Services

A pipe organ’s tone depends on hundreds, sometimes thousands, of individual pipes speaking together in tune and in balance — a very different task to tuning a single-stringed instrument. We carry out scheduled tuning visits for concert venues, cathedrals, churches and schools throughout our service area, including recurring seasonal visits to instruments such as Brisbane City Hall’s 1892 Willis organ and the 1929 Wurlitzer at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA).

Between full restorations, an organ needs ongoing mechanical care: cleaning chambers and pipe racks, releathering bellows and pneumatics, repairing soundboards, and replacing worn action parts before they cause ciphers or dead notes. This is the bulk of our week-to-week work, from a single overhauled soundboard through to multi-day repair projects at cathedrals and concert venues.

Where an historic instrument has reached the point that repair alone can’t address, we carry out full restorations — working systematically through the wind system, soundboards, action and pipework while preserving the instrument’s original character and construction. Our approach, developed over more than a dozen restorations since 1989, is set out in detail in our Restoration Philosophy, using the 1913 Whitehouse organ at St Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church, Red Hill as a case study.

Some projects go beyond routine repair without amounting to a full historic restoration — reworking a soundboard, rebuilding an action, or reusing sound components of an older instrument inside new casework. Current examples include the swell and great pipework we’ve removed for structural repair at Pitt Street Uniting Church, Sydney, and the earlier rebuild of St Stephen’s Chapel’s organ using pipework from a Fincham chamber organ inside new Tasmanian oak casework.

We also design and build complete new instruments in our Brisbane workshop, with the pipework manufactured in-house. Past commissions include a portable chamber organ for Dr Peter Roennfeldt and an entirely new instrument for Nazareth Lutheran Church, Woolloongabba, following a fire. We’ve recently been awarded a contract to build a new pipe organ for the Chapel of Diocesan School for Girls in Auckland, New Zealand, in collaboration with colleagues there.

Choosing the right path for an instrument — repair, rebuild, restoration, relocation or a new build — depends on the building, the budget and how the organ will be used. We work with churches, schools and institutions to assess an existing instrument’s condition and advise on realistic options, drawing on Simon Pierce’s own writing on organ-building philosophy and the particular challenges of small instruments.