![]() The Marsh Chapel pipe organ is the real deal, with no added digital technology like many contemporary organs. ![]() “I spend about 80 percent of my professional time here,” Blackwell says. ![]() His office is tucked behind the chapel’s proscenium and shares a wall with that of his friend and colleague Scott Allen Jarrett (CFA’99,’08), Marsh Chapel music director and former CFA interim director of choral activities. But even if you had two organs with exactly the same stops and the same pipes, the acoustics of the room would be different, which causes the sounds to interact in a different way.”īlackwell began his musical studies at the age of five in his native Charleston, S.C, and holds music degrees from Furman University (organ performance) and BU, where he earned a master’s in choral conducting at the College of Fine Arts. “The stops on every organ are different, and organ builders construct pipes differently over the years. ![]() “No two organs have the same set of sounds,” says Blackwell. Like every pipe organ, once installed, it is one of a kind. The Marsh Chapel organ was crafted by Casavant Frères, Ltd., in Quebec, installed when the chapel was built in the early 1950s, and refurbished and rededicated in 1985. Blackwell loves his job, and he loves even more the chapel’s Casavant Organ Opus 2000, its panels depicting bells, a lyre, clef scrolls, and music staffs, with a central panel carved with images of Saints Gregory and Cecilia. ![]() Blackwell (CFA’09), the chapel’s associate director of music, is constantly making minor adjustments based on the instrument’s quirks or its response to humidity, heat, and cold.Īlthough the career keyboardist performs on other organs, as well as on harpsichords, Marsh Chapel is his musical home, the place that has made his performances familiar to listeners of the Sunday morning services officiated by the dean of Marsh Chapel, Reverend Robert Allan Hill, and broadcast live on WBUR, BU’s National Public Radio station. From its elaborate keyboard, the pipe organist controls not just the air in the pipes and the sounds resulting from their vibration, but also the way the organ’s stops isolate sounds-like solo voices in its full-pipe choir-to emulate, say, the sound of a flute, or a string instrument. Justin Thomas Blackwell is at BU’s Marsh Chapel seven days a week, much of that time rehearsing or tending to a complex, sensitive instrument that demands his devotion, tenderness, and engagement. A principal organist’s connection to his church’s resident pipe organ is a kind of marriage. ![]()
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