Organ pipes in majestic sound
In the middle of the night, in the middle of September, Gloria Lien could already imagine the moment when she would sit at the keyboards of the new pipe organ in the church sanctuary and play it for the first time.
The air would rush into the pipes, filling the church with music. She thought she might play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in DMinor, a thrilling piece whose first three notes embody organ music. It would be a moment as beautiful as the instrument itself.
But on this night, the organ lay scattered in hundreds of pieces around the sanctuary of the Lord of Life Lutheran Church in Sun City West. The pipes, more than 2,800 in all, were wrapped, packed and mute.
Lien, the church’s music director, worked alongside about 60 other church members to move the pieces from a delivery truck into the building before sunlight brought damaging late-summer heat.
The organ had landed at the port in Long Beach, Calif., after spending a month aboard a cargo vessel that carried the components from a workshop in southern Germany.
Lien and the other church members still had to imagine the music their new treasure would make. But as dawn approached, they could finally see the end of a long journey.
The venture began four years earlier, when members of a search committee were charged to learn all they could about pipe organs. They traveled to other churches and listened to instruments large and small, old and new. They studied specifications, negotiated contracts and then set about raising the $1 million needed to build an organ for their congregation and for the community.
Now, the instrument was ready to assemble. The pipes would need to be tuned to produce the perfect tone. But Lien could nearly hear them, nearly feel her fingers fly across the instrument’s three keyboards.
The church had a plan with a deadline. First, to play the organ in time for Christmas, that season when wonders become real. And then, to play it for Pastor John Kautz. He had dedicated long hours of his time to bringing the organ music to his church, and he would be retiring after Christmas Eve services.
He hoped to hear the music fill the sanctuary once before he left.
The first time Pastor Kautz presided over services at Lord of Life in 2001, the organist played preludes and hymns on an organ built by the Allen Organ Co., one of the largest builders of church organs in the world.
The instrument had been installed in 1986, the same year the new church building was dedicated near the corner of Meeker and R.J. Johnson boulevards. The electric organ had served the congregation well, but it was nearing the end of its expected life. The speakers did not deliver the same crisp sound as they once did. Replacement parts were no longer made.
Some of the musicians in the congregation began suggesting the time had come to replace it.
Electronic organs, which produce notes digitally at a console connected to a speaker system, were more affordable and could simulate a traditional church pipe organ.
But they aren’t pipe organs. The instruments, with their towering rows of pipes and bellows of real, moving air, create sounds just as they have for centuries — sounds that can’t quite be duplicated with electronics.
The cost of building one, though, would drain many a church coffer.
“I’ve always loved the sound of a pipe organ,” Kautz said. His first parish church, in the tiny town of Zap, N.D., had a small pipe organ, but when he arrived at Lord of Life, “it wasn’t in my vision of things.”
His organists convinced him that the church needed a new instrument before the one they had began to fail. And the more he thought about it and talked about it with the congregation, the more Kautz began to believe Lord of Life might find a way to bring a pipe organ to its sanctuary.
Lutherans, perhaps more than most, consider music central to their services.
Public-radio performer Garrison Keillor, who has spent decades gently jesting about Minnesotans of all sorts, suggests that nobody sings like the Lutherans — that four-part harmony may be an inbred talent.
Even Kautz acknowledges that Lutherans always sing all the verses of every hymn.
“Music is really vital to our worship,” Kautz said. “Worship without music would be empty. Martin Luther said, ‘When you sing, you pray twice.’ ”
So, in 2008, he assembled the committee to find the church a new organ. It should be the best organ for their church, one that would get them through every verse of every hymn.
“It’s a matter of what we want to do to honor the music,” he said, “to praise God.”
In the days after the organ arrived in Sun City West, it sat in pieces.
In truth, the organ wasn’t being built. It was being rebuilt.
The maker, Glatter-Götz, had crafted the components in its workshop in Pfullendorf, a small town in southern Germany. Workers there built the entire organ, inspected it to make sure everything fit. Then, they took it apart.
When the organ arrived at Lord of Life, the console with its foot pedals and three keyboards was whole. The distinctive metal pipes leaned against the walls, upside-down. The rest was simply wooden frames. The sanctuary was filled with 2,873 pipes, from short ones that could be held in a hand to more majestic 16-footers. But the organ could not play a single note.
From the start, the committee agreed that the decision to select a new organ would not be made by one or two people. Several in the group had witnessed situations where a pastor and the church organist or one major donor had chosen a new instrument with little input.
The group of nine included experienced musicians as well as non-musicians, who acquired the title of “listeners.”
“We decided our listeners’ opinions would count every bit as much as mine or the other musicians,” said Lorraine Miller, who holds a doctorate in organ performance and who had lobbied for a new instrument at the church. “The majority of our congregation is going to be listeners, not musicians.”
The committee would reach a consensus and take it to the full congregation for a vote, then seek contributions. That way, the church organ would truly be the church’s organ.
It was also clear early on that they needed guidance. So they hired a consultant and quickly found themselves enrolled at Organ U.
The chief instructor in this crash course was Don Morse, the minister of worship and the arts at Central United Methodist Church in Phoenix, who holds degrees in sacred music, organ performance and choral conducting.
“They were hungry for knowledge,” Morse said. “I didn’t ever tell them what to do. They had to work hard to reach a consensus. I don’t think they would be as happy with the decision if I had made it for them.”
Morse taught the group the basics of organ construction, both how they work on the inside and how they look on the outside.
The Lord of Life sanctuary is decidedly modern in appearance, nothing like the long, narrow chapels where many old pipe organs reside.
“Wedon’t have any gargoyles,” said committee member Richard “Skip” Halvorson, “so we don’t need any of that Gothic influence.”
Most important, the group’s members studied the organ’s sound. They had to decide how their organ would speak, the tones and textures of its voice.
To do that, the group had to listen.
Morse took them on “organ crawls.” They visited churches in Phoenix and Tucson, in Southern California, in Washington, D.C., and in the heartland of Lutheran music, Minnesota.
The sound of an instrument is an inherently subjective thing, not unlike taste or smell. Where one listener can hear a chord and pick out the individual sounds of strings and reeds and brass, finding the “pluck” when a key pulls down the pallet of the pipe, another listener may simply hear music that is bright or strident.
To decide, they would have to become objective.
They drew up a worksheet. For every organ in every setting, each member would answer the same set of 47 questions, about architectural and visual impact, the layout of the pipes, the sounds of the “voices” of each instrument.
At each church, two of the committee’s musicians — Miller and Lien, the church music director — played three pieces of music, the same ones every time. Miller chose music by Felix Mendelssohn. Lien played selections from George Frideric Handel’s “Water Music.”
“I kept saying, ‘Can’t we play something else?’ ” Miller said. “Don said, ‘No, don’t.’ ” Morse wanted the group to make accurate comparisons, to hear the smallest variations.
“By the time they were through, the organ builders were stunned that this committee would ask them such detailed questions,” Morse said.
It was at the Augustana Lutheran Church in West St. Paul, Minn., that the group heard an organ built by a small German company, Glatter-Götz. It was a name they would become familiar with in the months to come.
By the beginning of October, the small team of builders who had followed the organ from Germany to Sun City West had made great progress in reconstructing the organ.
The worship space is wide, with pews fanning out from the front and center where Pastor Kautz delivered sermons
‘‘ Worship without music would be empty. Martin Luther said, ‘When you sing, you pray twice.’ ” JOHN KAUTZ Lord of Life Lutheran Church pastor, who is retiring
each Sunday. Before the sanctuary was renovated for the new organ, the wall behind the altar area was mostly empty.
As the organ builders assembled what at times seemed to be a giant jigsaw puzzle, the front wall was transformed into a huge case to capture air and send it up through the organ’s pipes. One set, or rank, of the pipes was installed on the outside of the enclosure. Inside, more would be added as they were tuned. Each set of pipes can be tuned to make the sound of an instrument — a clarinet, an oboe, a trumpet — but only with a long adjustment process by a tuning expert known as a voicer.
Most of the pipes remained scattered about the sanctuary. There were pipes of tin and lead, of wood, and a rare set of pipes manufactured decades ago by the now-defunct Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co., a builder whose work is found in organs at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City and at Lincoln Center in New York.
Midway through October, congregants could see their new organ rising above the church altar. But they could still hear only stories.
Kautz, the pastor, knew not everyone in his congregation would support spending so much money on a new organ.
“It had to be sold,” he said. “That’s kind of a crass word, but it had to be sold to the congregation.”
Almost from the beginning, some in the church opposed the new organ. They thought it too expensive or unnecessary. Some congregants wondered why the church would opt for an old-fashioned pipe organ.
A pipe organ would cost more than an electronic instrument, Kautz told them, but an electronic organ rarely lasts be- yond 25 years; a pipe organ could outlast the church building.
“And singing is just different with a pipe organ,” said Kautz, his passion evident. “You feel it. It envelops you.”
The study committee elected to buy a pipe organ from Glatter-Götz, the small German builder that had impressed them so much in West St. Paul.
June Fredericksen, chairwoman of the study committee and president of the congregation, was always mindful they would need to explain the decision to everyone else.
With a vote looming, the group printed a 32page booklet that chronicled their work.
To encourage donations, the church designed a fundraising campaign that would allow members to contribute for the organ or for mission projects on the Navajo Reservation, in Tanzania and in Haiti.
In March 2010, 70 percent of the congregation voted to accept the recommendation. The church signed a contract with Glatter-Götz. Pledges poured in. “This is a very generous congregation,” Fredericksen said. “What we were doing is to the glory of God and to our church. Music is a big part of our services. The music lifts you up.”
Barely two months after trucks delivered the pieces of the new pipe organ, almost all of the mechanical parts had been installed.
A pipe organ requires a constant air supply, so the church built a room off the sanctuary to house an air blower and a large air reservoir with a traditional system of bellows to maintain proper pressure.
Newly built flues would carry the air from the new room to the windchests, above the chancel, and near the choir alcove, where the more than 2,800 pipes would stand.
The front of the sanctuary had been remodeled. A stained-glass window was moved from the front wall to make way for the towering instrument.
And while the congregation could again worship in the sanctuary, for months a scene of construction chaos, the organ was far from ready to play.
The building where Glatter-Götz Orgelbau assembles its pipe organs in Pfullendorf might disappoint visitors looking for drafty work areas or storerooms with a century’s worth of old spare pipes and bellows.
Glatter-Götz moved into a modern workshop several years ago, a bright and airy space on the edge of the small German town near Lake Constance. But the company still starts every project the same way: listening.
“We always try to find out what the customer wants, what they like,” said Heniz Kremnitzer, who started the company 20 years ago. “The work at the beginning is very important. I might lose the job just because I didn’t pay attention.”
Members of the study committee, 47-question surveys in hand, had
clearly done their homework. They knew what kind of instrument they wanted and how they wanted it to sound.
Glatter-Götz has built church organs, instruments for concert halls and even organs for private residences. Among its past projects are an organ for the famed Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and one for the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles.
But none of that mattered as the builders started design work for Lord of Life.
“Every organ is different,” said Stefon Stürzer, managing director for Glatter-Götz. “You couldn’t take this organ into another room and have it sound the same.”
A modern pipe organ still works much the way organs did in the 1700s.
Each pipe plays one note on the scale in one musical voice. Each voice evokes the sound of an instrument, reeds or brass, strings, even bells or herald trumpets on larger organs.
The pipes are grouped in “ranks” of those voices. A typical rank consists of 61 pipes, one for each note on the keyboard, or manual. It’s like an orchestra with 61 trumpet players or 61 violinists, each of whom plays a single note on the scale and only when called for in the musical score. The Lord of Life organ has 47 ranks of pipes.
The pipes are fitted into a windchest. A bellows, a sort of pump to move air, pushes with an even pressure to fill the wind box. But each pipe atop the box is sealed off until the organist pulls a “stop.” With the stop removed, all the pipes of that voice are opened to the wind box. Then, when the organist plays a key, air flows into that chamber, past the open stop and into the pipe.
The volume on a pipe organ is controlled by the number of stops opened and, thus, the number of pipes played. Organists can combine stops to create sounds that are full and symphonic or quieter, with fewer layers. At Lord of Life, there are 61 separate stops for three keyboard manuals and a set of 32 foot pedals.
The result is a unique sound and feel. Each note is preceded by an almost imperceptible “chiff” as the air rushes upward, but that tiny sound draws in the listener in ways an electronic sound cannot. The air resonates in much the same way people breathe and speak and sing, creating an almost physical connection.
Because a single pipe, whether made of metal or wood, can produce only one tone, an organ can have hundreds or thousands of individual pipes. The famous Mormon Tabernacle organ has11,623 pipes. The Glatter-Götz organ in the Disney Concert Hall has 6,134 pipes. The new organ at Lord of Life has 2,873 pipes.
The number of pipes is less important in a church than the combination of voices the pipes produce. That is why the Lord of Life study committee met with an organ “voicer” even before settling on a final design with Glatter-Götz.
It is the job of a voicer to help perfect the overall sound of a new pipe organ, to listen to the desires of a customer and devise the right mix of tones and textures.
“As much as people like to think an organ is all about how it looks, it’s ultimately all about how it sounds,” said Manuel Rosales, an accomplished voicer who works with Glatter-Götz to give pipe organs a distinctive voice.
The Lord of Life committee had listened to an organ at St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church in San Marino, Calif., and told Rosales its voice represented what the church wanted.
“So we made those decisions before the organ was built,” Rosales said. “It was around that sound that the organ was built. The architect then designed an organ he thought would be suitable for the visual environment, and the organ builders had to take the sound and the visual and make it work mechanically. It’s not as if they built an organ and we put the sound inside.”
Glatter-Götz worked on the organ for about 13 months, crafting most of it by hand and fitting it all together in the workshop.
Then, piece by individual piece, the workers packed the instrument, wrapping the pipes in cloth, packing the pieces in wooden crates for shipment.
As Christmas neared, the pastor and the music people and the search committee at Lord of Life began to grow restless. The organ was still not ready to play.
They had known the instrument could not debut at full sound until spring. Preparing each pipe can take months.
After delays in building and shipping, Rosales would not be able to finish more than a few sets of pipes by year’s end. And until he finished, he would rather the church not play the instrument. It wouldn’t sound right.
Kautz and Lien almost tiptoed around the console, wondering how much they dared tinker with it. It was their instrument, after all. And Christmas Eve would be Kautz’s farewell service.
Lien, the organist and music director, has selected the compositions she will play when she sits at the new organ for the first time. ABach Fantasia and a prelude, in F or C. Her own arrangement of “Away in a Manger” or “The First Noel” for Christmas Eve, Kautz’s final day at the pulpit.
The music will be simple, nothing showy, nothing loud, something to show the congregation what they now own. With so few pipes installed and ready, the organ can only play softer tones. The Toccata and Fugue will have to wait until May or June.
Lien has heard from many church members since the organ arrived, and most of them are in awe, even some who had opposed the purchase.
“One person came up to me and said, ‘I just wept when I saw it,’ ” Lien said. She looked up at the windchest, the one hanging above the chancel. “It’s just so beautiful. It’s like it was always there.”
Rosales, the voicer, has made no promises about when his work will end. It is slow, deliberate work. He listens to each pipe and makes precise adjustments. He may change the opening at the pipe’s foot, where air enters, or reshape the mouth, where the air pushes the sound out.
Each pipe is adjusted and the voices matched so they blend to create the sound envisioned before the builders be- gan their work.
“My goal is to take as much time as needed,” he said. “You want to get it right. We get involved in the sounds in a very personal way, try to create something that wefind very pleasant and beautiful.”
More than a few Lord of Life congregants wondered how their church could justify spending $1 million on a pipe organ at a time when it seemed there were more pressing needs.
The pastor and the committee members talked about the value of music in worshiping and of leaving a legacy for the community and for the church. Lien found herself often referring to the New Testament account of Mary anointing Jesus with expensive oils and perfumes in his final days before he was to be crucified.
Some of the disciples objected, telling Mary and Jesus that the oils and perfumes could have been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus interceded.
“Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a good work for me. For you have the poor with you always, but you will not always have me.”
Lien considered the story a moment. Behind her, the new organ console and the rows of pipes waited to fill the sanctuary.
“This is for our future. This will endure,” she said. “Doesn’t the Lord deserve the best music?”