These pedal pipes, the longest 17 feet long, are mounted sideways in the attic.

The three rank Echo chamber before restoration. From left to right: vox humana, flute, string. Note the music rolls on the walkboards for the organ’s player, which was far from working order.

 

The Cooper Aeolian Organ is a new designation for the instrument that has resided in the chapel of Morris Sutton Funeral Home at 68 Giles Blvd E in Windsor since 1946.  The new name celebrates two great influences: both Cooper and Aeolian.

James Scott Cooper was a successful Prohibition-era entrepreneur who legally amassed a fortune by exploiting a loophole in the law.  He did much philanthropically.  He paid for Belle River’s first high school, supported two orphanages, made numerous contributions to the agriculture industry in the area, and even paid for shoes and haircuts for the local poor children. He also built the largest home in Walkerville. Its poshest feature was an Aeolian residence player pipe organ.

The 22 rank beauty was heard, not seen, as most of the pipework resided in the basement and spoke into the home with grilles and sound ducts that Aeolian called tone chutes.  The console was in the library.  An Echo division was located on the second floor.  The organ is not a church organ nor a theatre organ but an orchestral organ. Popular during the first third of the 20th century, these instruments were designed to specifically perform transcriptions of classical, operatic, and popular music. Transcriptions were very popular in a way that is hard for modern music lovers to comprehend.  Before the internet, Ipods, radio, and even the phonograph, transcriptions were big business.  And a player organ was able to render even complicated orchestral works faithfully.  The residence organ was essentially a jukebox.   It turned out that using a collection of pipes was the best way to recreate the effect of  an orchestra, so, in fact, the residence player organ was an organ only incidentally.

 

The  instrument, Opus 1535, built by Aeolian in 1924, was moved to its present location as the mansion was torn down in 1946.  Edwin Morris the first rescue of Aeolian 1535.  The area Casavant representative Auguste Hébert performed the transplant without altering or modernizing a thing.  It is surmised Morris was pleased with the organ as it sounded at the time.  The Aeolian’s service shifted from secular to sacred as a chapel organ.  But it never sounded “churchy”, owing to its orchestral voicing and stop specification.  Its soft residential tone palette was suffused by the placement of the main chambers in the attic, speaking down through a grille in the chapel’s ceiling.  The console and small three rank Echo organ are located in the balcony.  

The organ was in regular use for decades and treasured by the Morris family, who contracted a firm from Chicago for maintenence. 

 

 

Years later, a modern second funeral facility was built, which subsequently hosted most of the memorial services.  The organ at Morris Sutton was used less and less.  It gradually fell out of repair.

 

 

 

By 2005, the organ became silent and played no more. In 2012, a second rescue effort began by Ron Dossenbach.  Over time, the organ again became fully functional.  All pipes, stops, couplers and pistons operate.  Even the Sfz light comes on when the sforzando toe lever is depressed.

 

 

 

The final phase of the restoration project involved the player mechanism.  It again plays the paper organ rolls, one of only two in Canada able to do so. The other is at Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC.  The organ is a rare example of an unaltered Aeolian residence player organ.  There is a small museum room on site that details its history and mechanical characteristics.  We can hear the music, exactly, as James Cooper heard it in his home. We even have some of his rolls.

 

That is why the slogan of the museum is Music You Can Hear.

 

Due to its unaltered and excellent original working condition, the Cooper Aeolian Organ was awarded the A Citation of Historical Merit from the Historical Organ Committee of the RCCO, one of only 20 in all of Canada.

The scroll box behind the music rack. Users would read the instructions on the roll to change stops. The Duo Art player, shown here pre-restoration (the brass tracker bar now shines like gold!) automated this, but Aeolian still printed the stop information on the rolls.