Cornies: Renowned organ builder’s life will be celebrated with music

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Gabriel Kney was only 22 when he arrived in Canada in 1951, already having seen enough war and destruction to last a lifetime.

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Gabriel Kney was only 22 when he arrived in Canada in 1951, already having seen enough war and destruction to last a lifetime.

“Our father came from war-torn Germany, relatively traumatized, frankly…. It’s a very classic immigrant story: somebody who comes alone, as a young person with no language skills and zero money, but with faith that this would work out,” says Mary Chevreau, one of Kney’s three daughters.

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Somehow, it did.

When Kney died last month at age 94, he left a legacy of 130 organs in churches, universities, concert halls and private homes across Canada and the United States, as well as a place in musical history as one of this country’s premier organ builders. Among Canadians, the best known of his instruments is probably the four-manual, 71-stop tracker organ inside Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall.

His favourite? That’s like picking a favourite child, he told organist and biographer Andrew Keegan Mackriell a decade ago. However, owing to a wonderful professional experience with acoustician Robert Mahoney, of Boulder, Colo., it might have been the three-manual, mechanical action organ, comprised of 2,787 pipes, at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn.

Although he left Germany nearly penniless, Kney did possess two valuable skills: the craft of cabinetmaking, inherited from his father, and a keen musical ear he could use to “voice” pipe organs.

The voicing process is a mashup of science and art, whereby the voicer adjusts the tone, volume and “speech” (the onset of sound) within each pipe and across the entire instrument. It’s a meticulous process that, on most organs, can take many weeks.

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Kney had served two apprenticeships with organ builders in Germany. After he arrived in Canada, he got a job as a voicer with the Keates Organ Co. in Lucan, Ont.; then, in 1955, he formed the Kney and Bright Organ Co. in London, in partnership with John Bright.

The Kney organ

At Aeolian Hall, Kney met Jane Gribble, a soprano and occupational therapist who worked with tuberculosis patients at the London sanatorium. They married, had three girls in fairly quick succession and instilled a love of music in all of them.

In 1967, Kney founded his own firm, Gabriel Kney and Co., with a bigger workshop and, eventually, a half-dozen employees. He entered “semi-retirement” in 1996 and closed the company.

Jane Gribble Kney died in 2009 after 52 years of marriage. Gabriel Kney then wed organist Mary Lou Nowicki, of Mt. Pleasant, Mich. She died in September of this year.

Of the dozens of instruments Kney manufactured during his career, roughly three quarters of them are in the United States. As far as anyone knows, only one remains in London, Ont. It’s at St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church. The congregation awarded Kney the $198,320 contract for a new two-manual organ in early 1982. Installation was completed in November 1984.

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Yulia Draginda, organist at St. John since 2022, revels in every opportunity to play the instrument on which Kney’s signature nameplate is affixed just above the keys. She marvels at the organ’s “disposition,” the arrangement of the 1,564 pipes and 25 stops that create its unique sound.

“The [swell] box is very unusual,” she says, in that it permits the player to transition easily from a very baroque sound to a much more Romantic sensibility. “The combination is exceptional.”

“Liturgical music was always a very important part of his life,” Chevreau says of her introverted, humble father, but he didn’t dwell on the possibility of an afterlife.

“He wasn’t really spiritual in that way. He found music, especially [Johann Sebastian] Bach, to be therapy for the soul…. Finding peace through music meant the most to him.”

In fact, Chevreau and her sisters, Katharine Timmins and Martha Collyer-Bowman, repeatedly tried to persuade their dad that music should be part of his celebration of life.

“For many years, as he was aging, he told us he did not want any music at his funeral,” Chevreau says. “We were surprised at that. He said, ‘I won’t be able to hear it or enjoy it.’ In his last few months, however, he changed his mind. So, we’ll get to celebrate his talents in a very public way.”

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That service is scheduled for Jan. 18, 2025 at 2 p.m. at St. John the Evangelist church. The Kney daughters have arranged for renowned organist Patricia Snyder, a Western University alumna and director of music ministry at Storrs Congregational Church in Storrs Mansfield, Conn., to play at that event.

Although one of London’s finest craftspersons is now gone, it’s heartening to know  the master’s “voice” will live on through the dozens of instruments he built across North America.

Larry Cornies is a London-based journalist. cornies@gmail.com

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