Our History

Aubrey Thompson-Allen (1907-1974) founded our company in 1952. Mr. Thompson-Allen was an articled apprentice trained by Henry Willis III of Henry Willis & Sons, London, and he became Managing Director of the Willis firm before accepting G. Donald Harrison’s invitation to join the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company in 1949. Later, upon accepting the position of Curator of Organs at Yale University, Mr. Thompson-Allen established our firm, which has sought to provide maintenance and restoration services for distinguished American pipe organs.

Upon Mr. Thompson-Allen’s retirement in 1973, his son Nicholas, and his former assistant, Joseph F. Dzeda, continued and expanded the scope of the firm, dedicated to preserving and restoring the remaining instruments of the Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company. To date we have restored fifteen such instruments, in addition to several others by other builders.

Our company consists of seven full-time people, and all but two members of our staff have been with us for more than twenty years. In addition to maintaining and restoring Yale’s sixteen pipe organs, we provide regular service to over one hundred instruments in the tri-state area. Our restoration work has taken us to such far-flung places as Evanston (IL), Winston-Salem (NC), Portland, (ME) and we have recently completed the restoration of the four-manual Skinner instrument at Stambaugh Auditorium in Youngstown, Ohio. We are well known for our sympathetic approach to restoration, the quality of our work, and for our ability to meet our contractual obligations in a timely manner. Our firm was among the very first to embrace the concept of faithful restorations for quality instruments built in the first part of the twentieth century.