewer than six residences in South Orange held a pipe organ at one time, though only one is known to remain today. With more than 2,700 full-size pipe organs built in 1927 alone, the "King of Instruments" seemed ubiquitous.
But Skinners were never common, for all their wide and well-deserved reputation. By the time CHS was constructed, Ernest M. Skinner had built, through work of exceptional quality combined with aggressive self promotion, a reputation as the finest builder of organs in his day. The majority of Ernest M. Skinner's organs were not for public schools, or even Ivy League universities, but for large, prestigious civic and religious structures. Ironically, it is the very public face of these organs that made them vulnerable to radical overhauls as tastes changed.
Skinner built unabashedly Romantic organs, whose then-new electropneumatic technology made possible larger, lusher instruments capable of blending with an orchestra, or recreating it alone. A rich array of music was composed expressly for these high-powered organs, including the French "organ symphonies" of Charles-Marie Widor and Louis Vierne.
But musical taste can be fickle. By the middle of the 20th century, organ fashion shifted, with many organists expressing distaste for the symphonic organ and its often pyrotechnic repertory, preferring to play Baroque music on Baroque-style instruments emulating the organs actually written for and played by Handel or Bach.
Skinner loathed what he saw as a neo-Baroque fad (he would quip "I like Offenbach but not Bach often") and refused to change with the times. Eventually Skinner was pushed out of his own firm by new blood. Skinnner died in 1960, having seen his ideas and reputation eclipsed even as his successors retrofitted some of his most famous organs into "modern" Baroque instruments. Few Skinner organs made it through the mid 20th century unscathed.
Yet the seeds for a counter-revolution had been quietly germinating for
decades, finally bearing fruit in the last 20 years in an appreciation of
Ernest Skinner, and even a kind of "Skinner Worship." Not a few of the
"modernized" Skinner organs have been restored to their original form, often
at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, while new instruments are
being built today that consciously attempt to replicate "that Skinner
sound."
The reputation of that sound in Skinner's heyday came with a top-of-the-line price tag. In 1927, the year the school board contracted for the CHS Skinner, a Ford Model T cost $380, and you could order a complete house (the "Whitehall") as a kit from Sears and Roebuck for $1863 including all the lumber, doors, floors, cabinets and even the paint. Skinner's bid for the CHS organ (his Opus 637) came in at a whopping $15,484; to rebuild it from scratch today would easily top a cool million of today's dollars.
The reason we know down to the dollar what the handsome three-manual instrument at CHS cost is thanks to the well-preserved records at the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education, whose organ committee was led by Arthur Pratt under board president Harvey "The Field" Underhill. In a surviving letter to Underhill, Pratt writes approvingly of attending a private organ recital by virtuoso Chandler Goldthwaite on a Skinner organ at St. Thomas' Chapel on E. 63rd Street in New York.
Pratt glowingly rated it "the finest small three-manual organ he has ever heard," and Goldthwaite himself advised the Board to requisition the same stop list as at St. Thomas, with the addition of a 16' Tromba stop, to make what Pratt called a "perfectly magnificent full organ." Pratt and the school board took Goldthwaite's recommendations to heart: The St. Thomas instrument is long gone, but records show it to have been a near match for the organ at CHS.
Perhaps it was through the mixed blessing of a limited public school budget
that CHS's Opus 637 made it through the Baroque-revival period intact. Where
other organs were updated to meet the new-old idea of what an organ should
sound like, CHS's was for all practical purposes turned off and forgotten. A
few students clearly remember frequent use of the instrument until the
1960s, but later it fell into disuse.
Nowadays "Does it work?" is a familiar question when people find out, usually to their surprise, that CHS actually has a pipe organ. The key to switch it on is long lost, and it takes some ingenuity to give it a start; but it does in fact function. The district electrician had to run some new wiring to the organ's massive blower motor and remove an electric lock. Finally, with power to the console after years of silence, the organ made some noise, if not music - a cacophonous moan best likened to that of an angry tugboat. The CHS Skinner, a magnificent instrument, built by the finest builder of the era, had become effectively useless.
But the basic architecture is there, and not surprisingly, interest is brewing locally to do something about the situation. Matthew Russell, CHS's choir director, and Nick Santoro, district director of Fine Arts, have made the organ restoration a top priority. Imagine Russell's reaction - he was an organ major in college - at discovering an intact but non-functional Skinner organ in the auditorium! It's like coming to a new high school as the auto shop teacher and finding a Bugatti in Bay 3.
"Having been an organ major. it was an exciting prospect upon hire at CHS to
help in the restoration process of such a historically significant
instrument," exclaims Russell. "The CHS Skinner is probably one of the few
of its kind in any public high school on the East Coast, and perhaps, the
country."
Fortunately, interest in CHS's Skinner is not just a local phenomenon. The Joseph G. Bradley Foundation was formed with the sole purpose of restoring Skinner organs to their original condition. The foundation has made substantial grants to restore the instruments at the Toledo Museum in Ohio, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and the Music Institute of Chicago, among others. With an official application already in the works, indications from the foundation have been enthusiastic.
How fine it will be when that enthusiasm has spread among local citizens as well! For CHS's organ is almost unique as a surviving Skinner in a public school, where public access is much broader than in other settings; educational opportunities abound.
And the organ itself has never been modified, nor has it suffered damage from a leaky roof or any other structural problem. It is a prime candidate for a substantial grant: In the past the Bradley foundation has at times paid every cent to completely restore other instruments; now it's up to our community to recognize this treasure in our midst, and begin blowing its dust off to reveal the solid gold instrument beneath.
John Elwood has taken great personal interest in this project. A 1996 graduate of CHS, he maintains a website dedicated to this restoration project. Visit chsorgan.org for more information and how to help.
