The Planned Restoration

Project history In 2007, the Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral commissioned a committee to study and carefully consider how to best proceed with the restoration of the instrument. Everything from pursuing just the most immediate and necessary repairs to a complete replacement were considered. However, it was clear that temporary half-measures would only delay the restoration work and a new organ would cost considerably more and would mean the loss of an historic community asset. In the end, it was the unanimous decision that both from the standpoint of good stewardship and sound economics that the best course of action was a complete restoration of the historic instrument itself.

The recommended work included:

Replace windchests with modern Blackinton-style slider chests which have much greater longevity and require less maintenance than the current design.
Replace or repair/upgrade (as needed) existing blowers and wind supply system.
Replace certain pipe-work which has been deemed to be of substandard construction (approximately 10%).
Re-voice and tonally revise the instrument so as to serve the present cathedral space and accompany the choirs and worship services to a much higher level of capability.
Revise the current physical layout of the instrument to address a number of issues including tuning stability, balance of the instrument, and the blend of the organ divisions with the choir(s).

A major portion of this project will be to construct new chests and action for the entire instrument. The action is the system that controls the speech of each pipe, or any combination of sets of pipes. As our historic organ has developed over its 125 year history, different types of action and chest construction methods have been employed in various parts of the instrument. The result is that there are multiple types of actions, all in various states of decline that make for a marked lack of cohesion between divisions of the instrument. This will all be replaced with the time-tested Blackinton-style slider-action chests. These are the most reliable and responsive type available, and require less maintenance than the current, aging systems.

Another part of this project will be to round out the tonal palette of the instrument and include a few of the stops that were left out in the expansion project of 1989-90. This will primarily manifest itself in the creation of a modest Solo division. This is something that has been planned for, and sorely missed, since the original installation by the Aeolian-Skinner company in the 1960s.

This will increase the flexibility of the instrument significantly in rendering choral accompaniment, service playing, and solo organ repertoire in the most musical and appropriate way possible. It is the more subtle tonal palette that has been missing (think about the violas and woodwinds in a symphony orchestra), and those are the options that will be created as part of this restoration project.