SPIRITUAL RISING

A NEW ORGAN IS SHAKING THE PEWS AT MANHATTAN'S TRINITY CHURCH

- STORY: ADAM NAGOURNEY / NYT

It has taken more than two decades since the Sept 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York left Trinity Church covered in dust and debris.

This towering, Gothic Revival church in lower Manhattan survived the attacks that destroyed the nearby towers. But its ageing organ, a 5,000-pipe Aeolian Skinner, which had been in service since 1923 and had already seen better days, was deemed beyond repair.

Now, its replacement has been unveiled with a recent concert by organist Anna Lapwood that filled the church with sound and a message of hope.

"It's an amazing instrument," Lapwood said. "You can really feel you are playing the building as well as the organ itself."

The new instrument, 10 years in the making and costing nearly US$17 million (552 million baht), including the price of woodwork and casing, boasts 8,041 pipes, some as high as 10m. That's about as big as an organ gets.

There are two consoles — one at the front of the church and one at the rear—each with four keyboards (called manuals) and each with 61 keys. There are 113 stops, those knobs above the keys, which the organist uses to mimic the sounds of various instruments in orchestra, producing a swell of the kind of the grand sounds that recall The Phantom Of The Opera at one moment and a delicate pianissimo of Claude Debussy at the next.