Come Sunshine, come sweet organ sounds
Komm Sonnenschein, komm süsse Orgelklänge Thursday 08 April 2010 A girlfriend from the Randstad (the most densely populated mid-western section of The Netherlands) came to visit. This was her first time in Friesland (the most northern province), so we had to see Leeuwarden (the capital city of Friesland, where I live). We strolled around the city all day, along the canals, in the Prinsentuin (Garden of Princes), and finally through the terpenstraatjes (small streets on top of artificial dwelling hills, built from the 5th century AD until the 13th century A while later we stopped at the Great or “Jacobijner” Church, where someone was playing the organ. I tried to recognize the music. Was this a psalm, or a hymn? But there was nothing familiar about the sounds that the Müller organ put forth. We wanted to go inside, walking on our tiptoes so as to not disturb the organist, watch, listen… Nothing is so special as the sphere of a church with organ music playing on a late summer afternoon. We didn’t even take the trouble to try and see if the door was locked or not because we didn’t have much time left and there was the train to catch, back to the Randstad. So we stayed outside and listened. The sun was shining on our faces and the organ music played. The afternoon was beautiful.Organ music—how much I hated it as a child: The seemingly long Sunday afternoons in church, the dark brown pews, and the slow organ. As a child it is not easy to sit still for long periods of time. My mother threatened that one of the deacons would lock me up underneath the pulpit, where it was dark and scary. The organ was above the pulpit and I often wondered how the reverend could stand the sound. Later, the church was renovated: The pews were painted white, and the organ was relocated. We often sat diagonally across from the organ, in a pew where a hair had been brushed into the wet paint. During the long church service hours I often tried to pry it loose, without success. Apart from the hair that got painted in, the painters had done a professional job using quality paint. Going to church was not exactly my hobby. The reverend exclaimed from the pulpit that, “the bargen will bring peace.” What I didn’t know then that he meant to say “bergen” (mountains) instead of “bargen”, which in the Frisian language means “pigs”. Pigs that will bring peace? How could the reverend say that? What was written in the Bible couldn’t possibly all be true. My faith was shaken early, especially when a baby was baptized and the reverend said that the child was born with sin. I didn’t know anything yet about original sin at that time, but what the reverend said really could not be true. A little child like that had not yet done anything that could even point in the direction of any sin at all. I neither understood religion, nor the church, nor the slow organ music. Once in a great while, a trumpeter was brought in and then the little curtain that hid the organ player was lifted, and the organ player and trumpeter played together, bringing a bit more life to the music. During the sermon the curtain was lowered again. My father said that they did that because they were going to take a nap. I unquestioningly believed him, as there were more people sleeping during the sermon, and always the men. What I could never understand, however, was how the gentlemen musicians awoke exactly at the time the sermon concluded.
At the age of seventeen, I had had enough. The weekly church services had come to an end for me and I never heard the organ again because right about the time I had taken leave from the church, the organ disappeared as well. The church was renovated again and another organ came in. Later, during funeral services, I heard the new organ play, but I cannot remember its sound.
When I was twenty-eight and had my own family, an electronic organ came into our home. It wasn’t my idea, but my spouse really wanted it. He loves popular organ music—a genre I abhor. No, organs and organ music, whatever the genre may be, really were not for me. I primarily loved classical music, but to each his own, and that electronic organ wasn’t in my way. Thankfully, it had a headphone connection.
On a sunny day in July, my husband brought a summer employee home after work by the name of Egbert. The boy was still a student, but he was also a church organ player. While I was in the kitchen, he sat down behind our organ and started to play. Until today I don’t know exactly the name of the piece or the composer of the music that touched me immediately, but I do remember standing motionless in the kitchen and then slowly walking to the family room. I also remember looking at our organ with disbelief. Is this our instrument that produced this moving music? Music that told a story, first with a deep sigh of melancholy, then with sadness, but then with acceptance, resurrection, continuing to the final measures with optimism and yes, with comfort and tenderness, I would say. So beautiful…
Although I realized that you need talent to play music well, from that moment on I knew for sure that I would try and learn to play the organ, and see how far I could get. If I would succeed in playing pieces of music like Egbert could, my life would be much enriched. No matter how much time it would take me, I wanted to try. Anything I would learn how to play was a plus.
I did take lessons for a number of years and it soon became evident that, as suspected, I did not have much talent. There was the great advantage that I had taken recorder lessons in primary school so that I rather quickly learned to read music, but my motor skills were lacking here and there and my feel for rhythm wasn’t very good either. Learning to play the organ took much effort. In the beginning, it went okay: the little pieces with chords and the simple tunes I was able to play after considerable practice. However, I had bigger things in mind: the piece Egbert, the summer employee, had played. It didn’t necessarily have to be the exact same music – I had let go of that dream already for I didn’t have his talent – but something in that direction would be wonderful. My first teacher was a student of the Music Pedagogic Academy but he stopped teaching in-home, so I registered with the music institute, where I got another teacher using different study books. One of them was “Do Re Me of the Wig Period” by S. Schuitema. “Schuitema?” I exclaimed, astonished for that had been the name of the organ player of the church I had left. That couldn’t be the same person, could it? The one with the slow organ, the sleep-inducing music… Now I would get lessons following his study method, from his book? But my teacher said that the boredom during the church services had been due to my feelings for that organ, and he was right, there was nothing wrong with the book.
Although I took pleasure in the lessons, after four years I was ready for another form of music: I exchanged the organ lessons for voice lessons. I continued playing the organ as well, but didn’t further my organ studies and so it proved again that standing still is going in reverse. After some time, beside my voice lessons, I decided to search for another organ teacher and once again I received lessons at home. This time from a kind and skilled teacher, who was also very passionate: Even when I ran into her at the supermarket it could happen that I got a lesson in music theory, she in line at one cash register and me in another. Altogether, I have had three organ teachers and some substitute teachers in between. They were all so different in character, but there were some similarities as well: their patience (which they certainly needed with me) and their great love and admiration for the composer J.S. Bach, which they conveyed to me. The organ lessons gave me much more than learning how to play the organ a bit. Thanks to those lessons I was introduced to composers I never knew existed, such as the English and Italian composers who wrote small pieces for the organ, which are really beautiful and fairly easy to play by people without much talent – people like me. Hours and hours I spent behind our organ and I never would have thought that organ music would enrich my life that much.
So there I was, that sunny afternoon, listening to the Müller organ of the Great “Jacobijner” Church. While we moved on I told my friend about my first experiences with organ music, the time that I was a child, the Sunday hours in church, the slow organ of those days. She became curious and asked what type of organ that had been and where it had ended up. I didn’t know, but it made me curious as well. Would it still be played, after all those years? I decided to find out.
Some time later I started my search on the Internet, but could not find much information. I called a lady whose nephew had been a church organ player, the succeeder of Mr. Schuitema. Her nephew had passed away, I knew that, but perhaps she could tell me something about the organ? No, she could not, but perhaps the widow of her nephew could. The widow referred me to the archive manager of the church, who couldn’t tell me much either, but he was willing to jump on his bike and cycle over to the church to search the archives. Well, that would be a bit much to ask, I thought. The archive manager then told me that there was a book, written by Jan Jongepier, entitled “Five Centuries of Frisian Organ Building, A Truly Beautiful Collection,” and perhaps I could find more information in that book. He also gave me the phone number of the secretary of the church in Oude Pekela (a town nearby) where the organ was located now. The secretary did not know anything about the organ itself, but gave me the phone number of the current organ player, who, to my astonishment, could not tell me anything about the organ either. He said he played it with much pleasure and that was most important, but no, he didn’t know who had built the organ. The characters and markings on the organ had faded away, he said, and he even didn’t know that at one time it had been a cabinet organ, which I was able to tell him thanks to the information provided to me by the archive manager. Later, in the book by Jan Jongepier, I found photographs and read that the organ indeed had been a cabinet organ and that the organ builder, Mr. M. van den Brink, had placed it in the town of Enkhuizen, in 1843. It wasn’t certain, however, whether that same organ builder had also placed the organ’s front. The organ has pneumatic innards dating from the year 1920. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure what that meant so my husband had to explain. Now, it became clear to me why that organ was so slow and in my memory I heard it play once more. It suited the sphere of those quiet Sunday afternoons in church, with just a few churchgoers, and we, the children, who learned psalms during the sermon, so we would know them at school on Monday morning. That organ, that didn’t seem to feel like it all either. Now, the organ appears to be doing well and the organ player enjoys it. “Come and listen to it,” he says during our phone conversation. “There are church services on Sunday morning. It is so beautiful.” I doubt that will ever happen – I prefer to go to an organ concert, or sitting on the sofa listening to a CD with organ music. Maybe I will stroll over to the Great or “Jacobijner” Church some afternoon in the hope that the sun will shine on my face and the sounds of the Müller organ will fill my ears. What a beautiful afternoon that would be once more. A truly beautiful afternoon indeed.
August 2009, Translation: Maria O’Neill