Some of the pieces resembled enormous wooden kazoos. Others looked like oversized vacuum cleaner tubes. But to the crowd assembled on the lawn of the Severna Park church, each of the thousands of oddly shaped segments was created to do one thing: evoke the voice of the divine.
For nearly two decades, the parishioners of St. Martin's-in-the-Field Episcopal Church in Severna Park dreamed of hearing pipe organ music in their sanctuary each Sunday. A few years ago, they started raising money - to the tune of nearly half a million dollars - and ordered an organ to be custom-built for the church.
The organ, including each of the 1,349 pipes, arrived in a tractor-trailer this week. Workers will need about three weeks to assemble and tune the instrument. And then the church will resonate with a new sound.
"A pipe organ is meant to put the voice of God into everything," says Doris Buchanan Johnson, rector of the church.
The Anne Arundel County congregation, which was founded more than a half-century ago, moved to a new church building in 1989. A pipe organ-shaped spot remained bare on the left wall. Church members sang along with a small electric organ at services.
"The electric organ that we had before was dying," said David Bourdon, a member of the choir. "It would stop every now and then in the middle of a song, but we'd keep singing along."
Then, in 2005, a parishioner who wanted to remain anonymous donated about half the money needed to buy an organ. Others chipped in the remainder and soon the church had the approximately $460,000 needed to buy an organ.
They contacted Schantz Organ Co. of Ohio, one of the country's largest makers. Workers traveled to the church to test its acoustics while curious parishioners watched. "They would go around different spots in the church and go `Whoop, whoop, whoop,'" recalled Vee Mitchell, St. Martin's junior warden. Soon the workers had created a map of places where the sanctuary absorbed sounds and places where it bounced them back.
Then the process of building the organ began. Designers drew plans for a majestic instrument that would suit the bright sanctuary with its high, sloped ceiling. Woodworkers crafted curved panels from planks of maple and poplar wood. Other workers hammered sheets of metal into pipes. Musicians tested the purity of the sounds.
In the end, almost all of the company's 100 employees worked on some part of the organ, said Bob Betty, a company representative.
