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IT WILL SOON BE 20 YEARS since The Aeolian Pipe Organ and Its Music was published by the Organ Historical Society. This landmark volume has been out of print for so long that copies now sell for more than $500. A second edition, revised and greatly expanded, is now in publication and, in addition to emendations and many new photographs, the annotated opus list of over 900 organs (with contract dates, prices, additions, and alterations) has been updated to reflect subsequent activity.
The Aeolian Pipe Organ and Its Music is the story of America's oldest, largest, and longest-lived residence organ company, whose instruments provided music in the home in the era before the wide-spread use of the phonograph and radio. A list of Aeolian patrons is a veritable Who's Who in American business, industry, and finance.
This book not only documents the organs, but also the music they were programmed to reproduce, Aeolian's commissions from Saint-Saëns, Stravinsky, Stokowski, and Humperdinck, and their reproduction of performances of renowned artists. A special section features a wealth of unpublished photographs of Aeolian installations. In addition to a study of the 54 recording organists, dozens of stoplists are included and complete catalogues of Aeolian organ rolls.
As a companion volume to Rollin Smith's Pipe Organs of the Rich and Famous, this notable publication makes for reading as fascinating as it is entertaining. The auditorium survived, however, and continued to be used for performances and movie screenings throughout the decades of Round Lake's decline and transformation. The building received a concrete floor and fixed theater-style seating in 1914. The open side walls were glazed and the rear wall enclosed between 1911 and 1919.72 Although organ maintenance waned and the instrument fell into disrepair, it remained partly playable, and a Kinetic rotary blower powered by an electric motor was added to the instrument sometime in the 1920s or 1930s. A Sunday service sheet from 1944 shows the organ in use for the standard prelude, hymn accompaniment, and postlude, and a concert in the late 1940s featured the organ prominently, with organist Robert W. Boenig playing, among other works, a transcription for piano and organ of Finlandia by Jean Sibelius. Boenig's wife Ella, mezzo-soprano on the...