I’ve just come home after the “Motets and Cantatas” concert by the Oahu Choral Society Chamber Choir, and I must say that I heard some fantastic singing tonight. Tonight was the Chamber Choir’s debut, consisting of only 22 singers out of the larger OCS ensemble. The tone of the choir was light and agile, the… Read More A weekend of incredible singing
Operation Babylift. If you are as old as I am (ahem!), you probably have heard the term “Operation Babylift.” But if you’re still a spring chicken, and aren’t old enough to know what it was, I can tell you that it was the name of a mass evacuation of children at the end of the Vietnam War in… Read More Operation Babylift
For me, it wasn’t Easter until I was able to play the Easter hymn, “Jesus Christ is risen today,” which didn’t happen until Easter Tuesday when I played the Easter Eucharist for the St. Andrew’s Schools. I sang the hymn when I attended Easter Day mass at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church to hear my organ student,… Read More Easter Tuesday
Quick study Bach. There’s an oxymoron for you. Why, just recently I heard myself saying to a student, “You cannot cram Bach! It just doesn’t work!” That is, when I’ve heard people try to learn a work of Bach on short notice, more often than not, they panic and the performance falls apart. Believe me, unfortunately… Read More Quick study Bach
2017 would have been one of those years—when Tax Day collides with Easter. This year Easter is April 16th, and the deadline for filing 2016 tax returns is April 18. Which brings up the question “Why is Tax Day April 18?” instead of the traditional deadline of April 15th? The regular tax return filing deadline… Read More One of those years
In spite of the fact that the Oahu Choral Society scheduled its performance of the Verdi Requiem on a Thursday night, (and the Thursday before Palm Sunday at that!), there was certainly a decent audience. (Don’t they know that God made Thursdays for choir practice!) I invited my organist colleague, Elizabeth Wong, to share a… Read More Verdi Requiem
A few years ago, Karl Bachman of the Hawaii Chapter American Guild of Organists took visiting organist Nathan Laube to dinner in a local Honolulu restaurant. When the waiter asked why he was here, Nathan answered that he was here to play a concert on the pipe organ. You got it, the waiter had no clue what… Read More Orgelkids coming to Hawaii!
[Yesterday I started to share Carl Crosier’s 2008 article from Cross Accent, the journal of the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians, “A Personal Journey to the Bach Passions.” Here’s the second part.] “Although the St. Matthew Passion had been presented several times before in Honolulu, it had only been sung in English, in an adapted… Read More St. Matthew Passion: Part Two
A couple of things converged in my universe today. The first is that former LCH chorister Mark Boyle shared on Facebook that he was asked to talk about Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. As he says, he is slightly obsessed with it—he owns 48 different recordings of the work, plus his car’s license plate reads BWV… Read More St. Matthew Passion: a personal journey
Out of the words I say to beginning organ students, I think the words that I use the most often are “Don’t look! Don’t look at your feet! You need to find the pedals without looking!” It’s such a temptation to look down, especially when there is such a bright light on the pedalboard as… Read More Don’t look!