[Dixielandjazz] The world's largest organ.

[Steve Barbone]

Now that I have your attention . . . :-) VBG

Not quite OKOM perhaps, but then, all the Department Stores in the
Philadelphia area used Dixieland bands to promote openings, and the holiday
shopping season. Nothing left, now but this wonderful pipe organ at the
Macy's in downtown Philly.

If you are ever visiting, stop by and hear the noontime concert. It is a
magnificent instrument. (and precursor of the synthesizer)

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Amid the Shirts and Socks, a Concert Can Break Out

NY TIMES - By CRAIG R. WHITNEY - June 9, 2007

PHILADELPHIA ‹ What do you do if you buy a famous downtown department store
and find an organ with 28,482 pipes occupying thousands of square feet of
perfectly good retail space?

If you¹re Macy¹s, you let devotees of the instrument put in 61 more pipes
and give them thousands more square feet to set up an organ repair shop.

Diapasons, it would seem, are as much music to Macy¹s as cash registers,
coin counters and customers at its Center City store here, a Philadelphia
institution that was originally a Wanamaker¹s. So the company let the
Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, a private group of aficionados who have been
helping to maintain the instrument for years, install another stop and set
up a repair shop after Macy¹s took over the store.

³Every lunchtime, people hear the organ and feel good ‹ and people are in a
mind to shop when they¹re feeling good,² explained James Kenny, the store
manager. ³It¹s the ultimate feel-good experience.²

The organ, the world¹s largest operating musical instrument, has never
sounded better, according to the store¹s staff organist, Peter Richard
Conte, who has been here 20 years and fills the place with warm waves of
sound at noon and in the evening, daily except Sunday.

³In 1995 it was down to about 20 percent of the pipes being playable,
maybe,² and only two keyboards working instead of six, Mr. Conte said. ³Now
it sounds loved again.²

With money from private donors and more than $100,000 from Macy¹s this year,
the staff curator, L. Curt Mangel III, with his assistant, the Friends and
numerous organ groupies, now have 95 percent of the organ playing again.
Next year they expect to have it all up and running for the first time in
decades.

Today Mr. Conte and the Friends have the run of the store for the annual
Wanamaker Organ Day, and Mr. Conte will play something new: his own
transcription of Elgar¹s ³Enigma² Variations (Op. 36), at 11:30 a.m.
Shoppers are welcome.

He has been working feverishly on the Elgar for weeks, with all-night
practice sessions, alone in the store except for a guard. ³It¹s probably the
most difficult piece I¹ve ever done,² he said before trying out several
movements at a Wednesday evening concert, his fingers slinking from keyboard
to keyboard and darting restlessly over the 729 stop-control tablets as
phrase seamlessly followed phrase and crescendo climaxed and faded into
descrescendo. 

The Elgar sounds impressively orchestral on this organ, with its 462 sets of
pipes, including stops named for orchestral violins, cellos, flutes,
orchestral oboes, clarinets, French horns, tubas and trombones. It has just
about everything else imaginable ‹ chimes and even a kitchen sink (for the
curators to wash their hands) ‹ in a forest of pipes ranging from 32 feet to
less than an inch long, spread over both ends and multiple rooms and floors
off the store¹s Grand Court.

Next year a long, muffled section of 2,000 more pipes, now being cleaned and
restored, will rejoin the rest in a more audible spot, and Mr. Conte expects
to luxuriate in its liberated sounds, including three more French horn stops
made by the Kimball Organ Company of Chicago.

³I love the sound of French horns and I will probably use them a lot,² he
said. 

The instrument started life at the St. Louis International Exposition of
1904, when the Los Angeles Art Organ Company built it along orchestral
lines, rather than according to the baroque organ ideal, as Bach and
Buxtehude knew it.

It was a smash hit at the fair, but bankrupted the company. Then it
languished in storage until 1909, when John Wanamaker bought it for the
Philadelphia store that he was planning to open two years later.

His son, Lewis Rodman Wanamaker, saw the vast, 149-foot-high Grand Court
center space in the building Daniel Hudson Burnham had designed for them as
the ideal place for ³the finest organ in the world,² and 40,000 people and
President William Howard Taft came to the dedication ceremonies on Dec. 30,
1911.

Until his death in 1928, Lewis Rodman Wanamaker oversaw successive
expansions of the organ in the store¹s own organ shop on the building¹s
roof. The changes were so extensive that the instrument¹s ³string² section
finally had more pipes than most large organs do altogether.

Famous organists flocked to play it over the years, and both Marcel Dupré
and Virgil Fox developed signature pieces on the organ, but when Lewis
Rodman Wanamaker died, the organ¹s importance faded. Wanamaker¹s itself was
sold to Woodward & Lothrop in 1986; then it became a Hecht¹s; and in 1997 a
Lord & Taylor store. Macy¹s took it over last year.

Each of the owners recognized the unique historical value of the organ, and
Lord & Taylor hired Mr. Mangel as curator in 2002. The difference now, as
Mr. Conte sees things, is that ³Macy¹s gets it ‹ it understands how to use
this instrument and market it to the public.²

Martine Reardon, the Macy¹s national headquarters executive overseeing
holiday events, including now the annual Christmas organ and light show in
the Philadelphia store, said, ³The Wanamaker Organ¹s legacy is as legendary
as the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Fourth of July fireworks.²

Next year, Macy¹s 150th anniversary, the store hopes to get the Philadelphia
Orchestra to come and play Joseph Jongen¹s ³Symphonie Concertante,² a work
for organ and orchestra commissioned by Wanamaker¹s in 1928 but never
performed at the store.

And the Friends, with a $150,000 donation from the Phoebe Haas Charitable
Trust, have set up a spacious repair and organ-building training center on
an unused floor of the store. Early this year the additional 61 new pipes, a
rank of singing vox humana stops, joined nine others in a chamber rebuilt
especially for them and brought the total to 28,543. To many their vibrato
tones call to mind a choir of angels.

Mr. Conte patted the huge console that controls the pipes and said, nodding
at Mr. Mangel, ³Baby hasn¹t been given such care and tending since John
Wanamaker.² But he still hopes Baby will throw no tantrums at today¹s
performance.