diapason

“It sounds glamorous to say the president was there, but security was such an issue that it made life difficult,” Mr. Russell said in a 2006 interview with the Diapason, a publication for those who play and build pipe organs.

“In all three,” Mark Swed wrote in a review in The Los Angeles Times, “the stirring deep pedal tones produced a sonic weight that seemed to anchor the entire building, while the upper diapason notes were clear and warm. The delicate echo effects in the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s sonata spoke magically, as if coming from the garden outdoors.”

“Of course,” he told The Diapason, a publication about organs, in 2014, “any 3-year-old can figure out how to get into a piano if he really wants to, and I did.”

He tried the working ones, first the Pyramid Diapason, then the Choir Organ, then the Flute Harmonique, a high, sweet tone that shot straight to the altar.

There are basic groupings of sound, such as flutes, the human voice, trumpets and the diapason, which is the organ’s own sound.