Views from the Choir Loft

Chant, Mighty Pipe Organs • Two Sundays, Two Cathedrals

Richard J. Clark · January 10, 2020

WO CATHEDRALS — two Sundays. Gregorian Chant and mighty pipe organs will be front and center at two concerts: Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross (Sunday 1.12.2020 @2pm) and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City. (Sunday, 1.19.2020 @ 3:15pm)

On the program is the seven-movement organ suite Gregorian Impressions. Published by The Sacred Music Press/The Lorenz Corporation, it is based on familiar and beloved plainchants. The American Organist magazine praises Gregorian Impressions for its “engaging developments.”

The Boston Archdiocesan Schola will assist singing the chants prior to each movement. Several noted liturgical musicians from New York will join members of the Boston Schola in New York.

HE TWO ORGANS: BOSTON — Sunday, January 12 @2pm: Built in 1875, the 101-rank E. & G. G. Hook and Hastings, Opus 801 contains 5,318 pipes. This instrument is highly unique in that it is nearly original in its tonal design. Clothed in stone and marble (since the recent renovation) this organ is breathing new life into the Cathedral!

• Click here for concert program and specifications of the 101-rank E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings Organ, Opus 801

• A tour of the newly renovated Holy Cross Cathedral will immediately follow the concert.

NEW YORK — Sunday, January 19th @3:15pm: five-manuals, 206 stops, 150 ranks, and 10 divisions, the Kilgen Organs were rebuilt by the Peragallo Pipe Organ Company in the 1990s.

This concert will be live-streamed here.

Both concerts are free and open to the public. See you there!

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

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About Richard J. Clark

Richard J. Clark is the Director of Music of the Archdiocese of Boston and the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.—(Read full biography).

20 October 2020 • “What we can’t share”

Almighty God has given to us the example of the Jesuit Martyrs of North America, whose feast day we celebrated yesterday. Of course, along with those eight martyrs we honor their associates, e.g Father François Bressani. I can’t share with you the torments Father Bressani underwent at the hands of Iroquois: it is too brutal. It would tear your heart out. But I will share what Bressani’s Superior said, after receiving a letter from him: “The letter is soiled and ill-written; because the writer has only one finger left on his right hand, and cannot prevent the blood from his wounds—which are still open—from staining the paper. His ink is gunpowder mixed with water, and his table is the earth.” If you have the stomach for it, read what Father Bressani (d. 1672) underwent for Jesus Christ. Let his example help us never fall into sins of impurity, avarice, ingratitude, or envy.

—Jeff Ostrowski

13 October 2020 • Chopin talks Bach

My “pianist pedigree” goes from my teacher through Wiktor Łabuński through Felix Blumenfeld, who studied with Anton Rubinstein. I always considered myself part of the “Bach-Mozart-Chopin school” as opposed to the “Handel-Beethoven-Liszt school.” (Needless to say, there’s great overlap between these schools.) Before giving a concert, Frédéric Chopin would always shut himself up in a room and play through Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. The year Chopin died, he spent considerable time with the painter, Eugène Delacroix (d. 1863), who recounts hearing Chopin launch into a monologue on the transcendence of J.S. Bach, insisting that “the fugue is like pure logic in music,” and that “to know fugue deeply is to be acquainted with the element of all reason and all consistency in music.”

—Jeff Ostrowski

12 October 2020 • True Story

Before a Low Mass, the priest ascends the Altar to place the Chalice, check the altar Missal, and do other “preparing” tasks. The organist must be prepared to play here, and—depending upon the priest—this can be of surprising length! For certain priests, I can easily play all six verses of a hymn while he’s doing these tasks. In the Ordinary Form, I believe too many have abandoned the preparation time before Mass (vesting, praying, keeping silence, and so on). I remember waiting for a priest to arrive in Corpus Christi, so I could ask him about the music. He never did arrive, because he had gotten into his vehicle wearing his chasuble, parked, hopped out of his truck (fully vested), and literally “processed” in as he entered the Church…true story.

—Jeff Ostrowski

Had the Church never spoken on this matter, it would still be repugnant to our Catholic people’s sense of what is fit and proper in the holiest of places, that a priest should have to struggle through the prayers of the Holy Mass, because of such tunes as “Alice, where art thou?” the “Vacant Chair,” and others of more vulgar title, which, through the carelessness or bad judgment of organists, sometimes find their way into our choirs.

— Preface to a Roman Catholic Hymnal (1896)