News:

If you have difficulty registering for an account on the forum please email antespam@gmail.com. In the question regarding the composer use just the surname, not including forenames Charles-Marie.

Main Menu

Article highlighting an original MOller cinema organ...

Started by KB7DQH, August 14, 2011, 08:06:29 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

KB7DQH

http://www.uticaod.com/living/x181942893/More-than-80-years-pipe-organ-plays-on-at-Capitol-Theatre

QuoteMore than 80 years, pipe organ plays on at Capitol Theatre

Syracuse resident John Paul Fiscoe plays the 3-12 Moller theatre pipe organ at the Capitol Theatre for guests during a tour, August 08, 2011, in Rome, NY. "The uniqueness comes from it being an original installation. The organ has been here since 1928," Fiscoe said.
 


By CASSAUNDRA BABER
Observer-Dispatch
Posted Aug 11, 2011 @ 09:00 PM
   
ROME —

When the original owners of the Capitol Theatre opted to put a pipe organ in their design, they might not have expected that silent films soon would become obsolete.

They couldn't have predicted a stock market crash a year later leading into the Great Depression.
They certainly wouldn't have foreseen multiplex theaters, 3-D animation and digital surround sound.

But still, the Möller pipe organ installed at the front and center of the theater has withstood the ups and downs of the movie palace world. And even with intermittent bouts – sometimes decades – of silence, the organ still plays on, more than 80 years after its installation.

About three times a year it's played as it was intended – accompanying silent films. It will be played this weekend during the ninth annual Capitolfest, a three-day festival including 14 feature films, many of which are silent films accompanied by an organist.

The rest of the year, house organist John Paul plays the organ before sound films as people come in for shows.

What it was like

Keeping with tradition, the instrument still can be found as a somber backdrop to funerals, church services and sacred occasions, but in movie palaces of the past it became known as the theme for an exciting night out, Paul said.

"What we like to create (is) the sense of what it was like when patrons were paying their tickets, buying their popcorn and what it was like in 1928," Paul said. "It's a form of taking people back to a time in history — movie-wise and music-wise — that was not as complicated and complex as the society we are living in today."

That the organ still can replicate the era of silent movies could be considered remarkable on its own, but that the theater houses the original organ in its original space is almost unheard of.

"When you find an original organ intact and unaltered it is very rare," said Ken Double, president and CEO of the American Theatre Organ Society. "That would make that organ extremely special in terms of those of us interested in the preservation of these instruments."

The organ is one of about 50 originally installed movie palace organs in the country, said Art Pierce, executive director at the Capitol Theatre and member of the Rome Grand Theatre Organ Society. Furthermore, it's one of four Möller's originally installed in theaters.

"Roughly 12,000 or more theater organs were built," Double said. "Of those, there aren't many left in public places. And there are very, very few that are original, that don't have changes in pipe work or that have pipe work replaced or that have been replaced with a modern computer system."

"The movie palaces that did survive had the organs taken out," Pierce said.

And the ones that weren't removed fell into ruin, unable to be repaired. That could have been the fate of the Capitol's organ if it hadn't been for a group of theatre organ fans from the Empire State Theatre Musical Instrument Museum.

Restoring history

The group salvaged the instrument in 1996 and after years of not being used, the instrument required tender hands.

Lifelong Rome resident Fred Normand was one pair of those hands.

An electrical engineer by trade for Rome Labs, Normand had a bit of a knack for the wiring that transmits the sounds from the keys to pipes.

"It could take several hours to find one problem," said Normand, who continues to repair the wiring when needed. "There's so many possibilities that can go wrong. We probably fix a dozen problems a year. It sounds like a lot but there's thousands (of wires), so it's really rather few."

Those complexities don't keep Normand away. In fact, he's become enamored all over again with the organ which was silent when he attended Saturday matinees at the Capitol Theatre in the late '40s.

Then, he was barely tall enough to see over the quiet instrument. Today, you can find him lovingly and voluntarily inspecting each of the thousands of wires that keep the majestic sounds filling the historic theater.

"It's not an effort at all," he said. "It's the fact that it's such a majestic piece of equipment and I just marvel at the ingenuity that went into the design ... it's the heart of the theater."

Eric
KB7DQH
The objective is to reach human immortality—that is, to create things which are necessary to mankind, necessary to the purpose of the existence of mankind, and which have become the fruit that drives the creation of a higher state of mankind than ever existed before."