[Dixielandjazz] Bragging Rights & Organs

Mon May 15 09:48:06 PDT 2006

Some years ago a friend decided to buy a pipe organ an have it put in his 
house.  Since he was single and had a lot of room he had the living room and 
dining room ceilings raised into the next floor and made a mini concert hall 
to indulge his pipe organ passion.  One fly in the ointment.  It seems that 
every nail in the house started working out.  It cost him a fortune to have 
the place screwed together.  It started with the drywall but the adjoining 
wall studs were loosened too.  He had to have the place gutted and 
everything screwed together.  That was before contractors regularly used 
screws for drywall.   I haven't lived in that town for years and have lost 
track of the guy but the vibration from those 16 foot pipes will rattle 
anything loose.

I visited a guy in Fairbanks Alaska where he had a restored theatre pipe 
organ (glockenspiel, drums and all the stuff) as his living room but his 
house was made out of logs and he had the house built specially to house the 
organ.

By the way there is a pipe organ available here.  You haul away  and the 
asking price is I believe $300K.  It's a big one.
Larry
St. Louis
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve barbone" <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
To: "DJML" <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 8:51 AM
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Bragging Rights & Organs

No doubt about it . . . size matters! And according to Dobson Organs in Salt
Lake, Philly's is the BIGGEST in the world. :-) VBG

Hopefully, before too long, they'll have a jazz concert featuring it.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

Philadelphia Orchestra's New Toy Is an Organ

NY TIMES -  By JAMES R. OESTREICH - May 15, 2006

PHILADELPHIA, May 12 < The Philadelphia Orchestra, a vaunted treasure
revered around the world, is more or less used to being upstaged in its home
setting. . . (snip to)

A giant new organ was the visual and musical centerpiece of Verizon Hall in
Philadelphia on Friday. . . (snip to)

So it was not surprising to find the orchestra taking a back seat again in
its subscription concerts at Verizon Hall (as the auditorium is called) on
Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings. Or, more accurately, a front seat,
for the main attraction loomed behind the players: a mighty new pipe organ,
whose installation could begin in earnest only after the hall had been
completed and the dust had settled, literally. (snip to)

It is, no question, big. There are different ways to define size when it
comes to pipe organs, including not only physical bulk, weight and number of
parts, but also sheer output of sound. In any case the makers of this
instrument < Dobson Pipe Organ Builders of Lake City, Iowa < call it the
biggest pipe organ in any concert hall in the United States, a claim
supported by Michael Barone, an expert in the field and the host of
"Pipedreams" on American Public Media, who attended a press briefing on
Friday afternoon.

It has 6,938 pipes, ranging from pencil-size to more than 40 feet, deployed
in 125 ranks. In a demonstration and performance for the press, Jeffrey
Brillhart, an organist from Bryn Mawr, Pa., coaxed out a high, thin, almost
inaudible piping that was seemingly adrift in the hall (like the familiar
whine of a malfunctioning hearing aid), then sounded a hoarse, bottomless,
almost pitchless flutter that the builders refer to as a "tuned helicopter."

And it does create a glorious ruckus, yet one that < to judge from the blast
that opened the finale of Saint-Saëns's Third Symphony on Friday < the hall
can comfortably contain. That symphony was the capstone of the Philadelphia
Orchestra program, in which all the works prominently featured Mr. Latry and
the organ. . . (snip to)

Asked about the organ, Mr. Latry described it as wonderfully versatile. "It
has a very strong personality, which is good," he said. He compared playing
it to a collaboration in chamber music. "It's like finding a new partner,"
he said.

Like his organ at the cathedral, he added, "The organ sometimes says, 'No,
don't do that.' "

"Unfortunately, it doesn't say what to do," he said. "It just says, 'Do
something.' "

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