I’ve been waiting to play François Couperin’s “Tierce en taille” from the Messe pour les Paroisses, and finally got that opportunity when we visited the organ at Sarrebourg’s Église Saint-Barthélémy. Today is Day 5 of the Historical Organ Study Tour of Lorraine, France, and it was not until today that we have heard and played… Read More French Classic heaven
That’s what I heard someone from our tour say as we were climbing yet another spiral stairway up to the organ loft. “OSHA would never allow these dangerous steps!” Apart from our first church visit today, someone counted 67 steps at the Église Saint Sébastien and over 70 steps at the Cathedral Notre Dame de… Read More They’d NEVER allow this in the U.S.!
On this Historical Organ Study Tour so far we have climbed a number of vertical spiral stairways to access the organ console. But today at the Cathedral St. Étienne in Metz was the first time we ever crawled up to a true swallow’s nest organ. In case you’ve never heard the term before, here is… Read More The swallow’s nest organ
So I am a participant of the 2016 Historical Organ Study tour and we are a group of 39 people from mostly the United States, one from Ireland, and six people are from Australia. 19 of us are organists of widely varying abilities and the rest are listeners. This is rather different from the 1996 tour to… Read More All organs are not created equal!
A lot of people think that etiquette is passé, but here on the Organ Historical Society tour, it is alive and well. We are requested to wear our name badges at all times when we are with the group, in an effort to get to know one another and to easily enter the organ gallery… Read More Etiquette on tour
Let me see … I left home at 7:30 pm Friday night for a five-hour flight to San Francisco. Then I had a 9 (NINE!) hour layover before taking an 11 hour flight to Paris. Then I waited two hours at Charles de Gaulle airport for the train to Lorraine, and then a bus to… Read More 30 hours to Metz
On my “must do” list before I leave town was seeing the movie, “Florence Foster Jenkins,” the film about the amateur soprano whose singing of opera classics was preserved forever through recordings. I first became acquainted with her voice in the 70s and I remember laughing hysterically with friends at parties when her recordings were played.… Read More Every voice deserves to be heard
For many, August is a month of transitions—the last days of summer, going back to school, starting up a new choir season, and so forth. For me, I always remember August 12th as the day “I got my new brain,” as my husband, Carl, used to tell me. In 2008, I was diagnosed with a… Read More August transitions
When I was in Philadelphia for the Organ Historical Society convention in June, I bought yet another edition of Bach’s Clavierübung III, the music which I’m playing in a concert on October 30. This marks my sixth edition of this music, and you’re probably asking, “Why do you need so many copies of the music?” The… Read More “I am still learning”
You remember that huge box of mail that I returned home to, after being on the road for nearly six weeks? The bills always get my attention first, but what I look forward to is reading all the magazines that have piled up in my absence. It was not until yesterday that I finally opened… Read More Ding, dong bell!