Since early on Tuesday morning, devoted crowds have been setting up camp on Victoria Street, eager to catch the very first glimpse of Prince William of Wales and Catherine Middleton as they arrive at the west doors of Westminster Abbey for their wedding on Friday morning.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve stolen a few minutes away to write this, in between music rehearsals, camera rehearsals, my own last-minute practice (and the occasional glass of champagne), for one of the most talked about and eagerly anticipated events in recent history. I\u2019ll be playing organ music as the royal wedding guests take their seats and then assisting my colleague Robert Quinney, who will play during the service. Even though British singer-songwriter and former army officer James Blunt farcically claimed he would be playing the organ (\u201cLike every English or British musician being asked one silly question too often, I gave a silly answer\u2014and then I went to my Wikipedia page and changed it to say \u2018classically trained church organist,\u2019 and 4,400 websites picked up on it\u201d), the truth is that the circle of British organists is very small, and I know nearly all of my colleagues here in London.<\/p>\n
The news broke last November that the couple had chosen Westminster Abbey for their marriage. I heard the announcement immediately after playing the final chord of a piece at the end of a big service held in the Abbey, which had been attended by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. I\u2019ve been working at the Abbey for just over three years, having arrived from my previous post as Organ Scholar up the river at St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral. St. Paul\u2019s is a building of national significance and is the mother church of the Diocese of London as well as being a bold statement of civic pride for the city\u2014the image of Christopher Wren\u2019s famous dome is one of the most recognized on the planet. Westminster Abbey has a very different feel to it: it\u2019s smaller, older, and more intimate; it\u2019s a coronation church, the burial place of kings and queens, statesmen and soldiers, poets and priests, heroes and villains; and, as the Abbey\u2019s Web site enticingly describes, it\u2019s a \u201cmust see living pageant of British History.\u201d<\/p>\n
I first discovered the organ when I was eight, whilst walking past Holy Trinity Church in Coventry. The organist inside was practicing Widor\u2019s Toccata <\/em>very loudly; I ran into the church to hear what was going on and was completely stunned by the sheer power and volume of the instrument. He let me sit and play, and I stumbled my way through a short Chopin piano prelude, which was enough to make me want to learn the organ as soon as my legs were long enough to reach the pedals.<\/p>\n The organ is like a grand symphony orchestra controlled by one person manning a series of keyboards and pedals, stops and buttons. Much organ music is derived from orchestral music. On the one hand, an organ can imitate orchestral instruments\u2014the ardent string section of an orchestra, a lyrical clarinet, a French horn, timpani\u2014and on the other, it has its own indigenous magisterial voice. Organs are built to speak into specific acoustic spaces. When you play, it\u2019s as if you\u2019re playing the whole building you\u2019re in, which often can be electrifying. You also have a huge amount of power at your fingertips (and in the wrong hands it can sound unrelentingly terrible). An organ can perform anything from a sixteenth-century plainsong verset by Thomas Tallis to an orchestral transcription of Stravinsky\u2019s Firebird, <\/em>together with a Couperin Duo and a Messiaen meditation.<\/p>\n When I was eighteen, I went to work at St. Albans Cathedral with Andrew Lucas and Simon Johnson for two years prior to studying at Clare College, Cambridge. I think these two years were the most formative for me as an organist. I was forced to learn how to prepare a large amount of music in quick succession for daily choral services. I also had to learn how to accompany the Cathedral Choir on a complicated instrument, which involved playing slightly ahead of the conductor\u2019s beat (the choir is often placed at a distance from the organ, so you have to play \u201cahead\u201d so as not to appear \u201cbehind\u201d to the choir and listener). It\u2019s second nature to me now, but it\u2019s very hard when you do it for the first time. The current organ in Westminster Abbey was installed by Harrison and Harrison for the Coronation of King George VI in 1937. It\u2019s the ultimate early twentieth-century English organ, ideal for accompanying choirs in English romantic and twentieth-century choral repertoire, as well as being a comprehensive and exciting recital instrument. The earliest organ known to the Abbey dates from 1304, though no details of it survive.<\/p>\n The spectacle surrounding \u201cWills and Kate\u201d is incredible, as the swelling crowds and hoards of camera crews outside the Abbey demonstrate. We are all very excited about Friday\u2014it\u2019s a huge honour to be involved\u2014but there\u2019s also a sense that the Abbey has a tradition of worship and music making that stretches back for centuries. This somehow outweighs all the fervor. After all, it\u2019s the same organ we play each day for the Abbey\u2019s regular worshipers.<\/p>\n James McVinnie is the Assistant Organist of Westminster Abbey.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since early on Tuesday morning, devoted crowds have been setting up camp on Victoria Street, eager to catch the very first glimpse of Prince William of Wales and Catherine Middleton as they arrive at the west doors of Westminster Abbey for their wedding on Friday morning. I\u2019ve stolen a few minutes away to write this, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":165,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[2208,2206,2212,2210,2211,2207,2209,2205],"class_list":["post-15133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-catherine-middleton","tag-james-mcvinnie","tag-matrimony","tag-organ","tag-organ-pipes","tag-prince-william-of-wales","tag-royal-wedding","tag-westminster-abbey"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n