Learning about the Historic Church Organ with a Miniature Organ Kit

03Jul

Orgelkids is a program that began in the Netherlands and is now gaining members in the United States. It provides portable kits of wooden parts that children can assemble in about an hour to make a miniature organ that is fully functional, with a hand-operated bellows for the wind supply, two types of pipes, and a two-octave keyboard using the ancient mechanical “tracker” mechanism linking the keys to the pipes.

St. David’s was fortunate to borrow the only Orgelkids kit in Texas, from St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, Houston. The organ committee transported it back and forth, practiced building it ourselves, and hosted three other building and demonstration sessions for parishioners. Hands-on experience was a great way to learn how a tracker organ, the type St. David’s will eventually build in the Historic Church, will operate.

For comparison to the two-rank Orgelkids organ, our current electro-pneumatic organ has forty ranks of pipes. The Visser-Roland tracker organ in UT’s Bates Recital Hall has 100 ranks. Our new organ will need to be bigger than the Orgelkids instrument but probably smaller than our current organ.

See below a gallery of St. David's parishioners enjoying building and playing the kit.