Gales of laughter and trading of “war stories” — this is what I enjoyed most about the luncheon I gave yesterday for four of my former organ students, home for the holidays from college. “All the congregations I’ve played for sing slower and s-l-o-w-e-r!” “The organist used the SAME registration throughout eight verses of the hymn!”… Read More Flip-flops? No, slippers!
Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed 62,081 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it. It’s been an especially challenging year for “Another Year of Insanity,” the blog I started… Read More Madison Square Garden?
This morning I attended the 11:00 am service at Blessed Sacrament Church in Hollywood, CA where I came to hear organist Hyunju Hwang play the organ. You may remember that it was a year ago last summer that I heard her stunning playing at the Bakersfield AGO convention (see my post “The power of music”… Read More The exit hymn
Chances are that you’ve never heard of the saint, Charles Borromeo. Well, I hadn’t either, except that I knew that the legendary choral conductor, Paul Salamunovich, was the chief musician at this church for a record sixty years. So I was quite happy when my new daughter-in-law, Jessica Crosier, told us that we were going to… Read More St. Charles Borromeo
Yesterday I received word about the death of David Stuart Kayner, and although his death was not unexpected, it still means the passing of an era. I always thought my husband, Carl Crosier, would outlive him, but it turned out not to be, and in fact, David made a great effort to attend Carl’s funeral,… Read More The passing of a curmudgeon
You would have thought that after more than fifty years of playing the organ that I would know how to lead congregational singing from the organ — especially know the tempo of Christmas carols. Well, this morning, it was 2000 people in the Lower Gym of Iolani School with whom I played “tug of war”… Read More 2000 against 1 = Déjà vu!
I finally got a chance to sit down and read the December 2014 issue of The American Organist (also known as TAO) and a few names jumped out at me. The first one which caught my eye was the picture of Barbara Adler, who is Treasurer/Councillor for Finance and Development. Many people don’t know how instrumental… Read More Organists I know in TAO
I got back from Kona last night after a grueling three-hour dress rehearsal and then a short break before a sold-out performance of the Kona Choral Society concert (Schubert, Mass in G and Handel, Messiah). Unfortunately the dress rehearsal and the concert had to be scheduled on the same day due to logistics, and couldn’t… Read More “We are going on a journey…”
If there is any way you could spend an hour (really, 59 minutes and 10 seconds!) between now and Christmas, I invite you to watch this fascinating BBC video about how George Frideric Handel composed Messiah to raise money to support the Foundling Hospital. Based on my offhand comments in my last post on Handel being… Read More The story behind Messiah
This weekend I am looking forward to joining the Kona Choral Society in their performance of Schubert, Mass in G and Handel, Messiah on Sunday, Dec. 7th at 4:00 pm at the Sheraton Keauhou Resort. The concert marks the choir’s 25th anniversary with the same program it sang 25 years ago. Although the chorus numbers… Read More On to Kona