EROI Festival 2004

The EROI Festival is fast becoming one of the most important and fruitful meetings for some of the organ world's most influential movers and shakers. It provides a fertile environment conducive to creativity and the sharing of important new ideas in the evolution of the pipe organ.
- David Higgs, ESM organ department chair

For the third annual EROI Festival, October 21-24, 2004, the School welcomed an international contingent of influential organ builders, prominent organ scholars and researchers, and important Lithuanian dignitaries.

In collaboration with the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, the Gõteborg Organ Art Center (GOArt) in Sweden, and the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester, Eastman presented its most recent EROI organ project, and the first-ever global cultural heritage project of its kind: the building of a reproduction of an historic 1776 Lithuanian organ, to be installed in Rochester's Christ Church (Episcopal) in 2008, and the simultaneous restoration of the original Adam Gottlob Casparini instrument in Vilnius, Lithuania. The new instrument will be named the Craighead-Saunders Organ, in honor of two legendary Eastman organists, David Craighead and Russell Saunders.

The EROI Festival's opening event welcomed Vygaudus Usaçkas, the Lithuanian Ambassador to the United States; Professor Kestutis Masiulis, deputy mayor of Vilnius; Rimas Chesonis, the Lithuanian honorary consul of Upstate New York; and members of the local Lithuanian-American Association. Lithuanian music and dance were demonstrated throughout the festival.

Additional EROI highlights included concerts -- including the American premiere of Hans-Ola Ericson's Organ Mass for organ and tape -- scholarly lectures, professional workshops, and presentations by nearly a dozen instrument builders. EROI also honored the late Dirk A. Flentrop, one of the most influential organ builders in North America.