Mike Gaffney sits at his pipe organ's console. It has five keyboards and a pedal board. Rows of knobs, buttons, switches and couplers completely fill its front and sides. It looks like the cockpit of an airliner.

But that's just the beginning.

Behind the console are the real works of the instrument -- electric blowers, reservoirs, windchests and about 6,000 (so far) pipes arranged in ranks of various sizes, from penny whistles the thickness of soda straws to bass behemoths 16 feet tall and 18 inches around.

The whole thing, which Gaffney installed in his home off Harford Road a few years back, takes up a space maybe 40 feet wide, 60 feet long and 30 feet high, or about the size of a small car wash. Every available square inch beneath the ceiling seems crammed with wires, ducts, valves, cables, tubing, pipes and more pipes.

Some of the pipes are made of brass, some of tin or other metals. The largest ones are the wooden, 16-foot bass pipes, which are actually closer to 18 feet in length. They are so long that, in order to fit them in the space, they have to be installed lying on their sides.

"This all happened as sort of an accident," Gaffney says rather sheepishly. Then he turns back to the keyboard and bangs out a spirited rendition of Bach's "Sleepers Awake!"

With all the stops out, you feel like the sound can be heard clear to the beltway.

Mike Gaffney is a fanatical tinkerer, a dreamer, a visionary, a romantic. He has invested years of his life and no small amount of treasure to install an organ in his house, a project many might view as Quixotic.

There's something disproportionate about it, like having a pet elephant or commuting to work in a dump truck. Even J.S. Bach, the greatest organist of his day and an expert in its construction, never had a full-size pipe organ in his house.

And yet there are people all across the Baltimore region who do. There's an active group called the Free State Theater Organ Society, for example, that restores old pipe organs from the days of silent movies. Several of its members have theater organs in their homes.

But many enthusiasts don't belong to any organized group. They are just fans of the instrument or music lovers. There are any number of Web sites aimed at organ enthusiasts, but locally people seem more likely to know of each other through simple word-of- mouth.

Thinking big

What they have in common is that they are great individualists, as befits people who devote themselves to a single big idea.

And we mean BIG -- huge Moeller church organs with thousands of pipes, fancy Aeolian residential organs with self-player mechanisms originally designed for the mansions of 19th century robber barons.

These are the organs that put the king in the "king of instruments."

Nowadays, of course, the old robber barons are long gone, and a lot of church congregations have moved to the suburbs.

The old pipe organs they left behind languish in abandoned buildings or lie disassembled in thousands of pieces at some salvage yard.

Then someone like Gaffney comes along and says, hey, wouldn't it be neat to put this all back together again?

Gaffney is a lawyer by vocation. But when he's not filing court briefs, he's also a Peabody-trained church musician and choir director who confesses to a lifelong love affair with organ-playing and organ-building.

"It started when my law partner heard that this church in Littlestown, Pa., was selling its pipe organ," he explains. "It was a little tiny organ. So I went up and bought it. That was the seed."

Thus does the giant oak spring from the tiny acorn.

A couple months later, Gaffney found another bargain when the Moeller Organ Co. in Hagerstown went out of business. For years, Moeller was the largest organ company in the world.

For $2,700, Gaffney picked up about $350,000 worth of stuff from the Moeller factory -- vital parts such as pipes, windchests, reservoirs and blowers.

"The little organ was still in storage," he recalls. "I had planned to build a small lean-to for it in the yard. But after the Moeller factory sale, I got this big console and all this equipment. So I decided I needed an addition to the house."

A little more house

When the builders got finished, the addition was as big as the original house, with its own air-conditioning and heating system.

The organ's electric blower drew so much current, Gaffney had to run in a separate power line. He also padded the building with double-thick walls so as not to disturb the neighbors.

Meanwhile, he was busy figuring out how to combine the little Littlestown instrument with the Moeller monster organ. He read books on organ-building. He called up friends who had organs in their own houses.

He sorted through all 6,000 pipes, from the soda-straw penny whistles to the behemoth Big Berthas and matched each of them to its own set of mechanical enablers -- seals, actuators, pallets, sliders, pistons, languids, flues, valves and other organ esoterica.

Then he started putting everything together. He enlisted a friend, John Grosskopf, a retired millwright, to build a scaffolding inside the addition to mount the pipes on. Together they strung miles of wire cable that constituted the instrument's electrical nervous system.

A gigantic pump

To understand the immensity of his task, think of an organ as a gigantic pump connected to pipes of various sizes and shapes. Air passes from the pump, or blower, to a reservoir and then to a windchest, a large structure with holes drilled into it to fit the pipes.

The pipes are organized in sets called ranks. There's one pipe in each rank for every note on the keyboard. So an organ with a 61-note keyboard has 61 pipes in each rank.

Most organs have at least two keyboards, or manuals, in addition to the pedals operated by the organist's feet, which have their own set of pipes as well.

And, each manual usually controls several ranks of pipes, or "stops." Every stop has its own characteristic sound -- flutes, reeds, brass and strings.

Do the math: five manuals times 61 keys times 60 ranks of pipes, plus all their various permutations and combinations, plus the pedals. Pretty soon you've got a car-wash-size instrument that can produce every gradation of tone from a low hum to a screaming siren.

"It can sound gentle or powerful. It can express the whole range of human emotions," says Gaffney.

Gaffney, who lives alone in a house just a few doors away from where he grew up, says he fell in love with the organ at an early age.

"I was just drawn to it," he says. "I always wanted to play it, even though no one in my family played. Basically, this project was a group effort with some of my friends who helped me put this organ together."

Gaffney has been toiling on his instrument for years, and it's still a work in progress.

Still, he's way ahead of Mark West, an organ aficionado who lives in a renovated townhouse on Eutaw Place. He's completely restoring a century-old residential pipe organ that once graced a baronial mansion in Connecticut.

A sculptor and art restorer by trade, West doesn't consider himself a musician.

"I play very badly," he admits. "That's why I wanted an instrument that plays itself. My instrument has a player mechanism that reproduces recorded music the same way a player-piano does. I love the old organs because they are beautiful, plus I like working on mechanical things."

West has two full-sized pipe organs in his home. The main one is an Aeolian residential organ once owned by an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine Co. fortune. The other is a smaller, Baroque-style organ built by the Swedish manufacturer Hamerbourg.

For high society

"The Aeolian was the Rolls-Royce of organs for the very rich," West says. "All the upper crust of the 1920s had them. This organ, No. 1109, was built in 1909 for Douglas Alexander and his wife, for their mansion in Stamford, Conn."

West, who has researched the provenance of his instrument, is as fascinated by the social history of Aeolian organs and the wealthy people who owned them as he is by the instrument itself.

His instrument, along with many others of its type, is described in a new book by organ authority Rollin Smith, "The Aeolian Pipe Organ And Its Music," published by the Organ Historical Society.

"If you were rich enough, you had an organ rather than -- or at least in addition to -- a piano," he says. "The Alexanders, who owned this organ, also had a Steinway player-piano. Neither Alexander nor his wife were musicians, but as wealthy people they could afford to hire performers. Plus, their instruments could play pre-recorded piano and organ rolls."

The wealthy also contracted famous organists to play for their parties, West said. "Helen Gould Sheppard hired Archer Gibson, a famous organist who played for the Rockefellers at their parties in New York," he said. "Gibson would play for Sheppard every Sunday for an hour. He also recorded organ rolls for her.

"Louis Comfort Tiffany, the jewelry store magnate, was another wealthy owner of an Aeolian organ. In fact, Aeolian's list of customers included the social elite of the early part of this century -- Fords, Firestones, Rockefellers, Mellons, Fricks, Woolworths, Pulitzers and Carnegies. The industrialist J.R. Delamar even had one on his yacht," West said.

Total disrepair

West bought his instrument from a Connecticut dealer in the 1970s for $2,000. The instrument was in total disrepair, but he set it up in his New York City loft and worked on it enough to make it playable again.

When he moved to Baltimore, he brought the instrument with him and has continued to work on it over the years. Still, he has yet to restore it to his satisfaction.

"By now I've put hundreds of hours of work and thousands of dollars into it, and it's still got a ways to go," he says.

The organ console sits on the ground floor of West's townhouse while the windchests and about 2,000 pipes occupy much of the second floor. The blowers, reservoirs and electrical equipment are scattered throughout the rest of the house.

Through his research, West discovered that there once were at least three Aeolian residential pipe organs in the Baltimore area, including one built for the home of railroad tycoon Robert Garrett, an owner of the B&O; Railroad.

Garrett's mansion on Mount Vernon Place now houses the Engineers Club. West said he never found out what happened to the mighty organ that used to be there.

"Nobody really cared about preserving these organs back then, and there's still very little interest in residential organs today," he said.

"As a result, many of the old instruments have been lost or destroyed. So in a way, restoring these old instruments is a kind of historical conservation. Plus, it's fun."

Pub Date: 11/16/98