Throughout 2012 I never so much as touched a pipe
organ. A year off seemed a good
opportunity to re-assess an approach to the instrument which had become, after
decades of use and abuse, not so much jaded as ambivalent. As 2012 ground on and I found myself
completely unaffected by my self-imposed organ exile, I began to suspect that
my organless state would become permanent.
However, a happy hour sat listening to organ records with an old friend
finally got the juices running again, and I decided to give it another try. The first opportunity came, significantly, on
1st January 2013 when I played at a midday service at St Margaret’s
Church in Aberdeen. Not having so much
as sat at a console since December 2011, I was not at all sure how it would
work out, but with the high liturgical intensity of the Very Revd. Dr. Fr. Nimmo and a congregation
possibly subdued by the preceding night’s Hogmanay celebrations, I found that,
unlike riding a bicycle, I did not so much as wobble, but was straight back
into the stride of it all and, finishing with the deeply simple but brilliantly
effective Postlude of William
Mathias, even got a smattering of people who, over the post-service whiskies,
genuinely seemed to have enjoyed it.
Next up was a wedding in a tiny chapel deep in the heart of
rural Rutland. I’d taken the opportunity
to practice – after all The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba does
not play itself, even after a lifetime’s familiarity – but was startled when I
first looked into the chapel to realise not only how tiny it was but how
delicate (for want of a better word) the
organ was. With a choir of 40
made up from various professional groups from Surrey, London, Rutland and
Cambridge and an eminent choral conductor trying to keep them all in shape (not
helped by the fact that the chapel was broader than it was long, which meant
the choir had to stretch from side-to-side and effectively blocked out any view
of anything from the weirdly-placed organ) it could have been a nerve-wracking
experience. As it was it was pure,
unadulterated, fun despite my having to accompany some of the most dreary and
boring hymns (sorry, songs) known to mankind as well as a dreadfully monotonous
dirge arranged from the singing of Enya.
To me, it was just an absolute pleasure to be pulling out stops, pushing
them in, waving the swell pedal about and running up and down the pedal-board. I regret to say that, much to the horror of
my musician friends, I find myself more than happy to be back on the organ
stool and will be grabbing every opportunity to indulge myself with renewed
passion. Roll on the concerts in China
and Hong Kong (April), Scotland (May) and Ireland (June). Hopefully there will be more!
But for all my joy I was strongly reminded while playing for
the Rutland wedding of why playing the organ had caused me such unease in the
past.
Largely inured from the grotesqueries of playing in church
by 30 years in Malaysia (no churches with serviceable organs to talk of) and by
the Very Revd. Dr. Fr. Nimmo’s refusal to accept that music in a church service
is anything other than a solemn means of paying homage to God through the
highest level of artistic endeavour, I had quite forgotten that for most
churches, music needs to be utterly mundane, an obstruction to sincere thought
and an excuse to give respectability to the kind of drivelling nonsense that usually
goes on behind heavily stained curtains in karaoke lounges. I had a hint with the masses of photocopied
sheets sent to me beforehand bearing the smudged imprint of “celebration songs”
and with the unending stream of D major chord symbols above an unedifying melodic
line which, if spiced up with electronic wizardry and recording technology, makes
Enya sound rather special. I know that
for a lot of people, this is “easy listening” which, by its association with
certain events in their life, takes on a symbolic significance way beyond its
meagre artistic value, but I deeply resent that dismal and mundane has been
allowed to displace distinguished and magnificent, and that the awesome has
been replaced by the awful. With such
horrible stuff to play, is it any wonder that church organists are a dying
breed and that pipe organs, designed and built for better things, are decaying
in favour of the ubiquitous “keyboard” where, with the right banana on the
right dial, even a chimpanzee should be able to produce a good sound? There’s a wonderful hymn which lists the
great gifts humanity presents to God as including “Craftsman’s art and music’s
measure”; perhaps they now sing “Inexpensive plastic moulding and miniscule
computer microchips” instead.
Church congregations have obviously become so well used to
this rubbish being churned out for them that it has become not so much aural wallpaper
as aural graffiti, a slight nuisance which is best covered up in polite society. So it is that as soon as the organ starts
they start talking loudly and animatedly, terrified lest a note escapes into
the silence and comes to the notice of sensitive ears. So, despite my carefully planned programme of
Leighton, Handel, Mendelssohn, Mulet, Bach, Franck, C S Lang and Guilmant, all
I heard was the frantic yakity-yak of church folk. Whatever happened to quiet meditation or
contemplative thought? I tried all the organist’s
tricks; repeated B flats (making them believe the bride had arrived 20 minutes
early), subito pianissimos, molto crescendos and interrupted cadences, but all
to no avail. They only shut up when the
organ stopped playing. It was like
another stop; instead of “Open Diapason 8 foot’” we had “Open Mouths 160 feet”.
I do not blame congregations for obliterating from their
consciousness as much of the pseudo-musical drivel as they can, but it means
that when musical substance is offered to them, they can never get the
benefit. Such is the organist’s lot and
if nobody is going to appreciate me, then a year off has taught me how to
appreciate myself. (Plus, of course,
there is always the vague off-chance that God himself might also be listening!)