Ernest Skinner, G. Donald Harrison, and the American Classic Transition

Harrison arrived in July 1927, five years before Aeolian-Skinner existed. The OHS Pipe Organ Database describes him as Assistant Technical Director of the Skinner Organ Company from that year, and Wikipedia gives the same July 1927 arrival together with his 1933 appointment as Vice-President and Tonal Director, so his tonal directorship belongs to the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company formed in 1932 while his arrival predates it. The distinction matters when reading a contract date: an instrument contracted between 1927 and 1932 is a Skinner Organ Company instrument even though Harrison was already on the staff. Britannica adds that he was elected president and treasurer in 1940, and he died in 1956 while finishing voicing work at Saint Thomas Church, New York.

Authority over tonal design passed from Skinner to Harrison by a board decision in 1933. Wikipedia records that on July 14, 1933 the Aeolian-Skinner board formally stripped Ernest M. Skinner of his titles and authority after a dispute involving Harrison and the Grace Cathedral contract, and that a 1933 contract then paid Skinner $5,000 a year for the use of his name while restricting him, at Methuen, to rebuilding rather than building new organs. The OHS Pipe Organ Database gives the pressure behind the dispute: customers were increasingly asking that new organs be designed by Harrison. Both are historical accounts of a corporate dispute, and neither settles the artistic argument beneath it.

Skinner left the company in 1936 and founded Ernest M. Skinner & Son at Methuen with his son Richmond H. Skinner, a firm entirely separate from Aeolian-Skinner. The Diapason records that he built comparatively few instruments after 1936, that he lost the Methuen factory, and that in 1947 he joined the staff of the Schantz Organ Company in Ohio. An instrument carrying the Ernest M. Skinner & Son name is therefore the work of a firm distinct from the one that kept his name in its own; how the company names and their opus series are told apart is set out at Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner Identity, Company Eras, and Opus Numbers.

The Symphonic Organ names the tonal ideal of the Skinner Organ Company era. Rollins College describes Skinner as preeminent in the 1920s for a lush orchestral sound known by that name, and the characterization belongs to the Skinner Organ Company years rather than to the later Aeolian-Skinner instruments. The orchestral and imitative stops that trade and tertiary sources attribute to Ernest M. Skinner, among them the Erzähler, the French Horn stop, the English Horn, the Orchestral Oboe and the Flügelhorn, are the audible vocabulary of that ideal. What each name describes, and what a stop name can and cannot settle about an instrument, is the subject of Skinner Orchestral Stops and Distinctive Stop Names.

Skinner stated his tonal philosophy in his own advertising, and The Diapason preserves the language. In 1917 the line was to buy by the tone, not by the ton. In 1936, the year he left Aeolian-Skinner, his advertisements held that tone production of distinction is as individual and personal as handwriting and that tonal charm is a fundamental requisite of every musical instrument. These are marketing statements by an interested party, quoted here as his stated position rather than as a description of any instrument.

Skinner was still defending his position in 1945, nine years after leaving. The Diapason’s compilation of his writings records that in 1945 he defended the ‘so-called romantic organ’ developed in the United States for its ‘strings of warmth and prompt speech, the new orchestral voices’, and the same compilation notes that by his death in 1960 orchestral color was being de-emphasized in favor of clarity and brightness. The 1945 statement is read there in an editorial compilation rather than in the original issue, and Skinner was defending his own work. Neither his position nor the one that displaced it is treated on this page as the correct one.

The American Classic is a term the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company applied to its own sound. Wikipedia records that the term is most firmly attached to the company’s own LP series, and The Diapason records that the company used that series to market its American Classic sound. Nothing in those attachments defines the term as a neutral period style shared across builders, and it is not the same thing as the Symphonic Organ of the Skinner Organ Company era. The wider mid-century argument over organ design, and the reasons instruments elsewhere were altered, is told at Why Skinner Organs Were Altered During the Mid-Twentieth Century.

The recordings are where the term is most firmly fixed. The Diapason records a thirty-volume LP series titled The King of Instruments, beginning with Volume 1 in 1961 and running into the early 1970s, which Aeolian-Skinner used to market its American Classic sound, and notes that Joseph Whiteford designed a synthetic reverberation system used on many of those recordings to compensate for poor church acoustics. Wikipedia records that the first volume of the company’s LP series was titled The American Classic Organ and that the series was organized around Principals, Flutes, Strings, Reeds, and Mixtures and Mutations. Two dates in that account deserve attention: Volume 1 appeared in 1961, and Harrison had died in 1956, so the term’s firmest documented attachment is to a series produced after his death, and the synthetic reverberation on many of the records is part of what a listener hears on them.

One institution’s record uses the phrase in a commission. The University of Michigan records that its Frieze Memorial Organ in Hill Auditorium had been reworked in 1927 by Ernest M. Skinner into ‘a characteristically ‘orchestral’ tonal design’ and that ‘In 1955, G. Donald Harrison of the AEolian-Skinner Company was commissioned to rebuild the organ to reflect the ‘American classic’ ideal’. The record is an undated web page, it concerns one instrument, and it does not itemize which 1927 ranks were removed in 1955. It is useful because it is dated, explicitly aesthetic, and places both names on one instrument twenty-eight years apart with the two ideals named as the reason for the work.

The one instrument analyzed in detail is Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1257, dated 1955. Létourneau’s technical analysis, published in The Diapason with its account of the restoration of that organ at Winthrop University, reported that Harrison favored narrow basses and broader trebles with a fine, refined style of voicing, and that its reed stops used small to average scaling on generally high wind pressures with a surprising variety of shallot types. Those are findings about one organ dated the year before Harrison’s death. They describe a preference the analysts saw in that instrument; they do not establish what any other Aeolian-Skinner instrument contains, and an earlier or later organ has to be read from its own pipework and its own records.

Pipe metal is the other physical correlate, and here the evidence is a single attribution. Charles Fisk wrote in 1978, in Some Thoughts on Pipe Metal, that early American organs of the 1920s used tin less extensively than later became standard, and he credited Harrison with initiating widespread tin adoption. Fisk offered that attribution without a documentary citation, and it is a builder’s recollection about the trade rather than a finding about any particular instrument. Wind pressure belongs under the same caution: the generally high pressures reported for the reeds of Opus 1257 are a reading of that organ, not a figure to carry to another.

Harrison’s death in June 1956 was the first of several changes at the top. The Diapason identifies his final project as Opus 205-A at Saint Thomas Church, New York, a mid-1950s job whose suffixed opus number carries a three-digit base from a much earlier era, so the size of an opus number is no guide to the date of the work attached to it; what a suffix means is set out at Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner Identity, Company Eras, and Opus Numbers.

Wikipedia records that Joseph S. Whiteford became president after Harrison’s death, resigned in 1966, and was followed by John J. Tyrell, Donald M. Gillett and Robert L. Sipe as presidents. The Diapason’s account of the same years has Whiteford succeed Harrison and later become Vice Chairman, Gillett assume leadership after Whiteford relocated in the 1960s, and E. David Knutson purchase the company in 1969 with Robert Sipe as Vice President. The OHS Pipe Organ Database names Sipe as the last head of the company and records that during his tenure it built its first mechanical action instruments. The accounts differ in the titles they assign, and each is carried here as its source gives it. What they agree on is the point that matters for an instrument: a leadership date identifies a period, and it does not establish that any individual organ reflects a particular director’s work.

The documented causes of the company’s end are commercial. The OHS Pipe Organ Database attributes Aeolian-Skinner’s failure to the retirement of key personnel, the loss of part of the factory to a new freeway, a shortage of capital and the economic downturn of the early 1970s, noting that the firm which had survived the Great Depression did not survive the smaller downturn of the 1970s. John Tyrrell, a former president who worked there from 1952 to 1970, recalled in 1995 that the Southeast Expressway cut through the factory site in 1957 and that a move to a new plant in late 1968 left too little time for it to prove itself. Wikipedia gives 1972 as the year the company ceased operations, while the OHS builder record is headed 1932 to 1971; the closing year stays an unsettled 1971 or 1972, and the corporate sequence is examined at Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner Identity, Company Eras, and Opus Numbers.

The dates on this page place an instrument in a period; they do not say what its pipework is. A contract of 1929 falls inside the Skinner Organ Company years with Harrison on the staff, one of 1934 inside his tonal directorship, and one of 1960 inside the company’s later leadership, and none of those placements tells you how a given chorus was scaled or voiced, whether the pipe metal is what the design called for, or whether the specification was ever completed.

The last question is not hypothetical: the A.E. Schlueter Pipe Organ Company lists a project at Druid Hills Presbyterian Church in Atlanta that restored a Harrison-era Aeolian-Skinner organ ‘with additions as originally planned’, completing tonal expansions the original design had called for but had not fully implemented. That is one firm’s summary of one project, given without rank counts or dates, and it establishes only that a Harrison-era specification could be left not fully implemented, not how often that happened.

An instrument’s own records and pipework are the evidence this history cannot replace. A leadership date identifies a period and nothing more, a suffixed opus number can carry a base from an era decades before the work it names, and a Harrison-era design may not have been fully implemented, so the contract date, the opus number and the physical pipework have to be read together and the findings written down before any conclusion about which ideal an instrument represents and before any tonal project is planned on it. Whether an altered instrument should be restored or rebuilt is a separate decision with its own page in this section, and what a stop name can settle is at Skinner Orchestral Stops and Distinctive Stop Names. The overview of the firms and the choice of resource begin at Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner.