Immanuel Church's organ comes out of deep sleep

By Rebecca Mowbray

JAKARTA (JP): The organ at the Immanuel Church in Central Jakarta may be one of the oldest and largest in Asia, but it usually sits silent.

Organ players are not exactly roaming the streets of Jakarta looking for work.

But Friday night three young Jakarta organists pumped the 1,116 pipes of the organ with air, filling the church with sound.

The three performers, Christina J.A. Mandang, Maria I.B. Siegers and Raoul Rehatta Alhambra, have made the organ their instrument of choice, even though they can't practice at home, it's not a hit at parties and the job outlook for organists is bleak.

Still, Mandang, 24, is passionate about what she calls the "king of instruments".

"I put my whole concentration together with the organ and the music. I breathe together with the music," she said. "You become one with the instrument -- we are one big instrument working together."

That is true. The organ itself is some five meters high and three meters wide -- a behemoth looming over the pulpit of the round 157-year-old Protestant church. Mandang sits alongside the mighty organ on the balcony facing two keyboards, 21 knobs and a litany of foot pedals.

She is dwarfed by it but not overwhelmed. Her feet skate along the pedals, and her hands massage one keyboard each, sometimes moving in opposite directions. Her body arches gracefully with the music, breathing visibly with the organ and the notes it produces. All are in harmony.

The air being expelled from the large pipes is audible, adding to the atmosphere of the organ music. The organ is a versatile instrument, sometimes reminiscent of a horror movie, other times sounding like a Christian wedding, with a range that can go as high as the voice of a piccolo.

Mandang and her fellow performers played a series of songs Friday night that progressed from the baroque to the romantic before a packed audience, a rare treat for organists who have a choice of playing on only four organs in Jakarta.

The organ at the Immanuel Church has its own unique history. Built in 1841 in Holland, it spent a year in the cargo-hold of a sailing vessel enroute to the East Indies (Indonesia), and then another year being assembled and built into the church itself.

Mandang, who studied under the direction of local theologian Harry van Dop, has followed her passion for the mightiest of instruments back to the birthplace of the Immanuel Church's organ: Holland. She is now studying at the Rotterdam Conservatory and hopes to become a concert organist and organ teacher.

She concedes that it will be difficult to pursue her career in Indonesia.

Meanwhile, organ music is undergoing a new twist in Jakarta. Van Dop, Mandang's teacher and the caretaker of the Immanuel organ, has taught several people to make organs of bamboo. These bamboo organs will be the focus of a concert on Friday evening at the Erasmus Huis in South Jakarta.