mixing ancient and modern styles

Christ Church is blessed with an abundance of talent and energy offering musical excellence to the Glory of God. Volunteer and staff musicians work together seamlessly each week to produce a unique blend of ancient and modern musical styles. 2023 marked continual expansion of our music ministry that had only recently been restarted in 2022 following the COVID shutdowns of the past years. Currently there are about 30 musicians that regularly play or sing with the Choir and Band. Both groups endeavor to provide effective musical leadership for congregational singing and to offer the best of both traditional Anglican music and modern church music each Sunday.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM 2023

The Youth Good Friday service featured youth musicians singing with the Band for the first time. Youth musicians were also recruited to sing with the Choir for the first time in many years. The full band packing out a redesigned stage and sound system at Weekend Away was yet another highlight. And in the fall, the Choir expanded back to its pre-COVID role of singing three services a month with a full four week rehearsal schedule.

The Choir is open to all parishioners who are interested in singing with us and can commit to the rehearsal schedule. The Band is an audition-only group due to the special musical capacity our program requires. If you are a musician, we strongly encourage you to consider joining our ministry! Please contact Dan Dufford, our Director of Music, for more information.

the ORGAN PROJECT

Slow but steady progress towards the building of our new pipe organ kept a group of dedicated volunteers busy all year long. We began 2023 with a critical evaluation of how the new pipe work sounded & performed in our worship space (as opposed to the West Room in 2022). Experiencing this was a long time coming, and, to our surprise, the organ seemed lacking in power, and was much softer than we had been expecting. We were losing 40% of our sound energy inside the organ chamber itself. Factors that are obvious to us now were literally not observable when evaluating the organ during its earlier West Room days. The constraints presented by the chamber space itself coupled with the sheer amount of time and work already committed to the project would make this a tough issue to solve.

In late February we began implementing a two-pronged approach involving changes to pipework and swell shade design. The swell shades are the large shutters or louvers which cover the tone openings of the chamber. They ultimately control the amount of sound let out into the church. The original design built in 2022 was a compromise that split the difference between the upper and lower chambers. It seemed reasonable, given the shutter design was already three times larger than the visible shutters on our existing “tracker” organ. The new 2023 design would create the absolute maximum allowable opening our chamber could possibly support. This would be coupled with a general raising of wind pressures the pipework ran on, which would also increase overall volume. Dan Dufford took the lead on the pipe work respecification, and John Bredehoft graciously agreed to be in charge of the swell shade rebuild. The work was done in stages, one side at a time, so half of the organ always remained playable for Sundays. The original sets of shades were moved higher (to the very top of the brick arch). Two new sets of shades of ‘smaller stature’ were fabricated on our CNC machine to enclose the new freshly exposed lower chamber openings. Most of this work was done from inside the chamber so we could leave the structural elements of the already built facade in place. In total we gained 42% of additional tone opening.

PIPE PLACEMENT WAS KEY

While the pipe work of each side was removed, more changes were made. Pipe work deemed unsuitable for higher pressure was removed entirely, and larger scale pipe work was selected instead. Some ranks switched position on the wind chests, as we found there was a dramatic difference in tonal egress from front to back in the chamber (the sloped ‘A frame ceiling’ coupled with the large brick ‘overhang’ between the ceiling and the top of the existing brick arch creates a sound trap). Ranks that were originally too soft were moved closer to the tone opening and new ranks that could run on higher pressure (and thus be louder) were put on the back chests.

In our quest to source louder, larger pipe work, we discovered in September that five ranks of organ strings made by the Kimball Company in 1914 had become available out east. Kimball was also the builder of the venerated organs at St John's and the Catholic Basilica in Denver. Their pipe work is typically of larger stature and well suited to fill larger churches, and they specialized in string tone. Today, their surviving pipework is becoming increasingly rare and difficult to find. We all know God sometimes works in mysterious ways, and here is no exception: back in 2017, the seeds of our organ project were sown when Christ Church rescued a small Kimball organ from a church in Iowa. Unfortunately, a local collector had beat us to it by a few weeks and had taken all the strings from the organ. Fast forward to summer 2023 and it was now clear to us that what Kimball pipe work we did have was among the most successful stops in our new instrument; however we were missing the Kimball strings. Therefore the mission to acquire, restore, and integrate these newly available string ranks into our instrument was clear, and the crew set out in earnest to make it a reality.

Another highlight of the year included completion of a custom chamber door designed by John Bredehoft and built by the crew. It features hidden hardware and a magnetic latch, and is designed to blend in seamlessly with the surrounding hallway.

PIPE ORGAN CRAWL

In December Christ Church was visited by the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the American Guild of Organists and Historic Denver as the last stop on their annual “Pipe Organ Crawl”. Over 125 people stopped in on a Saturday to hear the history of our parish and demonstrations of our two pipe organs. The guests arrived sufficiently primed and ready to engage in a deeper dive of the design, mechanisms, and technical artistry that combine together to make a pipe organ work.

GOALS FOR 2024

In 2024, the final push on the project will entail completing a high pressure Tuba stop, a dark 16’ Trumpet, larger sets of pipes for the pedal, an upgraded console computer, and continued refinement of the voicing of the instrument.

Volunteers and staff regularly contributing to the project in 2023 include Ron Breaux, John Bredehoeft, Michael Brown, Dan Dufford, Heidi Farr, Gary Hard, Sarah Kanyok, Frank Olson, and Steve Petty.