What is at stake

A major project to renovate and refresh Convocation Hall, secretly prepared, will desecrate the university's 1978 Memorial Casavant Organ by removing it permanently. In other words, the University of Alberta plans to obliterate a significant WWI War Memorial dedicated in 1925, rededicated in 1945 and again in 1978 along with 101 years of organ pipes breathing and sounding in Convocation Hall. 

The solution to this problem is to prevail upon the President of the University of Alberta, Bill Flanagan, to pause closure of the hall on April 30th, less than one month after the news broke. We ask that he reverse the decision to permanently remove the Memorial Organ that graces Convocation Hall with beauty of architecture, sound and historic significance; to respect the generations of university students, faculty and officials who chose to remember the fallen with a monument which offers cultural value, solace, majesty, lament and joy through its 36 stops, 51 ranks and nearly 2500 pipes. We ask President Flanagan to consult, to compromise and to revise the revitalization plans with a decision to preserve the Memorial Organ.  

It is heartbreaking for me to think that future generations of students, faculty, members of the Edmonton arts community, public and beyond will not be able to hear, to study, to research, to compose, to perform on or to perform with this Brunzema Casavant, a rare and significant tracker action organ in Canada, the first of its kind in the West. Opus 3358 helped make the University of Alberta a frontrunner in BMus, MMus and DMus organ performance programs. I was the first DMus graduate at the University of Alberta in 1988. On faculty from 1988 to 2014 I had the great honour and pleasure of teaching organ students in all three programs as well as second studies and music majors until 2014. How deeply satisfying it is to see how they have built their careers having had the the opportunities to learn on and about the 1978 Casavant. It is my dream and sincere hope that once budgets allow, an organist will be hired to serve the university again and the organ programs will be reinstated. 

Marnie Giesbrecht

Professor Emerita

University of Alberta