Name associated with a series of American piano, organ and player piano manufacturers.
A. Dolge: Pianos and their Makers (Covina, CA, 1911/R)
G. Kobbé: The Aeolian Pipe-Organ (New York, c1917)
Q.D. Bowers: Encyclopedia of Automatic Music Instruments (Vestal, NY, 1972)
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: Pianola: the History of the Self-Playing Piano (London, 1984)
H. Jüttemann: ‘Die mechanischen Harmonien der Firma Aeolian’, Das mechanische Musikinstrument, no.46 (1988), 15–23
R. Smith: The Aeolian Pipe Organ and its Music (Richmond, VA, 1998)
N. Barden: ‘A History of the Aeolian Company’, American Organist, xxiv (1990), 254–60
CYNTHIA ADAMS HOOVER/EDWIN M. GOOD, BARBARA OWEN
Founded by William B(urton) Tremaine (1840–1907) who had begun as a piano maker with Tremaine Brothers in New York City. He formed the Mechanical Orguinette Co. (1878) and the Aeolian Organ & Music Co. (1887; from 1895 the Aeolian Co.) to manufacture automatic organs that used perforated music rolls; see Player organ. E.S. Votey, inventor of the Pianola, the first practical piano player and the most famous name among automatic piano brands, joined the Aeolian Co. in 1897. Henry B. Tremaine (1866–1932), the founder’s son, tapped a larger market with an extensive advertising campaign for player pianos in the first three decades of the 20th century. In 1913 Aeolian introduced the Duo-Art Reproducing piano, a mechanism (fitted in high-quality pianos) that made it possible to record on paper rolls the slightest nuances of dynamics, tempo and phrasing. Many leading pianists were recorded on Duo-Art machines.
At the turn of the century self-playing organs were becoming a status symbol in the homes of the wealthy, a trend that would continue for the ensuing three decades. Aeolian had begun applying player mechanisms to pipe organs as early as 1895, initially in conjunction with the Ferrand & Votey firm, but eventually established its own factory at Garwood, New Jersey, directed after 1916 by Edwin Votey. The application of the Duo-Art technology in this period enhanced the popularity of Aeolian’s residential organs, as well as their capability for reproducing the playing of notable organists such as Yon, Shelley, Eddy, Bonnet, Courboin, and Dupré, who were among the many artists who cut player rolls for Aeolian. While the majority of Aeolian residential player-organs were built for North American clients (including the largest, with four manuals, installed in 1929 at ‘Longwood’, the estate of industrialist Pierre S. DuPont), such instruments were also exported, a significant number going to England; a smaller number went to purchasers in Argentina, Australia, Belguim, France, Germany and Spain. Although Aeolian had always had a few non-residential clients, during the late 1920s the firm made a conscious effort to branch out into the field of larger church and concert-hall organs, usually without self-players. However, their major stock-in-trade was still residential organs, a market devastated by the stock market crash of 1929; such a large market loss could not be sustained, and following the completion of the large four-manual organ for Duke University Chapel in 1930, Aeolian closed its organ-building operation, selling its assets the following year to the competing firm of the E.M. Skinner firm of Boston, which then became known as the Aeolian-skinner organ co.
In 1903 Tremaine formed the Aeolian, Weber Piano & Pianola Co., of which the Aeolian Co. was a significant part. It took control of a number of important but failing American firms, such as George Steck & Co., Stroud Piano Co. and Weber Piano Co.; some significant reed organ and automatic organ companies, such as Vocalion and Votey Organ Co.; and overseas companies such as Choralian Co. of Germany and Austria, Orchestrelle Co. of Britain and Pianola Company Proprietary Ltd of Australia. In addition to pianos and the Duo-Art mechanism, the company developed and aggressively promoted such self-playing mechanical instruments as the Aeriole, the Aeolian Orchestrelle Pianola and reed organ, the Metrostyle Pianola and Aeolian pipe organs. The firm maintained the Aeolian Concert Hall in New York essentially as a showroom for its instruments, although many noted musicians performed there. In 1932 the Aeolian, Weber Piano & Pianola Co. merged with the American Piano Corporation to form the Aeolian American Corporation.
Incorporated in June 1908, it consolidated such earlier American piano companies as Chickering & Sons of Boston and Knabe & Co. of Baltimore with companies owned by the Foster-Armstrong Co. Foster-Armstrong, founded in 1894 in Rochester, New York, by George G. Foster and W.B. Armstrong, had bought the Marshall & Wendell Piano Co. of Albany, New York, in 1899. After the construction of a new factory in East Rochester, New York, in 1906, the company acquired other piano makers and incorporated with a capital of $12 million.
Formed to manufacture pianos ranging from concert grands to mass-produced commercial uprights, the American Piano Co. established a player piano department in 1909. Its Ampico reproducing system, invented in 1913 by Charles Fuller Stoddard, dominated the American automatic piano market along with Aeolian’s Duo-Art and the German Welte-Mignon mechanism. The company acquired the Mason & Hamlin Piano Co. in 1922 and sold it to the Aeolian Co. in the early 1930s. Becoming the American Piano Corporation in 1930, it merged with its primary competitor, the Aeolian Co., on 1 September 1932 to form the Aeolian American Corporation in an effort to survive the crises of the Depression and the new technologies of radio and phonograph as rivals to the piano.
The successor to the Aeolian Co. and the American Piano Co. It was called the Aeolian American Corporation from 1932 until 1959. In May of that year Winter & Co. purchased the assets of the corporation, renaming the company the Aeolian Corporation, but retaining the name Aeolian American Corporation for the East Rochester, New York, division until 1971, when it was changed to the Aeolian American Division of the Aeolian Corporation.
The company owned the assets of many earlier American piano manufacturers and made pianos in Toronto, East Rochester and Memphis under the following trade names: Mason & Risch; Mason & Hamlin; Chickering & Sons; Knabe & Co.; Cable; Winter; Hardman, Peck; Kranich & Bach; J. & C. Fischer; George Steck; Vose & Sons; Henry F. Miller; Ivers & Pond; Melodigrand; Duo-Art; Musette; and Pianola Player Piano.
Peter Perez, former president of Steinway & Sons, bought the Aeolian Corporation in 1983 and operated it until 1985, when the firm declared bankruptcy and closed the East Rochester factory. Its assets were distributed among Sohmer & Co., Wurlitzer Piano Co. and Young Chang. Sohmer controlled the names of Mason & Hamlin, Knabe and George Steck, but later transactions brought these names under control of the owners of Music Systems Research; Wurlitzer bought the Chickering name (later purchased by Baldwin, which bought Wurlitzer in 1988); and Young Chang took over the Weber name.