Tonight was the first of two Hallock at 100 concerts that I will be attending this weekend at St. Mark’s Cathedral, dubbed “The Holy Box” because of its shape like a cube. The evening began with a pre-concert conversation with Mel Butler (Peter Hallock’s immediate successor, now retired from the Cathedral and serving St. Luke’s… Read More Hallock in the Holy Box
If you asked the average man or woman in the street, what are the odds that they would know what a pipe organ is? Not likely, I would guess, and I can’t count the number of people who walked into the Lutheran Church of Honolulu and exclaimed to me, “That’s a really big PIANO!” (Uh,… Read More Pipe organs in the news!
Last April you may recall that my good friend, Joan Ishibashi and I drove out from London to the Cornish countryside to visit the village of Port Isaac, the setting of the television show, Doc Martin. Joan lived for fifteen years in Honolulu but moved to London seven years ago—I not only saw her in… Read More My London agent (LOL!)
As I was listening to my former student Joey Fala play Choral Vespers at Duke University tonight, I thought he must surely be in hog heaven! I thought back to a day sixteen years ago when I first met Joey at Iolani School, who used to always come to chapel to hear me practice. His… Read More Hog heaven
Perhaps no church music program had a greater influence on the late Carl Crosier than that of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, Washington. As a student at the University of Washington, he attended the weekly Compline service in the mid-60s —that was when only about 50-60 people attended, not like the hundreds of young people… Read More Living stones
If you live in Hawaii, maybe you’ve attended concerts at the Doris Duke Theater at the Honolulu Museum of Art. Or perhaps you’ve visited Shangri-La, Doris Duke’s home in Hawaii which is now a museum of Islamic art. Check out Wikipedia to read: “Doris Duke (November 22, 1912 – October 28, 1993) was an American heiress, socialite, horticulturalist,… Read More The Duke connection
Did you know that the phrase, “warts and all,” is attributed to Oliver Cromwell, in his instructions to the portrait artist, Sir Peter Lely? According to the Free Dictionary, Cromwell ordered Lely “not to flatter him, but to paint him with any and all physicial imperfections . . . “warts and all.” Nowadays, when we… Read More Warts and all
Probably the most famous organist ever was the legendary E. Power Biggs, who made a name for himself and the pipe organ through his many recordings. For me, I had an E. Power Biggs LP record of Bach organ works (Do kids these days even know what LPs are/were?) which I played absolutely to death while… Read More Vibes from E. Power Biggs
Psalm 23 from the Ionian Psalter, conducted by Carl Crosier Since Peter Hallock‘s death last Sunday, the tributes have been pouring in for this extraordinary church musician and mystic. Especially poignant and touching was the Office of Compline for April 27, 2014, which was sung at St. Mark’s Cathedral on the very night that Peter… Read More Tributes pour in