Pipe Organ the size of a building

[IanJ]

This is such an interesting video.....keep watching it to the end for the interesting stuff.
For sure next time I am at a church wedding I'll be looking around with different thoughts!



Ian.

[NiHaoMike]

Fran Blanche did a series of videos on one:

[IanJ]

Let's connect up the MIDI interface!

https://youtu.be/SQHdFAm7g7E

[ajb]

Years ago the dance company my sister did ballet with as a kid would do their shows at a local high school that had an old Kimball theater organ.  It was removed from a silent movie theater, so in addition to ~5000 pipes it had a whole complement of percussion plus a bank of sound effects suitable for film accompaniment--doorbells, ringing telephone, old timey AWOOOGAH car horns, and I'm sure a few others.  Those last few never made it into the annual nutcracker as far as I recall, but I remember at one point the organist let some of us bored siblings play around on the console between shows and it was fun to just flip random selector switches and see what sounds came out of the bewildering array of keys.  Supposedly it's the 4th largest organ of its type in the world, with something like 20hp worth of blowers to supply the required air.  There were chambers in the back wall of the stage, in the auditorium walls either side of the proscenium, and then a rank of MASSIVE pipes over one of the stage wings that made sounds you could feel as much as hear.  Truly an amazing piece of art in itself.  Seeing the organists' hands and feet flying over the console and making an entire orchestra's worth of music come out of the room itself always blew me away.

[jmelson]

Anybody know where the first organ is?  The second must be eastern PA, as that's where the old Wanamaker stores were.

Thanks,
Jon

[edavid]

Anybody know where the first organ is?  The second must be eastern PA, as that's where the old Wanamaker stores were.

It's in Chicago: https://fourthchurch.org/music/organ/index.html

The Wanamaker organ is at the Macy's store in Philadelphia: https://wanamakerorgan.com/

[jmelson]

Anybody know where the first organ is?  The second must be eastern PA, as that's where the old Wanamaker stores were.

It's in Chicago: https://fourthchurch.org/music/organ/index.html

Thanks, interesting story on the rebuild.  I had a junked 8-rank organ pulled out of a church and moved to a guy's barn loft!
I built my own electronic action for it, but it was just too big a project, and I didn't have proper space to put it all together.  The original casework was identfied by the guy I sold it to as Henry Erben, from about 1850.  But, it had indications of many rebuilds, by George Kilgen and St. Louis Organ Co.
I believe most of it is in a guy's apartment in Chicago.

The Wanamaker organ is at the Macy's store in Philadelphia: https://wanamakerorgan.com/

Yup, that one was fairly obvious.
Jon

[tooki]

Pipe Organ the size of a building

Umm, isn’t “building size” an essential characteristic of the instrument we call the pipe organ? (Since all the smaller types, even if they use pipes, have more specific names.)

[magic]

Of course not, most of them are about room size

BTW, before the electric action rubbish came, some fairly complex pneumatics went into those things.