Holtkamp’s senior voicer, Ron Yeater, meticulously adjusts the mouth of a pipe. (Photo by Jane Rubinsky)

Those who work at Juilliard have gotten used to construction in the building during the summer. But anyone curious enough to investigate the sawing, hammering, and drilling sounds emanating from Paul Hall this past June and July would have been greeted with an astonishing sight: The hall's seats were covered with plastic, over which lay long metal cylinders with tapered ends. Enormous wooden crates were stacked in towers on the stage; rectangles of wood with hundreds of carefully spaced holes rested against the walls. Oddly shaped boards were propped up everywhere; tubing, wires, and tools were scattered about on a thick layer of sawdust. What looked like Geppetto's workshop gone mad was nothing less than a complete refurbishing and major expansion of the organ in Paul Hall.

The hard work was carried out over an intense, four-month period at Juilliard and at the Holtkamp Organ Company in Cleveland (which built the instrument in 1970 and was overseeing its repair and augmentation). But the project actually began more than a year ago, with discussions between John Weaver (head of Juilliard's organ department) and Christian Holtkamp, a fourth-generation organ builder who now runs the company his great-grandfather took over shortly after the turn of the 20th century. With more moving parts than any other instrument, organs require periodic maintenance, including "re-leathering" (replacement of the leather hinges on which the valves open and close underneath the pipes, as well as the expandable leather pleats in the wind reservoirs) every 20 to 25 years or so. Juilliard's organ had held up remarkably well over its 32 years without major repairs, thanks to the relatively constant temperature and humidity of Paul Hall and a good air filtration system, but it was now time to address this and other issues.

But refurbishing Juilliard's organ was to be only half of the story. Weaver saw a unique opportunity to expand the instrument's capabilities, making it suitable for a broader range of repertoire. Preferences in organ sound have varied over the years; Holtkamp was producing extremely brilliant instruments in the mid-'60s, with "lots of very bright upper work in the form of mutations and mixtures, but insufficient foundation sound at unison and sub-unison pitches," Weaver explains. These qualities were characteristic of north German instruments built by Arp Schnitger a generation before Bach, and long believed to be ideal for his music. "The truth of the matter is, in the middle of his life, Bach became enamored of the organs by Gottfried Silbermann, who was also the builder of the first piano," says Weaver, who had the chance to play two Silbermann organs for the first time this summer (while teaching as part of the Juilliard-Leipzig exchange) and found them "very full at the unison level." Bach also became very enthusiastic about the work of Zacharias Hildebrandt, and, says Weaver, almost certainly had some influence upon Hildebrandt's organ built in nearby Naumburg four years before Bach's death. Its "wonderfully rich foundation sounds" serve Baroque literature splendidly without being overpowered by the more penetrating mixtures typical of earlier organs, says Weaver.

American builders—including Holtkamp—are now moving in the direction of a fuller unison pitch. The addition of a new solo division (with seven stops, or particular sounds) to Juilliard's organ—along with the expansion of the already existing great, swell, and positive divisions and the addition of a 32' extension in the pedal—will not only balance the instrument's sound, but increase its range and flexibility, enabling more faithful performances of 19th-century and contemporary repertoire. "When students have come to Juilliard to audition," says Weaver, "we have lost some excellent talent because there was a better, more comprehensive instrument at another school. This is one of the main reasons it was important for us to undertake this project."

A generous grant from the Alice Tully Foundation made the half-million-dollar restoration and expansion of the instrument possible, with an additional $250,000 helping to create the necessary endowment for the Mark Schubart Teaching Chair in Organ. Additional funding for the project was generously provided by the Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation. (A private ceremony will name the organ in memory of Schubart, who was one of the organ department's most active supporters during his years as dean of Juilliard, from 1949 to 1962.)

The skilled builders at Holtkamp—which was founded in 1855, making it the oldest continually operating American organ-building company—produce three or four organs each year, in addition to handling one or two renovations. But the Juilliard project was more extensive than the usual refurbishing, and the space itself presented special challenges. The builders knew they would be tucking the new chests and their pipes into the empty triangular spaces on either side of the existing instrument, removing some of the wood façade panels behind them in order to utilize all the space up to the wall. But the fit was tighter than expected—necessitating the removal of a few more, along with the steel brackets that had held them. Removing the paneling from the back wall created a new problem: The whole side of the chamber that contained the swell box was now wide open and needed to be closed in and sealed, in order to contain the sound.

Holtkamp’s Larry McCormick installing bung boards, which hold the magnets under the pipe valves. (Photo by Jane Rubinsky)

Also, the new division had to be supported without building any legs down to the floor because the area underneath is used for piano storage. The builders devised a system of wooden sills jutting from the existing steel framework for additional support. Along with these major challenges, there were smaller, more typical ones: a gas pipe not shown on the architectural drawing meant that a bellows had to be moved up from its planned position, requiring additional wind line. "We brought plenty of materials—extra pieces of milled wood, cleat stock, wind line material, all kinds of cable, plenty of screws, and tools to do most everything—and we used almost all of it," says Ben Al-Doory, who oversaw the bulk of the installation. About 75 percent of the plan remained unchanged. "All four chests went in where they were supposed to; we didn't change the framework at all," notes Al-Doory, a skilled woodworker, who adds that meeting the challenges of on-the-spot retrofitting is half the fun. "Otherwise it would be like putting a fridge in someone's kitchen, just plugging it in and there you go—boring!"

About half of the organ's original 2,380 pipes were shipped back to Cleveland for maintenance work when the instrument was dismantled last May. "All the reed pipes came back, which are the ones with the resonators in the big lead boots at the bottom. They're more complicated and need more attention than the regular pipes; they actually have moving parts inside that create the sound," explains Al-Doory. Some of the other pipes were also needed in order to size up the racks for new chests being built at the shop. Additional work going on there included preparing and labeling all the wiring, as well as building a sophisticated new console with built-in wheels, drawknobs for stops (replacing the old tabs), and a multi-level computer memory system enabling up to 125 different settings to be stored—a vast improvement over the old mechanical setter piston.

Juilliard's organ utilizes electro-pneumatic action (first developed in the 1920s), in which depressing a key creates electricity that activates a magnet which opens each valve, allowing air to flow into the pipe above. (A tracker organ, on the other hand, has a completely mechanical action, in which a long rod connected to each key physically pulls down the valve under a pipe. Thus a tracker's console must be built in; the free-standing "remote" console of an electro-pneumatic organ allows for flexible positioning.) Advances in technology since the late '60s allowed for some improvements to Juilliard's organ: what resembled a hefty firehose connecting the old console is now a small cable. The old memory system—an enormous, antiquated mass of magnets and wires, insulated with cotton and wax in the days before plastic ("comparable to a telephone switchboard of the '60s," notes John Weaver)—has been reduced to a small computer processor. PVC is now used for wind lines instead of metal (which required airtight soldering of every joint around each angle). A recently developed computer-aided program was used to work out the optimal arrangements of pipes on a few of the new chests. (793 pipes were added to the instrument, bringing the total to 3,173.) Yet, after hundreds of years, leather and wood remain the materials of choice for the moving parts, as they minimize the noise of the mechanism itself.

Once the pipes were reinstalled (a tedious process in which they were carefully handed up one at a time, "bucket-brigade" fashion, and set into place), the organ looked finished—but weeks of work still awaited the experts who arrived to tune and regulate it. The volume of each pipe must be balanced with the others in its rank, along with its sound characteristics. "Every pipe needs to sound like its neighbor, so it sounds like there's one particular voice coming out of there," explains Ron Yeater, Holtkamp's senior voicer. This painstaking process, called "voicing" the instrument, requires two people working in tandem: one holds down each key in turn while the other, standing up among the pipes, gently taps and nudges each one (reaching the tall tops with the aid of a long wooden stick) until the sound is satisfactory. (A spring band of metal at pipe's top can be moved up or down slightly to adjust the pitch.) Should further adjustment be required on a particular pipe, it is removed and lowered into waiting hands. Minute adjustments made with special tools to various parts (such as making tiny notches at the mouth of the pipe or slightly pinching or enlarging the toe hole in the bottom) can nudge the sound toward a clearer and brighter, keener tone or make it broader, thicker and more romantic. The trickiest to tune are the "mixtures," in which anywhere from 3 to 12 pipes sound together. "Tuning is really the simple part; all you need is to listen carefully. With the voicing, you've got to have a little bit of music in your soul, to know whether it's a musical tone or not," says Yeater. In the process of voicing, the pipes will also be made to "speak" or sound a tad more quickly now—without the slight lag in response that was originally intended to imitate 18th-century voicing practices.

Weaver also hopes that expanding the capabilities of Juilliard's organ will better serve not only the needs of the School's organ students, but also encourage composers to write more for the instrument. "Those who write for the organ are frustrated, I think, by the limitations of many of the instruments they encounter," he notes. "An instrument that has a great deal of flexibility and much unison color will be an incentive, because it will be able to more accurately reflect what the composer has in mind, rather than constantly presenting limitations."