SPECIAL ORGAN MUSIC
By Christopher Dazey
There are two very special pieces of organ music I'll be playing soon that I wanted to draw your attention to.
On Maundy Thursday (April 17, 7:00 pm), for the organ prelude, I will be playing Le Banquet Celeste (The Celestial Banquet) by the 20th-century organist and composer Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen wrote all kinds of instrumental and vocal music, but organists love him for his organ pieces which are rhythmically and harmonically complex. The Celestial Banquet is a slow, methodical and mystical meditation on the Eucharist, with very interesting long chords in the organist's hands (played on the organ's very beautiful string and flute stops) and high, staccato (short) notes in the pedal played by the organist's feet, signifying (according to Messiaen himself) the drops of the blood of Christ. It is a very affecting piece, lasting about seven minutes, so I hope you arrive early (around 6:53 pm) to this special service to hear it in its entirety.
Then on Easter Sunday morning, April 20, for the postlude I will play one of the most venerable and well-known pieces of organ literature, the final movement from Louis Vierne's (1870 - 1937) Organ Symphony No 1. This piece has the melody in the organist's feet much of the time, and will use the broad, full range of our 79-rank Aeolian-Skinner organ, with its deep, ground-shaking 32-foot reeds in the pedal division and its thousands of individual pipes in both the front and rear of our sanctuary.
Crossroads is incredibly fortunate to house (in my biased opinion) the finest pipe organ in all of Stark County, so I hope you take advantage of the opportunity to hear this magnificent instrument lead worship and song in moments both meditative and exuberant in all of our upcoming Holy Week and Easter services.
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