What Brad Jaeger had found, at the far end of the vast and gloomy
subterranean workshop in the undercroft of the Basilica of St. Gladys de la
Croix, was the former office of Harry Willis, where in isolation as
complete and as peculiar as that of his patron at the other extreme of the
building, he plotted and schemed the final and incomplete rebuild of the
Elhanan Q. Hackenback Grand Organ.
"I couldn't believe my eyes", Brad told us.
"It looked as though he had just walked out of there before his final
illness in 1948 and never came back. There was the layout of the big
console on a drawing board. I blew away the dust, and found the stop-names
written in hard pencil on the tracing paper - the whole thing was there in
front of me. Looking round the office I saw a rack with neatly rolled
parcels of other drawings. I took one or two of them down, reading out the
labels to myself as I did so: 'NAVE CHORUS - NORTH SIDE'; 'ECHO &
ORCHESTRAL - SWITCHSTACK ROOMS 1-3'; 'WEST END: 200" PRESSURE RAM PUMP AND
ACCUMULATORS' - that kind of thing. I took a roll at random and laid it out
on the setting-out bench. It was a complete set of drawings for one of the
transept sections, beautifully laid out in classic style, drawn in ink on
cartridge paper and watercoloured by hand. Looking round to see what else
there was, I found a filing cabinet full of correspondence. Just from the
tags on the files I could see that Harry had been in touch with every
supplier in the business at one time or another - Herrburger Brooks,
Spencer, Schopp, Eisenschmidt, Reisner, Laukhuff - you name a company, and
he had ordered from them."
"I carried on looking around the office without any real idea of what I was
expecting, and then made my 'big find' - the key cupboard. On the wall was
this cupboard full of keys. Keys to every chamber and room in the building.
At last, I was truly able to find out what we had got."
And over the next few months Brad did indeed find out what Harry Willis and
his august predecessors really had laid out in the way of preparations for
the greatest organ the world had ever seen. Armed with great bunches of
carefully labelled keys he explored every nook and cranny of the building,
filling page after age of his legal pads with inventories, notes and
reports to himself. These he would take back to the office in the evenings,
cross-checking what he found against the paperwork in the office and the
pipes and parts stacked in the crypt.
By the fall of 1974 Jaeger was eager to make a start. Reporting to the
Trustees that certain significant renewal would be needed to set the organ
project in motion again, he arranged for several large withdrawals to be
made from the Organ Account. Armed with the appropriate cheques, he was
able to bring in engineers of various different kinds. Naval Engineers
arrived to examine and restore the steam turbines driven off the Edison
Power Company's main supply. Blower Engineers came to clean and re-balance
the Orgoblo fans. Electrical Engineers came to look over the three dozen
rooms entirely devoted to Reisner relays and switchstacks, to test wiring
and report on safety. Experts in Air Conditioning climbed through the
mysterious doors that gave access to the huge cast-iron wind-lines laid
down by Hope-Jones, and pronounced that the whole cracked and leaking
system could be brought back into action by lining the duct with new
materials. Men from Otis arrived to restore the goods elevator which gave
direct access from the organ workshop to the triforium and roof-spaces. A
team of volunteers from the Metropolitain Transit Authority led by Stan
Fischler came and marvelled at the narrow-guage tramway that ran through
the roof and triforia, checked through the electrical system, restored the
dumpy little Sprague locomotive, and spent a happy summer in 1976 testing
out the entire line.
As soon as Jaeger had the building to himself again, in early 1977, he
engaged a few skilled helpers and started the herculaean task of lifting
the hundreds of thousands of parts, so carefully prepared and labelled by
Willis, to the upper levels of the Basilica. From the elevator doors trucks
could be wheeled straight on to the tramway to be delivered to the
appropriate chamber by locomotive. At the same time he and his staff
started on a massive programme of regular maintenance, so that those parts
of the organ that were actually installed and working could be heard to
their best advantage. Individual restoration tasks were tackled at the rate
of one major item per year, each one dismantled in the fall, prepared in
the workshop over the winter, and reinstalled during the following spring.
Thus the Wagnerian Brass Organ was renovated in 1983, and the Tuba Mirum
section in the Dome cleared of its infestation of pigeons and brought back
to life in 1991.
Brad Jaeger explained all this to us as we stood at the old Skinner console
of 1909, still in use awaiting the wiring of several new relay rooms and
the installation of the six-manual console of 1942, planned to be on-line
by 2005.
"The trouble is," continued Brad, "even with a staff of ten to twelve
people it is becoming very difficult indeed to keep the whole thing going.
There are two relays of tuners, doing tuning all night, every night, in two
shifts: one week on, and one week off. Fridays are devoted entirely to
fault finding, so that we are prepared (as far as possible) for services on
the Sunday. In the other four days of the week there are about six of us
doing the actual organ building. In the summer we are doing jobs in and
around the organ, and in the winter we are mostly downstairs preparing for
the next campaign. Even with the huge amount of space, the elevator, and
the tramway, we can hardly keep pace with what we have put in so far."
"As we install more and more - all of it beautifully prepared by Harry
Willis, I have to say - so the job gets slower and slower. Frankly I
despair of anyone ever getting to the end of it. The infrastructure has
been laid out so that it is *just* possible for a full-time team to keep
the whole organ working - but only just! - and only by dint of working
almost round the clock. We are all here six or seven days a week - at the
weekends we just all sit at a big table and try and sort out the paperwork.
I would employ more staff, but there is no point in putting in more pipes
than the upstairs guys can tune, so in the meantime we just do the best we
can."
"Somewhere amongst all the stuff marked out for the west end, there is a
thing referred to in Willis's plans as the 'Last Trumpet' - and I can quite
see why. For a start, it's on two-hundred inch pressure, raised by a
special pneumatic ram-pump in the campanile, powered off the fifty-inch
main. We've rigged a couple of pipes up on a compressor outdoors, and they
are terrifying things - we had complaints from all over town. I can't see
us getting the ram-pump and accumulators up there until 2010 at the very
earliest, and by then the rest of the organ is going to be virtually
full-time tuning and repairs. I think that Willis knew that the Last
Trumpet was to be both the crowning glory of the whole scheme, and also
dangerously close to the limit of feasibility. The name is highly
suggestive of the idea that it will never actually be heard in this world,
but only the next!"
I asked Brad how on earth anyone managed to play what was currently
available from the five-manual Skinner console, clearly still labelled with
the stops of the Roosevelt/Audsley/Hope-Jones/Skinner organ from before the
first world war.
"Well," he said, "we use the Skinner console to represent an approximate
picture of the resources of the whole instrument. The organists set the
pistons to represent certain levels of power in the main ensembles, and I
switch the stop action accordingly. This is done by relaying all the
stop-position information through the old disused telephone exchange under
Hackenback Square, next to the Subway Station. It went out of use when the
phones round here all went digital, and it has been invaluable. I just
plug in the stops that are wanted. We work with a very broad pallette of
course, and most of the effects are general across the whole organ. In
addition the organists can use a keypad to switch certain sections of the
organ in or out. Each main division can be toggled on or off with these
pistons,"
- Brad here pulled out a little drawer from under the left side of the key
bench, revealing a row of carefully labelled push buttons -
"and they all have double-touch cancel, so that if you want one specific
division only you can have it with just one press."
It all seemed perfectly clear to me, I had to admit.
"As for the Solo stops: for the time being a handful of these are rigged up
to play off the fifth manual. We swap them round each week for the sake of
variety, so at some times of year the fifth manual will be awash with
Clarinets, at another time it might be devoted to a huge Flute Organ, and
at Easter it just becomes a great collective Bombarde division for the
trumpets. It means the drawknobs for the old Echo - on manual V - are
usually several layers deep in hand-written labels and sticky markers - but
we get by! Another set of pistons is for transfers on the fifth manual
only,"
- here Brad pulled out another little drawer of buttons under the right
side of the key bench -
"and that allows a few extra antiphonal effects and a bit more flexibility
with the solo voices. Frankly the telephone exchange has made all this
possible - I don't know what we would have done without it."
At this point I could resist temptation no longer and, asking Brad Jaeger
to manipulate the controls for me, I swung my legs over the bench. Brad
made a quick call on his mobile phone to warn the staff at the visitor
centre, and then threw the main switch on the wall next to the console.
From some distant place there came the sound of a muffled thump. Then,
very slowly, the entire building started to hiss, and the still
incense-scented air around us began to move. It was as though the whole
Basilica, like some giant granite dinosaur, had come to life. A shiver ran
down my spine as I prepared to play.
(To be continued)
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Note: opinions expressed on PIPORG-L are those of the individual con-
tributors and not necessarily those of the list owners nor of the Uni-
versity at Albany.
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