🔒Pipe Dreams: Elm City company makes beautiful music working on rare pipe organs

On an otherwise unremarkable side street on the Hamden town line, a tiny cadre of master craftsmen perform an outsized role rebuilding and restoring some of the largest, most complex and most revered musical instruments in the world.

The company is the Thompson-Allen Co. Its business is rebuilding and restoring pipe organs in churches, concert halls and universities all over the world. The work is so specialized — some might say arcane — that only a handful of master craftsmen are qualified to do it.

In their spare time, the Thompson-Allen technicians also perform routine tuning and maintenance of pipe organs, many in churches throughout southern New England and New York, to pay the piper, so to speak.

The company is owned by its two principals: Nicholas Thompson-Allen and Joseph F. Dzeda. It was founded by the former’s father, company namesake Aubrey Thompson-Allen (1907-1974) in 1952. Dzeda was the elder Thompson-Allen’s assistant for many before his retirement in 1973, when Dzeda and the founder’s son decided to carry on the legacy.

Over the half-century since, they have done just that. Today Thompson-Allen employs seven craftsmen, including the two principals. All except two have been with the company for more than two decades.

The company was among the first in its tiny industry to embrace the concept of faithful restorations of high-quality pipe organs built in the first part of the 20th century. Thompson-Allen is renowned for its sympathetic approach to restoration, the quality of its work, and for its ability to complete complex jobs on time — albeit within timeframes that can span years of painstaking work. All without an owner’s manual to guide them.

Take, for example, just one instrument: the famed Newberry Organ inside Yale’s Woolsey Hall. When it was completed in 1929, the instrument was the largest ever to bear the nameplate of its maker, Boston’s Skinner Organ Co. Its 12,617 pipes (think about it) can shake the legendary performance hall to its very foundation. Top-to-bottom restoration of the instrument — which receives heavy use in the form of concerts, recitals, public events and incalculable rehearsal hours — took six years.

Thompson-Allen specializes mainly in restorations and rebuilds of pipe organs made by Skinner and its successor company, Aeolian-Skinner, which between 1901 and its closing in 1972 produced some of the finest examples of their rare craft in North America. No two are identical and, to borrow from Will Rogers, they ain’t making any more of them.

Aeolian-Skinner organs are prized “for their distinctive ‘American Classic’ sound that is a combination of English, French and German organ influences,” explains R. Walden Moore, organist and choirmaster of New Haven’s Trinity Church, which houses an Aeolian-Skinner dating from 1935. “The organs are noted for their clarity of sound and beauty of cohesive organ pipes,” he adds. Other well-known examples are found in Boston’s Symphony Hall and St. Thomas Church in New York City.

Pipe organs are complex systems of wind chests, pipes, action and console created with technology from another, bygone epoch of human imagination, resourcefulness and endeavor. It is not for nothing that pipe organs are called “the king of instruments” — for their complexity as much as for the God-fearing sound they can emit. Unlike, say, piccolos, they are not exactly portable.

So Thompson-Allen goes to them.

“We travel to wherever they are, remove them, bring them back [to New Haven], restore them and take them back again,” Thompson-Allen explains. ”If they are unchanged from their original design, we strive to keep them that way. If they’ve been changed — especially if they’ve been changed poorly, which is often the case, trying to ‘modernize’ an instrument that was artistically designed — then we labor to restore that [instrument] wth period or replica period pipes.”

“We have a reputation for being good at doing that,” he adds.

The work typically involves lengthy, complex labor at churches and performance spaces throughout North America. Some of the work — including rebuilding actual pipes, which can be as long as 16 feet for the lowest notes emitted by the console’s pedals — is performed at the company’s decidedly unglamorous shop on Welton Street.

Most recently the company completed work on a Skinner organ at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Worcester, Mass., a restoration that consumed about a year and cost some $400,000.

Other recent projects near and far involved restoration of a 1955 Aeolian-Skinner instrument in Seymour Congregational Church, a 1950 Aeolian-Skinner at South Congregational Church in Hartford and an early (1906) Skinner organ at the University of Virginia.

Currently the Thompson-Allen team is in the process of removing the Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Church of the Redeemer on Whitney Ave. in New Haven, which recently closed its doors, and moving the instrument — lock, stock and windchest — to its new home in Derry Presbyterian Church in Hershey, Pa. The instrument was originally installed by Aubrey Thompson-Allen in 1951.

Today Thompson-Allen fils and Dzeda are also associate curators of organs at Yale. Don’t be misled by that title: The university has 16 pipe organs, in spaces including Battell Chapel, Marquand Chapel at the Yale Divinity School and Dwight Chapel, so the role of “organ curator” is far from a sinecure.

Since many of the instruments Thompson-Allen works with are in places of worship, one might go so far as to say they are doing God’s work here on earth. And even as America becomes a less church-going society, the company continues to thrive performing rebuilds and restorations on instruments in colleges and concert halls — making beautiful music together well into the foreseeable future.