The legendary Woolsey Hall organ. The console of the Woolsey Hall organ.On Thursday at 3 pm, I left my Honolulu condo for the airport, and it wasn’t until Friday afternoon about 3:15 pm that I walked into my New Haven hotel. Luckily I got upgraded to first class on the long first leg to Chicago, and watched four movies. The extra legroom with the lie-down seat (except I didn’t sleep a wink!) plus the nice dinner and breakfast, was certainly a pleasant surprise!
I’m in Connecticut at Yale University to hear my former student, Joey Fala, play the first of four recitals in fulfillment of the Master of Music degree in organ performance. I had booked a shuttle from Bradley International Airport in Hartford, CT with Connecticut Limousines, but to my surprise, a large 55-passenger bus pulled up to the curb. It turned out I was the only passenger on the bus to New Haven, about an hour and ten minutes away!
George Fergus (on the right)After checking into my hotel, I got a bite to eat, took a short nap, and set off for Woolsey Hall, about six blocks away where I heard George Fergus, a second-year graduate student play William Bolcom’s Free Fantasia on ‘O Zion haste’ and ‘How firm a foundation,’ Sigfrid Karg-Elert’s Hymn to the Stars from the Seven Pastels on the Lake of Constance, Charles-Marie Widor’s March of the Night Watchmen and Louis Vierne’s Fifth Symphony for Organ. With every note, the audience was enveloped with a warm ambiance, and the loud portions of the program were powerful but not overpowering. Fergus showed off the organ well, bringing out many subtle colors with his choice of stops (registration).
Joe Dzeda has been the organ’s curator since 1968.After the concert, a few of us were treated to a private tour of the large E. M. Skinner organ (1928) by Joe Dzeda, one of two full-time caretakers of the instrument. He has been maintaining the organ since 1968 and his affection and meticulous work on the instrument was obvious.
The first stop on the mini-tour was to see the special seat built for President William Howard Taft, whose son graduated from Yale. The seats in the hall are uncomfortable and small, and the huge, 350+ lb. man would not have fit in any of the regular wooden seats.
The extra-wide seat built for William Howard Taft. The hooks underneath are for hanging hats.Hence the extra-wide seat, as shown to the right. The hooks underneath the seat were designed to hang a hat, part of every man’s wardrobe in those days.
We entered the organ chambers in the back and I took so many pictures that I created a small slideshow for you. Now, I’ve been inside quite a few organ chambers and what I was most impressed with was how spotlessly clean it was, and there was absolutely no dust anywhere! Even the floor was so clean you could have eaten off it.
Ernest M. Skinner
Here I am in the echo division.
4 thoughts on “The legendary Woolsey Hall organ”
enjoy! thanks for the tour. jb
The Woolsey hall organ has a unique and beautiful sound, however, to describe it as E.M. Skinner is wrong. It is a rebuild of a previous organ and does not sound exactly like other large Skinners.
While what you say is quite true, by the time the original organ had been built, Skinner had been at Hutchings, developing and perfecting the earliest versions of his chest actions. Harry Van Wart was also present at Hutchings at the time, and took everything he learned at Hutchings — including much of what he was exposed to, working along with Skinner — onto his next employer, Steere, where he was involved in the building of Newberry 2.0. By the time Skinner Organ Co. came along to build Newberry 3.0, there was already a little bit of the Old Man insinuated throughout. Skinner and Harrison, still in the late stages of their “honeymoon,” each took on different parts of the work, with each responsible for their own specialties. However, both the ears and a scan of the stop list, show that in spite of Harrison’s influence, the diapason choruses, while brighter, were decidedly more Romantic than where GDH would eventually take the company under the A-S name. By the way, I love the way the world of organ-building has a sort of continuum which runs through it. After what remained of Steere was absorbed by the Skinner Organ Co., the name of Harry Van Wart, who worked with Skinner at Steere, and for Skinner at the pre-Marks E.M. Skinner Organ Co. pops up again at about the time Opus 722 was building, this time in as a supervisor in connection with the giant Midmer-Losh in Boardwalk Hall. Perhaps there’s a little Skinner genetic material hiding within the world’s largest musical instrument, as well.
Thanks for posting these pictures and your thoughts. I was just listening to Joey Fala on YouTube. He is a great organist. You must be very proud of his accomplishments. He is a gifted performer. His pedal work in particular impressed me.
As a young man, I had the privilege of working for a local organ builder in my hometown and while I did not make it my life’s work, I thoroughly enjoyed it. At the time, I was sorting out what I wanted to do and so I took a break from school. After my time spent working on pipe organs, basically a year spent assisting the experts who did the real work, I learned that I really liked the music. As well, I was struck by how well designed and logical an organ could be; a good design philosophy is essential. This insight was part of what convinced me to go back to school and to study engineering. What also convinced me was that no one who works on organs ever has an easy time of it, financially.
To your point, that is a very clean organ; very few of the organs I worked on were even remotely as clean as that one.
enjoy! thanks for the tour. jb
The Woolsey hall organ has a unique and beautiful sound, however, to describe it as E.M. Skinner is wrong. It is a rebuild of a previous organ and does not sound exactly like other large Skinners.
While what you say is quite true, by the time the original organ had been built, Skinner had been at Hutchings, developing and perfecting the earliest versions of his chest actions. Harry Van Wart was also present at Hutchings at the time, and took everything he learned at Hutchings — including much of what he was exposed to, working along with Skinner — onto his next employer, Steere, where he was involved in the building of Newberry 2.0. By the time Skinner Organ Co. came along to build Newberry 3.0, there was already a little bit of the Old Man insinuated throughout. Skinner and Harrison, still in the late stages of their “honeymoon,” each took on different parts of the work, with each responsible for their own specialties. However, both the ears and a scan of the stop list, show that in spite of Harrison’s influence, the diapason choruses, while brighter, were decidedly more Romantic than where GDH would eventually take the company under the A-S name. By the way, I love the way the world of organ-building has a sort of continuum which runs through it. After what remained of Steere was absorbed by the Skinner Organ Co., the name of Harry Van Wart, who worked with Skinner at Steere, and for Skinner at the pre-Marks E.M. Skinner Organ Co. pops up again at about the time Opus 722 was building, this time in as a supervisor in connection with the giant Midmer-Losh in Boardwalk Hall. Perhaps there’s a little Skinner genetic material hiding within the world’s largest musical instrument, as well.
Thanks for posting these pictures and your thoughts. I was just listening to Joey Fala on YouTube. He is a great organist. You must be very proud of his accomplishments. He is a gifted performer. His pedal work in particular impressed me.
As a young man, I had the privilege of working for a local organ builder in my hometown and while I did not make it my life’s work, I thoroughly enjoyed it. At the time, I was sorting out what I wanted to do and so I took a break from school. After my time spent working on pipe organs, basically a year spent assisting the experts who did the real work, I learned that I really liked the music. As well, I was struck by how well designed and logical an organ could be; a good design philosophy is essential. This insight was part of what convinced me to go back to school and to study engineering. What also convinced me was that no one who works on organs ever has an easy time of it, financially.
To your point, that is a very clean organ; very few of the organs I worked on were even remotely as clean as that one.
Thank you again for posting these pictures.