Skinner Orchestral Stops and Distinctive Stop Names

The group attributed to Ernest M. Skinner in trade and tertiary sources is orchestral and imitative throughout: the Erzahler, the French Horn, the English Horn, the Orchestral Oboe, the Bassoon, the sixteen-foot Heckelphone, the Contra Bombarde and the Flugel Horn. The credit is uneven in kind: the Encyclopedia of Organ Stops dates Skinner’s Erzahler to 1904, credits him with the first successful imitation of the hand-stopped orchestral horn under a French Horn name that already existed, and describes the Flugel Horn as pioneered by him. Whether any of these stops was patented is a separate question from whether it is attributed to him, and the trade and tertiary record behind these attributions does not settle it; the French Horn patent described below is a separate documented record.

These stops belong to the tonal ideal known as the Symphonic Organ, the lush orchestral sound that Rollins College associates with Skinner’s preeminence in the 1920s and with the Skinner Organ Company era, and not to the American Classic, the term most firmly attached to the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company’s own later series of recordings; how one ideal gave way to the other is the subject of Ernest Skinner, G. Donald Harrison, and the American Classic Transition.

Two of the least common names in the group, the Corno di Bassetto and the Flugel Horn, occur together in one dated specification: the W. K. Kellogg Auditorium organ at Battle Creek, Michigan, which The Diapason printed in its February 1933 issue and which the journal’s 2019 survey of Skinner’s appearances in its pages singles out for that reason. The Kellogg instrument dates from the Aeolian-Skinner period rather than from the Skinner Organ Company, and a single specification says nothing about how often either stop was supplied.

The same names recur across the documentation of both firms’ instruments, alongside Heckelphone, Orchestral Oboe, Harmonic Mixture and the ligatured company spelling Æolian-Skinner.

The Erzahler is a tapered flue stop whose name describes its speech rather than its shape. The Encyclopedia of Organ Stops records that Ernest M. Skinner invented it in 1904, with the first example in the Dutch Reformed Church at Kingston, New York, and that the German name, meaning storyteller or narrator, was chosen for the stop’s talkative quality, a naming story the encyclopedia itself reports as legend.

Physically it is an 8-foot rank whose pipes narrow so that the diameter at the top is about a quarter of the diameter at the mouth, and that taper brings the octave partial forward until it is about as prominent as the fundamental, which is why Skinner called the tone ‘hybrid in character’, neither purely flute, string nor diapason. Published mouth heights differ, one sixth attributed to Skinner and one fifth to Audsley, scaling varies between instruments, and no published description substitutes for measuring the pipes of a particular organ.

Skinner’s French Horn is a reed built to imitate the hand-stopped orchestral horn, and its construction is unusual at both ends of the pipe. As the Encyclopedia of Organ Stops describes it, the stop has pockets in both the pipe top and the shallot, a shallot an octave larger than normal trumpet practice, relatively few weighted tongues, and a heavy metal cap to prevent vibration.

The pockets are what the patent discloses: US patent 1,169,687, filed by Ernest M. Skinner on 26 March 1915 and granted on 25 January 1916, describes a reed pipe in which the shallot is made longer than ordinary and extended below the lower end of its opening, forming a pocket below that opening, combined with a second pocket formed at the closed top of the pipe body, the stated object being to produce a pipe that speaks with the characteristic tone of a French horn. That such a pipe simulates the horn exactly is the applicant’s claim inside the patent, not an independent finding.

Skinner’s own claims for the finished stop, quoted at second hand by the encyclopedia, were that its acoustical range ‘permits sharp tuning without loss of stability’ and that the stop ‘was and is the orchestral voice itself, even to the peculiarity in attack known as the bubble’. Construction details vary between instruments and eras, and no opus range is attached to that description.

The Flugel Horn and the English Horn are described in covered rather than brilliant terms, the one by its capped body and the other by the quality Skinner ascribed to it. The Encyclopedia of Organ Stops describes the Flugel Horn as pioneered by Skinner as ‘a Cor d’Amour of larger scale than normal’, with oboe-type shallots and slender, capped, trumpet-form bodies. In his 1917 book The Modern Organ, Skinner himself gives the English Horn ‘the covered, mournful quality of the orchestral instrument’, a description in the builder’s own words rather than a later attribution.

Skinner’s own descriptions of the Erzahler and the Corno di Bassetto survive in The Skinner Organ, a company publication issued in New York in 1922 under the imprint ‘Ernest M. Skinner & Co’. Of the Erzahler it says: ‘It is a hybrid. It is neither Flute, Reed, String or Diapason. The tone is polyphonic in character, sounding two notes at the same time, the fundamental note and its octave with equal prominence.’ Of the Corno di Bassetto it says: ‘The Corno Di Bassetto is in effect a powerful Clarinet. Its tone is cool, authoritative and of great richness and purity.’

The stop name Flugel Horn does not appear anywhere in that text, so the publication carries the builder’s voice on two of the three rarer names and is silent on the third.

Skinner’s 1917 book The Modern Organ names the Erzahler, the Corno di Bassetto and the Flugel Horn only inside printed specifications and offers no descriptive commentary on any of the three. The Erzahler appears in the St. George’s Hall specification as ‘8 Erzahler’ on the Great and ‘8 Kleine Erzahler’ on the Choir, the Corno di Bassetto in the same instrument’s Solo division, and ‘8 Flugel Horn’ twice in the St. Thomas’ Solo and Echo specification, once marked interchangeable with the Choir.

A reader who wants Skinner’s own account of those three stops therefore turns to the 1922 publication for two of them, while for the Flugel Horn the 1917 book supplies specification entries and nothing more. The English Horn is the exception in that book, characterized there in Skinner’s own words as quoted above.

Skinner also tied individual orchestral stops to specific orchestral models late in life, and those statements are recollection rather than contemporary description. The Diapason’s 2019 survey of his appearances in the journal draws on a March 1951 reminiscence and a July 1949 letter to connect the French Horn to Strauss’s Salome, the English Horn and the Orchestral Oboe to Wagner’s Parsifal, and the Bassoon to Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra; in the 1949 letter he complained that in competitors’ organs ‘the authentic English horn tone was not heard when the stop was drawn’. These are self-reported inspirations published decades after the stops were introduced, and they give neither introduction dates nor opus numbers.

French Horn and Corno di Bassetto were established organ stop names before Skinner built either. The Encyclopedia of Organ Stops cites a French Horn in a 1724 Renatus Harris instrument at St. Dionis Backchurch, and places the earliest documented Corno di Bassetto in 1840 at St. James Church, Stockholm, crediting Henry Willis I with hundreds of English examples that Audsley considered the most successful.

What the encyclopedia credits to Skinner under the French Horn name is the first successful organ imitation of the hand-stopped orchestral horn, made for an organ at Grace Chapel, Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts; ‘first successful’ is the encyclopedia’s editorial judgment, the Williams College example is undated in the entry, and no opus number is given. Whether Skinner voiced a distinctive Corno di Bassetto is a different question from whether he originated the name, and he did not originate it.

The rarer Skinner-associated names were also used by other firms within the same years. For the Flugel Horn, the Encyclopedia of Organ Stops lists dated examples running from 1906 at Smith Hall, Wells College, and 1910 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, both labeled Skinner, through 1912 at St. Michaelis, Hamburg, by Walcker and 1915 at the Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, by Austin, to 1933 at Kellogg Auditorium by Aeolian-Skinner. About two dozen examples are reported in all, drawn from the Osiris database rather than from a complete census, and just over half of them are Skinner or Aeolian-Skinner, so the name is not a builder signature.

The Corno di Bassetto record is dominated by Willis and other European builders, with the 1933 Aeolian-Skinner organ at Kellogg Auditorium among the later examples.

Even the Erzahler, the most characteristic name in the group, is a strong but not exclusive marker: the Encyclopedia of Organ Stops reports roughly 150 examples in the Osiris database, of which about 80 percent are labeled E. M. Skinner or Aeolian-Skinner, leaving a fifth built by other firms. Those counts reflect one database’s coverage, in which Skinner work may be unevenly represented, and the proportion is not a probability for any particular organ.

The same caution applies to unusual pipe forms: James H. Cook’s Organ Historical Society page on flue-pipe construction notes that wooden flue pipes are most often square or rectangular in cross section and names the triangular pipes of E.M. Skinner as an exception alongside the round gold-leafed wooden pipes at the Mormon Tabernacle, and a triangular wooden pipe, unusual as it is, does not by itself attribute an organ to Skinner. Which firm built an instrument, and when, is settled by its records and its fabric; the firms and what their names and opus numbers mean are introduced at Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner.

What made these reeds distinctive was largely the shallot, the surface the tongue rolls down against, and the way tongue and shallot were shaped to meet. Skinner’s French Horn patent lengthens the shallot to form a pocket below its opening, the Flugel Horn used oboe-type shallots, and the French Horn’s shallot was an octave larger than trumpet practice and carried relatively few weighted tongues.

A patent granted in February 1961 and assigned to the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company describes the conventional practice it sought to replace: the brass tongue was given a critical and absolutely smooth degree of curvature so that it rolled down evenly against the shallot, and a flat spot in that curve produced a harsh and blatant tone, the patent’s own account of the prior art rather than an independent acoustical finding. Shallot type also varied within a single later instrument: Létourneau’s technical analysis of Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1257 of 1955 reported reed stops of small to average scaling on generally high wind pressures with a surprising variety of shallot types.

Voicing a reed tongue by hand was slow, exacting work, and the 1961 patent puts a number on it. US patent 2,970,507, filed in November 1958, states that the tongue ‘heretofore has been carefully voiced by imparting to that tongue a critical degree of curvature’, that ‘a full day is commonly required to properly voice a reed tongue for the 32 Contre Bombarde pipe’, and that manual voicing depended on burnishing tools and polished steel blocks. The one-day figure is the applicant’s statement about the practice it wanted to replace, not a verified labor standard.

The patent’s alternative reverses the arrangement: a flat, unvoiced tongue meets a shallot whose face is curved to a mathematical equation, so that the shallot can be shaped in a controlled mechanical grinding operation and the tongue rolls down smoothly into progressive contact with the curved edges of the aperture. How widely that method was adopted in production is not shown by the patent, and a patent establishes a claimed design, not what left the factory.

The named horizontal reeds belong to the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company of the 1950s, not to Ernest M. Skinner’s orchestral group, and they are distinctive for placement rather than for shallot form. The OHS Pipe Organ Database records the Trompette en chamade at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, part of Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1208 and voiced on 5 inches of wind, as the first installation of a horizontal reed in New York City, two years before the State Trumpet installed in 1954 at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine; that precedence is a database manager’s note about one city, not a surveyed finding.

The Encyclopedia of Organ Stops describes a State Trumpet’s unison or harmonic-length resonators as, in its words, ‘usually installed horizontally in front of the main organ or at some point distant from the main organ’, and cites the 1954 St. John the Divine stop ‘at the west end of the long nave, high up under the large rose window’.

What any of these stops needs today is a question about the pipes in the chamber and the records of the instrument, not about the name on the drawknob, and it begins with an inspection that documents which ranks are present and how they are built; the treatment of surviving pipework is handled at Preserving Historic Skinner Pipework, and the reasons instruments were altered in the mid-twentieth century at Why Skinner Organs Were Altered During the Mid-Twentieth Century.