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Shandon Presbyterian Church
Columbia, South Carolina
Lewtak Pipe Organ Builders

by Tomasz Lewtak

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Building a three-manual tracker instrument is exciting and challenging. In the case of Shandon Presbyterian Church, the greatest predicament stemmed from the limited space in which the sizable organ is placed. All 3,075 pipes, including the full-length 16’´reed and open 16′ Contre Viole, had to be fitted within a 135- square-foot area. It nearly put us beyond our comfort zone, as we realize the importance of accessibility to all pipes and internal components. The solution came with many hours of creative design. The end result is tight, but comfortable.

Rather than provide obvious information about our quality materials, excellent construction, and painstaking attention to the smallest details, we focus our thoughts on one aspect often underappreciated and treated as secondary— tuning and temperament.

What determines the temperament for a new organ, or any instrument for that matter? Perhaps the simple answer is personal taste, but surely there are other factors, such as style and character of the instrument, its future role and functionality. We have no intention of arguing the superiority of one tuning over another. After all, what is beautiful to some may be unattractive to others! In our quest for the best temperament we settled on universality as the most important factor. Equal temperament lacks color and variation of different keys. It can be compared to a gray paint with which all music will be treated, well . . . equally! What a loss for repertoire composed in different keys! The Shandon organ is tuned according to a formula from 1724, developed by the German theorist and composer Johann Georg Neidhardt. We stumbled upon this temperament when the consultant for our organ in Denmark requested it. We experienced a total aural surprise in the most positive way—it worked in an incredibly subtle way, giving various keys their unique individuality without being perceived as harsh or, as it is in cases of many other unequal temperaments, unusable. In fact, it made the organ sound sweet and playful. To the average listener there are no unpleasant surprises associated with tonality. Organists find it perfectly usable for virtually all of the literature.

Many people contributed to this enormous project. The person who deserves the highest recognition is consultant  Timothy Belk. His energy, enthusiasm, kindness, and perseverance made this undertaking a reality. We will remain forever grateful.

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Tomasz Lewtak is president of Lewtak Pipe Organ Builders.

For further information regarding the work of Lewtak Pipe Organ Builders, visit lewtak.com.
Photography: Mateusz Littwin

Located in the heart of Columbia, South Carolina, Shandon Presbyterian Church has been affiliated with the Presbyterian Church USA since 1916. A worshiping community of nearly 900 parishioners celebrated their centennial with the preservation of the neo-Gothic-style sanctuary interior and new pipe organ.

As specified by acoustic design consultant Dana Kirkegaard, the 39-foot ceiling was reinforced with thick wooden decking to better enhance the spoken and sung Word. Its adobe color is accented with gold-colored molding. With once-fashionable carpeting removed, the original tupelo wood flooring was restored to a rich luster. Hardwood pews were stripped of thick cushions and refinished to their original color. Stained-glass windows, from the studio of George Hardy Payne of Paterson, New Jersey, were meticulously cleaned revealing the artistry and splendor of artist Per Bergethon. Crenshaw Lighting of Floyd, Virginia, dramatically improved overall lighting with custom fabricated bronze LED fixtures.

The south transept houses original chancel furnishings faithfully restored and dating from the 1920s. Named for its central window, The Sower’s Chapel is an intimate setting for smaller memorial, Taizé, and wedding services.

An inviting narthex welcomes visitors and worshipers alike. A blue ceiling reminds us of the promise of a new day.

The original M.P. Möller organ (Opus 6626, 1938), and its 1958 and 1975 modest additions by the original builder were removed and the chancel expanded to maximize flexibility within the contexts of worship and concert alike. New chancel furnishings, designed by liturgical consultant Terry Byrd Eason of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and crafted of exotic sapele wood by Lewtak Pipe Organ Builders, are seamlessly wed to the organ case design. Its speaking facade is comprised of tin principal pipes with gilded mouths of 24-carat gold leaf.

Tuned in a slightly modified temperament, the organ, leaning toward the romantic, is well suited to all periods. Manual divisions offer a rich singing fond d’orgue, punctuated with orchestral color and pungent chorus reeds, mutations, and complementing mixtures. Comprised of 47 stops and 59 ranks, the new organ pays homage to the old with the subbass, violone, and clarinet retained from the original instrument. Walker Technical provided judicious use of the usual 32′ digital stops, which serve well in the small space. The use of carbon fiber trackers offers the organist tremendous touch control while electric stop action with Heuss Orgelteile’s virtually unlimited memory and solid-state expression provide ease of playing. A French terrace console design ensures visibility of the choir.

Shandon enjoys a traditional worship and music ministry comprised of usual singing and ringing choirs for all ages, and an admirable concert series. The organ remains a central voice in this intentional focus. The organ selection committee struggled with a desire to commission a mechanical- action organ of three manuals despite constraints defined by a central window. A church musician and organist, North Carolina-based organbuilder Tomasz Lewtak brought a wealth of practical and professional knowledge. His contagious passion, realized in the aural and visual beauty of the organ, is the crown jewel of the centennial effort.

Timothy J. Belk
Church Administrator

Our firm was invited to work with Shandon Presbyterian Church several years before the organbuilder was finally selected. The church, before renovation, suffered from the typical constricted choir area behind a narrow stage-like rostrum pulpit, the communion table down on the nave floor level with very poor visibility, and very dry acoustics that did not well support hymn singing and traditional music. By way of an extensive design process with a church committee, a very flexible single-level chancel platform plan, which strategically fills much of the “crossing” area defined by the transept seating, is large enough to maximize the possibilities for many kinds of liturgical and musical uses. New flexible principal furnishings (communion table, pulpit, and font) were designed to relate to the simple and restrained Gothic characteristics of the church building. New ministers’ chairs were developed to permit masking of the new organ console when desired, or re-spaced or removed to allow variable or full visibility to the fixed console location. These chairs together with movable choir modesty screens permit the choir area to expand onto the spacious main platform when a larger choir or orchestra is needed. Likewise, the choir area can be reduced to maximize the open space available on the chancel platform.

The new choir and organ area remains on the central axis, but with an expanded width and depth permitted by the removal of the large proscenium arch that defined the old constrained choir loft and side-opening organ chambers. This reconstruction of the chancel end of the church was coordinated with replacement of the old lightweight wooden dropped ceiling with a much heavier wooden ceiling that maintains the previous ceiling form and retains the ornamental wooden arches that conceal the main steel structure. The new ceiling was extended solidly back over the reconfigured organ and choir area so that these key elements for musical leadership were now in the same acoustic space as the gathered congregation.

The organ selection committee very much wanted a mechanical-action organ. Removal of the large central window was considered by some organbuilder proposals, but that was met with much resistance from the congregation as might be expected. The large organ cases that now flank the retained window in the widened choir area were developed by Douglas Abbott of Abbott Designs and, wisely, are broken into three parts with the smaller part of each case placed closest to the window so that the window remains the focal point of the chancel. The Eason firm also developed the design for the pipe shades that work with the rounded forms of the top of the organ cases but introduce a subtle Tudor Gothic shape to the largest pipe towers to relate to the room architecture, the central window, and the new chancel furnishings.

Terry Byrd Eason
Terry Byrd Eason Design
Liturgical Design Consultant

Key to Pipe at the Speed of Light
Grace Episcopal Church
Hartford, Connecticut
Schoenstein & Co. and Peterson Electro-Musical Products Inc.

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For generations, Grace Episcopal Church has held a well-deserved reputation for its traditional Anglo-Catholic liturgy and its fine music program headed by Kyle Swann, who is also lecturer in opera at Yale University. The church is quite small, seating only 112—a village church in the heart of a big city. It has a very pleasant, resonant acoustic; amid the grandeur of the ceremony, the setting seems spacious. However, space for the organ is another matter! Sixteen stops, 18 ranks was the absolute limit without encroaching upon already-tight space for choir stalls and pews.

The Anglo-Catholic service places great demands upon the organ. Three qualities are absolutely necessary. First, variety of well-differentiated tone colors. Second, wide dynamic range from ppp to ff. Third, flexibility of control. The first two of these are obvious from the stoplist. There is a complete ensemble of tone colors quite distinctly different from one another just as are the wind instruments of the orchestra. Dynamic range is aided by having Great and Swell separately enclosed and the Tuba Minor with strings in a third expression box located within the Swell. The third key element, control of these resources, is usually just a footnote or completely neglected on the stoplist. All the complex mechanisms that make the modern console aids possible seem mysterious. In this article, we will reveal some of what goes on behind the scenes in the nerve center of an electric pneumatic organ—the electrical control system.

What is the organ’s electrical control system? It consists of two main elements. First, the relay and switching system, which could be compared to a telephone central switchboard taking signals from keys, stops, and couplers and distributing them to the actions that operate the pipes and expression motors in the organ. The second is the combination action that makes it possible to pre-set combinations, to have reversibles and other console playing aids. There are many varieties of systems involving electromagnets and/or pneumatic motors that move contacts much like those in the wall switch turning on and off your lights. On a three-manual organ with 215 keys, 77 stopknobs, and 44 pistons, you can imagine the number of contacts required and the bulk of machinery to operate them.

The advent of solid state has revolutionized this whole process. What is solid state? Very simply it means that all of these electrical transactions are done with no moving parts except the initial contact at each key, stop, and piston. This results in a vast miniaturization of the systems. It also eliminates the need for air power and replacement of contacts and leather.

Here is what the electrical control system does for our Hartford instrument. Of primary importance is unification, sometimes called duplexing, or extension. This allows a stop to be played at different pitches on one manual, to be borrowed from one manual to another or extended into the Pedal. If done with care, this can easily double the effectiveness of an instrument. This installation illustrates one of the most valuable uses of unification—creation of a third manual so helpful especially in service playing. Solo stops from both manuals, accompaniment stops from both manuals and a small “Positiv” ensemble from the Swell are immediately available.

The console has an extensive combination action with a generous number of pistons and 100 assignable and lockable memory levels. The stops affected by a piston can be programmed via a feature called “compassing” whereby, for example, divisionals can become generals. There is a piston sequencer to allow moving through the sequence of general pistons by simply touching the Advance piston. It has a record/playback system and numerous other features including the ability to memorize combination settings and store them on a memory stick.

Most of these control features would not be possible at Grace Church without the most recent revolution in solid-state technology, the integrated control system; in this case, a Peterson model ICS-4000. There wouldn’t be enough space to house the necessary electropneumatic equipment and a good many of the features including multiple memories, piston sequencer, and record/playback would not be practical even with unlimited space.

The evolution of modern control systems started in the late 1960s, when early versions of solid-state switching systems appeared on the market and began to be incorporated into the instruments of some forward-thinking and adventurous pipe organ builders. Those early “diode matrix” switching systems offered, for the first time, a more cost-effective and far more compact way to connect an organ’s key and stop control contacts to its note actions using no moving parts, no perishable materials, and far fewer electrical contacts to periodically clean and maintain. Soon, separate solid-state electronic combination actions such as Peterson’s original “DuoSet” single-memory model were developed utilizing digital integrated circuit memory. Interestingly, many of the very first pioneering pipe organ installations are still in service today and diode matrix switching systems continue to be built for some new organs and rebuild projects. But over the years, steady advances in available technology have been utilized by control system suppliers to offer far greater capacities, a long list of creative features, ever-smaller size, and much lower relative cost.

One of the critical strategies has been to “integrate” organ control subsystems—relay and switching, combination action, transposer, manual transfer, reversibles, vast amounts of piston memory, programmable crescendo and tutti, piston sequencer, MIDI interface, and record/playback—into a single all-encompassing microprocessor-controlled system . . . thus the term “integrated control system.”

While some of these features of integrated control systems may be deemed unnecessary and even inappropriate for particular pipe organs and may be left out, the principle behind the efficient implementation of such a system is generally the same. Microprocessors and microcontrollers can be thought of as tiny but very powerful computers that accept inputs, process those inputs based on software instructions, and then drive outputs to accomplish the required tasks.

A pipe organ control system’s inputs consist of electrical voltages that appear at system inputs when keys, stop and coupler controls, pistons, expression shoes, and other miscellaneous console controls are operated. Through an extremely fast, constant, and repetitive scanning process, all of an organ’s inputs are sampled quickly enough that any change, such as the press or release of a key, will be processed so quickly that no delay is discernable to even the most proficient organist playing as rapidly as possible.

The efficiency of an integrated control system’s size, cost, and performance is accomplished largely because, once inputs have been scanned, the resulting data can be manipulated by the microprocessor and microcontrollers with remarkable speed and precision, and surprisingly few parts, given careful software design. Whether used to run a small pipe organ like the instrument at Grace Episcopal Church in Hartford, or an enormous recital instrument with two consoles and every imaginable convenience for organists, integrated control systems have truly revolutionized the way electric-action organs are controlled today.

The Grace Episcopal Church organ was completed on June 26, 2017, and was featured in a dedicatory recital by Thomas Murray on October 29, 2017. The priest-in-charge is the Rev. Rowena J. Kemp and the director of operations in charge of preparing the installation site was parishioner Tom Phillips. This was a project we enjoyed thoroughly, especially due to the strong cooperation, encouragement, and enthusiasm of the entire parish.

Jack Bethards, President
Schoenstein & Co.

Scott Peterson, President
Peterson Electro-Musical Products Inc.

Cover feature photography: Louis Patterson