A Higher Plane
A Higher Plane
A Higher Plane
Renowned organ builder Martin Pasi recently expanded the 1961 Hotkamp organ at St. John's Abbey to include 6,000 pipes. Photos by Caroline Yang.
Wearing a plaid shirt and a tool apron, renowned pipe organ builder Martin Pasi sits at a large wooden workbench littered with tools and an unnervingly hot soldering iron, rolling sheets of lead-tin alloy into a pipe. “We are going to put a bevel on the edge here,” says Pasi, who recently moved his shop from Roy, Washington, to the grounds of Saint John’s Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Collegeville, Minnesota. “Everything needs to be very clean. This is 28 percent tin and the rest lead. The tin is in there to strengthen the lead up.”
The alloy sheets, formed in-house, are coated with sizing, a white powder made of gum arabic and chalk. “It protects the metal from burning,” says Pasi, rubbing the edges with wax. “When I’m soldering, the metal is very close to the solder. It wants to melt. But we don’t want it to. So that’s why we protect it with a sizing. It washes off really easily with warm water. This is an ancient method.”
Pasi uses a series of mandrels—basically, metal rods—to roll and shape the pipe, all the while banging on it with a piece of wood. Then he reaches for the soldering iron and carefully dabs the edges to seal them. “Now, the temperature and the speed with which I’m doing this is all-important.”
Pasi goes through the remaining steps of making a finished pipe—trimming, filing, soldering, forming the “lip,” cutting the “mouth,” adding a flat plate called a languid to control the angle of air flow—with the skill of a master. “Just the sound itself” drew Pasi to organs as a kid in his native Austria, he says. “It’s unique. It tries to imitate orchestral instruments. But, of course, it’s only an imitation. So it’s really its own thing.”
Hand-building an organ takes between a year and a half and two years. Currently, Pasi and his crew are making one for a church in Leawood, Kansas, that will have more than 3,000 pipes. “And the beautiful thing about pipe making and organ making in general is it’s a lot of handwork, still,” Pasi says. “It’s not something you can automate, because each pipe has a different measurement.”
Pasi is one of just a handful of pipe organ builders in the US who make these hulking instruments using the old ways. He first came to Saint John’s in 2019 to oversee an expansion of the abbey church organ, which involved creating thousands of new metal and wood pipes. The project, completed in 2020, boosted the sound in the church, a stunning Bauhaus-style structure built in 1961—arguably the heart of a campus that includes a university, a preparatory school, and 2,500 acres of woods and lakes.
Once Pasi got to know the community, moving his operation to Saint John’s made sense. “It really was the desire to find a meaningful place for the tools and the templates and ideas and knowledge to go further,” he says. “I didn’t want to continue my business once I’m turning 70 or something like that.” The plan is to take on apprentices and pass on his craft. “I had a lot of time to be here and get to know the people, and Father Lew.”
“And then getting something like this,” Pasi says, standing at a new tub sink, washing the sizing from the now-formed pipe. “I don’t think there is another organ shop like this in this country.”
Pasi makes the “lip” on a new pipe, using a mirror to keep track of the seam (LEFT); shapes the pipe using a from called a mandrel (CENTER); and shows a finished pipe (RIGHT)
I don’t think there is another organ shop like this in this country.
Martin Pasi
A New Home for Craftspeople and Artisans
Fr. Lew Grobe is director of Saint John’s Abbey Organ Builders and the 150-year-old Saint John’s Abbey Woodworking program, both housed in the bright, modern, two-story Abbey Woodshop. Grobe, a woodworker himself, was integral to planning and fundraising for the $12.3 million project, which opened in October 2023. “For us, we worked out of seven buildings before, all around campus,” he says, including a main woodshop that was outfitted in the early 1900s. “So we had to go outside all the time and it took a long time to get things done. This has been a dream for a long time.”
The project drew more than 2,000 donors, says Grobe. “So it’s much wider than Saint John’s. We captured some people’s imaginations about passing on this tradition, both in the woodworking and with the organ building.”
Abbey Woodshop Director Fr. Lew Grobe at the Abbey church organ, its pipes obscured by a red screen.
Grobe believes in the power of handwork and hopes to pass along woodworking and organ-building traditions and skills.
He views handwork as integral to Benedictine principles and to monastic life, which emphasizes simplicity, integrity, reverence, and beauty. “I love that balance between prayer, work, and study,” says Grobe, who wrote his master’s thesis on the value of manual labor. In fact, the Saint John’s campus is brimming with such efforts, including candle making, sculpture, painting, bread making, and ceramics. The Saint John’s Pottery is housed near the new workshop and helmed by longtime artist-in-residence Richard Bresnahan.
“We’re still moving in,” Grobe says, entering the new workshop, the buzzing of machinery and smell of fresh sawdust in the air. “I think what you’ll see today is a mixture of older hand-working traditions—we still build all of our furniture out of solid wood, with mortise and tenon and dovetail and things like that, for durability—and then some new additions like these dust collectors,” which press sawdust into briquettes that can be burned for fuel.
The workshop includes everything a woodworker or organ builder might hope for. Besides state-of-the-art tools and expansive work areas, the facility features a large wood storage room, a dedicated “small projects” area, a finishing room with a spraying cove where coatings are applied, locker rooms for men and women (complete with ADA-compliant showers), and three studios for “abbey artisans” such as Fr. Jerome Tupa and Fr. Nathanael Hauser, both painters. The space is populated by an array of monks, lay woodworkers, students, and volunteers. Grobe hopes the new facility will draw even more.
At one station, woodworker Rob Lillard makes a cradle for a Saint John’s Bible cabinet, which will hold a copy of the renowned handwritten Bible created in 1998 by the abbey and university, and calligrapher Donald Jackson. “I’ve been here for about fifteen years,” Lillard says. “It’s been a good experience for me. I enjoy working with solid wood. That’s unusual these days.” Much of the wood used by Abbey Woodworking is red oak from the Saint John’s property. They build the Bible cabinets—which have found homes at the Washington National Cathedral in DC and with the archbishop of Canterbury—and also much of the furniture on campus, including doors, beds, tables, chairs, urns, and the simple pine coffins in which the monks are buried.
Grobe holds a bread paddle made of wood harvested from the Abbey Arboretum.
A handmade wooden coaster.
The rest of the workshop is dedicated to pipe organ building, such as the well-ventilated casting and hammering room where the tin-lead alloy is made, a space with a 38-foot-high ceiling and crane where organs are assembled before being disassembled for delivery, and a voicing room where pipes are tuned. “I was the one who traditionally took care of the abbey organ,” says organ builder K. C. Marrin, crouched in the voicing room over a box of reclaimed pipes. “But this was a little too big for me.” When it came to the recent expansion, “I said Martin Pasi was the one. We always say the room is half the organ. He realized this was a special place to have an organ. He got shivers from the room.”
A wall of stained glass illuminates the Saint John’s Abbey and University Church.
The striking church was designed by Hungarian-German modernist architect Marcel Breuer.
Built for Meaning and Purpose
When entering the Saint John’s Abbey and University Church, which was designed by Marcel Breuer, a Hungarian-German modernist architect and furniture designer, the first thing you notice is the breathtaking wall of stained-glass windows shaped like honeycombs. “They came up with this idea of a hive,” says Grobe. “We are all together for this purpose. And all of these cells matter. This is kind of an abstract view of a liturgical season.”
The church is built of concrete, with a cantilevered balcony and unexpected clear glass windows overlooking planted courtyards. “It gives it an airiness,” says Grobe. “But it kind of changed our theology as well: What happens outside isn’t different from what happens in here. You take what is out there in here and what is in here out there.”
At the front stands the organ and its colossal bank of about 6,000 pipes of all sizes, from tiny metal whistles to wooden columns that reach 32 feet tall. The pipes are accessed via a spiral metal staircase. On the way up, Grobe points out the instrument’s various features. “Those are the bellows,” he says. “Those would fill up with air. This is a swell box. That is how you control the volume, with shutters. This is part of the addition here. These are some of the larger metal pipes. And then here is the biggest pipe. Remember that mouth Martin was making and it was so small? Well, look at how big it is here.”
Standing on an elevated platform next to an open cupboard containing clusters of metal pipes, Grobe says, “Think about the engineering that would go into setting these up and then actually making them sound right. This is what they call the vox humana. It’s supposed to sound like the human voice, but it sounds like a frog. I don’t know how Martin does that. I don’t know how you tune something like that. But he made it.”
Grobe hopes the new Abbey Woodshop will help keep pipe organ building and woodworking traditions alive. “There is a fear of them being somehow lost, along with the places that are able to keep them up,” he says. “I don’t think it’s something romantic. It’s just kind of, we’re doing it because it serves a purpose. I think of pipe organ building as the combination of the liberal arts. You have architecture, you have engineering, you have music and design. And it all comes together.”
sjawood.org | sjaorgans.org
The spacious new Abbey Woodshop, dedicated in October 2023, contains state-of-the-art equipment.
This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Charitable Foundation.
