Over two years ago when I came to play an all-Bach recital at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, their music director and organist, George Emblom, reluctantly showed me his office. My reaction to the chaos was, “But George, how do you get any work done in there?!”

Another thing I remember telling him was that the first thing to do was: Clear the room! And that he did two years ago, a few months after I left.  “Only put back the things you really need to save—pitch or giveaway the rest!”

I know, however, that church musicians can be easily swamped by weekly service bulletins, programs to save from other churches (for getting ideas), organ music, vocal music, choral reference copies, notes from workshops, convention programs, and all the thousands of papers we found in George’s office.

The contents of the room, including a number of tables, desks and too many filing cabinets of the wrong kind were hauled to the stage area of the old Parish Hall (where the choir rehearses on Wednesday evenings.)

In the meantime, a contractor installed badly-needed new lighting and refinished the floors.

So what have I been doing this week? Helped by Peg LaFrance (my homestay host and former librarian) and Andrea Stufflebeem (the choir librarian), we tackled the endless pile of boxes and emptied them completely of their contents, sorting all the papers and music into categories.

I organized the books George wanted to keep on the bookshelf — Episcopal hymnals on an accessible shelf, along with hymnal supplements, hymnals from other denominations in alphabetical order, psalters, books on liturgy, musicianship, convention programs, and historical Sunday bulletins which were bound in volumes.

New filing cabinets were delivered on Tuesday last week and we started putting the old files into new hanging folders, making them much easier to access and file. I put George’s organ music into hanging files and he was absolutely stoked! “This is fantastic!” was his reaction. Before, his organ music was stored in traditional filing cabinets and the music kept falling over as he leafed through the drawer contents.

We first sorted all the organ music and put the books into alphabetical order.

Alphabetized organ music was put into boxes to be given away to students.

Next we worked on the choral music and arranged them by publisher.

Here are the newly-organized files:

And … (drumroll please), here is George’s new office!

Even though we separated out 15 boxes of books and 9 boxes of organ music to be given away, and who knows how many boxes of papers went to recycling, I’m afraid the entire job is not completed. But for now, hopefully, George has a new life.

I will just have to plan another trip to Berkeley!

Yesterday’s photos of Lake Merritt in Oakland.