Today at Brown

Step into the Sayles Hall vestibule and walk past the portraits of the building’s namesake and donor. Invisible above your head sits one of Brown’s most cherished treasures.

In the main hall, turn around and look up into the balcony. There it is: the pipe organ whose notes float in the air at midnight on Halloween and several other times a year.

“It’s the largest Hutchings-Votey organ in the world,” says University Organist Mark Steinbach. “It was a gift from one man” – Lucian Sharpe, class of 1893, who made the donation in memory of his parents.

Steinbach explains that the famed Hutchings-Votey Organ Company of Boston installed the organ in 1903. To accommodate its 25 tons and 3,355 pipes, the existing narrow gallery was replaced with a large loft that has a projecting center. The first recital on the organ was given at Commencement in 1903 by Belgian organist Chevalier August Wiegand.

The organist sits at the console, quietly running through chord progressions. “There was mandatory daily chapel in here until the 1960s,” Steinbach says. That was well before his time. Steinbach, who performs internationally, was hired as University Organist in 1990.

Each year the organ is used for midnight recitals on Labor Day and Halloween, a guest artist recital, and Steinbach’s faculty recital. French 19th- and 20th-century compositions sound great on it, such as the all-Messiaen program Steinbach performed in November 2008.

The organ is tuned before every recital due to the fluctuations of temperature and humidity in the cavernous room. Dust in the pipes is common, and there is the occasional spider and, once or twice, a bat.

Mark Steinbach Occasionally Steinbach will give tours inside the organ, whose works are mostly hidden behind its grand facade. The area looks and smells something like the backstage area of a high school auditorium: old wood warmed by sunshine; a little dust.

Inside, the instrument’s complexity is revealed. The Sayles Hall organ has wooden and metal pipes ranging from 32 feet to just a few feet long. A ladder reaches up to the swell chamber, an enclosed room of the smallest pipes. A small door leads to an electric bellows that channels power to the organ from the basement. The pipework is original, though the console has been replaced twice. In 1949 the organ was completely renovated, including the installation of a new console designed by the Schantz Organ Company. The last restoration was done by the Potter-Rathbun Company of Cranston, R.I., in 1990.

“Instrument curator” is part of Steinbach’s title, and aptly so. At a time when more and more churches and concert halls favor cheaper electronic substitutes for the pipe organ, Brown remains committed to its glorious Hutchings-Votey. “A synthesizer is certainly less expensive,” Steinbach says. “But imagine the difference between sound coming through a few speakers and air rushing through 3,000 pipes.”