[Dixielandjazz] The world's largest organ.

[Bob Shoring]

Anyone wishing to see this on YouTube, can go to the youtube site
http://www.youtube.com/
and just type in wanamaker in the search field (or "macys organ").  
There are several short clips.  There's also a website
http://www.wanamakerorgan.com/bell.html

Regards,
Bob

>------------------------------
>
>Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2007 10:29:43 -0400
>From: Steve Barbone <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
>Subject: [Dixielandjazz] The world's largest organ.
>  
>
>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 you?re Macy?s, 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 Macy?s as cash registers,
>coin counters and customers at its Center City store here, a Philadelphia
>institution that was originally a Wanamaker?s. 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 Macy?s took over the store.
>
>?Every lunchtime, people hear the organ and feel good ? and people are in a
>mind to shop when they?re feeling good,? explained James Kenny, the store
>manager. ?It?s the ultimate feel-good experience.?
>
>The organ, the world?s largest operating musical instrument, has never
>sounded better, according to the store?s 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.
>
>?In 1995 it was down to about 20 percent of the pipes being playable,
>maybe,? and only two keyboards working instead of six, Mr. Conte said. ?Now
>it sounds loved again.?
>
>With money from private donors and more than $100,000 from Macy?s 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 Elgar?s ?Enigma? 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. ?It?s probably the
>most difficult piece I?ve ever done,? 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 store?s 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.
>
>?I love the sound of French horns and I will probably use them a lot,? 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 ?the finest organ in the world,? 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 store?s own organ shop on the building?s
>roof. The changes were so extensive that the instrument?s ?string? section
>finally had more pipes than most large organs do altogether.
>
>Famous organists flocked to play it over the years, and both Marcel Dupr?
>and Virgil Fox developed signature pieces on the organ, but when Lewis
>Rodman Wanamaker died, the organ?s importance faded. Wanamaker?s itself was
>sold to Woodward & Lothrop in 1986; then it became a Hecht?s; and in 1997 a
>Lord & Taylor store. Macy?s 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 ?Macy?s gets it ? it understands how to use
>this instrument and market it to the public.?
>
>Martine Reardon, the Macy?s national headquarters executive overseeing
>holiday events, including now the annual Christmas organ and light show in
>the Philadelphia store, said, ?The Wanamaker Organ?s legacy is as legendary
>as the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Fourth of July fireworks.?
>
>Next year, Macy?s 150th anniversary, the store hopes to get the Philadelphia
>Orchestra to come and play Joseph Jongen?s ?Symphonie Concertante,? a work
>for organ and orchestra commissioned by Wanamaker?s 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, ?Baby hasn?t been given such care and tending since John
>Wanamaker.? But he still hopes Baby will throw no tantrums at today?s
>performance.
>  
>