page_title: Stanford Memorial Church
section_title: Organs
hierarchical_section_title: Stanford Memorial Church / Architecture / Interior / Organs
caption_attribution_description: English: View of the Fisk-Nanny organ in the Stanford Memorial Church Clifornia, USA.
context_page_description: Stanford Memorial Church is located on the Main Quad at the center of the Stanford University campus in Stanford, California, United States. It was built during the American Renaissance by Jane Stanford as a memorial to her husband Leland. Designed by architect Charles A. Coolidge, a student of Henry Hobson Richardson, the church has been called "the University's architectural crown jewel".
  Designs for the church were submitted to Jane Stanford and the university trustees in 1898, and it was dedicated in 1903. The building is Romanesque in form and Byzantine in its details, inspired by churches in the region of Venice, especially, Ravenna. Its stained glass windows and extensive mosaics are based on religious paintings the Stanfords admired in Europe. The church has five pipe organs, which allow musicians to produce many styles of organ music. Stanford Memorial Church has withstood two major earthquakes, in 1906 and 1989, and was extensively renovated after each.
  Stanford Memorial Church was the earliest and has been "among the most prominent" non-denominational churches on the West Coast of the United States.
context_section_description: Stanford Memorial Church houses five organs, a "situation only a few places in the nation can boast".  The presence of high-quality organs makes Stanford an ideal location for accomplished musicians, and the sanctuary one of California's best settings for instrumental and choral performance.  The church's organist is Robert Huw Morgan.
  Stanford Memorial Church's first organ, the 1901 Murray Harris, named for its builder Murray M. Harris, sits in the upstairs galley and is still in use.  Damaged in the 1906 earthquake, the organ was rebuilt in 1925, enlarged in 1933, and thoroughly restored in 1996.  It features three manuals (keyboards for the hands), 57 stops, and over 3,700 pipes. The Murray Harris plays music from the Romantic period; its sound has been described as "romantic [and] undulating" and "like a low-decibel airplane engine revving up"   Morgan compares the Murray Harris to both a Rolls Royce and a Bentley.
  The Fisk-Nanney organ, which many consider one of the best organs in the world, was built in 1985 and is also housed in the church's upstairs galley.   It is named after its builder, C. B. Fisk, and for Herbert Nanney, who was the church's organist for 39 years.  Although it was commissioned in 1973, its completion was delayed for many years, due to logistical, financial, and construction issues.  The organ's case is made of poplar wood and its almost 4,500 pipes are made of varying sizes of lead and tin.  Its keyboards, which Morgan calls the "flight deck," are made with grenadilla, with rosewood making up its natural and sharps, and are capped with bone.  The organ's keyboards are black on white, instead of the modern white on black.  The stop controls create "a huge array of sounds".
  The Fisk-Nanney is a four-manual Baroque-type organ with 73 ranks.  It uses a "combination of elements from historic East German, North German, and French organs plus dual temperaments", and is "the first instrument in the history of organ building that is capable of reproducing nearly all organ music written from the 16th through the 18th centuries".  The organ, which "has remarkable complexity", features both French- and German-style reeds and principal choruses.  It is equipped with a Brustpositiv division in meantone temperament.  A lever allows the remaining divisions to alternate between well temperament and meantone temperament, a feature made possible by the inclusion of five extra pipes (two for each sharp key) per octave.
  Morgan describes the organ's sound as "delicious" and "visceral", ringing with "'incredible clarity' and 'dark color'", and compares it to driving a Maserati.  He insists that the best place to listen to the Fisk-Nanny is not upstairs in the galley where it sits, but in the church, "about halfway down the nave".  In 2005 Morgan performed the complete organ works of Dieterich Buxtehude during a series of recitals, eight hours in all, to celebrate the organ's 20th anniversary.  During the 2009–2010 school year, Morgan commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Fisk-Nanney organ and his 10th year at Stanford in a concert series of the complete organ works of Johann Sebastian Bach, which took 18 hours to complete.
  Memorial Church's third organ, the Katherine Potter-Brinegar organ, was built in 1995 and was named for the spouse of Stanford alumni Claude S. Brinegar.  It "further enhances" the diversity of the organs in Stanford Memorial Church, and was inspired by a famous chamber organ designed by German organ maker Esias Compenius in 1610.  It is self-contained, with its blower and bellows encased in its walnut case, and has hidden, retractable wheels that allow it to moved anywhere in the church.  It is a single-manual organ; most of its pipework is made of different types of wood, and has 8 speaking stops, 3 of which are made of reed pipes.  Its sound has been described as "relaxed and refined to the listener".
  The continuo organ built by Martin Pasi of Roy, Washington was acquired in June 2001.  It contains three stops.  The case and most of its pipes are made of walnut, and its keys are made of eb
caption: The wooden cases and metal pipes of the two largest organs, the Murray Harris and the Fisk-Nanney, rising from the organ loft
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