Murray M. Harris

Murray M. Harris (* 1866 in Illinois ; † 1922 ) was an American organ builder . He is considered the "father of organ building" in the US West.

Life

Harris was born in Illinois in 1866 to a Presbyterian minister. In 1884 the family moved to Los Angeles , where Harris trained with a jeweler and watchmaker. In 1888 he married the daughter of a senior administrator and shortly afterwards moved to Boston . Here he worked as a piano tuner and at the same time learned the trade of organ building from George Hutchings . At the same time, Ernest Martin Skinner also met here . Skinner excelled in improving the electro-pneumatic action , while Harris specialized more in intonation .

In 1894 Harris returned to Los Angeles to build some organs there on behalf of Hutchings. Soon afterwards, Harris broke away from Hutchings and started his own business in Los Angeles. Harris' workshop was the first organ building workshop in Los Angeles:

"Now this city can produce an instrument so complicated, so artistic and so excellent as to meet in competition the product of east coast manufactors."

- The Los Angeles Times

The numerous churches - in 1899 there were 154 churches in Los Angeles alone - the rapidly growing city ensured an excellent order situation and Harris was soon considered an outstanding organ builder who combined business acumen with high musicality. The easy availability of good woods enabled him to offer high quality instruments at reasonable prices. Harris had started with only one employee in 1894, but was able to modernize his production facilities as early as 1899; in 1901 his company had grown fourfold. In the same year Harris built his first three-manual organ for the First Methodist Church in Los Angeles, where Clarence Eddy played three sold-out concerts for the inauguration.

With the growing success, the need for qualified workers who were familiar with the technical innovations of organ building also grew. Harris had previously only built mechanical and partially pneumatic action, but the size of the organ was limited by the constraints of the mechanics. The drive of Romanticism for ever larger instruments broke the ground for the development of electropneumatics. In their early days, the risk of fire due to short circuits and unreliability were the obstacles to their ultimate breakthrough in practice. Harris therefore recruited 51-year-old William Boone Fleming (1849-1940), a former Hilborne Roosevelt employee in Philadelphia, who was considered to be a leader in the further development of electropneumatics; With the so-called Fleming system , he had developed a form of electropneumatics for the first time that was reliable enough for practical use; some of Fleming's instruments still exist as late as the 20th century and have functional (albeit sedate) action. The recruitment of Fleming also led to a mixing of different sound cultures in the area of ​​intonation: Harris had previously oriented himself on his teacher Hutchings, Fleming, on the other hand, brought Roosevelt's sound characteristics with him to Los Angeles.

Harris and Flemings' first major joint project was the Stanford Memorial Church organ in 1901 , the core of which still exists today. Roosevelt's influence is already evident in the disposition, which was almost a copy of Roosevelt's disposition of the organ for the First Presbyterian Church in New York. Since the construction of the organ was completed before the church was completed, Harris first exhibited the organ at the Fifth International Convention of the Epworth League in San Francisco from July 18 to 21, 1901.

In 1903 the workshop already had 100 employees and Harris planned to set up a branch in New York . At the beginning of the 20th century, wealthy residents on the American west coast had large numbers of house organs and automatic organs of orchestral design built into their houses and yachts in order to have light musical dishes played by specially employed organists for their entertainment. Harris wanted to participate in this deal. To draw attention to his company, he planned to build a grand organ for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis . Since he received a request at the same time to build the organ for the Kansas City Convention Hall with 140 registers , he combined both projects: the organ should first be at the exhibition in St. Louis and then be transported to Kansas.

List of works (selection)

year	opus	place	building	image	Manuals	register	Remarks
1900		los Angeles	First Methodist Church		III / P
1901		Palo Alto	Stanford Memorial Church		III / P	57
1903		San Francisco	Calvary Presbyterian Church

literature

• Murray M. Harris . In: Douglas E. Bush, Richard Kassel (Eds.): The Organ. To Encyclopedia . Routledge, New York / London 2006, ISBN 0-415-94174-1 , pp. 240 sq . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
• Ray Biswanger: Music in the Marketplace: The Story of Philadelphia's Historic Wanamaker Organ — from John Wanamaker to Lord & Taylor . Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, Bryn Mawr, Pa. 1999, ISBN 978-0-9665552-0-2 , Chapter One - “Something of the Medieval Artist”, pp. 1-9 .
• David Lennox Smith, Orpha Ochse: Murray M. Harris and organ building in Los Angeles . Organ Historical Society, 2005, ISBN 978-0-913499-21-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c d e} Ray Biswanger: Music in the Marketplace: The Story of Philadelphia's Historic Wanamaker Organ — from John Wanamaker to Lord & Taylor . Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, Bryn Mawr, Pa. 1999, ISBN 978-0-9665552-0-2 , Chapter One - “Something of the Medieval Artist”, pp. 1-9 .