Our organ is a digital organ, created especially for our church by the world-renowned company, Hauptwerk. It has the facility to reproduce the sound from more than one organ. Hauptwerk are unique in that they record each pipe of an organ three times over, in order to capture every nuance of that hand-made pipe: there are no sampled sounds at all.

Hauptwerk have installed a considerable variety of organs from around Europe, in order to bring to life a panoply of music, using organs for which the composers deliberately wrote their music. Our unique organ console, which we’ve had specially built for our church, contains a number of features not found on any other instrument, greatly facilitating the playing of such a wide variety of music.

Because this is the first Hauptwerk digital organ to be permanently installed in Cambridge, and because of the centrality of the church in the city, and the live-streaming and recording facilities of our new church, Hauptwerk have very generously installed no less than three, free additional organs for us to use. So now we have eleven organs, the earliest dating from 1745, and the most recent dating from 2008. We have organs from England, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands.

We also thought it important to honour the previous organs that our two former churches owned. Accordingly, in honour of the organ that Henry Willis built for Emmanuel, we’ve installed the stunning ‘Willis’ organ in Hereford Cathedral, and in honour of the English, two-manual pipe organ that was built at the beginning of the 20th century for St Columba’s, we’ve installed a beautiful two-manual English church organ dating from 1907.