From the inside out, a CC organ gets a clean-up
“Young” organ gets a spruce-up in first cleaning since installation
Employees of Levsen Organ Company store pieces of the Congregational Church's organ in boxes across the sanctuary as Rodney Levsen Jr. and his employees take the instrument apart and clean it from the inside out. Press photos by Kate Hayden
A Levsen employee sits behind the grill cloth in one of the multiple chambers within the organ. Employees removed all but the tallest pipes and are cleaning the chambers from inside out.
Rodney Levsen Jr. and his son look through the keyboard at the church during the week-long organ cleaning. The organ was built by the Austin Organ company in 1970, after Charles City's 1968 tornado destroyed the former organ and much of the sanctuary.
The sanctuary windows are seen from inside the pipe organ, where workers removed each of the pipes and carried them down into the sanctuary for cleaning.
Levsen displays a working mechanism inside the organ's windchest. The organ, built by Austin Organ Company in Hartford, Conn., includes enough space to fit a person inside, letting workers see the mechanisms in action as they check for maintenance issues.
These 16-foot pipes are the only pipes still remaining in the organ chamber as workers vacuum out the dirt and debris.
By Kate Hayden | khayden@charlescitypress.com
There’s not much space to move inside the pipe organ at First Congregational Church — but there’s still more than would be expected once Levsen Organ Company removed the interior pipes and began day two of a week-long cleaning process.
It is perhaps the first time the organ has experienced a deep-cleaning since it was first installed in 1970, after the previous organ was badly damaged during the 1968 Charles City tornado, Rev. Forrest Cornelius and Nancy Houston, organist and Minister of Music, said.
A year after Houston first noticed some off-character sounds coming from the pipe chamber, technicians from the Levsen family company packed up from Buffalo, Iowa and made the nearly three-hour trip for some organ attention. The company, which tunes the Charles City organ twice a year, typically recommends a deep cleaning every 15 to 25 years, depending on environmental factors.
“They got here at 3 p.m. (Monday), and by the time I got here this morning they already had a good share of the pipes out,” Houston said.
The church’s organ is made up of 35 ranks, or sets, of pipes that can create different sounds, similar to the different sets of instruments in an orchestra.
“A rank is a pipe for every key on your keyboard, so you have 61 keys, that would be 61 pipes,” Rodney Levsen Jr., Vice President of Levsen Organ Company, said.
The pipes in the First Congregational Church’s organ range from 16 feet down to less than half an inch long, Levsen said.
“It’s got a full range of pipes, and that’s what makes the organ sound so rich. You have all these harmonics playing when you’re playing a hymn, it’s literally like a symphony,” he said. “An organist at the keyboard can play hundreds of pipes all at once.”
“There are so many pipes (Levsen) really couldn’t do the math in his head,” Rev. Cornelius said. “There are thousands, it’s in the thousands.”
The Levsen Organ Company was founded by Levsen’s father, the company president, and continues to be run as a third-generation family company. Levsen’s two sons now work full-time as part of the eight-person staff, six of whom will have worked on the First Congregational Church organ cleaning by the end of the week.
The company, which produces it’s own organs, also services about 200 organs on a regular basis. That boils down to around 400 tunings a year, and typically six or seven cleaning jobs a year.
“Sometimes the cleaning jobs are piggybacked with other types of operations,” Levsen said. “They need to have some rebuilding on part of the organ, like the bellows need to be re-leathered or there may be some electrical work being done, and we like to combine the jobs together when we have our crew here.”
The crew will be doing minor repairs or maintenance projects on the Charles City organ while they are here, Levsen said, but no major operations are needed for the relatively young organ.
The organ was built by the Austin Organ Company in Hartford, Conn. in the 1970s, Levsen said.
“You can actually get inside the windchest where all the mechanisms are, and you can be inside of it while it is playing and see all the parts moving,” Levsen said. “Most organs, you have to open up an access panel and you can’t work on it while it’s turned on…it’s kind of interesting.”
The current organ is a replacement after the church’s previous organ and sanctuary was destroyed by the 1968 tornado, Rev. Cornelius said.
“This is one of the only churches that was extensively damaged that much in Charles City that did not move,” Rev. Cornelius said.
The congregation at the time was already considering replacing the church’s organ, which would have been built sometime in the 1920s or 1930s.
“I guess that’s one way to replace an organ,” Rev. Cornelius said.
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