Unless, of course, Cameron Carpenter is involved:

https://archive.is/DQQq0

https://www.marshallandogletree.com/opus8

…though it was in fact maintenance costs that did in the I.T.O., may it rest in peace…

> “It travels in a 53-foot truck,” he says. “It has workshop and carpenter facilities that travel with the organ at all times. It has a massive accoutrement of spare parts. And it has two sound systems.”

> The system is controlled by a bank of computers running software built on Linux, the open-source operating system.

> Maintenance costs are not inconsiderable.

> “Big computer mainframes don’t like to be turned off,” Carpenter says.

No, no no.

I am sorry to burst your bubble here, but that electronic organ is most definitely not a pipe organ. These are two completely different types of instruments.

It is perfectly fine to take a gigantic electronic organ, its manual, its accessories, and box it up and drop it into whatever "enclosure" you have booked for a concert. Because an electronic organ is not intricately intertwined with its enclosing building/room. That's a key differentiator.

You could really never design a "portable pipe organ" because it's simply unheard of. Like a square circle. A pipe organ's pipes are custom-fitted and custom-tuned to the space. "Transplanting" a pipe organ to a different space would probably be more difficult and error-prone than just creating a new opus altogether.

Donald Knuth's pipe organ, on the other hand, is a bona fide pipe organ, and very much deserves to be installed in its own custom-built room.

A church where I used to sing had a very lovely choir loft, and one of the music directors had been an aficionado of "Early Music", and he had caused the parish to install a pipe organ in that choir loft. Sadly, the pipe organ was more of a "theatre" type than a "church" type, and it was also maddeningly difficult to maintain with the variations in humidity and temperature up there. There was a larger-than life stained-glass window in the western wall, and San Diego's setting Sun did a number on us every evening.

So eventually, they superseded it with an electronic organ, and they did this by just plopping the new manual in the midst of the loft, even before they were able to hire a crane with a crew to dislodge the deprecated pipe organ. The electronic organ was fantastic, though, because there were two directors who knew how to play it, and it had all kinds of MIDI/programming features that placed it head-and-shoulders above the pipe organ's best days.