This morning I attended the 10:00 am service at St. Mark’s Episcopal in Berkeley, CA where I am helping to organize the music director’s office. George Emblom introduced me to the choir after the warmup and related the conversation I had with him on my visit here two years ago. In looking at the state of his office, apparently I said to him, “But George, how can you get any work done in there?”

Already after two days, we had sorted books into two piles: “Keep” and “Give Away.” The books in the latter category were taken into the Parish Hall and were announced as “free for the taking.” You would have thought we had advertised free money! Many people took multiple books: hymnals, song books, books on liturgy, etc. and George was very pleased!

 After church, George and I drove out to Sonoma State University where Jonathan Dimmock gave a recital at Schroeder Hall (named after the Peanus character). It is a John Brombaugh instrument, opus 9, which was built in 1972 for a now-closed Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Toledo, OH. You may be interested to know that John Brombaugh apprenticed with Rudolf von Beckerath, builder of the Lutheran Church of Honolulu organ.

Here’s what happened next:

Sonoma State University, led by the late Bruce Walker, enlisted the help of George Taylor and John Boody—original partners of John Brombaugh’s in the building of the Opus 9—to install the organ in the newly renovated Sacred Heart Cathedral in Rochester, New York. Once that cathedral’s new organ had been built, the Opus 9 was relocated across town to St. Michael’s Parish, where it remained until early 2014. While in Rochester, the Opus 9 was a favorite organ of professors and students at the nearby Eastman School of Music.

As completion of Schroeder Hall neared, Taylor & Boody restored Opus 9 in their shop in Staunton, Virginia. In the summer of 2014, the organ arrived at Sonoma State University’s Green Music Center in carefully dismantled pieces. Taylor & Boody carried out the assembly and tuning of the instrument over several weeks, preparing the organ for its Schroeder Hall unveiling.

Jonathan Dimmock, who played the Duruflé Requiem organ accompaniment for my husband’s memorial concert, opened the concert with Buxtehude’s Prelude and Fugue in F# minor, eye-opening at the time it was written because of the unusual key signature. He followed with two contemporary works, “Psalm 98” by Cary Ratcliff (b. 1953) and a setting of “Ein feste Burg,” by local San Francisco composer, John Karl Hirten (b. 1956) before ending the first half with Sweelinck’s “Fantasia (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la).

Intermission followed, then the program ended with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s “Sonata in A minor,” and the great “Fantasy and Fugue in G minor” by Bach. It was a well-played program, but I have to admit, that the acoustics were a little dry. Oh, the acoustics weren’t bad for a concert hall, but they can’t compare with those of European cathedrals.

After the concert, I was introduced to Jonathan Ryan, who said he knew me! I did not know him, though, and it must have been from Facebook that he saw my picture, because he knew about Adam Pajan’s tour to Hawaii and my hosting him!

Jonathan had a student pull stops for him (because there was no combination action), and this poor student had to continually move from one side of the console to another —running up the stairs, out the back door, going in the other door and coming down on the other side! I immediately thought of “Hickory, dickory, dock.. the mouse ran up the clock!”

The concert was very well-attended and George and I were sitting in the next to the last row. The people behind us were complaining that the seats were very tight— at intermission, I measured them with the Measure app on my iPhone, and our seats were 19″ wide, and their seats were only 15-1/2″ wide! Wonder why?

Tomorrow I am going to start tackling the boxes upon boxes of unsorted music and paper from George’s office: the hardest job yet. Don’t worry, I’ll show you Before and After pictures when the job is done!