Follow the Pipes!

One of the events co-sponsored by the History Center during the 3 Rivers Festival is “Follow the Pipes”. This series of organ concerts throughout the area is put together by the American Guild of Organists (AGO) and features pipe organs at various churches and entities such as the Embassy Theatre.

You can get details of the schedule in the Events section of our website:

www.fwhistorycenter.com/events.html

Patricia Sagester Arthur, who works hard each year to make “Follow the Pipes” a success, authored a book in 2001 entitled “Making Joyful Noises: A History of the Pipe Organs of Fort Wayne and Allen County, Indiana”. The book is dedicated to the memory of the sixteen organists who founded the Fort Wayne Chapter of AGO on March 25, 1946.

From the Introduction:

“On October 3, 1999 the strains of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor’ filled the magnificent sanctuary of the 127 year old St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In the hands of a talented organist at the console of the newly restored Aeolian-Skinner organ, this 200-year-old Bach composition soared to new heights. The everlasting joy of the music erased the gap of time so that everything that was old was new again.

“There are over seventy pipe organs in the Fort Wayne/Allen County area, each one, like the one at St. Peter’s, an inanimate object, a piece of furniture. They cannot speak, they do not move; they take up a lot of space, and they cost a lot of money. But each of these instruments is dressed in the history of the church in which it sits. Some have had more than one home, like the one that now graces St. Peter’s Catholic Church; but each one is an integral part of the religious and musical heritage of Fort Wayne and Allen County.”

Join us on July 17-19 and “Follow the Pipes”.