Of Fugue Serenades in the Wee Hours

On the not so blunt edge of the universe, I get the singular privilege that I don’t think anyone else in our ward has. Since I drive our daughter to early morning Seminary every day, I nap in the meetinghouse’s lobby while waiting for Seminary to end. This year, the father of one of the freshmen in Seminary has decided to sometimes stay around and practice the organ in the chapel. Saves him gas, as he put it.

This man does not just play the organ. He makes music with the organ. He is a very accomplished organist.

I even caught him fiddling with and playing an antique organ in the chapel at Deerfield Village one Saturday! We had entered the building as he was first starting, and the organ wasn’t sounding right. I thought “My goodness! That sound track recording playing on the intercom sure is garbled and warped! They should shut it off.” Member of the Museum or not, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to be behind the ropes in that historic building, and pretty sure he wasn’t really supposed to be fiddlin’ with the workings of that organ. But, he adjusted it in a couple minutes, and it was funny to hear “Come, Come Ye Saints” booming on an antique pipe organ in an old Protestant chapel now in a museum setting. Some other museum patrons entered the building and were probably thinking this was normal to have an organ concert as part of the exhibit. Of course, they had no clue what the music was that was being played. For fun, I snapped a photo of him up in the organ loft. Me, use it for a mock case of blackmail? Shame on you for even thinking that… even if I giggled at the thought when I snapped it!

Anyway, it is almost as if organ music is a part of his soul. I think the man could probably take apart an organ and put it back together!

So, while I nap in the mornings while waiting on my teenaged Seminary student, I am not listening to mere rehearsal of hymns. No sir! This is music that will most likely never be heard in a Sacrament Meeting setting. I am hearing him practice parts of a classical piece he says many in the organist world classify as perhaps the most challenging and difficult of pieces ever composed for the organ.

Some of the sections sound almost like show tunes or what you would have heard by the theatre organ in those grand old theatres. It is hard to sleep when that is wafting through the air getting adrenaline pumping. Some of it sounds like funeral dirge. That is as equally hard to sleep through, because with me laying down in the dark -- all bundled up in my down coat to stay warm -- the mind has to work to remind my subconscious semi-asleep self that I’m not a corpse in a casket in a funeral home. And some of it is sudden starting and stopping, as this virtuoso of the organ writes his own arrangement of certain parts of it.

But, on days I am so tired it is a miracle I’ve driven to the ward meetinghouse with my eyes open, it doesn’t really matter. I’ve learned snoozing through a fugue under construction is much easier and more restful than trying to ignore the occasional teenaged boy squeals echoing down the hall from the Seminary class.