NYCFarmboy
05-06-2006, 12:36 AM
<a href="http://www.theithacajournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060503/NEWS01/605030304/1002">http://www.theithacajournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060503/NEWS01/605030304/1002
</a>
A 'glorious' new sound
First Presbyterian's new pipe organ to be dedicated Sunday
<<<<<>>>>>audio link and more photos on the page link>>>>><<<<
A 'glorious' new sound
First Presbyterian's new pipe organ to be dedicated Sunday
By KATIE MASLANKA
Special to The Journal
ITHACA — Music of a strange kind rang out from the sanctuary in First Presbyterian Church in the past few months. Drills whined, hammers pounded, boards clapped together, pneumatic systems clicked and clacked, and metal pipes emitted single tones that were low and rumbling or high and piercing.
It's the music of organ making, and it has been happening on a grand scale: A 5,000-pipe organ, the largest in Central New York, is set to be completed Friday. For the past three years, Russell and Company Organ Builders in Vermont have dedicated themselves to completing the project.
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“This is the biggest organ we've ever built from scratch,” said Dave Gordon, who does woodworking for the company.
And George Damp, organist and music coordinator at First Presbyterian since 1999, sings high praises for the instrument they've created.
“It is the most glorious organ I've played in my life,” said Damp, who has played more than 100 organs in the United States and Europe in his 50 years as an organist. “I will say that without qualification.”
Pastor James Henery said the organ, along with other renovations within the sanctuary, has enhanced the worship space.
“We...see music as being instrumental in incorporating all the elements of worship,” he said.
The organ was built using a $1 million donation from parishioner Dorothy Park, president of the Park Foundation.
“I tremble, because that's so far beyond financial arenas I operate in,” Damp said.
As a reminder of her generosity, he keeps on the console of the organ a small stuffed bluebird that Park gave him, he said.
The new organ's range was already displayed in weekly concerts each Wednesday of Lent. A concert to unveil the completed organ will take place at 4 p.m. this Sunday in the church. A dedication ceremony is set for the 9:30 a.m. worship service Sunday as well.
Damp said he knew shortly after he had started playing at First Presbyterian in 1999 that a new organ was necessary.
After an “eloquent” presentation by Steven Russell, owner of Russell and Company, and a visit to his workshop in Cambridgeport, Vt., Damp knew he'd found the right company for the job. The church signed a contract with the builders in June 2002.
“I was so excited by the church's willingness to go through with this,” Damp said. “When I could have mailed it express mail ... my second trip (to Cambridgeport) was to take the contract to have it personally signed.”
Larry Doebler, director of music at the church, recalled his first trip with Damp to the small town where the workshop sat up the road from the crumbling stone ruins of an old mill. In the shop's basement lay a pipe that would help seal the deal.
“He opened the door, and we went down the stairs, and it's full of pipes and dirt, and he picked up a pipe,” Doebler said and whistled. “He blew into it, and it was the most incredible sound.”
Russell has spent more than 30 years perfecting pipes. At 16, he apprenticed with a Dutch-American pipe-maker, Timen Koelewijn, and later inherited Koelewijn's company and moved it to its current location in Vermont.
Russell studied at Westminster Choir College at Princeton University, and created his first complete organ in 1978. It was Opus No. 2 - “Opus No. 1 we don't talk about,” he said.
Twenty-eight years later, the innards of Opus No. 47 are spread out on every available space in First Presbyterian's sanctuary. Rows of pipes sit on the altar. Tools are scattered throughout the pews. Gordon drills and shapes valve systems using the top of a grand piano as a work surface.
Each worker in Russell's company has spent nearly a lifetime perfecting his craft. Gordon has worked with wood since he was a teenager, making banjos and guitars. He joined Russell's company 10 years ago when he wanted to get back to spending more time in a workshop.
“Once I got back from the shop and started getting tennis elbow, I started wondering why I needed to be productive,” he said.
Russell's company is typical of the kind that dominates the organ-building market: small and specialized, they concentrate themselves within a small geographical area and usually focus on one project at a time.
Those projects are developed at Russell's small workshop, nestled off a dirt road lined with maple trees that collect sap for syrup each spring. His workshop uses a 35-foot ceiling to allow mock-ups of sections of an organ. Using everything from typical woodcutting tools to a strange spiraled instrument that shapes large pipes, Russell and his workers build pipe after pipe, piece after piece. In a small room that overlooks the Berkshire Mountains, Russell “voices” each pipe, ensuring that it creates the correct sound quality and is in tune.
Larry Chace, a local electrician and a 50-year organ enthusiast who has done the wiring on First Presbyterian's organ, said he happened upon this particular project when his daughter told him she saw what looked like organ parts in the dumpster outside First Presbyterian Church.
“It was actually not pipes, it was some shellacked wood...and some wires and cables tacked on the side,” he said. “It really didn't look that organic to me, and I was astonished that she recognized it. So she told me about that, and I came down to see what was going on.”
Organ's looks deceiving
The looks of the pipe organ at First Presbyterian are deceiving - only a small number of its pipes are actually visible from the sanctuary. To see the rest, one has to climb through small doors, up ladders, or into crawl spaces that allow as little room as necessary for tuning while economizing space for pipes.
The earliest form of the organ, an instrument known as the hydraulis, was created in Greece in the third century B.C. In medieval Europe and in the Byzantine Empire, portable organs were carried, and larger instruments began to built in the Renaissance era.
Organs are instruments of extremes: 16-foot pipes tower over pipes no longer or thicker than a pencil. Stops that create the deep booming tones of a trombone share a console with stops with names like “Celeste,” which creates a tinkling, ethereal sound to layer over richer tones. Giant tubes of metal are fed air by intricate and minute electric boards of wood and wire.
“So often, whatever you do, you have to do it 61 times, one for each note on the keyboard,” Gordon said.
Then, he said, multiply that by each rank — or set of pipes for a stop on the organ. First Presbyterian's organ has 86 ranks. In other words, 5,246 times.
But organs are also instruments of subtlety - differences between one woodwind-sounding stop and another can only be discerned by a knowing ear. First Presbyterian's organ can decrescendo from loud to soft in 16 different stages. It is an electropneumatic organ, or one that uses electric signals assisted by pneumatic devices to control the air pressure within the organ.
“The organ is essentially a physical embodiment of the basic laws of sound,” Damp said.
“You have stops of different pitches that the organist combines at will like an artist.”
The combination of those stops creates the powerful wave of sound familiar to the pipe organ.
“It's got everything you could possibly want, or very nearly so,” Russell said.
While officially set for completion Saturday, May 6, the organ builders will return the week of May 15 to finish their gift to the project — the Silver Trumpet stop, which was not included in the contract with the church.
http://cmsimg.theithacajournal.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=AF&Date=20060503&Category=NEWS01&ArtNo=605030304&Ref=AR&Profile=1002&MaxW=290
Originally published May 3, 2006
</a>
A 'glorious' new sound
First Presbyterian's new pipe organ to be dedicated Sunday
<<<<<>>>>>audio link and more photos on the page link>>>>><<<<
A 'glorious' new sound
First Presbyterian's new pipe organ to be dedicated Sunday
By KATIE MASLANKA
Special to The Journal
ITHACA — Music of a strange kind rang out from the sanctuary in First Presbyterian Church in the past few months. Drills whined, hammers pounded, boards clapped together, pneumatic systems clicked and clacked, and metal pipes emitted single tones that were low and rumbling or high and piercing.
It's the music of organ making, and it has been happening on a grand scale: A 5,000-pipe organ, the largest in Central New York, is set to be completed Friday. For the past three years, Russell and Company Organ Builders in Vermont have dedicated themselves to completing the project.
ADVERTISEMENT
“This is the biggest organ we've ever built from scratch,” said Dave Gordon, who does woodworking for the company.
And George Damp, organist and music coordinator at First Presbyterian since 1999, sings high praises for the instrument they've created.
“It is the most glorious organ I've played in my life,” said Damp, who has played more than 100 organs in the United States and Europe in his 50 years as an organist. “I will say that without qualification.”
Pastor James Henery said the organ, along with other renovations within the sanctuary, has enhanced the worship space.
“We...see music as being instrumental in incorporating all the elements of worship,” he said.
The organ was built using a $1 million donation from parishioner Dorothy Park, president of the Park Foundation.
“I tremble, because that's so far beyond financial arenas I operate in,” Damp said.
As a reminder of her generosity, he keeps on the console of the organ a small stuffed bluebird that Park gave him, he said.
The new organ's range was already displayed in weekly concerts each Wednesday of Lent. A concert to unveil the completed organ will take place at 4 p.m. this Sunday in the church. A dedication ceremony is set for the 9:30 a.m. worship service Sunday as well.
Damp said he knew shortly after he had started playing at First Presbyterian in 1999 that a new organ was necessary.
After an “eloquent” presentation by Steven Russell, owner of Russell and Company, and a visit to his workshop in Cambridgeport, Vt., Damp knew he'd found the right company for the job. The church signed a contract with the builders in June 2002.
“I was so excited by the church's willingness to go through with this,” Damp said. “When I could have mailed it express mail ... my second trip (to Cambridgeport) was to take the contract to have it personally signed.”
Larry Doebler, director of music at the church, recalled his first trip with Damp to the small town where the workshop sat up the road from the crumbling stone ruins of an old mill. In the shop's basement lay a pipe that would help seal the deal.
“He opened the door, and we went down the stairs, and it's full of pipes and dirt, and he picked up a pipe,” Doebler said and whistled. “He blew into it, and it was the most incredible sound.”
Russell has spent more than 30 years perfecting pipes. At 16, he apprenticed with a Dutch-American pipe-maker, Timen Koelewijn, and later inherited Koelewijn's company and moved it to its current location in Vermont.
Russell studied at Westminster Choir College at Princeton University, and created his first complete organ in 1978. It was Opus No. 2 - “Opus No. 1 we don't talk about,” he said.
Twenty-eight years later, the innards of Opus No. 47 are spread out on every available space in First Presbyterian's sanctuary. Rows of pipes sit on the altar. Tools are scattered throughout the pews. Gordon drills and shapes valve systems using the top of a grand piano as a work surface.
Each worker in Russell's company has spent nearly a lifetime perfecting his craft. Gordon has worked with wood since he was a teenager, making banjos and guitars. He joined Russell's company 10 years ago when he wanted to get back to spending more time in a workshop.
“Once I got back from the shop and started getting tennis elbow, I started wondering why I needed to be productive,” he said.
Russell's company is typical of the kind that dominates the organ-building market: small and specialized, they concentrate themselves within a small geographical area and usually focus on one project at a time.
Those projects are developed at Russell's small workshop, nestled off a dirt road lined with maple trees that collect sap for syrup each spring. His workshop uses a 35-foot ceiling to allow mock-ups of sections of an organ. Using everything from typical woodcutting tools to a strange spiraled instrument that shapes large pipes, Russell and his workers build pipe after pipe, piece after piece. In a small room that overlooks the Berkshire Mountains, Russell “voices” each pipe, ensuring that it creates the correct sound quality and is in tune.
Larry Chace, a local electrician and a 50-year organ enthusiast who has done the wiring on First Presbyterian's organ, said he happened upon this particular project when his daughter told him she saw what looked like organ parts in the dumpster outside First Presbyterian Church.
“It was actually not pipes, it was some shellacked wood...and some wires and cables tacked on the side,” he said. “It really didn't look that organic to me, and I was astonished that she recognized it. So she told me about that, and I came down to see what was going on.”
Organ's looks deceiving
The looks of the pipe organ at First Presbyterian are deceiving - only a small number of its pipes are actually visible from the sanctuary. To see the rest, one has to climb through small doors, up ladders, or into crawl spaces that allow as little room as necessary for tuning while economizing space for pipes.
The earliest form of the organ, an instrument known as the hydraulis, was created in Greece in the third century B.C. In medieval Europe and in the Byzantine Empire, portable organs were carried, and larger instruments began to built in the Renaissance era.
Organs are instruments of extremes: 16-foot pipes tower over pipes no longer or thicker than a pencil. Stops that create the deep booming tones of a trombone share a console with stops with names like “Celeste,” which creates a tinkling, ethereal sound to layer over richer tones. Giant tubes of metal are fed air by intricate and minute electric boards of wood and wire.
“So often, whatever you do, you have to do it 61 times, one for each note on the keyboard,” Gordon said.
Then, he said, multiply that by each rank — or set of pipes for a stop on the organ. First Presbyterian's organ has 86 ranks. In other words, 5,246 times.
But organs are also instruments of subtlety - differences between one woodwind-sounding stop and another can only be discerned by a knowing ear. First Presbyterian's organ can decrescendo from loud to soft in 16 different stages. It is an electropneumatic organ, or one that uses electric signals assisted by pneumatic devices to control the air pressure within the organ.
“The organ is essentially a physical embodiment of the basic laws of sound,” Damp said.
“You have stops of different pitches that the organist combines at will like an artist.”
The combination of those stops creates the powerful wave of sound familiar to the pipe organ.
“It's got everything you could possibly want, or very nearly so,” Russell said.
While officially set for completion Saturday, May 6, the organ builders will return the week of May 15 to finish their gift to the project — the Silver Trumpet stop, which was not included in the contract with the church.
http://cmsimg.theithacajournal.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=AF&Date=20060503&Category=NEWS01&ArtNo=605030304&Ref=AR&Profile=1002&MaxW=290
Originally published May 3, 2006