The Jewel in the crown of the Episcopal Church

Four manuel Aeolian-Skinner Organ

English-built, French-inspired, in Jesuit splendor

Noel Mander four manual tracker

Kent Tritle getting in a little practice time

John D. Rockefeller's French gothic masterpiece and Virgil's organ

Riverside Church

Virgil Fox's Five manual Aeolian-Skinner

High Gothic and Catholic sensibilities in Times Square

Solemn Mass for the feast of the Annunciation

Four manual Aeolian-Skinner with the original console

Gothic Magnificence and Art Deco on Central Park

The Church of the Heavenly Rest (sometimes known among church musicians as the "Celestial Snooze") is located on Carnegie Hill, Fifth Avenue, two doors up from the Guggenheim Museum. Founded in 1865 by Civil War veterans hoping for a more restful life and a higher vision of how things might be after the unexpected and unprecedented savagery of that long and destructive war. The second building to serve this parish, on land purchased from Mrs. Andrew Carnegie (who lived across the street), was designed by Bertram Goodhue, one of the great American architects in the Gothic style. The building is grandly proportioned, but is characteristically American in its very wide nave and chancel, made possible by internal steel construction, so that the altar can be seen from any point in the building. Like all Gothic buildings it leads the gaze upward, but does so in an interesting way: large masses of sandstone blocks in the lower part of the walls, with all the color and decoration above. The windows are extraordinarily bright and glittering in their colors (mostly red and blue) and not necessarily futuristic, and the sculptured reredos begins high above the altar and the detail becomes sharper and more defined the higher up the eye travels (in part, of course, because the figures are larger). The sculpture--especially the angels in various places inside and outisde of the building--seems sort of Sumerian--and gives the building a kind of abstract and futuristic feel. The organ is an enormous five-manual Austin Organ (like most New York organs, with a long history of development and change) in a French style shaped by the church's former long-term organist who was a student and long-time friend of Jean Langlais. The church had a disastrous fire in the '90s which necessicated a new console which is now movable into the center of the chancel (this is not as simple a move as one might think), but for most of the time it rests in an alcove under the huge chamber that houses most of the organ. It's a lot of fun to play with all those French reeds and coloful mutation stops (mostly higher partial pitch stops - not sounding on the octave - ask me to explain later) which are requirements for 18th and 20th century French music. I'd love to hear this organ from the middle of the nave! This is a really good parish with a fantastic organist/choirmaster, Mollie Nichols, lots of families of all ages, enough children to have great programs for them, and a warm and friendly atmosphere for all the tourists who truly find it a restful and renewing place.

Monteverdi in a Hockey Rink

On Thursday morning we drove up into the Berkshires for a performance of the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 at the famous Berkshire Choral Festival. This American musical institution, now in its 30th year, brings singers from around the world to study and rehearse great choral works (and some minor ones as well) for a week and then perform them with the Springfield (Mass.) Symphony Orchestra. It's a kind of summer music camp for adults, with the singers paying handsome fees to live in dormitories and work and play in a beautiful natural environment. For some of the works - such as the Monteverdi Vespers that pose special musical difficulties - the singers also have to pass an audition as well as being able to pay! The setting is very
beautiful, the Berkshire School in Sheffield, Mass. Reached by a narrow, winding rural road, the spacious campus of largely traditional looking academic building, huge green spaces, and playing fields, is surrounded by deep forests and mountains. I don't know much about this school, but I do know that hockey is very big. The most prominent building on the campus is a huge domed hockey stadium. This building is divided into two sections: a professional hockey rink with bleachers, media facilities, hung with the requisite flags of all Sheffield's New England prep school opponents, and an equally large, but unfinished space capable of seating, I would guess, at least eight hundred people on movable chairs and risers. This is where the Festival has its rehearsals and performances. This was not an acoustically dead space, but it had surprisingly little warmth and reverberation. The festival brings in renowned conductors for each week's program (the previous week Julian Wachner from Trinity Church for Elijah), and the Monteverdi was conducted by one of New York's most celebrated conductors, Kent Tritle. Kent has been for the past 22 years the Director of Music and Organist at the Church of Saint Ignatius of Loyola on Park Avenue, and currently he conducts almost every major concert chorus in the city as well as choral activities at the Manhattan School of Music - this in addition to an active career as a virtuoso concert organist. Next month he will become the Organist and Director of Music at the Cathedral Church of Stint John the Divine in NYC. As a conductor he has complete technical control of all musical details, an unfailing sense of how to get the confidence and best efforts of all musicians, and a graceful and precise conducting style that brings it all into being in the moment. He is also an enormously warm and engaging person who, after one week appeared to have a personal relationship with each of the 160 amateur singers in the chorus. The festival also brings in professional soloists (5 for this piece) chosen by the conductors for each week's masterwork, and that's why we were there. Molly was the soprano soloist for this performance of the Monteverdi, a work in which she has specialized and often performed. Vespers was a controversial choice since most amateur performers as well as listeners prefer the better known and more easily accessible romantic scale works such as the Brahms, Verdi, Berlioz requiems, Elijah, and so forth. So they had fewer campers that week (especially with the weeding out auditions), but even so the chorus was still very large for this work (160 singers) together with an orchestra scaled down to accommodate the instrumental requirements of Monteverdi's music. I've never heard a performance of the Vespers quite like this: huge choir (usually you hear one or two singers on a part), an orchestra playing modern instruments, and a non-reverberant room that had nothing in common with San Marco. But it was a great performance because Tritle had taken those singers seriously, was unfailingly demanding, and made them want to perform in a musical idiom that was a major aesthetic and technical stretch for most of them. Similarly for the orchestra, who knocked themselves out to make their modern instruments do things they didn't ordinarily do. The soloists were excellent and Molly was brilliant. She has a similar personality to Kent's, so although she had only been there for 2 1/2 days, they were all crowding around her and having their picture taken. The performance itself was, apparently, the surprise hit of the season with a prolonged, resounding standing ovation.

We also had a little family reunion over the weekend at the home of Peggy's sister Patty and her husband Bob in Lee, Mass. All four of the sisters were there (including Jane who flew up from Chapel Hill) plus three of the husbands, and two of Patty's grown children and five grandchildren. It was a lot of fun and terrific for everybody to gather for Molly's performance.

I had one other quasi-musical experience on this little trip. A wonderful little town, Great Barrington, Mass. lies about midway between Sheffield and Lee. I had been through it once several years ago but didn't have time to stop. The interesting thing about this little town is that its beautiful, un-New England looking Congregational Church has one of the finest and largest surviving 19th century American organs. The church, which is not large (although quite tall), has this monumental organ installed in the rear gallery. Built by Hilborne Roosevelt in 1883, this three-manual organ was considerably larger than the Kleuker at the C of C, and the unique and technologically advanced aspects of its action, winding system (originally water operated so efficiently that the builder advertised that "not one drop of water was wasted). All the details about this organ are preserved in the literature and, apparently, the organ gives a
brilliant effect in the building. The case was designed by the prominent organ architect (who literally wrote the book on organ design), George W. Audsley. The main doors of the church were locked, but I wandered around to the back and followed a sign that read "Church Office" into the cellar. Nasty, dank air was, apparently not a new problem since the winding system was elaborately constructed such that no "cellar air" was taken into the organ, even though the blowers were located in the cellar. No one around, although lights were on, office doors open, some kind of telephone message loop with the minister's voice kept playing. We went up into the church, but couldn't get into the organ, sad to say. But it gave a magnificent visual effect. I noticed from a message board in the cellar that the minister was called "Pastor Van," so I'm sure he would have let me into the organ had he been available!

Unexpected Beauty in the Savage and Profane

It was something of a surprise to find myself jostled about and stepped on in the mad crush of people at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's most popular show of all time - Savage Beauty -a retrospective of the British fashion designer Alexander McQueen.As not only an innocent abroad, but also an ignoramous abroad I had no idea what the Alexander McQueen exhibition was "about." I had intended to leave Peggy and Molly at the beginning of the 2 1/2 hour line, sit for a while in the Temple of Dendur, wander through my beloved medieval and Renaissance collections for the one hundredth time and, perhaps, wind up in the restaurant. But when I found out that my museum membership card entitled all of us to go right around that 2 1/2 hour line and straight into the exhibition, I was dragged into that human maelstrom and into one of the most horrifying, exhilarating, multivalent, and transcendent experiences of my life. I expected that this was going to be more radical than an exhibition of First Ladies' inaugural gowns, but when I encountered this creation - the first thing in the show - and learned that the bodice (I think that's what it's called) was made out of laboratory slides painted red - blood - my Gothic imagination was immediately shifted into high gear. Moving on into the first exhibit room it turned out that McQueen's masters thesis show was based on Jack the Ripper (who, according to his genealogist mother was in the family line) and into a rich, dark, atavistic Victorian sensibility that equated extreme emotionalism with the experience of beauty. The Romantic movement to which McQueen was heir emphasized "awe and wonder, fear and terror," emotions closely aligned with the concept of the Sublime." The experience of the Sublime "was both destabilizing and transformative," evoking wonder and fear, attraction and revulsion, always with the possibility of exaltation and transcendence." (Andrew Bolton) The uneasy pleasures of this exhibition ,
organized somewhat like McQueen's runway "shows," are like that. While there is little directly "religious" in McQueen's intentions, this concept of beauty is not unlike the understanding of some 19th century writers on the nature and experience of God. Rudolf Otto (in The Idea of the Holy) describes the Divine as that which is "Totally Other," to which we respond with repulsion and attraction, fear and love. In that encounter Reality is reconfigured and the individual along with it. Kierkegaard (or at least his translators!) describes the approach to this transformation as a "sympathetic antipathy" or an "antipathetic sympathy." The show had an effect on me similar to that of certain organ works by Messaien, specifically "The Combat between Life and Death" from Les Corps Glorieux and "The Two Walls of Water" (the ones that crashed down upon the Egyptians) from Livre du Sainte Sacrament. I'm afraid you'll have to listen to these pieces to see the point. Like McQueen's fashions, they don't lend themselves to rational, one-dimensional comprehension. The extraordinary nature of McQueen's artistic vision and technical brilliance, and the capacity of his works to elicit revulsion and exhaltation at the same moment reminds me of some lines from Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game:



A Toccata by Bach

Frozen silence. . . Darkness prevails on darkness.
One shaft of light breaks through the jagged clouds
Coming from nothingness to penetrate the depths,
Compound the night with day, build length and breadth,
Prefigure peak and ridge, declivities, redoubts,
A loose blue atmosphere, earth's deep dense fullness.
That brilliant shaft dissevers teeming generation
Into both deed and war, and in a frenzy of creation
Ignites a gleaming terrified new world.

All changes where the seeds of light descend,
Order arises, magnificence is heard
In praise of life, of victory to light's great end.
The mighty urge glides on, to move
Its power into all creatures' being,
Recalling far divinity, the spirit of God's doing
Now joy and pain, words, art, and song,
World towering on world in arching victory throng
With impulse, mind, contention, pleasure, love.

http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/video/

Happy Birthday, Molly!

Monday, August 1. Today was Molly's birthday and is was great to be able to spend it with her for the first time in several years. It was a full day with lunch, a visit to the Harry Potter Museum (great artifacts from the movies - their robes, their bedrooms, Hagrid's hut, wands galore, and so on), a water taxi ride over to Brooklyn, and a fabulous party for present and former members of the Trinity Choir thrown by Nathaniel and his brilliant and beautiful girlfriend Virginia Warnken at his apartment in Green Point.Molly has fabulous friends (including Chapel Hillian Katherine Dain) and it was terrific that so many of them were able to come and party with her. We agree with the Rev. Wright that she is a "force of nature!"

taking in the Manhattan Skyline

When "evening shades prevail"

In the afternoon we went to Evensong at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. This was Bruce Neswick's last service as Organist and Director of Music before leaving to join the music faculty at Indiana University. The choir is on holiday so they have guest choirs in to sing Evensong. This large choir was from a parish church in London, and the program listed some great music: more Charles Wood and Purcell, a double chorus Mag and Nunc by Thomas Weelkes. Oh, dear! Nothing good to report, but they were very excited to be there! Bruce is, by international acclaim, one of the world's great improvisers, and he vamped before and after the service and played the hymns. The cathedral's organ is, possibly, my favorite of all organs, and Bruce's final musical gesture as cathedral organist had to have been one of the finest moments in that organ's long and distinguished history. Truly heaven and earth were joined in a soulful and ecstatic utterance. Douglass Hunt, another one of our own, is the Curator of Organs at the Cathedral and at Saint Bartholomew's Church.

He was unhappy about the "summer tuning" in an enormous unairconditioned building. I thought the organ sounded absolutely magnificent. More on the organ later. Parishioner Terry Eason was there, and it was great to see him in a different - and appropriately grand - space. We went to a surprise reception for Bruce, and had a great time visiting with a fun assortment of people that I didn't realize sang in the cathedral choir. Then back Downtown.