Oberlin Dedicates New C.B. Fisk Organ With Live Broadcasts of Concerts on WCLV 104.9 FM Musicians Dedicate Concert Performance to Victims of September 11 Terrorist Attacks By Marci Janas '91
	Back to the main story		Organs at The Oberlin Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College Long recognized as one of the world’s leading centers for organ instruction, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College, founded in 1865, is the nation’s oldest continuously operating conservatory, and the only major music school in the country linked with a preeminent college of arts and sciences. Oberlin offers majors in performance, composition, music education, music theory, electronic and computer music, jazz studies, music history, and a double major in piano performance and vocal accompanying. The Oberlin organ program, designed to help students develop excellence in performance and to give them a broad understanding of repertoire and performance practice, has graduated professional musicians who serve with distinction as internationally-noted recording and concert artists and as university organists, professors, and church musicians. Included among these graduates are Timothy Albrecht, James David Christie, Jonathan Dimmock, David Hurd, Michael Kleinschmidt, William Porter, Christa Rakich and Erik Suter. Three superb concert instruments, representative of different historical periods and musical styles, are part of Oberlin’s period-organ enterprise, which is rooted in the early 20th century German Orgelbewegung or "organ movement." Reformers who engaged in this movement, discontented with the sound of the instruments being built in their own day, looked to the building practices of earlier centuries. As Oberlin was building its ensemble, leadership in the organ-reform movement was gradually shifting from Europe to America. In 1974, the shift was just beginning, and Oberlin’s first period instrument—an 18th-century Baroque-style organ by Dutch craftsman Dirk Flentrop—was dedicated in Warner Concert Hall. In 1981, the Conservatory installed a late-Renaissance/early-Baroque, 17th-century-style Brombaugh organ in Fairchild Chapel. The advent of the C. B. Fisk Opus 116, designed and constructed in the best of the late-Romantic tradition, based on the symphonic style of the great French organbuilder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, is specifically designed for the performance of 19th- and 20th-century music. The Fisk organ completes an Oberlin triad of outstanding instruments, which represent the finest traditions of European and American craftsmanship and the work of some of this century’s most admired builders.
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