Gorham Street |
by Steve Panizza
Welcome to this entity I'm building, the Gorham Street Pipe Organ Company.
Milwaukee pipe organ builder John Miller and I got together on New Year's Eve at Five Watt Coffee on East Hennepin Avenue here in Minneapolis, just a couple of months before the start of the pandemic. Five Watt Coffee combined a coffee shop with an active alt-indie music performance space.
We discussed all things pipe organ, particularly all that relates to a project we wanted to launch that repurposed my Op.1 into something that correlates well with our shared idea of an organ, with a sustainable cost of ownership, placed in an alternative space for collaborative use, and able to attract a more diverse audience.
We today live in a post-pandemic world. I want to build organs for musicians who gather and perform all the more. And like Five Watt Coffee, the ideal location might be a multi-use performance, art, or liturgical space where people come together to build community within the art and performance going on around them.
Gorham Street is a design family of 43-note one-manual continuo pipe organs based on my earlier work. Although I right-sized my shop to build larger instruments, these are what I want to build for our time. They incorporate recycled pipework that provides Victorian timbres where appropriate. They give a tonally varied solution to people who need an artistic yet cost-sustainable, cost-efficient tool for music performance and accompaniment.
A Gorham Street Design Study
I started something this summer that lets us use our imagination. I decided to conduct a design study that conceptually builds a very real church, an organ they didn't ask for, using pipes taken from their existing mid-industrial era gallery organ.
This study, whose progress I'm blogging, provides us an opportunity to develop, if only on paper, an example of my 43-note continuo for a space I am familiar with, using material I am familiar with. I was an organist there for eight years.
Start here and work your way up.
