I recently took possession of a new 112-key concert organ, "The
Glacier", built by Johnny Verbeeck in Belgium.  The acquisition
marked the end of a three-year process to either find or build new
an organ capable of playing a wide variety of music.  In the end,
it made more sense to work with Johnny Verbeeck to design an organ
with the capabilities I was looking for enhanced by Johnny's
knowledge and advice as a 4th generation organ designer and builder.

According to Verbeeck, this organ is one of the largest and most
elaborate fairground or concert organs built in Europe in many years.
The final result was an organ that indeed delivered the supreme
musical and visual experience!  A picture of the organ is on the
cover of the current AMICA Bulletin [Vol. 50, Nr. 1, January-
February 2013].

The organ has 17 automatic registers with 557 pipes capable of playing
a wide variety of classical, popular, dance hall, and fairground music.
While it was traditionally built in the spirit of Gavioli and Marenghi
and has an internal key frame for book music based on the Carl Frei
92-key scale, it also has MIDI capability to enable a wide and more
affordable diverse selection of music.  In that regard, I am working
with well-regarded arrangers to provide transcriptions of vintage book
arrangements, compositions from more contemporary arrangers from the
last few decades, and more modern music to please contemporary
listeners.

Details of the organs build -- its five chromatic sections
(3 melody, accompaniment, bass), registers, pipes, percussion,
façade, pictures, video and audio clips -- are here:
http://www.nickelodeonhouse.net/Concert-Organ.html 

Videos of this organ can also be accessed on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/wurlitzer166   Audio clips are also
available on Soundcloud here:  https://soundcloud.com/glenn-thomas-6 

Along with the Wurlitzer 165/166 band organ detailed previously on
MMD, in other journal articles, and the above Internet sites, the
two organs and their extensive music repertoire provide a wide variety
of large organ enjoyment.

Glenn Thomas
Princeton, New Jersey
wurlitzer165@comcast.net.geentroep [delete ".geentroep" to reply]