A Celebration of Organs

ORGAN-IZATION: Kola Owolabi, a doctoral student at the Eastman School, helps restore a pipe organ at Asbury First United Methodist Church in Rochester as part of the graduate student course Organ Building, taught by Hans Davidsson, associate professor of organ. Students in the course spent last summer working with Davidsson and other organ specialists to restore the organ, a 1980s replica of a 1741 organ by German master Gottfried Silbermann.

The work is the latest in the Eastman-Rochester Organ Initiative, a 10-year collaboration between local churches and Eastman’s organ department to amass a collection of historic organs in the area that will make Rochester a center for the study of the instrument.

At the third annual EROI Festival in October, an international contingent of influential organ builders, prominent organ scholars, and researchers gathered at Eastman. The celebration included the announcement of a new effort to build a reproduction of a historic 1776 Lithuanian organ to be installed in Rochester’s Christ Church (Episcopal) in 2008, and the simultaneous restoration of the original Adam Gottlob Casparini instrument in Vilnius. The new instrument, to be called the Craighead-Saunders Organ, is to be named in honor of two Eastman faculty organists: David Craighead, professor emeritus, and the late Russell Saunders.