St James’s Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles November 2022

A little over a year ago we were commissioned to build a most unusual chamber organ, the vision of  director of music James Buonemani at St James’ Church Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles. An exchange of emails and video calls eventually lead to the final design you see illustrated below in pictures.

Most of the manual ranks are split between treble and bass with some ranks being treble side only. There are also 6 stops dedicated to the pedal department and an independent 16 ft stop that can be played from the manual. A challenge of the commission was to have a selection of moveable split points to cater for the varied repertoire that James had in mind for the instrument. We were able to provide eight, from the A below middle C to the D sharp above.

As you can see in a picture below, it unusually includes a swell expression pedal and also real pipe shades that can be manually adjusted. These significantly alter the timbre of the stops playing through some of the speakers set directly behind the swell shades. There are a total of 16 speakers, 4 project toward the musician, and the other 12 through the decorated facade. It is clearly an instrument that could never be built in real pipes and so set some interesting voicing challenges, not least what overall sound volume should we produce and was this to be set with the expression shoe open or closed.

There were considerable engineering challenges to this instrument including creating a keyboard that could move position extending sufficiently out of the case when the instrument was to be used with the pedal board attached. A filler board was made to nicely finish off the opening when the instrument is used without the pedal board in place.

It finally set sail from the UK in late September for installation and in situ voicing in November 2022.

Keen-eyed readers will see that the RHS stop names in the picture do not quite agree with the stop list below. In final on site voicing our client decided that a Mixture and Sesquialtera would be more useful than the Tierce and Nasard which were prepared in the UK before the instrument was shipped. We made these late voice changes while working in Los Angeles. New stop discs will shortly be in the post to replace those that are now incorrect.

Here is a video demonstration of the instrument made before it left the UK.

The organ will mainly reside in a small chapel set to the north side of the main church but will move into the choir of St Jame’s to contribute more widely to the busy musical life of the church. If you time it right you may well see this instrument on one of the live stream service or concert broadcasts.