CHANGING PARISH

During the Covid pandemic churches with music leaders willing and able to embrace technology found ways to sing together from their isolated homes and diverse buildings. Many crematoria that were already not huge supporters of live music removed organs, often electronic, to create space for socially distanced seating. Many of those instruments have not returned. All this creates a different scene for organists.

A traditional task for the organist has been to provide hymn accompaniments that encourage singing. During the pandemic we had to devise new ways to play hymns as meditation backgrounds that made them recognisable but impossible to sing to. Tricks such as playing them in impossible keys for singers or dropping bars, repeating sections or adding interline sections could be effective at defeating any would-be singer from unauthorised vocalising.

Some of us who derive a significant part of our music income from freelance playing have acquired our own ways of providing organ sound where there is no longer an organ. This helps in crematoriums that have removed organs. It is also useful in those churches where Sunday worship is led by a music group who are not available to play for midweek funerals and weddings.

The music group trend has also shaped the music repertoire and not always in directions every organist finds comfortable. For example, the piano parts of hymns and songs written for guitar and drum accompaniment do not always work well if played on an organ just as written in the hymn/song-book.