SHEBOYGAN, Wis. — At Holy Name Church in Sheboygan, 105-year-old sounds are being brought into the 21st century. When church-goers arrive to take a seat on the pews this Easter Sunday, they'll be treated to hymns from the resurrected organ in their church.
Organist Frank Trcka has been in charge of filling the church with music for the last 35 years, just a fraction of the time the organ has spent in the church.
"It's always been a beautiful instrument," Trcka said. "When I first started playing it, many more things were working on it."
The organ is an engineering feat from 1917. Each key triggers an electric current to play the right note. But after a century, it started to show its age. Wrong notes were often cued and it required weekly fixes.
"For a long time it worked just fine," Trcka said. "These last few years it's really started to deteriorate more, so we really felt like we needed to update it, update the wiring."
Fellow church member and choir singer Tim Engman noticed how much time Trcka spent creating a workaround to play every Sunday.
"Every week something would go wrong and Frank would have to come into early mass every Sunday and figure out what wasn't working and figure out how he was going to cope and work around it," Engman shared.
Engman decided to volunteer his time over the last two months, alongside a local organ repairer, to help make it more reliable.
"We needed to move forward and modernize the brains of the organ," Engman said.
That meant putting a computer in the massive instrument and rewiring the connections to work with the 21st-century 'brain.'
"To play it the first time and have everything work, all the notes play, no ciphers... it was very cool, very nice," Trcka said. "As far as the sound goes, it's the same sound. The pipes are 105 years old. They were voiced back in 1917."
All the tweaks and renovations were completed just in time for Resurrection Sunday.
"The parish has been deprived of the beautiful sound of the organ since basically the start of the year and they'll be able to hear it full throttle this weekend," Engman said.
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