Scot Huntington on March 28th, 2022:
There was a succession of organs in this building, beginning with No. 436, 1867, which case front still existed in the gallery fronting a chamber, but which had existed at one time or other at both ends of the building. There was little if anything left of the original Hook pipework.
The Brunner organ was dedicated on Sunday, Oct. 22, 1989 by organist Marion Anderson. The organ is entombed in a rear gallery chamber which exceeds the available tone opening in all directions, fronted by the 436 Hook case whose facade pipes were reactivated in this instrument. The organ is further hampered by carpeting, other acoustical treatments, and extreme winter dryness. The core instrument was an 1850 3-manual organ built by Henry Erben for the Christ Episcopal Church of Norfolk, Virginia. This was rebuilt and enlarged by Hook & Hastings in 1885, reusing a great deal of the Erben pipework, albeit re-pitched and re-scaled to raise the pitch to A450 and to introduce expression-type slotting for tuning the larger pipes.
The organ was enlarged again by R. J. Brunner as their Opus 19 for Pawtucket when it was relocated here through the Organ Clearing House. The organ was re-pitched to A440 at that time, which created some voicing anomalies in the larger basses, open wood pipes, and reeds. The organ received a handsome new detached walnut console in the Hook style, new key action, and electric combination action. Given the large size of the Hook pallets, the action was stiff to play when coupled.
Circa 1996, the Brunner company returned to make several modifications to the organ: electric couplers were installed to lighten the coupled touch, binding sliders caused by extreme dryness were re-shimmed, and some tuning slots were either soldered up with new ones cut, or selected ranks were re-pitched one note and shortened-- this solved the tuning problems nicely.
Database Manager on October 30th, 2004:
Status Note: There 1996.