Northshore Magazine

Northshore April 2018

Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.

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115 e organ needed to re-create the original Ro- man Catholic liturgies, so the C.B. Fisk team drew inspiration from 19th-century English Romantic organs. e instrument also had to fit seamlessly into the cathedral's sprawling space, and its tonal design had to consider the church's construction materials, volume, layout, and even its climate. "You have to be sure you have the tonal resources to fill the space with sound, and that comes down to scaling the pipes and the materials from which they're made," says Pike. With those designs in place, the organ builders created a 1:16 scale model of the cathedral and fit a model of the organ into the space. (Dozens of similar models are displayed around the design studio, a pantheon of Fisk organs from across the decades.) en, the company's 25 engineers, woodworkers, pipe makers, leatherworkers, and musicians set about bringing their vision to life. e organ's casework and interior structure were constructed from raw lumber, which was planed and sawn at the shop. Because the instrument is so large, its various sections were assembled separately across the building's rooms, like layers of a cake. In the entryway sat the organ's upper reaches, and its intricate keyboard and first tier sat at the rear of the building. The pipes for Opus 147 were made of wood and sheets of tin and lead, which were alloyed at the shop, and then cut, soldered, and filed to precise specifications. The small- est pipes are just ¾ inch long and the largest are 32 feet. Emily Pardoe, a 2007 graduate of Beverly's Montserrat College of Art, has been with C.B. Fisk for 10 years. e 32-year-old specializes in building organ bellows using wood and leather, and she has taken on the role of as- sistant voicer at C.B. Fisk. In 2014, she spent several weeks in Niiza, Japan, as part of the voicing team for Opus 141. And at the Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral in Raleigh, she hopes to again join the voicers in bringing Fisk's latest masterpiece and the great composers to life. "To be able to actually hear and feel that in a room is very powerful," says Pardoe. "It's inspiring." cbfisk.com draw from several historical periods, posing both a structural and tonal design challenge. at was the case with Opus 120, considered the company's magnum opus. Installed at the Lausanne Cathedral in Switzerland in 2003, the 7,000-pipe organ combined baroque, classic, and romantic styles from France and Germany. It was also the first American-built pipe organ installed in a European cathedral, a job that was massive in size and scope. In all, Pike and his fellow organ builders spent 48,000 shop hours on the project, collaborating with Swiss architects, Italian designers, Canadian wood workers, British computer experts, and German pipe makers. Voicing the organ—the process of ma- nipulating the pipes to fit the acoustics of the space where it is installed—is a months-long process. C.B. Fisk's voicing teams work in shifts, playing and adjusting the organ until it sings as it should. e Lausanne Cathedral's acoustics were "luxurious," according to David Pike, the company's senior vice president and tonal director. e larger challenge was finding a tonal harmony incorporating the instru- ment's many historical sounds. "e art is to figure out how to combine these diverse elements into a single instrument and have it make sense musically," says Pike. Building a C.B. Fisk organ is both simple and infinitely complex, and the process can take several years. Inside the shop last Novem- ber, designers and artisans were putting the finishing touches on Opus 147, a 3,707-pipe organ built for the new Holy Name of Jesus Ca- thedral in Raleigh, North Carolina. e Raleigh community dedicated the 44,000-square-foot cathedral in July 2017, and it features seating for more than 2,000 people. With a cruciform design and a 160-foot-tall dome on the build- ing, the Archdiocese of Raleigh envisioned an equally impressive instrument. "Music is transformative, and the majestic quality of the pipe organ assists people in un- derstanding an encounter with the Lord," says Monsignor David Brockman, vicar general of the Diocese of Raleigh and the chair of the cathedral's organ committee. e seeds of that transformative experi- ence began in 2014, in meetings between C.B. Fisk's designers and the cathedral's architects, acoustic consultants, and organ committee. C.B. Fisk uses pipe scales from the golden ages of organ building.

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