In celebration of the 150th birthday of a landmark American organ commissioned in 1875 by American organist and professor Eugene Thayer for his private studio in Boston.

This organ now resides in North Chapel in Woodstock, VT, where members of the Organ Historical Society discovered it, intact, in the 1950s. The recital will feature selections idiomatic to the repertory Thayer and his students, featuring this organ’s unique pedal action in virtuosic passages for the feet.

Thayer established a private teaching studio in Boston around 1875, the first of its kind in the city. He commissioned Hutchings and Plaisted to construct a custom instrument for the space, specifically designed for his teaching purposes. In the next edition of The Organist’s Journal and Review, Thayer includes a description of the studio and specifications of the organ, which he glowingly describes as “as near a perfect model as it is possible for human skill to produce,” and notes that “we believe there is no organ music in existence which it cannot give with artistic and most beautiful effect.”67 The 2-manual, 16-stop organ boasted double-named stops in German and English (French for the strings and one flute), just as Buck had requested that Johnson use German names in addition to English ones to denote stops of more European voicing characteristics.

The most interesting feature of this instrument was its pedal action, requested expressly by Thayer. On a typical instrument of this period, each organ pedal is anchored to a fulcrum pin at its rear, most easily depressed by means of pressure at the very front of the pedal’s length, towards the kickboard. On the Thayer organ, Hutchings & Plaisted custom-built an action anchoring the pedal to pins at either end, so that the key could be depressed with equal efficiency at any point along its length, much like the mechanism of a space bar on a computer keyboard. With this action, Thayer could play interchangeably with heel and toe at any point along the length of the key, with reportedly unparalleled virtuosity.