The organ is a modern adaptation of classical French design. Most instruments are built for a particular period or style of music, but the Rice organ has been designed to encompass a number of periods of literature. The Edythe Bates Old Recital Hall and Grand Organ will allow Holloway to centralize his successful organ program on campus. In addition to the organ in the student center chapel and one practice organ, he had been using larger Houston church organs for teaching. A rank is a set of pipes that makes up a stop, or the different tones that can be made to sound by pulling the stop knob.
Some stops require more than one rank.
Bover estimates the total weight of the organ to be about 20 tons. The smallest pipes will be the size of a pencil. The largest pipes will be shipped to Houston from subcontractor August Laukhuff and Co. of Weikersheim, Germany, one of three companies in the world that make pipes that large. More than 35,000 hours of work will go into the organ at the Fisk shop, where construction began in January 1995. The organ is expected to be shipped to Houston in two 40-foot trailer trucks in early January 1996, at which time the large pipes from Germany are scheduled to arrive.