Updated through online information from Will Headlee. -- The Schwenkedel Positief was built for the Paul Kuenz Chamber Orchestra of Paris and traveled with the orchestra to this country in 1970 with organist Olivier Alain, a brother of Marie-Claire Alain. Both were in central New York on the same weekend that fall and, at a dinner for Olivier and Marie-Claire, Donald Sutherland and I found that Kuenz was interested in selling the organ in this country rather than transporting it back to France. Don persuaded Howard Boatwright, then Dean of the the School of Music, to agree to the $4,000 price. I went to New Haven, Connecticut, to hear the orchestra's final concert with the Positief in Woolsey Hall and bring it back to Syracuse. Over beer and pizza with the orchestra at the motel afterward, I got the story of how the organ came to be known as Antoine.
The organ traveled in a U-Haul trailer behind a station wagon looking enough like a horse trailer that the orchestra members (mostly in their early twenties) had begun to refer to it as "Cheval." Driving the station wagon was the organ man from Schwenkedel and navigating for him was an American violist just under thirty who was the mother-figure in the group. She thought "Cheval" too impersonal, so the orchestra dubbed the organ "Antoine." The name stuck. (Notes by Will Headlee are quoted from the booklet for his CD, Raven OAR-440.)

Builder's Nameplate: Schwenckedel

Status Note: There 1989.

Positif.