When Michael Barone boarded a plane from Minnesota to Rochester in February, he didn't know exactly what he was getting into. Barone, the host of the nationally syndicated public radio show "Pipedreams," felt pretty confident he would hear adrenaline-pumping performances from Eastman School of Music faculty and students during a three-day festival. But he wasn't sure if anyone else would show up.

"In November I was invited to Massachusetts for a live event," he said over the phone. But organizers didn't publicize it. "It's dispiriting to see a huge place with only a hundred people there."

Nonetheless, Barone crossed his fingers and stepped on the plane. He travels the country, using his celebrity to generate sizzle for live performances of organ music, which get professionally recorded and nationally broadcast.

When he arrived at Sacred Heart Cathedral on Flower City Park for the first concert on a Friday night, the parking lot was full. The place was jammed with roughly 1000 people, drawn by the church's spectacular new Fritts' Halloran All-Saints Dutch-influenced organ.

"Afterwards," Barone says, "I thought, Gosh, have we blown our wad? People will be too exhausted for the next concert."

He needn't have worried. The next night 500 people crowded East Avenue's Christ Church to hear the newly dedicated Craighead-Saunders Casparini 33-stop organ, a vision in blue, white, and gold.

"We had to get extra chairs," Barone said. "Then we had to get extra, extra chairs."

But it wasn't over. For the final Sunday afternoon performance, organists were scheduled to play the humongous Wurlitzer 4/23 theatre organ at the Auditorium Theatre, with its 1619 pipes and myriad sound effects: trumpets, clarinet, saxophone, drums, shimmering strings, and marimbas.

Barone worried when he woke up on Sunday to blue skies and sunshine. But even with unusually fine weather, 1300 people filled the hall. That's three times the usual number. The event swelled membership in Rochester's graying Theater Organ Society.

"Rochester is different from other American cities," Barone said after the festival ended. "There's an energy and focus of talent that's caused an elevated awareness of what the organ is and what it can be."

Rochester is home to several marvelous instruments already, and a growing group of enthusiasts is excited about the possibility that the city may become an international destination for important pipe organs and their fans.

In a world where the latest iGadget comes in black, white, red, and green with cellular broadband, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 60-gigabyte coffeemaker, Rochester's churches, museums, and schools are quietly investing, over time, tens of millions of dollars in a technology that dates back to the ancient Greeks. Inventors created the first, primitive pipe organs for military campaigns; their eerie sounds scared enemies away.

"Think about what a new exit on the Thruway costs," says David Higgs, chair of the organ department at the Eastman School of Music. "How long will that last?" With proper care, he says, the instruments appearing in local churches and galleries might sing for another 300 to 500 years.

"People joke with me," he says, "that organists just like the feeling of power when they play the organ. But that's not true. It's not all about power."

More and more, he says, he is growing to love the quiet sound of wind passing through pipes, and the delicacy of the instrument. When pressed by church committees to justify the staggering expense, Higgs speaks passionately about truth, beauty, and the pipe organ's power to produce the most beautiful sounds on the planet.

But ultimately, he says, an organ exists to support people.

"A pipe organ is all about breath and life," he says. "It imitates the human voice in all of its flaws and limitations."

Higgs divides his time teaching, performing, and working to make Rochester the pipe organ capital of North America. "George Eastman started it," he explained over a salad at the Orange Glory Café on East Avenue. In the 1920's, according to Higgs, George Eastman outfitted Rochester with the best organ school and biggest theater organ in the world (the instrument was dismantled in the 1960's). Theater organs were, at the time, integral to silent films. During the first few decades of the 20th Century, Rochester sailed through a Golden Age of organ construction, including the installation of a ground-breaking E.M. Skinner at St. Paul's Episcopal Church and the University of Rochester's Aeolian-Skinner Organ at Strong Auditorium, a ginormous instrument crafted in 1937 by G. Donald Harrison, the Frank Lloyd Wright of organ builders.

"Rochester has always been on the cutting edge," Higgs says.

During the mid-50's and -60's, organ models developed a brilliant, thin-sounding edge, based on a new aesthetic. Pipes that used to be hidden away popped out into view, as conspicuous as stained-glass windows. Technology dazzled church organ committees. As construction workers razed neighborhoods to dig the Inner Loop, some Rochester churches ripped out historic instruments and installed cheaper electronic ones that might last a generation, and could not be repaired.

Then along came John Brombaugh. The American pipe organ builder became deeply interested in remaining 17th and 18th century instruments. After touring Europe in 1971, he returned to the States to build organs the old-fashioned way. He rejected plywood. He installed wedge bellows - huge, mechanical lungs that make organs sound alive. He hand-forged and hammered pipes when other builders were pouring metal into molds. In 1972 he built the first American pipe organ based on historical standards.

That organ wound up in Rochester for a while, at Sacred Heart Cathedral, before being purchased by California State University at Sonoma. (A second Brombaugh instrument, built for Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Toledo, recently arrived at St. Michael's Church in Rochester, where it will play until its new owners can move it to California.) Ultimately, Brombaugh's success sparked a wave of enthusiasm for building historically informed instruments.

With pipe organs, it's all about the maker. In the way that an object by Tiffany is rare and a print by Picasso is unmistakable, an instrument by Charles Brenton Fisk is priceless.

On a recent Wednesday morning, organist Lee Wright slid onto the organ bench at the Downtown United Presbyterian Church on Fitzhugh Street and moved his hands over three black keyboards that ascended like stairs on the console.

"You have to think positive thoughts," he said with a short laugh. Wright pulled out wooden stops sticking out like bobbins from multi-colored panels. The sound of rushing wind poured out of the pipes. Pulling another stop, he created the sound of a loon's call, haunting and quivery. He pulled another: a sweet pan pipe floated out and caressed the ceiling.

"I'm not supposed to do this," he said, pulling out more stops and jamming his fingers and feet onto the console. "There are people working in the office next door." Three deafening chords thundered out of the case. The floor shook.

Wright is the organist and music director at DUPC, and he plays the last organ ever finished by Charles Brenton Fisk, the man who founded one of the most prestigious organ companies in the country. At the time it was installed in 1982, it was the largest mechanical action organ in Western New York with 39 stops and nearly 3000 pipes. Those pipes tower over the congregation, front and center and in your face, jutting two stories high over the front altar.

Wright sometimes talks about it as though it's a person.

"If you're nervous, she tells you. If you play too loud, she tears your head off. You have to be with it," he says.

According to ESM's David Higgs, the DUPC Fisk is a radical instrument, just one that makes Rochester an important destination for organists. In 2001, Higgs and his colleagues at the Eastman School set out to create a city of unusual instruments like the Fisk that would attract students, fans, and scholars from around the world. To do that, they founded the Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative, or EROI (pronounced "ee-roy."). It's a long-term effort, and by Higgs's reckoning, the group is at least one-third of the way there. So far, EROI has fostered two unique instruments.

The first, a Baroque instrument in the Fountain Court at the Memorial Art Gallery, is the only full-size antique Italian organ in North America. It was rescued in pieces from a junk shop by a German organ builder. Reassembled in 2005, its 600 pipes and gilded case sing in a variety of rich, textured voices that surprised experts with its sweetness.

EROI's second achievement was the $2.8 million, scientifically based replica of an organ by a famous East Prussian designer named Adam Gottlob Casparini at Christ Church on East Avenue. It's the first organ in the United States constructed in the late 18th Century style as a research project, and it has astonishing attention to detail. Builders used hand-hammered nails. The case glows like a Baroque theater set, glued together with ground rabbit entrails, stroked with egg tempura, and gilded and burnished by German painters with a battalion of volunteers.

"A historical organ like that is like a dinosaur tooth," Higgs says. "You take a piece of that and you can reconstruct a whole culture."

Christ Church's Craighead-Saunders Organ was dedicated last October. Organ maker Munetaka Yokota is still tuning each of the instrument's 1800 pipes. If America slides into an energy crisis, you'll be happy to know it will still work. Every Sunday, its bellows are powered by a person pressing wooden levers with his feet in a kind of 18th century elliptical machine, behind the scenes.

Higgs and his colleague, Stephen Kennedy, music director at Christ Church, could not be more pleased with its clarity and sound. Kennedy spends rehearsal time getting his choir to mesh with the instrument. Facing singers during a recent session, he started conducting a motet by Thomas Tallis. The voices swelled, the organ sang, but a few singers slid in pitch.

Kennedy stopped the music. "Have your voice make friends with the organ," he coached. "Don't compete with it. You won't win." He started the piece again. Voices and pipes spooled out, a single, glittering ribbon of colors.

About a mile away, organist Robert Poovey walked into the dark sanctuary of St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Westminster Road. He flicked on a few lights and slid behind the console of an organ boxed in behind the choir pews. The pipes were nowhere in sight.

Poovey sat down and pressed a key. A hollow whoosh came out from an unseen pipe. He depressed another key. A nasty whine snarled and choked. Poovey turned, stuck out his tongue, and made a face.

"This is a wonderful, wonderful old lady who desperately needs a facelift," he said.

Poovey came back to Rochester in 2007 as music director of St. Paul's, assuming one of the top church positions in the city from long-time director David Fetler. He inherited a watershed instrument, a 1927 E.M. Skinner that, in its day, broke new ground for a widely respected organ builder. For the first time, Skinner included the stop "flauto miravilis," producing a sweet, dark tone named "wonderful flute." Other bells and whistles make Poovey's old lady an uncommonly versatile instrument, a period piece that he says is irreplaceable.

But since the 1920's, most of the original pipes have vanished, and those that replaced them are caked and clogged with dirt. A good cleaning won't help. The inner workings of the organ include weakening magnets, deteriorating leather pouches, and mechanics patched up with vacuum hose.

"[Former organist] David Craighead was a very good steward," Poovey says. "But it just sounds tired."

A couple of months ago, St. Paul's had a decision to make: whether or not to replace, refurbish, or restore an instrument that one could argue is the equivalent of a Tiffany window or Stradivarius violin.

In January, after serious debate, the vestry - the church's governing body - voted to commit $1.2 million dollars to completely restore the Skinner. The painstaking work will start in the middle of 2010 and finish in the fall of 2011. The decision to spend so much as the country flounders in recession represents a leap of faith, but Poovey says the congregation felt the organ needed the same amount of TLC as the rest of their historic church. 

"They see it as a monument," he says. "It's a color machine. And when it's done I'm looking forward to seeing how differently the organ is going to want to be played."

George Eastman's desire for a city filled with glorious organs breathes with new oxygen from EROI. The wave of interest in historic instruments fueled by American builder John Brombaugh shaped a generation of performers and designers in Europe. One of them was Hans Davidsson. In 1989, he helped establish an organ center for research in performance practice in Sweden at the Göteborg Organ Art Center. In 2001, he came to Rochester to work with David Higgs on doing pretty much the same thing here. Given Brombough's important organ that was initially installed at Sacred Heart, in that way, the story of pipe organs in Rochester completed a circle.

Now EROI's sights are set on the renovation of an early 20th Century E.M. Skinner organ housed in the Eastman School's Kilbourn Hall. Its completion will mark the end of a 10-year effort, Higgs says, and it will give students a place to practice and perform 19th Century French Romantic music.

In the meantime, Rochester's important organs are already inspiring contemporary composers and craftsman to experiment with new ways to push air through pipes.

"Maybe this is just a warm-up period for the future," Higgs says.

Brenda Tremblay hosts radio broadcasts by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on Classical 91.5 WXXI-FM.   She blogs about music at wxxi.org.

Upcoming organ performances

Friday, May 1: Organist Dr. H. Ricardo Ramirez, director of music at the Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, plays the Halloran-All Saints Organ at Sacred Heart Cathedral, 296 Flower City Park. 7 p.m. Free. 254-3221, cathedralcommunity.org.

Sunday, May 3: Going for Baroque, 25-minute presentations and mini-recitals on the Italian Baroque organ by students from the Eastman School of Music. Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave. 1 & 3 p.m. Free with gallery admission. 276-8900, mag.rochester.edu.

Sunday, May 3: Student recital with Anne Lam. Downtown United Presbyterian Church, 121 N. Fitzhugh St. 5 p.m. Free. 274-1000, esm.rochester.edu.

Monday, May 4: Student degree recital with Mark Edwards, organ, on the Craighead-Saunders Organ. Christ Church, 141

East Ave. 3:30 p.m. Free. 274-1000, esm.rochester.edu.

Tuesday, May 12: Martin Ellis plays the mighty 4/23 Wurlitzer theater pipe organ at the Auditorium Theatre, 885 E Main St. 7:30 p.m. $15. 544-6595, theatreorgans.com/rochestr.

Sunday, May 24: "Eastman at St. Michael's." William Osinski, trumpet; Daniel Aune, organ. St. Michael's Roman Catholic Church, 869 N Clinton Ave. 2:30 p.m. Free. 274-1564.