Local Video
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| An organ waits for a home: Donors are needed |
By: JIM HAMMERAND, Staff Writer
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Posted: Saturday, November 28, 2009 1:03 am
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NORTHFIELD — When construction started on St. Dominic Catholic Church in 1985, architects envisioned organ pipes reaching toward the pitched ceiling.
Two dozen years later, the space designed for an organ still doesn’t contain one — but perhaps it soon will.
Sitting in storage in a Cleveland, Ohio, shop is a Holtkamp organ built in 1949 for the now closed St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. After the church closed and fearing the organ could be dismantled by vandals, the parish left it in Holtkamp’s hands to be donated to an organless church willing to refurbish the historic instrument.
That’s where Chris Barth comes in. A St. Dominic parishioner and baritone in the choir, he’s leading efforts to bring the organ to Northfield. Clad in a shirt that reads, “Be an organ donor!” he gestured to the front of the church, where planners set aside space specifically for an organ.
“A church should have an organ whether it’s used all the time or just occasionally. They’re expensive, that’s the bugger. Once you get one, you’ll take care of it, but getting one is difficult,” Barth said.
Getting this one is costly, too. Before Holtkamp will start work on the organ, the church needs to have the $500,000 renovation and installation cost pledged by the end of the month.
Chris Holtkamp’s grandfather gave his name to the company, and his father consulted with St. Dominic on the space it would need for an organ when the church was drawing up plans for construction. Now the president of the Holtkamp Organ Co., he explained just how much work it would take to bring the organ to Northfield.
“This particular kind of organ has a lot of leather in it, and the leather is an integral part of the valving system for each of the kind of pipes and each of the notes,” Holtkamp said.
The leather gets brittle as it ages, and needs to be replaced if the organ is going to function. There’s other work to do: rewiring, rekeying and reconfiguring for the new space.
The work could be done in time for the 2,828 pipes to play on Easter morning, and could last as long as six decades.
“If they (church members) are successful in their efforts … they’ll have an instrument that is of unusually high quality that will come to them at roughly half the cost of what a new organ would cost,” Holtkamp said
But a new, $1 million organ would lack the grandeur and historical significance of the Holtkamp, said John Ferguson, a St. Olaf College organ and church music professor and the author of Walter Holtkamp: American Organ Builder.
The organ was one of the first out of the factory after a wartime ban on their production was lifted, Ferguson said, and was marked as a “step in the evolutionary process” of domestic organs.
“What we have here is an instrument of extraordinary historic value, if we want to preserve the history of American organ building in the 20th Century,” Ferguson said.
Northfield, home to close to 20 pipe organs and 10 percent of the nation’s undergraduate organ students, is known as a place where there are fine organs, he said.
Ferguson recalled the four or five times he played the organ and its clear, clean and colorful sounds.
“(It is a) sound that is sort of warm and inviting, the sort of sound that says to other musicians and singers, ‘Hey, make music with me,’” he said. “The organ as a single instrument played by a single person is probably still the most successful instrument to lead the widest range, the widest variety of song … St. Dominic isn’t finished as a real place of worship until it has an organ, and a good one.”
WANT
TO HELP?
If you want to help bring the Holtkamp organ to Northfield, contact Chris Barth at 645-7389 or christopherbarth1@mac.com.
— Jim Hammerand covers the city. He can be reached at jhammerand@northfieldnews.com or 645-1114. |
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