Chattanooga organ experts sing the instrument’s praises

On any given Sunday, if you find yourself at Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church in Chattanooga’s St. Elmo neighborhood, you’re likely to hear the church’s organ filling the worship hall with music that evokes a sense of the heavens opening up and shining down upon the Earth.

Demonstrating Thankful Memorial’s organ, John Wigal, organist and director of music for Lookout Mountain’s Church of the Good Shepherd, presses the instrument’s keys and pedals with his hands and feet, causing air from the bellows to travel through an array of pipes to produce that harmonious sound we associate with the organ. As he plays, the music reverberates through the chamber, filling not just the room but also the human body with sound, titillating the senses and causing feelings to stir within a listener.

“The organ and the sounds of the organ can be a very emotional thing,” Wigal says, “and I think when you’re listening, you can hear great gravitas for 20 seconds and then this tiny little sparkle that comes from somewhere way up in the rafters in another second. I think that can be very, very moving to any person who’s listening and thinking about it.”

Thankful Memorial’s organ is the oldest in Chattanooga, says Wigal, who is also a member of the executive committee of the Chattanooga chapter of the American Guild of Organists. Made of wood and metal and impossible to miss because of its immense size, the organ was built in the 1880s for Christ Church Cathedral in Nashville and gifted to Thankful Memorial when it came time for Christ Church to replace the instrument, he says.

Just as playing the organ is an art, so too is constructing the instrument. Perhaps no one knows this better than the organ builders at Richards, Fowkes & Co., an Ooltewah-based pipe organ business that has built over 25 organs across the U.S. since 1988. The company was the first American organ builder to construct an instrument for a church in England — St. George’s, Hanover Square, says Bruce Fowkes, one of the company’s founders.

The company handles the various aspects of an organ’s construction, from casting the metal for the pipes by hand to carving the wood for the exterior case to fine-tuning the instrument once it’s completed. From start to finish, it can take the company’s builders over a year and thousands of working hours to build a single organ, Fowkes says.

“When we’re building them, it’s just lots of parts and pieces. That is so challenging because there are so many hundreds and thousands of pieces, depending on the size of the instrument,” he says. “And my wife once asked me, … ‘You really think you could build a pipe organ on your own?’ and I said, ‘I would compare it to eating an elephant. I can’t eat an elephant all in one go, but I could do it one piece at a time.’ And that’s how this is, and when you get done and actually hear it play the first time, it’s a real thrill.”

The look of an organ can be just as integral to its affect as the sound. For an organ in Scottsdale, Arizona, the Ooltewah company incorporated Southwestern Native American motifs and desert themes, and for another in Cincinnati, Ohio, they added Art Deco designs and artistic renditions of Hebrew lettering.

Organ builder Andy Wishart, who brought his decades of experience from England to Richards, Fowkes & Co., says he enjoys seeing people’s reactions to the finished product. When installing an organ, the builders will tell clients not to look at it until the work is completely done, Wishart says. Once the organ is in place, his clients finally get to experience the wow factor of the instrument, usally reacting with a lot of ooh-ing and ahh-ing as they stare at the completed work. “They always go, ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh!'” he says.

After an organ is installed, all that’s left to do is to let it sing.