By Laura Hand
Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 7:19 p.m.
SU installed its Holtkamp organ in Crouse College in 1950, but 25 to 30% of the pipes are actually from the instrument it replaced, an 1889 Roosevelt organ, original to the building. Dr. Olucola Owolabi, the SU organist, says that gives it a more diverse sound, than many other Holtkamps (including perhaps the best-known one, at Salt Lake City's Mormon Tabernacle).
Owolabi -- nicknamed Kola--has come to this position after a many years' love of organ music: as a child in Nigeria he played a harmonium (an organ-like instrument) at church. When he was ten, his family moved to Toronto, and he was enrolled in the St. Michael's Cathedral school. He says singing at the Cathedral every weekend gave him an appreciation for the organ, and he'd go home and try to replicate it on a piano.
Playing an organ is much more complicated than a piano: three tiers of keyboards, plus the foot pedals. Kola says it took about a year and a half to learn the coordination. In addition, there are stops: pulls that modulate the note produced by a pipe, to make it sound like another instrument, or to achieve another effect. On the Holtkamp, there are 61 variations for the hand keys, plus 32 on the foot pedal. Then, the swell, a box with louvers that encloses some pipes, can also vary the volume of the sound.
Kola says playing the organ is like having three orchestras going at once.
>There are free concerts at SU's Crouse College on a regular basis. And, in this International Year of the Organ, the American Guild of Organists is staging 'the world's largest organ recital' on Sunday, October 19. Syracuse's contribution will be at St Paul's Cathedral at 2pm--all are welcome to come hear.
