Pipe Dreams--by the Thousands : Get ready to rumble when the Great Organs of First Congregational Church sound forth.

After the calm reassurance of the benediction and the recessional hymn comes the storm. Inside the First Congregational Church, an imposing neo-Gothic edifice at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and 6th Street in Los Angeles, organist Lloyd Holzgraf lays down the shimmering, glassy arpeggios of Charles-Marie Widor’s Toccata in F.

Suddenly, the sanctuary rumbles as thunderous bass tones wash over it from behind the pews. Heads turn to admire the ranks of pipes that engulf the gallery at the rear of the church. Visually, it’s something to behold. Sonically, it’s a wonder.

As it turns out, it’s also only a part of what Holzgraf has at his command: In side galleries, and layered into the nooks and crannies all around the church, there are thousands of pipes, organized into five organs. All are under the command of his wraparound keyboard-and-knob console. Considering the vibrations emanating from the back alone, it becomes clear that Holzgraf has the capacity to rattle rafters and bones, and, it would seem, even endanger the church’s stained glass panels.

On this Sunday, however, he merely finishes up Widor’s evocative piece with neat precision, and lifts his hands from the keyboards, cutting off the enveloping sound. Now the silence comes as a bit of a shock. Very quickly, it’s broken again, this time by a soft smattering of applause.

In the ranks of musical instruments, pipe organs are special. As a source of spectacular dynamics and myriad tones, their centuries-old technology compares with anything today’s sonics and electronic sampling can produce. They are uniquely site-specific; the environment that houses an organ plays a critical role in the character of the music it produces. And they can change--evolve--over time.

The Great Organs of First Church exemplify all these characteristics, especially when it comes to evolution. On May 21, the church held a dedication ceremony and recital in celebration of the considerable changes--expansion, mainly--that the instrument has been through over the last five years. And there is more growth to come.

After a recent noon concert (the church offers free half-hour organ concerts on Tuesdays and Thursdays), Holzgraf conducted a grand tour of the organs: two all-around instruments and three additional specialized organs, with one more, an echo organ, under construction.

Separate identical consoles, each with five manuals, or keyboards, and studded with draw-knobs, allow two people to play at the same time, or allow one organist to get close to the front or back organ, whichever set of pipes he prefers.

With the two main instruments, Holzgraf says, “I think we have our cake and are eating it, too. We have very classical sound from the west gallery [in the back of the church] and then the more romantic sound from here in the chancel.

“When you throw everything on and are playing,” he turns to the keyboards to demonstrate with a short, grand passage of Bach and consumes the empty sanctuary with music, “there’s not a sound like it around here.

“Of course, I’m prejudiced about this instrument. There are many organs that have these traits. But this is particularly novel in that we have [such] large instruments in the back, the front, and then we have sounds in the sides. We have 15,000 pipes playing right now, which is amazing,” he exclaims, with a slightly bemused expression. “We went from 11,909 to over 15,000 in just a couple of years.”

When completed, the Great Organs will consist of more than 330 ranks (sets of pipes devoted to certain sounds, like flutes or strings), 224 stops (the knobs that control which ranks will sound) and 16,901 pipes. As anyone close to the project will tell you, the two draw-knob consoles are the largest in the Western hemisphere, and the finished project will comprise one of the largest organs in the world.

The numbers make for good PR, but more is also musically better. Thomas Somerville, who has been the minister of music at the church and a professor of music at Occidental College since 1977, has been around long enough to appreciate the added dimensions of the new organs. “It’s like having this tremendous palette of colors.”

He suggests that the expansion is “comparable to the situation of an artist who has maybe had a palette of primary colors and then, all of a sudden, you’ve got all these different shades to work with.”

In a way, the creation of the Great Organs all began with Bach, that Prometheus of organ legend. In 1934, First Church founded the Los Angeles Bach Festival, which will be presented for the 62nd time in February. The event has always featured an organ recital and, over time, the need for a truly Bach-appropriate instrument became increasingly obvious.

The church’s original organ, built in 1932, has limitations, especially when it came to multiple-tone clarity. According to Holzgraf, it’s strengths are “the lush, Romantic stuff, like some of this Purvis music I played [at the noon concert]. We decided that we needed something more up-to-date for Bach, because that old organ can be a tubby old thing. It wasn’t good for playing polyphonic music, and Bach, of course, is a great polyphonic composer.”

So fund-raising began for a second organ, which was dedicated in 1969 and named for Frank C. Noone, the banker and parishioner who spearheaded the fund drive. The biggest of the five instruments in the First Congregational Church, the Noone Organ is the one whose pipes swoop impressively in the back gallery of the church.

With the addition of a second organ, things at the church just seemed to snowball. The original organ was enlarged, and then the third organ was installed. It’s an Italian-style continuo organ, designed to complement light music and small ensembles, and it went into one of the side galleries. Then in 1984, the church trustees added the Holzgraf Royal Trumpets to the collection, appending them to original organ in honor of Holzgraf’s 25th anniversary at the church.

The organist laughs now about his namesake pipes. “They’re very loud,” he says. “I don’t know if they were trying to tell me something.” He turns again to the keyboard: “It’s a sound in which single notes can be heard above both organs going full blast,” he says, illustrating with a bold set of chords through which the horns pierce, with fanfare.

Five years after the trumpets were added, the church was at it again. In 1989, it received a bequest of organ pipes that it just couldn’t refuse.

With Holzgraf, Richard Muench, the church’s organ curator, began drawing up a design that would add the gift pipes into the mix. At the same time, it was decided to spruce up the mechanics of the original organ, by then nearly 60 years old.

Muench’s sudden death in 1992 both stymied and enhanced the project. Muench had his own large collection of pipes, which his estate decided to donate to the church, so the plan was modified again to accommodate them.

Then, as word spread of the expansion project, other organ enthusiasts--and more pipes--gravitated toward the cause. Twenty-five ranks of pipes came from the Highland Park Faith United Presbyterian Church, which was being revamped. “I’m really happy about that,” says Holzgraf, “because that instrument has some really wonderful stuff in it. It’s nice because people can come here and hear a bit of their old organ.”

Of course, the ever-growing forest of pipes required a new console, another formidable design task. The two identical five-manual consoles were ordered in 1990 and finished in 1992, at a cost of roughly $400,000--all raised in yet another church fund drive. Their state-of-the-art technology enables the organist to control multiple changes of stops with a single flick of the wrist.

Acoustics being an inexact science, the organ project has entailed some elements of trial and error. “I don’t want to say that we change our minds all the time,” Holzgraf says, “but some of these pipes can be reversed or exchanged with another set of pipes in the design of the instrument. Sometimes, we really don’t know where certain pipes would be best until we try them in the church.”

The experiments were still going on when the Northridge earthquake struck, interrupting the organ expansion with repair work for a year. And last winter, the original organ was damaged by a leaking roof, which also set back the project’s timetables.

But all along, the organs have continued to be played. In addition to Sunday services, the weekly free concerts and the Bach Festival, the church hosts a yearly recital series and sponsors youth programs that bring in kids from the L.A. Unified School District by the busload. Many of the kids, says Somerville, who oversees the program, have never experienced live organ music. He likes to employ an element of surprise.

“I tell them to slowly turn around and look at the back of the church. They see those pipes back there and their jaws drop. Then Lloyd will play a cadence of chords, and they’ll applaud. Then he’ll play one of the small preludes and fugues or a big dramatic piece. Their reaction to the thing is one of awe. We get letters from them and the thing that is always their favorite is the organ, because they didn’t know such a thing existed.”

As of now, plans call for the last pipe to be in place on the Great Organs of the First Congregational Church sometime in 1996, but who knows. “This is an important instrument,” Holzgraf says. “It’s very popular at the church, a great asset. When organs get to be so big as this”--he smiles--”you always want to improve it.

And after all, there is still some empty wall space inside the church.