Red Elm and Crowd Sourcing the 43-Note Continuo
July 13, 2026 19:17
Last May, I played a commencement ceremony on the Aeolian-Skinner organ at Northrop. I bonded with the College of Pharmacy graduating class of 2026 and especially with a group of three students. The family of one of the students owns a restaurant, and I was invited to their graduation dinner later that evening. Those memories will last forever. The college, in fact, wrote an article about it for its newsletter, which was later published in the University of Minnesota Brief.
I sat with the family of one of the students and spoke with her dad about my plans to build an organ based on a novel design I had been working on for the past two years, and whether the time was right to seek a commission. He suggested I apply some form of crowd-sourcing.
That got me thinking about the first organ I built. Someone was storing organ pipes in a basement. The pipes had to go due to a building renovation. A congregation got hold of this and asked if I could recover the material and build a new organ using whatever I might find useful. I would not have known it then, but that may be the model, a form of crowd-sourcing, that I find myself using to build examples of my 43-note concept. I designed it, after all, to use recycled pipework from discarded instruments, plenty of which are available.
About a month before graduation, my neighbor took down a large elm tree that had earlier died. He and I had a sawyer come out with a portable sawmill and cut its branches and limbs into slabs and planks. I got about thirty boards of beautiful 5/4 red elm, most select or better, each about nine feet long and approximately six inches wide, now drying in my shop.
So what I’m now looking for is an organization to “crowd-source” that red elm with me, combined with some recycled pipework from a discarded instrument or instruments, into the first example of my 43-note concept.
Let’s do this.
Posted July 13, 2026 19:17
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