Richards, Fowkes & Co. is an American organ-builder. They make historical-style mechanical-action pipe organs. The firm is located in rural Ooltewah, Tennessee, just outside Chattanooga and was founded in 1988 by Bruce Fowkes and Ralph Richards.
As part of a larger number of organ builders working in the wake of the Organ Reform Movement, Richards, Fowkes & Co. have applied many concepts from historical styles of organ building (Arp Schnitger and his pupils, Central German, and the late eighteenth-century Dutch style of organ building) to their instruments. Other builders within this movement include John Brombaugh, Taylor & Boody, Paul Fritts, Martin Pasi, Charles B. Fisk, and Fritz Noack.
Discography
Bach in New Brunswick: Art Bergwerff Plays the 2001 Richards, Fowkes Organ. Aart Bergwerff, organist. Raven, OAR-760.
Clavier-Übung: Johann Sebastian Bach. Robert Clark, organist. Calcante, CAL-042.
Desert Fugue. DVD and CDs, Documentary with Christoph Wolff, George Ritchie, Ralph Richards, and Bruce Fowkes. Fugue State Films.
John Brock in Recital on a new Richards, Fowkes Organ. John Brock, organist. Raven, OAR-904.
Tennessee Organ Tour Vol.2. John Brock, organist. Raven, OAR-770.
Bruce Neswick, Organist. Raven, OAR-240.
21 Newly Published Organ Chorales attributed to J.S. Bach. Stephen Rapp, organist. Raven, OAR-420.
Sources
Periodicals
Ambrosino, Jonathan. Deep in the Heart. (Choir and Organ, 2010)
Ambrosino, Jonathan. Gentle Mavericks. (Choir and Organ, 2009)
Thesis
Oliver, David. Richards, Fowkes and Company: Representatives of a New Generation of North American Mechanical-Action Organ Builders. (DMA Thesis, University of South Carolina 1999)
Book
Whitney, Craig R. All the Stops: The Glorious Pipe Organ and Its American Masters, Public Affairs (2003) ISBN1-58648-262-9
The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by driving pressurized air through the organ pipes selected from a keyboard. Because each pipe produces a single pitch, the pipes are provided in sets called ranks, each of which has a common timbre and volume throughout the keyboard compass. Most organs have many ranks of pipes of differing timbre, pitch, and volume that the player can employ singly or in combination through the use of controls called stops.
In music, the organ is a keyboard instrument of one or more pipe divisions or other means for producing tones. The organs have usually two or three, up to five manuals, for playing with the hands, and pedalboard, with the feet. With the use of registers, several groups of pipes can be connected to one manual.
Æolian-Skinner Organ Company, Inc. of Boston, Massachusetts was an American builder of a large number of pipe organs from its inception as the Skinner Organ Company in 1901 until its closure in 1972. Key figures were Ernest M. Skinner (1866–1960), Arthur Hudson Marks (1875–1939), Joseph Silver Whiteford (1921-1978), and G. Donald Harrison (1889–1956). The company was formed from the merger of the Skinner Organ Company and the pipe organ division of the Æolian Company in 1932.
A pedalboard is a keyboard played with the feet that is usually used to produce the low-pitched bass line of a piece of music. A pedalboard has long, narrow lever-style keys laid out in the same semitone scalar pattern as a manual keyboard, with longer keys for C, D, E, F, G, A and B, and shorter, raised keys for C♯, D♯, F♯, G♯ and A♯. Training in pedal technique is part of standard organ pedagogy in church music and art music.
Casavant Frères is a Canadian organ building company in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, which has been building pipe organs since 1879. As of 2014, the company has produced more than 3,900 organs.
A manual is a musical keyboard designed to be played with the hands, on an instrument such as a pipe organ, harpsichord, clavichord, electronic organ, melodica, or synthesizer. The term "manual" is used with regard to any hand keyboard on these instruments to distinguish it from the pedalboard, which is a keyboard that the organist plays with their feet. It is proper to use "manual" rather than "keyboard", then, when referring to the hand keyboards on any instrument that has a pedalboard.
Ronald William Sharp was an Australian organ builder. He was awarded the Silver Jubilee Medal (1977) and the British Empire Medal (1980).
The organ repertoire is considered to be the largest and oldest repertory of all musical instruments. Because of the organ's prominence in worship in Western Europe from the Middle Ages on, a significant portion of organ repertoire is sacred in nature. The organ's suitability for improvisation by a single performer is well adapted to this liturgical role and has allowed many blind organists to achieve fame; it also accounts for the relatively late emergence of written compositions for the instrument in the Renaissance. Although instruments are still disallowed in most Eastern churches, organs have found their way into a few synagogues as well as secular venues where organ recitals take place.
John Burlin Brombaugh is an American pipe organ builder known for his historically oriented tracker action pipe organs.
Pasi Organ Builders, based in Roy, WA, manufactures mechanical action organs and restores historic instruments. Martin Pasi received his first formal experience in organ building during a four-year apprenticeship with the Rieger Company in his native Austria. After working in Austria and in the United States, Pasi set up his own studio, Pasi Organ Builders, in 1990 in a former school building in Roy, Wash.
Paul Fritts is an American organ builder based in Tacoma, Washington, who, following historical models, has created over thirty mechanical action instruments that have contributed to the revival of historically informed organ music. The Murdy organ at Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Notre Dame, Indiana is his largest Fritts instrument to date, with four manuals (keyboards) and 70 stops. Other recent Fritts instruments of note are located at the University of Notre Dame, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Pacific Lutheran University. The organ at PLU was the largest Fritts organ built before the organ in Columbus.
In music a voluntary is a piece of music, usually for an organ, that is played as part of a church service. In English-speaking countries, the music played before and after the service is often called a 'voluntary', whether or not it is so titled.
The Organ Reform Movement or Orgelbewegung was a mid-20th-century trend in pipe organ building, originating in Germany. The movement was most influential in the United States in the 1930s through 1970s, and began to wane in the 1980s. It arose with early interest in historical performance and was strongly influenced by Albert Schweitzer's championing of historical instruments by Gottfried Silbermann and others, as well as by Schweitzer's opinion that organs should be judged primarily by their ability to perform with clarity the polyphonic Baroque music of J. S. Bach (1685–1750). Concert organist E. Power Biggs was a leading popularizer of the movement in the United States, through his many recordings and radio broadcasts. The movement ultimately went beyond the "Neo-Baroque" copying of old instruments to endorse a new philosophy of organ building, "more Neo than Baroque". The movement arose in response to perceived excesses of symphonic organ building, but eventually symphonic organs regained popularity after the reform movement generated excesses of its own.
Pipe organs that are tuned in meantone temperament are very rare in North America. They are listed here, by type of temperament and sorted by date of construction. North America is defined here as Canada, the United States of America and Mexico. All instruments listed are playable but unplayable instruments may be added with a note.
The Schoenstein Organ at the Conference Center is a pipe organ built by Schoenstein & Co., San Francisco, California located in the Conference Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah. The organ was completed in 2003. It is composed of 160 speaking stops spread over five manuals and pedals. Along with the nearby Salt Lake Tabernacle organ, it is typically used to accompany the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. Schoenstein & Co.'s president and tonal director, Jack Bethards, describes it as "an American Romantic organ" that is "probably more English than anything else."
Desert Fugue is a 90-minute documentary film about Johann Sebastian Bach's The Art of Fugue directed by Will Fraser and produced by Fugue State Films. It features organist George Ritchie, Bach scholar Christoph Wolff and organ builders Ralph Richards and Bruce Fowkes.
John T. Fesperman was an American conductor, organist and author of several books on organs. From 1965 to 1995 he worked at the Division of Musical Instruments at the National Museum of History and Technology, part of the Smithsonian Institution.
The organ of Poblet is a three manual, 56 stop pipe organ installed in the church of the Abbey of Santa Maria of Poblet. It was built in 2012 by the Swiss firm Metzler Orgelbau AG.
David P. Dahl is an American professor, composer, pedagogue, organist, church musician, organ clinician, and advisor. He is also one of the founders of Olympic Organ Builders.
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