Self-Guided Tour: 8 The Organ
It may not have been a war, or even an openly-acknowledged friendly rivalry, but each of Grand Island’s mainline congregations that built new facilities in the immediate post-WWII era clearly wanted its organ to be something special. For our claim to braggin’ rights, the Presbyterians turned to the M P Möller company, a very well-regarded organ builder based in Greencastle, Pennsylvania. The Möller company did not disappoint.
Think of our instrument not as something that’s installed in the building, but as something integral that the building is designed around—not as an object that occupies a space in our sanctuary but as a resonant voice that indwells and is acoustically attuned to the space–so that when the organist sits at the console in control of the instrument’s 52 stops, 36 ranks and 2,462 pipes, (s)he is, in effect, “playing the entire building.” If the church were a living, breathing human being, the organ would certainly be its heart!
That effect is achieved via strategic placement of 2,462 mostly-hidden pipes: the largest, belonging to the “antiphonal organ” are secreted in the walls of the former “choir loft” (now the control booth) above the narthex; the majority of pipes, belonging to the “principal organ,” are invisibly tucked behind screens between the chancel’s east roof and ceiling.
Such an arrangement was popular in the 1950s, but it meant that the taller, robustly-voiced pipes had to be placed toward the front of the steep-roofed chamber, while the smaller, more subtly-voiced pipes were relegated backward, to the muffled space beneath the lower eaves—the exact opposite of an acoustically ideal arrangement. Not until the 20__ renovation when the so-called “singing pipes” were moved to their beautiful new home aligned with the nave did we Presbies hear our organ in all of its full-throated splendor!
