Photos by Kyle Green |The Roanoke Times

By Ralph Berrier Jr.
  981-3338

Raleigh Court Presbyterian Church's new  organ arrived on the back of a rental truck, 50 years late.

Four strong men unloaded pedal boards and various electronics from the gleaming white truck on a recent chilly morning, as they cleared a path to the most precious cargo -- a hulking organ console stacked high with four decks of keyboards and dozens of knobs.

Linda Mayes couldn't wait to get her fingers on those keys.

"That thing is huge," Mayes said as she got her first look at the new instrument.

She is Raleigh Court Presbyterian's organist and music director, the person who will get to know every key, pedal and knob on the new organ.

"Can I reach from one side to the other?" the petite woman asked. "If one more person asks me if I have to go back to school to learn how to play this thing. ... "

Mayes has waited for this delivery for a long time, ever since she came to Roanoke in 1985. That's when the church's search for a new organ officially began.

However, the church's ambitions for obtaining a larger pipe organ date back even farther, back to when Raleigh Court built its current sanctuary in 1958.

Things came up, however, and the church never got around to replacing its mid-'50s organ. In 2004, though, the church received a gift from Roanoke's Second Presbyterian Church congregation, which had installed a new pipe organ and needed to rid itself of hundreds of old pipes. Raleigh Court accepted the pipes, and its organ project was resurrected.

"This gave us the unique opportunity to go after a wonderful new instrument, at a considerably lower cost," said Dennis Fisher, chairman of Raleigh Court's organ committee.

That's how Raleigh Court became the latest Roanoke church to invest heavily in the sacred sounds of the pipe organ, an instrument that literally breathes life into music.

In an age when many churches are introducing contemporary Christian music into their services, several Roanoke churches have spent more than $3 million in the past decade to purchase or restore their grand pipe organs.

Organ music "is so connected with Christian and Jewish forms of worship, and perhaps others as well, that it has become thought of as a traditional thing," said Richard Cummins, organist and music director at Roanoke's Greene Memorial United Methodist Church.

"It's like when people look at stained glass and see the biblical characters. It is automatically associated with church. It's in the psyche of people. The sound of an organ sounds like church, even to people with no connection with religion. The sound itself becomes a work of art."

Cummins knows many of the valley's pipe organs through his work as a musician and as a longtime representative of the defunct Moller Organ Company in Hagerstown, Md.

Cummins said that when he arrived in Roanoke from New Jersey in 1965, only one church had an organ with four manuals -- that is, four keyboard decks. Now, he knows of at least six four-manual organs in Roanoke and several other three-manual instruments.

Since 2001, Greene Memorial, Second Presbyterian, Christ Episcopal Church and now Raleigh Court have either replaced or made major upgrades to their organs. St. John's Episcopal Church will replace its grand organ later this year.

Both the cost of a new (or refurbished) organ and the time it takes to install one are considerable.

Raleigh Court's $600,000 project will take eight to 10 months to complete, including the installation of the gift pipes, which saved the church as much as $400,000.

Cummins worked closely with Raleigh Court Presbyterian during its 23-and-a-half-year organ search, compiling a file nearly 2 inches thick. He helped the church work with the Hagerstown Organ Company, which succeeded Moller after that company closed in 1992.

The new organ is a monster of a machine, with more than 200 keys, a foot pedal keyboard, 115 knobs and a solid-state electronics system that allows recorded playbacks. When fully installed, the organ will boast more than 3,500 pipes, including some that are 17 feet tall.

Brothers Robbie and Mike Victorine will oversee the installation. The Victorine family has serviced Roanoke organs for three generations.

Mayes, who happens to be Cummins' first cousin, will play a loaner organ from the Hagerstown company until the new organ is fully installed. She can hardly wait.

"I love the fact that the organ can give people a sense of mystery, awe and majesty at a time and in a culture where those characteristics are so rarely experienced," she said.

"That's what hooked me to go into church music, having those experiences as a child in choir festivals that the American Guild of Organists sponsored. There's nothing more worshipful and inspiring than accompanying a hymn on a fine, supportive and uplifting pipe organ."