Laus Organi!

Welcome to my blog about organs, churches, and religious art in New York City. I'm taking a short sabbatical from my job at the Chapel of the Cross, an Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I plan to spend some numinous time in some of the world's great sacred spaces, exult in their vibe, indwell their iconography, and play their organs. I am already familiar with many of these instruments but have not played them in some time. For the most part, they are different in style and feel from the large German-built mechanical action organ and the exquisite smaller American organ that I play daily in Chapel Hill. Moments of genuine transcendence are possible in such places as the great churches of New York: their scale, the interplay of light and shadow, the kaleidoscopic shifting of colors and forms throughout the hours of the day, the living and breathing feel of the acoustic in a great space where "sound travels ever upward as if loath to die." In such spaces the sound of a great organ joins earth to heaven and time to eternity in modalities both transcendent and immanent. "The stained-glass windows magnify the light, one of God's first creations, but the organ brings to the church something similar to light that yet surpasses it: the music of the Invisible. It is the wondrous overture to the Beyond." (Olivier Messiaen). I will write about this from time to time, perhaps with some pictures and sounds. Please join me in my little musical-aesthetic-spiritual adventure.