Toledo Art Museum

(Top) The ca. 1785 Johannes Strumphler organ at the Toledo Art Museum will be heard in a series of brief demonstrations throughout Tuesday afternoon, July 7.

(Bottom) Tuesday afternoon, July 7, Stephen Tharp will demonstrate the impeccably restored four-manual 1926 E.M. Skinner, Opus 603, at the Toledo Art Museum. The largest fully-automatic roll-playing organ by the Skinner firm, will also demonstrate it’s own abilities.

Built in 1926 for the Museum’s Hemicycle auditorium, this four-manual organ was the gift of the Libbey family, and was installed in two chambers on either side of the stage. The console was located in a small and shallow pit on the main floor of the room, confined by the seating around it. Renowned American organist Lynnwood Farnam acted as consultant and designer of the stoplist for the instrument. The organ contained fifty-nine speaking stops derived from forty-eight ranks and 3,201 pipes. Opus 603 was to be the largest Skinner organ furnished with the firm’s sophisticated multiplex roll-player, although records indicate that very few rolls were ever owned by the Museum.

In the 1920s it was not uncommon for art museums to own pipe organs. Skinner organs could be found in Cleveland’s Museum of Art (Opus 333, 1920); San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor (Opus 455, 1924); Dayton (OH) Art Institute (Opus 749, 1929); and the Brooklyn Art Museum (Opus 758, 1929). Having a fine pipe organ was considered a natural addition to an organization dedicated to the arts.

In 1931 the organ was removed from the Hemicycle auditorium and relocated by the Skinner Organ Company to the newly-built and much larger Peristyle auditorium. The new “atmospheric style” venue has two chambers that were constructed to duplicate the instrument’s original situation. The console was made movable and furnished with its own integral dolly so that it could be conveniently placed among the other instruments on the stage.