Ken Krause
“You’ve never heard anything like this!”
That was a common refrain in the early 1920s when the grand movie palaces across the country began to introduce audiences to a new musical invention: the theater pipe organ.
A century later, the same may soon be said at the city of Medford’s historic Chevalier Theatre, where the installation of a 1922 Wurlitzer theater organ is approaching completion.
The theater pipe organ was an early 1900s creation of a British inventor and telephone engineer, Robert Hope-Jones. He called his instrument a Unit Orchestra, because it was designed to imitate and sound of a full orchestra – some 300 instruments worth – at the hands (and feet) of just one person: the organist.