Bach
I am so buzzed.* Oisin’s been playing Johann Sebastian Bach. I probably told you a while ago that Oisin had bought a Virtual Pipe Organ from Hauptwerk**—you remember that Oisin, my piano teacher,*** loves the organ first?—and then spent a long time checking out, buying, swapping, arguing with the providers of, hooking up, rehooking, rejigging, rehanging, reconfiguring, rewiring, and shouting at the necessary pieces of kit to make the thing work. Piano teachers and church organists generally speaking are not rolling in cash, so the result is that his studio now looks like a steampunk set for Phantom of the Opera.† He’s usually playing the beast when I turn up on Friday afternoons. In the short winter daylight, with the rest of his studio murky in the twilight, the spot for him to read the music by is making pythons and giant spiders out of the loops and gyres of cable—and Oisin himself has a strong face, so the stark lighting is turning him into Saruman.†† I’m walking down the little hill toward the studio end of his house with the earth under my feet going brrrrrrrrooooom, ††† and I have been known to have a brief, faint-hearted moment when I think about having something to do right now on the far side of town. Preferably in a strong overhead light.
I do not yield to these spasms of cowardice. Not only will there be music, there will be tea.
The thing about your virtual organ is that it can be many organs, and probably is. I think Oisin’s came with three already loaded. There are also lots of sample packages or what-you-call-’em out there, where you can try some of the other organ software, although it usually has the failure-to-buy-averting trick of the sound dropping out every few minutes which, just by the way, is infuriating, but I see their point. One or two Friday afternoons Oisin has had a stack of samples that he’s worked his way through with lavish commentary from the peanut gallery. It’s astonishing the variety of organ sound—of course a lot of your experience of an organ is of the building it’s in—usually a church—which is more than just the experience of your ears, plus that the architecture has an enormous contribution to what you hear. You also don’t usually hear six organs in an hour and a half so their individuality isn’t so obvious.‡
Oisin had a new one today—the full programme, not a sample. I’ve forgotten where the real one is, except that it’s in Germany, or exactly how old it is, although it’s the 1730s, which means it was around when J S Bach was around, and while there’s no documentation that he played it, still, he could have—but perhaps more to the point, this is the sort of organ he was writing for.
It was fabulous, listening to Oisin play Bach on this 1730’s German organ. Fabulous. One might almost say a Religious Experience.
I’ve always been a bit resistant to Bach. Very nice and all, and I do somewhat get it that he was this amazing innovator blah blah blah. But, you know, I’m resistant to Shakespeare: I am an evil cow. That’s just the way it is. I like Bach better after five years of Friday afternoons with Oisin‡‡, but he still wasn’t on my top ten composer list or anything. That was yesterday. He is today. Blither blither blither erk. There was a coming-home quality about today: a good deal of what Oisin played was the really famous stuff that even the Bach-resistant like me are familiar with, but as if hearing it right for the first time, because played on the instrument it was meant to played on. One of the astonishing things about this particular organ is how well balanced the three keyboards are‡‡‡: the pedalboard thunders away like the Ents on their way to Isengard but never overwhelms the manuals, which are each as sharp-cut clear as Orthanc in snow. And the way the three musical lines all work both separately and together, each being itself at the same time as creating one or seventeen or an infinity of things out of the resonances that clever Mr Bach has laid down—I’m going to say something about Lothlorien or Rivendell here, I just know I am, and then I’ll never forgive myself.
If I’m reverting unilaterally to LOTR I’m in a dangerously transcendent state. I’d better eat more chocolate. But . . .
Wow.
* * *
* No, not by the frelling tower meeting. The frelling tower meeting was a success as measured by the fact that it only took forty-five minutes. But we’ve got various issues, chief among them that our precious and beloved bells need some serious repair and maintenance work, and we’re going to have to do some fund-raising. I don’t want to think about this tonight. I want to go on thinking about Bach.
*** And new voice teacher enabler
† His pedalboard is to die for. You want it in your sitting room as sculpture. But he’s still using a pair of tatty old plastic manuals (keyboards) which he happened to have about the place^ before he bought his organ. He keeps muttering about how he should upgrade. True. But I, being a hellgoddess, and committed to leading men to doom and destruction, keep trying to convince him he should buy the keyboards by the maker of his pedalboard, and he keeps cringing and whining about not being able to afford it. What are you, a man or a karaoke singer at the Troll and Nightingale?^^ But it’s been a few months since he’s bought a new piece of the three-dimensional gear or had printouts of keyboard ads lying around or said anything to me about it so I’m hoping he’s nerving himself to buy the good manuals.
^ I’ve also told you, although you’re forgiven for forgetting+, that he has an entire little recording studio in his attic. You can’t stand up in his attic, but the recording stuff is tucked in very neatly, like nests of owls.
+ I am in a very bad place for ever getting snarky about anyone forgetting anything.~
~ Except Peter my birthday. I am wearing the earrings he gave me for Christmas—the earrings he commissioned at my request—for the second time today and he hasn’t noticed either time. And remember that gorgeous black cardigan with the embroidered roses I got for my birthday? I haven’t worn it partly in fear of the likelihood of my instantly overturning a large bottle of salad dressing on myself, but also partly because it’s been SO UNGLEBLARGING COLD, and it’s only cotton. I finally wore it for the first time on Tuesday, for my adventure with trains and little blue sewing machines with wheels. I don’t have to tell you he didn’t notice when I turned up at the mews for dinner, do I? Okay, it was just because he was so glad to see me, right?
And at least he gives me the presents. He has the really important part down.
^^ One night recently while Wolfgang was still in the body shop and hellhounds and I were walking home there was the most awful racket—not from the Troll, which is locally notorious for its live cough cough music, but from the Six-Legged Pony.+ Karaoke night, I said to myself, and looked in the window as we went by. No. Wrong. You mean he was getting paid for that noise? I hadn’t realised I had a future as a bar singer. This changes everything.
+ You are of course assuming that I am taking the usual liberties with its alias. Well, I am, but a six-legged pony is what is on its sign. Not one of the greater examples of the pub-sign-painter’s art.
†† No not Christopher Frelling Lee. Saruman.
††† It’s the Uruk-hai! Run for your lives!
‡ And sad but true, some organs have been better served than others by their virtual programme builders.
‡‡ With a little help from our frelling blondviolinist and her bleating about solo violin sonatas and partitas. I’m sure it’s really her fault that I had a Road-to-Damascus^ conversion driving home—oh, a year or so ago now I think? I told you this at the time, didn’t I? This solo violin thing came on the radio and it so blew me away I had to pull over to the side of the road so I could listen to it properly. I don’t even remember which one it was: just that it was Bach, and solo violin. Music of the spheres. Golly. Never been much of a strings person either. Well, five years ago—before Oisin—I had very little use for the organ, great bullying thing, except I was aware it could be thrilling live. But, eh. So you see there is always hope even for evil cows.
^ Speaking of religious experiences
‡‡‡ With all due plaudits and huzzahs to the sample recorders and programmers.
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