Reluctant Organists - 2

(this article appeared in the August 2010 edition of the parish magazine)

I might have mentioned last month the rocks and sharp stones that bestrew the path of the Reluctant Organist, but I didn’t know the half of it then.

It was when I raised with the Treasurer, I thought quite politely, the matter of the customary Fee for services above and beyond the call of duty, that I was transfixed by a gimlet eye and informed in acid tones that the Fee for a Reluctant Organist was exactly the same, to the penny, as the fine for failing to sing in the choir.  In vain did I protest that I had hummed as well as strummed.  It cut no absolutely no ice.

I was particularly peeved because on Whit Sunday I had become the latest innocent victim of a cunning plan hatched by French organ composers to restore national pride after Agincourt.

French composers of organ music, you see, have a mischievous  streak, and they are never happier than when they are teasing the reluctant organist by starting a piece off innocuously enough on Page One in some easy key like F, with a nice tune and only the flute stop out, then introducing more and more sneaky sharps and flats after the first page turn, until suddenly, just as you’ve arrived at a really fast passage in six sharps and 11/16, you are expected to have enough free hands to pull out 19 more stops on the swell and 12 on the great while holding a nine-note chord with your feet, and the new ‘registration’ (as we organists call a particular combination of knobs and buttons) occupies half a page of extremely small print.  In French.

It is not surprising that ladies make good organists, because reading an organ score must be very much like reading a knitting pattern.  If you can translate K2, yfwd., sl.1, K2tog, psso, yfwd., K5, yfwd., sl1, K2tog. psso., yfwd., K1 into dexterous digital activity while simultaneously concentrating on daytime television then reading an organ score, even one by a French composer, must be an absolute doddle.  And it is worth noting that in a random sample of French organists, such as Olivier Messiaen (anag: “vile ear emission”) and Marie-Claire Alain (“a miracle alien air”), fully half are women.

The reason that there is so much French organ music is, of course, that French orchestras, like French farmers and French ferry operators, are always on strike, and churches and cathedrals there have learned the hard way to play safe.  Indeed, the great French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (“calm is an essential”) got so exasperated that he wrote a symphony for Organ and Orchestra that still packs the concert halls because he cunningly fixed things so that nobody notices if the orchestra do not actually turn up.

But on one thing all Reluctant Organists agree – that the last word should come from their patron saint, perhaps the finest of all English-speaking women organists, the New Zealand-born Gillian Weir – 


“I are willing.”