Today I took a trek to Glenn Thomas' house in Belle Mead, New
Jersey, for a private band organ concert which was part of AMICA's
2016 Convention in Princeton. His Verbeeck concert organ, "The
Glacier", has recently been expanded from a 112-key to a 125-key
organ and now includes the following additional voices and traps:
an accordion (with the Verbeeck company's name labeled on its
keyboard section), a drum kit, wood blocks and maracas as well as
another rank of pipes surrounding the accordion.
This expansion of the Verbeeck organ causes the organ to play
arrangements by Decap and other European concert organ makers.
Today Glenn showed us how the organ can sound like a Dutch street
organ and other European fairground organs. Click each of these
YouTube links to hear the expanded system in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXawc6f92dU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eGbebq9J1c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rU-_kZ_dJU
Andrew Lardieri
Voorhees, New Jersey
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