A voice two centuries in the making
By Patra Ann Taylor
For nearly 160 years, the sanctuary of the French Protestant (Huguenot) Church on Charleston’s Church Street featured but one musical instrument: the human voice. There was no organ or other instrument of any kind — just a congregation singing the Psalms in French, the way their Calvinist ancestors had since the 16th century insisted worship should sound. It was 1845 before that changed.
That year, the congregation raised its fourth sanctuary — the Gothic Revival building that still stands at 44 Queen St., designed by South Carolina architect Edward Brickell White, himself descended from Huguenot stock. And into that new sanctuary, for the first time in the congregation’s history, came an organ: a tracker-action instrument built by Henry Erben, one of the most prolific organ builders in 19th-century America. Erben’s workshop in New York sent instruments not just around the eastern United States, but throughout the New World — to churches and cathedrals across Latin America and the American West. The one he built for Charleston’s Huguenots, carved in the shape of a miniature Gothic chapel to echo the sanctuary around it, was — and is — something rarer: a direct, unbroken link to the way organs actually sounded and felt in the years before pneumatic and electric actions came along and put machinery between a player’s fingers and a pipe’s voice.
By rights, the organ should not still be here. In the century and a half since 1845, this organ has weathered a war that saw occupying troops move to strip Charleston’s churches of anything valuable, an earthquake that leveled buildings across the city, and decades of the ordinary neglect that eventually claims most things. Other congregations irreparably altered their Erbens, but the Huguenot Church’s organ survived because, again and again, someone refused to let it go — a congregation that kept choosing to restore rather than replace, culminating in a 1997 restoration that returned the organ to its original 1845 specifications, tracker action and all. Today, when organists sit down at that console, their fingers are connected — mechanically and physically — to the same instrument the congregation heard the week the doors first opened.
One member who came to love that instrument and often clambered up to the organ loft to play it was Gaye Sanders Fisher, who grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. As an organ and English major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she, as a young organist herself, found that her lifelong love of organ music took root. Gaye went on to live three full careers — musician, architectural preservationist and finally a watercolor artist with her own galleries in both Charleston and Myrtle Beach — but the marriage of two of those loves, music and preservation, drew her and her husband, Jesse, to the historic Erben at the Huguenot Church. When Gaye died in 2024, she left the church a generous endowment earmarked specifically for the organ’s care — not a memorial meant to be admired from a distance, but a gift meant to keep the instrument doing exactly what it was built to do: sing.
A group of church members set out to answer that gift properly. Rather than only fund maintenance and call it done, the newly formed Henry Erben Organ Committee decided Gaye’s endowment deserved to be heard by establishing an annual concert series that would put the organ, and the story behind it, before an audience. Last year, they found the perfect person to launch it: Jared Lamenzo, director of music at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Manhattan, and a co-founder of Friends of the Erben Organ, a nonprofit devoted to preserving and presenting that Basilica’s own 1868 Erben. Jared had first encountered Charleston’s organ in 2023, as a participant in Piccolo Spoleto’s L’Organo series, and it was love at first sight. His 2025 recital last year wasn’t just a concert; it was, everyone involved agrees, the beginning of something special.
“What we have with Jared isn’t just a booking; it’s a relationship,” states Jay Claypoole, chairman of the Henry Erben Organ Committee and a member of the church’s board of directors. “He understands this organ the way very few people alive still can. When he plays it, you can tell he isn’t just performing on it — he’s in conversation with it.”
Jared, for his part, doesn’t undersell what Charleston has. “There may be only one Erben organ in America more historically important than this one,” he says, “and that’s the one I play every week at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, which has just come home from its own restoration. So many of these instruments are gone now or altered past recognition. Charleston’s is a survivor in the truest sense — and every time I sit down at it, it has more to say to all of us … and to generations to come.”
That relationship returns on Thursday, October 15, when Jared comes back to Charleston for the series’ second concert. Presented in honor of America’s first ally as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration, the program traces three centuries of French music, from the grandeur of the Baroque through the clarity of the Classical to the lush colors of the Romantic — a repertoire built for an instrument constructed squarely within that same tradition. It is not a stretch: the muskets and gunpowder that armed the Continental Army at Saratoga, the fleet that sealed Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, came from the same France whose composers shaped the music that will fill this sanctuary that night. Joining Jared this installment of the series is New York City violinist Lavinia Pavlish, a Juilliard-trained soloist whose career has carried her from Carnegie Hall to the Cleveland Orchestra to the sanctuary of the Huguenot Church for an evening promising both virtuosity and intimacy.
The concert begins in the church at 136 Church St. promptly at 6:30 p.m., with a reception to follow in the courtyard at 44 Queen St. Admission is free and open to the public. Bring a friend who has never heard what an 1845 Henry Erben organ, restored to its original voice and kept alive by one congregation’s stubborn devotion, can really do.
This concert is presented as part of the Gaye Sanders Fisher Organ Concert Series.
