First Presbyterian Church
Knoxville, Tennessee

B. Rule & Co.
New Market, Tennessee

Established in 1792, First Presbyterian Church of Knoxville, Tennessee, still stands on its original plot: the onetime turnip patch of Knoxville’s founder, James White. Immediately adjacent to the church is Knoxville’s oldest graveyard, where a number of early settlers and local luminaries are buried—including White himself and the church’s first pastor, Rev. Samuel Carrick.

As it happens, the cemetery helped to form one of this country’s great newspapermen. In 1872, Adolph Ochs, then 13 years old, began work as a “printer’s devil” at the Knoxville Chronicle, where Captain William Rule—the paper’s editor and one of my forebears—became a valued mentor. Ochs, who as a young man had a superstitious fear of cemeteries, often chose to stay all night at the Chronicle rather than walk home in the dark past the FPC graveyard. As a result, he whiled away many late-night hours at the paper’s offices, teaching himself the printer’s trade. Following his apprenticeship at the Chronicle and several other newspaper jobs, he purchased the ailing New York Times in 1896 for $75,000 and turned the paper into a profitable enterprise. No doubt Capt. Rule’s mentorship—plus all those nocturnal hours at the Chronicle, spurred by a fear of the old cemetery—was instrumental to Ochs’s later success.

William Rule III (b. 1912), another of my relations, grew up at First Presbyterian Church, and in 1940 he and his wife, Effie, began 33 years of mission work in the Congo, where they established training programs for nurses and dentists. The couple returned to FPC in their retirement. William passed in 1999; Effie in 2013.

Given these and other connections between the extended Rule family and First Presbyterian Church, it was with pleasure that B. Rule & Co. received a call from the parish in 2015, asking us to remove its 1963 Casavant (before a major remodeling project) and either replace or reimagine it.

The Casavant was an example of the Organ Reform Movement at its height: an obsession with getting clean, articulate speech from every single pipe (in order to create a perfectly transparent chorus) combined with a Bauhaus-inspired look. The entire front of the church was stripped clean of any existing architectural detail in 1963, and the new organ was placed behind a wainscot-to-ceiling curtain wall of repetitive rectangles made of two-by-sixes and expanded steel, all painted white. The entire array looked like a huge cold-air return, except for the vague glint of organ pipes that showed through here and there. Mies van der Rohe would have been proud.

The organ’s principals, strings, and reeds spoke with an aggressive, highly articulate sound. Open-toe voicing atop individual pneumatic valves accomplished Casavant tonal director Larry Phelps’s goal: perfect transparency and repeatable accuracy of every pipe’s speech, leading to a glass-clear rendering of polyphonic lines. Many years ago, I gave my undergraduate senior recital on this instrument, in the years when organ students were encouraged to study and perform mostly Baroque, polyphonic works. Those pieces came off well on that organ; the Vierne and Franck, not so much.

In any case, the instrument was very, very loud. Choir members, surrounded on three sides by the organ, described feelings of being trapped in a kind of sonic prison during hymns and preludes, and some of them discreetly wore ear protection.

The building committee confessed that pretty much everyone in the church was heartily tired of the aggressive speech of the organ and desired a compromise: an instrument informed by the practices of the Baroque that could play complex polyphonic music with clarity while producing sound more sympathetic to the low, flat-ceilinged 400-seat room and its dry acoustics. Talk began to circulate that an entirely new organ might be necessary.

Our firm spent several days creating a spreadsheet of existing scales, cut-ups, pipe construction, and wind pressures and found upon analysis that most of the principals and flutes came very close to the scales we would use for a room of that size and acoustic qualities. In addition, the flue pipes were beautifully made: exacting solder joints, perfect, un-nicked windways, and precisely beveled languids. It was clear that working with them would be almost like working with brand-new, unvoiced pipes.

Some of the reed scales bordered on the bizarre, and maintenance over the years had shown that a number of the ranks were chronically unstable for tuning; moreover, the extremely narrow scales created sounds that had poor blending quality. A number of the reed ranks would have to be replaced, and most of the rest revoiced considerably.

The flutes were lovely. Open-toe voicing suited them nicely, and very little change was judged necessary. Only the 4′ Spitzflöte on the Great, which was very fat-scaled and unstable in the treble, was deemed unusable.

In the end, we proposed a complete rebuild. Wind pressures were raised, and the toes of all Principal ranks were closed; these pipes were voiced as if new (some judicious nicking, a little raising of cut-ups here and there). The Swell 16′ Basson and 4′ Klarine were replaced with a 16′ Clarinet and 8′ Trumpet, both made by Fred Oyster; the remaining reeds were revoiced. The original voicing sought to create a distinct “slap” of the reed tongue at the onset of speech—an effect that works well in a large, live room but is a bit too aggressive in a typical American Protestant sanctuary built just before World War I. Altering the curve not only smoothed out the onset of speech but also created significantly more fundamental.

The acoustics had always been poor in the flat-ceilinged room, and we spent considerable time analyzing them. Julie Mundy, a brilliant employee who was then an acoustical engineering student at the University of Hartford (working long hours during summers and other school breaks), managed to procure an impressive array of acoustical-analysis equipment: microphones and amplitude-measuring devices with real-time readouts—a dizzying array of switches, buttons, and lights. We ensconced ourselves in the balcony and analyzed an entire Sunday service, taking amplitude and frequency measurements with congregation standing, congregation seated, entrance doors open, entrance doors closed, etc. Whether or not we collected usable information, it looked very impressive and gave weight to our recommendations to the building committee.

We actually gained the most useful acoustical information by walking around the sanctuary with a twelve-foot-long hardwood stick, knocking on the walls, and identifying the places where the plaster had come loose from the brick. The contractor ended up stripping off the plaster in those hollow-sounding areas and replastering; workers also removed the quarter-inch pegboard in the aisle ceilings (an acoustical mistake from 1963). Meanwhile, the building committee disposed of the pew cushions. These three things improved the acoustics dramatically; the organ and choir now easily project all the way to the back of the room, with just enough reverberation to give life to the sound.

All chests in the organ were re-leathered, as was the wind system. A new two-horsepower Zephyr blower was provided, as the original one-and-a-half-horsepower blower was deemed insufficient for the higher pressures and added ranks. The console is entirely new, built in our shop, and utilizes a Peterson ICS-4000 system. The two matching organ cases were designed by Will Dunklin and built in our shop, patterned closely after the handsome, historic G-compass E. & G.G. Hook organ at First Parish (Unitarian) of Northfield, Massachusetts. The white expanded-metal grilles were replaced by grilles built in our shop, after a design in Thomas Sheraton’s pattern book; the same patterns can be found in the leaded work of the nave’s stained-glass windows.

Many thanks are due to Denis Blain of Casavant Frères for his advice on re-leathering the low-pressure Casavant pitman chests, as well as to Mark Pace, organist, who extended considerable effort toward making our installation as easy as possible.

The organ is expected to provide at least another 60 years of reliable musical service.

Bradley Rule

B. Rule & Company
Steven Lloyd
Hannah Martin
Naomi Martin
Julie Mundy
Bradley Rule

Photos by Hannah Odom