PORT TOWNSEND — An organist sits down at a pipe organ. The organ has 23 ranks of pipes replicating the instruments of a symphony orchestra. Each rank has 61 pipes spanning five octaves. Using the two keyboards, 32 foot pedals and 31 stops on the console, how many different sounds can the organist produce?
Stan Goddard is an engineer, and even he doesn’t know the answer.
“The number of variations and combinations you can play — you’d have to be a mathematician to do the computation,” Goddard said, “but it’s very high.”
Goddard attends Trinity United Methodist Church, where he and Harry Takata, also a retired engineer, reassembled a nine-rank, 1902 Mudler tracker organ in 2002.
Now Goddard, with the help of Takata and other volunteers, is creating a second pipe organ for Trinity, an 18th century, Baroque-style instrument like Johann Sebastian Bach used to play — with a twist.
“What’s Baroque about this is the sound,” Goddard said. “It will sound like a 18th century organ but use late 20th century technology for the control system.”
Goddard built the first organ because he wanted to hear the German composer’s music played in his church.
But on completion, he found out that late 19th century American church organs were designed to play music of the romantic era using flue pipes, open tubes that are basically big whistles.
Reed pipes, which replicate the sound of woodwinds by forcing air across a slit in the pipe base, are more expensive and harder to maintain than flue pipes, but are an important component of Bach’s compositions.
“You have the basics without the trimmings,” Goddard said of the standard church organ.
He first considered adding several ranks of reed pipes to the Mudler, a tracker organ that operates mechanically.
Because of logistics, the added ranks of pipes would have had to be located outside of the organ and operated electronically, which would make it impossible to get the timing — much less the sound — right, Goddard said.
“We came to the conclusion that we’d end up with a kluge,” he said, using the word for a Rube Goldberg creation.
Building second organ
So he went back to the drawing board and came up with a more ambitious plan: to create a second organ based on the ones built by Gottfried Silbermann.
Specifically, he modeled it after organs Silbermann, who was godfather to two of Bach’s sons, built in Germany in 1731 and 1732, when the composer was in his mid-50s.
Goddard and organ technician Clint Meadway, a hands-on consultant for the project, left out two stops that Bach never used and added five more.
“Bach would have loved them,” Goddard said.
Silbermann would have loved being able to locate the pipes anywhere in the church, Goddard said, and have the freedom to change or add to the configuration.
The console, purchased from a Seattle church, can also be moved anywhere in the chancel or out of the way when not in use.
Goddard and his wife, Beth Mackey, went on an organ tour of Europe and visited Germany, where they heard Silbermann’s organs played.
Across the front of one in Saxony is a verse from the 150th Psalm, “Alles Was Odem Hat Lobe Den Herrn,” which in the King James Bible translates to “Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.”
The organ is designed on the pressure of a human breath, Goddard noted.
When he came across the verse in a Bible study class, he felt like the project was meant to be.
“I was immensely pleased not only to find this verse, but the one about praising God with string instruments and organs,” Goddard said.
November completion date
Goddard is aiming at a Nov. 15 date to have the instrument together and playable, as that’s the day the bishop is visiting to dedicate the instrument.
When completed, it will be a powerful addition to the classical music concert scene, Goddard said.
And because the organist has the equivalent of a whole orchestra at his or her fingertips, the pipe organ can be used to compose a wide variety of musical compositions, like Bach did 300 years ago.
“This will be the only organ like this on the Peninsula,” Goddard said.
“There’s nothing close to it.”
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Port Townsend/Jefferson County reporter-columnist Jennifer Jackson can be reached at jjackson@olypen.com.
