Gorham Street |
by Steve Panizza
Welcome to this entity I'm building, the Gorham Street Pipe Organ Company.
Before the pandemic, I would often frequent Five Watt Coffee on Hennepin in Minneapolis. Five Watt Coffee combined a coffee shop with an active alt-indie music performance space.
Here I thought of something that correlates well with my 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.
