Pipe Organ Praise Music ?

Toby Brown, over at A Classical Presbyterian, has an interesting post and comments about pipe organs and contemporary worship music.

What a great question! Pipe organs are capable of all kinds of cool musical effects. Of course, they are very hard to play and it takes skill and experience to coax these sounds out of them.

I'm not aware that anyone has ever tried to do this. But if they did, the result could really be awesome!

More Playing It Forward

In response to Playing It Forward Daddy, the organist at MDPC sent me the comment below and asked me to post it for her. It's longer than the usual blog comment and gives a contestant's viewpoint of my father's pipe organ contest, so I decided to make it a separate blog post. Many thanks, Kathryn, for sharing this with me!

"I am the organist at QG's church. I have many stomach turning remembrances of the "San Antonio contest," as we called it at UT. I can remember pacing the halls in First Presbyterian Church as I awaited my turn to play. The organ is a Holtkamp, which has a setterboard. You can not change pistons at the organ console. You have to walk around the pipes in the balcony and get to this contraption on the wall, and set all of your pistons. I did not like the setterboard! Holtkamp Organ Co. finally stopped making the setterboards!

QG is right about sightreading the hymns. You were given a list of a dozen hymns to practice, and you didn't know which one they would ask you to play. I still think of the "San Antonio contest" everytime I play "All Creatures of Our God and King."

Another thing is they gave you a Bach prelude and fugue to learn. One for undergraduates and one for graduates. The big Bach prelude and fugue for my Junior and Senior degree recitals were the pieces assigned by the San Antonio contest organizers.

Thanks for Mr. Hall and to QG for the vision and energy to maintain such a wonderful contest and for encouraging organ students!"

Playing It Forward Daddy

Since I missed the concert given recently by our church's organist, I bought the CD of the program so I could listen to it in the car. I'd been playing it for a couple of days before I took the time to look at the notes on the cover.

There I read among the organist's credentials an award from the pipe organ contest founded by my father and named in his honor after his death, nearly twenty years ago. I got a big lump in my throat.

Those words were like Proust's madeleine, bringing back many memories. Back in the late 1960's my father, an amateur organist himself and huge pipe organ aficianado, was concerned that young people were not studying the pipe organ and feared future churches with fine organs would not be able to find organists able to play them. So he got together others of like mind in San Antonio and organized a competition to encourage pipe organ students in Texas colleges and universities.

He raised money for the awards, wheedled a foundation to support it, and every year sent out letters to professors inviting both graduate and undergraduate students to enter. The competition began at our home church: University Presbyterian, which while small, was on the corner of Trinity University campus. Members of the church helped out on contest days by serving breakfast, lunch and dinner to the students on contest weekend. Daddy had me make many sandwiches and cookies for the meals and help with registration and set-ups. He loved nothing better than to take the "late night practice shift" the night before at the church when the students took turns practicing on the organ there so he could listen to them. The competition emphasizes sacred music. Contestants must sight-read hymns in addition to offering prepared pieces.

After 10 years or so the contest grew too large for University PC to handle, so First Presbyterian Church in San Antonio agreed to host the competition, where it continues today.

The William C. Hall Memorial Pipe Organ Competition was always be scheduled during Fiesta Week-- the week in which San Jacinto Day is celebrated (April 21). I just realized that is this week!

Daddy would have been so tickled to know that our organist at MDPC was one of the students that he hoped the contest would encourage, and that pipe organs in the churches are not silent, but continue to ring out with the praise of God in worship-- playing forward his dream into the future.