a Church Unveils Its New Organ

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posted for musical content...

March 23, 2008

On Day of Resurrection, a Church Unveils Its New Organ

By JAMES BARRON, NYTimes

Jack M. Bethards stood on a catwalk in a room the size of a walk-in closet, a little room that his crew had built in the front of a little church on the Upper West Side.

In this space, a few feet from the altar, are the inner workings of a brand new $600,000 pipe organ that his crew had also built. He wanted to tune it. But on a March morning that was more lion than lamb, the church was too cold. The thermostat had been left at 65 during the night.

“I’ve asked for it to come up to 68,” Mr. Bethards said. “We’d like it to be a little closer to 70.”

It was the beginning of another 12-hour day of testing and tuning at Christ and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, on West 69th Street between Broadway and Columbus Avenue — another day in the race to get ready for Palm Sunday and Easter, two of the most important days in the Christian calendar.

The church wanted the organ to be heard on Palm Sunday, and it was. Then it fell silent for Holy Week, as dictated by church tradition. Its full-fledged debut, on Easter Sunday, was to begin with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Major, B.W.V. 547. That would be followed by the choir’s singing the hymn “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today” as it marched down the aisle.

Christ and St. Stephen’s wanted more than an instrument for Sunday morning services. It wanted to take advantage of its location, a few blocks from Lincoln Center, to attract well-known organists for recitals of music beyond the liturgical repertory. Christ and St. Stephen’s already has a concert series and an artist in residence, Paul Jacobs, the chairman of the organ department at the Juilliard School. He was closely involved in the planning for the new organ, and is scheduled to play a dedication recital on May 17.

“This is a new treasure for New York,” Mr. Jacobs said.

Choosing a new organ is a milestone for any congregation, a commitment to the future and a statement about what the church wants to be: traditional or contemporary, formal or less so. Next to a sanctuary itself, an organ is one of the most permanent anchors that a church can have in the everyday world. It is also one of its biggest investments and, if the congregation is unhappy with the way the organist is playing it, one of its biggest irritants.

Since the 1960s, as congregations have dwindled and a changing culture has moved away from hymns and traditional compositions, some churches have experimented with folk guitars. Some megachurches have abandoned organs for rock bands.

Not Christ and St. Stephen’s. Its old organ dated to 1876 — “a Cadillac in its time,” said the Rev. L. Kathleen Liles, the rector. But it had been renovated and reworked over the years until it was, Mr. Jacobs said, “a hodgepodge.”

But the church put off deciding what to do until the ceiling in the sanctuary collapsed in 2004. Plaster dust filled the old organ’s pipes, dooming the instrument. “Our conservators told us it wasn’t worth fixing,” Ms. Liles said. So the church added a new organ to its to-do list. That doubled the budget for the renovations and repairs.

“It was an exceedingly ambitious project for a parish our size, 285 members,” she said. “But we’re a musical congregation, this is a music-loving neighborhood, most of our members live in the neighborhood and walk to the church, and we see music not as an ornament to our worship but as an integral part of it.”

The neighborhood pitched in. The West 69th Street Block Association approved a $3,000 grant for the church, Ms. Liles said, and several bequests helped bring the church to within $200,000 of the $1.2 million total.

The church decided to go the traditional route, buying another pipe organ and not a “virtual” instrument like the computerized electronic one with digital audio that Trinity Church on Wall Street installed after its pipe organ was damaged in the dust cloud from ground zero on 9/11. Christ and St. Stephen’s hired one of the big names in the business, Schoenstein & Company.

Christ and St. Stephen’s had already been considering Schoenstein, a choice that was met with approval by the church’s organist and choirmaster, Nigel Potts, and Mr. Jacobs. Both of them studied at Yale under the organist Thomas Murray, who has championed Schoenstein organs for their distinctive tonal colorations.

So, since mid-February, the sanctuary has served as a staging area, carpentry shop and final assembly point as Mr. Bethards and his crew have put the instrument together, piece by piece.

They made the components in their factory near San Francisco and shipped them to New York — 1,042 pipes, the wind chests that drive air into the pipes, the console with three 61-note manuals and a master switch modeled after the one found in a Rolls-Royce.

Except on Sundays, when the tools were packed up and the church held services as scheduled, Mr. Bethards and his installers put in long days in the sanctuary. They used the pews as workbenches. They scurried down the aisles carrying ladders, drills, meters to measure electrical power or strange-looking tools for poking and probing organ pipes — metal pipes with tops that look like exhaust vents, and wooden pipes that end in little chimneys.

This organ is about one-eighth the size of the largest one Schoenstein has ever built, for the Mormon church’s conference center at Temple Square in Salt Lake City. That one has 7,708 pipes. “But in many ways, small organs are more challenging to build than big organs,” said Louis E. Patterson, a member of Schoenstein’s installation crew. “Each stop has to serve two, three, four different purposes, so the sound is more critical than on large organs where if you don’t like one flute stop, you can choose another one.”

There was also the problem of shoehorning the organ into Christ and St. Stephen’s. The pipes could not be hidden in the back of the church because there is no loft. The parish set aside space at the front of the church — the walk-in closet.

But the ceiling is only about 15 feet high. The longest pipes, the 16-footers that are a staple of any pipe organ, had to be shortened. Schoenstein’s solution was a pipe-within-a-pipe design that involved inserting a small tube into the top of each pipe. That, Mr. Patterson said, would “fool the pipe into thinking it’s longer than it is, and generate the right amount of sound.”

The console looked different from the 60 organs Schoenstein had built since Mr. Bethards took over the company. This was the first with a circular, Rolls-Royce-style master ignition switch. As a boy, Mr. Bethards had idolized Rolls-Royces, especially the main switch, a round, black dial on the dashboard with a brass lever that turned on the engine in the days before Rollses had keys. On later models, a second brass lever also controlled the headlights. “I thought it was the most beautiful piece of industrial machinery, and we needed the same thing,” he said.

So right there on the organ console, above the top manual, is a round black dial on the organ console with two brass levers. One is a starter: It turns on the blower in the walk-in closet to generate the wind that goes to the pipes. The other lever controls the lights on the console.

The new organ also has a clock, an old-fashioned analog clock that is silent. “An organ clock can’t click,” Mr. Bethards said. “If it clicks, you’ll play everything at the tempo of a Sousa march.”

But the clock was counting down the hours until Easter, and Mr. Bethards wanted to do the tuning and voicing, a critical final step in getting the organ ready. This involves directing the flow of the wind across the mouth of each pipe — moving the alignment of the pipes ever so slightly and making other adjustments.

“It’s not terribly critical what the temperature is, as long as it’s the same when the organ is played,” Mr. Bethards said. “Temperature is important because people can begin to notice little inconsistencies in tuning when you’re two degrees off.”

Mr. Bethards could tell that it was still too cold. According to the thermometer on the wall above the pipes, the temperature was still 66 degrees.

“We’ll do this after lunch,” he said.