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The Artisan Classic Pipe Organ
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Photo by Fraser Carr
This three manual pipe organ is quite unique with an electronic swell manual and was built by Artisan Classic Organ Inc. of Markam, ON, replacing the Keats Organ burned in the fire of 1995. It also has a 25 channel memory and a midi of 99 different sounds.
A WORD ABOUT THE ORGAN
The organ was built and installed by Michael Donovan and Robert Smit of Artisan Organ Builders of Toronto, an internationally active Canadian Organ Builder, specializing in building and rebuilding hybrid pipe and digitally-sampled organs.
It has a new handcrafted oak console, using refurbished and revoiced pipes from the previous organ. Another set of pipes, called “tierce” was added to complete the new, unenclosed positive keyboard. The wooden bourdon pipes were replaced by advanced, digitally sampled stops to provide more working/service access space within the instrument.
The limited resources of the previous organ were expanded by the addition of digitally sampled electronic sounds to the existing pipes for greater flexibility and individual tone colour variety. These sounds are produced from a library of selected recordings of individual organ pipes, and are stored in memory chips, to be replayed at the command of the organist.
The new organ contains three 61 note keyboards, a 32 note pedal keyboard, eleven ranks of pipes, twenty-four ranks of samples and sixty-five stops, all controlled by a state of the art microcomputer. This micro-computer also has the capacity to save in memory, the combinations of sounds previously selected by the organist. The organ is fully “MIDI” (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) oriented, and can control, and be controlled from other compatible musical devices.
The organ has its own
built-in synthesizer which produces some of the orchestral sounds (violin,
piano, harpsichord).
St. Paul’s wishes to thank the Organ Builders, and in particular, Michael Donovan and Robert Smit for their expertise and dedication in bringing this exciting project to fruition. Our thanks also to David Cameron, our organ consultant and current Organist and Director of Music at Chalmer’s United Church, Kingston, who approved the specification, stop list and final voicing of the instrument.
Prepared from information provided by Michael Donovan.
THE ARTISAN CLASSIC ORGAN WAS MADE POSSIBLE IN PART
BY A GENEROUS DONATION FROM
THE ERIC BAKER FAMILY FOUNDATION
(MRS. ANN BAKER)
IN MEMORY OF HER FATHER
MR. THOMAS RELYEA
A FAITHFUL MEMBER
DEDICATED TO THE GLORY OF GOD
OCT. 15, 1995
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