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Miscellaneous News

1.  New Pipe Organ Shakes the Pews At Trinity Church

Trinity 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. In 2003, still without an organ, Trinity installed a digital one called the Opus, built by Marshall & Ogletree of Needham, Mass. 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.  In 2018, the church underwent a renovation and ended its use of the digital organ.

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.)

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.''

Nagourney, Adam;Etheredge, George. NYT Oct 5, 25

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