Organist Quotes

The organist was almost at the end of the anthem’s long introduction, and as the crescendo increases the cathedral began to glitter before my eyes until I felt as if every stone in the building was vibrating in anticipation of the sweeping sword of sound from the Choir. The note exploded in our midst, and at that moment I knew our creator had touched not only me but all of us, just as Harriet had touched that sculpture with a loving hand long ago, and in that touch I sensed the indestructible fidelity, the indescribable devotion and the inexhaustible energy of the creator as he shaped his creation, bringing life out of dead matter, wresting form continually from chaos. Nothing was ever lost, Harriet had said, and nothing was ever wasted because always, when the work was finally completed, every article of the created process, seen or unseen, kept or discarded, broken or mended – EVERYTHING was justified, glorified and redeemed.

No organist played a Magnificat but the wind in the flue chimney, no choir sang a Nunc Dimittis but the wuthering gulls, yet I fancy the Creator was not displeazed.

Immoral women do not exist", said the organist. "That this only a superstition. On the other hand there exist women who sleep thirty times with one man, and women who sleep once with thirty men.

Westray remembered the organist’s manner in the church, and began to suspect that his mind was turned. The other read his thoughts, and said rather reproachfully: “Oh no, I am not mad—only weak and foolish and very cowardly.

In the end, it was a Bach motet that shooed me away—choristers weren’t damnably bad, but the organist’s only hope for salvation was a bullet through the brain. Told him so, too—tact and restraint all well and good in small talk, but one mustn’t beat around any bush where music is concerned.

It is sad when man’s unhappiness veils from him the smiling face of nature. The promise of the early morning was maintained. The sky was of a translucent blue, broken with islands and continents of clouds, dazzling white like cotton-wool. A soft, warm breeze blew from the west, the birds sang merrily in every garden bush, and Cullerne was a town of gardens, where men could sit each under his own vine and fig-tree. The bees issued forth from their hives, and hummed with cheery droning chorus in the ivy-berries that covered the wall-tops with deep purple. The old vanes on the corner pinnacles of Saint Sepulchre’s tower shone as if they had been regilt. Great flocks of plovers flew wheeling over Cullerne marsh, and flashed with a blinking silver gleam as they changed their course suddenly. Even through the open window of the organist’s room fell a shaft of golden sunlight that lit up the peonies of the faded, threadbare carpet. But inside beat two poor human hearts, one unhappy and one hopeless, and saw nothing of the gold vanes, or the purple ivy-berries, or the plovers, or the sunlight, and heard nothing of the birds or the bees.

C. P. Snow, the son of a church organist, recalled in 1940 being reassured by listening to Churchill. “He was an aristocrat, but he would cheerfully have beggared his class and friends, and everyone else too, if that was the price of the country coming through. We believed it of him. The poor believed it, as his voice rolled out into the slum streets, those summer evenings of 1940.

One cannot deny that Duruflé's improvisations and compositions had their source and their summit in a climate of belief. And to that extent it may be said that his work as a liturgical organist 'becomes a real meditation. There is not merely a an auditory delight, as refined as it might be, and God knows that Maurice Duruflé was refined, but an interior elevation that disposes the heart and spirit of others to the the infinite encounter, to the radiance of divine contact.

Much of the music of the north European Baroque is familiar to organists, but it is often played and registered in a static and lackluster manner. This music is exuberant; the big pieces were meant to be exciting and even startling, and the small pieces offer endless opportunities for color. Perhaps part of our problem lies in the familiar brittle-sounding “neo-Baroque” instruments of the 1950s and 1960s that we tend to associate with this music, with their thin, top-heavy sound and unyielding wind supply. While it is true that the organs of northern Europe ostensibly provided the inspiration for this style, it is more of the letter than the spirit. They look all right on paper, but lack the substance to deliver musically. The instruments for which Buxtehude, Bruhns and Böhm wrote are red-blooded, warm, and colorful, with seeming faults–such as unequal temperament and wind systems of uncertain equilibrium–that turn to virtues when the right music is played on them.

These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.

You look beautiful,” my dad said as he walked over to me and offered his arm. His voice was quiet--even quieter than his normal quiet--and it broke, trailed off, died. I took his arm, and together we walked forward, toward the large wooden doors that led to the beautiful sanctuary where I’d been baptized as a young child just after our family joined the Episcopal church. Where I’d been confirmed by the bishop at the age of twelve. I’d worn a Black Watch plaid Gunne Sax dress that day. It had delicate ribbon trim and a lace-up tie in the back--a corset-style tie, which, I realized, foreshadowed the style of my wedding gown. I looked through the windows and down the aisle and could see myself kneeling there, the bishop’s wrinkled, weathered hands on my auburn hair. I shivered with emotion, feeling the sting in my nose…and the warm beginnings of nostalgia-driven tears. Biting my bottom lip, I stepped forward with my father. Connell had started walking down the aisle as the organist began playing “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” I could close my eyes and hear the same music playing on the eight-track tape player in my mom’s Oldsmobile station wagon. Was it the London Symphony Orchestra or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? I suddenly couldn’t remember. But that’s why I’d chosen it for the processional--not because it appeared on Modern Bride’s list of acceptable wedding processionals, but because it reminded me of childhood…of Bach…of home. I watched as Becky followed Connell, and then my sister, Betsy, her almost jet-black hair shining in the beautiful light of the church. I was so glad to have a sister. Ms. Altar Guild gently coaxed my father and me toward the door. “It’s time,” she whispered. My stomach fell. What was happening? Where was I? Who was I? At that very moment, my worlds were colliding--the old world with the new, the past life with the future. I felt my dad inhale deeply, and I followed his lead. He was nervous; I could feel it. I was nervous, too. As we took our place in the doorway, I squeezed his arm and whispered, “I love thee.” It was our little line. “I love thee, too,” he whispered back. And as I turned my head toward the front of the church, my eyes went straight to him--to Marlboro Man, who was standing dead ahead, looking straight at me.

Belinda laughed. “Darling, if only true virgins were allowed a white wedding, church organists would die of starvation.

A notice was pinned on the back of the organ, about two feet from his face: DESTRUCTION OF CHURCHES BY FIRES ORIGINATING IN THE ORGANS 1. The organ is damp, a lamp or stove is placed in it and left to burn all night, with the result of setting it on fire. 2. The organist, the blower, the tuner, or a workman making repairs, strikes a match , or lights a spirit taper, or candle, which he leaves burning, with the result of setting the organ on fire. 3. The music desk lights are movable brackets which can be placed so that the flames touch woodwork; this is done once, and the whole is set on fire. ECCLESIASTICAL INSURANCE OFFICE Lim. 11 Norfolk Street, Strand, London WC

He belonged to an ordered society, and this was it. More than any of the friends in her own world, he spoke the familiar language of her childhood. In London, anybody, at any moment, might do or become anything. But in a village—no matter what village—they were all immutably themselves; parson, organist, sweep, duke’s son and doctor’s daughter, moving like chessmen upon their alloted squares. She was curiously excited. She thought, “I have married England.” Her fingers tightened on his arm.

When two loud notes of different frequencies f1 and f2 are played together, a note can be heard corresponding to the difference f1 – f2 between the two frequencies. This was discovered by the German organist Sorge (1744) and Romieu (1753). Later (1754) the Italian violinist Tartini claimed to have made the same discovery as early as 1714. Helmholtz (1856) discovered that there is a second, weaker note corresponding to the sum of the two frequencies f1 + f2,

Roughly speaking, at a High Mass the priest only murmurs when the choir shouts. But which way about was it? Did the priest say to himself, ‘I can’t be bothered to say this bit out loud, with those sopranos howling me down all the time’? Or did the organist say, ‘The holy priest doesn’t seem to have much to say for himself just now; come on, boys, let ‘em have it’? I don’t know. I only know I always rather wish these Secret prayers after the Offertory were said out loud, because they are so very attractive, some of them.

For each stop—each timbre, or type of sound, that the organ could make (viz. blockflöte, trumpet, piccolo)—there was a separate row of pipes, arranged in a line from long to short. Long pipes made low notes, short high. The tops of the pipes defined a graph: not a straight line but an upward-tending curve. The organist/math teacher sat down with a few loose pipes, a pencil, and paper, and helped Lawrence figure out why. When Lawrence understood, it was as if the math teacher had suddenly played the good part of Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe organ the size of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda—

OBJECTIVELY SPEAKING, my wedding to Troy Brennan was a beautiful event. Obscenely lavish and obnoxiously wasteful. Brennan spared no expense when it came to what was his. Be it his penthouse, his cars, his women or his wedding. The candles, floral arrangements, aisle runner, soloist, organist, floral archways and extravagantly decorated pews were all impeccable and plush. In fact, I was surprised the altar wasn’t built exclusively from blood diamonds and rolled one-hundred-dollar bills. Nonetheless, to me, it was as pointless as Henry Cavill with a shirt on. So much detail and beauty shouldn’t be wasted on fraud. And that’s what Brennan and I were—a lie. A charade. Doomed people trapped in a marriage built on the ruins of extortion and lies. We

I hadn’t thought about prom, Bailey, or that car crash in years. I’d been under the assumption that therapy had wiped it from my mind completely. The search for Lizzie was doing something to me. Causing me to regress, in a way. Bailey Shepherd was no one to me, but at the same time, she was everything. My cause and value of life forever changed by a girl buried in a labyrinth of gnarled alloy and gasoline.

church organist for the past twenty-one years, stroked the last notes of “Faith of Our Fathers.” The next several minutes were ritual Catholic routine—up, down, sit, up, down, sit. When the calisthenics ended, Father Benedict stood before the pulpit and gazed out at his congregation.

This was a Baptist church and except for the organist, it was as empty as a Baptist church on Good Friday.

There was always a little difficulty as to who should decorate what, all the ladies having the lowest opinion of each other's decorative powers. There was especial difficulty over the side chapel vases . . . If there is one thing in the world that every woman is quite sure no other woman but herself can do it is vases. . . The vases on the high altar were of course, as always, the duty of the wife or daughter of the Canon in residence (though goodness knew that poor Nell Roderick could no more make dahlia stick upright than fly), but the side chapel vases were only filled on benefactors' day and there was no real precedence as to who did them. Mrs Elphinstone, as wife of the Senior Canon, naturally thought she should, and Miss Roderick thought she should because she was doing the high altar vases and might as well do the lot together, and Mrs Allenby thought she should because she had once been to the Scilly Isles and therefore must know more about flowers than anyone else, and no one knew why Mrs Phillips, who was only the organists's wife, thought she should . . . The Archdeacon had no female dependents.

Beethoven was appointed, by the Elector Max Franz, brother of the Emperor Joseph II., organist to the electoral chapel, a post obtained for him by Count von Waldstein, a patron of the arts, not only a connoisseur in music, but himself a practical musician, a knight of the Teutonic order, and favourite of the Elector. [7] To this nobleman Beethoven was indebted for the first appreciation of his talents, and his subsequent mission to Vienna.

In 1695, when Johann Sebastian was not quite ten years old, his father died. He lost his mother at an earlier period. 47 So, being left an orphan, [pg 10] he became dependent on his eldest brother, Johann Christoph, Organist at Ohrdruf, 48 from whom he received his earliest lessons on the Clavier.

while he was at Lüeburg, he several times travelled to Hamburg to hear the famous organist, 61 Johann [pg 13] Adam Reinken.

Pastor Hardy’s wife had been the organist back in Arkansas, and he missed her acutely whenever Mrs. Turner—her small spidery hands—would play the opening chords of “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” or “Abide with Me.” A warmth would travel up his spine and then fly off, leaving him more lonesome than ever. In front of his flock, he sometimes could feel the abyss of despair open beneath him. He feared these moments and felt the hand of the devil in them.

An English organist named Jeremiah Clarke wanted to commit suicide but he couldn’t decide whether to hang himself or drown, so he flipped a coin. The coin landed on its edge in the mud so he ended up shooting himself instead.

Often help from the Lord came in unexpected ways. The time came in Poland to open a mission there, but how do you open a mission without a mission president who can speak Polish? And where does one find such a person? This was on Elder Nelson’s mind when, on October 27, 1989, he attended the inauguration of BYU President Rex E. Lee in Provo, Utah. At a reception celebrating President Lee’s appointment, Elder Nelson just happened to meet Walter Whipple, a professor of Polish in the department of Germanic and Slavic Languages. Dr. Whipple had just returned to BYU after a teaching stint in Poland. Who became the first mission president in Poland? President Walter Whipple, who was also a professional organist and accomplished cellist. “The Lord doth provide,” Elder Nelson summarized. “I’ve seen this over and over again. When we didn’t know what in the world to do next, the Lord stepped in and handed the answer to us on a silver platter. We would have had to be blind not to see it.

The two ladies had supper, discussing, as they ate, various aspects of life as lived in the village of St. Mary Mead. Miss Marple commented on the general distrust of the new organist, related the recent scandal about the chemist’s wife, and touched on the hostility between the schoolmistress and the village institute. They then discussed Miss Marple’s and Mrs. McGillicuddy’s gardens.

6 Yet, history took a different course. Mozart died that December and the adjunct post fell to Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, court organist in Vienna, distinguished composer, theorist, and Mozart’s senior by twenty years.7 A little over a year later, the Viennese magistrate also honored the commitment previously made to Mozart and, after Hofmann’s death in March 1793, Albrechtsberger became kapellmeister of the cathedral and retained that office until the end of his life in 1809.