Organs of Southern Alberta

The organ at First Baptist Church began as Casavant Frères Opus 484, a three-manual instrument of 29 ranks built in 1912 for the congregation’s new Gothic Revival church on 4 Street SW. It replaced a 1905 D. W. Karn organ, which was sold to a church in Saskatoon that year.

In 1965 Casavant Frères Ltée. rebuilt and enlarged the instrument as Opus 2861. The work included tonal changes and a new three-manual drawknob console, and brought the organ to 44 ranks across Great, Swell, Choir and Pedal divisions. The reconstructed organ and renovated sanctuary were dedicated on 29 May 1966. Casavant added three more ranks in 1992.

Several stop names from the 1912 organ survive on the present console, among them the Swell Stopped Diapason, Voix Céleste, Harmonic Flute and Vox Humana and the Choir Clarinet. Alongside them are stops introduced in the rebuild, such as the Great Fourniture, the Choir Sesquialtera, and the Pedal Fourniture, Bombarde and Schalmei.

Originally purchased in 1898 for $80, this organ was restored and moved to Heritage Park in 1987.

Demonstration video.

Knox United’s Organ (Casavant Frères Opus 2336, 2001, Originally built in 1956) has 70 ranks, 5,018 pipes, 6 divisions, 4 manuals and 62 stops and is one of Alberta’s biggest and best!

The church’s architecture contributes to the instrument’s dynamic sound and, besides being a historical landmark, makes this organ a must-hear in Calgary.

Mount Royal University’s Carthy Organ in Wyatt Hall is a three-manual, mechanical action teaching instrument with an electronic combination memory card system. Created by Orgues Létourneau, the organ reflects time-honoured traditions in its craftsmanship and exceptional voice and tone. Measuring twenty feet in height by nineteen feet in width, the organ has three polished bone and rosewood manuals and a maple and rosewood pedal board. Hand-carved, solid-oak cabinetry houses twenty-nine ranks of pipes – more than 1,600 polished alloy and wood pipes in total – and twenty-seven stops.

In 1978, Gabriel Kney, a French-Canadian organ-builder working out of London, Ontario built and installed Christ Church’s very fine three-manual mechanical action (tracker) organ. This is the largest tracker organ in a Calgary church and in addition to its regular duties enhancing Sunday worship, is often used as a concert instrument. In 1994, both the console and pipes were moved from the front of the church to a newly-constructed gallery at the back, just in time to be used in the first round of the 1994 International Organ Competition. Since then, it has been featured in numerous “organ crawls” and music festivals.

The organ of the Cathedral is one of Calgary’s most historic instruments. Built by the renowned firm Casavant Freres and installed in 1906, it was significantly enlarged and overhauled in 1937 and again in 1955. In 2002, the Calgary Universal Foundation for the Organ generously provided funds for the complete restoration of the instrument, including the replacement of the electro-pneumatic combination system with a solid-state switching system and solid-state logic combination system of one hundred twenty-eight levels of memory. The present instrument consists of thirty-nine stops over three manuals and pedal.

Highwood Lutheran Church lays claim to having the oldest pipe organ in Alberta. The organ was completed in 1870 by the O’Dell Organ Company of New York. It was built for a Presbyterian church in Sing-Sing, New York. It was obtained by Highwood from a Baptist church in Ossining, NY in 1967.

Highwood Lutheran’s organ is a mechanical, tracker-action instrument. The organ has two manuals and a pedalboard. The manuals each have fifty-eight keys and the pedal has twenty-five keys. There are twenty-three ranks, four couplers, eight combination pistons and approximately four thousand individual pipes ranging in size from a few inches long to sixteen feet long. It has three divisions, or sections; the Great Division, the Swell Division and the Pedal Division.

The Ronald B. Bond Bach Organ (Jürgen Ahrend, 2006) is one of only four in North America designed by Jürgen Ahrend, and is the only instrument of its kind in Canada. The tonal design and specifications are consistent with the seventeenth-century North German organs as were heard in the time of Bach and Buxtehude.