Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs and Consumer Culture in Victorian America (review)

The mechanical reed organ, or harmonium, a keyboard instrument with "freely-vibrating reed tongues . . . activated by air under either pressure or suction" (p. 1) dates back at least to the fourteenth century. The instrument that is the subject of this book, the brainchild of and profit maker for J. Estey and Company of Brattleboro, Vermont, achieved international fame by the late 1870s and remained a familiar item of American household furniture until World War II. Though exceptionally popular in both church and home—around 1900 it occupied more parlors than did the contemporary piano—the reed organ has been virtually ignored by historians of classical music. The consensus among twentieth-century critics appears to have encouraged both amateur and professional musicians to dismiss the widespread appeal of the reed organ (versus the prestigious pipe organ) as well as the wider ramifications of its presence. Dennis Waring's well-written book, bolstered by solid research, should change our way of thinking about nineteenth-century musical culture in the United States.

Manufacturing the Muse consists of five chapters divided into two major parts. Chapter 1, "The Reed Organ and the Victorian Image," provides cultural background in readable prose. Chapter 2, "Sing the Old Songs," fills us in on the repertory used by performers, including comments about characteristic arrangements of pieces originally written for other media. Chapters 3 to 5 explicate the story of Jacob Estey and his family and the scope of their commercial enterprise. There is information ranging from the instrument-building process to the manner in which the Estey Organ Company housed, trained, and otherwise provided for its employees.

Books devoted to musical instruments usually fall into one of three categories: technical manuals for builders, tutors for performers, or histories of development and dissemination. Normally, all these types skirt extensive discussion of musical context or everyday usage, especially the significance of instruments in social or recreational settings. Neither a builder's blueprint nor a student's guide, Waring's book is fundamentally a piece of ethnomusicological organology—that is, a social history as well as an instrumental one. Although the reed organ has never been accepted as an equal participant in the public-concert tradition, Waring makes a strong argument for addressing its history. By assembling and consulting an up-to-date and authoritative bibliography (filling nine double-columned pages) and covering an impressive range of ancillary topics, he has vividly painted a context for his subject. This book touches on a remarkably wide variety of issues in only 356 pages. It is also beautifully illustrated and laid out.

Waring gives due consideration to the woman's role as mistress of home activities in Victorian America and to the special associations of the organ with religiosity and child rearing. He also combines a case study of a multigenerational family business with a critique of the development of advertising and several examples of how managers and industrial workers interacted in turn-of-the-century New England.

Manufacturing the Muse differs from earlier social histories related to musical instruments—such as Karen Linn's That Half Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in Popular American Culture (1991) and Arthur Loesser's Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History (1954)—in its coverage of the purely technical or physical aspects of Estey's organs. Some thirty of Waring's 125 figures illustrate structural elements of the instruments or their components: reeds, reed boxes, cases, consoles, voicing jacks. All figures are clearly captioned or explained in the main text. Sixty-three pages are devoted to appendices that show sales charts, tables, floor plans, maps, and diagrams, and take up such issues as "Estey Reed Organ Casework and Tonal Design" and "Sound Production with Free Reeds" (these two by different authors). One appendix provides five notated musical examples, which are included among...