His grandfather was one of the original seventeen students enrolled when classes began on May 12, 1875, in an old stone hotel downtown. Charles has close family ties to Park College.
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The following analysis is made possible by the vivid recollections of one elder statesman of the organbuilding fraternity, the brief remarks of another who has passed on, and the insights of several contemporary observers well-acquainted with Kimball instruments and the 1930s era.Ĭharles McManis, living and working in semi-retirement in Woodbury, Connecticut, helped install the 1938 Kimball at Park College, an inspiring early step in his long and distinguished career as an independent builder in Kansas City, Kansas. Mixtures of the 1920s were largely confined to the narrow scale string-sounding Dolce Cornets. What mutations existed were frequently extensions of foundation stops. The distinctive character and blending quality of independent mutation ranks, which are tuned to pure‚-not tempered-intervals, was scarcely appreciated by voicers accustomed to wide-scale diapasons and other unison stops. Likewise, there was a pronounced lag in voicing philosophy and technique. They moved gingerly into mixtures and mutations, while holding onto favorite stops of the previous era-solo reeds, for example. These builders were reluctant to depart from stoplists that had worked so successfully a decade earlier. Thus much of the industry fell behind in the emerging trends. What about other builders and their instruments? The majority were family-owned firms where change came slowly and was often viewed as a threat. The pioneering work of Walter Holtkamp and G. The recital programs dedicating these instruments are representative of organ recital fare during that period and in contrast to recent times. How did Kimball, progressive throughout its history, articulate and implement these changes? The stoplists under discussion shed light on Kimball's approach to organbuilding in that watershed era.
The King of Instruments began to break away from the romantic and orchestral paradigm of the 1920s and earlier and moved toward "old world" antecedents and the classic ensemble. The 1930s were the crucial decade before WWII when changing tastes and preferences swept the pipe organ market. This article takes a close look at three instruments in two small liberal arts colleges in western Missouri-Park College in Parkville and Missouri Valley College in Marshall-as examples of Kimball's work in the 1930s, near the close of its glorious era in organbuilding.
Their richness, timbre and incredible promptness of speech, even in the 32' octave, have never been surpassed."3 Michel's strings set the standard by which all others were judged. They had distinctive tone colors, stood rock solidly in tune and were perhaps more uniform note per note than any ever built. Junchen was unsparing in his praise of Michel: "His reeds were constructed with a jeweler's precision. Yet as Van Allen Bradley remarks, correctly, in his company history Music for the Millions: "It was Michel more than any other man who gave the Kimball pipe organ of the 20th Century its great reputation."2 Meyer, and the astute front-office businessmen Wallace Kimball, Walter Hardy, and the much-traveled Robert P.
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His superb voicing talents, which embraced the full spectrum from reeds to strings to a Diapason chorus, were complemented by the skills and experience of other factory personnel including superintendent Oscar J. Michel, a forgotten figure in the pantheon of notable American tonal directors and voicers, was the heart and soul of the Kimball pipe organ. No comprehensive history of the pipe organ and its builders in America in the twentieth century can be complete without a major study of Kimball. Ironically, very little has been written about the company and its instruments, apart from David Junchen's perceptive summary of the firm and its theater organ work.1 A systematic study of the tonal philosophy and practices of the firm, as well as design features and construction details of their instruments, is long overdue.
John's Episcopal Church, Denver, and the Minneapolis Civic Auditorium, others lesser-known, and in the recollections of older generations. The name lives on in epic instruments in St. Instruments of all sizes in churches, colleges, theaters, homes and municipal auditoriums across the country made the Kimball organ well-known to churchgoers and the music world of that era. The Kimball Company of Chicago was one of the foremost pipe organ builders in America in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
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