June 2026

While listening to Louisville Public Media Classical during Kentucky Derby season, I encountered an unexpected broadcast of Horse Racing by Chinese composer Huang Haihuai. Chinese organist Mengfei Xu had arranged the erhu composition, which vividly depicts the excitement and energy of horseback riding, for her own performance on the organ. The timing felt unexpectedly symbolic—alongside Kentucky’s famous horse culture, 2026 also marks the Year of the Horse in the traditional Chinese zodiac.

From the builder

When the sanctuary at Saint Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church opened on February 2, 1930, it was filled with the sounds of a 16-rank, three-manual Austin pipe organ from two shallow chambers in the chancel. That instrument was replaced in 1980 with another Austin offering 27 ranks from a functional case in the church gallery and a further six ranks enclosed in a chancel division in the gospel-side chamber. Each instrument served its era, though their sizes and dispositions were, each in their own way, limiting.

On Sunday, November 3, 1974, Robert Sutherland Lord, associate professor and organist at the University of Pittsburgh, presented an organ recital at the New Jerusalem Christian Church (Swedenborgian) at Sandusky and Parkhurst streets on Pittsburgh’s North Side. The special service was a celebration of the centennial of the church’s pipe organ, the first in philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s long legacy of donating funds for church organs.

In the beginning

Out and about

David Aprahamian Liddle