Posted in: Musicouching by Tiffany J L Alfonso on June 1, 2010 | 0 Comments
Childhood memory has it that I really love attending a Mass with a pipe organ, but now I have to endure attending Mass with a digital one.
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I miss Paterson, New Jersey, and it’s fudging vicinity for so many reasons – I miss the bustling town square of my former childhood hometown of Clifton on Main Avenue, the dance recitals I’ve performed with the rest of the troupe from Kathryn Collins Dance Studio at nearby Montclair High, and the hubbub of Wayne’s Willowbrook Mall on Route 46. Speaking of that route, near it’s intersection with NJ 3, I miss the parish situated on a hill overlooking Valley Road, St Philip the Apostle, and it’s not just the spaciousness of the sanctuary and the abstract stained glass windows I longed for since my move to the Tampa Bay Area almost a decade ago, and this is what I really missed – the 3-manual and pedal-board Peragallo pipe organ. I grew up basking in its lovely music, when the singing diapasons complement the clarinet-like reeds. The part when the huge furnishing – with its Trompette De Maria (a trompette en chamade dedicated in honor of Dr. Frank and Edith DiMaria) protruding over the choir loft – showed its majesty was when it accompanies us in singing the introits of Marty Haugen’s Mass of Creation. (I know a majority of Catholics will flame me for appreciating that Mass setting, but I just love it when the pipe organ is involved!) My musical part of my religious childhood just ended when I moved to Florida.
In June 1999, after a series of past vacations to my (now ex-) cousins and Central Florida (Mary Queen of the Universe Shrine, my second-favorite area attraction to Walt Disney World, has a Rodgers Trillium.), I finally moved to the Tampa area, namely in the Brandon vicinity. We church-hopped a few times – sometimes I’d celebrate Mass at St. Stephen’s in Valrico or Nativity near FL 60 in Brandon (renovated a few years ago). We finally settled in our current parish of St. Francis of Assisi after a few transfers here and there. The three churches have Achilles heels – each one harbors a digital organ.
Roughly a month before the Mournful Morning (what I call the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks), my cousins, uncles, aunts, parents, grandmother, and I went to St. Augustine and spent a day there. We stopped by at the fantastic Cathedral-Basilica, where we remained until an estimated 15 minutes post-Mass. I looked around in the sanctuary and found just a mere organ console – no facade of pipes or grille concealing them. Family Catholic tradition has it that I had to make three wishes whenever I set foot in a newly-visited parish, so when I got out of the old church, one of the three went disclosed – I ached for a real pipe organ, and judging from the looks of the console it was a digital one, possibly an Allen. (It came true a few years later, when Casavant installed a three-manual monster, with the facade pipes in the sanctuary.)
