History of Trinity’s Organ

Trinity Reformed Church was blessed to have the substantial body of the present instrument given to us by generous donors from Acton, Ontario. The installation and work on the present instrument was kindly facilitated by Byron and Tamara Jansen and their parents, organ aficionados and hobbyists. During the summer of 2014, they and their whole family worked in Trinity’s new building to bring together the Keats-Geissler instrument of about 6 ranks (around 600 pipes) to working condition for Trinity’s building dedication. The organ has since then served as a training instrument for several young keyboardists in Trinity’s congregation eager to learn how to play the instrument. Trinity is continually grateful both to the Jansens, to Master’s Touch Woodworking, and to Roy Atwood for the coordination of the present instrument.

Trinity hopes to expand the present instrument and become a concert venue for the Pacific northwest

In addition to congregational singing, Trinity’s vision for the organ includes the facilitation of community concerts and community education in early music. For this reason, Trinity approached Marceau & Associates Pipe Organ Builders in Seattle, WA to help Trinity expand the present instrument so that it could become a suitable organ for congregational accompaniment, for solo organ recitals, and for chamber music.

Marceau & Associates will be developing Trinity’s organ during 2016 in three phases. These phases will move the organ toward the goal of having concert and chamber applications as well as ecclesiastical ones. The proposed organ will have a 17 ranks and around 1000 pipes. The facade will be a complete array of speaking pipes facing the console.

Why the organ?

It’s probably a fair point that pipe organs seem a particularly pungent anachronism in a modern American worship service. Trinity doesn’t believe in adopting the organ merely because it’s traditional, but because it is actually useful for what we want to achieve: good congregational singing and a copiousness of sound reflecting the fullness and glory of worship in heaven. Generally the reasons for using organs in church have been theologically dubious in the past two centuries—organ was exciting to have in services performatively, the way a rock band is exciting to some now, or perhaps the organ fit admirably into the Romantic, transcendentalist vision of the ineffability of God, or perhaps it was fitishized at the hands of a grossly Franco-philic American population in the late 19th century. None of these is a reason for its presence at TRC.

We’re more interested in the organ for the reasons that Medievals and the early Reformers were. TheChurch originally chose the organ as its instrument because of her view of the Trinity and the Medieval cosmos. Aristotle hypothesized that whatever is perfect is also changeless and immutable—a bush that burns but is not consumed. And not only does God have this characteristic, but, to an extent, the perfect universe does as well, creating music of the spheres that continues forever the same. The reasoning of the Medieval church was that our music should imitate both the Trinity and the angels in immutability, in never having to need a breath, in having one sound that can go on forever. Organ was one of the great technological marvels of the Medieval and Renaissance eras because of its ability to create just such a sound. On no other instrument could you play one note ad infinitum. Nicholas Brady, a metaphysical poet of the 17th century, put it well in his Ode to St. Cecilia:

With that sublime Celestial Lay
Can any Earthly Sounds compare?
If any Earthly Music dare,
The noble Organ may.
From Heav’n its wondrous Notes were giv’n,
(Cecilia oft convers’d with Heaven,)
Some Angel of the Sacred Choire
Did with his Breath the Pipes inspire;
And of their Notes above the just Resemblance gave,
Brisk without Lightness, without Dulness Grave.

Brady here makes the argument that the music of the spheres (“Celestial Lay”) is an eternal, breathless, unchanging sound that earthly music can’t really replicate, because all vocalists must take breaths, all flute players need to rest their lungs, and all violinists must retake their bows. The only instrument that can keep a sound going forever and ever, says Brady, is the “noble Organ”. The incorporeal unchanging “Angel of the Sacred Choire” gave it notes because, in the Medieval universe, unending polyphony is the musical language of angels who need no breath and have no lungs. That’s why the organ gives the most “just Resemblance” of the “Celestial Lay”.

The great line here, though, is “Brisk without Lightness, without Dulness Grave.” We think of dullness always accompanying gravity and lightness always accompanying briskness. But the organ’s music has the solemnity without losing the joy, and the joy without gaining the triviality. Selling the organ to modern churches means reinventing this sort of connotation when the word “organ” is heard. “Brisk without Lightness, without Dulness Grave.”

One of the other advantages that early Protestants found in the organ was that it was one instrument that contained many other instruments. The Bible described worship full of as many instruments as it can seem to cram into a single place, and this is not a bad description of an organ. Elias Nicolaus Ammerbach, organist at Leipzig in St. Thomas Church, gave an apologia for the organ just on that basis. He published a pedagogical anthology of organ music, sacred and secular, for organ and said this in his introduction:

Among different musical instruments, however, of which I leave each as established in its worth, the organ—so nowadays employed in our churches and sacred service, and (as some suppose) unknown to the ancients—, in my opinion, justly has preference. For on it, thanks to its abundant stops (Regiester) and many kinds of timbres (stimwercks), one can devise and realize a great varietet and artistic change in the voices, which is not found on other instruments. (lxxiv, “Source Texts”, Orgel Oder Instrument Tabulaturbuch, Elias Nicolaus Ammerbach)

This is also one of the reasons J.S. Bach was so popular with his congregants, as recorded by Forkel, upon hearing Bach play.

To all this was added the peculiar manner in which [Bach] combined the different stops of the organ with each other, or his mode of registration. It was so uncommon that many organ builders and organists were frightened when they saw him draw the stops. They believed that such a combination of stops could never sound well, but were much surprised when they afterwards perceived that the organ sounded best just so, and had now something peculiar and uncommon, which never could be produced by their mode of registration. (Bach: the Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff.)

One of the most important features of an organ for congregational accompaniment is its bass. It is, really, only one instrument that rivals today’s synthesized popular music in raw power and compelling bass. This is not incidental—the presence of a timbre-distinct and prominent bass is exactly what makes pipe organ the best instrument for congregational singing. It is an instrument designed to smack you into the back of the pew with its magnitude and might. Bach reputedly loved the 32′ register on the organ. This is the register, incidentally, that is too low for the human ear to identify distinct pitch, which means that, with soft pipes, you simply hear a rumble, and with loud pipes, you hear loud whacking and growling. The sound of a full organ with a 32′ bombarde is a sound that will never stop surprising you because it goes lower, pierces deeper, literally moves you more than you thought it possibly could.

Since the Middle Ages, the organ has since grown a bit bigger—on average containing thousands of pipes, the largest ones containing upwards of 20,000. Its pipes can be less than an inch tall and 30+ feet. Their pitches reach higher than the human ear can distinguish pitch, and lower. On the piano, playing one key simply rings one pitch, but on the organ, playing a single key could activate 50, 60, even 70 pipes all at once. A full chord with fullorgan is playing literally hundreds of pipes simultaneously. It isn’t for nothing that it’s called the king of instruments. Whatever preconceived notions you’ve gathered—based perhaps on bad stereo recordings and Hollywood wedding scenes—the real ancient pipe organ has a numinous enormity. It is sublime in the Burkian sense.

The end of Fantasia in G major orTransport de joie, when heard live, gives the listener the same sort of feel he might have near a waterfall, or at the drag races, or during the moment when an old tree has just been felled, or behind a volley of cannon. That’s when it’s being loud, but more often, its power is as much its quiet might as its manifest might.

Such power, such intimacy, such agile restraint is characteristic of few other instruments. For all its practical advantages, it has the singular quality of never ceasing to dazzle, to inspire, sometimes, even fear and joy simultaneously. It is, in the Elizabethan sense, an awful instrument.