Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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113 C.B. Fisk custom builds mechanical action pipe organs for churches and institutions around the world. Blowing Out the Pipes A G L O U C E S T E R S H O P B U I L D S M A S S I V E P I P E O R G A N S F R O M B Y G O N E E R A S . By L O R N E B E L L – Photographs by E R I C R O T H gans, and the resulting sounds are as rich and nuanced as the originals. "You get warmer, more pungent qualities out of pipes that are scaled generously, and there are certain sounds associated with the period that the music was written for," says Michael Kraft, C.B. Fisk's president and senior reed voicer. "We use pipe scales from the golden ages of organ build- ing. And over five decades, we've built projects that delve into many styles, from Italian Renaissance to 20th-century symphony halls." e late Charles Brenton Fisk founded C.B. Fisk, Inc., in 1961. With degrees from Harvard and Stanford, Fisk planned to become a nu- clear physicist, and he was a technician on the Manhat- tan Project. But he took up organ building at Stanford and made a name for himself by rejecting the industry's move toward modern electro- pneumatic instruments. Only in a mechanical action organ—with a hand-pumped wind supply—could such an impossibly complex machine "seem to be alive," he wrote. "You hear it breathing." Today, C.B. Fisk custom builds mechanical action pipe organs for churches and institutions around the world. e company's designers travel across Europe to research centuries-old organs and musical traditions and incorporate design elements into new organs. And while most clients request elec- tric blowers to maintain a steady wind supply, there are exceptions. Opus 72, for example, was built for Welles- ley College's Houghton Chapel and installed in 1981. Its design was inspired by the 17th- century Jakobi Church organ in Germany and Esaias Compenius organ in Copenhagen and features 1,845 hand-sculpted pipes. True to Fisk's purist roots, the instrument has an optional human-powered wind supply. As the aybe you remember that old organ in grandma's parlor. Flipping an orange switch sent electricity humming through the circuits, and rows of yellowed keys made odd, discordant noises. Well, this is not your granny's parlor organ. On an industrial road four miles west of Gloucester Harbor sits the C.B. Fisk building, where designers and artisans build massive pipe organs like Bach or Haydn might have played. e instruments can reach more than four stories high and are built in the great mechanical action traditions of pre-20th-century organ builders. Instead of having electronically controlled pipes, each key pulls a carbon fiber track that releases air into handcrafted wood-and-metal pipes. e pipes themselves are designed to the exact scale and style of Old World Europe's finest or- M