Church gets new $1.1 million organ

BLOOMINGTON -- There's a reason the front of the sanctuary at Second Presbyterian Church looked a bit barren in recent months. A three-story-tall organ belongs front and center.

The massive instrument was to arrive at the downtown Bloomington church in thousands of pieces starting at the beginning of this month, and by month's end it will be making architectural, musical and spiritual statements.

Of the sound, organ maker John-Paul Buzard of Urbana said, "It will be like a symphony orchestra in a box a very big box."

The Second Pres organ will be 24 feet wide, 13 feet deep and 32 feet tall. It nearly reached the ceiling in the erecting room of the Buzard production facility in downtown Champaign where it was built and tested.

Buzard gets excited while talking about any pipe organ, but when talking about this one he becomes almost giddy. The Second Pres project represents the ideal collaboration of architect, church and organ maker, Buzard said. At times, John-Paul Buzard Pipe Organ Builders must retrofit an instrument into an existing church.

Or the organ maker is brought into new-church planning after acoustics and design decisions have been made.

Second Pres was talking to Buzard before it had a draft plan from BLDD Architects, and the church joined the architect and organ maker into group discussions. Architect R. Carson Durham, a BLDD senior associate, said the organ for Second Presbyterian "always has been the focal point of the room."

John-Paul Buzard Pipe Organ Builders imports some of its pipes from Europe, but most organ parts are handcrafted in the Champaign building.

At a cost of about $1.1 million, the Second Pres organ represents about 15,000 hours of work.

The organ maker draws every Buzard organ by hand, without computer-assisted design. But he said he is a designer who listens; in this case to Durham.

Durham, on behalf of the church, gave Buzard the organ's central design element: A Celtic cross, which is a cross enclosed by a circle and is a symbol historically linked to Second Pres. Buzard had never incorporated the Celtic cross into a design, so it posed fresh opportunity for him, the organ-maker recalled.

Some of the pipes in the organ are of wood, and much of the musical instrument is wooden. Poplar, mahogany, pine, white oak, walnut and cherry are used on this instrument. Its casings are wooden and so are multiple ladders built into the structure for access for maintenance and repairs.

Other pipes are metal. Silver-finished ones are made of lead and tin. Others are polished copper.

The choice of wood for pipes largely is a consideration for acoustics, said Buzard, but the choice of metal pipes relates to appearance. For Second Presbyterian, the polished copper pipes will be in the middle of the instrument, a "splash of color," the designer said.

Like virtually all modern organs, this instrument represents a bridge between modern and ancient.

It combines valve technology dating to the 1500s with today's computers and electronics. The interior of the organ is loaded with computer boards and electronics equipment as well as airtight wooden piping. Building the instruments is a hybrid of artistry and engineering.

The Second Pres organ will have more than 3,500 pipes. Its 55 sets of pipes will produce sounds of the traditional organ but also approximations of flutes, violins, clarinet, trumpets, trombones and other orchestral instruments.