The Pipe Organ of the Soo Theatre
By John Ignatowski
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The
Kimball (1924)
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The
Wurlitzer (1916)
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Two Classic
Pipe Organs Donated to the Soo Theatre Project |
The American
Theatre Pipe Organ in its Heyday
In the 1910’s and 20’s, the heyday of
the movie palace, between film, live stage productions, elegant
architectural surroundings, luxurious comfort, and a host of
courteous, uniformed ushers at one’s service, “going to the
show” was a total entertainment experience to which today’s
coldly anonymous self-serve mall multiplex cannot compare.
At that time every great movie palace and
nearly every neighborhood cinema had its theatre pipe organ, the
Roaring Twenties version of Surround Sound. The hundreds of
voices of the mighty organ sighed, sobbed, and rumbled from
within the walls and above the ceiling, under the control of a
live musician at the gleaming “horseshoe” console rising out
of the orchestra pit.
No classical church organ, this. It was
designed for popular music, imitating the sounds of the dance
band and pit orchestra. These organs were made by dozens of
builders such as Barton; Robert Morton; Link; Marr & Colton;
Kimball; Kilgen; and most notably the legendary Rudolph
Wurlitzer firm.
Not only did the organ provide silent
films with a live soundtrack, it served as the musical glue
holding the show together, providing entr’acte music between
features, leading community sing-a-longs, accompanying
vaudeville acts, newsreels, and even full-scale concerts.
With the advent of recorded sounds on film
in 1927 and the Great Depression in 1929, silence descended upon
the grand old cinema organs and many organ firms turned to the
manufacture of other products or folded altogether. After World
War II, entertainment venues shifted from the public theatre to
the private home TV screen and population centers moved from
cities to suburbs. Many magnificent theatres, abandoned to decay
and vandalism, were doomed. As audiences dwindled and operating
costs rose, the wrecking ball claimed one after another of them,
and often their unappreciated and long-silent pipe organs went
down with them.
Today, alongside the trend toward
renovating classic surviving theatres, a new awareness is
growing of the cinema organ. Upper Michigan currently boasts
three venues in which audiences can appreciate this nearly-lost
art, all in the western U.P. region.
The Soo Theatre's Pipe
Organ
The original architect’s blueprints of
Soo Theatre make provision for a “future organ” in the
chambers to either side of the stage, but the intended organ was
never installed, because by 1930 when this house opened, the
future of cinema clearly belonged to the new “talkies.” (Soo
Theatre was in fact the first theatre in Upper Michigan to show
sound films). The elegant arched organ chambers on either side
of the stage proscenium, originally designed to house the
organ’s pipes, were by the 1960’s occupied by the go-go
dancers of so many local memories, and later by huge steel
ventilators when the house was divided by the late, great Wall.
In 2004, the Soo Theatre Project
authorized board member John Ignatowski to place a notice on a
theatre organ website, describing STP’s renovation plans and
offering to provide a home for a theatre organ lacking a
theatre. The ad elicited responses from two generous people,
both of whom ended up donating classic theatre instruments to
Soo Theatre.
To make these organs work for the Soo
Theatre, the plan is to combine them in an historically
sensitive way to make a comprehensive instrument, which will
have approximately 1300 pipes. As the sole operating theatre
pipe organ in eastern Upper Michigan, it will provide a unique
feature in the programming and operation of Soo Theatre as a
comprehensive community performing arts center as well as place
Soo Theatre on the theatre organ map.
Some Interesting Facts About the Soo
Theatre's Future Organ
All of the
sounds the organ makes will be produced acoustically and
mechanically; there will be no digital sampling, no amplifiers,
no loudspeakers. Just natural tone from air-blown pipes and
genuine percussions, which will be delivered directly to the ear
by the auditorium‘s extraordinary acoustics.
The visually stunning console at which the
organist sits produces no sound whatsoever. Merely the “tip of
the iceberg”, it houses the keyboards and tonal controls for
the hundreds of pipes which are located apart from the console
and not visible to the listener.
By a stroke of luck the Blue Island
Kimball and the Detroit Wurlitzer happen to be complementary in
their tonal design, each instrument contributing voices that the
other instrument lacks.
The smallest and highest-pitched pipe in
this organ is about the size of a soda straw. The largest and
deepest is bottom C of the Viole d’Orchestre, made of
inch-thick knotless sugar pine, 7 inches square and 17 feet in
length and producing a tone of 32 Hz. These longest pipes are
mitred and will be installed horizontally as the 11-foot height
of the chambers precludes their standing upright.
The vast majority of pipes are less than 4
feet in length.
The pipes are sounded by a
low-pressure/high volume system supplying compressed air at
10-15 inches water column. The wind is raised by a turbine
blower driven by 3 hp motors.
The electro-pneumatic valves and relays
which admit wind to the pipes are operated by 12-volt direct
current, like that of a Lionel train set.
The pipes and percussions always speak at
their standard volume: LOUD;
when standing in the chamber while the organ is being played,
the noise
is deafening. To tame this sound for its artistic purpose,
dynamic
gradation is achieved by enclosing the sound-producing portion
of the
organ behind a wall consisting of pivoted wooden louvers like a
giant Venetian blind.
The “toy counter” and percussion divisions include: Siren,
Fire Gong,
Doorbell, Auto Horn, Train Whistle, Police Whistle, Bird Call,
Bass
Drum, Crash Cymbal, Tap Cymbal, Chimes, Chrysoglott Harp,
Xylophone, and
an actual full-size Player Piano.
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