11 A Portable Organ and a
Glass Armonica

It may be a little organ, but I have big plans for it!

—E. Power Biggs to Herman Schlicker, 1952

Few people had a better opportunity than Biggs to feel the pulse of the American organ-building world. His popularity as a recitalist peaked during the 1950s, and of the hundreds of recitals he gave nationwide during this period, many were dedications and openings of new instruments. Keen observer that he was, and possessed of more than the average organist’s interest in what made an organ tick tonally and mechanically, he was quick to note the trends exemplified by some of this newer work and always generous in his praise of good tone and design.

During the 1930s and 1940s the Aeolian-Skinner Company, under the leadership of G. Donald Harrison, was the bellwether of the industry, and from its soot-stained brick factory in Dorchester came some of the most distinguished and innovative organs of that era. But the 1950s saw the emergence of other firms whose work Biggs began watching with interest. Although Walter Holtkamp of Cleveland had made some rather bold innovations in the 1930s and 1940s—Rückpositivs, insistence on unchambered placement, and the use of slider windchests—his work remained largely unrecognized by the eastern moguls until the early 1950s, when he began to gain a following among avant-garde organists such as Melville Smith, Arthur Poister, Robert Noehren, and H. Frank Bozyan. Their support led to Holtkamp’s securing prestigious contracts at Syracuse University, Yale University, Oberlin College, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which in turn gained him a following among the younger organists.

Likewise stepping out of the shadows was Herman Schlicker of Buffalo. Trained in Alsace and Denmark, he emigrated to the United States as a young man in 1925 and set up his own workshop in Buffalo in 1932. But again it was not until the 1950s that Schlicker became nationally visible and began to collect his own coterie of partisans, particularly in Lutheran circles, where certain influential organists were embracing the “neo-baroque” concepts of the German Orgelbewegung. Biggs had concertized on some of the newest instruments by Holtkamp and Schlicker and noted with approval the tonal direction these firms were taking. When Biggs’s advice concerning organ builders was solicited in the early 1950s, he usually recommended only three: Aeolian-Skinner, Holtkamp, and Schlicker.

Meanwhile, relations between Biggs and Harrison had cooled somewhat. In late 1952 Biggs had requested some tonal alterations in the Germanic Museum organ. In particular he was dissatisfied with the Principal in the Great and suggested that it be replaced by something he termed an “English Salicional.” Just what he had in mind is not certain; perhaps this was the name of a stop he had admired in another Harrison organ. What he got was a standard Viola da Gamba, and he did not care for that any more than for the old Principal. At the same time he also ordered a 16’ bass extension for the Quintaten, the installation of which seems to have been delayed. Early in 1953 Harrison sent Biggs a bill for the work, and Biggs complained: “I’d be glad to pay for anything that represents progress for the organ, but its shortcomings won’t be cured in this way. I should think that the company would have the artistic interest to improve the instrument, and it’s too bad if this isn’t so.” He also complained about the mechanical condition of the new Symphony Hall organ: “we can hardly depend on it when scheduling broadcasts or a recording session. On practically every occasion we have had difficulties.”

Biggs’s letter had an edge of exasperation to it; Harrison’s reply had a somewhat wounded tone: “Some of the things you say may be justified. However, other things hurt me not a little.” Harrison agreed that if Biggs did not like the replacement for the Principal they should get together and decide on something else: “I certainly agree that you must have exactly what you want in this regard.” As for the Symphony Hall organ, Harrison allowed that while there had indeed been troubles, 90 percent of them concerned the console cables, which the builders were planning to replace with a newer type. He also made a point of criticizing “the way the console is banged up and pushed around” by the stagehands, since the elevator that both Biggs and Harrison had hoped for had never materialized.

The rift between Biggs and Harrison continued to widen, however, and in the summer of 1953 Biggs arranged to have the maintenance of the Symphony Hall, Tanglewood, and Museum organs turned over to Roy E. H. Carlson, whose subsequent work, particularly in tuning, seems to have met with Biggs’s approval. Harrison, for his part, probably did not fail to notice that Biggs was recommending other builders. By fall the gossip was on the organ fraternity grapevine, and Biggs received a fatherly reprimand from Walter Holtkamp:

Jimmy, me boy,—there is too much talk going around about the parting of the ways of one E.P.B. and G.D.H. I don’t like it. You both have too much meaning for each other and together, you have too much meaning for the American organ scene to so upset your public. If I may, I would suggest an arms around the shoulder picture in Father Gruenstein’s paper. You are clever. You can contrive it.

Holtkamp’s conciliatory snapshot unfortunately never materialized, in The Diapason or elsewhere, and the incident of the Methuen jacket notes in 1954 only widened the breach. What little interaction there was between the two after this time was not particularly cordial. In June 1956 Harrison was felled by a heart attack while finishing the organ in St. Thomas’s Church in New York. Into his place as tonal director of Aeolian-Skinner stepped the leading shareholder, Joseph Whiteford. Biggs, among others, felt he was ill equipped to inherit Harrison’s mantle—an opinion shortly to be confirmed by the beginning of the firm’s decline. But even before Harrison’s death Aeolian-Skinner’s name had ceased to appear in Biggs’s recommendations to organ purchasers.

For a concert organist, practice is both a necessity and a problem. Biggs had access to two good Aeolian-Skinner instruments, in the Germanic Museum and in the Harvard Congregational Church, but use of the first was restricted by the Museum’s hours, and the church was farther away. At home, he relied heavily on piano practice, having acquired a good Steinway for that purpose, and worked out his pedaling on an electrified Estey reed organ.

In the spring of 1952 Biggs dedicated a large Schlicker organ in St. Paul’s Church in Buffalo, with which he was considerably impressed. At the same time he visited Schlicker’s factory and noted with interest a small and compact practice organ being built for a local university. The more he thought about it, the more interested he became. In May he wrote Schlicker, “Be sure to let me know when the little two manual with pedal practice organ is finished! We want to come right out to Buffalo to see and hear this.”

The instrument in question was a “unit” organ, in which certain ranks of pipes are made to do duty for more than one stop or pitch, and of course it had electric action. But its stoplist and voicing followed neo-baroque lines, it was unenclosed, and its visual design, while compact and functional, was not unattractive. Biggs, with typical caution, wanted to see how the prototype would work out, but it is evident that he had decided that he wanted something similar for himself. By the fall of 1952 he had seen and been impressed by Schlicker’s first attempt and had placed his order. Biggs’s instrument was to be a little larger than the one for the University of Buffalo, but the major difference was that Biggs wanted his made so it could be easily dismantled and reassembled. With his usual ingenuity, Biggs had decided that besides serving as a practice organ at home, it could do double duty as a portable concert instrument, thus extending his range to places where there was no permanently installed pipe organ.

Biggs was conversant with the technical and tonal aspects of organs, and as the work progressed, his suggestions found their way to Schlicker’s desk with a fair amount of regularity. The pitch was to be higher than A=440, to enable the organ to be used with Symphony orchestras, most of which tended to play sharp (even in 1952 the Boston Symphony Orchestra was playing at A=444). Also on Biggs’s list was tracker touch—“just a very slight resistance, of course, to approximate the sense of playing a larger instrument.” By December he was addressing the details of the pipework. Schlicker wondered whether the organ should be scaled for a small room or a concert hall. Biggs suggested that it be

designed for concert use (both solo and with instruments) in small auditoriums, and for broadcasting and recording. Its use as a practice instrument in a small room is secondary, and one can always practice on just a few stops. However, quality rather than quantity is the idea, and I picture the instrument as having a certain beautiful softness of effect, rather than volume.

He hoped that the reed stop (Ranket) could be available on both manual and pedal at more than one pitch, and that the Gedeckt could be extended down from 16’ pitch so that a 16’ flue would also be available on the Pedal.

By early spring of 1953 Biggs was urging Schlicker to move ahead with the design work of the organ, which in the meantime had acquired an additional reed stop and, at Schlicker’s suggestion, 16’ extensions on the Great as well as the Pedal. By summer the pipes were being voiced, Biggs had made an inspection trip, and concerts involving the organ were being planned for the following spring. Still later the Bourdon unit, now fully detachable for instances (such as continuo playing) where the Pedal might not be needed, had been stretched from 44 to 56 notes to allow for a 4’ extension. By December the organ had been christened “The Cambridge Portative” and was being measured for a specially constructed trailer to be hauled by Biggs’s Studebaker. In the same month it was played with its “twin” at the University of Buffalo in a concert that was also broadcast over CBS radio.

Biggs lost no time in publicizing his new acquisition. Trade journals were notified, an article appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, and a photograph of the portative accompanied Biggs’s recently written article for the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Biggs was enthusiastic about the new instrument’s potential; writing to Schlicker in February 1954, he predicted a bright future for the design: “I think it’s very evident that you could sell the Portatives like hot cakes if you made a brochure and sent it to all colleges and schools of music in the country.” Shortly after this the Cambridge Portative was packed into its trailer and taken to Washington, D.C., where it was heard on March 5 in a concert of chamber music for organ and strings at the Coolidge Auditorium. Biggs’s program notes sum up the rationale of the organ’s design:

Standing in the open the organ gains in “presence”—both aural and visual. Seventy-six of the pedal pipes, grouped together into two units, serve as a reflecting shell for the instrument. The instrument may be disassembled and transported anywhere for concerts, thus affording a new flexibility and musical usefulness for the organ.

The “76” pedal pipes may have been a misprint; there were actually only 56. In describing the organ, the Washington Evening Star reviewer added a folksy touch that probably tickled Biggs’s well-developed funny bone: “The large pipes [are] enclosed in a reflecting shell in the rear and the pretty small ones out front [are] like curios in a whatnot.”

The same reviewer, in a more serious vein, revealed not only a fair knowledge of what was going on in the organ world but also a sensitivity to what Biggs was trying to convey musically. He liked the new organ’s crispness and clarity, the “marvelous almost touchable quality” of its sounds, and the “brilliance and intimacy” of Biggs’s performance of the Mozart “Epistle” Sonatas. “The organist,” he wrote, “seemed a part of the proceedings, not like a player in a large church who presses the keys and after a lapse of time listens to a reflection of the music he has made.” But the reviewer was disappointed with the one work (Piston’s 1944 Partita, originally commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge) that was played on the Auditorium’s old Skinner organ: “The hollow and muffled sound of the organ seemed to be coming from the green room, rather like the ghost of Hamlet’s father on strike.” Since Biggs never cared for that particular organ, he probably could not disagree with the critic, especially since the comparison helped to put the Portative in an even more favorable light. Apparently the Auditorium’s administrators were themselves finding the Skinner organ something of a liability, for a year later they sold it to a Catholic church in Georgetown.

Shortly after the Washington concert, Biggs embarked on a three-month European tour, one of the souvenirs of which was a more portable portative, a little one-stop Steinmeyer instrument of limited musical use, but ornamental, and handy for some of Biggs’s occasional illustrated lectures. In August 1954 Biggs took the Cambridge Portative to Canada for a well-reviewed concert. The instrument spent the rest of the year as a practice organ, occupying half of the large double parlor in the Biggs’s home; but in 1955 it went on the road again and was played in June by Biggs at a regional convention of the American Guild of Organists in Reading, Pennsylvania. On this and many subsequent occasions the Portative was to prove the validity of its original concept by providing a suitable organ in halls where the only alternative would have been an electronic instrument. It also gave Biggs additional ammunition when it came to answering inquiries from small churches that did not think they could afford a real organ, for the instrument cost little more than a suitably sized electronic substitute.

Biggs with the Cambridge Portative, 1954

Biggs with a model of a hydraulis on the “Omnibus” show, 1956

Biggs was in a position to know the going price of the Portative because, as his correspondence with Schlicker proves, he paid it in full. Rumors were being circulated to the contrary, however, and Biggs became highly indignant upon hearing insinuations that his endorsement of Schlicker was due to the Portative’s having been a gift. The source of the rumor appears to have been Aeolian-Skinner partisans, and Biggs thought it a matter for his lawyers. He wrote to them in May 1955, stating firmly that he had “always paid full professional price for all instruments, including our present Schlicker, also the Aeolian-Skinner in the Germanic Museum, and contributed a thousand dollars . . . towards the Aeolian-Skinner organ in Symphony Hall.” The episode blew over quickly, but it did nothing to improve relations between Biggs and Aeolian-Skinner, which, intentionally or not, had irritated Biggs further by the unauthorized use of his picture in an advertising brochure. Actually it was an old picture, depicting Biggs, Harrison, and Albert Schweitzer at the factory in more congenial days. Had the former good feelings still existed, Biggs probably would not have objected to its use.

In December 1955 Biggs made his first television appearance with the Portative. He braved the wintry weather to tow it to Montreal, where he appeared with the CBC orchestra on CBC-TV’s “Concert Hour.” In February 1956 he was in New York for a solo telecast of his own on the popular “Omnibus” program, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. In that half-hour special, Biggs, with all the stage presence and aplomb of a seasoned TV personality, reviewed the whole history of the organ and its music in laymen’s terms. Sharing the stage with him were the Cambridge Portative, on which he demonstrated the various families of organ tone, and a variety of props, including an assortment of organ pipes, a syrinx, the little Steinmeyer portative, and a half-scale model of a hydraulis borrowed from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The script was written by Biggs himself, who also supplied some of the graphics along with taped excerpts from his recordings of European organs.

Biggs and Schlicker collaborated on two other projects during the 1950s. Both had their creative and adventurous elements; and while one of them, with some qualifications, might have been called a success, the other was almost a total disaster.

The first of these projects involved the rebuilding, in 1957, of a late nineteenth-century tracker-action organ housed in a handsome eighteenth-century case in Boston’s famous Old North Church. A gift for musical purposes had been made to the church by Amelia Peabody, and Charles Russell Peck, then vicar of the church, approached Biggs for advice. Since the amount of the gift was insufficient to purchase a new organ, Biggs recommended that the old one be thoroughly rebuilt by Schlicker. Schlicker’s firm at that time was one of the few in the country that had some familiarity with new tracker-action organs, but it had only limited experience in rebuilding old ones. It was agreed that a new and enlarged Pedal division was essential, and although the original mechanical action of the manuals was retained, the new Pedal had electric action. The Tenor-C Swell windchest was extended to full compass, but no wholesale rebuilding of either of the two manual chests was attempted, thus some serious faults in the form of ill-fitting sliders and cracked table-boards remained. Several tonal changes were made, but attempts at revoicing some of the nineteenth-century pipework in the neo-baroque style were less than successful. A rather crude electro-pneumatic combination action and a unified Quintadena rank on a separate electric-action chest, playable on all divisions, added to the confused eclecticism of the result.

Despite its faults, the Old North project was a noteworthy breakthrough in a period when the standard treatment of similar organs was still routine electrification or worse. Biggs dedicated the completed organ on June 9, 1958, and he later featured the instrument on a broadcast. This exposure, plus good publicity in the trade journals and newspapers, gave needed encouragement to both organists and builders who were leaning in the direction of a more sympathetic treatment of old American organs. Biggs chose to ignore the hybrid nature of the rebuilt Old North instrument when he stated his views on organ action in an article in the Christian Science Monitor for June 29: “The tracker action makes an organ a musical instrument. Electricity makes it a mechanical instrument.”

The other project in which Biggs and Schlicker were involved was in many ways a quixotic one. It grew out of Biggs’s interests in Americana and musical technology, plus the coincidence, in 1956, of the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s birth and the 250th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s birth. Biggs put the two together and came up with the Glass Armonica, a musical instrument invented by Franklin and written for by Mozart.

The idea of extracting music from glasses was not original with Franklin. No one knows who first discovered that rubbing a wet finger around the rim of a wineglass will produce a pleasing musical sound, or that a series of glasses can be “tuned” to produce a musical scale by varying the amount of liquid in them. By the eighteenth century specially made and tuned sets of graduated glasses had been fitted in wooden cases so that they could be played by a single performer. And such performers began to materialize, to the delight of novelty-seeking audiences. One of the most notorious of these virtuosi was the Irishman Richard Pockrich, whom Franklin apparently heard perform in England.

The manner in which this sort of glass instrument had to be played placed limitations on the speed and complexity of the music performed. On his return to America, Franklin conceived an improvement on the instrument whose sounds had so charmed him. The glasses were replaced by glass bowls of graduated size, nested inside each other and mounted on a spindle turned by a treadle. This construction allowed the compass of the instrument to be increased by as much as three octaves. Since the edges of the bowls were closer together and it was they, rather than the fingers, that went around, performance of more sophisticated music was possible, and serious composers were attracted to the improved instrument.

By the end of the eighteenth century Franklin’s invention had become more popular in England and on the Continent than in his native country, and it was only a matter of time before attempts were made to provide it with a keyboard. In Europe, at least, this seems to have met with some success. A blind girl, Marianne Kirchgessner, emerged as a virtuoso on the keyboard version, which now went by Franklin’s Italianate sobriquet of “Armonica.” Marianne’s playing attracted the attention of Mozart, who wrote a solo and a quintet for her, plus a third work that was never completed. Beethoven, Naumann, Martini, and others contributed to the growing repertoire, but, as Biggs observed in some program notes written in 1956, “the gathering thunders of nineteenth century romanticism gradually blotted out the soft and subtle sounds of the glasses,” and the instrument faded into obscurity. At the height of its popularity there were a fair number of armonicas around, with and without keyboards, but glass is a fragile substance, and the mortality rate was high. One armonica was accidentally dropped following a successful concert; another was knocked over by an unhappy sow; yet another was shattered by a falling painting. The few survivors now rest silently in museums.

With the Mozart and Franklin anniversaries approaching, Biggs thought it a good time to break that silence. His voluminous correspondence and library research began early in 1955, and one of his first discoveries was that while Franklin’s own keyboardless Armonica still existed in a Philadelphia residence, not one keyboard version or fragment thereof survived anywhere. This, of course, was the instrument Biggs was most interested in, since only with a keyboard could some of the more complex music of Mozart be played. When hopes of finding a restorable antique faded, Biggs persuaded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to sponsor the construction of one, and the Academy in turn interested the Franklin Savings Bank in financing the project. One of the Academy’s members, Harlow Shapley of the Harvard Observatory, caught Biggs’s enthusiasm and became a willing accomplice to his research and fund-raising activities.

With funding secured, Herman Schlicker was engaged to devise and build the playing mechanism, and the Corning Glass Company was to make the hand-blown glass bowls. The future of Biggs as armonica virtuoso looked rosy, and he began collecting scores of works that had been written for or played on eighteenth-century armonicas. As word got around, there were offers of concerts, and Columbia showed mild interest in a recording.

Work got under way in the spring of 1955, with the deadline for completion a year away. By November the glasses were finished, and Biggs and Schlicker went to the Corning plant the following month to assist in their tuning. By January the glasses were being fitted to the mechanism in Schlicker’s shop, and the problems began showing up. Coming’s glasses seem to have been partly at fault. When Schlicker visited the original Franklin instrument in Philadelphia he found that the old glasses were thinner, especially in the treble, and thus easier to make speak. Coming’s glasses were also somewhat irregular in shape. In addition, the rubber mounting turned out to be too soft and had to be replaced with wood; and it was discovered that the smaller glasses had to be rotated faster than the larger ones. Finding a suitable covering for the mechanical “fingers” that played the glasses from the keyboard also proved problematic. Wet pigskin and dry rubber gave the best (though slightly differing) effects, but neither was as good as human fingers. And of course there was that nemesis of all musical glasses, breakage. Biggs was still optimistic but, as he confided to John Burchard, president of the Academy, he was also “touching wood, holding on tight, and keeping my fingers crossed.”

A concert featuring the new armonica and (fortunately, as it turned out) other instruments was scheduled for April 11, 1956 at the Kresge Auditorium of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By March 24 there was a note of urgency, even desperation, in Biggs’s correspondence with Schlicker. Biggs had planned to come to Buffalo on the 28th “to record a few sounds” for a broadcast, but “as far as a fair chance for me to learn how to play the instrument—we’re way past it!” The Academy wanted the instrument on hand by April 3 in order to unveil it to the press. If they could not have it by then, “the concert will have to take place without it, and our work will have come to nothing, for the anniversary occasion will have passed.”

The instrument arrived in time, and the concert went on, a program of works by Franklin and Mozart, performed by Biggs, six members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the popular tenor, Roland Hayes. Biggs wisely brought the Cambridge Portative, on which he played not only Mozart’s Fantasia in F and four of the “Epistle” Sonatas, but also the armoni-ca part of Mozart’s Adagio and Rondo for Armonica, flute, oboe, viola, and cello. Although Biggs gave a preliminary demonstration of the principle of “glass music” on eight tuned glasses, the armonica itself was used only for three “Divertimenti”—a Minuet from an armonica tutor, an Irish folksong that had been a favorite of Captain Pockrich, and Mozart’s short Adagio for Glass Armonica. The tone of the new armonica was wobbly and erratic and was frequently accompanied by gratuitous squeaks and scrapes. As one of the students later observed, it “wasn’t quite a flop, but almost!”

Biggs trying his hand at glass blowing in the Corning glass factory, 1956. Photo courtesy Corning Glass Works.

The discouraging performance at the concert may have had something to do with the Franklin Savings Bank’s sudden loss of interest in the project, leaving the Academy and Biggs to hunt up a donor to make up the deficit caused by Schlicker’s extra costs in trying to perfect the mechanism. Biggs and Shapley were discouraged, but not quite ready to give up. Just enough publicity had been given the experiment to generate requests from orchestras, chamber music groups, radio, and television for concerts involving the armonica. “Unfortunately”, wrote Biggs to Ralph Burhoe, another Academy official, “in every case the answer has had to be no, because the one test of success is whether the Mozart Adagio and Rondo can be played on the Glass Armonica!” He still had hopes that it might be perfected, though, for, “It’s certain that if the Glass Armonica were successful it would fill a unique niche, and have continuing interest and use over a number of years.”

In the summer of 1956, Biggs received a request from his old friend Harold Spivacke of the Library of Congress for the use of the armonica in a December program linked to the Mozart/Franklin anniversaries. Biggs doubted that the instrument would be any improved by then and candidly outlined the problems: the glasses themselves were too thick and not perfectly circular, and more research was needed on the “finger” material. Between $3,000 and $4,000 had already been expended on the instrument, and while the Academy hoped to coerce Corning into making a new set of glasses at no cost, Corning decided that it wanted nothing more to do with the project. The harpsichord makers Hubbard and Dowd suggested making a striking mechanism to operate the stationary glasses, but since the musical result would have been more that of a glassichord or celesta, this idea was quickly abandoned.

In a last desperate attempt to salvage the project, the armonica was turned over to a “think tank” of MIT engineering students. Concentrating first on sound production, the students found that their fingers, dipped in vinegar, still produced the best effect. Other substances and means of exciting the glasses, from violin bows to electronics, were tried without success. Nothing very conclusive emerged, and most of the students felt that the contraption was better as Franklin had left it, without the keyboard. One was optimistic enough to suggest that “With unlimited funds, it would serve the memory of Franklin well to establish a research project to investigate the use of different bowl and exciting materials and build an accurately engineered Armonica.” But the “unlimited funds” were nowhere to be seen. In 1958, at Biggs’s suggestion, Shapley approached Henry Ford II regarding the possibility that the glass-blower at Greenfield Village might be able to produce better bowls than Corning had, but nothing came of that either.

In 1965, answering an inquiry from Leonard Labaree, editor of the Franklin papers, Biggs gave a short and rather dispassionate account of the armonica venture. While the word “failure” was not in his vocabulary, Biggs did have to admit that “our experiment was quite inconclusive,” and, with regard to his performance of Mozart’s Adagio, K. 356, “one cannot claim that the tone did any sort of justice to the music.” His vision of what might have been was still intact, though, and at the end of his letter he wrote, a bit wistfully,

Mozart’s Adagio and Rondo, K. 617, which we had hoped to give with such a flourish, was played on the flute stops of the organ. The sound of a delicate flute stop, incidentally, rather resembles that of a glass armonica. Though it lacks, of course, the effect of coming from nowhere, and the slow dying away into silence, which is a quite magical effect with the glasses.