BRATTLEBORO — On Nov. 5, 2001, Ned Phoenix held a meeting at First Baptist Church to talk about preserving the legacy of the Estey Organ Company, and asked if anyone was interested in starting a museum.
Exactly 10 years later, on Saturday, Nov. 5, at 2 p.m., the Estey Organ Museum will present a concert by organist and carillonneur George Matthew Jr. to celebrate the museum's first decade.
Matthew will perform what organizers describe as “an exciting, unique concert of works” on the Estey organ at First Baptist Church on Main Street.
Admission by donation ($15 suggested) will support the museum's continued work.
Offertory for Grand Organ by François Couperin will open the concert and “put the organ through its paces,” organizers say. Allegro & Scherzo from the Suite for a Musical Clock, one of Beethoven's few works for organ, “sparkles all over the flute stops,” they add.
Matthew will also offer recently discovered pieces by Russian composers, works by Americans Eric De Lamarter, Seth Bingham, and Robert Crandell, and a Nigerian Prayer by African-British composer Fela Sowande.
The concert will end with Dudley Buck's march built on A Mighty Fortress.
Matthew serves as organist at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Middlebury. He also served as organist, choir director and carillonneur at churches, temples, schools, and colleges in Connecticut and Vermont, including Middlebury College and Norwich University. He has traveled widely in the United States and Europe as an organ recitalist and carillonneur. In June 2004, he was named Artist of the Year by the Vermont Chapter, American Guild of Organists.
The first decade of the museum has included the purchase and operation of the Estey Engine House as a gallery space; and the display of reed, pipe, and electronic organs and other Estey ephemera.
The museum has also hosted the EsteyFest national reed organ convention and completed a Preserve America grant - an initiative by a number of federal agencies - to plan the preservation of the original slate-sided factory buildings. It has hosted numerous workshops, lectures, demonstrations, and performances, as well as an annual birthday celebration honoring Jacob Estey, who was born in Hinsdale, N.H., on Sept. 30, 1814.
Phoenix recalls how it all began.
“Although there were two or three important and well-attended meetings elsewhere in Brattleboro that evening, 25 people came to hear of an Estey Museum,” he said. “After my presentation, I asked, 'Who is interested?' and five people raised their hands. The Estey Organ Museum was born.”
More recently, the museum held the first annual Levi Fuller A435 Extravaganza in August, honoring the memory of the company's vice president and Vermont's 44th governor, who invented a standard pitch.
“A standard pitch allowed musicians to play in tune together, which was important in orchestras and when playing in other locales and countries,” explained board president Chris Grotke in a press release for the event. “International Pitch was eventually changed to today's standardized pitch, A440.”
Phoenix and Dennis Waring also recently presented a Sound and Science program and workshop in five area schools.
Waring, an ethnomusicologist, instrument maker, and collector based in Middletown, Conn., is author of Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs and Consumer Culture in Victorian America, published by Wesleyan University Press in 2002.
The museum received $1,245 from the Vermont Humanities Council for “American Invention and Innovation in Sound,” a pilot program to teach the history, technology, and cultural impact of Estey organs to students in five southern Vermont schools.