Welcome. I am happy that you have dropped in. Music has been my passion and my life from a very young age. When I first heard the sound of the organ, the person making the glorious sound was Victor Togni. He was improvising something that sounded amazing and incredibly celestial. The impact he made on me as he worked his magic on the grand organ at St. Michael’s Cathedral was life defining. Today, as you work your way through this website, you will see the result of this lifelong passion. While I have spent most of my working life in business management, primarily in marketing communications for the technology and financial services industry, I have also had the privilege of serving various churches as their music director and organist. In fact, I have been doing that for over 43 years. In 2002 I went back to school full time at the University of Toronto and six years later, graduated with a master’s degree in music specializing in organ performance. Since August 2008 I have been the music director and organist at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in Toronto where I play a very fine Casavant tracker organ. In 2006 I co-founded ORGANIX, a yearly month-long music festival that showcases the pipe organ. I bring this passion of organ music, organ building and of course, the pipe organ to every Allen organ installation. I think about how sound works in a particular space and the sound that a pipe organ would create in it. Then, as Artistic Director, I go to work in developing a similar approach for installing an Allen organ. You be the judge by comparing the recording of a recent installation of a Q385 with William O’Meara performing the inaugural concert. Listen to Bill perform that concert and then again as he performs on the grand Casavant pipe organ at St. Basil’s, Opus 800. The major difference in the two recordings, apart from one being a digital organ and the other a pipe is that St. Basil’s is an extremely resonant high ceiling neo-gothic building. The space in which the Allen Q385 is installed is quite the opposite with very low ceiling and no natural resonance. Both recordings are on this web site to enable this comparison. You may also have a look at the videos that are here. Stunning performances on Allen organs await! If you need a tutorial on our MIDI product (VISTA), then we have a video for you. Allen has a new VISTA Navigator product where all the the controls are operated from an intuitive touch-screen interface. This makes it so much more intuitive to the organist. I don’t have a video of that on this site yet but hope to have one from the factory soon. If you are playing the organ in a church and need a refresher or a primer on how you might want to register for hymns or perhaps how to accompany hymns, then there is a video here for you too. You may also want to visit the Toronto Centre of the Royal Canadian College of Organists website for details about an upcoming Organ Skills Workshop September 17 and November 19. Visit www.rccotoronto.ca for details.

Whether your interest is purely as an enthusiast or you are in the market to purchase an organ, you will come to know that Glionna Mansell Corporation represents excellence in all manner of organ building, service, performance activity and scholarship. Whether you have an interest in a classical or theatre organ for your home, school, concert hall, temple or church, each installation will result in true integrity of product quality, sound and service. With nearly 100,000 successful installations throughout the world and over 500 here in Ontario alone, I am confident that you will agree, no other musical instrument has made such an impact as this on such a stage. I look forward to hearing from you and better still, to working with you in designing an organ that will deliver true pipe-organ sound and one that will suit your needs today and for generations to come.

Gordon Mansell’s bio

http://www.sorrows.ca