Sitting in a pew with a digital keyboard and screen in front of him, US technician John Panning is painstakingly tuning the new organ of St James’ Sydney, pipe by pipe. A colleague of Panning’s, John Streufert, is somewhere in the pipe loft, tapping away with a small hammer.

With more than 3,000 pipes to work through, Panning expects the job to take several weeks.

John Panning’s workstation, St James’ Sydney. Photo supplied

“This whole process is about adjusting the organ so that it sounds right in the acoustic of this building,” he explains. “Every space reflects some frequencies and absorbs others differently, and so we have to listen to each pipe in the space individually and in relation to all the other pipes.”

This is the final stage of the lengthy and, at times, fraught mission to replace the organ of St James’s Church with an instrument worthy of the building. The project to replace the original inhabitant – a venerable instrument, parts of which dated back to 1827 and in the grip of an irreversible decline – was launched in 2017.

In March 2018, it was announced that Dobson Pipe Organ...