In my last post, I discussed my purchase of a Flic button as a means of turning pages on my iPad, and my first challenge was going to be at the Ascension Day service with the hymn, “Hail thee, festival day.” Some people were confused when I said the hymn now had 13 pages, and that was because I copied and pasted the refrain between each of the verses. With six verses, the odd-numbered stanzas had one melody while the even-numbered verses had a different melody. Essentially, my page order was:
Page 1 Refrain
Page 2 Verse 1
Page 3 Refrain
Page 4 Verse 2
Page 5 Refrain, etc. The hymn ends with a final refrain.
The Flic button is larger than a thumb piston for an organ, those gadgets on an organ console which allow us to pre-program certain combinations of stops to be recalled later. After playing the organ now for over SIXTY (gasp!) years, I can say that I am an experienced piston-pusher, so using the Flic to turn the pages as an oversized piston was easy. I am so happy to say that the hymn went like clockwork and I nailed it!
This weekend is Pentecost, and St. Mark’s will sing “Hal thee Festival Day” (SALVE FESTA DIES) as the opening hymn, only with the Pentecost words. That means I have another chance to fall flat on my face or Nail It! Of course, I’m hoping it’s the latter.
This morning, I had a most interesting telephone call from Dr. Eileen Hunt, the National President of the American Guild of Organists. The National Convention of the AGO will take place this summer in St. Louis, and apparently the last time the convention took place in that city, my teacher, Dr. Irene Robertson, was the only woman who performed. All the rest of the performers were men. Dr. Hunt wanted to find out more about Irene Robertson since surprisingly, there is no Wikipedia article about her. In fact, Google “Irene Robertson” and the first item that pops up is the bio from my blog where I mention that Irene Robertson was my teacher in college.
Dr. Hunt reached out to me by contacting Dr. Ladd Thomas, long-time faculty member at the University of Southern California (my alma mater) who has been teaching organ for more than 50 years. Dr. Hunt then asked Collin Boothby (he’s on National Council as well as is the choral director of Hawaii Pacific University and Church of the Crossroads) for my contact information. Voilà, we finally connected!
We talked about not only Irene Robertson, who was the first woman dean of the Los Angeles chapter of the AGO, but also my previous teachers of Norman Söreng Wright and Marcel Dupré, and she thought the readers of The American Organist magazine might be interested in their two very different styles of teaching organ. We’ll aim for a small article in the November issue!
Meanwhile, I have less than two weeks until I take off for Los Angeles to celebrate my grandson’s 9th birthday and to attend the Association of Anglican Musicians conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Another race to the finish!