Organ designer makes art on a major scale

Boston Globe

26-05-2025

C.B. Fisk Pipe organ designer Charles Nazarian points out a rose window in his scale model of an organ he designed for Church of the Little Flower in Coral Gables, Florida. (John Tlumacki/Boston Globe Staff.)
John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
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Where to find him
: www.cbfisk.com/staff/charles-nazarian/
Age
: 73
Originally from
: Watertown
Lives in
: Gloucester, in a nineteenth-century oxen barn he converted into a house.
Making a living
: In addition to his work at Fisk, Nazarian is an architectural designer of period homes and president of the
A selection of organ pipes lie in a drawer in the storage room at C.B. Fisk, Inc. (John Tlumacki/Boston Globe Staff.)
John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
Studio
: Opus 166's scale model fills a corner of his small, shared office at Fisk. Drawings, dowels, and sketches on foamcore cover a nearby worktable.
How he started
: Nazarian studied organ as an undergraduate at Trinity College. Summers, he played Harvard's organ. 'There was a day when I was practicing, and
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Nazarian had observed differences between Harvard's organ and Trinity's.
'I cornered him,' Nazarian said. 'I asked him point blank, why is it that your instrument doesn't do X, Y, or Z? He gave me a very tired look and said, 'Chuck, if you think you can do better, you should come work with us.'' After a detour to law school, Nazarian apprenticed at Fisk.
Organ designer Charles Nazarian presses down on the keys of the pipe organ for the Church of the Little Flower in Coral Gables, Florida. Each keyboard relates to roughly 1,000 pipes. (John Tlumacki/Boston Globe Staff.)
John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
What he makes
: He designs and builds scale models of organs in situ.
Nazarian emphasizes the teamwork involved. It was Fisk's approach, too.
'If you could get at the time, eight or nine people, but now 20-plus people, to agree that the scale model looked good, most likely most people would think that it was a success,' he said. 'And this is the most persnickety group of artisans you can ever imagine.'
Charles Nazarian examines designs atop the large roller board for the C.B. Fisk organ that will be installed in Church of the Little Flower in Coral Gables, Florida. (John Tlumacki/Boston Globe Staff.)
John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
How he works
: He starts with freehand sketches and moves to foamcore, which he can prop up inside his model of the church's interior. 'Once the direction seems to be working, I start turning the pipes and making the woodwork of the case,' Nazarian said.
'The core of what I do is trying to figure out what the instrument itself wants to be in the space,' he said. 'The goal is for the instrument to look as if it could have always been there.'
Gloucester 05/21/2025 Cylindrical forms are used to form the shape of organ pipes in one of the work rooms at C.B. Fisk Inc. John Tlumacki/Boston Globe Staff
John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
Advice for artists
: 'Find the best mentors you possibly can, follow your passion in what it is you most want to do,' Nazarian said, 'and combine those two pieces together.'
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