EVERETT — The low notes rumbled through the floor and the high tones hummed in the walls Monday morning as organist Sung Joo Kim practiced Franck’s Choral No. 3 in A Minor, one of her pieces for this weekend’s concert.
First Presbyterian Church in Everett is celebrating 25 years of its custom-built pipe organ Sunday. All are welcome.
In the chapel, daylight is softened by stained glass windows depicting biblical scenes. Rows of pews face a stage three steps higher than the rest of the room. At the back of the stage, the pipe organ dominates the space. Its hand-stained red oak case towers nearly two stories high and contains more than 2,000 pipes, mostly made from alloys of copper, zinc, tin and lead. The longest pipe in the organ is more than 16 feet and the shortest is three-eighths of an inch.
The organ is one of the largest in the area. John Moir designed the instrument. He’s president and tonal director for Balcom and Vaughan Pipe Organs, a Seattle-based company that has designed and built more than 200 organs since the 1960s.
The First Presbyterian organ took about 6,200 hours to build, and Moir put in at least a third of those, he said. He lives in Everett and became a member of the church after finishing the organ.
“It’s my baby,” he said. “The model for the way the instrument sounds comes from the first part of the 19th century in France, the transition from Baroque to Romantic music.”
Alan Villesvik was the church organist when the instrument was built. Gary Norris took over soon after and has been the organist for 21 years. Both say the organ is well-suited to the powerful pieces of German Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach. Music from Bach is expected to be played at the concert.
Villesvik and Moir remember when the organ was built and installed. It never was in one piece in the shop, Moir said. The parts were designed and crafted, then brought in and put together. Pipes were laid across the pews and segments of the wood casing propped against the walls.
Installing the organ took about 10 days, Moir said. Voicing the instrument, where the pipes are tested and adjusted until they match the tone and quality of their neighbors, took about three weeks.
Some organs have extra pipes just for appearance, Villesvik said. Not this one.
“Every one of these pipes speaks,” he said.
On Sundays, they speak to about 200 people in the congregation. Organ music accompanies the church choir and also has been featured in concerts. Norris and Villesvik recall sharing the organ bench for a performance of “Ride of the Valkyries” while a soprano soloist sang her way down the aisle, dressed in costume armor.
Norris enjoys the drama and spectacle of the organ. He’s planning special effects for this weekend’s concert, where he’ll be playing two pieces. At least four organists are set to perform, along with the choir, a brass quartet and bells.
The 25-year-old organ replaced a predecessor built with half of the instrument on each side of the stage. If one set of pipes was getting hit by sunlight and the other set was on the cooler side, it would throw off the tone and tuning, Villesvik said. The only good seats were directly front and center because the sound was unbalanced. Now there isn’t a bad seat in the house, he said.
Villesvik worked for a while with Moir at Balcom and Vaughan. Organ building is a craft with a lot of hand labor. He always liked that kind of work.
Moir stumbled into organ building by accident. He was studying in Chile in the early 1970s, working on his doctoral dissertation on the labor movement there.
“I was looking for an instrument to play to kill time after the archives closed at 5,” he said.
He met an English-speaking Jesuit priest who said the organ at his church was broken. Moir helped repair the instrument, made by a renowned European builder. Word started to spread that there was a man in town who fixed pipe organs. Before he knew it, he’d become an organ repairman and, as time went on and he worked more extensively with the instruments, an organ builder.
“So instead of eight months, I stayed there eight years,” he said.
He moved back to the United States with his wife, who had worked in the archives where he did much of his research. He began building organs with Balcom and Vaughan and eventually took over as president.
He can play the organ, but “not for public consumption,” he said.
He does, however, love to listen. He takes pride in the instrument, and he knows the church does, too.
Kari Bray: 425-339-3439; kbray@heraldnet.com.
Concert
The organ concert starts at 3 p.m. Sunday in the chapel at 2936 Rockefeller Ave. Admission is free. Donations to the church are accepted.
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