Reprise of Mighty Music

Without warning, the sleeping giant stirred to life.

There was a faint quiver at first, followed by a deep rumble that seemed to shake the walls. Then a high-pitched moan echoed down the hallway.

Suddenly, the pulsating beat of the “Hornpipe” from Handel’s “Water Music” swept across Reseda Elementary School, stopping pupils and teachers in their tracks.

“Wow!” yelled 8-year-old Andrew Barreiro, who ducked out of a line of third-graders headed for the school library to peek into a resource office from which the music seemed to be coming.

“It’s like an explosion!” he shouted.

It wasn’t pyrotechnics. It was a pipe organ.

Nearly 90 years after its installation, a mighty organ hidden behind an office wall had sprung back to life in all its glory.

Most of its glory, at least.

“It doesn’t look like some of the preset pistons are working,” organist David Reeder said after finishing the piece. “And it’s a little out of tune.”

That Reeder was able to play the instrument at all defied the odds.

Reseda is one of the few public elementary schools in the country with a pipe organ -- though there are some at high schools. It was installed in 1916, when Marian School -- as it was known then -- provided a first- through eighth-grade education for the west San Fernando Valley.

Over the years, Reseda Elementary’s 900-pipe instrument has suffered through three earthquakes that damaged its internal workings -- including the 1933 Long Beach temblor, which demolished the second floor of the original school building.

There was a repair job -- financed by donations -- in the years after the 1971 Sylmar earthquake. After the 1994 Northridge quake, organ technicians spent nearly two years restoring bent and mangled pipes. That $160,000 repair bill was covered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

These days, nobody at Reseda Elementary plays the pipe organ. So the school’s 540 young pupils had never heard the sound of the rebuilt instrument’s wind-powered reed, flute and diapason pipes.

Granada Hills concert organist Bob Ralston, known for his work with Lawrence Welk, volunteered in late April to fire up the organ and test it. But there was only silence when he flipped the switch on its well-worn console.

With its series of pedals, its two keyboards and its dozens of buttons, the console sits in a tiny pit. Next to it is a small, elevated platform that takes up most of the resource office. In the school’s early days, the platform, which functioned as a little stage, stood at the front of a larger music room, which served as an auditorium.

After a real auditorium was built in 1956, the music room was partitioned off into office space. For a time, three microphones suspended in front of an opening to the pipe chamber behind the stage were connected to auditorium speakers so organ music could be heard there.

Ralston climbed down a short ladder to reach the pipe chamber in a futile search for an alternative on-off switch. Pipe organs can be finicky, he explained as he inspected the ranks of metal and wooden pipes in the pipe room.

He told of a concert in Sioux City, Iowa, at which he was asked to perform on a restored theater pipe organ that hadn’t been played in 75 years. But after several minutes of playing, its pipes would stick, forcing Ralston to finish each piece on a grand piano on the other side of the stage.

“The performance could have been a bomb, but I was a hero for pulling it off. I also told a joke between each number, and that helped,” he said.

The day after her school’s organ failure, Reseda Principal Rosemarie Kubena called in Los Angeles Unified School District electricians. They discovered a hidden electrical box with a blown fuse that had cut power to the organ console.

Because of out-of-town concert commitments, Ralston could not return for another try. So he tapped Reeder, a Sherman Oaks resident and a local leader of the American Guild of Organists.

The Reseda instrument quickly came to life for Reeder, who works weekly as an organist-choirmaster for churches in Inglewood, Hawthorne and Venice. By the time he had finished his Handel piece, students were squeezing into the resource office to see what was creating such loud music.

“It’s coming from the pipes!” exclaimed 6-year-old Maureen Ha, pointing to the tubes visible behind the little stage.

In the hallway outside the pipe room, third-grader Nancy Sandoval, 9, pressed her ear against the chamber door and marveled at how it seemed to be vibrating to the music.

Reeder played Jean-Joseph Mouret’s “Rondeau,” perhaps better known as the theme from the television show “Masterpiece Theatre.” “Should we play something soft next?” he asked his impromptu audience.

They enthusiastically agreed. So he played Charles Callahan’s delicate “Aria” as the youngsters stood silently, transfixed.

Kubena was disappointed to learn that the organ’s presets didn’t work.

The repair job, finished in 1998, came with a warranty, she said. But because nobody played the organ, nobody realized it was malfunctioning.

Before the 1994 earthquake, there had been teachers on the Reseda staff who played. As late as the 1980s, parents regularly raised money to pay for tuneups and occasional repairs, said Cathy Altuvilla, a literacy coach who has worked at the school for 26 years.

In even earlier days, children received music instruction on the Reseda organ.

Shirley McConnell grew up on a Reseda Boulevard farm surrounded by acres of oranges and pecans, fields of alfalfa and rows of tomatoes. And she grew up playing a pipe organ at school in the 1930s.

“It’s crazy, but I just never gave it any thought,” McConnell said Tuesday by phone from her home in Newman, Calif.

Joan Mills also remembers learning to play the organ there. The Woodland Hills resident is a retired Van Nuys High teacher and counselor who graduated from eighth grade at Reseda School in 1941.

“I was 10 or 11. I didn’t have any idea it was anything unusual having a pipe organ in your school. To me, every school had a pipe organ,” Mills said.

Oddly enough, that was nearly the case in the Valley.

Both Van Nuys and Canoga Park high schools had pipe organs. That’s because the Valley’s first manufacturing plant -- Johnston Organ and Piano Manufacturing Co. (later called California Organ Co. and Robert Morton Organ Co.) -- operated in Van Nuys from 1913 to 1933.

Early subdividers had lured the organ maker to Van Nuys from Los Angeles as a way of stimulating the sale of residential lots. To give the rural Valley a hint of sophistication, the developers then spearheaded drives to buy organs for the schools, apparently at a discount from the company.

Van Nuys High got its instrument in 1915; Canoga Park High (then called Owensmouth High) and Reseda School got theirs the next year -- though one Reseda PTA document erroneously lists 1922 as the installation date.

The two high school organs were also damaged in the Northridge earthquake. When Mills learned that FEMA money was used at Reseda Elementary, she led a successful campaign to secure federal funding to fix those two organs and one at Hollywood High -- which was acquired in 1925.

These days, the high school organs are still used often, according to campus administrators.

But the Reseda Elementary instrument has been all but forgotten. “There’s no historical information on it,” a school district spokeswoman said. Officials at the local district office were unaware Tuesday of the organ’s existence.

Nonetheless, Principal Kubena said she hoped to repair the microphone system that is supposed to carry music from the organ into the school auditorium.

And then -- as a final grace note -- find someone to play it.