Shop n stops
The world’s largest organ is in … Macy’s!
Who would have thought that the world’s largest pipe organ was built in a department store! And what’s astonishing is that people shopping in the store have been able to hear it played every single business day since 1911.
So, after having bought a pair of Levi’s (for one third of the UK price) in Macy’s Philadelphia, we then enjoyed a 45 minute recital including arranged Debussy and Strauss waltzes. It’s a gorgeous instrument, an example of the American Orchestral style, with lots of strings and gentle reeds and tremulants. No perky mixtures here!
It’s amazing that this extraordinary piece of engineering is in good nick. It hasn’t always been so. After the recital we spoke to Peter Richard Conte, who told us lots of stories about its history. When he took over in 1989 only 10% of the instrument was playable. (This is the fate of the largest organ in the world by pipes in Atlantic City – it’s currently only 67% playable. The Philadelphia organ is the largest by stops at a whopping 395 stops!). He spent a long seven years playing a temporary console while the main console was slowly restored. Then, bit by bit, they have restored the whole organ to full functionality. Macy’s have been a very supportive landlord, unlike previous store owners, some of whom Peter said “hated the organ”. In the building there’s a full-time organ workshop with staff to keep the organ fully functional and tuned, and apparently a smaller theatre organ too somewhere else in the store that they use at Christmas time to entertain the Father Christmas queues. How extraordinary is that? I suppose back in 1911 these organs provided an early version of the background music that pervades most shopping now. It must have made Wanamaker’s store seem very superior compared to the competition.
The organ itself is staggering in scale and complexity. Nearly all the pipes are enclosed in twelve – yes, twelve! – swell boxes. As organists are not octopuses, it’s possible to couple these together to fewer than the twelve swell pedals. But not only that, there’s a sliding bar just underneath each keyboard which you can couple to the swell pedals if you want, allowing you to operate the swell boxes with a thumb instead, thus freeing up your feet. Or you can allocate the thumb slider to the temulant, so that you can slide the tremulant in and out while you play, allowing you to start a note without any vibrato and then bring it in just like singers do. And, talking of singers, there are seven Vox Humana ranks, each with a different tremulant rate. The idea is that if you pull them all out, you get a choir! The multiplicity of options that the pneumatic engineering in the console caters for is simply breathtaking.
