St. Paul's excited about $600,000 pipe organ

[KB7DQH]

MURFREESBORO — Angela Tipps used to worry about rock bands taking over the church.

Tipps, a music professor at Middle Tennessee State University and longtime church organist, knows that church musicians often are under pressure to switch to more contemporary music, especially when attendance at services goes down.

But that kind of switch is not a cure-all, said Tipps, the organist and director of music at St. Paul's Episcopal in Murfreesboro.

"Sometimes if a church is not doing well, the easiest thing is to blame the music," she said. "People think, 'If we only did our music like World Outreach Church, then we'd have more people.' That's not true. Each church has to find its own identity."

At St. Paul's, that identity includes traditional hymns and church music. The congregation recently bought a brand-new, $600,000 organ from Orgues Létourneau Limitée in Montreal, which should be ready to play by mid-July.

That new organ at St. Paul's is one of several installed at Nashville churches in recent years — a sign that traditional church music is here to stay in Middle Tennessee.

The region is home to a thriving chapter of the American Guild of Organists, which has more than 200 local members. That local chapter recently hosted the guild's biannual convention, which brought more than 1,500 organists to town for workshops and concerts this past week.

Among convention-goers were Faythe Freese, an organ professor at the University of Alabama, and Christopher Henley, organist at First Methodist Church in Pell City, Ala.

It was the first convention for Henley, a high school senior who's been a church organist about four years. He said he was thrilled to be at the convention.

"To see organists that I have heard legends about — to be able to hear them and meet them in person — is wonderful," Henley said.

While places such as Nashville are awash with church musicians and it is hard to find a job, that's not the case in other parts of the country, Freese said.

Freese said there's still plenty of room for young organists, especially at smaller congregations that want traditional music but can't afford a full-time organist.

"It's a tough business, but not an impossible one," she said. "There are jobs out there in churches — if they haven't gone praise band. A lot of them can't find organists. It can be pretty tough to keep a bench filled."

Tipps hopes the new organ at St. Paul's will encourage more young people to study the instrument. It's hard for her students to learn without having pipe organs to play on, and MTSU has only one. She's arranged for her students to be able to use the new instrument at St. Paul's to help address that need.

"It's really difficult to make a living as a full-time organist without being a choir master or giving private lessons," she said. "If we can take piano majors and young folks and make them part-time organists, I think that really is the way things will go in the future."
Music that moves

Bill Davis, the organist at Woodmont Baptist Church in Nashville, says he's glad his church has stuck with traditional music.

Davis, who is in his 50s, first started playing in church when he was 12. An IT project manager for Nissan, he spends about six hours a week at the church — two hours on Wednesday night and four more on Sundays.

He moved to Nashville about six years ago and had thought about retiring from playing in churches before coming to Woodmont.

"I like to be in a place when the music I select and play really ministers to someone," he said. "Rarely a Sunday goes by without someone saying thank you."

Carl Smith, senior lecturer of theory and composition, organ and harpsichord at Vanderbilt's Blair School of Music, said churches that want traditional music are in a quandary.

Today's organists are more accomplished musicians than the ordinary church musician of the past, he said — but there are fewer of them, and the places for them to play are getting scarcer.

"In the places where the music is really good, it keeps getting better," he said. "And the number of places where it is good keep(s) getting smaller."

These days organists often work longer hours for less pay, Smith said. And they often clash with clergy who are under pressure to bring bigger crowds in to church. That's caused some churches to embrace what he calls "Je-zak" music.


Still, Smith said, organists offer something of value at a time when young people's exposure to music is limited to whatever is on their iPods.

"The biggest struggle for organists is to wrestle with this unbelievably rich legacy that we have in an increasingly secular and ephemeral world," he said.

Tipps hopes the new organ at St. Paul's means the church will have traditional music for a long time to come.

The new organ is about four times the size of the current one. The older instrument had been designed for a smaller space and there wasn't enough money to buy a new organ when the church built a bigger sanctuary, Tipps said.

"It is like having a child's voice in a man's body," she said.

The new organ was built at the Létourneau workshop in Montreal and recently shipped to Tennessee. When it arrived, congregation members pitched in to unload the truck.

"I can't put into words what a spiritual experience this is," she said. "It's really enlivened our congregation to know that the organ is here. It really is a work of art."

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Eric
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