At the end of the 19^thcentury, Charles Gerard Conn built up a company that dominated the manufacture of band instruments. He operated it as a sole proprietorship. Conn had many other interests, including being a politician and newspaper publisher. He founded what became the Indiana National Guard and became known as Col. Conn.

For the last 15 or so years of his ownership, Col. Conn had drifted away from the business principles that had made him successful. He withdrew money from the company’s earnings to pay for expensive hobbies.

Sometimes, as a consequence, the company did not have enough remaining operating capital to make payroll. It no longer had a favorable credit rating. In 1915, he decided to sell the company to Carl Diamond Greenleaf.  In what follows, “Conn” refers to the Conn company. I will refer to Conn the man as Col. Conn.

By that time, the popularity of town bands had passed its peak. Rising popularity of guitars and mandolins meant reduced demand for band instruments. Eventually, so did radio and phonograph recordings. With these new media, it was no longer necessary for people to learn to play instruments to enjoy instrumental music. Despite the double threats of Col. Conn’s negligence and changing taste in society, C.G. Conn & Company had become well enough established that it continued to grow.

The Greenleaf family owned Conn until 1969. Since then, the company has had a succession of owners, one of which nearly destroyed its reputation.

Carl Greenleaf buys C.G. Conn & Company

Greenleaf operated a flour mill in Wauseon, Ohio up until 1915. He knew next to nothing about musical instruments, but he knew a great deal about solid business practices.

When Greenleaf bought the company, he incorporated it and renamed it C.G. Conn Ltd. Before he could do anything else, he had to put it back on a firm financial foundation.

Old business practices

Col. Conn, and the band instrument industry in general, marketed their products in a way that distressed Greenleaf. It relied heavily on personal contacts with leading musicians. Instrument manufacturers typically gave discounts of 20% to professional musicians. They gave instruments outright to especially well-known performers, and even paid some of them to play their instruments. The point of all this largesse? In return, the companies expected endorsements to endorse the instruments they played and induce the general public to choose the same ones.

John Philip Sousa used exclusively Conn instruments. As a result of his European tours, Conn started to export instruments. According to a 1902 article in the Indianapolis News, Conn’s exports exceeded the number of band instruments imported from all foreign factories combined.

Besides soliciting such endorsements, companies encouraged musicians to visit the factory for tours. Inducements frequently included luncheons, concerts, and even boat rides. (It’s worth remembering that Conn’s hometown of Elkhart, Indiana was headquarters of other important manufacturers, so the rides would have been along Lake Michigan.)

For customers who could not visit Elkhart, sales managers recruited local agents from among their personal acquaintances to recommend the company’s instruments. The companies sold instruments directly to customers by mail order.

Greenleaf’s new practices

Instead of direct sales by mail order, Greenleaf established authorized retail dealers. He stopped giving instruments away. Greenleaf not only put an end to such practices at Conn, but he also encouraged other companies to change methods as well. To that end, he organized the Band Instrument Manufacturers Association. The association formally disapproved of extraordinary discounts and otherwise subsidizing prominent musicians at its 1923 meeting.

At first, Greenleaf attempted to operate Conn through company-owned stores, but this practice proved unsatisfactory. It proved too difficult to recruit managers for them. Instead, it sold instruments to privately owned dealers. By 1953 it dealt with more than a thousand of them.

A digression on American music education

American public schools had offered music instruction ever since Lowell Mason introduced singing classes to Boston schools in 1838. Over the next half-century, many schools offered singing classes as an extracurricular activity. Some few sponsored bands and orchestras.

At that time, the US was a largely rural nation, but dramatic urbanization took place over the course of the 19^thcentury. The years between 1885 and 1910 saw high school enrollments quadruple.

Schools began to offer a wider variety of extracurricular activities, including interscholastic athletics. Since both professional and community bands grew in popularity at the same time, schools saw bands as an opportunity for boys who couldn’t sing and as welcome entertainment on the football field.

But the bands were seen as social activities rather than artistic activities. They had inconsistent instrumentation and generally played poor music badly. The Music Educators National Conference, which traces its origin to 1907, sought to raise standards.

How Conn enlarged its market while the town band movement waned

As the vogue for touring professional bands and town bands modeled after them began to wane, musical instrument makers saw the schools as a possible new market. They also responded to the new jazz craze

School bands

In 1917, Greenleaf established the Pan-American Band Instrument Company as a wholly-owned subsidiary of C.G. Conn Ltd. to sell less expensive instruments to the new school band movement.

In 1923, the Music Chamber of Commerce, under Greenleaf’s leadership, sponsored the first ever national band contest in Chicago in 1923. It was poorly organized, but it sparked a movement. The Band Instrument Manufacturers Association, in cooperation with music education organizations, began to sponsor more successful state contests in 1924. National contests continued. Greenleaf also offered financial assistance to Joseph Maddy, founder of the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan. He considered the development of the school band movement his and Conn’s most important achievement.

To aid the development of school bands, Conn offered special deals. Through its dealers, it offered to sell instruments with no down payment and a rental of $5.00 per month until the customer had paid the entire list price. It accepted the return of the instruments up until that time, with no further obligation.

Conn also started a band service department. It provided books that explained how to organize a band and recommended teaching methods. In 1923, it established the Conn National School of Music in Chicago. Its first director, Frederick Neil Innes, had made his reputation as trombone virtuoso in the Gilmore Band. Subsequently, he had led his own band and took part in other music education activities.

The school intended to train music educators. Many of its enrollees already played instruments at a high level, but music teachers must be able to teach all instruments. Schools accepted a diploma from the Conn National School of Music as sufficient qualifications to lead a school band program. The school continued to operate until 1932 when the number of college and university music departments made it unnecessary.

Jazz

As jazz became popular, the demand for saxophones grew. In response, Greenleaf hired saxophone virtuoso E.A. Lefebre. Lefebre, a personal friend of Adolphe Sax, had come to the US to perform with Patrick Gilmore’s band. His association with Conn began almost immediately; the Conn factory made the first ever American saxophone for Lefebre in 1889. Under his leadership, Conn saxophones became the best in the world.

Conn had made about 100 saxophones per month when Greenleaf bought the company. By 1922, it was making 150 per day. Greenleaf pioneered assembly line production to increase Conn’s output of saxophones and later introduced it to other instruments.

In expanding production of saxophones, Greenleaf did not neglect the rest of the wind instruments. Conn produced the first American-made bassoon in 1940. In the meantime, Greenleaf expanded Conn’s offerings by buying other companies.

New acquisitions

The years World War I saw an increased interest in military and marching groups. Drum and bugle corps became more popular than ever. Companies that made band instruments were well positioned to sell more bugles. In 1929, Conn went a step further and purchased two large drum manufacturers: Leedy Manufacturing Company of Indianapolis, Indiana, and Ludwig and Ludwig of Chicago.

At the time of its sale, Leedy operated the largest drum factory in the world. It also produced such other percussion instruments as temple blocks, cymbals, gongs, and tom-toms. And beyond instruments, it made sound accessories and for motion pictures.

Conn had already made drums and accessories under its own name. Its two new acquisitions continued to sell through their own separate distribution networks even after Greenleaf moved their manufacturing operations to Elkhart.

Later, Conn expanded into making pianos when it purchased the Haddorff Piano Company in 1940 and the Straube Piano Company in 1941. Manufacture of pianos did not move to Elkhart but remained at Haddorff’s original home of Rockford, Illinois.

When Conn bought Leedy, it also acquired its sound equipment business. Conn thereby expanded into electronics. It established its research department in 1928. No other company had such a unit. Conn easily outdistanced other companies because of its ability to apply science to musical instrument design. Among its major innovations was the Stroboconn tuner in 1936, the first device that enabled visualization of sound.

After the disruptions of World War II, the research department enabled Conn to issue the first all-electronic organ (the Connsonata), the Electronic Music Box for the recording industry, the Lektro Tuner (which emitted a continuous pitch), and a simplified version of the Stroboconn called the Strobotuner.

Unrelated to electronics, the research department introduced Connstellation brass instruments and the fiberglass sousaphone.

Craftsmanship in instrument manufacture

A finished instrument requires many individual parts. Besides its 35 keys, an alto saxophone has 500 of them. Making a single key requires 34 manufacturing operations. All of the various instruments Conn made in 1953 required a total of 55,000 manufacturing operations. It also used 654 different raw materials.

The earliest brass instruments required wrapping sheet metal around a mandrill to make a tube. Then it was necessary to fill the tube with lead or similar in order to bend it into the necessary curved shapes. Conn patented a hydraulic expansion process. Forcing water into tubes at a pressure of 2,000 to 4,000 pounds per square inch produces smoother curves much more quickly.

Even though this process and other assembly line techniques long ago replaced hand making all the parts, it required six full days for a skilled craftsman to assemble one bass clarinet. On average, from the beginning of the assembly line to a finished instrument took about three months. While manufacturing techniques have certainly changed since then, making band instruments still requires many steps and skilled craftsmanship.

Under Col. Conn, expert players tested each instrument as it was completed. Lefebre, for example, tested all the saxophones. Advancing technology gave instrument manufacturers a better way. In 1920, the US Bureau of Standards accepted A=440 as a base pitch and started to broadcast it constantly. Conn and other manufacturers soon began to test completed instruments against this standard. At first, they used a reed organ calibrated to the broadcast standard until the Stroboconn and other Conn innovations improved on it.

Wartime disruptions

It is hard to imagine today how thoroughly World War II disrupted American society. Since the Eisenhower administration, our country has been so dependent on consumerism that in times of crisis, the federal government urges citizens to go out and spend money.

The Roosevelt administration, on the other hand, determined that certain materials were critical to the war effort. It imposed rationing on citizens and commandeered manufacturing facilities to serve the military.

Conn and other instrument manufacturers were allowed to use materials on hand to finish instruments under construction as of May 31, 1942. They could not sell the instruments to civilian customers, but only to the armed forces. Normal production of band instruments did not resume until 1946.

Instead of instruments, Conn manufactured various machine parts, trunks, boxes, and canvas bags. It greatly expanded its electronic research in order to produce aircraft flight instruments, naval navigation equipment, and various testing equipment. Conversion to a war footing occurred as rapidly as possible. Reconversion to producing musical instruments happened more slowly.

Postwar recovery

Most of the bands that existed before the war, continued through the war. As instruments wore out, it was impossible to replace them until after 1946. At that time, the demand for new instruments was so great that Conn and other companies struggled to keep up.

Then came the Korean War and new restrictions. Major manufacturers like Conn found their access to copper and other necessary materials limited. Then, to hasten the rebuilding of European industries, the government reduced tariffs on imported musical instruments. Employment at Conn, which had increased greatly during the war years, began to decline.

While making instruments required painstaking craftsmanship, wartime conditions demanded that the new products be made as quickly as possible. New workers hired during the war never had the experience of patient craftsmanship. They became used to high wages and overtime pay.

Conn workers soon took their union out of the American Federation of Labor and joined the more militant Congress of Industrial Organization. They went on strike for 15 weeks during the winter of 1946-1947. Conn lost its status as the leading band instrument manufacturer in the world.

Carl Greenleaf’s retirement and what followed

Carl Greenleaf retired as president of Conn in 1949, but the family continued to own it. Paul Gazlay, former head of Conn’s Continental Music Division, served as president until 1958. Lee Greenleaf, Carl’s son, took over and held the office of president until 1969. Both Gazlay and the younger Greenleaf presided over important expansions of the business.

With Conn valued at about $35 million, Lee Greenleaf began to worry about the possibility of a takeover. So he sold Conn to Collier MacMillan, an important book publisher.

It found the labor-intensive manufacturing processes too little profitable and took steps to cut costs. In the process, it moved the headquarters from Elkhart to Oak Brook, Illinois and moved manufacturing facilities to various other places, even outsourcing the student brass lines to Japan. It deliberately destroyed Conn’s historical records when it left Elkhart. Collier MacMillan’s ownership of Conn proved disastrous for Conn’s reputation.

In 1980, Daniel Henkin, a former Conn advertising executive, bought Conn and some other musical instrument manufacturers from Collier Macmillan and returned the company headquarters to Elkhart. He hired Doc Severinsen, leader of the Tonight Show, as Vice President of Production. Conn soon issued the Severinsen trumpet, announcing Conn’s return to innovation. Conn acquired the W.T. Armstrong Company in 1981 and King Musical Instruments in 1983. For medical reasons, Henkin sold the expanded company to Skåne-Gripen, a Swedish conglomerate, in 1985.

Skåne formed a new parent company, United Musical Instruments, and spun it off. In 2000, Steinway Musical Instruments, which already owned the American branch of Selmer, bought UMI and merged the companies to form Conn-Selmer. In 2004, it acquired G. Leblanc and added it to Conn-Selmer.

Under Steinway’s ownership, Conn-Selmer has regained Conn’s old reputation as an innovator and maker of well-crafted instruments.

Sources:

Banks, Margaret Downie. “A brief history of the Conn Company (1874-present).” National Music Museum, 2009.
Reed, Charles Vandeveer. “A history of band instrument manufacturing in Elkhart, Indiana.” M.S. thesis, College of Business Administration, Butler University, 1953. Available online at https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1412&context=grtheses
Rhodes, Stephen L. “The American School Band Movement.” Lipscomb University, 2007

Photo credits:
C.G. Conn Ltd. logo. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Conn factory. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
High school band. Photo by Arthur Rothstein. Library of Congress collection via Picryl
Charlie Parker. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Stroboconn. Source unknown.
Conn saxophone keys. Photo by Tom Oates. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
A-10 cockpit. National Museum of the US Air Force