Pipe dreams

[Times photos: Carrie Pratt] Darwin Klug, top, Warren McGahey, center, and Frances Klug help assemble the $270,000 hand-crafted Heissler pipe organ at St. Petersburg College. The instrument is now nearly two-thirds assembled.

By DAVE SCHEIBER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 1, 2002

A $270,000 pipe organ, long desired by a St. Petersburg College music professor, has completed its 5,000-mile journey to the campus. It will make its booming debut this spring.

ST. PETERSBURG -- For more than a month, inside the revamped Music Center at St. Petersburg College, the experts have been laboring over some complicated new pipe organ pieces.

Make that about 3,000 pieces. And we're not talking sheet music here.

All the parts have been carefully unpacked from wooden crates and cellophane wrappers sent from a tiny town in southern Germany. One by one, each has been painstakingly fitted into the towering structure of oak and metal that stands 25 feet high and 22 feet wide along the back wall of the stage.

The $270,000 hand-crafted, customized Heissler pipe organ is now nearly two-thirds assembled. Or, in this case, reassembled.

The instrument was built and tested nearly 5,000 miles away in Markelsheim, taken entirely apart and trucked to the northern port city of Bremerhaden, shipped across the Atlantic to Miami and finally delivered by 18-wheeler just before Christmas to SPC. For weeks, boxes and components filled the Music Center, stage and seats included.

Frances Klug unwraps some of the pipe organ’s components before handing them over to be installed. There are some 1,600 pipes of various shapes and sizes.

On a recent morning at the Music Center, Darwin Klug, 42, stands in an opening 15 feet off the ground in the pipe organ's middle section. Klug's mother Frances unwraps a shiny 4-foot pipe -- among some 1,600 pipes of various shapes and sizes. It is one more small step in the arduous process of bringing the pipe organ to life in its new home in America.

Amid the work, professor Robert D. Setzer, who began teaching pipe organ at the school 42 years ago, takes a seat at the three tiers of keyboards, dwarfed by the three massive cabinets on the large oak stage.

The look is sleek and contemporary to match the new 310-seat hall -- intricate wood-cut patterns on the pipe shades even match the seat-cushion designs.

But the notes that the white-haired, 77-year-old professor plays are timeless, embracing the room with the airy pipe-organ sound. He plays a portion of the school hymn, Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past, working some of the organ's 24 stops that control the elaborate voicing. He savors the warm sound -- enhanced by the room's high-tech acoustics.

"With this finally happening, you feel a great sense of, well, I would say blessing," he says later. "But as much as it means to me, the organ is so much more important in what it means to the school, and to the students and people in the community who will hear it for many years to come."

Until three years ago, such a pipe organ was only a pipe dream of Setzer's. He always taught students with two small practice organs. When it came time for recitals, he would have to stage them off campus at area churches with larger pipe organs.

But in 1998, the school unveiled plans to modernize what was then Lynch Auditorium, a hall shared by the music department, the theater program and dance. The idea was to make the building a showcase for music. To Setzer, there was only one hitch: the blueprints didn't call for a pipe organ.

Setzer spoke up. He had an advocate in Dr. Janice Buchanan, president of development for the St. Petersburg College Foundation. The school's former choral director oversaw financing of the music hall project. She liked the idea of a pipe organ, too.

Soon, she and Setzer were working together, planning a large but not overpowering instrument for the room. The proposal was approved, and Setzer set out to obtain bids. But he had a good idea whom he wanted -- the Klug family of Lakeland.

Darwin Klug, Heissler's U.S. sales representative, had helped dismantle and reinstall the two practice organs during campus renovations. Setzer liked his work and loved the Heissler organ the Klugs had installed at Blake High School in Tampa.

Klug and his brother Dave, who learned the organ business from their father, got the contract in April 2000. They made a few refinements and did not ask for a down payment before starting work. Meanwhile, Setzer made the initial donation, $30,000. Buchanan led the drive for private donations and helped obtain matching state grants.

"We've had gifts of $5 and $25,000," she says. "We're still accepting gifts and naming chairs, and we're very close to having it all paid for."

While the drama program has languished since moving to the Clearwater campus, music is thriving at the school, which this year went from a junior college to a four-year school. The Music Center was dedicated in March. Today, the hall, the organ and two vintage Steinway grand pianos are cornerstones of the college's expanding music program, which this week featured a concert by the New Haydn String Quartet.

Dr. Janice Buchanan, president of development for the St. Petersburg College Foundation, and music professor Robert D. Setzer helped SPC buy the pipe organ.

"The most exciting thing to me is that St. Petersburg College is only beginning to realize the significant role it can play in the musical makeup of our community," says Dr. Jonathan Steele, program director for humanities and fine arts.

On March 22, Setzer will give a preview concert on the Heissler. The official debut is April 7, with free concerts at 2 and 5 p.m. by well-known pipe organist John Obetz. Yet as excited as Setzer is about the concerts, he's even more thrilled about teaching students to carry on the pipe-organ tradition.

"Bob has a thing about training organists," says Buchanan, "in styles from the baroque period to the romantic period to contemporary."

Now, he can help usher in a new era for organ instruction at SPC. "One of our regrets today, and it's a serious one, is that there are not enough pipe organ students," Setzer says. "I think this will create a lot of interest, not only in the music, but in the instruction and luring people to pipe organ. They'll see this, and they'll want to play it."

Buchanan says SPC president Carl M. Kuttler Jr. has spoken with Setzer about creating a sacred music certificate program. She also has hopes of getting a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to make a documentary on modern pipe organs.

"We have an opportunity and an obligation to help the world know what a modern day pipe organ is all about," she says.

Setzer knows the instrument well. He learned it as a young teen in Tampa churches and played it as an assistant chaplain serving in the Pacific in World War II. He got an organ music degree from Rollins College and a master's degree at the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

In 1951, Setzer began working as organ choirmaster at St. Peter's Cathedral in downtown St. Petersburg and started giving lessons at the then-SPJC in 1960. He has been there since, for years as a full-time professor, and now as an adjunct. The Heissler is everything he could have imagined. It was built by the 12-employee family company in Germany that makes two to five pipe organs a year, selling them worldwide.

Darwin Klug is thrilled that the organ is fully exposed. Many in the United States are hidden in chambers, with only the keyboard showing. "This is something you'd only find in Europe," he says. "If you watch a PBS special from Vienna, you see a free-standing pipe organ across the back of the stage."

Klug and his brother will spend the next month "voicing" the organ, or adjusting tone and pitch of the pipes. It may take a year for any kinks to work out. And after that?

"This will be here for 200 years," Klug says, "and it shouldn't need a thing."

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