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The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Organist
Few people now recollect Edna Ferber, once a best-selling novelist. Nevertheless she numbered among her champions Somerset Maugham, who in 1948 told playwright Garson Kanin: “I admire Edna Ferber. She’s a true professional.” To Kanin’s inquiry “What sort of writer would you call her?”, Maugham responded: “The best sort. She writes because she must, compulsively. She couldn’t not write, if you take my meaning.”
That last sentence, suitably altered, summarises us organists. Try as we will, we couldn’t not be organists.
Heaven knows, prospects of glittering financial rewards seldom motivate us. Our incomes (a few French and American star performers aside) would be greeted by plumbers and electricians with Rabelaisian bellows of derisive mirth. We lack even the spiritual benefits that come from being actively resented, like cops, politicians or tax collectors. Rather, we become organists not because we can, but because we must. Why must we? That question’s answer…
The Editor of Quadrant Music, Alexander Voltz, has won the symphonic section of the prestigious George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest.
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1 mins
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