It has taken more than two decades since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center left Trinity Church covered in dust and debris.
This towering, Gothic Revival church in Lower Manhattan survived the attacks that destroyed the nearby towers. But its aging organ, a 5,000-pipe Aeolian Skinner, which had been in service since 1923 and had already seen better days, was deemed beyond repair.
Now, its replacement has been unveiled with a recent concert by the organist Anna Lapwood that filled the church with sound and a message of hope. “It’s an amazing instrument,” Lapwood said. “You can really feel you are playing the building as well as the organ itself.”
The new instrument, 10 years in the making and costing nearly $17 million, including the price of woodwork and casing, boasts 8,041 pipes, some as high as 32 feet. That’s about as big as an organ gets. There are two consoles — one at the front of the church, and one at the rear — each with four keyboards (called manuals) and each with 51 keys. There are 113 stops, those nobs above the keys, which the organist uses to mimic the sounds of various instruments in orchestra, producing a swell of the kind of the grand sounds that recall “The Phantom of the Opera” at one moment, and a delicate pianissimo of Debussy at the next.
“Do you want loud or soft first?” Avi Stein, Trinity’s organist and chorus master, said as he prepared to show off the instrument. He turned to the console. “Let’s pick quiet.”
In the audience, it’s tempting to focus on the player’s hands as they dart from key to key and keyboard to keyboard. But an organist plays with all four limbs. Watch below, the slow dance by Stein’s feet, navigating the thicket of levers, pedals and buttons out of view of most of the audience. There are 32 pedals that produce the deep notes at the bottom end of the scale. The four levers in the middle, which look like gas pedals, are called swell shoes, and open and close the shades make the tones softer or louder. The buttons are the pistons, used to flip on programmed combinations of stops that control the tenor, pitch and character of the notes.
In 2003, still without an organ, Trinity installed a digital one called the Opus, built by Marshall & Ogletree of Needham, Mass. Did it sound like the old fashion pipes-and-billows organs that had graced the church for centuries? That is a matter of debate to this day. As much as engineers tweaked the sound, it was hard to forget that this was electronic music. The notes from the “organ” came not through pipes, but from 74 speakers hidden behind fake pipes in the choir loft.
Not surprisingly, this did not go down particularly well, at least in some corners of the Trinity music community. The organ “lacks some of the tangible singing quality that turns a machine into a work of art,” Stein said (diplomatically). In 2018, the church underwent a renovation and ended its use of the digital organ.
Listen to the real thing, as Stein plays “Prélude et Fugue sur le Nom d’Alain” by Maurice Duruflé.
Depending on how the player uses those 113 stops, the organ can sound like a French horn. A big trumpet tuba. An oboe. A flute. “American organs in particular were built as equivalents of orchestras,” Stein said. “If you didn’t have an orchestra, well you had an organ.” To demonstrate the musical versatility of this organ, Stein turned to the concluding measures of the slow movement of Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor. “That’s not even a piece of organ music,” he said. “But as you can see, it can do all these great orchestral colors.”
The organ is one instrument with four different components: the two consoles (a mobile one in the front, and a stationary one in the rear), as well as sets of pipes in the front and in the rear. Unlike its predecessor, it produces no sound electronically, but the mechanism tying it all together is mostly electronic. On the front console, plucking a key sends an electric signal through an Ethernet network, resulting in a blast of air through the pipes. (A technician uses an old iPod to tune the instrument.)
Still, certain connections are mechanical. Pictured below, in the gallery organ, is a linkage in which the key moves the pivots that control the air flows through the pipes.
From its base on Broadway to the top of its steeple, Trinity Church is 281 feet tall. It reached higher than any other building in the United States when it was completed in 1846. That is no longer the case, but Trinity remains by any measure a very big church. And after 24 years, it once again has an organ that fills that space. “You feel it all through your body,” said Melissa Attebury, Trinity’s director of music. “It is magnificent.”
Adam Nagourney is a Times reporter covering cultural, government and political stories in New York and California.
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