Cosmic Music

What do we mean when we call a person "musical"? A tune can be musical, like a symphonic melody; sounds can be musical, like running water or birdsong or the wind in the gutters. How is a person musical? Is it simply someone who likes music, or invests in equipment in the service of home sound reproduction? Or is it a person who actually plays an instrument? No matter - I consider myself among the first, an audiophile within a limited range of musical genres, ranging from Paganini, Palestrini, Puccini and Purcell and through (roughly) Schubert, Strauss and Shostakovich - what I consider the sirloin of musical history. I should in all fairness (and devotion) include Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Bruch. I could go through the alphabet (Handel, Haydn) but you get the idea.

So I am not at all musical in the sense of playing any instrument, the explanation for that deficiency being quite simple; when I was in elementary school the opportunity arose to join the school band and take the first steps as a participant in the history of music. I mentioned this at the family hearth one evening; my father, with his customary heavy-handed patriarchalism, suggested that I might enjoy learning the cornet, an instrument that he had played twenty years earlier in his high school band. As he had suggested it with some force, I silently demurred. I have never learned to play an instrument.

In all fairness my father was the one who instilled in me a love of classical music. Every Sunday ('Sabbath' in our house), he would slip a stack of red vinyl 45 rpm's over the post in our 'hi-fi', each disc dropping with a splat onto the next as the symphonic movements developed and ceded to the next - Rachmaninoff and Schumann and Lizst and Mozart and Brahms - the Romantics figured large in our Sunday morning pre-roast beef concerts. Eventually he upgraded to LP's and the clack-and-slap of the 45 was heard no more in the land.

The Romantics were what my father knew and approved, and hence they were welcome of a Sabbath in a Calvinist Presbyterian household. The  pipe organ may have been another matter, smacking of it did of European cathredals and Catholicism and (even) Episcopalianism. And so I knew nothing of the symphonic powers of a single person until I was in my 30s and long freed of the encumbrances of Calvin. As it happens, the single instrument I would have ever wished to play. But an instrument having three keyboards and two ranks of pedals (not to mention two banks of stops) and looking like a commercial airliner cockpit, was more than I could ever master. I can still ride a bicycle but can barely add three words of Spanish to my vocabulary in a six-month.

My first introduction to its sublimity came late; in the 1970s I was living in a decrepit northeastern city whose manufacturing was dying or moving south but whose Catholic parishes were still numerous, ethnically arranged, and still maintained their well-kept parish churches with proper organs. I walked into a bar (well, no, that was subsequently and frequently). I was introduced to a priest, a large-souled, raffish and bibulous fellow, in short, all the qualities which serve to make a good pipe organist. He had, in his short tenure as a cleric, instituted a series of organ recitals throughout the various parish churches and managed to attract some well-known organists (admittedly within those constrained circles) to fill his bill of events. 

He was himself a fair, if not very disciplined musician. In those years I was living in the third floor of an old and very tall Victorian, not far, or not far enough, from the rectory of St. John the Evangelist where he resided. Some long departed tenant had installed an old iron bell outside my window, attatched to a rope which hung within reach of any vagrant, pedestrian or convivial cleric who happened by, and frequently I was awakened in the wee hours by a discreet ding. He would mount the stairs, proffer a half-full bottle of Chartreuse, and off we would go on foot to any nearby church to which he had been vouchsafed a key - usually it was St. John but not always.

The massive church door would creak open, we would walk in unceremoniously, clatter up the central aisle and ascend the narrow stairs above the nave to the organ loft. Side by side on the polished bench we would sit. He would open the lid to the stacked ranks of ivory keys, turn on the distant hum of an air pump, and strike the first cord into the deep silence of a dark firmament. I would sit beside him, back to keyboard, light a Camel straight, and feel the reverberations, through air and wood and solid stone, through the dark of vaulted space above, peals of Widor, Cesar Franck, of Jehan Alain's Litanies, of Bach's Toccata in D Minor. The cigarette smoke followed the music upward to the high roof. I was hooked.

My friend is dead now. I enjoy the music when I can, rarer of access now than it was then. But I have never savored it so deeply as when we were in a darkened and vaulted church, seated on a wooden bench, feeling the vibrations coursing through the bench, through my legs and backbone, lifting into the dark and uncluttered cosmos.