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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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| Comment on this article The Behemoth of Woolsey Hall When I arrive, Woolsey Hall is almost empty, and I take a moment to look up at what has brought me here—the Newberry Memorial Organ. I can't even count how many times I've seen its gilded and pilastered array of pipes during concerts, recitals, assemblies, and commencement speeches. Mostly, I'd taken it as part of the scenery and ignored it. Today, however, I'm getting a much closer look. I am going inside the Newberry. My tour guides, Joseph Dzeda and Nicholas Thompson-Allen, are an erudite pair of bewhiskered philosopher-electricians who care for the Newberry and know every pipe, every screw, and every scrap of its history. Joe is a sturdy, medium-sized man with an old-fashioned gray push-broom moustache. Outgoing and prone to colorful disquisitions, he is the front man for the two of them, and for the organ. Nick is a bit taller and more matter-of-fact, with an even more old-fashioned bicycle-handle moustache that blends into a gray beard. They meet me at the front of the hall and conduct me over to a ladder, stage right, that will lead us up to the balcony and into the organ's innards. Joe pauses to draw my attention to the ladder. "You see that if you put it on level ground, it's uneven—it's been twisted out of shape," he says. He leans it against the balcony. "But you put it where it belongs and it works perfectly. Like so many of us, it's been trained to do its job very well." With that, we ascend. The Newberry is considered one of the world's great organs, a uniquely American masterpiece that combined the most advanced technology of its day with immaculate craftsmanship. Playing the Newberry has been a pilgrimage for some of the greatest organists of the modern era, including Marcel Dupre, E. Power Biggs, and Virgil Fox. It remains in high esteem: the acclaimed French organist Daniel Roth has called it "the greatest orchestral organ in the United States." "It's a superb example of the organ builder's art," says New York Times writer Craig R. Whitney, author of All the Stops, a book that traces the development of organ-building in America. "It's in a hall whose acoustics are perfect for an organ, and it's beautifully maintained, so it's survived as a pristine example of an organ ideal from almost 100 years ago. It sounds as good today as it ever did." "It's just a fantastic-sounding instrument," says concert organist Kenneth Cowan '99MusM. "It's one of the softest organs I've ever heard and also one of the loudest. A lot of romantic music calls for imitative sounds"—pipes that sound like flutes, or oboes, or trombones—"and those are all really beautiful. The overall sound is warm, but also clear." And yet the fact that the Newberry remains intact is a minor miracle. Most of its contemporaries have long since been altered, gutted, or ripped out entirely. Its survival in such pristine form is a testament to the efforts of Joe and Nick and Nick's father, Aubrey Thompson-Allen, who cared for the organ before them and trained them to follow in his footsteps. Once we reach the balcony, a small, nondescript door leads us to the organ chamber. Stepping inside, we enter a forest of pipes—towering wood pipes the color of dark honey, ranks of narrow metal pipes arranged like miniature mountain ranges. Here too are the massive bellows that pump air into the pipes, held in place by powerful black springs. The gilded front of the organ, with its elaborately decorated pipes, is only the public face of the organ. The reality is far more complex. The Newberry has 12,617 pipes in all, from delicate flutes a few inches long to a 32-foot Bombard that can make the hall shiver with its rumbling bass. The pipes are massed into divisions hidden behind the Woolsey proscenium. Each division produces a different sound—there is the choir division, with pipes that imitate human voices; the orchestral division, with pipes that imitate the instruments of an orchestra; the great division, with pipes that make the characteristic "organ" sound, and more. There is even an "echo" division, toward the back of the hall and beneath the floor, which produces a distant, ethereal effect. As Joe and Nick lead me up a stairway to the second level of pipes, they point out to me a bit of ancient graffiti: "H. Van Wart," carved into a wood panel beside the stairs. Harry Van Wart, Nick explains, was the foreman on the first two installations of the organ, in 1903 and 1915. The Newberry Organ was actually built in three stages, overseen by university organist Harry Benjamin Jepson. A stern and demanding teacher, Jepson was no less demanding of his new organ, hand-picking the best builders of his day. Fortunately, he had a willing set of donors in the Newberry family. The organ was named for John Stoughton Newberry, who, as it happens, never attended Yale and had no particular interest in organs. But his son Truman Handy Newberry was both a Yalie (Class of 1885) and an organ enthusiast. The Hutchings-Votey company began work on the first Newberry in 1901; both the organ and Woolsey Hall were dedicated in 1903. By 1915 Jepson wanted an expansion. The Newberry family obliged, and Van Wart, now with J. W. Steere & Son, came back for the rebuilding. The Newberrys bankrolled a final expansion in 1928-29 by the Skinner Organ Company. The Newberry's three installations occurred at the height of a national organ-building boom. Pipe organs were the perfect instrument for the industrial age—large, technically complex, rapidly evolving, and capable of entertaining the masses in the days before amplification. With a decent pipe organ, a good organist could perform for hundreds, even thousands, for a fraction of the cost of hiring a symphony. An organ fad gripped the country, and new organs were built not only in churches and concert halls but also in movie theaters, mansions, department stores, and even private yachts. The Newberry today is most fully the vision of Ernest M. Skinner, a self-taught genius who was the greatest American organ builder of the time. Born to a pair of itinerant musicians, Skinner was obsessed with organs from an early age; he tried to build his first at age 12. Though he barely attended high school, Skinner mastered the complexities of the organ through endless experimentation and soon began to invent mechanical devices that harnessed the power of the new century's technologies. Under his influence, organs became larger, more powerful, more responsive, and more musically flexible. Skinner also expanded the musical vocabulary of organs. One of his abiding passions was for the lush romantic symphonies then popular, and he worked endlessly to create new pipe voices that could offer the same panoply of color as an orchestra. As word of his talents spread, Skinner was increasingly in demand. Though a wretched businessman, he ran a workforce that, at its peak, included 200 craftsmen who could make and voice pipes, carve organ cases, and build the motors and complex electrical systems to control the instrument. Every organ was custom-built from scratch. "Mechanically, they were the Duesenbergs of pipe organs," Nick says. "They were above and beyond all of their competition." When Yale hired Skinner in 1928, he was at the height of his powers—and, though he didn't know it, nearing the end of his active career. His company had just imported a younger man from England, G. Donald Harrison, supposedly to assist Skinner, but in fact to supplant him. Tastes were changing in the organ world, moving toward a more academic revival of Baroque music. The younger organists looked down on instruments like Skinner's as muddled "cafeterias" of stops. For a few years, Harrison and Skinner got along well, and their combination of talents produced some of the country's greatest organs, including the Newberry. But the Newberry was also the first sign of trouble. Skinner ran late and over budget, as he was wont to do, and eventually Jepson told him to stay away from Yale and let Harrison finish the job. In the years to come, Harrison revolutionized American organs, producing a brighter, cleaner, more unified sound. As part of the revolution, Harrison and other organ builders were hired to remake many of Skinner's instruments, ripping out pipes and retuning them. Skinner spent his waning decades in tortured frustration as he saw his greatest masterpieces destroyed, often by the company he had founded. He died in 1960, virtually forgotten. By the mid-1950s, the Newberry Organ had gone out of fashion. Most of Yale's organ students preferred to play their recitals on Battell Chapel's newly installed neo-Baroque organ. There was even a plan to update the Newberry, but mercifully, Yale was broke at the time, so it was simply left intact. Today, the Newberry is once again well loved—perhaps too much so. It is so popular among the organ students that they must compete for playing time. The Newberry's caretakers carefully limit the instrument's schedule, but even so, university organist Thomas Murray estimates that the organ is in use for 30 hours a week. It is, he admits, "a little more than is ideal for wear and tear." Nick and Joe have a workshop in the basement of Woolsey Hall. The walls are covered with an enormous array of black-and-white photographs, including portraits of Skinner, G. Donald Harrison, Aubrey Thompson-Allen, and Aubrey's predecessor, Arthur Goeckler. Joe says the workshop looks pretty much the same as it did in Goeckler's day, down to the placements of springs and screws and brackets on the shelves. Aubrey Thompson-Allen had come to the United States from England to work with Harrison, but he grew disillusioned with the direction organ-building had taken. When Goeckler offered him a chance to take over his organ repair business and to become the organ curator at Yale, Thompson-Allen jumped at the chance. According to Nick, the Newberry reminded Aubrey of the old organs he had worked on as a young man in England, particularly the one in St. Paul's Cathedral, which Aubrey had saved during the Blitz of London by stowing it in the crypt alongside Lord Nelson and Dr. Johnson. Nick tagged along with his father on many repair jobs. "I was about five years old when he first came" to work on the Newberry, says Nick. "I knew the halls of Woolsey Hall organ chamber from a very young age. I used to go hiking around in there." Every summer, Aubrey and his assistants would overhaul one section of the organ, removing deteriorating leather membranes and replacing them with new ones—a practice Nick and Joe continue to this day. Aubrey also tactfully warded off any major changes to the organ. "They handled it very deftly," recalls Charles Krigbaum, Yale's organist from 1965 through 1990. "Somebody would come and want something changed, and oh, sure, they would do it. But nothing that was changed permanently." Nick learned his trade from his father. Joe came to the organ more circuitously: in college, one of his electrical engineering classes was taught in a church, and at the end of the term, the church organist gave the students a concert and a tour of the organ. "We went around the corner, opened up the door, turned on the light, and suddenly I was inside the belly of the beast," says Joe. "And I had my road-to-Damascus experience. I knew right then and there what I wanted to do for the rest of my life." Joe joined Aubrey's business in 1968, and Nick soon after. In 1973, Aubrey retired and sold them the business. (He died a year later.) Not long afterward, in North Carolina, Nick and Joe carried out one of the nation's first restorations of a Skinner organ. They now travel around the country restoring old organs, particularly Skinners. Like Aubrey, Joe and Nick take great pride in preserving the Newberry's sound and its look. They haven't won all their battles. For nearly two decades, they resisted Yale's efforts to install a modern computerized system that can automate hundreds of different combinations of the organ's 142 stops, instead of the two dozen possible with the original system. Proponents of computerizing argued that it would make life easier for student players. Nick and Joe argued that it would violate the Newberry's historical integrity. But when money came available a few years ago and the new system became inevitable, they worked with a contractor to minimize the invasiveness of the installation and to insure the original system remained functional. But if Joe and Nick are sticklers about preserving the organ, they aren't fussy about it: at one point in my tour of the Newberry, I noticed that someone had patched a leaky gasket with the top of a pizza box. By now, the Newberry is safe from destruction or alteration. But Nick and Joe still fret about periodic insinuations from Yale administrators that they are thinking about sprucing up Woolsey Hall: putting in carpet, replacing the hard wooden seats with upholstery, maybe adding some drapery to cut down on the reverberations that, some orchestras complain, make the hall such a difficult place to practice. These additions might make the hall more comfortable, and more hospitable to the three orchestras—the music school's, the college's, and New Haven's—that call it home. But they would also spoil its beautifully resonant organ acoustics. For the time being, however, there are no plans for big changes. Joe and Nick lead me along a vertiginous catwalk in the organ's very top level. From where I stand, I can see over the tops of the show pipes in the facade, down the length of the barrel vault of the Woolsey ceiling, and out over the empty expanse on the auditorium. We sit down amongst the pipes to rest and to talk. Joe looks me in the eye. "Tony, do you appreciate how special it is to be in this organ? This is one of the great organs in the world." He gestures to the organ. "The people who designed it were geniuses of their time. We tend to believe we're the smartest people who walked the planet. That's a fallacy. These were very bright people. They may have thought about the world differently than us. But they left their mark. They're gone, but their mark is still here. "The
past conservators are forgotten. Joseph Dzeda and Nicholas Thompson-Allen will
be forgotten. But the builders—Hutchings, Steere, Ernest Skinner, Donald
Harrison, Harry Van Wart—their names will survive." Click here for a panoramic view of Woolsey Hall Click here for a panoramic view of the organ chamber Click here for a panoramic view of the organ curators' workshop Slide show of images from the organ |
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Related Panoramic views of Woolsey Hall, the organ chamber, and the curators' workshop.Slide show of images from the organ. A survey of Yale's collection of pipe organs. |
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