Video: Piping in the sounds of bygone centuries
In the early 1700s in north Germany, Arp Schnitger was the Stradivarius of organ builders. Now, even though Schnitger is long gone, his organs, and replicas inspired by them, are heard all over the world.
Soon, a Schnitger-inspired organ will echo through the Anabel Taylor Hall chapel at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and some Upstate New York organ builders will have a hand in putting it there.
"Everything about this organ is a replication," said Richard Parsons, president of Parsons Pipe Organ Builders in Bristol. "The bellows are made the same way they were made 300 years ago."
Parsons is teaming up with Cornell and Goteborg University in Sweden to build an organ in the same style and tonal design as the Arp Schnitger organ at the Charlottenburg-Schlosskapelle, a church in Berlin.
Since the organ was first made in the 1700s, that means the one at Cornell can't have any screws or plywood and must have only hand-forged hinges, locks and nails. Workers from Parsons went to Sweden two years ago to check out a copy of the organ and meet with designers in Goteborg.
The exterior of the organ is made from white oak, which is now in a pile on the ground of Parsons' warehouse. Hand-forged nails will be shipped over from Sweden.
"That's what makes organ-building a challenge," Richard Parsons said. "The next job always has something new."
It takes a Jack-of-all-trades to build organs. Richard Parsons works with computers to design instruments, with carpentry to build the structure, with math to determine the lengths of pipes and with music to design tone.
"I just grew up in it, and I love the challenge," he said. "Everybody here does a little of everything."
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<param value="transparent" name="wmode" />width="425" height="355" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/22RtxPoajUwrel=1"></embed></object> The Schnitger organ is Parsons' first project with international collaboration. Parsons will be responsible for construction drawings and building of the wind system. A man from Freeville, N.Y., in Tompkins County will construct the organ's structure, case panels and molding in his workshop. All the pieces will be put together in Parsons' Bristol workshop for fitting. Then it will be taken apart and shipped to Cornell, where it will be reassembled under the watch of Munetaka Yokota, who oversees the project in Sweden. "It's immersing ourselves in a historical system that we don't typically build in," said Peter Geise, who works at Parsons. Geise studied organ at Goteborg University for 10 months as part of his master's degree. It's an interdisciplinary project at the universities, too. At Cornell, research for the project has been done by students of art, architecture, history, German studies, physics, chemistry, computer science and technology studies. Geise said it will be exciting to see the final project, which is expected to be complete in 2010. "You spent a year or more of your time creating this and working together to create it," he said. "It's really neat to play and hear the final results." <em>Contact Daily Messenger writer Stephanie Bergeron at (585) 394-0770, Ext. 255 or sbergeron@mpnewspapers.com.