Life and Island Times July 21 2016 – Church Music

This one is from early 2016.

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W and Marlow had walked onto the church altar to fetch a live Easter lily with the name of someone on the bottom of the vase, who needed their prayers, when Marlow found himself jerked back in time. His time travel was courtesy of a recessional piece that the church organist was playing – Toccata from Boëllmann’s 1895 Suite Gothique . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Fj3UD8gBI

Key West’s United Methodist church sanctuary with its
pipe organ in the background, Christmas services 2015

He was literally hopping about the altar while his hands were flying over invisible keyboards. He was pulling stops, and his toes were tapping on the footboards. W looked at him and sighed. He was prone now and then to these musical fits, and she had gotten used to them. Clutching their prayer piece, she gently guided him off the altar, while he continued to play along with the organist. He did not stop until they had exited the church.

Arriving home, he immediately dialed up YouTube and played the whole suite. Over and over again. Once becalmed, he wondered what had happened. Uncontrolled boogying was not uncommon for him, but this was different. It was continuing to happen. Brushing his hands though his mental cobwebs along with searching the World Wide Web, he pulled on various threads until he found what the connections were. The backstory threads then came to him.

It started with a long ago greatest hits mix cassette tape that he had made from pieces played by iconoclast organist E Power Biggs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pFk8BcZDmE back in 1972.

Driving the family long haul in a single day from Chapel Hill to Logansport or from Denver to Logansport and back in the early 70s made church attendance on Sunday take a back seat. As a substitute, Malrow’s solution was to play E Power’s greatest hits in the car on his small Panasonic hi-fi boom box.

Marlow’s Panasonic

The second part was from his days as a choir boy during the early 60s at a parochial elementary school. Marlow sang all the soprano parts of the Latin Masses for regular, baptismal, marriage and funeral services. The last was especially sweet duty, since it got him out of class, some food from the bereaved family and at times a sizeable tip in cash (only if Father Crossin did not intercept the envelope).

When eighth grade rolled around for Marlow, the San Franciscan nun church organist was replaced by a 40 something man with a real musical background. When this new director first played the Christmas mass music in practice, we choir boys were covered in soot and dust from the pipes that hadn’t been used in decades.

The whole loft shook. New pieces were played that challenged the old timer 13 year olds. Best of all was that he played music from the 20th century, even from pop culture. He swore us all to secrecy — the new play list would be a secret until midnight mass on December 24th 1962.

Holee molee! We blew the doors off of the place. Parishioners, parents, friends and siblings turned to face the back of the church to better hear to the new arrangements of old songs, new songs and mind blowing organ music that transported everyone to a sacred place. After we finished singing our last song, we heard for the first time in our lives applause in church.

This organist had one more trick up his sleeve. He gave us all a gift that night. None of us knew it was coming. During the recessional, he played the Tocata from Suite Gothique.

Copyright © 2016 From My Isle Seat