Church tour - the keyboard

At the picnic this past Sunday, I hope you all enjoyed not only the diverse styles of music, but also the diversity of sounds from the keyboard. I know sometimes it seems like the church has more instruments than one person could ever need with a pipe organ, a piano, a harpsichord, and the keyboard. They each have their uses and properties, however, and I strive to make use of each of them on a regular basis.

This past Sunday was an opportunity to feature the keyboard. The church's Roland Fantom allows for multiple sounds at the same time, so on some hymns you were hearing piano and woodwinds and pipe organ sounds. I could play the tri-fold Amen on a pipe organ and the Mozart variations on the piano - now that is a valuable resource for outdoor worship!

When the keyboard is indoors, it is actually linked to the organ with a midi interface. That means I can supplement the organ with any of the keyboard sounds, a huge boon to creativity and flexibility from the organ keyboard.

Church tour - the front entrance

I adore the beauty and symbolism of church architecture, from the grand sweep of a Gothic nave to the minutiae of intricate stained glass. Art and architecture serve the same goals as music in a church: to direct congregants toward God's glory, to proclaim the Gospel story in another form.

Not many of our members use the front door at Bethany, quite simply because it doesn't face the parking lot. Like many homes today, the front door hardly gets used. It's too inconvenient or too formal or just no longer makes practical sense (for our church the new addition of a welcoming room makes the side entrance imminently practical). For these reasons, as well as for anyone who might struggle with the stairs at our main entrance or for anyone trying to stay out of the elements, it only makes sense to use the side entrance.

However, if you've never used the front door to the church, you've missed an important symbolic element of the architecture. When you enter the front door, you enter a transitional space from the everyday to the sacred. The staircase symbolizes physically the mental and emotional change that should take place when we enter the sanctuary.

If it's a sunny day this Sunday, come in the front door for a change and notice the contrast with the darker space inside. Look up and glimpse the stained glass window and the altar. Allow yourself a physical prelude to accompany the musical prelude. Use both the music and the architecture to prepare for worship, rising up out of your everyday concerns to commune with God.

Coffee and friends will still be in the welcoming room between services!

Church tour - the organ

Since we've had communion at the altar rail since the beginning of Advent, many of you have had the opportunity to walk by the organ while I've been playing. I've especially noticed some of our youngest members peeking around the corner at all the buttons. Today, I want to share some of the basic facts about our instrument.

At Bethany English Lutheran, our organ is officially titled Austin Organ Company's Opus 1649, originally installed in 1929 and extensively rebuilt in 1981. It has two manuals (keyboards) of 61 keys each, a pedal keyboard with 32 pedals, and an electro-pneumatic action.

The organ has 13 ranks of pipes. That essentially means that there are 13 distinct sounds that can be made by pulling out the stops, based on the shape, size, and characteristics of the pipes. Each rank requires one pipe for every key, which means there are around 700 pipes in the wall behind the organ (on the pulpit side of the church).

Additionally, the church has a set of Ahlborn "electronic pipes" that are controlled by the black box you can see sitting on top of the organ. The speakers for these sounds are on the lectern side of the church, so you can likely tell when I'm adding these sounds to the pipe organ, based on where the sound is coming from. (The big bass sound for the closing hymn this past Sunday was from the electronic pipes, where our best 16' and 32' sounds come from.)

I don't want to bore my readers with too much technical writing about the instrument (hopefully I haven't already), but there's a decent summary about pipe organs in general at this link, if you'd like to read more. I also encourage you to satisfy your curiosity by coming up between services or anytime you see me in church. I'm always happy to demonstrate the instrument and talk about the music at Bethany!

Tintinnabulation

Isn't that a glorious word for the sound of bells? The poetry of the English language occasionally provides just the perfect word to describe something, and tintinnabulation perfectly conjures up the music of bells for me.

For Transfiguration Sunday, the short prelude was played by the Bethany Bell Choir, whom you can see pictured here. When they play, it gives me a rare opportunity to clear my mind before the service begins. It reminded me how wonderful it can be simply to stop creating and working and striving, so that we can listen and hear God's word.

I hope you enjoyed their playing as much as I did, and even more I hope that you tell them about it! Also, I know they'd be glad to have people joining them in making their beautiful music.

Church tour - the harpsichord

At Bethany, we're fortunate to have a wide range of instruments available to accompany and enhance our worship. Over the next few weeks, I'll take you on a mini-tour of our music facilities. Today, we start out with a unique keyboard, our harpsichord.

The harpsichord was invented sometime in the 1400s and essentially peaked in popularity during the 18th century. It has appeared in a wide range of variations, but they all share the one common feature of plucking the strings. This is in contrast piano, which uses a hammer to hit the strings, and accounts for the more "metallic" or "crisp" sound of the harpsichord. This feature also prevents the harpsichord from producing as much volume as the piano, which was certainly a factor in its decline.

Today, perhaps the primary reason to play the harpsichord is for the music of J.S. Bach. At the late service on Christmas Eve, the congregation got to hear his harpsichord for two concertos, and Lent will feature a number of Bach's preludes and fugues. When performed on this period instrument, the music of Bach possesses clarity and character that cannot be precisely reproduced on the piano. One biased account from the link above states that by the year 1800, "The precision and clarity of the baroque had been replaced by mush and bombast." To put it another way, the Romantic era ushered in a very different sound, full of emotion, in comparison to the intellectual purity of Bach's time. Hearing music on the harpsichord gives us a new musical perspective and that variety can help keep worship interesting and stimulating.