Reading Létourneau Opus and Action Records

As read on 2 September 2026, the Opus List on the firm’s website has exactly seven columns, headed Opus, Client, Location, Country, Ranks, Manuals and Action, on both of its two pages. Traversed on that date it returned 142 rows: 100 on the first page, from Opus 143 down to Opus 43, and 42 on the second, from Opus 42 down to Opus 1, where a Previous control and no Next control end the series. One number between 1 and 143 has no row, Opus 103, and the list gives no explanation of the gap.

The lowest row is Opus 1, Conservatoire de musique de Hull, Québec, 5 ranks, 2 manuals, ‘Mechanical’; the highest on that date is Opus 143, Kirk in the Hills, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 86 ranks, 4 manuals, ‘Electric Slider’. Between them sit four-rank continuo instruments such as Opus 13 and Opus 29, Opus 35 at Trois-Rivières at 101 ranks, and Opus 97 in Houston, which the firm’s history page calls its largest instrument to date at 144 ranks, so a number says nothing about size on its own.

The list publishes no total-entry count, no revision date, no completeness statement and no inclusion criteria, so 142 rows is a reader’s count on a stated date, not a figure the firm publishes. Its introductory sentence says only that ‘More than 140 new Létourneau pipe organs have been designed and built in our workshops.’ The site footer carries the copyright year 2022 while the highest row is scheduled by its client for installation in 2027, so the footer year is not a revision date for the table. The list also carries no Stops column, no pipe count, no stoplist and no date; the firm’s per-instrument page for Opus 143, read on 2 September 2026, gives a full stoplist and an action label but no rank, stop or manual count and no year.

No build year, completion year, dedication year or any other date appears in any of the 142 rows as traversed on 2 September 2026, and the firm’s other instrument index, the opus map, publishes opus number, client, location and a map link, and no date either. The firm’s separate Rebuilds and Restorations List runs the opposite way, with Restored in and Originally built in columns, so a reader can date a Létourneau rebuild from the builder’s own site but cannot date a new Létourneau instrument from it.

A Létourneau opus number therefore identifies an instrument and does not date it, and it should not be turned into a year by interpolation between neighboring numbers. Dated third-party records of mixed authority place individual numbers in broadly ascending order — Opus 43 in 1995, Opus 50 and Opus 80 in 2002, Opus 95 in 2004, Opus 97 in 2005, Opus 112 in 2007 — but Opus 50 and Opus 80, thirty numbers apart, share 2002, so even the order is only broadly chronological.

An opus number is in public use before the instrument exists. The Diapason announced Opus 139, for Marvin United Methodist Church, Tyler, Texas, as a signed contract on 19 February 2023 with completion projected for the first quarter of 2025, and Opus 140, for St. John’s Lutheran Church, San Antonio, as a signed contract on 6 July 2023 with completion projected for late 2025. Opus 143 itself belongs to an instrument its client, Kirk in the Hills, describes on its own project page as being built and tested at the workshop through July 2027 and installed between July and December 2027, so as the list stood on 2 September 2026 its highest row was an instrument not yet built.

When the firm assigns a number is a different question, and as read on 2 September 2026 the firm’s published material answers it nowhere: the five ‘About the pipe organ’ articles say nothing about opus numbering, and neither The Diapason’s May 2026 cover feature on Opus 138 nor its December 2024 item on Opus 100 states a rule. Dated announcements show those numbers in public use at contract stage; they do not establish when each number first appeared or show the firm’s internal practice, which stands unpublished rather than inferred.

A year for a Létourneau instrument comes from a named source outside the firm’s list and should carry that source and the event it records. The Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec catalogues ‘Orgue (Létourneau, Opus 15, 1987)’ at Saint-Césaire. A Pipedreams profile places Opus 43 at Pembroke College Chapel, Oxford, in 1995, and a Birmingham community-history wiki places Opus 45 at Samford University as complete by the chapel’s dedication in October 1995. Michigan State University’s dedication program dates Opus 134 to 10 April 2022, and a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints newsroom account dates the inaugural concert of Opus 100 at Brigham Young University to 11 March 2025. Dedication, installation, completion and contract are different events, and these sources do not use them consistently.

These pairings cover about a dozen of the 142 rows, come from sources of mixed authority, and mostly rest on matching institution and builder rather than on an opus number the third-party source states. They show how dating evidence works for this builder; they are not a table and license no date for a row that lacks one.

As read on 2 September 2026, the Action column uses seven verbatim strings: ‘Mechanical’, ‘Electric Slider’, ‘Electro-pneumatic’, ‘Electric’, ‘Mechanical & Electric Slider’, ‘Mechanical / Electric Slider’ and ‘Electric Slider / Electro-pneumatic’. ‘Electric’ appears on one row, Opus 65 at St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney. The 42 rows from Opus 42 down to Opus 1 add no label to that set, and the firm’s rebuilds list uses at least one label, ‘Tubular pneumatic’, that appears nowhere on the Opus List. Quote the label as published: it is the Action column value for that row, not a technical description of the instrument.

A compound action label names two actions joined by an ampersand or a slash — Opus 100 at Brigham Young University is ‘Mechanical & Electric Slider’, Opus 118 at the Cathedral of Christ the Light, Oakland, is ‘Electric Slider / Electro-pneumatic’ — and the list states no rule for when each connector is used.

Neither of the two named sources that describe a compound-label Létourneau instrument in any detail says which divisions carry which action: The Diapason’s item of 16 December 2024 on Opus 100 gives stops, ranks and pipes and nothing about key or stop action, and the firm’s per-instrument page for Opus 138, read on 2 September 2026, publishes a divisional stoplist with no division-by-division action statement. Which parts of the instrument each named action applies to is not stated by either source, so report the label exactly as it stands and assign no division to either action.

The Opus List page carries no legend, glossary or footnote defining any label, as read on 2 September 2026, and the firm’s ‘About the pipe organ’ section on the same date holds five articles, none a glossary of action types and none using the term ‘Electric Slider’. What the firm does publish is a partial lay explanation: its general-information article says that in a mechanical key action or tracker organ the keyboards are mechanically linked to pallets that permit or block wind to the ranks of a given note in each division, and that with modern electric action chests the pallets or pneumatic valves are controlled electrically through an electronic switching system. That text separates mechanical from electric control; it does not define ‘Electric Slider’ or electro-pneumatic action and is not keyed to the list’s labels.

One dated account describes the hardware behind one instrument carrying the label. For Opus 138 at Saint Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church, New Orleans — ‘Electric Slider’, 79 ranks, 4 manuals on the list — The Diapason’s cover feature of May 2026 states that the chests’ pulldown magnets and slider solenoids are wired to output panels by Solid State Organ Systems. That is what the firm built under the label on one named project, in a builder-derived account; it is not a definition and does not establish that every ‘Electric Slider’ row shares the construction.

Three consecutive rows of the firm’s own list carry three different labels: Opus 43 at Pembroke College Chapel, Oxford, 25 ranks, two manuals, ‘Mechanical’; Opus 44 at Bush Hill Presbyterian Church, Alexandria, Virginia, 22 ranks, two manuals, ‘Electric Slider’; Opus 45 at Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama, 29 ranks, two manuals, ‘Electro-pneumatic’. The table gives no years, so proximity alone does not prove the three contemporaneous, but a Pipedreams profile places Opus 43 in 1995 and a Birmingham community-history wiki places Opus 45 in the same year: two instruments independently placed in one calendar year carry two different labels.

The same holds at similar sizes among United States instruments: Opus 128 at the Church of St. Joseph, New York, 39 ranks and three manuals, is ‘Mechanical’, while Opus 143, 86 ranks and four manuals, is ‘Electric Slider’. The lower page of the list reads as predominantly ‘Mechanical’, yet it also carries Opus 35 at Trois-Rivières, 101 ranks, as ‘Electric Slider / Electro-pneumatic’; that reading is of the Action column, not a proportion the firm publishes, and it fixes no period because the rows carry no dates. The documented action category of a Létourneau instrument is the label on its own row, and nothing about the brand predicts it.

James B. Hartman wrote in The Diapason in 2003 that the great majority of Létourneau organs have mechanical action using classical principles found in European instruments. The firm’s list as read on 2 September 2026 labels several of its largest recent United States instruments ‘Electric Slider’ or ‘Electric Slider / Electro-pneumatic’, among them Opus 97 in Houston at 144 ranks, Opus 138 in New Orleans at 79 and Opus 143 at 86. The two statements are more than twenty years apart and describe different periods; they do not contradict each other and should not be merged into one claim about what Létourneau builds.

The Diapason’s cover feature on Opus 118 in Oakland, an instrument it describes as installed in 2010, records that a tracker instrument was judged impossible given the cathedral’s layout, so electric action was used: the choice was made for a building on a project, and the list records only its result.

The Opus List publishes a Ranks column and no Stops column, so it supplies a rank count and never a stop count, and the two are different numbers for the same instrument: The Diapason gives Opus 137 as 59 stops and 60 ranks, and an open-edit encyclopaedia listing gives Opus 43 as 22 stops and 26 ranks and Opus 50 as 96 stops and 122 ranks. A rank figure from the builder’s list should never be reported as a number of stops, nor a stop count written back into the Ranks column.

Rank figures also differ between sources: the list gives Opus 43 as 25 ranks where the encyclopaedia listing gives 26, and Opus 112 at Raleigh as 97 where the listing gives 98, and neither source says whether digital or borrowed voices are counted. Record the figure, the source and the date together.

A rank figure in the list can be a prepared-for maximum rather than an as-installed count. For Opus 140 at St. John’s Lutheran Church, San Antonio, the list shows 60 ranks with the Manuals value ‘3+3’; the commissioning church states 56 stops and 52 ranks, expandable to 64 stops and 60 ranks, and The Diapason’s contract announcement of 6 July 2023 gave 52 ranks. The list’s 60 matches the church’s expanded figure, not its initial one — a match of figures on one instrument, not a statement by the firm that the column carries prepared-for capacity, and the list publishes no note saying so.

Three further row forms need care. The ‘3+3’ manuals value is unexplained by the list and should not be paraphrased as six manuals or two consoles on the list’s strength alone. Opus 65 at St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, labelled ‘Electric’, publishes a dash in place of a rank figure, alongside Opus 64 at the same cathedral at 59 ranks; the dash should not be read as zero ranks or as a digital instrument. Separate opus numbers also go to different instruments in one building and to small continuo organs — the Cathedral of St. Andrew, Grand Rapids, holds Opus 77, 78 and 79, and four-rank continuo organs carry Opus 71, 72, 85, 90 and 99 — so an opus-row count should not be presented as a count of client projects.

A row also says nothing about whose pipework is inside the instrument: by dated announcements, Opus 139 incorporates refurbished Kimball pipework from 1941, and Opus 140 and Opus 143 each reuse M.P. Möller pipework, without any of the three appearing on the firm’s rebuilds list. When the question becomes who built what inside a composite instrument, it leaves this page for Identifying Létourneau Rebuilds of Other Builders’ Organs.