The Wanamaker Organ - Inside the world's largest operating musical instrument

[Music] you're seeing the world's largest functioning musical instrument so 28,500 pipes are in this organ the ones you see interestingly enough don't actually play the facades of this very very famous instrument are not speaking they're just there for show the pipes are behind the walls uh hi I'm Peter Richard Conte my title is Wanamaker Grand Court organist at Macy's this console that you're seeing right now it's just a control panel it's like a cockpit of a large aircraft and these are the keyboards much like piano keyboards we have six of them because there's so many different voices to control each one of these keyboards controls a different family or division of pipes they're called and then to my right and left of the keyboards are the actual stops the voices and there are three symphony orchestras worth of voices we call the voices on organ a rank and this organ has 469 ranks or players the organist sir our part octopus and the pedalboard is the equivalent of the the bass end of the orchestra is played by the feet [Music] back when I first started here am i overly proud of my tenure the organ was pretty much dead if you can believe it most of it just didn't function Macy's came in and within just a few years the organ went from hardly playable to now it's 100 percent playable [Music] [Music] the old UNS turning on the first thing that turned on was the DC power supply to give the power to the organ you can see all the pilot lights lit so that's putting out 13 volts for the instrument and and the next thing that happens is that the eight blowers throughout the building turn on slowly one after the other so we don't take too much current at once and you can hear the organ coming to life the air is goes through a bellows which is like a diaphragm regulator and that controls the final pressure because inside the child there we go and then you have a pneumatic under this note that opens and closes and allows the air to come in here when it's called for so in many cases you have three pneumatics per note that have to be maintained and rebuilt this is where the signals for the orchestral come upstairs and then are distributed into the chamber this has reads you'll see there's all kinds of different shape resonators for all the reeds in this chamber [Music] [Applause] [Music] you can see the shutters that let the sound out you can see them opening and closing as he's playing Basie's gets the fact that this is an international icon and it's a philadelphia treasure as well and Macy's understands that and they have really poured their resources into it and it's a it's a wonderful thing the organ is in the best shape of its life [Music]

Channel: Alex Rivera

Views: 2,093,813

Rating: 4.9053793 out of 5

Keywords: philadelphia, news, philadelphia daily news, wanamaker organ, organ, world's largest, wanamaker, john wanamaker

Id: 98KYMpBx9og

Length: 5min 11sec (311 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 11 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/jackofslayers]

How much you wanna bet those dudes HATE each other?

[u/dtallee]

Pretty darn impressive - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanamaker_Organ

[u/The_Super_D]

I bet that plays a mean rendition of In the Garden of Eden by I. Ron Butterfly.

[u/Sardoodledum]

Stop by if you're in town around Christmas. https://www.wanamakerorgan.com/xmas.php

[u/The_Charred_Bard]

I'm afraid what'll happen when Macy's goes out of business :(

[u/D34th_gr1nd]

Here in New Jersey our Macey's has kazoos.

[u/ElfMage83]

Wanamaker's organ is pretty massive.

[u/solitarium]

Just told my wife that we're going here this Christmas

[u/Sinborn]

My understanding of this organ is while it has a 64' petal stop, they are using an acoustic trick I can't recall the name of to get them, and the largest pipe is 32'. There are I think 2 organs in the world with real 64' ranks, one in Sydney Australia and another in Atlantic City.

Here, have a listen of the Sydney organ