The Sydney Opera House Grand Organ is the world's largest mechanical tracker-action pipe organ

Pipe organ

The pipe organ is a musical instrument that produces sound by driving pressurized air through pipes selected via a keyboard. Because each organ pipe produces a single pitch, the pipes are provided in sets called ranks, each of which has a common timbre and volume throughout the keyboard compass...

 by Ronald Sharp

Ronald Sharp

Ronald William Sharp is an organ builder based in Sydney, Australia.He specialised in mechanical, tracker action instruments, and was responsible for re-introducing mechanical action to Australia. His tracker action baroque organs are particularly famous...

, located in the concert hall of Sydney Opera House

Sydney Opera House

The Sydney Opera House is a multi-venue performing arts centre in the Australian city of Sydney. It was conceived and largely built by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, finally opening in 1973 after a long gestation starting with his competition-winning design in 1957...

 in Sydney

Sydney

Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...

, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

.

It is in six divisions, five manuals plus pedals, and is the largest tracker action

Tracker action

Tracker action is a term used in reference to pipe organs and steam calliopes to indicate a mechanical linkage between keys or pedals pressed by the organist and the valve that allows air to flow into pipe of the corresponding note...

 organ ever built, with 131 speaking stops

Organ stop

An organ stop is a component of a pipe organ that admits pressurized air to a set of organ pipes. Its name comes from the fact that stops can be used selectively by the organist; some can be "on" , while others can be "off" .The term can also refer...

 served by 200 ranks of pipes consisting of 10,154 pipes

Organ pipe

An organ pipe is a sound-producing element of the pipe organ that resonates at a specific pitch when pressurized air is driven through it. Each pipe is tuned to a specific note of the musical scale...

. It is a baroque organ in style.

The contract for the construction of the organ was awarded in 1969, during the construction of the Opera House, and the organ was completed in 1979, six years after the opening of the building. Since then the electronics have been updated, including a major refit in 2002, but the musical specification is unchanged from that developed by Sharp starting in 1967.

In addition to its mechanical action, the organ can be played remotely by an electronic system, enabling it to be played from a remote console, or a performance or passage can be recorded by a system built into the keyboards and played back by the electronic action. This system is used by visiting organists to select the registration (the combination of stops) that they will use, enabling them to stand in different parts of the hall and hear the results. Its stops are entirely electronically operated and programmed.

External links

• Sydney Opera House Grand Organ specification (PDF
  Portable Document Format
  Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....
  
  , 110KB.)