Daily Newsie

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to learn how to play the pipe organ. When I discovered Bach’s fugues and heard them played on pipe organs in Europe, I cursed the fate that had me growing up in rural Pennsylvania with a gorgeous old upright piano rather than in some quaint German hamlet with an ancient stone church and sprawling pipe organ. I would stand in the aisles transfixed, staring up at the clusters of pipes with tears leaking from my eyes as some lucky soul got to coax music from the belly of the instrument. Various piano teachers over the years had organs as well but I never had one readily available for practice, and so my dream lapsed into quiet and grew dusty over time as dreams are wont to do.

But tonight I started thinking about it again. Fifteen or 16 years of piano lessons have taught me how to read music and make my fingers move where they’re supposed to go, but organs are so much more complex, with foot pedals that I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to reach with my stubby little legs. My piano teacher in college indulged me by allowing me to play a Bach fugue — which one now, I can’t recall — and I struggled through it all semester until finally she bumped me off the bench and played it herself, beautifully, so I could hear what it was supposed to sound like. (Funny enough, my Sims play the same song on their piano, and do a pretty good job of it.) One of my professors, a cellist, joked that playing Bach pieces should be followed by a hosing-down with Gatorade. Even after mangling that fugue in super-slow motion, I knew what he meant.

But if I had my druthers, I’d walk into a quiet cathedral early one morning when no one’s around, sit at the pipe organ, and play Bach’s Fugue in G-Minor (”The Great”) like this guy:

Amazing, isn’t it? I don’t know if I’ll ever learn to play the pipe organ, but I hope that when Beloved and I make it to Europe one day we can revisit some of those churches and hear someone else play those magnificent pieces. Forget the sermons, the prayers, the communions — it’s when I’m a small speck in a giant church listening to a Bach fugue that I feel closest to the infinite.