Organist Mark Pall plays the hybrid organ he designed in his West Pittston studio.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
Admission is free, but bring your own chair
Click here to subscribe today or Login.
The hybrid organ Mark Pall designed is part traditional, mostly digital.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
When organist Mark Pall and his wife, Dana, were looking for a new home, the young couple had an unusual requirement.
They needed space for the large hybrid organ — part traditional, mostly digital — that Pall has designed and built.
Fortunately, they found a house in West Pittston that has a second building in the back yard.
“We knew we had to have this place,” Pall said, explaining the studio space is big enough for the organ — he believes it’s the largest hybrid model in Pennsylvania — with its 197 ranks of pipes, including a set of en chamade pipes that sound like trumpets and a set of cornopean pipes that have darker tones.
There’s room as well for the piano that Pall also plays, and there’s room for at least 30 people to come and be the audience at the “Christmas Spectacular” concert he has planned for 7 p.m. Dec. 15.
Admission will be free, but audience members are asked to bring their own chairs.
They will hear an array of Christmas-time music, from “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Away in A Manger,” to “Jingle Bells” and “Sleigh Ride,” and they will have a chance to sing along during certain selections.
While it’s been a few years since Pall, now 24, presented an Advent/Christmas concert, he used to give them regularly when he was a youth, growing up in the Back Mountain and playing at various churches around the area.
This concert at his home studio in West Pittston will give audience members a chance to see and hear the hybrid instrument, which he describes as “two organs married into one.” The traditional part of the organ came from the former St. Boniface Church in Wilkes-Barre, which closed in 2010.
“Over the years I’ve added to it,” Pall said. “I’ve added digital programming, and I have over 12,000 watts of audio power.”
Thanks to digital programming from the Hauptwerk company, Pall explained, his hybrid organ has the potential to create sounds that duplicate, pipe for pipe, some famous European organs.
He also has recorded himself playing the piano, and if he has that recording accompany him when he plays the organ, in effect he can “play a duet with myself.”
Pall began playing the organ when he was about 6 years old, and about 10 years later, as a student at Dallas High School, he built from scratch a hand-powered busker organ, the kind of instrument you might see an Old World street musician playing. He still has the busker organ; there’s plenty of room in his studio for it.
The organist, who can be heard playing each weekend at Lake Winola United Methodist Church as well as First Congregational Church of West Pittston, also runs his own landscaping business.
If you are interested in attending his 7 p.m. Dec. 15 Advent/Christmas concert, the address is 16 Ann St. in West Pittston. And don’t forget to bring a chair.