Official News Letter of The South Manchester Museum Of Keyboard Technology.
I found a reference to a Lillian Meyers in regard to the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Apparently Miss Meyers, daughter of Chicago industrialist Arthur Meyers, had been invited to put together a concert to demonstrate the brand new electric keyboard instrument the Novachord, invented the previous year by Laurens Hammond. The concerts were commissioned by the Acoustical Society of America and performed every afternoon at 2pm at the Bell Telephone Pavilion by ‘The Lilian Meyers Organ Quartet’, comprising Lillian herself and three fellow students from Sarah Lawrence College: Miss Mitchell, Miss Lang and Miss Arnold.
However, it appears after the first week of concerts Meyers’ quartet was replaced by Homer Dudley’s ‘Voder’: an early speech synthesizer. Further research reveals that the physical effects of the sub-harmonics and high ‘super’ harmonics from the Novachords meant that audiences left feeling nauseous after ten minutes – although those who lasted into the thirty-minute area of the music reported a great feeling of lightness and euphoria. There were many requests for the Meyers quartet to return in subsequent months, but by then Hammond had moved the organs to the Garden Court Ford Exposition under the direction of Ferde Grofe. The presence of these two quartets has led to confused accounts of the 1939 World’s Fair and the controversial organ concerts.
There was a report of a Lillian Meyers concert in 1941 in Yonkers New York, this time using three Hammond organs and one Novachord. Miss Irene Dewey reported having to be revived with the aid of smelling salts after the first half of the recital before re-entering the concert and experiencing ‘the feeling of the lightness before a thunderstorm’ and the ‘smell of metals in the air followed by a disturbance of the digestion’. Mr Raymond Freiberg wrote enthusiastically about ‘an overwhelming harmonious bonding of the audience’, a ‘glorious architecture of the music’, and his ‘body beating in tune, it felt as if a suspension of time had occurred’.
The Burton Wood Quartet and World War II
By 1944 it would appear that Miss Doreen Lang, one of the original members of the Meyers quartet, was stationed at Burton Wood Army Air Force base outside Warrington in the North West of England, then the home to the USAAF. Nearly a city unto itself, Burton Wood was home to 18,000 US and British service men. Having direct links to the Hammond Company in Chicago, Miss Lang had persuaded the Chicago-based company to supply Hammond Model D organs for use in US military chapels in the UK. Delivery of the heavy organs was no easy task, even with the transatlantic shipping convoys of World War II. The first shipment of twenty-five were delivered to Liverpool’s Albert Dock on 2 April 1944 and moved by road to Burton Wood for distribution to the rest of the UK. Miss Lang’s duties included the testing, setting up and final distribution of the organs.
Prior to the build-up to D-Day in June 1944, a great leaving dance was organized at the base on May 16. Miss Lang commissioned local music store Dawson’s to copy some scores of music by Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington she had arranged for an organ quartet. Included with these were some of the arrangements from the World’s Fair concert by Lillian Meyers. Miss Lang had also asked if there were any local girls who would perhaps like to help by performing in her new organ group. So the first Burton Wood Quartet was formed: Miss Doreen Lang (from New York), Miss Irene Roberts (from Warrington) Miss Leslie Dawson (from Warrington) and Barbara Thomas (from Liverpool).
The concert held in Hangar 6 was a great success and also featured the Ray Denham Dance Orchestra, who finished the concert by one am. Don Voorhees, stationed at Burton Wood in1944, was interviewed in 1972:
The Saturday dance crowd seemed to want to hang around after the dance, and around three am the organ girls came back wearing blankets and spent some time warming up the instruments. There seemed to be a problem with one of the instruments and some of the ground crew got involved. Just before sunrise they began to make a very slow kind of cloud music, a lot of the guys were crying and the local girls were trying to comfort them, you could see their tears as steam in the morning air…about sixty tough guys crying like babies!
The Burton Wood Quartet continued to play Saturday night dances at the base right through until May1945 when Miss Lang returned to New York. Six months earlier had come the sad news that Lillian Meyers had died as a result of an accident while on a camping trip with her husband to Bryce Canyon in Utah.
The Second Burton Wood Quartet
Miss Lang’s position in the Burton Wood Quartet was taken over by a striking Italian woman from Ancoats in Manchester. Imelia Sivori had been a pupil of Miss Lang’s and had even lived at her cottage over the previous summer outside Warrington.
It was at this point that the Burton Wood Quartet became involved with a series of concerts at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall and returned to the 1939 music by Meyers with its unusual effects, using the Free Trade Hall’s Wurlitzer organ, two Hammond Model C’s and a prototype instrument developed at UMIST called an Ocranarium which resembled a Wurlitzer in the layout of its four keyboards and multiple tabs but also utilized a new development by Ferranti called the ‘Transistor’. The Tuesday afternoon concerts were poorly attended during the thick fogs of November 1949 but were followed by a second season in the Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1950 using two Hammond model C’s and two Ferranti prototype portable transistor organs. Again much of the audience left after the first half of the concert, which featured Swing Era music. The second half was dedicated to some new pieces by a French composer called Oliver Messiaen, whom Miss Thomas’s (now Mrs Davidson) husband had met in Paris during the Liberation. Mr Davidson kept up a correspondence with the French composer and often talked about Meyers’ music. Some hand-drafted copies were taken to Paris on a trip by Mr and Mrs Davidson in 1949. They spent many afternoons at the organ of Église de la Sainte-Trinité. Miss Arnold came out for the last two days of their trip and stayed a further week working at the organ.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s most of the Burton Wood Quartet’s activity centred around a review called ‘Keep on Fire, Keep on Burning’ that played at Tabernacles or Christian Summer Camps in the North West. As far as we know, none of the members of the quartet were committed Christians, but they seemed to be in great demand for the Pentecostal services; and it marked a second wave of compositions, most notably ‘Carry Me To The Water’, later to be translated in to Icelandic as ‘Berđu Mig Út Ađ Sjó’. Also ‘East of Easter (Onward Journey of the Sun)’ was a popular song at the Bethshan Tabernacle and The Church Of God Of Prophecy in Longsight.
The quartet would go to Imelia’s uncle’s café on Stockport Road after the services for a postmortem. Miss Sivori was often delighted at the wilder reactions of the Pentecostalists and use to complain about the stuffiness of English churches if it didn’t go well. They were also experimenting with using percussion and had local drummer Brian Derbyshire play with them if he wasn’t playing at the British Legion or the Conservative Club. Miss Sivori grew very excited about exploring rhythms and spent her Saturday afternoons organizing the Star Of Italy Marching Band leading up to the Whit walks, which were still a very important social event amongst the Italian Catholic community of Ancoats, There were many arguments with her priest over playing for the Pentecostalists, but St Michael’s needed her as they were justly very proud of the band and her work. The Burton Wood Quartet started to rehearse every Sunday afternoon in Dawson’s new shop in Stockport. The Dawsons now lived in Offerton, the Davidsons had moved to Wythenshawe, and Imelia Sivori had married Maurizio Domizzi, who worked at Ferranti’s in Moston.
The 1960s and the La La Las
Sunday mornings were given over to piano teaching in the shop, and many of the pupils used to bring packed lunches and stay to hear the quartet rehearse into the evening. Piano student Deborah McLeish wrote in her diary: ‘I told them not to play the toothache tune and that the last tune makes my tummy feel warm – Miss Sivori says it wouldn’t do that unless you listen to the first tune even though it is horrid.’
By 1967 Deborah McLiesh had her own group, the La La Las, with Miss Sivori's younger sister Lorena, Mary Ryder and Norma Dabbs. The La La Las also rehearsed at Dawson’s on Tuesday evenings and were now the proud owners of two brand new VOX organs – a Continental and a Jaguar – courtesy of Mr Dawson Sr. The group also used one of the Ferranti organs that was still working and a Welson organ they bought with Green Shield stamps.
Mary’s brother Steven played the drums. The La La Las recorded a single in a small studio above Nield and Hardy’s in Stockport; a song called ‘I Could Never Ever Marry You’ appeared on the A-side and was quite popular on the jukebox at the ABC Bowling Alley and the Ten-Ten Café, where the girls used to hang out. The B-side, ‘Dandelions and Burdocks’, is a strange empty instrumental, essentially just a dominant 11th chord (D, E, F sharp, G sharp, A, B and an E in the bass) with modulations of the drawbars on the Vox Continental. It marks the early use of a Bentley Rhythm Ace drum machine, which they had borrowed from the shop.
Ted Donnelly, manager of local clothes boutique ‘The Toggery’, had entered the band into the Italian song festival in Rimini in August 1967 with ‘Never Ever’. Italian organ company Farfisa paid for the group to stay at Villa Vicente, and the group spent four weeks there before returning for school in September.
A concert on October 31 1967 at the Cat and Fiddle public house in the Derbyshire Hills resulted in controversy. According to the Manchester Evening News, a convoy of over 120 motorbikes gathered in Buxton before attending the concert, while from the Macclesfield Road a second convoy of motor scooters had set off from The Don fish bar on the A6, picking up a further forty Vespas and Lamberettas along the route. The La La Las performed a number of Italian tunes they had learnt while away, including an arrangement Dies Irae, from the Latin Mass, a cover version of ‘Beat Girl’ by the John Barry Seven, ‘Glad All Over’ by the Dave Clark Five and an extended version of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. ‘Never Ever’ was performed twice, and they finished with a 45-minute version of ‘Dandelions and Burdocks’. Again tales of an unusual sense of communion between the rival gangs continued to circulate for years after the event. The La La Las didn’t perform again until the Buxton Rock Festival in 1970, which proved to be their last concert.
Deborah McLeish:
We played some of the Meyers music at the festival as part of our song suite ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, and a new twenty-minute piece ‘Cinema X’. We had the sheet music taken off us the following day by a furious Miss Dawson. She also took away the manuscript we had been given in Italy, which was in a remarkably similar style. The Italian music also involved an old Latin mass ‘Dies Irae’, which wasn’t popular at our concerts – but we always played it. Mostly we did cover versions of radio hits and one piece by Rachmaninov that Ruth had arranged from a Liberace record. I remember Mrs Davidson advising us to use the bass bourdon tab and playing the bass part doubled with a 4th, which just brought it into style with the older material.
Lorena Domizzi (interviewed in 1995):
Imelia’s group [the BWQ] were still playing concerts around the North West in the early 1970s: places like the KLM hall on Deansgate, The Grosvenor Hall on Peters Street, a month’s residency at a club called Dino’s, the Lady Lever Museum in Port Sunlight and the Town Hall in Lancaster. I stood in for Mrs Davidson when she was having her baby, and we played every Thursday at the Masonic Lodge on High Lane in Chorlton. They had some terrible organs there: modern rubbish. I took my own. I was using a WEM Teisco C at that point, which was great for the third organist parts. I never knew of any concerts they performed outside the Northwest, save for one in Harrogate. And a week at Butlins in Pwllheli in 1966.
I remember at one of the Lodge meetings Imelia was very agitated, and the Burton Wood ladies decided to call it quits in October 1973 when they heard about a riot at Carnegie Hall in New York at a concert by a man called Steve Reich. His piece Four Organs seemed to have enraged her, and there were some transatlantic telegrams between her and Doreen Lang and also Miss Mitchell, who had apparently set up a quartet at a U.S. Air Force Base in Iceland. Imelia had me copy out the Lillian Meyers music, some copies had to be dropped off at the Barnes Wallace building near Sackville St and some was posted to the Kléberg School in Reykjavik. Imelia even sold her Hammond B3: a man called Eric from Strawberry Studios came and picked it up. Imelia went on a trip to New York on the QE2 and was away for about five months. On her return she was anxious to buy back the Hammond, but she settled on a new Japanese model organ – a Yamaha YC45D – and a Teac four-track tape recorder, both purchased brand new from Nield & Hardys, now in Mersey Square. I know Imelia was preparing for a reunion concert with Miss Lang and Miss Mitchell when she died of a brain haemorrhage in 1982. In her will she had left twenty-two boxes of tapes and manuscripts to the Ferranti Institute in Didsbury. Two boxes marked ‘Volkswagen’ were sent to an address in Chicago and another to the Kléberg in Reykjavik.’
Formation of the new organ quartet: The Sisters Of Transistors
On a number of occasions I had tried to incorporate some of the Lillian Meyers music into 808 State’s for special effect, most notably on the track ‘Bird’ from our 1996 album Don Solaris, and ‘Suntower’ from 2002’s Outpost Transmissions. I began to piece together her sub-harmonic and super-harmonic concepts. But something was missing with regards to the sound sources I was using.
Miss Meyers had been studying Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system but had become more interested in ‘Modes of Limited Transposition’ at the exact time of acquiring the electronic instruments. The Novachord was especially suited to exploring modes with parallel harmonic content being able to be set up for specific fractional anomalies within certain modes. The widened frequency range of the electronic spectrum below 40 Hz and above 20 kHz led to all kinds of altered scales in order to fit accepted mathematics, not taking into account the limitations of the human ear. Meyers had a lot of correspondence with Professor George Turnbull whose research into sonic perception at Manchester’s Deaf and Dumb Institute in the 1930s had already opened up the idea that the ear plays only a small part in the process of human hearing. It transpires that Miss Meyers had an advanced form of synaesthesia, which gave her the sensitivity to detect anomalies in the harmonic spectrum outside the now ridiculous notion of the tempered scale: a rare perception in the days before the clarity of modern amplification systems.
By 2005 I managed to secure a five-year bursary from the Ferranti Institute and began serious lab work using a restored Novacord we had purchased from the TR social club in Moston. A borrowed B3 Hammond also worked well in the sub-harmonic frequencies but had become unstable in the mid-partials, due to age. We found that using an Elka organ – such as a Panther or a Capri – gave great results in the higher mid-partials, due to its wide vibrato. It was only when we acquired a rather well kept Yamaha YC 45D that we could cover accurately the glassy highs once characteristic of a 1939 brand new Novachord. By 2007 we were very close to a complete harmonic reconstruction. We wasted nearly a year trying to restore a Solovox – an early Hammond monophonic keyboard with a perfect spectrum – but had to abandon the project when modern valves were filtering slightly at the output stage and had unstable tuning in the higher frequencies. The missing link came with the acquisition by the institute of a PNTM Soviet combo organ from 1967. This was an extremely rare find due to the poor construction and limited production of the organs. The Germanium found in the transistors was not from the usual American source; it was from the mine in northern China that the early Yamahas used so well. ‘G6’, as it was called, led to a sweet spot in the area of 12.7 kHz.
The 12.7 kHz frequency was missing from any Hammond after World War II when they changed the f2 valves to an argon-based tube that peaked at 12.2 kHz. This led to a dip in the one-foot drawbar’s ability to complete what should have been a perfect spectrum and why so many attempts at Meyers’ music had failed even with precise altered tunings
While anxiously waiting for the results of our bursary application in late 2004 we began to hear about a privately funded quartet that had split off from a research project at the Kléberg School in Reykjavik. Olafur Johansson had been racing to reconstruct Meyers’ work using Wersi organs and a Doepfler Modular Synthesizer. The Johansson Quartet made a failed attempt in December 2005 at the Domkirkjan Cathedral in Reykjavik, resulting in a distressed audience, the breakup of his group and Johansson’s flight to Berlin. He soon set up an all-male quartet, and by early 2007 he was ready to book the Konzerthaus in Berlin but had to wait for a break in scheduling, which gave our team at the new South Manchester Museum Of Keyboard Technology (SMMOKT) a fighting chance at the first successful reconstruction of Meyers’ work. But back in Manchester the news was not good.
Unfortunately the poor crating of the PNTM lead to a delay of about six months while the Team at SMMOKT put the wiring back together using a 22 percent tin solder reformulated at the Schuster Labs at UMIST. There were further problems at the output stage, and a new transformer had to be wound with the help of Dr Alan Peterson at The Flixton Labs in Nantwich.
We began to receive applications for the new quartet in late 2006, and the selection process took place in the spring of 2007 at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. The selection panel included myself, Mrs Deborah Handforth (formerly McLeish), Miss Emily Dawson and Dr Peterson. Eight applicants were selected and split into two teams to prepare for a test concert at a remote location in North Wales in July. The naming ceremony took place on August 4 2007 on the site of Miss Doreen Lang’s cottage near Burton Wood – which now happens to be the car park at IKEA.
The team selected for the upcoming concerts and recordings would be as follows:
Miss Mandy Wigby – given Sister Wigby Elka Whippany – one of Yorkshire’s foremost organists with extensive audio engineering experience in Manchester’s studio system. A specialist in alternative therapies.
Miss Naomi Hart – given Sister Naomi Doric Pencrest – again from Yorkshire, graduate of the Royal Northern College of Music. Spent three years under private tuition with Miss Virginia May Hom in Hong Kong. Also involved in the Artists Expedition to Antarctica in 2005, studying harmonic structure in icebergs.
Miss Henrietta Smith-Rolla – given Sister Henrietta Vox Humana – from Devon, self-taught organ obsessive. Rescued and customized a Wurlitzer theatre organ from the Princess Theatre in Torquay when she was only fourteen. Spent three consecutive summers at the Augablanik School in Iceland specializing in sub-harmonics. Has an advanced form of synaesthesia.
Miss Ragna Skinner – given Sister Ragna Tiescodottir – great granddaughter of Miss Dorothy Arnold of the original Meyers quartet. Graduate of the Kléberg School in Reykjavik, the Augnablanik Summer School and ex-member of the Johansson quartet. Came to study Acoustics at Salford University in 2006.
By May 16 2008, the Sisters Of Transistors were ready to present a whole concert not only featuring the work of Lillian Meyers – some of which had not been heard since 1939 – but also a complete history of the organ quartets, including some of the Sivori pieces and the repertoire of the La La Las. Chorlton Arts Festival was able to arrange for the use of St Clements Church for the occasion. The dimension of the nave gave a perfect 40 Hz natural resonance, allowing the volume levels to be within the safety limits imposed by a cooperative but cautious Manchester City Council.
The concert was a great success, and documentation was sent back on a strictly limited basis to the Kléberg and Sarah Lawrence in New York, resulting in further funding for the recordings undertaken at the Ferranti Institute through the remainder of 2008 and early 2009. On October 2009 on the seventieth anniversary of the World’s Fair performance we are now proud to present The Sisters Of Transistors at the Ferranti Institute (Advanced Composition For Electric Organ Quartet).
‘Only women’s minds could have mapped into abstraction such a territory’
Graham Massey 2009
