Books › Ayars, Contributions to the Art of Music in America by the Music Industries of Boston (1937) — the Squier, Farley, Rettberg, Rockwell and Elias Howe matter, 1937 › scan 181
Scan 181
Ayars, Contributions to the Art of Music in America by the Music Industries of Boston (1937) — the Squier, Farley, Rettberg, Rockwell and Elias Howe matter, 1937
15 lines. Read by computer on 27 September 2026. Printed page 155. See the scan on archive.org.
1played. It was probably used in Holden Chapel at Harvard University, which owns it and had it restored by James Cole.45
3b. The Advent of the Music Hall Organ, Boston
5"Organ playing in this country was given a stimulus when the great organ in Music Hall, Boston was opened November 2, 1863. This large instrument was the first thorough concert organ in the country. A group of organists, B. J. Lang, John K. Paine, Eugene Thayer, S. F. Tuckerman, John H. Willcox and George W. Morgan were the first to play on it."46 It took five years for E. F. Walcker and Cie. of Ludwigsburg, Germany, to build this great organ, 47 feet wide, 18 feet deep, 70 feet high, with 4 manuals, 89 speaking stops, 58 note keyboards and 5474 pipes, weighing nearly 70 tons.47-48 This organ had a large-scaled 32 ft. front of tin, certainly the first 32 ft. metal in America. The façade was, and is easily the finest and most imposing in the country. The two largest front pipes, 28 inches in diameter inside and 31 feet 3 inches high, would cost $800 apiece to build now.49 They were made of tin blocked in and cast in a single sheet. There are none like them in the United States today because though others are as large they are not blocked in.49
7The influence of the Music Hall organ on American builders,50 notably Hook and Hastings, the George S. Hutchings Company, and the Roosevelt Company of New York, and on the choice of occupation made by many who became leading organists of the country is so important that its later history is given here. This organ was used in Music Hall for only about twenty years and then removed, because its pitch, nearly a semi-tone above international pitch A 435, made it too high to be used with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which wanted the platform occupied by the organ, and there was not enough money to have it lowered at that time. Furthermore it had become so badly in need of repair through leakage and defects in the building that not all of it could be used. This organ, the contract price of which had been $55,000 including extras, was sold in 1884 for $5,000 to W. O. Grover. He, as a trustee, had bought
945 Information supplied by James Cole.
1046 Fisher, William Arms. Notes on Music in Old Boston pp. 45 & 46.
1147 For further specifications see The Organist's Quarterly Journal and Review, April 1874 pp. 4-7.
1248 Lahee, Henry C. "Organs and Organ Building in New England." New England Magazine, December 1897 p. 496.
1349 Information supplied by William B. Goodwin, Lowell, Mass., organ builder.
1450 Covell, William King. The Boston Music Hall Organ p. 4.
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