Schoenstein & Co., Benicia, CA, welcomed 150 guests for a factory Open House in celebration of the three-manual, 32-rank organ for Church of the Redeemer, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.  Among those hearing the organ for the first time were Music Director Michael Murray and members of the Parish with friends from Chestnut Hill, which is a suburb of Boston.  Both Michael Murray and Stuart Forster, who presides at the Schoenstein organ of Christ Church, Cambridge, entertained the crowd with brilliant demonstrations of the organ’s tonal variety despite the decidedly non-Anglican acoustic of the factory and the lack of two 32′ stops and some 16′ stops on their way to the church already.  Visitors enjoyed refreshments and a first look at the newly expanded pipe shop with its specialized tools and equipment.  Also in the factory for inspection were organs destined for Silverado, San Jose, and Sonoma, California.

Benicia, CA – Schoenstein & Co. has announced a new website, easy to navigate and fully responsive for mobile devices and tablets.  Many new features have been added including an opus list with immediate access to any stop list.  The instruments are sorted by state, name and denomination of client, number of voices (stops) and number of ranks.  The list is also searchable: to find all instruments in a particular city, for example.  The stop lists are in a flip book format that also provides immediate access to all stop lists in date order.

The completion of this project has been delayed due to the foot dragging of company president, Jack Bethards, who detests computers, won’t have one in his office, and hoped this “on-line craze” would just fade away.  However, he was given an Amazon card, located a biography of violist-composer Eric Coates, received it from London in a week and is starting to change his mind.