Caledonia Times
October, 2014 Volume 46, Issue 10 The Diocesan Section of the Anglican Journal
Tearing down the organ has led to new, fuller life for Church instrument By Elaine Anselmi, Alaska Highway News
Tools, parts and pipes of every size fill the nave and sanctuary at St. Mark’s Anglican Church Sunday services have been temporarily relocated to the church’s hall as lots of space is needed for a major project: refurbishing music director Merrill Flewelling’s 1919 Casavant pipe organ.
“It’s a very complicated instrument with a very simple result: beautiful music that is created by actual wind sound - it’s not electronically generated - which has a full range of frequency and full range of sound,” said St. Mark’s pastor Tim Johnson. “I think what it enables is the support of a liturgical form of worship that has been valuable in the church for centuries.” The project requires a very specific skill set. Thankfully, a friend of the congregation, an electrical engineer and organist who lives out of town, was brought in to tend to the very large project, which he said gets bigger and bigger at every step. (The craftsman has asked to remain anonymous, and will be referred to as Dan Michaels.) Michaels said working on the instrument requires both familiarity with the piece and curiosity of the unknown. Once the project is completed (this coming Ash Wednesday is the hopeful deadline) the instrument will be extended from seven to 11 ranks - organ talk for a complete set of pipes - through the addition of a Positif organ that Flewelling acquired while heading up the music program at Northern Lights College. “He purchased, for the music department, a kit set organ of four ranks from the United States in 1980 as part of the Northern Lights College music program,” said Michaels. “That arrived, they set it up in Fort St. John and tried to get it working, but it wasn’t very reliable.” Michaels said the Positif sat unused since then, mostly gathering dust. Now, not only are the two instruments being married, but upgraded with an electrical system for ease of use and tuning, without taking away from the natural wind sound. The main organ was built by Casavant Freres in St. Hyacinthe, Quebec. Michaels noted that at the time of its construction, a metals ban was in place because of World War I. “The pipes had to be made in France and imported as a completed part,” said Michaels, explaining how all scrap metal was supposed to be reserved for the war effort, but an exception was made for unbroken, complete pieces. The Casavant was originally installed at an Angli-
Above: Archdeacon Tom Johnson stands with the various wood and metal pipes laid out and ready for the reassembling of the 1919 Casavant Brothers Organ at St. Mark’s, Dawson Creek. can cathedral in Edmonton, where it was converted from tubular-pneumatic action - the organ’s console is connected through lead tubes to the valves that control wind through the pipes - to electro-pneumatic action, in which electric current, controlled by the keys of the organ console, operates the valves.
lenge of maintaining the instruments, with the climate offering an extra roadblock in terms of keeping them in tune and functioning properly.
“Sometime during the 1960s, two things happened: one was that the original pneumatic action was converted to electro-pneumatic and it moved to the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Dawson Creek,” said Michaels, adding that during this time a leak in the roof of the church caused damage to the instrument - the extent of which they discovered during this process of refurbishing.
Johnson added that with much of the development in the region coming after the 1950s, the option of bringing in modern electric organs was already in place.
“Their style of liturgy and music changed and they no longer had a need for it, so they wanted to dispose of it. That’s when Merrill bought it.”
A part of the current project at St. Mark’s is also moving the massive instrument, which required disassembling the entire organ, consisting of more than 400 parts. Michaels pointed out that one part of the organ, the wind chest, required six people to lift. “Having disassembled it, we were able to see that there was damage inside it that had to be repaired. So part of this process is to recondition and repair the damage that was done and the aging process that has damaged parts of it,” said Michaels.
Flewelling purchased the instrument, installing it in the Truss Factory in Dawson Creek. Then, under new ownership, it again had to be moved, this time to a storage unit. “When Merrill took up the music director position here [at St. Mark’s], the organ was installed in the church here,” said Michaels. The Casavant organ has been in place at St. Mark’s since 2010, although Johnson said they haven’t yet been able to play it to its full potential. Pipe organs are a rare sight in churches in the North. Michaels attributes part of that to the chal-
“I haven’t heard of any pipe organs north of Prince George in this province,” said Michaels.
“By the 50s or 60s, if you were looking at a new church and a new organ, electrics are possible, ... whereas 50 years before that, you either had a pipe organ or you didn’t have an organ,” said Johnson.
Various problems came up that temporarily stopped or delayed the renovation process, he said - there was no point in continuing on without addressing them. “There’s only one way you can do organ building, and that’s doing it right the first time, or you have all of these other problems down the road,” said Michaels. Michaels has been at work on the project since See Tuning Up on p. 4
Informing and Inspiring the Faithful in Northern BC sine 1905