High-tech pipe organ to blow minds at famed SF theater
The city’s Castro Theatre, known as much for its colorful organ concerts as its quirky film offerings, will house a massive $700,000 pipe-digital hybrid featuring a sample library used in the film industry.
Bad news for San Francisco’s historic Castro Theatre, site of many a film festival and celebrity-studded special event: the iconic pipe organ that’s entertained audiences there since the early ’80s is packing up and leaving town.
Great news for the famed theater: “The Mighty Wurlitzer” is getting replaced by a crazy high-tech pipe-digital hybrid that can reproduce the sounds of the familiar organ, plus those of a full symphony orchestra — in virtually any musical genre, and in ear-ringing surround sound.
“An all-pipe organ of this magnitude would cost many millions of dollars and would be physically impossible to install in this theater,” explains SFCoda, a nonprofit made up of music devotees dedicated to bringing the fancy new organ to life. “Fortunately, cutting-edge digital sampling technology now allows us to greatly enlarge the resources of the instrument and dynamically distribute the sound throughout the auditorium, providing a thrilling surround-sound musical experience in an acoustically reverberatory environment appropriate to whatever style of music is being played.”
The Castro Theatre, a San Francisco designated landmark, was built in 1922 by theater entrepreneurs who started with a nickelodeon in the neighborhood in 1908.
The single-screen movie house on the city’s famed Castro Street has offered organ music since 1922. Just before films and programs start, musicians famously play rousing compositions before dramatically sinking back to the organ pit below stage level on a mobile lift.
The Wurlitzer that’s greeted audiences at the theater for the past 30 years is privately owned, and the owner has left the Bay Area, along with the organ console and three-quarters of the pipework. Purchasing and refurbishing available components for the instrument, according to SFCoda, would make far less financial sense than investing in the newfangled $700,000 creation, which is being funded with help from private donations, the Castro Theatre, a grant from the Schapiro Fund in New York City, and a $40,000 Indiegogo campaign now under way.
The new organ, a fully restored Wurlitzer/Kimball theater pipe organ, will feature seven keyboards and more than 800 stops, the part of the instrument that admits pressurized air to the organ pipes. On the digital side, the gigabyte-heavy instrument will rely on an orchestral sample library used in the film-scoring industry. It’s expected to be one of the largest pipe/digital organs in the world.