Trompette en chamade, Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Phoenix AZ
pic courtesy OHS Pipe Organ Database/Schantz Organ Company

Thank you to Lillian’s students in NJ for a link that led me to US internet radio station Organlive.com, devoted to the classical organ.

It’s great for background listening – they’re streaming Bach right now in honour of his birthday.  You’re not quite sure who or what is coming up, but that’s part of the fun.

For each broadcast performance there are lots of links to play with – organist pic and biog, public domain sheet music, and links to Amazon to buy the CD or mp3.  You can visit the OHS Pipe Organ Database to see the organ specs.  And (I love this!) you can click through to the Google Earth location of the organ you happen to be listening to.

You sometimes have to refresh the listening now page manually to make sure the info correlates with what you’re hearing (they’re working on it) and it took a while to get it to play on my computer here in the UK, but that was probably the fault of my browser setup (there is a choice of 5 player formats and 3 bit rates for Europe – just keep clicking until one works).

Organlive plays organ music from all periods – the sister station Positively Baroque plays only organ music of the baroque (the playing now/coming up function is much slicker here).

Both stations are brought to us by the Organ Media Foundation, a non-profit organization, set up a couple of years ago to make sure the organ and its music are heard over new media as well as the old.  Thanks guys.  We need something like this over here.

I’m grateful to the OHS Pipe Organ Database for permission to reproduce their photos.

Swell pipework, First Presbyterian Church, Wooster, OH
pic courtesy OHS Pipe Organ Database/Eric J Gastier

Pipedreams with Michael Barone

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The 1984 Ruffati at San Francisco Davies Hall

Pipedreams, website of the US public radio show, is well worth a visit, even if we can only listen to the archives, not the live programmes, outside of the USA.   Their archives contain hundreds of hours of online listening, with detailed programme notes and links galore, featuring pipe organs from all over the world. Pipedreams newsletter is worth a subscription too.

Pipedreams presenter Michael Barone will be over this side of the pond next year, for the 28th London Organ Forum next March (see Events).   Subtitled Stars and Stripes it will explore American organ culture on the new Richards Fowkes & Co organ at St George’s Hanover Square, London – which is of course a US built instrument, the first American organ to be commissioned in a London church.  St George’s  has always had strong links with the US of A – after Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, was married there, it became (and still is) quite the fashion for Anglo-American weddings to take place at the church.  (More on St George’s and the USA here)

In the meantime my pictures provide a little US razzle-dazzle to brighten a cold London February day – two splendid Ruffatis courtesy of Pipedreams extensive photo gallery.

Garden Grove Crystal Cathedral – the 1977 Ruffati organ

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