So far, so good! I just got back from the first Light in Winter event, Dr. George Damp’s presentation on “The King of Instruments” — the organ. The audience filled the First Presbyterian Church to capacity, and the performance proved well worthwhile.

Dr. Damp performed a number of organ pieces by Bach and Messiaen, among others. The performances were interspersed with fascinating anecdotes about the composers and their relationships with the organ. He explained that it was Mozart who had named the organ “the king of instruments,” and performed a piece written by Mozart for a mechanical clock (similar to a cuckoo clock but with a miniature organ inside). He played the piece first on the small-sized pipes that would have been inside such a clock, but explaining that Mozart had scorned having to write for such a toy-like instrument, he then performed it as Mozart probably “would have preferred,” on the full organ. Before playing Messiaen’s piece, which incorporated a number of bird-call melodies, Dr. Damp played recordings of the original bird calls, and then demonstrated how Messiaen had transcribed them for the organ.

I was particularly excited to attend this performance because I’ve always been fascinated with the organ — its immense size, beauty, and powerful sound. So Dr. Damp’s explanations of how the organ works — including a chance to peek inside to view the more than 5,000 pipes that make up the organ but are largely hidden from view. He was also joined by a local artist who had crafted many of the organ pipes, and who demonstrated a variety of different pipes that emulate different sounds (flute, trumpet, strings, bass trombone, etc.). These different groups of pipes can be activated by pulling out different stops on the organ console — thus, Dr. Damp informed us that if we’d ever used the saying “to pull out all the stops,” we’d used organ terminology!!

Another nice detail for me was the fact that Dr. Damp is a life-long Ithacan. He opened his talk by telling how he was in the last class to graduate from Ithaca High School while it was still located in what is now the DeWitt Mall (just a block away from the church we were in), and that at the time he was the assistant organist in another church located less than a block away. Just goes to show all of the amazing people who inhabit Ithaca and choose to live here all their lives!

I’m at home for dinner but I can’t wait for tonight’s Pilobolus performance at the State Theater! I look forward to writing about it when I get home from it later tonight.