A Pipe Organ for OLL
How Is a Pipe Organ Different from Our Current Organ?
As announced in July, 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.
Stay tuned for details of a pipe organ demonstration in the fall, when you will be able to hear this sound difference for yourself!
New Pipe Organ Coming in Early 2025
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.
Stay tuned for more information on this exciting development for our parish. We will begin fundraising to cover the remaining expense of the organ this fall.