From the Archives: Pipes, Patience, and Purpose - The Journey to a New Organ

Rector William Yardley quipped in the spring issue of The Chat that many alumnae would remember “with some amused unhappiness, the organ in St. Mary’s Chapel.” He was referring to the original organ installed in the spring of 1939 when the chapel opened. That jest introduced Yardley’s announcement of an anonymous gift that would enable Chatham Hall to have a new organ built, “an exquisite baroque instrument, handmade by one of the continental builders.” A new organ had been needed for at least five years. An article in the March 5, 1966, issue of Anonymous, Chatham Hall’s long-standing student publication, quoted Music Department Director, Mrs. Elizabeth Shufeld, as saying the old organ had just “given up the ghost.” Since then, chapel services had made do with an electric organ borrowed from Willis Hall.

 

The original organ was never considered satisfactory. St. Mary’s Chapel was far from complete when it opened on June 2, 1939. There was no funding for the tower, stained glass, marble flooring, and woodwork. Without adequate funding, the school found an old Kilgen organ, abandoned and deteriorating in a Danville movie theater since the introduction of sound movies a decade earlier. It cost $1,000 to rebuild the theater organ with parts discarded from Chatham churches. A movie theatre, Kilgen, was known as a “unit orchestra;” its pipes had to imitate a range of musical instruments. The person playing it was constantly improvising music to match scenes from a movie, unlike the trained church organist who played formally.

 

Not trusting salesmen, Rector Yardley invited Arthur Howes of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore to visit Chatham Hall and make recommendations that would set the parameters of the project. Howes first determined that the location of the old organ was “a soundproof box.” Its replacement should be a Dutch-modified baroque organ in the balcony. That would necessitate the removal of the school seal from the front of the balcony. Tradition dictated that the “positive division, playable from the lowest keyboard, be suspended over the aisle and rear pews.” Finding a builder was another matter. The Dutch builder Flentrop could not fulfill a contract for at least four years. The Swedish builder Hammarberg was expensive. Only Detlef Klueker of Brackwede, Germany, appeared to be within the $40,000 budget. On September 15, 1966, Kleuker acknowledged receipt of $12,211 as the first third of an organ that would cost $36,633 (145,433 German Marks at the time).

 

The chapel itself posed some problems for any builder. Chatham Hall had two choirs, the Balcony Choir and the Chancel Choir. The initial prospectus for the organ called for risers in the balcony on both sides facing the center. Neither the Swedish nor the German builders had built an organ with a main case and wind chest shallow enough to accommodate choir risers in so small a space. Eventually, the risers had to be eliminated, forcing the Balcony Choir to move to the Chancel. Together, the two choirs would become St. Mary’s Choir. Tall pipes in front of the rose window posed another challenge. Still another problem was the space abandoned by the old console. A gift from the Grace Richardson Foundation enabled the space to be paneled in with seats, cornice, miniature pilasters, and columns to match the 1940s paneling.

 

There were delays in the construction before the completed organ was disassembled in Germany to be shipped in separate crates and reassembled in Chatham. Work in St. Mary’s Chapel began on March 7, 1968. Hopes were high that the organ would be finished by graduation, but one of the German builders was stricken with hepatitis, forcing him to return to Germany after a month in Danville’s hospital, leaving only 14 of the organ’s 29 stops in working condition by summer. The organ had to be finished over the summer. The Klueker organ was dedicated on Sunday, October 20, 1968. Interestingly, the processional hymn played on the new organ was “For All the Saints,” the same processional hymn played at the chapel dedication in 1939 on the old organ.