(If you prefer, you can listen to the audio recording of this post. It’s a 6 minute listen.)

I’ll be having my third organ lesson soon, and I realise that it won’t be long before I need an instrument with at least twenty-seven foot pedals to practice on when I’m at home. My organ teacher, B. K., recommended that I make a visit to Stolk Orgels, the place where he’d bought his own organ. 

So, we made the trip to Stolk; an establishment that boasts quite a reasonable collection of new and occasion organs. 

B.K. had told me that he doesn’t like the Hauptwerk organ because it’s actually a computer. 

There was a Hauptwerk organ in Stolk, and after the showroom organist had shown us a selection from their stock of new organs, he showed us what a Hauptwerk organ can do and why it’s become quite popular. 

It was interesting to learn that you can programme a Hauptwerk to sound like the any famous pipe organ you fancy. So, you can pick anything from the organ in Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk to the Notre-Dame de Valerie in Switzerland. 

The showroom organist told us that he’d recently had a Hauptwerk organ made to spec and it was a source of continuing frustration. When the computer works, it’s great, but when the computer breaks down, it’s a drama. (I’m sure there are people who love this kind of organ, but I quickly realised it wasn’t for me.)

I also didn’t dare to ask how much these things cost new because by the time we headed into the occasion section, it was pretty clear that even a secondhand organ was going to be a pricey investment. 

We listened to the organist as he played on a Johannus organ which is one of the best known brands in the world of organs. It has a clear and robust sound and I suppose this is one of the reasons why it’s so well-liked. We also listened to the Content organ which has a warmer, more romantic sound. 

I can’t help thinking about the time I went in search of a piano. 

Granted, my Grotrian Steinweg has been refurbished, but when I heard it for the first time, I felt something in my insides. Something that said: this is the one. 

My piano tuner says that old pianos have this warmth about their sound that you don’t get in modern pianos. Maybe a Fazioli would have it. As I’ve never played on one, I wouldn’t know. I once played on an older Bechstein and the feelings I had for that piano are similar for the feelings I have for my Grotrian. Maybe I just love the sound of instruments that carry some sort of history with them. 

I didn’t have this feeling with the organs we saw in the main showroom. There wasn’t this moment of wowness and ‘I am in love’.

So, I asked the organist/showroom person, if he’d ever heard of Eminent organs. Jan used to work for Eminent and he once put together an organ which was given a place in his mother’s bedroom. The funny thing is, no one played the organ in that house and except for the few moments when the grandkids were allowed to play around with the thing, we hardly ever saw or heard it. Still, I was curious if the name Eminent organs meant something to the organist who was showing us around. 

Eminent organs are Dutch-made organs. There’s an entire history about the company on the Eminent website, but the showroom specialist told us that they’ve fallen behind in terms of commercial viability. A trivia thing, which may or may not be true, was that there were two people left building these organs at the mother company. It made me a bit sad to hear this. 

“It just so happens that I have a beautiful Eminent in the back,” the organist told us. 

He led us to the backroom and showed us an organ with a beautiful honey oak cabinet. It had real wood levers, it had something like 6 or 8 woofers (I don’t remember the exact number) and it had come from the home of an 80-year old man who could no longer see well enough to play the organ. It was magnificent. 

As we stood there in awe, the organist took his seat at the organ, pulled out registers and started to play. 

Sound. 

I remember falling in love with the sound of a pipe organ being played in the belly of an old Dutch church. There’s nothing like it really. It sounds and resounds all around you and for a while, it feels as if you are part of this gigantic resonance. You are inside this instrument and when you open your mouth and sing, your voice joins with the voices coming from those pipes. 

Of course, house organs can’t possibly compare, but the sound this organ produced captured my imagination. It was like golden light, clear and warm wrapping itself around the listener. For a while, I was spellbound. I wanted to sit at this instrument, I wanted to press its keys, I wanted to be embraced in its sound. 

Alas, this organ was too large. (It was also way beyond my budget) 

Practicality overrules the desire to own a thing. I have seen and heard a beautiful and enchanting thing. It doesn’t mean I have to own it.