December 2020

Peragallo Pipe Organ Company, Paterson, New Jersey; Saint Leonard of Port Maurice Parish, Boston, Massachusetts

A long time ago, a young John Peragallo, Sr., made his way up to Boston from what was then a much smaller New York City—a fraction of the size we know today. He served as an apprentice and installer with the notable Ernest M. Skinner Company and had been recommended by his superiors to go up to Boston to gain experience at the big plant.  

Flentrop Orgelbouw, Zaandam, Netherlands

Dypvåg kirke, Tvedestrand, Norway

The work of Arp Schnitger was the inspiration for the new Flentrop organ in Dypvåg kirke, best suited for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music and with a warm and colorful sound. The organ has two windchests, positioned one behind the other—a seventeenth-century solution—to save space, two wedge bellows, a stable but flexible wind supply, and a small pedal division behind the main case. 

In 1984, William T. Van Pelt, then the executive director of the Organ Historical Society, wrote in The Tracker: Concomitant to the popularity of photography at the end of the nineteenth century was the blossoming of picture postcards that fortuitously embraced organs and church interiors among a wide range of subjects. Cards provide the examples we need to study architectonics and the visual evolution of organs, as well as traits of contemporary builders and their instruments. In some cases, a card represents the only remaining record of an organ’s existence.²

Passing eras

Towards a pedal method

Philip Klepfer Gehring, 94, died October 6, 2020, in Oak Park, Illinois. Born November 27, 1925, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Carlisle High School in 1943. He studied for one year at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, before interrupting his education for three years in the United States Navy as an ensign. Upon completion of service, he continued studies at Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music, Oberlin, Ohio, graduating with Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Music degrees in 1950.