Renewing Phillips Church: Final Chapters

A New Instrument from the Old World

Three years ago, during planning for the full renovation of Phillips Church, Exeter discovered that the existing pipe organ had suffered irreversible damage as a result of temperature and climate fluctuations in the church. As part of the renovation (which included installing a climate control system), the Academy commissioned a new organ from the Italian firm, Fratelli Ruffatti, founded a generation ago in 1940. Famiglia Artigiana Frattelli Ruffatti gained international recognition in 1952, when the company won the contract to build the huge five-manual organ for the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal.

In August 2004, Piero Ruffatti and a three-person crew that included his daughter, Michaela, an architect and third-generation organ designer, traveled to Exeter from Padua, Italy, to oversee the installation of the new organ. Piero’s brother and business partner, Francesco Ruffatti, arrived in September to voice the organ—the process of regulating the pipes for pitch, prompt speech, volume and the best sound for the space in which they will be heard. “The voicing is the artistic part of the process,” says Piero of his brother’s work, but Piero’s remark can’t diminish what he and his crew accomplished during their two weeks in Exeter.

The new instrument was custom designed for Phillips Church and built by hand in Italy, then shipped to Exeter for assembly. According to PEA Clerk of the Works Guy Conrad, who worked closely with the Italian team, it took a 12-man crew to unload the truck on which the organ arrived. “It was like putting together a giant puzzle,” he says. “The next construction project is going to be a piece of cake after that.” Fratelli Ruffatti is one of the few organ builders to make all the instrument’s components themselves. Most of the new organ’s 2,699 pipes, for instance, are hand made from a tin-lead alloy—the exact make-up is determined by the desired sound for each pipe—that is poured, planed, cut and rolled by hand on a traditional marble table with wooden guides. (The organ’s most full-bodied sounds are achieved from wooden pipes.) The organ’s controls are computerized. Since the Rufattis designed the instrument to be heard in solo concerts as well as in accompaniment, they included some distinctive features such as sounds for the bagpipes, thunder, glockenspiel and the nightingale. This last, achieved by four pipes placed upside down in water, was a gift to Exeter from the frattelli.

Exeter’s new organ was dedicated with a concert on October 30 by Michael Kleinschmidt, director of music and organist of Trinity Church, Copley Square, Boston.

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