What's
Inside?

Cover Story
A tale of two Oberlins.

In View
Pie-in-the-sky possibilities or difficult life-and-death decisions? The Human Genome Project may ultimately mean both.

Obies
The Oberlin Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies placed its first intern last summer. Read this firsthand account of his experiences in Moscow.

Center Piece
A new organ takes shape in Finney Chapel. Profile 6 Economist Gregory Hess and his student research assistant ponder the relationship between war, economics, and the election cycle.

Arts
Filmmaking at Oberlin? Most definitely. A three-hour marathon of student film shorts last May was just the tip of the growing celluloid iceberg.

Yeosports
Player-turned-coach Ann Marie Gilbert inspires teamwork on and off the basketball court.

The Big Picture
The Oberlin Orchestra performed at the Getty Center, L.A. under the direction of guest conductor John Williams.


Side Lines
Little facts you might be interested in.


 


An Organ Grows in Finney

New Instrument Installed Last August
by Anne C. Paine and Marci Janas '91 photos by Al Fuchs



For more than a year, the stage in Finney Chapel stood strangely empty. Now, the gaping void has been filled by a new organ that promises to be the capstone of Oberlin's impressive organ collection.

In June 1999, the organ that had for 85 years graced Finney's stage was dismantled and shipped to the organ builder who will rebuild and install it in its new home, a church in Fairfax, Virginia.

This made way for the Fisk Opus 116, a symphonic organ in the Romantic tradition designed and built by C.B. Fisk that was installed in Finney last August. Assembled almost in its entirety in the Fisk shop in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the organ was then disassembled so that no individual components were larger than the doorways through which they'd have to pass. Pipes ranging in length from a few inches to 32 feet were individually wrapped and packed in wooden crates for shipping to Oberlin.

A crew from Fisk spent most of August and September reassembling the organ in Finney. Since then, pairs of Fisk voicers have been adjusting the 3,951 pipes in a painstaking process that is expected to take up to 10 months to complete.

"They do the voicing one pipe at a time," said David Boe, professor of organ. "They have to establish the right level for the room, the right timbre. Pipes can be quite willful. It's a matter of the voicers listening to the room, listening to the pipes, and making many minor adjustments. The pipes were shop-voiced, and that gives us an idea of what the final sound will be. The sound so far is very promising."

Professor of Organ and Chair of the Division of Keyboard Studies Haskell Thomson concurred. "The Opus 116 will be ideally suited for Romantic and contemporary music," he said. "It is characterized by a virtual rainbow of tone colors, with a dynamic range extending from the softest flutes and strings to the most powerful foundations and reeds. It's an instrument capable of making a crescendo from the most ethereal pianissimo to a thundering fortissimo."

The organ's inaugural event is tentatively scheduled for September 28 and 29, 2001. Funding for the Opus 116 was made possible in large part by the 1991 bequest of Kay Africa, a Fort Lauderdale philanthropist, as well as by gifts from Karen Flint '64, the Phoebe W. Haas Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, and the Kulas Foundation.