Someone You Should Know

Like many members of A.G.O., music is an avocation for me.  I became interested in church music while stationed on the east coast during the Viet Nam conflict, and was able to attend a number of services at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C.  After my...

After 12 years of piano study, it was my senior year in high school when I began studying the organ at the urging of my mother. I decided to major in organ at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN.  After 2 years of study I was not accomplishing much, and...

I'll let you in on a little secret:  my greatest joy as an organist is playing hymns.  To be sure, I enjoy the repertoire of our    instrument, but I also find the experience of leading a choir and congregation in the great hymns of the church to...

But I was there!!!  I mean I was really, REALLY there when that Skinner was installed!.  I was an eighteen year old kid (it’s ok if you do the numbers; I’m too old to care) from the neighborhoods of Chicago with nothing special but a love of playing the...

“There is no sound more beautiful than people singing God’s praise.” These words, instilled in me by my first organ teacher and choir director, Ann Celeen Dohms, have become a life-long mantra. Before I sang in her boys’ choir or was her organ student, I was...

My life as a musician, organist, conductor, and harpsichordist has been much more enjoyable and rich than I could have ever imagined when I set my sights on this path in earnest, some thirty years ago.  Above all else, I value the opportunity to immerse myself in...

I got my start playing the organ when I was in 7th grade in Powhattan, Kansas, and was a member of Zion Lutheran Church.  The elders decided that they needed some new blood at the organ bench and asked my friend and me if we would take organ lessons and be willing to...

My first experience hearing a pipe organ live happened when I attended the graduation of the Medical School at the University of Michigan as a child.  We were in Hill Auditorium when all the newly minted medical doctors, including a family friend,  stood up for the...

I recently celebrated a birthday - not one of those that slips by and you hope no one notices. With this one, I am standing on the cusp of a new decade and for some reason, those decade birthdays have been very significant in my life. I've thought back to how my life...

It seems a lifetime ago that I was a grade school kid at St. Francis Xavier in Wilmette. At that time, the school offered free music lessons…students would leave class and walk across the parking lot to the convent. My piano teacher, Sister Marian Celeste, looked at...