BANGOR – Dr. Kevin Birch, director of music and organist at St. John’s Roman Catholic Church and faculty member at the University of Maine, will lecture on historic E&GG Hook organs in Maine at the International Organ Festival on July 7 in Germany.

The organs were selected to illustrate key developments in organ building practice in New England during the 19th Century.

Maine is an important area for the study of the historic American pipe organ. Many beautiful instruments have been carefully restored – and many remain essentially unchanged.

Birch plays every day on one of E&GG Hook’s masterpieces – Opus 288 – built in 1860 for St. John’s Roman Catholic Church in Bangor. It is a large organ with three manuals and pedal, housed in a room with some of the finest acoustics in New England.

In addition to the lecture, Birch will perform the festival’s opening concert on June 29 on the 1870 Hook Organ, recently relocated to the Heilig-Kreuz Kirche in Berlin. The Berlin Hook had previously served in a church, now closed, in Woburn, Mass.

Birch has served as director of music at St. John’s since 1992. In addition to choir training and service playing, he directs the St. John’s Organ Society, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the church’s historic organ.