The Sunday after Easter is sometimes referred to as Low Sunday.

One website described it this way:

The word “low” may serve to contrast it with the “high” festival of Easter on the preceding Sunday. Or, the word “low” may be a corruption of the Latin word laudes, the first word of a sequence used in the historical Sarum Rite.

In my opinion, low also refers to the low number of people attending church, in contrast to the high number of people who come on Easter!

Oh, in years past, it also meant I would play easier music which would take less practice.

However if I thought it was going to be a cakewalk compared to the 5 services I played over Holy Week and Easter (Maundy Thursday, Easter Vigil and three services on Easter) I was sadly mistaken! This week I’m still playing four services: two on Sunday morning, Vespers and Benediction on Sunday afternoon and Annunciation (transferred) on Wednesday night.

I have to admit I was so tired on Easter night that I went to bed at 8:30 pm; however please note that on the previous night (a two-hour Easter Vigil) I sat up in bed completely wide awake at 1:30 am and never went back to sleep. So maybe I had an excuse for being so tired.

By the way, Easter lilies must have been in short supply this year because I saw plenty of springtime flowers at Nuuanu Congregational but no lilies, and only a couple at St. Mark’s. In fact, Fr. Paul Lillie made a joke that there were three lilies at the pulpit, but that he was the most handsome!

On Tuesday this week, I led an informal organ tour for a man who contacted me through Facebook. On the Facebook Organists Association page, Karl Fischer asked if there were any organs in Honolulu because he and his wife were going to be visiting. I answered right away, and he then contacted me about seeing the instruments. All it took was a few phone calls to my fellow organists/church musicians and voilà, an impromptu organ crawl, which is what organists call it. You can see him at the consoles of Central Union Church, Lutheran Church of Honolulu and Kawaiaha‘o Church. Thanks to my colleagues Margaret Lloyd at Central Union, Nicholas Lee at St. Andrew’s Cathedral and Buddy Naluai at Kawaiaha‘o Church for opening their buildings to us. (The Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Cathedral is undergoing restoration by Manuel Rosales.)

As I began to write this post, I was sitting at Lihue Airport, having come over for the day to teach my organ student, Daniel Welch, who took me to a wonderful lunch!

As you can see, it has been a busy week! And now, it’s only five days until my trip to Barcelona and Greece with Bill Potter. What I’m most excited about is a scheduled visit to the pipe organ factory in Barcelona — by the world-renowned organbuilder Gerhard Grenzing, who apprenticed with Rudolf von Beckerath. He has built organs in France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Korea, Japan, Switzerland and the USA, among others.

Here is a video in which 5 world-class organists visited the Grenzing factory in El Papiol (that’s where we’ll be visiting!) before an organ was installed at the Radio France concert hall in Paris.