About the Grand Court Organ

Built for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the Wanamaker Organ was designed by renowned organ architect George Ashdown Audsley, author of The Art of Organ-Building. The driving force behind the project was Murray M. Harris, a superb organ builder hailed as “The Father of Organ Building in the American West.” Harris was also a shrewd investor and promoter. Living in California, a land with abundant mineral resources and superb lumber from pristine, old-growth forests, Harris was able to invest the finest in materials in his organs, and he brought a group headed by master craftsman William Boone

Fleming into his group to incorporate the latest developments in electric action into his instruments, with the patents that went with them.

During construction of the organ, costs skyrocketed and certain questionable financial manipulations by Harris came to light, causing the company to be taken over by its chief investor, a Colorado mining mogul named Eben Smith. Harris was ousted and the Murray M. Harris company was rechristened The Los Angeles Art Organ Company. But the organ’s soaring $105,000 price tag, 

and the refusal, during the Fair, of the Kansas City Convention Hall authorities to accept the organ they had commissioned, would ultimately lead to the company’s demise.

The investment, however, paid huge musical dividends. The heroic instrument that resulted had five manuals, 10,059 pipes, and it won the Grand Prize and five other medals at the Fair, where was played by Alexandre Guilmant and virtually every other notable organist of the day. 

 

In 1909, Philadelphia merchant-prince John Wanamaker bought the instrument for his new Philadelphia emporium. Thirteen freight cars were required to ship the entire organ from St. Louis, and installation took two years. The Grand Organ was first heard in the Store’s seven-story atrium on June 22, 1911, at the exact moment when England’s King George V was crowned at Westminster Abbey. Later that year, it was prominently featured when President William Howard Taft dedicated the Store.

Despite its immense size, the organ tone was judged inadequate to fill the huge court. Wanamaker’s opened a private pipe-organ factory in the Store attic, employing up to 40 full-time employees to enlarge the instrument. William Boone Fleming, the original factory supervisor, was hired to direct the work.

From the beginning,  the instrument was an Art Organ. Lavish construction, expensive materials and elegant workmanship made the Wanamaker Organ both a tonal wonder and a monument to superb craftsmanship. The largest pipe is made of flawless Oregon sugar-pine three inches thick and more than 32 feet long—so large that a Shetland Pony was once posed inside for publicity photos.

Supervising tonal matters was George W. Till, a superb voicer who is credited by many for the Wanamaker Organ’s beautiful tone.  It is said that Marcel Dupré used to embrace him whenever he saw him. All wood pipes were made in the Wanamaker Shop. Metal pipes were purchased from supply houses to strict quality specifications and regulated on-site. Among Till’s stop contributions were the Clear Flute, perhaps the most noble and well known flute stop in any organ, and compound stops of two ranks with intriguing sounds such as the Nasard Gambas and the Quint Flute. Till devised the Pedal 10-rank mixture, which Audsley praised for its reed-like tone.

In an unusual move for the times. Audsley had insisted on the necessity of mixtures, and his dictum on this and numerous other ideas were faithfully followed through throughout the instrument’s long development, leading to its overall unity of concept and harmonious inter-blending.

Mr. Till was also an inventive genius and his brilliance with pneumatic and mechanical devices led to advances such as the first piano played by an organ, selective mixtures, adjustable tremolos and expression-shoe couplers. The color coding of stop tablets and couplers was also a Till innovation.

Insisting on quality, Rodman Wanamaker during the 1920s wanted “all the tonal glory of the orchestra” added to the instrument, making it a perfect organ and orchestra built of pipes.

Completing the picture is organist Charles M. Courboin, a Rodman Wanamaker favorite and one of the brilliant virtuosos of his day, who was a driving force behind the String, Orchestral and Great Chorus divisions that capped the completed instrument. Courboin also thought in terms of making choirs out of the same sort of stop, such as Cellos, Dulcianas, French Horns, Flutes Vox Humanas, Orchestral Violins and Muted Violins.

During Courboin’s tenure the Store began buying pipes from leading builders, particularly the W.W. Kimball Company of Chicago, although vendors acted as supply houses and were not permitted to publicly advertise their contributions.  In addition, Courboin is also largely credited for the visionary layout of the present six-manual console.

Hear Charles M. Courboin play Wagner’s “To the Evening Star” on the Wanamaker Organ HERE

The smallest pipe is a quarter-inch in length. More than 8,000 pipes were added to the Organ between 1911 and 1917, and from 1924 to 1930 an additional 10,000 pipes were installed, bringing the total number of pipes today to 28,750.

Commanding these huge resources is a massive console with six ivory keyboards and 729 color-coded stop tablets. There are 168 piston buttons under the keyboards and 42 foot controls. The console weighs 2.5 tons; the entire instrument weighs 287 tons.

During the lifetimes of John Wanamaker and his son Rodman, the world’s finest musicians were brought to the Store for brilliant after-business-hours concerts, among them France’s Marcel Dupre, Louis Vierne and Nadia Boulanger, Italy’s Fernando Germani and Marco Enrico Bossi, and England’s Alfred Hollins.

At a 1919 Musicians’ Assembly, virtuoso Charles M. Courboin, in association with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, performed before a standing-room-only crowd of 15,000. Since then, great organists have continued to perform at the Store, many making special pilgrimages.

In 1986, the evening-concert tradition was continued as the Grand Organ marked its 75th anniversary with a Keith Chapman recital that attracted a huge audience. More recently, elaborate music events have regularly been sponsored by the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, attracting visitors to Macy’s with representatives from all parts of the U.S.  

In 2008 Macy’s celebrated its 150th anniversary with a Philadelphia Orchestra concert under Maestro Rossen Milanov. At the Wanamaker Organ, Peter Richard Conte performed Joseph Jongen’s Symphonie Concertante (1925) for the first time with the organ and orchestra for which it had been written.

Now a National Historic Landmark and valued in excess of $79 million, the Wanamaker Organ is of the American Symphonic design, which can play the great organ masterworks as well as the entire range of orchestral literature. The pipework encompasses the resources of three symphony orchestras; its String Organ alone has 7,000 pipes.

Organ Tonal Resources

The Wanamaker Organ is a Concert Organ of the American Symphonic school of design, which brings to traditional organ tone the added color resources and expressive capabilities of the symphony orchestra. All of this was made possible by the application of electricity to the pipe organ, allowing instruments of unlimited size arranged at various distances from the keyboard and winded by powerful blowers. For an appreciation of the Symphonic School of organ design, an article by Jack Bethards of the Schoenstein Company is found HERE.

In accord with its overall design as an ideal concert organ, the Wanamaker Organ is a Straight Organ with a minimum of unification. Borrowing of stops is used sparingly, mainly in the Pedal and Orchestral, where it has great value. Duplexing of stops is reserved for the few instances where valuable solo voices can be separated from their divisions without tying up the remainder of tonal resources there. Choruses (16′, 8′ and 4′) are true choruses of three ranks, with each set of pipes expressiong its own personality, rather than a single rank electrically “tapped” at three pitches, with the resulting weakening of any octaves, and sameness of tone between the three voices. Rigorous adherance to traditional organ design is another major factor in the instrument’s abiding success.

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THE MAIN PEDAL DIVISION is unexpressive and forms the core of the largest independent Pedal department ever built. It has 75 ranks, forty-four stops and wind pressures of five to twenty-five inches. Its stupendous 32-foot-series 10-rank mixture has the timbre of a magnificent reed and adds immense power when drawn with the Double Open Diapasons.

THE CHOIR, consisting of sublime, delicate voices, is on five inches of wind pressure, and is one of the many soft sections that mass to form beautiful “carpets” of rich tone that can serve as accompaniment for the bolder voices found elsewhere in the Organ.

THE GREAT DIVISION is on wind pressures of five to sixteen inches, and consists of unenclosed stops as well as a section enclosed with the Choir division. Together the Enclosed Great and Choir can be electrically combined to form a single expressive division independent of the Unenclosed Great.

IN TWO HUGE EXPRESSION CHAMBERS, THE SWELL is on wind pressures of five to twenty-two and one-half inches. All stops are under expression. One of these expression chambers houses the Original String division designed by George Ashdown Audsley—the first independent String organ ever found in a pipe organ.

THE ENTIRE SOLO DIVISION, in the Main Chamber, is under expression, on a wind pressure of fifteen inches. Powerful tubas, bold trumpets, assertive strings and particularly rich diapasons are among the many dominant stops at hand. Milder voices include a beautiful Soft Tuba, a Violin Diapason, a two-rank Nasard Gamba, and a Chimney Flute. Topping the ensemble are seventeen ranks of mixture work. Curiously, the Solo is not heard directly by the player at the console, because of an intervening pillar, but its sound easily bounces off the pillar on the far side of the console, creating for the player the illusion that the sound is coming from the opposite direction. The 51-rank division has recently been enhanced with sound-reflective paneling as it undergoes a complete restoration and pipe cleaning.

THE ETHEREAL ORGAN IS COMMANDING, rich and full in tone, entirely expressive. It has twenty-one stops, and a wind pressure of twenty-five inches. It is located on the seventh floor. An unenclosed E.M. Skinner Tuba Magna 8′ was added on the occasion of the Organ’s Centennial in 2011.

THE FLOATING DIVISIONS

THE STRING ORGAN, for many the glory of the Wanamaker Organ, is entirely expressive, has wind pressurea of fifteen to twenty-seven inches. There are eighty-seven manual stops and a  matching pedal of twenty-seven stops. The sheen of its tone is unusually captivating, producing at full volume a velvety carpet of lush string tone suggestive of hundreds of actual stringed instruments. Individual tablets enable the organist to reduce the sound to a gorgeous hush with a sweep of the stops. This division, with metal pipework by the famed Kimball company, occupies the largest space of any single organ chamber ever constructed. It is approximately sixty-seven feet long, twenty-six feet deep and sixteen feet high.

THE ORCHESTRAL DIVISION, also with Kimball metal pipes, has pressures of fifteen inches and is entirely expressive. There are thirty-two stops, including bold imitative reeds from the brass and woodwind families, backed by a battery of assorted flutes. The flute section and stops on the French Horn chest are each capable of being electrically detached and played separately on other keyboards.

This division was moved out of the Main Chamber in 2007—where its tone was obstructed—to a new, specially constructed in 2007. Built into the walls was a nail from Independence Hall and part of the propeller of Rodman Wanamaker’s pioneering airplane America, which Admiral Richard Byrd and his intrepid crew piloted across the Atlantic in 1927.

THE ECHO DIVISION is located opposite the main organ, on the seventh floor. Entirely expressive, it has a wind pressure of five inches.

THE VOX HUMANA CHORUS was originally part of the Orchestral and now occupies its own expression chamber, in the front of the original Orchestral chamber. It is on a wind pressure of 15 inches with eight manual ranks and two 16′ pedal ranks. This revision brought the total number of separate expression chambers to eight. The division has been dubbed the “Fox Voxes” in honor of the late virtuoso Virgil Fox, who had a long history with the Wanamaker Organ.

UNUSUAL AND ADVANCED FOR THE PERIOD IS THE EXTENSIVE USE OF MIXTURES, which Dr. Audsley and Wanamaker Organ Shop Tone-and-Voicing Chief George W. Till felt were essential for proper chorus development. Mixture pipes use pipes to bolster the upper tones of nature’s harmonic series, giving brightness to the duller stops, edge to the reeds, definition and promptness to slow-to-speak Pedal pipes and articulation in fast Pedal passages.

Perhaps the most breathtaking of all the Mixtures is the Pedal Grand Mutation X, a 32′ harmonic series stop that George Ashdown Audsley praised for its stupendous effect, like that of a “magnificent reed, so perfectly are its harmonic constituents balanced and regulated.

Tierce mixtures in the manuals are intended for use when the division’s 16′ stops are drawn.

THE PERCUSSION DIVISION is largely expressive and operates on pneumatic, vacuum and electric action. Each stop is a floating restorce that can be played individually on any of the keyboards.

THE MAJOR CHIMES are usually referred to as “tower chimes” because they were especially made for outdoor tower-chime playing by Chicago’s J.C. Deagan Co. The largest chime of this set, Note C, is twelve feet long, five inches in diameter, and weighs 600 pounds. It is struck by a leather-topped hammer four inches in diameter, the stroke of which is nine inches. It weighs eighteen pounds and has an impact of seventy-two pounds of pneumatic pressure. The force of the pneumatic impulse is controllable from an expression shoe at the console.

MECHANICAL FEATURES

PULSATIONS OF THE TREMULANTS, two for each division, are controllable in ten stages by means of tremolo pulsation levers to the right and left of the music rack on the console. This device was invented and patented in the Wanamaker Organ Shop. It enables the organist to adjust the speed of an individual tremolo or of all the tremolos to suit the performer’s taste. Expression pedals at the extreme end of the console can also be used to regulate tremolo speed, giving a lifelike shifting vibrato to many solo stops.

Fifty-three regulators furnish steady wind pressure from five to twenty-seven inches. The organ is electro-pneumatic throughout, requiring seven large centrifugal blowers and one vacuum blower totaling 173 horsepower.

For a Restoration Overview, please click HERE. For a Restoration Timeline, please click HERE.
For the Stoplist, please click HERE.

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George Ashdown Audsley
Organ Designer and Visionary

The David Fox Audsley Biography may be obtained by clicking HERE.

An updated version without photos is HERE.

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Ranks and Pipes

The Wanamaker Organ has 464 ranks of pipes, the most of any pipe organ. It possesses 28,750 pipes with nine expressive pipe divisions.

PEDAL		75 ranks, 81 stops, 2,573 pipes
CHOIR		24 ranks, 19 stops, 1,452 pipes
GREAT		58 ranks, 43 stops, 3,634 pipes
SWELL		71 ranks, 51 stops, 4,361 pipes
SOLO		51 ranks, 35 stops, 3,640 pipes
ETHEREAL		23 ranks, 21 stops, 1,670 pipes
STRING		88 ranks, 87 stops, 6,340 pipes
STENTOR		1 rank,     2 stops,      61 pipes
ORCHESTRAL		32 ranks, 32 stops, 2,312 pipes
ECHO		33 ranks, 22 stops, 2,013 pipes
VOX CHORUS		8 ranks,   8 stops,    572 pipes
Click here for the STOPLIST.

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Wanamaker Organists