This Sunday, August 18, 2024, marks the last Mass at which Sacred Heart’s current pipe organ publicly performs. The instrument will be removed this week as the first of many preparatory steps in anticipation of our new Fratelli Ruffatti pipe organ which will arrive here from Italy next spring. And while the advent of the new organ is of immense liturgical, historical, and cultural import to our parish, diocese, and city, it is right and just to honor the end of this current era with a brief history of our soon-to-be former instrument.
Sacred Heart’s current organ was installed in 1962 by the Wicks organ company of Highland, Illinois, as the company’s 4,295th installation. Oral tradition has it that this instrument came secondhand to the parish from a music store in Kalamazoo where it served as a display organ for potential buyers to try out.
The Wicks replaced the church’s original organ, a small Kimball (of Chicago) instrument installed in 1925. There is no explanation as to why the Kimball was replaced, though I theorize that it was a cost-effective decision. The Kimball was most likely a tubular pneumatic organ, meaning that it maintained its wind pressure through lead tubing. After 30 years of use and inconsistent maintenance, the lead lines deteriorated, and the cost of restoring these lines outweighed the purchase of a new, more stable electro-pneumatic organ. In the spirit of continuity, Wicks did integrate one set of Kimball pipes into their organ, a lovely set of sub-bass wood pipes.
The 1962 Wicks was also rather small, an organ of only four ranks (1 rank= 61 pipes, a full keyboard’s worth). With the addition of the aforementioned Kimball rank and a three-rank mixture from a local builder (Mutchler), the organ’s 8 ranks seemed meager, especially in an acoustic as rich as ours. This was probably intentional; organ salesmen often offered parishes modest instruments that they could then expand in the future once more money had been raised. Wicks drafted a proposal for such an expansion (an additional 11 ranks) in 1987, 25 years after the original installation, but this was never completed. This is why only the right chamber contains pipes. (Note to the reader: the painted façade pipes that you see from the nave are truly a “façade;” they are decorative. The actual pipework sits enclosed behind them in the right chamber.)
However, the organ was “expanded” by a Rodgers digital system in 2001, supplementing the extant pipe- work with digital MIDI “ranks” produced through speakers. Rodgers also replaced the Wicks console with the current one, from which the organist could manipulate both real and digital ranks. This “new” organ, classified as a “Wicks-Rodgers hybrid,” was dedicated in honor of John A. Kamyszek, longtime parish organist at Sacred Heart, by Fr. (now Msgr.) Edward Hankiewicz in April 2001. It has remained more or less unchanged for the last quarter-century.
Next year, a century after the original Kimball organ was dedicated, we shall dedicate our new Ruffatti organ as the “Peter F. Secchia Memorial Organ” in memory of the late ambassador to Italy, whose family gifted the parish this state-of-the-art organ. Unlike the Kimball, the Ruffatti organ will not deteriorate in a quarter-century’s time. And unlike the Wicks, the Ruffatti consists of 39 ranks of pipework, an instrument which will finally satisfy the height and breadth and depth of our architecture. It is a severe privilege and honor to serve as organist during this historic moment in the life of our parish. What has taken a hundred years to come to fruition may God make flourish for a thousand more.
Jonathan Bading, Director of Sacred Music
Special thanks to Mr. Chad Boorsma of the Organ Historical Society for his excellent database work.
