Pipe organ building in the United States spans over two centuries and totals tens of thousands of instruments. The scope and sweep of the King of Instruments in American culture far exceeds that of other nations and reached its zenith in the first three decades of the last century. Pipe organs were built for hospitals, hotels, yachts, lodge halls, municipal auditoriums, high schools, colleges and universities, churches, private residences, soldiers' homes, theaters, and mortuaries, a category that includes cemetery chapels and mausoleums. These venues can be interpreted as market segments, each with its own characteristics, demand determinants, and time period. The mortuary pipe organ has been totally neglected in the history of organbuilding in this country; none of the well-known studies even mentions it and it is doubtful whether the countless papers written in higher education do either. Perhaps this is not surprising. Conservatively estimated, approximately 600 instruments were built expressly for the funeral industry, accounting for less than two percent of the total output of American builders and even far less in voiced ranks produced.1 Yet a closer look at this product (which the author considers a special instrument), its market and its builders reveals a fascinating epoch which surely belongs in the rich and colorful history of organbuilding in America.
The mortuary pipe organ was a uniquely American product, an instrument whose mechanical features and tonal characteristics departed significantly from the conventional church organ even though its purpose was to provide "churchly" music in a quasi-liturgical setting.2 Its development underscores the entrepreneurship and innovations of American builders who responded to the requirements of the evolving funeral home industry. The heyday of the mortuary pipe organ was over a half century ago: most were built during the 1920s and 1930s; only a few were built after WWII. A surprising number are in use today, routinely serviced and restored as needed.
The Instrument
The mortuary pipe organ as a distinctive instrument was one example of the small, often self-contained instruments developed and marketed by the organbuilding industry in the first three decades of the last century. These instruments marked a milestone in the evolution of the instrument, in the spectrum of keyboard music and in the choice of music media in an institutional setting. The Austin Company, introducing the four-rank Chorophone--"The Ideal Small Pipe Organ"--in 1916, had correctly forecast that a low-cost pipe organ requiring little space would open a vast new market now being supplied by the reed organ or piano. "We have . . . long realized that there is a large demand for an instrument which can be sold for somewhat less than $2,000.00," to quote their sales brochure,3 adding that such an instrument "would be within the reach of a larger number of clients who need a serviceable organ, but are now restricted to the use of a reed organ or piano,"4 an observation which certainly describes a funeral home. The option of a player-attachment greatly enhanced the utility of the instrument and gave it a competitive advantage in the choice of a keyboard medium. Other builders soon followed with small instruments and, borrowing from the automobile industry, named each model (see Wicks box) to increase market awareness and, hopefully, influence buyer selection. Pilcher's was "The Cloister," Möller "The Artiste," Kilgen "The Petite Ensemble," and one of Aeolian-Skinner's numbered series "The Marie Antoinette." These models were ideally suited to the mortuary market.
The new generation of small instruments closely paralleled the mechanical design of the theatre organ in that both required an individual magnet and valve per pipe, based upon what organbuilders refer to as the unit principle. This is a radical departure from the much acclaimed Austin Universal Air Chest and the conventional slider, pitman and ventil windchests found in church organs. In the unit principle, each pipe can be accessed by any manual or pedal key as required, making unification possible. Conversely, in the straight chest system, the electrical impulse from the key contact must work through a matrix of stop and key actions before pipe speech. In addition to its close mechanical similarity, the mortuary instrument also paralleled tonally the emerging theatre organ of the early twentieth century. Each used as its first rank the stopped flute, and the Vox Humana was found early in the stoplists of both of these instruments.
The mortuary instrument was the quintessential unit pipe organ. As few as two ranks could be unified and duplexed into as many as eighteen speaking stops over two manuals and pedal (see Wicks Miniature). The two fundamental flue ranks, found in virtually every mortuary instrument, were the stopped flute, i.e., Bourdon, playable at 16, 8, 4, 22/3, and 2 foot pitches, and the Salicional, customarily playable at 8 and 4 foot pitches and sometimes at 16' TC. Together they provided the required "churchly" sound of the organ, reinforcing the religious nature of the funeral service and meeting the emotional needs of the bereaved. In addition, by combining these two ranks at different pitches, synthetic stops were produced, adding to the tonal palette. When the 22/3' Bourdon is added to the 8' Salicional, the result is an Oboe, a useful solo stop. Combining the 8' Bourdon with its 22/3' extension, the twelfth, produces a Quintadena sound. To give the illusion of greater tonal resources, builders renamed every pitch of a unit rank. This was customary with the stopped flute, but now the Salicional becomes a Contra Viol at 16' TC and a 4' Violina. The third rank in a mortuary organ, with the exception of Wicks, was quite often the Vox Humana. People were accustomed to hearing a quivering Vox Humana in church and theatre organs, and thus it augmented the ambience of a mortuary service. [The Vox Humana appeared to define the pipe organ of the 1920s far more even than the Zimbelstern and Positiv of the 1950s and 60s. In recent decades the horizontal trumpet has become a defining characteristic and almost a necessity.] A fourth rank in a mortuary organ would most likely be a Dulciana or Erzahler and a fifth rank, finally, a Diapason.
The mortuary instrument was, of necessity, a small one given the limited space available in a typical funeral home. Builders recognized the space limitations and developed a product to meet them. Möller, one of the few builders who actively solicited this market, wrote in its brochure describing a three-rank cabinet organ (Bourdon, Salicional, Diapason Conique): "M. P. Möller has developed an organ adequately meeting the requirements of a funeral service and so compact in size and reasonable in price that it finds a place in the equipment of every funeral director."5 The need for compactness is evident throughout the design and construction of the instrument and in the choice of pipe ranks and scales. Builders chose small strings, i.e., the Salicional, Viola and Aeoline, and used a smaller scale throughout the compass of the stopped flute to stay within cabinet dimensions. The most dramatic example of space economy was the use of free reeds in the 16' octave of the stopped flute, found in many cabinet instruments (see photo). These the industry reportedly obtained from Estey, the largest builder of reed organs and a logical supplier.
Perhaps two-thirds of all mortuary organs built were cabinet instruments, often with a player attachment, which could be placed almost anywhere and function effectively. At the James O'Donnell Funeral Home in Hannibal, Missouri, dating back five generations, the 1928 three-rank Wicks cabinet organ is located on a landing on the second floor with the music wafting down the stairway to the services room below.6 Many were installed in attics or wherever space was available. Typical was the 1924 three-rank Schoenstein placed in an alcove above the chapel floor at N. Gray Morticians in San Francisco.7
The Market
The demand for a pipe organ in the mortuary trade grew rapidly in the 1920s and reached its peak in the 1930s although there had been a few installations around the turn of the century. Hook and Hastings built a one-manual, nine-stop instrument, Opus 1246, for the Forest Hills Mortuary Chapel in Boston in 1885, and another one-manual, Opus 2243, for a mortuary in Canandaigua, New York in 1910.8 Hutchings built a two-manual, eight-stop duplexed organ for the West Parish Cemetery Chapel in Andover, Massachusetts in 1907.9
This emerging market coincided with a major shift in funeral services, from the home and church to the mortuary or cemetery chapel, well established by the 1920s.10 Morticians surmised their establishment must contain public rooms for casket selection, viewing and services, far more space than previously required for pre-service preparation. In metropolitan areas spacious facilities were built in popular architectural styles, typically with manicured and lighted lawns and off-street parking. In outlying neighborhoods and small towns, large former private dwellings were often converted into mortuaries. Soon a pipe organ became a competitive necessity, a matter of "keeping up with the Joneses" in a business sense. Möller recognized this in their brochure which read: "Music presents to the progressive mortician an opportunity to enhance his services. Only the dignified, artistic tones of a pipe organ can definitely fulfill the requirements necessary to make music the foremost advertising medium of the mortician."11 The J. P. Seeburg Corporation of Chicago was even more effusive. Advertising in Southern Funeral Director, a leading trade publication, they asked: "Has Your Funeral Home A Soul? What the Soul is to a human so is a Pipe Organ to the mortuary. Without the enthralling presence of its solemn music the service lacks that vital quality--sacred atmosphere."12
Funeral directors, who scarcely knew one organ stop from another, were indifferent to the origin of the instrument or its builder; they were acutely price conscious and were easily satisfied with anything that supplied the required churchly sound. A local market could often be supplied by builders' showrooms or agents. The 1928 Geneva organ in the prestigious Stine & McClure Mortuary in Kansas City, Missouri, restored in recent years by Jerry Dawson, began as a demonstrator on the balcony of the Jenkins Music Company downtown emporium.13 In the 1920s and 1930s a significant trade emerged in used instruments, from private residences and theaters, the latter often repossessed from failed movie houses. The two-manual, three-rank, 16-stop Estey installed in Resurrection Chapel at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, in 1930, had been built for the Estey Studio in Los Angeles and later installed in a local radio station.14 The Style D-Special Wurlitzer built for the American Theater in Walla Walla, Washington, in 1922 was installed in Elderding's Mortuary in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1935.15 Funeral homes became a promising place to unload a repossessed instrument and for the buyer no doubt a bargain. A survey of builder lists reveals that almost anything called a pipe organ could find new life (pun intended) in a mortuary. When Balcom & Vaughan of Seattle installed a three-rank instrument in 1941 in the Stoller Funeral Home in Camas, Washington, it comprised a Wurlitzer console, Morton windchest, Hinners swell shades, a Smith flute and a Kilgen Dulciana and Diapason.16
Builders
Builder response to and participation in the emerging mortuary market varied. The 1920s were a boom time for the industry, and with healthy order books and a substantial backlog, few appear to have directly solicited this business. Table 1 (p. 18) portrays the output of the five largest builders of funeral home organs: Estey, Reuter, Kilgen, Möller and Wicks, who together accounted for over 75 percent of industry production. Möller and Wicks, who booked sales nationwide, built slightly over half (57 percent) of the total. Among other well-known builders of this era, Austin, Casavant and Hinners each built fewer than twenty mortuary organs, like Kilgen mostly in their immediate and neighboring states and provinces, while Hall, Hillgreen-Lane, Kimball, Pilcher and Wangerin-Weickhart each built less than a dozen organs for funeral homes, again mostly nearby.
Eastern builders, notably Skinner and Hook & Hastings, were conspicuously absent from this market. Perhaps they viewed excessive unification, the cornerstone of the mortuary organ, as "low brow," beneath their dignity and carefully cultivated elitist image. More objectively, they were no doubt conscious of the intense price competition, the governing factor in this market, and, otherwise occupied, were not disposed to actively pursue this business, let alone develop a specific product to compete in this market. Austin sold only three organs to funeral homes in the 1920s.
The Great Depression of the 1930s was a time of turmoil in the pipe organ industry. Builders struggled to find work; some survived, others failed. The theater, hotel and private residence markets were gone and the church market severely curtailed. Conversely, the mortuary market "boomed" as evidenced by the number of instruments and percent of total built during this decade as shown in Table 1. All builders welcomed funeral home business including Aeolian-Skinner who, in 1936, built a two-manual instrument with Duo-Art Player, Opus 949, for the Hillcrest Mausoleum in Dallas, Texas.17 The next year they installed one of their Marie Antoinette models (see specification), the largest of several unit series, with a curious opus number 30038, in a mortuary chapel in Acton, Massachusetts.18 With seven ranks, fourteen stops and 427 pipes, this instrument is larger and far less unified than customarily found in mortuary organs.
Builders offered financial and other incentives to clinch a sale in this market (perhaps now driven by competitive emulation)--one which ran counter to the severely depressed national economy. When the Reuter Company signed a contract with the Eylar Funeral Home in Kansas City, Missouri, in August, 1938 for a three-rank organ (21 stops plus chimes) for $1,539, the down payment was only 20 percent, the buyer given a 30-day option to accept the organ and a year's free service19 (see also Wicks below). The importance of the funeral home market in this decade to one and perhaps other builders was underscored by John Sperling, recently retired tonal director of Wicks, who commented that during the 1930s mortuary sales accounted for 25 percent or more of Wicks' output.20
The mortuary pipe organ market essentially ended with World War II; only a few pipe instruments were built for this venue in the postwar era. By the end of the 1940s the electronic organ had gained enough acceptance that its lower cost and smaller space appealed to price-conscious funeral directors. Two recent exceptions are the four-rank unit instrument for the Simminger-Book Funeral Home in Cincinnati, Ohio, built by M. W. Lively & Company in 1988,21 and the 65-rank, four-manual organ built by the Quimby Company for the Skyrose Chapel at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, California in 1997.22
Wicks
The Wicks Company, founded in 1906 in Highland, Illinois, was the preeminent builder in the mortuary market when measured by the number of instruments produced and the geographical scope of their installations (see Table 1). It is a tribute to the enterprising spirit of this firm that they capitalized on their strengths in the highly competitive pipe organ business to design and build a series of instruments to meet the budget and space requirements of any venue. Actively soliciting this market, the Wicks brochure read: "A field in which Wicks organs serve with special effectiveness is that of the mortuary chapel and funeral home."23 Direct-Electric® action, championed and patented by Wicks, requires much less space than a pouch windchest, and thus is ideally suited for a cabinet instrument or cramped attic installation. Unification and duplexing, the heart of a mortuary instrument, are easily obtained in this individual valve chest. The Wicks business philosophy of being the low cost supplier was a major factor in the intense price competition in this market as were, no doubt, the liberal payment terms, particularly in the 1930s. They largely explain Wicks' notable success in coast to coast sales. For the Drummond instrument in 1937, a Sonatina model plus Vox Humana and chimes (see photo p. 17), priced at $1790.00 less $100 for the former organ, the terms were ten percent down, 30 percent upon installation, and the balance (60 percent) in fourteen equal monthly payments of $70.00 plus interest (not specified).24
Direct-Electric® was the mechanical foundation of the Wicks organ and was emphasized in their mortuary sales publicity. "The mood of mourners and their friends is met by taste in appearance and rich beauty of sound. Direct-Electric® action gives unvarying response to the organist's genius--a quality of dependability under all conditions of temperature and humidity. This exclusive Wicks feature provides a great saving in up-keep for an instrument in frequent daily use. There will be no embarrassing moment in a service by reason of a split leather or membrane, because the Wicks Direct-Electric® control makes no use of these obsolete materials. Swift electric application to every call of the performer brings magic response."25
The prospective Wicks buyer could choose from nine named models, graduated in size and price, with either attached or detached console and optional player attachment. The series began with the Miniature (see box p. 16), a two-manual instrument and the smallest one built, measuring five feet three inches wide, four feet eleven inches deep including console, and five feet six inches high. The 16' octave of the stopped flute was free reeds, and the bottom octave of the Salicional was borrowed from the flute. The Sonata, also a two-rank specification, had pipes in the pedal instead of free reeds and a full compass Salicional. Three-rank instruments included the Symphony, Concerto, Fuga and Fuga DeLuxe. The Rhapsody was a four rank model. The third and fourth ranks were the Open Diapason and Aeoline, the latter a small scale (almost pencil) string chosen, no doubt, for windchest space economy. Wicks' low cost profile explains the absence of the Vox Humana and other reeds in their standard mortuary stoplists, although the Vox Humana and Chimes would be supplied when requested. Reeds require significantly more man-hours to build and to voice not to mention required maintenance with their temperamental tuning and troublesome sensitivity to neglect.
Recognizing the importance of visual as well as tonal ambience in the quality of the funeral setting, Wicks wrote: "The installation of a Wicks in your chapel will be tailored to your individual situation in design, location, size and coloring."26 In addition to the choices among tonal resources and cabinet dimensions, the buyer could select from Gothic, Roman and General grills. Wicks developed a user friendly device called an Automatic Pedal Accompaniment wherein the bass note of a chord on a manual plays the 16' Bourdon pipe in the Pedal and thus "it is impossible to play the incorrect pedal note if the manuals are properly played,"27 no doubt an important feature for pianists turned organists. The development of standardized models for sale to mortuaries continued into the early 1940s when one-manual, three-rank organs were built in groups of five. Ten groups were built.28
Summary
The mortuary pipe organ occupies a small niche in the pantheon of the King of Instruments. In the history of organbuilding, its development is a further illustration of the fundamentals of market segments and the demand for keyboard music in a specific institutional setting in the twentieth century. It is another example of the broad sweep of the pipe organ and keyboard music in American culture and western civilization, and a testimony to the eloquence of organ music in the funeral service. The American organbuilding industry, long known for its mechanical and tonal innovation, produced an instrument that met the stringent tonal, space and cost requirements of funeral homes so successfully that it displaced the reed organ and piano, leading to the sale of several hundred instruments to funeral homes. Together with other small organs they contributed significantly to builder survival in the dark days of the Great Depression.
For research assistance and critical comments on earlier drafts of this paper the author gratefully acknowledges: Gordon Auchincloss, E. A. Boadway, Jerry Dawson, Barbara George, Brent Johnson, Richard Kichline, Allen Kinzey, Larry Leonard, David Lewis, Charles McManis, George Nelson, Albert Neutel, Michael Quimby, Dorothy Schaake, Elizabeth Schmitt, Jack Sievert, John Sperling, Georg Steinmeyer, Robert Vaughan, and R. E. Wagner.
Wicks Miniature
Analysis
8' Flute 85 pipes (1-85)
8' Salicional 61 pipes (13-73)
16' Sub Bass 12 reeds (1-12, free reeds)
Console attached, Tremolo, Crescendo Pedal, Swell Pedal
Organ Space: 5 feet 6 inches high, 5 feet 3 inches wide, 4 feet 11 inches deep including console
2 ranks, 18 speaking stops, 146 pipes
GREAT ORGAN
16' Bourdon T. C.
8' Flute
8' Salicional
4' Flute d'Amour
4' Violina
2' Piccolo
SWELL ORGAN
16' Bourdon T.C.
8' Stopped Flute
8' Viola
8' Quintadena (Syn)
4' Flute
4' Violina
22/3' Nazard
8' Oboe (syn)
PEDAL ORGAN
16' Sub Bass
8' Gedeckt
4' Flute
4' Violina
Wicks Rhapsody
Analysis
8' Open Diapason 61 pipes (1-61)
8' Flute 85 pipes (1-85)
8' Salicional 73 pipes (1-73)
8' Aeoline 61 pipes (1-61)
16' Bourdon 12 pipes (1-12)
Console attached or detached, Tremolo, Crescendo Pedal, Swell Pedal, Automatic Pedal Accompaniment. This model sometimes included a switch wired for 20 chimes starting at 4' A (note 22 on the keyboard).
Organ Space (detached console): 8 feet 10 inches high, 7 feet 4 inches wide, 4 feet 6 inches deep
4 ranks, 28 speaking stops, 292 pipes
GREAT ORGAN
16' Bourdon
16' Contra Viol T. C.
8' Open Diapason
8' Flute
8' Salicional
8' Aeoline
4' Flute d'Amour
4' Violina
22/3' Twelfth
2' Piccolo
Blank Tablet (for future addition of chimes)
SWELL ORGAN
16' Bourdon
16' Contra Viol T. C.
8' Open Diapason
8' Stopped Diapason
8' Viola
8' Aeoline
8' Quintadena (Syn)
4' Flute
4' Violina
22/3' Nazard
2' Piccolo
8' Oboe (syn)
Blank Tablet
PEDAL ORGAN
16' Bourdon
8' Open Diapason
8' Gedeckt
8' Cello
8' Aeoline
4' Flute
