PART TWO
In 2000, Dr. Davidsson joined the Eastman faculty, and he and Mr. Higgs decided to expand the school’s organ collection. They formed a partnership with Goteborg and enlisted expertise from several noted American organ builders.


The team wanted to make a replica of an organ from the high Baroque, preferably one that Bach himself had played. The instrument would be named after the Eastman organ teachers David Craighead, now retired, and Russell Saunders, who died in 1992, and whose family left the school $500,000 to begin the project at Christ Church. In all, the replica would cost $3 million.

“But such an organ didn’t exist,” Dr. Davidsson said. The instrument they built would have to fit into the west end of Christ Church. The organ they copied would also have to be in virtually pristine condition so the team could understand how it looked when it was brand-new. None of the Bach-era organs they examined matched the specifications.

Then they thought of the Vilnius organ. It had been built 26 years after Bach died, but Casparini had worked as a journeyman on at least one organ that Bach had tested, and could have known him.

More important, the Vilnius organ, although it was modified during the 19th century, had never been restored and had seldom been repaired, and it was easy to see exactly how the original was built. In the 20th century, its custodians, led by Rimantas Gucas, a Lithuanian organ-builder, shut it down and mothballed it so the Communist government would not tamper with it.

They measured the organ, and when the replica was finally installed, it was perfect for Christ Church — 25 feet across and 24 feet tall, stopping just short of the rose window at the church’s west end. From the altar, sunshine appears to burst from the organ’s central pinnacle. “It was meant to be,” Dr. Davidsson said.

The Goteborg Center formed a collaboration with the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and Mr. Gucas to support Lithuania’s efforts to restore the Vilnius organ and make a replica as part of the project.

“I was very skeptical at first,” said the Japanese-born Mr. Yokota, now a resident of Sweden. “But I changed when I inspected the pipes. I couldn’t believe they were in such good condition.”

Mr. Yokota emphasized the need to understand the organ’s “proportions” — the relationship between the size and shape of the instrument and its components. This is what gives an organ its unique character.

The team began by measuring everything in the Vilnius organ, including the cabinets and the smallest hand-wrought iron fixtures and nails. Team members made drawings of every fixture, every join, every pipe and every surface. The data were printed out and put together in enormous manuals the size of telephone books.

Then they were analyzed. The team removed the pipes to study the metal composition and to test the acoustics. The Vilnius organ was not playable, so the team could not hear what it sounded like. In fact, the meticulous preparations were necessary partly because the replica was to provide guidance in restoring the original.

It took four years to make the parts in Goteborg. Meanwhile, in Rochester, specialty cabinet-makers were building a new organ balcony for Christ Church, using lumber salvaged from a 19th-century South Carolina factory. Digital scans enabled the team to reproduce the carvings of the Vilnius cabinet, including the statue of King David above the console. German specialists painted the exterior wood surfaces with 18th-century-style gesso.

The organ arrived in Rochester in 2007 and took a year to assemble. Behind the soaring facade, the interior is roomy and airy like a three-story, walk-in pine closet. Pipes of all sizes leap toward the rafters, but virtually all the moving parts — stop throttles, key action, air valves and trackers — are made of wood and driven mechanically by the power of human hands and feet.

The organ made its debut in October 2008, with four days of lectures, workshops and concerts. Today it is used for Mass, choral accompaniment and as a teaching instrument for Eastman students — the only opportunity they have in the United States to play an organ that is, in all respects, a Bach-era instrument.

“There’s a lot to understand,” Dr. Davidsson said, depressing keys and pulling stops for emphasis.

“It’s low-tech and simple,” he said, adding that the action of the keys and stops “gives you noise all the time — a kind of clackety-clack.”

“A lot of organists don’t like this,” he went on, “but you mess around with it and you corrupt the instrument right away.”

But if you play it right, added Stephen Kennedy, the musical director at Christ Church, it will do you proud. “It’s fabulous for hymn-singing, and the lighter sounds have incredible vitality,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It screams with joy.”