The Delight of the Organist and the Audiophile.
Studying Recent Performance Practice in Vintage Recordings.
by Frederick Hohman
© Copyright 2025 Frederick Hohman. All rights reserved.
Many visitors to this website may already know that my career, which includes being founder of the Pro Organo label, has been divided between life as a concert organist / composer and as a media producer, who helps other musicians to always sound their best in commercially-released audio and video recordings. In the latter function, people also think of me, asking my advice for what to do when a loved one, usually a family member who has been an audiophile, passes away. People want my advice on how to best dispose of what is, at times, a vast quantity of accumulated audio recordings. Organ recordings came to the commercial marketplace in the 1950s, and there were rare instances of commercially-marketed pipe organ recordings prior to 1950, because the pipe organ was, and still is, one of the most difficult of musical instruments to capture in audio recordings. Sometimes, I come across a library of audio recordings which were made by audiophiles, in their local area or region. They were made using open-reel audio tape recorders. Although audiophiles often used audio equipment that was not truly professional, the results these amateurs obtained was often very impressive. As both an organist and a media producer, I have a double interest in live, vintage concert organ audio recordings. Recordings found in such private libraries are not studio produced, but are one-of-a-kind examples, documenting a particular organist’s performance practices. About a decade ago, I was given a large library of open-reel recordings from an organ devotée in greater Los Angeles. They were recorded from the 1950s through 1970s. I found, in listening to these recordings, some noticeable differences between the typical organ recitalist of the 1960s and the typical organ recitalist of today. It is never a good idea to over-generalize about such things as performance practice, but nonetheless, I have found some value in auditioning and studying the recordings in that audio tape library.
The move from analog audio to digital audio recording made everything we hear today possible. Many people reading this article may not have been born until after the digital audio age was firmly established. The majority of this article is to describe, as succinctly as possible, how open-reel analog audio recordings worked.
Until the dawn of the 20th century, recorded sound did not exist, at least, not in any useful form to humans. This statement alone can cause us to wonder what music making was like for composers in the 19th-century and before. Scholars have tried repeatedly to define and truthfully interpret and re-create the music scores of centuries past, but the fact is, no matter how we try, we just don’t know for certain how a composer’s music was made during the composer’s lifetime. Sure, we have hand-copied music scores (they are often called autographs), from earlier centuries, but even so, there is often much that does not become annotated in the written score. When measuring today’s world against this history, we can realize how fortunate we are to enjoy the helpful tools we have today in audio recordings.
From the late 1940s through the mid-1980s, the highest fidelity in recorded sound was achieved with what was known as an open-reel analog tape recorder. Magnetic tape, with a standard width of 1/4”, was driven at a steady speed, as a capstan and a pinch roller propelled the magnetic tape forward, from the supply reel, over the audio recording and playback heads, and onto the take-up reel. Variations in magnetic energy, or fluxivity, of electrified audio waves were captured on tape, and then played back, heard with electronic amplification. We would hear the recorded sound faithfully reproduced through loudspeakers when the tape was rewound to its starting position and played back. The tape recorder – originally called magnetophon – is considered by most to be a product of German research in the 1930s. After the end of the Second World War, the technology of audio recorders was soon adopted by and improved upon by Polish and American scientists. By the late 1940s, magnetic tape recorder/reproducer machines were in wide use in professional recording studios and in radio stations, where the new technology allowed the new luxury of delayed, recorded broadcasts. A variation on this new technology, intended for consumer use, was spun off, with the appearance of less expensive tape recorders, appearing in the 1950s. These amateur, or audiophile, units were close in fidelity to the best professional audio recorders. While professional open-reel recorder / reproducers ran tape typically at 15 inches per second, and only occasionally at 30 inches per second (as was the case in parts of Europe), the open-reel machines intended for audiophile use typically propelled tape at slower speeds of 3.75 inches per second, or at 7.5 inches per second. People had a choice of magnetic recording tape with respect to tape thickness. The most robust 1/4” recording tape had a thickness of 1.5 mils, although many would opt for a thinner tape, at 1.0 mils. While a 7” reel of 1.5 mil magnetic tape held 1200 feet, with a record / play time of about 32 minutes, a thinner, 1.0 mil tape allowed 1800 feet in length to fit on a 7” reel, and this thinner tape allows about 47 minutes of continuous audio recording. By the 1970s, an even thinner magnetic tape was developed, but this was considered unsuitable for professional use. Tape at a thickness of less than 1.0 mil could stretch easily, and the magnetic signal recorded on an ultra-thin tape could “print through” to the next layer, or to the next wind of the reel.
At first, 1/4” magnetic tape was recorded with a mono signal over its full width, and the result was a monophonic open-reel recording. Stereo audio, with a pair of channels recorded onto the same 1/4” wide magnetic tape, did not gain popularity until the rise of stereo during the 1960s. The 1/4” wide magnetic tape adapted to the introduction of stereo quite well, because manufacturers began to create recording heads where two independent, but paired, audio channels recorded a stereo audio signal, with each of 2 channels on a 1/4-inch tape occupying about a linear track of just under 1/8 inch. The exploitation of the original 1/4” tape width went further with the consumer and audiophiles, when the 1/4-inch wide was divided into 4 tracks, or channels, with each channel of a stereo track holding a stereo pair of signals occupying about 1/16-inch per channel. Four-channels on a 1/4-inch open-reel tape allowed two channels to be recorded when recording audio in one tape direction, but then, when the tape ran out, the user could swap the supply and take-up reels, and recording could continue on the “other” area of the tape not recorded in the first pass through the machine. So there were variations in the numbers and widths of audio tracks distributed on a 1/4-inch magnetic tape.
Audiophiles in the 1960s and 1970s could also use the 1/4-track stereo capability of an audio recorder / reproducer to record 4 mono channels onto a 1/4-inch wide tape, thereby increasing the recording and play time of a reel of 1/4-inch tape. Of course, the sacrifice was that the audio recorded was mono, not stereo.
It was important for magnetic tape users to know the head and channel configuration of the tape in use, because a 4-track stereo program would reveal one program going forward, and another recorded program playing in reverse, if a 4-track stereo program would be played back on a 2-track stereo machine.
In the 1960s, open-reel tape recorders expanded to wider tapes of 1/2-inch, 1-inch, and even 2-inch widths, and correspondingly, these tapes could hold up to 24 individual simultaneous audio tracks, or channels. In spite of these multi-channel analog recorders, the bulk of commercial classical music recordings were acquired, from the 1950s through the 1970s, using a 1/4” open-reel recorder and a simple stereo pair of audio channels.
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The F. Eugene Miller Collection of Organ Recordings.
One of the most ardent fans of the pipe organ during the 1950s through 1990s was F. Eugene Miller. Mr. Miller lived in Southern California, and although he is known to have played at the organ, he was appreciated primarily for his generosity in helping to sponsor concerts by touring organists, who would give frequent organ recital performances in greater Los Angeles. Mr. Miller was also instrumental in the design and installation of one pipe organ, built to his specifications,. It was an instrument that some considered highly eccentric. That instrument was built by the Wicks company and installed at St. Cross Episcopal Church in Hermosa Beach, California. Gene Miller also attended most organ recitals in southern California, and he often brought his audio recording equipment, making audio recordings of many guest recitalists as he built his personal audio collection. Mr. Miller was not alone. During the 1950s and 1960s, there were other audiophiles similarly engaged, including the late Wesley C. Dudley III of Williamsburg, Virginia. As a guest of Mr. and Mrs. Dudley one year over the Christmas holidays, I was given a house tour, which included one large room devoted to the climate-controlled storage of his vast open-reel tape library.
While on a visit to southern California in the mid 1990s for organ recitals, I took the advice of my father-in-law and looked up one of his long-time friends, Mr. Gene Miller. This was F. Eugene Miller. It was then that I learned of Mr. Miller’s library of live organ recital recordings. Many years later, when Mr. Miller passed away, his attorney and executor offered, and I accepted, Mr. Miller’s organ music audio library. His library contained scores of open-reel tapes and an equal, if not greater number of audio cassette tapes (a format popular for commerically-distributed music in the 1970s and 1980s). To my dismay, I found the majority of the open-reel tapes to exhibit a pronounced “flutter.” This was likely due to poor capstan bearings in the audio tape transport of the machine on which the recordings were made. The effect was something like when an organist leaves the tremolo stop on throughout an entire concert, by mistake. There were enough tapes, however, that did not have this flutter ailment, and from them, I went about choosing the best performances for digitization and preservation.
The digital conversion process is really not difficult, once the analog audio playback machine is properly prepared. As I mentioned above, many of Gene Miller’s recordings were in 1/4-track stereo, and professional open-reel units usually do not record or play back in this format. After some searching, I located a 1/4-track stereo playback head that conformed to the electronic specifications of my playback decks, which were Sony APR-5003 units. The APR-5003 units were the last-produced analog open-reel recorder-reproducer, with production ending about 1990. I placed this alternate playback head in the place in the head stack that normally held the 2-track stereo record head. So, when I needed a 1/4-track stereo playback head, I would shift the play back setting to patch into the alternate, 1/4-track stereo playback head. For all open-reel tapes with 2-track stereo or 1/2-track mono, I could still choose to use the existing and original 2-track stereo play back head, which remained undisturbed and located in its normal place in the head stack.
Pictured below: A pair of Sony APR-5003 audio recorder/reproducers, during the audio to digital transfer process. These units were built in the USA, until contract to the American firm MCI, and branded as Sony. The transport of the APR-5003 is similar to one of Sony’s earliest digital audio recorders which utilized a DASH (Digital Audio Stationary Head) design and an open-reel digital audio tape. When Sony discovered that there was still a strong market for analog open-reel recorders in the 1980s, it re-tooled its DASH recorder chassis to become the APR-5000 analog series of recorder/ reproducers. The APR-5003 had a three-channel design, with a center-track SMPTE timecode track, located between the two audio channels on the heads and tape. This allowed the high-fidelity open-reel analog unit to sync-up with and provide highest quality stereo audio to studio-grade video equipment. The unit that was modified for an alternate playback head is on the right side of the image.
It was at this point that I proceeded to evaluate the recording quality of each of Gene Miller’s open-reel tapes. Along with this process, I had to make a judgment as to the performance quality of each program. These were, after all, live performances. Some of the programs Gene Miller recorded of guest recitalists were recorded in their entirety, on the day of the recital, but several hours prior to the evening concert time. In essence, Gene had recorded the organist’s “Dress Rehearsal” or the final “Run-through” of a complete recital program, where no audience was present. The only reasoning I can offer for this is that Gene preferred not to have audience noises to detract from the live performance recording. For those concerts where Gene actually recorded the live performance with audience in attendance, he would usually stop the recorder after one-second of applause, resuming his recording just before the next piece began.
Some of the performances I heard and spot-checked in the collection did not meet with my satisfaction, and for a variety of reasons. In some cases, Gene recorded the performances at the slower, lower-fidelity tape speed of 3-3/4 inches per second. Thankfully, most of the recordings from Gene’s open-reel collection were recorded at 7.5 inches per second. The most frequent reason I found for not performing a digital conversion of an open-reel recording is excessive “flutter and wow,” which I have described above. Actually, all brands of consumer tape decks from the 1970s had some flutter issues, and the issues were usually related to poor capstan bearings. The only consumer analog tape recorder units that I found to have had excellent flutter and wow specs were the Revox A700, and Technics 1520. Vintage, reconditioned units of both models can still show up for sale from time to time on the internet.
Flutter and wow being “out of spec” in an analog audio recording is not limited to analog open-reel audio recordings. Flutter is also a notorious issue when making music recordings on traditional audio cassettes, where the tape speed is a very slow 1-7/8 inches per second. Nearly every one of the hundred-plus cassettes in the Gene Miller library had mechanical flutter, introduced by the poor control over flutter and wow in original cassette recorder, and many of the cassettes also exhibited tape substrate breakdown. Of the scores of open-reel tapes I examined, and in those tapes with good fidelity overall, I did discover several true musical gems, with excellent sound and brilliant performances. On these recordings, I applied some digital filtering to remove the constant “tape hiss” that occurs with low-speed analog recordings. Levels between the analog playback deck and the analog/digital interface required a careful eye, because there were no test tones for level setting on these tapes. And it is here that the value of the Gene Miller library begins to emerge for the organist and musician.
Below is a line-by-line listing, chronologically, of the programs I have digitized for preservation from the Gene Miller library. These were digitized in a marathon session in July 2025. Except for the last two items marked as “UNKNOWN,” each open-reel tape had very detailed information about the artist, location, date, time and program content:
1955-01-20 Pierre Cochereau – First Congregational Church, Los Angeles CA
1961-05-22 H. William Hawke, Grace University Methodist Church, Ganonoque Ontario
1962-07-02 Hector Zeoli – Immanuel Presbyterian Church, Los AngelesCA
1963-08-26 Charles Shatto – Long Beach Congregational Church, Long Beach CA
1963-10-28 Ladd Thomas – Long Beach Congregational Church, Long Beach CA
1965-08-25 David Craighead – Pasadena Presbyterian Church, closed session
1966-10-18 George Markey – Long Beach Congregational Church, Long Beach CA
1967-03-14 Rudolf Inselmann (Leslie Chelsey, violin), First Congregational Church, Long Beach CA
1967-04-24 David Craighead – Long Beach Congregational Church, Long Beach CA
1969-01-31 Karel Paukert – First Congregational Church, Long Beach
1969-01-24 Robert Baker – First Lutheran Church, Los Angeles CA
1969-05-13 Simon Preston – First Congregational Church, Long Beach CA
1969-10-13 Andre Marchal – All Saints Church, Pasadena, Pasadena CA
1969-10-02 David Britton – Occidental College, Herrick Memorial Chapel
1975-10-19 Thomas Hazleton – St. Cross Episcopal Church, Hermosa Beach CA
1977-11-08 Darrel Wm. Orwig – St. Cross Episcopal Church, Hermosa Beach CA
1979-10-14 Pierre Cochereau – St. Francis de Sales Church, Philadelphia PA
1980-05-13 Joyce Jones – Informal try-out! – St. Cross Episcopal Church, Hermosa Beach CA
UNKNOWN Heinrich Fleischer – AGO Far Western Regional Convention
UNKNOWN Jean Langlais –
As you can see, there are two “unknown” recordings, where date and location were not documented. I include them for the study of the performance style of the organists (Fleischer and Langlais). In the Langlais recording, Mr. Langlais improvises a 5-movement organ symphony, which I found especially interesting.
In several of the digitized recordings listed above, I came to appreciate things which stand out when compared with our recital experiences today. In these live concert recordings, I found it interesting that artists would take a healthy amount of time between the pieces on their programs. The audiences would patiently wait. In my recent experiences today, I find that it is possible for an organist to take hardly 10 to 20 seconds between conclusion of applause and the next selection. In these recordings from over 50 years ago, I measured a time of 60 to 100 seconds that could pass between selections, without drawing audience protest or unrest. In several of the recital recordings, but especially in the program by Robert Baker, I sense what I would best describe as strong, reliable rhythm, along with with a reserved and stately sense of grandeur. An old school “legato” was present in these players who also doubled as college organ professors. The legato was tempered by a well-applied variation in manual articulation. And the last generalization I can make from having re-mastered these vintage recordings is that there is a true and vital sense of bravura when a quick tempo is indicated, and a deeper sense of calm when the prescribed tempo is slow. In short, I noticed a wider contrast between slower and quicker tempi. Many more observations, compared with the fine recitalists of 75 years ago, will become apparent as one delves into the actual programs that these artists played. While some of the artists names became obscure early in their careers, there are several musicians, including George Markey and Robert Baker, whose recordings are among those I have digitzed and preserved, who are still revered by many of the more mature current teachers of organ.
It is my hope to be able to share these re-mastered recordings digitally and at no cost, through one or more social media platforms, sometime in the next year. Until then, I would encourage organists, but especially the young and upcoming organists, to seek out and assess the similarities and differences that one may encounter in organists that preceded the current generation by a half-century or more. Making good mental notes on how organists of another time and place interpreted the same literature, combined with the young artist’s own occasional recording of his or her own playing, looking for both the similarities, strengths and differences, is a formula that may surely result in a resounding success.