New church organ will offer quality not seen for miles

Posted by Nancy Guenther Chapman on January 14th, 2010 at 10:45 am,
with photos by Nancy Guenther Chapman

Fonda Davies, music direc­tor at EUMC, shows the con­sole off to choir mem­ber Janet Davison.

The 12,000 feet of wiring has been laid out. Speak­ers have been placed on either side of the altar on sec­ond floor land­ings. The glo­ri­ous new organ con­sole is in place.

Work at Engle­wood United Methodist Church is con­tin­u­ing apace. When it is done, EUMC will have the largest pipe organ in Sara­sota County, a com­bi­na­tion of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy and the pipes installed when the church was built in 1979.

“It’ll be pretty awe­some,” said Jim Baines, an Engle­wood Per­form­ing Arts Series board mem­ber and tire­less vol­un­teer at the church.

“It will be quite an addi­tion for the entire com­mu­nity not just this church,” said Ted Hayes, vice pres­i­dent of sales for Dunne Music Co., Sara­sota office, refer­ring to the many events that are held at EUMC.

The “Renais­sance Quan­tum” made by the Allen Organ Com­pany fea­tures a hand-rubbed fin­ish of wal­nut and oak and 97 ranks.

By con­trast, the old organ had 29 ranks.

A rank is a set of pipes that pro­duces a given tim­bre. Each key on a pipe organ denotes a cer­tain pitch; each rank con­tains one or more pipes that  pro­duce that pitch when air is blown through it.

There is a big­ger organ in Sara­sota County: the Church of the Palms in Sara­sota has an S rank organ with 132 ranks. But it isn’t hooked up to pipes.

Tommy Drake, tonal direc­tor for Dunne Music, said his com­pany used 100 per­cent  of the old organ, except for the console.

“It’s very desir­able to the con­gre­ga­tion that the money invested 30 years ago wasn’t wasted,” he said, point­ing out that the new sys­tem is fully inte­grated with the old one. “… They made a very wise invest­ment initially.”

This time, the church put twice the organ into the space of the old one, as it had to fit on a plat­form that rises above the chan­cel, or slide onto a plat­form that sinks below the floor level.

The new con­sole will be usable for Sunday’s ser­vices. The next day, work­ers will begin remov­ing every pipe. Each pipe will be cleaned and “re-voiced.”

“We’ll adjust the speech and the sound and the vol­ume of each pipe,” Drake said. “It will be trans­formed into some­thing that they will rec­og­nize in one regard but it will be so much better.”

Work­ers will also blow out the “chest,” the box the pipes sit on, which is filled with the air that goes singing through the pipes when each valve is opened.

When that work is done a week from Fri­day, a new era in EUMC music con­certs can begin.

Sev­eral church mem­bers checked on the progress Wednes­day, includ­ing church Music Direc­tor Fonda Davies.

She showed Baines and his wife some of the new fea­tures of the organ, includ­ing a pull-out drawer that trans­poses the key of what is being played with the turn of a knob.

“(Rev). Gale (Williamson) plays by ear, in B flat,” she said. “Peo­ple who play by ear usu­ally play in one key. Now he can play in any key.”

Another  pull-out drawer has 16 mem­o­ries that can be reset 16 dif­fer­ent ways. Sounds include cello, vio­lin, chime and bell sounds, trum­pets and seven drum sets.

Drake and oth­ers joked that Davies wouldn’t be able to leave the church now, and Davies agreed she’d have to be torn away.

Hayes said the qual­ity of the organ will be unri­valed locally, and not just at churches.

“Not even the Van Wezel has one,” he said.

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