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Volume 11, Issue 24
Lehigh University Campus Weekly
April 1,1998
Packer Chapel organ restored with gifts from alumni
» A two-year, $200,000 project to
restore the 45-year-old organ in
Packer Memorial Church, funded
by contributions from alumni, will
be completed in time for a student
recital and also for the annual
Bach music festival that takes
place each May in the chapel.
John Daniel '60, a division
manager with Allen Organ Co. in
Macungie, who supervised the
restoration, said the latest electronic technology, combined with
re-tuned and repaired pipes, will
enable the organ to produce a
greater variety of sounds and
timbres.
"What was a ceremonial organ,
with an English-style character,
now has some classically voiced
stops and higher pitched mixtures
for greater clarity, transparency
and lightness," said Daniel. In
addition, a new Antiphonal division
enables the organ for the first time
to project some sound from, over the
tower entrance (left side door) of
the church.
"This has truly been a formidable project," said Daniel. "The
amount of time required was
staggering. And the price is incredibly low, considering that a 63-stop
pipe organ brand-new would cost
more than $1 million.
"We expect the organ will be up
and running in time for the Bach
Festival," which celebrates its
centennial May 8-9 and 15-16.
The project was two-phased,
Daniel said. Allen Organ built a
new digital console, the desk-shaped
portion of the instrument that
contains the keyboards and pedals.
Austin Organ Co. of Hartford, Conn.,
the original builder of the organ,
overhauled the pipe work, and
retuned and revoiced many of the
organ's pipes.
Daniel said the project was
inspired by an article published in
1995 by the Lehigh Alumni Bulletin,
which described the mechanical
problems that had caused the organ
to fail on the eve of more than one
concert in which it was used to
accompany the University Choir. The
instrument was always repaired by
curtain time, but not without causing
a measure of alarm.
The article also documented how
water entering through roof leaks
had rendered several pipes
unplayable in the organ's huge pipe
chamber in the church's south-side.
Those leaks have been stopped, and
flaking plaster has been patched,
Daniel said.
A total of 700 reed pipes, corresponding to 10 of the organ's stops,
were transported to Hartford for
rebuilding, Daniel said. All the pipes
were retuned, washed and overhauled. The organ has 69 ranks, or
collections of pipes corresponding to
each stop, or voice, on the keyboards
and pedals. The organ's three original electronic 32-foot voices have
been replaced with digital tone
generation.
Please see Restoration on page 3
John Kish IV
Laird Morris and Dave Shelly install the new organ console in Packer
Chapel as John Daniel '60 watches. The 45-year-old pipe organ recently
underwent a major restoration funded by gifts from alumni.
Rob Upton
Chris Lorenzetti '98 (left) plays the
NEO Products J-2 SpitFire electric
violin at a meeting of the Newcomen
Society, while Newcomen chairman,
dward Kottcamp '56 (top, right)
presents an award to Prof. John
Ochs and Provost Nelson Markley.
The violin was made by students in
the Integrated Products
Development program. Lorenzetti
will play Mozart on a traditional
violin at Friday's orchestra concert.
Philharmonic story on page 5
New generation of computers
to arrive in "Magic Bus"
Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) of
Mountain View, Calif., has been
selected as the vendor for the next-
generation Unix-based computers to
be installed here, says Arnold
Hirshon, vice provost for information
resources.
SGI will park its "Magic Bus" on
Packer Avenue across from Maginnes
Hall all day on Tuesday, April 7.
Visitors can see SGFs high-performance desktop workstations,
supercomputers and servers plus
development tools and peripherals.
The systems will run software for the
Web, scientific visualization, distance
learning, chemistry, interactive
multimedia, database, file serving
and other applications.
Before August, a 16-processor SGI
server will be installed at the central
site. IR will begin to replace the
current IBM RS 6000 workstations
with SGI workstations.
Kevin Weiner, IR group leader for
advanced technology, says the new
SGI compute server will have 24
times the compute power of the
main IBM Computer Server, CS1.
It will be configured with tools and
applications to allow the use of
multiple CPUs in processing much
more massive jobs than those
possible today
The IBM Compute Server
Cluster will continue to be available during the next year, but will
cease operations by July 1999.
The new SGI workstations will
be installed in Fairchild. Library
(EWFM 8A), the Computing Center
(EWFM 8B), Physics 419, Packard
264, Whitaker 457, Fritz 221,
Iacocca D117, Mudd 489, Mohler
(no location yet), Christmas Saucon
106, and Williams 406. The workstation site at Iacocca B103 is being
converted to a PC site. The current
Packard 118 RS6000 workstation
site will be eliminated.
m LEHIGH
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