Celebrating 100 years of the Wanamaker Organ - and taking a peek insidePrint Page
One hundred years after the greatest organ work was first performed at the Wanamaker department store, world-class organist Peter Richard Conte has worked its magic on the keys, pedals and tabs that make the organ sing.
The crowd applauded enthusiastically Conte.
He applauded the instrument, raising his arms to the wall mount over 28,000 pipes and channels that allowed his hands and feet to communicate with them.
But none of the wonderful sounds Conte summoned during Wednesday's celebration of the organ's centennial came from the ornate gold pipes topped with the Wanamaker angel that are visible above Macy's Grand Court.
“They're fake,” said Scott Kip, restoration woodworker on the nine-person team that keeps this rare instrument in concert shape.
The actual working pipes - made of wood or metal in sizes ranging from flute to tree-trunk – are not usually seen. They weren't apparent in 1911, when the two-year installation of the organ was completed at the direction of John Wanamaker, either.
“People kept asking, 'Where's the organ?'” Kip said. And so Wanamaker had his architect create the marvelous but mute set of visible pipes.
The fancy pipes are dwarfed by the working pipes, which are housed in a house-sized space behind a white door in the woman's clothing department. The inside of the organ is four floors high, and larger than a typical trinity.
Most of the main chamber is made of wood – poplar and pine. And it smells slightly of pine or incense, almost like a church. A small raised board-walk of sorts snakes around what seem like support columns, but what is really wooden ductwork through which air flows on its journey to the pipes.
What looks like a twin-bed sized wooden platform turns out to be a windchest – an air reservoir. There's a popping sound, and then a rumbling, and then the monster takes a breath, filling its huge, leather lung.
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Hearing Conte play the organ on its hundredth anniversary in Philadelphia “Just sends chills up and down everyone's spines,” said Biswanger, of the Friends of the Wanamaker. The Wanamaker Organ is special not just because of its age and size, he said.
The Lightning will be drafting players this weekend and free agency begins next week. It may be the off-season, but things continue to hop around the Forum. "I've got to find someone who can play that massive pipe organ," Leiweke said.
For it was while I was learning to play the organ, at age fourteen and fifteen, that I first began to entertain serious questions about my Catholic faith. The Holy Spirit provided a remedy for both my musical and my theological interests in the person
range of colors and sounds that are so much more than sterotypical organ music." He arrived in Des Moines three days early but will leave right away--that's the way organists travel. "If you're a violinist, you play on the same violin every night,
After completing her graduate work she hopes to work as a music librarian at either an university or with a symphony. “I would love to be able to play in a symphony,” she said. There will be a reception after Saturday's concert.
organ | Mixture II
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The Moodswinger
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The Zadar Sea Organ
The Sea Organ is a splendid example of impeccable architecture and sound engineering. Located on the shores of Zadar, Croatia, this is the first musical instrument naturally played by the waves of the sea. This unique instrument, made by architect Nikola Basic in 2005, looks like normal but elegant steps along the seashore. Underneath it, however, are 35 musically tuned tubes. Depending on the size, strength, and velocity of the waves that toss on the seashore, musical chords are played and the sound comes out from whistle openings on the sidewalk. Call it a main instrument in nature’s orchestra.
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The Atlantic City Convention Hall Organ
The Guiness Book of World Records consider the Atlantic City Organ as the loudest musical instrument ever created. It is also the world’s largest pipe organ. This instrument has 7 manuals (controls found in most traditional organs), 1,255 speaking stops, 455 ranks and 33,112 pipes! One of the natural speakers built inside this instrument can be six times louder than the world’s loudest train whistle! The Atlantic City Convention Hall Organ weighs approximately 150 tons (which explains why it’s stuck in that location possibly forever).
I wonder how long it would take to play the organ?
My cousin knows how to play the piano, saxophone, guitar, clarinet, flute, upright bass, baritone, and mouth organ. DANG!
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Soon after I learned how to play the keys and organ! Smh 
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