This morning was devoted to organ practice on the Beckerath organ at Trinity Lutheran Church which was built in 1956.

From the church’s website:

Trinity’s Beckerath was built in 1956 in Hamburg, Germany by Rudolph von Beckerath, who crafted it in the tradition of the organs of northern Europe in the Baroque era. This organ is the first large mechanical-action pipe organ in North America built on historic Baroque principles.

Its installation was a watershed event in modern organ building. A stream of visitors – organ builders, performers, academics, and music lovers – came to hear, play, and inspect Trinity’s Beckerath organ. It has inspired more than one generation of builders, organists, and music lovers. 

With this organ, Beckerath demonstrated that centuries-old techniques of organ-building produce a beautiful sound of unsurpassed clarity, power, and warmth. This sound is ideal for Baroque repertoire, most notably the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. A versatile instrument, the Beckerath is also congenial to the music of many other styles and periods.

My challenge today was to register my pieces on an instrument with four manuals but no combination action, meaning that all stops must be drawn by hand. It also means that there is no handy-dandy General Cancel button to push when the piece is over—stops have to be manually pushed in to cancel.

I was pretty discouraged even after the first page of the Cortège et litanie by Dupré, to smoothly add and subtract stops, and got totally confused by the division of stops until Florence Mustric, stepped in with her magic pieces of felt which she called “organist training wheels”— which she slid over the stop knobs to clearly delineate stops for the Rückpositiv and Swell divisions.

Florence Mustric has a master of music in organ performance from Cleveland Institute of Music and a bachelor of arts from Oberlin College. In April 1994, to showcase Trinity’s world- famous Beckerath pipe organ, Florence Mustric and Trinity’s director of music began Music Near the Market, a series of free programs presented every Wednesday of the year.

Florence helped tremendously with the Dupré and will be my registrant (“stop puller”) for the concert.

As it turned out, I had to change one set of pieces for my Wednesday program because it just was going to be too complicated, if not impossible, to do all the stop changes.

Florence took Joan and me out to lunch and the three of us hit it off right away. As Joan said, “It was like connecting with a sister!” We found we had many things in common to talk about and I invited Florence to come to Honolulu to play our Beckerath. We even talked about traveling together on a future trip!

Afterwards Joan and I drove out to Amish country where we saw seven different horse-and-buggies, and even one with brake lights and turn signals.

We stopped at the Smucker’s store, close to the Smucker’s factory for jams and jellies.

Lehman’s was like a Home Depot for Amish customers, with human-powered appliances and gadgets of all kinds. I found all kinds of things to buy in this store!

In the evening we drove back to downtown Cleveland where we met up with Joan’s old “gang,” friends from the Cleveland Orchestra. We shared delicious food and much laughter, staying at the restaurant until closing.