Before it leaves for its new home in a Madison, Wisconsin, church, a Staunton organ shop offers a musical send-off for its latest creation. WMRA’s Christine Kueter reports.
[organ plays, people chatter]
MELISSA DRUMHELLER: They’re just so majestic and enormous and beautiful.
KEN MYERS: Classic.
JULIE KASLUSKY: Heavenly. Ethereal. Traditional.
SARAH GROVE-HUMPHRIES: Sublime.
That’s how Melissa Drumheller of Waynesboro, Ken Myers of Baltimore, Julie Kaslusky of Lake Monticello, and Sarah Grove-Humphries of Staunton—who plays each Sunday at Hebron Presbyterian Church—describe it.
GROVE-HUMPHRIES: It’s the intersection of music and art and history and religion and human beings and craft. What could be better?
On a recent Sunday, hundreds turned out to gawk at the latest creation from Taylor and Boody, the nearly 50-year-old organ maker located in an old brick schoolhouse a few miles outside of Staunton. Since their first party for Opus 4 in 1981, when 1,500 well-wishers crowded the building, each instrument the company makes earns a send-off and a name before being carefully hauled to and installed in its final destination.
Opus 88, as the newest organ is called, sweeps more than 30 feet high, weighs 21,000 pounds, sports 122 keys across two levels—called “manuals”—and offers 32 pedal keys below an adjustable bench that players press with their feet.
Its 35 “stops” activate pipe clusters that change the organ’s pitch and sound, and, on its gothic basswood panels—open to allow sound to flow through—carvings reflect its home church’s native flourishes.
Unusually, Opus 88 will have a twin: it’s the first of two massive installations that will flank a stained glass window in the choir loft at Luther Memorial Church in Madison, Wisconsin, that will be completed by mid-2027.
While every Taylor and Boody organ has things in common—hand cast pipes to carvings, swells, and blowers that require tens of thousands of man hours to make—each is distinct, too. In addition to coming in two parts, Opus 88 has what tonal director and vice president Aaron Reichert calls “mechanical key action.”
AARON REICHERT: So your fingers will actually open the valves under the pipes and give that player a little more control, and more music-making nuance. . .
. . . Important for the many occasions the instrument will be tasked to mark.
REICHERT: The weeping and crying and joy at a wedding. The tears and hugs of comfort at a funeral. What we’re doing is building a thing of wood and metal and all those parts together, and that’s not the important thing at all. It’s the personal connection that that bit of fundraising, and that community coming together to say, “Hey, we need something to lift our voices with, to be able to comfort each other, and to send each other out in hope and joy.”
Reichert says he often only sees an organ’s shortcomings by the end of each lengthy, intense build, but he’s proud of work that’s anything but assembly-line.
REICHERT: People say, “Oh, go to the organ factory,” and I go, “Boy, we're really the least factory thing out there.” We’re a bunch of crazy craftspeople who are lucky enough to get to make these wonderful, wild, mechanical marvels. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine that makes music at the end of the day and it’s super fun, it’s super satisfying. You know, once you get a little distance from the thing, when you’re a perfectionist and trying to make it just so . . . we’re so lucky to have folks come to us and say, “You’re the right kind of crazy for us.”
Opus 88’s twin will occupy Reichert and his colleagues for the next year and a half before it's installed across the loft from its sibling, which can be played independently in the meantime.
