A Pipe Organ for OLL
Buy a Pipe!
To kick off our pipe organ fundraising, we are inviting everyone in the parish to buy a pipe! There are 840 organ pipes in our new organ. We ask you to prayerfully consider purchasing a pipe (or several pipes!) to help us ensure that this magnificent instrument will inspire and uplift our congregation for many years to come. Check out this form for more information on the available pipes and the different levels of giving, or give online!
The Story Behind Our Pipe Organ
As we announced earlier this year, Our Lady of the Lake has purchased a pipe organ for our church! We found this unique opportunity more than a year and a half ago, when a pipe organ consultant connected us with an organ shop in the Netherlands, Pels & Van Leeuwen. This organ shop had a used pipe organ for sale that they were hoping to send to a church in the United States. Not only was it sized appropriately for our space, but it was readily available and priced at a significant discount! We are so excited to receive this instrument to replace our electronic organ and elevate the beauty of our liturgies. The organ shop is also excited to send another one of their organs from Holland, the Netherlands, to Holland, Michigan. (The grandfather of the current organ builder at this shop built the organ in Dimnent Chapel at Hope College!)
Our new organ, Opus 934, was originally built in the French style in 1993 for the Municipal Music School in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Some modifications are currently being completed to make the organ more suitable to our space. The black and white image in this post is the new casework design for our instrument. Our new organ will arrive in January 2025 and will take approximately six weeks to install, voice, and tune.
Funding the Pipe Organ Project
Before the organ arrives, we will be making some modifications to the choir area in the sanctuary. The organ will be placed against the back wall in the choir area, next to the stained-glass window. We will extend the top step to make room for the organ and use insulation beneath the floor to protect the instrument from the radiant heat beneath the tile. The choir seats will be shifted to the side, with new choir risers built out of wood and the addition of new choir microphones. The piano will move to where our electronic organ currently sits.
When Fr. Michael presented this opportunity to Bishop Walkowiak, the bishop was very excited about this opportunity and encouraged us to proceed. To help finance this project, Bishop Walkowiak extended us a line of credit from the diocese’s deposit and loan fund at 3%. It is structured as a construction loan, so while the project is underway, we make interest-only payments on funds drawn to date. When the organ is installed and the last installment has been paid, the loan converts to a principle + interest loan at 3% for the balance drawn. We hope to fundraise the cost of the project to minimize the total amount borrowed and pay back the loan and interest.
Organ and Installation Costs
| Total Cost of the Organ and Labor | €180,278 |
| Estimated Shipping and Insurance | €7,500 |
| Estimated Travel and Lodging for the Two-Person Installation Team | €14,400 |
| Taxes and Import Duties | TBD |
| Estimated Total Cost for Organ, Shipping, and Installation | €202,178 or $221,864 (number to fluctuate based on changing exchange rate) |
Sanctuary Modification Costs
| Modifications to Steps and Floor in the Choir Area, and New Choir Microphones | Estimated $50,000 |
Total Anticipated Project Cost: $271,864
More on Our Pipe Organ
How Is a Pipe Organ Different from Our Current Organ?
Our parish has bought a pipe organ from the Netherlands and it will be installed in January 2025. Several parishioners have inquired about the differences between this new organ and the one we currently have. One of the primary differences is in the way each instrument produces sound. Our current organ is an electronic Allen organ built in the early 1980s. All of the sounds that you hear are prerecorded and amplified by speakers. In contrast with this, a pipe organ generates its sound in the same manner as the human voice that it accompanies: by putting air through pipes. Pipe organs move pressurized air through hundreds or thousands of pipes to produce various tones and pitches. Our new organ will have 828 pipes.
To understand this difference further, consider our lovely grand piano. When one of its keys is pressed, a hammer inside the piano strikes the strings, causing them to vibrate and produce sound. This creates a warm and rich sound with natural acoustics. If we had an electronic keyboard instead of our grand piano, we could still play the same music. However, the sound quality would be drastically different, as the electronic keyboard is a simulation of a real piano. Likewise, this is the difference between an electronic organ and a pipe organ. While the two types of organs can play the same music, a pipe organ will produce a more pure and natural sound.
Original Pipe Organ Announcement
According to the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council, “The pipe organ is to be held in high esteem in the Latin Church, since it is its traditional instrument, the sound of which can add a wonderful splendor to the Church’s ceremonies and powerfully lift up men’s minds to God and higher things.” At Our Lady of the Lake, we are excited to announce that we are on the verge of acquiring our very own pipe organ to replace our current electric organ and elevate the beauty of our liturgies.
This unique opportunity first came to our attention more than a year and a half ago. We heard about an available organ that was created by a family workshop in the Netherlands that also built the organ in Dimnent Chapel at Hope College. Buying such an organ would ordinarily be prohibitively expensive for our parish. However, though the organ is in excellent condition, it is technically “used,” since it was originally built for a music school in France that has since gone out of business. As a result, we are able to purchase it at a significant discount. It is relatively small for a pipe organ, meaning it will fit well in the sanctuary of our church. When we got in contact with the family that built the organ, they were excited for it to go to Holland, MI, near the one their grandfather built for Hope.
After discussing this opportunity with Audrey Gorman and our pastoral and finance councils, Fr. Michael sought permission to purchase the organ from our bishop. Bishop Walkowiak encouraged us to proceed. OLL has now signed a contract with the workshop, which is planning to disassemble the organ, ship it to the U.S., reassemble it, and install it beginning in January 2025. The installation will take about six weeks.