Hear historic 1698 organ at Great Elgin Pipe Organ Tour concert May 18
The next stop on the Great Elgin Pipe Organ Tour will be at 4 p.m. Sunday, May 18, at the Church of the Brethren General Offices, 1451 Dundee Ave. in Elgin. Note the location is the denominational headquarters on Dundee Avenue (Route 25), not the church building on Highland Avenue.
The concert will feature the historic Harttman/Kurtz cabinet organ, the oldest extant pipe organ in North America.
Admission is free, and a free-will offering will be taken to support the upkeep of this historic organ and the ministries of the Church of the Brethren.
The Harttman/Kurtz organ bears the inscription: “In the forenoon of September 23, 1698, I, Johan Christoph Harttman, organ maker of Nürttingen, firmly closed this small wind chest. May God grant that many beautiful and spiritual psalms and songs be played and struck on this work to His name’s honor.”
A little over a century later, the organ found its way into the possession of Henry J. Kurtz, a Lutheran pastor and schoolteacher. It then crossed the Atlantic with Kurtz as he made his way from southern Germany to Northampton County, Pennsylvania in 1817. He was baptized into the fellowship of the German Baptists, who called themselves Brethren, and rose to prominence within the faith becoming ordained as an Elder in 1844.
After Kurtz’s death in 1874, the instrument remained in the family with his son, Jacob. As the Brethren churches began to accept instrumental music in the 20th century, this organ eventually made its way from the Kurtz family to the Bethel Church in Poland, Ohio.
Some years later after the church had to relocate, the organ again made its way to descendants of Henry Kurtz, eventually ending up in a barn in the 1950s. But it was soon rescued from the barn by and slated for restoration by an Illinois organ builder.
Unfortunately, the organ would languish unfinished until the 1970s when another organ builder, John Brombaugh, completed the task.
The Kurtz organ made a much-anticipated debut at the Church of the Brethren’s 1976 Annual Conference, in Wichita, Kansas. The organ would receive further accolades at the Organ Historical Society’s national convention held in Chicago in 1984.
The May 18 concert on the Harttman/Kurtz organ will be held in the beautiful chapel on the grounds of the Brethren’s General Offices and will be performed by Jeffrey Neufeld, music director at First Congregational Church and organizer of the tour.
The program will include works by Pachelbel, Sweelinck, Bach, Buxtehude, and Dupré, as well as hymn singing. The organ requires manual pumping to supply air to the pipes, and Neufeld will be assisted by his son, Charles Neufeld, and by Mark Kuntz, celebrated and recently-retired cellist for the Elgin Symphony and a Church of the Brethren member.
Because the planned finale for the Great Elgin Pipe Organ Tour at First Congregational Church has been postponed until Sept. 12, this concert on the Harttman/Kurtz organ makes for a poetic and symmetrical, temporary conclusion to the 2024-2025 tour: arriving at the smallest and oldest organ in Elgin after beginning the tour at First United Methodist on one of the newer and certainly the largest organ in Elgin.
But the official and exciting finale for the tour featuring works for organ and orchestra will still take place at First Congregational Church at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 12.
Tickets will go on sale later this summer. Music lovers and benefactors can still help fund the finale concert by visiting fcc-elgin.org/organ-tour to donate or by mailing a check to First Congregational Church of Elgin with “Organ Tour” in the memo line.