It’s a sound all of Prairie Village, Kansas will soon be talking about.
The Village Presbyterian Church has a new pipe organ that will be making quite the noise.
“If we turn out to have the best pipe organ in the Midwest, that’s wonderful. We love it,” Jim Borthwick said.
Borthwick became the chair of the Sanctuary Pipe Organ Committee when it started seven years ago, after the old one started showing off its problems.
“Should we try and fix this, the existing pipe organ, rebuild it, should we replace it? And our committee studied the problem for over a year and decided the best solution was to replace it,” he said. “Because it was going to be a continuing expense, a continuing problem and it just seemed the obvious choice.”
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Borthwick said the committee wanted a high quality pipe organ to lead and assist in congregational singing and assist in morning worship.
“That’s its primary purpose,” he said. “But we also wanted an instrument that we could play and it could be used in concerts and have plenty of other uses.”
Principal organist and associate director of music, Dr. Elisa Bickers, said there has been a lot of planning.
“We've been thinking of this in theory for so long and planning for it and praying for it and working for it," she said. “To see her come up and be built piece by piece has been just very inspiring and also, it just shows the complexity of the instrument because we've been seeing it piece by piece go up for several weeks."
The $2 million pipe organ, built by Richard, Fowkes & Co., began construction in August 2012.
“It arrived here on site September of 2016. So it's been in the process of being built over the course of four years,” Dr. Bickers said. “Then when they got here in September, it started with nothing and has grown up to be this over the last two months and it's almost completely installed.”
Dr. Bickers said it’s an exciting time for the church.
“We are certainly very proud of it and very proud of the work that we've done and very confident that it's going to be the best thing that we could've ever asked for our circumstances,” she said.
Weighing 16 tons and scaling 21 feet high, the pipe organ will have nearly 38 hundred pipes. It will also have unique carvings on it that represent the state of Kansas.
“We've got sunflowers, cottonwood tree leaves, since that's our state tree, and of course sheaves of wheat. So we got Kansas all over the place,” Dr. Bickers said.
She said the pipe organ is only five percent finished, but it can still produce music. It will be complete sometime late next Spring.
“Once the instrument is finished, we are going to have huge celebrations that will last forever. We're going to have solo artists come,” she said. “I'll play solo concerts. We're going to have a children's program, choral concerts, all kinds of things so come one, come all. Everybody can come celebrate with us.”
If you’d like to hear the new pipe organ, it will be making its debut this Sunday, November 20 at Village Presbyterian Church at 8 a.m., 9:30 a.m. and 11 a.m.
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Rae Daniel can be reached at Rae.Daniel@KSHB.com.
