Church prepares place for new pipe organ

Al Sullivan attended Old St. Vincent's Church as a child and remembers listening to the organ. Now, more than 50 years later, he's helping with the installation project for a new instrument at the nearly 150-year-old cathedral.

A new Schantz pipe organ was installed last week at the downtown church and is one of several pipe organs in the community. The organ at Eisleben Lutheran Church in Scott City, Mo., has been removed for restoration at a St. Louis company and should be returned in March.

A "voicing" team arrives Monday to spend two weeks tuning each of the nearly 1,200 pipes in the instrument at Old St. Vincent's. The organ installation completes more than 20 years of restoration projects at the church, said Loretta Schneider, who has been working with the renovations since 1977.

Until the voicing team arrives, Sullivan and several other men in the church have been completing floor remodeling in the balcony where the organ sits. Parts of the floor had to be rebuilt to house the new instrument.

The organ was set up in the Schantz company's shop, then disassembled for transport to Cape Girardeau. The pipes are partially tuned in the shop just to make sure they will play properly, said Paul Lohman, Midwest area representative for the Orrville, Ohio-based company.

As the instrument is disassembled, its pipes are numbered so that installers can more easily reassemble the instrument. Each pipe, most of which are made of zinc, is stamped with its stop name, said Rob Baumgartner, the design engineer who came to Cape Girardeau for the installation.

The organ at Old St. Vincent's replaced a 1926 instrument that was sold to a church in Arcadia, Mo. That instrument had only six ranks of pipes; the new organ has 19.

The more ranks of pipes on an organ, the better its sound will fill a room. Organs are designed to fill the space where they are to be played with adequate sound. Every instrument built by Schantz is custom-made. Decisions about the size and space of the instrument affect its quality. "It's a matter of wanting the instrument to fill the space," Lohman said.

An organ with 154 ranks filled space at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Newark, N.J., he said. But most church pipe organs have about 10 ranks.

Baumgartner said the instrument at Old St. Vincent's was roughly tuned when it was installed just to make sure all the pipes would work together. "They aren't all in tune but it wouldn't sound bad," he said. "For some people they would say it's just fine."

But the voicing team, two organists who will set the tone of each pipe, have an intense job. They will work eight hours each day setting the tone on each individual pipe and set of pipes to make sure "they speak properly," Baumgartner said.

The temperature of the room affects the air density, which in turn affects the pipe tone. The preference for tuning is to have the room's temperature be exactly what it would be when the organ is played.

"Generally you will seasonally tune an organ before Easter and again at Christmas because there's a drastic change in the air," said Baumgartner.

While the pipes are partially voiced, its the finishers who "get to dress it up and polish it and listen to it play," said Lohman.

The congregation at Old St. Vincent's plans a recital in early March and one on Palm Sunday so that the community can hear the new instrument.

ljohnston@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 126