San Antonio College Library

For centuries, pipe organs stood at the summit of musical and technological achievement, admired as the most complex and intricate mechanisms the human race had yet devised. In All the stops, Craig Whitney journeys through the history of the American pipe organ and brings to life the curious characters who have devoted their lives to its music. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, organ music was wildly popular in America. Organ builders in...

From the Spanish mission days of the seventeenth century to the present, the history of the organ in the United States mirrors to a remarkable degree its social, economic, and cultural setting. It has unique characteristics that bind it more closely than any other instrument to its location, to social and economic changes, and to fluctuations in musical taste. Trends in immigration, wars, economic crises, the growth of factories, the availability...