The Organ List
Organs of Interest in the Upper Midwest
After many years of outstanding work, Richard Greene has retired from maintaining the organ list.
Dick assembled a comprehensive list of over 2100 instruments, truly a remarkable resource which many of us use on a regular basis. We will forever be in his debt and wish him all the best with the free time he will now have.
The task of maintaining the list now passes to me. I'm converting from a proprietary (and unsupported) Apple editor to a Microsoft editor (Expression Web 4). This is a cut-and-paste process, which is quite slow. I'm working my way through by city in alphabetical order.
A new enhancement is addition of more pictures. Facebook was not available when the OrganList was started, but today I can lift pictures of the churches and usually, the organs, from the Facebook photo albums.
Another enhancement I hope you notice is that the pages come up more quickly. The Microsoft files are much smaller than the Apple files, so there is less data to load.
Please continue to send new and old organs and corrections to what we already have. Send your emails to me, not to Dick. We try and publish a brief description of each organ with its builder and date, along with pictures of the building, the console and a view of the pipes if possible. I'll keep your information until I get a to the appropriate city and organ.
The link to the new list is below. Eventually the old list will be retired.
- 03 April 2015 Minnesota cities beginning with "A"
- 27 April 2015 add Minnesota cities beginning with "B"
- 19 April 2016 add Minnesota cities beginning with "C" and "D"
- 02 May 2016 add Minnesota cities beginning with "E"
- 02 Jan 2017 add all organs that will be in 2017 OHS National Convention
- 29 April 2017 add Minnesota cities beginning with "F" and "G"
A note about terminology: In most organ entries you will find "Stops" and "Ranks". Some choose to equate "Stops" with the number of knobs or tabs on the console. I approach it from the builder's perspective, which is the physical number of stops in the organ, regardless of number of knobs. A single rank (which is generally defined as one pipe per key) might appear in two divisions (i.e. Great and Pedal), but it's physically one rank/one stop. In most entries, this would be one stop, not two. In older organs without compound stops like mixtures you will find that stops = ranks. In organs with compound stops, the number of stops will always be less than the number of ranks.
David Engen
DavidPEngen@aol.com
The Organ List