 John we're here on the stage of the Merrill Auditorium at Midsum Organized Chaos with the rebuilding of the organ. What's going on here? What stage are we at right now? The crew from Froley Baker in Connecticut is in what is the second stage of the installation of the organ? Last summer at about this time. They had removed the organ and a large Large component of the organ was built new and ready to be installed right at that time. They are now They're now doing what we're calling the mechanical installation where the physical structure of the organ is being set up and all the mechanical workings Are being installed? Give us a few facts and figures about the organ parts and that sort of thing. I Was talking about the major component which is brand new which is a pressure vessel, which is the ground floor of the organ That is 55 feet from one end to the other and seven feet deep and seven feet tall As I said, that's brand new. It's replacing the original pressure vessel Which had been reduced in height when the organ was relocated to the platform Above the stage there are there are more than 6,800 pipes in the organ. The largest one is 32 feet long Speaks 32 foot pitch, which is 16 cycles per second at the lowest night of note note of the keyboard The smallest pipes are roughly the size of a pencil The weight of the organ we think is around 50 tons You said that some things are being built new and are other things being refurbished The most of the organ is being refurbished and returned in like new condition Some very large things are being added to the organ not only this big pressure vessel But several sets of base pipes the big 32-foot big 32-footers are being Are being made new and added to the organ to give it a more powerful base response You've been involved in the preservation of many many thousands of organs Where does this organ fit in in terms of the size of the job? The there are organs that are two times that are twice the size of this organ As far as the size of a job for an organ that's owned by a municipality This is as big as that has gotten If we talk about working on monumental organs by how much it takes to move them This was a three semi organ The biggest organs that we handle routinely are five semi organs by semi. I mean of course semi trailers on the highway Jobs of that size in this country are very rare And so in the last 10 years maybe across the United States there have been 12 or 15 projects Approaching this size in addition to being involved in the preservation and restoration of organs You're also an organ player yourself. How does the kachmure sort of fit into the overall panoply of pipe organs? The kachmure organ tries very hard and is very successful at being many things to many people A concert organ is in a sense different from a church organ I think you might say that a concert organ is a church organ with bad manners This organ also has quite a few features in it that come from the tradition of the theater organs that accompanied silent movies in the 1920s Tuned percussions like xylophones and marimbas We're also adding what we call a toy counter that has Car horns and police whistles and bird calls and things like that in it just for the right moments in those movies So the this organ can play can play the the standard Repetory of solo organ music it can do all of the stuff that goes with the full symphony orchestra And it has all of the little bells and whistles as we say that allow it to do the novelty things from the theater from the silent cinema Are any more organs of this scale and size being built new anymore? Or is it just we are fixing older ones organs of this size are being built new happily We we're not seeing very many new organs being built In the United States far fewer than a hundred a year In the United States and most of those are much smaller than this It's probably fair to say that in a decade there have been seven or eight organs of this size built in the United States Tonight here at Merrill. You're giving a little tour of the organ and the status gives the preview of your tour The preview of the tour is I have a collection of slides that were taken photographs It was taken when the organ was being dismantled and photographs that I took at the workshop of Foley Baker in Connecticut Showing the intricacies and the attention to detail that's necessary to do this kind of work When we bring the group that slideshow is happening in the rehearsals of the rehearsal hall downstairs When we bring the group upstairs, we're splitting them in half So that I'll stand on the stage with half of them and and give them a walkthrough of what the organ How the organ is laid out from what we can see when we're standing on the stage And of course all the pieces and parts that are Stacked and piled in various places Phil Carpenter who is the project supervisor from Foley Baker Will take the other half of the group up inside the organ to show the actual Interior the mechanical structure of the instrument this project got started in the early days the beginning in January of 2007 Because we the board had raised some money to add a couple of new voices to the organ a couple of important bass voices to the organ and As the chair of the organ committee, I was I was asked to look for a contractor to do this work We invited The specialist in this particular kind of work to come see the organ He came with several of his colleagues spent a day with me in the organ and they said they didn't want to think about making an addition to the organ because it was in such poor condition and It was then my duty to take that news to the board of the friends of the Kochmar organ Which came as a surprise I think to many of the people on the board the the board was responded by Starting by by planning a symposium for the following summer. We invited seven International experts of organ players and organ builders to come and inspect the organ to participate in a public roundtable discussion To share their opinions about the organ with the members of the Foco board and the greater The wider community What we what we were being told first of all the bit the ground floor of this organ is a pressure vessel It's a an airtight box. That's 55 feet long That's about seven feet from front to back and about seven feet tall And in a little while you're going to be inside that box and you'll see then what a 55 foot pressure vessel actually means but What we're finding was that many of the joints in this pressure vessel were failed That organ that air pressure was pouring out of the thing and the structure was weak Some people expressed concern that the organ might actually physically collapse. I'm not sure that we were in In such a dire situation But throughout the organ we had all sorts of places where we were losing air where the stability of the instrument Was in serious question and so these are the some of the participants in that in that symposium We commissioned as as oh and of course I need to say that all seven of those experts were Unanimous saying that it's a marvelous instrument. It's a local landmark. It's a national treasure one of the two remaining Municipally owned pipe organs that's in use with a municipal organist sitting on the bench two in the country Portland, Maine and San Diego, California We commissioned a Professional survey of the organ Which came back with a very frank assessment of the organs condition. This was about a 25 page document which the organ committee converted into a request for proposals and During the winter of 2008. We solicited we solicited proposals from four different organ companies and As as the winter ended and the summer began we were then in the business of comparing and contrasting These proposals we wound up selecting Foley Baker as a company from Tallinn, Connecticut largely because they had recently finished a renovation of the organ at Symphony Hall in Boston and Besides the fact of the tremendous skill an organization required to Do a serious overhaul on a monumental organ? They also at Symphony Hall had the complication of working in a very very busy building where each day represents a huge amount of money and Finding time when the hall is not in use or creating time when the hall is not in use to do a project like this is a very touchy business and We have the same situation here in Merrill auditorium where the schedule is very very tight the city Makes great use of the building as a source of revenue for renting for concerts and so on And Foley Baker's performance getting through this project in Boston was Spot was singled out as one of the great achievements of that project they did Last August on the day of the centennial There was a concert which concluded a week-long festival of concerts and workshops and panel discussions and The morning after that concert the Foley Baker crew went to work dismantling the organ Here you see a stack of wooden crates. We call them pipe trays. These crates are Are specially built for the safe handling and transportation and storage of organ pipes, which are actually very fragile Inside the organ the pipes are arranged in rows and Here most of the pipes have been taken out of this box So you need to just interpolate that every one of those holes had a pipe in it And when we're done every one of those holes will have a pipe in it again Here comes one of the big wind chests which has the which is the unit that would have pipe standing on it Being hoisted out of the organ pipe trays being stacked loaded into trucks and then driven to Driven to Connecticut to the Foley Baker workshop, which is overlooking if you threw a stone over the top of that sign It would line on it would land on route 84 Right at exit 69 The workshop is divided into departments that there's a woodworking department leather work Electrical and the and the shops where the Repairs to the organ pipes are made and where the voicing and tuning of the pipes is done This picture shows what we call note motors It's a a row of pneumatics Which are air driven motors The little red items are electric coils, which are electric magnets Which are operated by a relay system that is driven by the keyboards at the hands of the organist When a note is played and one of those magnets is energized a valve is opened and that starts this pneumatic process Which pulls the levers that open the valves that let the air blow into the organ pipes Now it's a kind of a convoluted thing to try to describe without having a show and tell in my hands But I'll just say that when electric actions were being developed and this organ built in 1912 was at the Forefront of the development of electric actions organ builders established the idea that a repetition rate of 60 per second in other words if a note could repeat 60 times a second the action would be fast enough that no organist would ever find it sluggish and That's been the standard all along How that how that was achieved the way The the invention by mr. Ernest Skinner the great pioneering organ builder in Boston about how to test in 1904 he did this a repetition rate of 60 per second was to wire a saw blade hot and run a Run a tool across the teeth of the saw blade Having done the math as to how fast he would have to go across the teeth to have 60 in a second And if his action would go what he did When he did the thing across the saw blade that he knew he was good About doing all this talking about pneumatic in order for anything pneumatic to work it has to be airtight and Each of these notes. Let's say C C sharp D D sharp E F F sharp and so on Is screwed to a flat surface and the flat surface has in it holes that allow The exhausting of the pneumatic machines to work So we assume that that flat surface is perfectly flat. So there's a nice airtight seal between the motor and the And it's mounting board what we found was These boards in terrible condition with cracks running from note to note The implication being if you play C C sharp might also try to play With anything buck flat surfaces to put these motors against Here's a good picture showing cracks that are connecting the connecting these exhausting holes and Screw holes that were stripped out. So not only were they not against anything flat, but they weren't being held in tight anymore So what foley Baker and by the way, you can see the shadows where these motors were mounted on the wood Foley Baker's response was to route out all of the cracks and holes and and strip screw holes and lay new pieces of wood In mill everything perfectly flat again and then finish them So when we started with something like this, we finish up with something like this and Then new no motors could be mounted in an airtight fashion So I dwell in on the airtight thing to say if there's any leakage in that note The organist plays a note and then it's sort of waiting for the note to play That the crispness of the action has been lost to the deterioration of the instrument Other little pneumatic motors Here are some completed ones. Here's a portion of one that's been stripped and is ready to be rebuilt But here's the detail you see there's a new double canvas hinge here Which is allowing that thing to operate this way and Through varying stages of the rebuilding we see we see these Processing from one to one of the next little valves about two thousand these valves inside the organ about seven hundred of these valves inside the organ 450 of these and then every one of those pipes has 6800 pipes more than 6800 pipes and everyone has a little valve under it and here's a pipe valve a brand-new pipe valve manufactured for this purpose and then here's a box full of that one size of pipe valves There's six different sizes These are the boards that the pipes stand on top of and the valves are mounted underneath And in this series of pictures The board is on a workbench upside down You see here is the row of springs that will be closing the valves when everything is finished if you let a note go It's the spring that shuts the the valve against gravity valves being installed Actions being adjusted springs being placed on the valves and close they look like this when they're complete and then they're all mounted inside the The boards are mounted on the on the wind chest bodies and The action is all connected. So the valves are ready to be operated by these motors And you'll be seeing all of this when you go upside upstairs inside the organ We had a field trip Last February where a charter bus full of people went down to the workshop to have an opportunity to see all of this These are expression machines an organ pipe is in a sense a pretty dumb little unit that a Single organ pipe knows how to make one note at one volume and Anything to do with expression or the changes of volume or the changes of sound is done by bringing in Subsequent sets of pipes sets as the organist draws the stop knobs at the console He's bringing into play or taking out of play Individual ranks of pipes which I like to compare to the artist's palette that the artist the oil painter He's got a whole row of colors like that and you can bring them into the center to blend them to make just what he's looking for That's what the organist is doing by choosing stops The expression machines much of this organ is enclosed in what we call in spread expression boxes Which are big wow big heavy soundproof boxes that have Venetian blind movers in front of them and The organist can open and close those movers by operating pedals on the floor above the organ's pedal keyboard and these are the machines that Did it run those movers? Holy Baker was using surgical tubing Here because it has such a it's so very flexible that the weight and the resistance of the tubing won't get in the way of the operation of the machine Organ pipes standing in an organ for a hundred years Start to keel over and when they keel over their their conical feet Get dented and what Foley Baker has done is cut off those dented feet and soldered on new ones which you can see in this photo or look here at this joint here where Where a new conical foot has been added to to an old pipe And if you want to think about craftsmanship and think about the formula pie and how familiar you have to be with Circles to be able to make those tapers match exactly. It's a wonderful little thing about the mathematics of organ building Spring-loaded slide tuners that slide up and down the pipe as a tuner hits them You make the pipe longer by hitting up on this and the pitch goes down Get down on the little tuner and the pitch goes up. These are all replaced in this organ 6800 pipes and On the wooden pipes the tuners are little scrolls of metal like the top of a sardine can those are all brand new that those can be unrolled or rolled up to Effectively change the length of the pipe The pipes are fitted on the chest now to make sure that they're going to stand straight so that We can go a hundred years without having the keeling over again We have great big new 32-foot pipes going into the organ. These are a Coiled up on themselves for two reasons One is you don't need to have something really standing 32 feet tall but the fact is if you did it would be floppy and and Weak and when you coil it up like that you give it structural integrity that it can hold itself up Because these pipes weigh a thousand pounds at a time The organ console is being altered because there are additions and changes being made to the stops So we've had committee meetings and phone conferences About how the stops are going to be laid out on the stop jams Where are they going to go so that the organist can grab a logical handful with one hand? An annex warehouse that Foley Baker brought in To to facilitate this project gave them the space to manage all of the very large parts of the organ Rebuilding of again 32-foot pipes Against this back wall behind that behind that lineup of suspects There is a 20-foot long sink in which all of the metal pipes of the organ were washed and in the foreground You see pipes on drying racks drying Ready to be cleaned up repaired and then have a new shellac finish sprayed on them This is a row of those Expression shutters I was talking about and you'll see a big stack of them on the stage when we go upstairs These are made out of wood something close to two inches thick So they're a very very effective sound barrier that when they're actually closed the powerful sound of the organ is contained I'd like to think of it as a caged lion that you can you can Let the let the listeners have a little glimpse of that roaring sound by just kicking that little pedal just a little bit Lots and lots of base pipes standing up all cleaned and ready to go these are panels of the expression chambers and As you as you see them here one of the first things you'll see when you look up into the organ from the stage is This tremendous. It's like a condominium complex of all of these large expression Expression chambers I'll point that out to you as I talk with you. Here's a shot looking down in the workshop at the large assembly space Another shot and What we're looking forward to is During The process has been I'll see the process with you upstairs. We're looking forward to having the organ The pipes going back into the organ next year at this time and then in September next year. We look forward to a celebration Series of concerts to introduce the rebuild organ to the public and we're about a year away from the grand return What's going to happen over the coming year is During the winter I should start by saying that when we were scheduling this project because of the complicated use of this hall We were able to secure large blocks of time in the middle of each summer that was for the removal of the organ last year what's going on now here and The tonal work the tuning and voicing of the organ which will happen next summer During the winter we have windows When we have as much as a week of Available time and the Foley Baker crew will be coming and going according to that schedule doing the electrical wiring doing mechanical Troubleshooting doing adjustments Getting it so that the organ is is ready to have the pipes when the time for the big window next summer comes