Jeff If you’ll forgive me for entering an alternative universe. SH’s talk of pipe organs sent me web hopping to try and find a pic of the one looming large in my past. I used have to live at FBC Dallas as my mother was Children’s Choirs Coordinator when growing up. And if I admit to it; played hide and seek in the Sanctuary. Other times I’d roam through it on my way here and there often when alone. Whenever I thought NO ONE would catch me I would sit at the organ, I had too much respect and fear of it to ever MESS with it. But it was the focal point in that room for me, It seemed (sitting there quiet and waiting) to have a living presence in that huge dark space as (in my imagination) it was a beast sleeping. I played it once or the one before it..I say play loosely) when the organist let me….pull/push this …, he let me blast trumpets and harps etc) While typing in search words I learned something about its history I never had cognizance as a child. I knew it was was not world class, but seemed a nice one.
I found this:

“Shut for a quarter of a century, the swank seventh floor of Eaton's College Park reopens next month, giving Toronto a truly dazzling new social venue, JAMES ADAMS writes

By JAMES ADAMS
Saturday, April 12, 2003

One element of the original Eaton Auditorium that won't be on view when the restored venue opens to the public next month is the famous Casavant organ. It's now housed in First Baptist Church in downtown Dallas.

Built in Quebec by the famous Casavant Frères, it was a four-manual 90-stop beast with 5,804 pipes. The first person to play it in public was the then-conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Ernest MacMillan (later Sir Ernest), who performed at an Eaton Auditorium recital on Mar. 26, 1931. Almost 14 years later, a 13-year-old Glenn Gould made his recital debut on the same instrument, playing pieces by Bach, Dupuis and Mendelssohn. A review in the Dec. 13, 1945, Toronto Telegram was headlined, "Boy, age 12, Shows Genius." (Gould was born Sept. 25, 1932)....Even after Eaton's College Street closed in 1977, Gould continued to practise and occasionally record in Eaton Auditorium until the summer of 1981. By that time, the organ had been dismantled by Keates-Geissler Pipe Organs Ltd. of Guelph, Ont..."

Thanks SH for sending me on that search…..for some reason it is amazing to me that the organ I grew up with, was once played by Gould an eccentric genesis who loved Eaton Hall for practice till his force out. I had read he favored its acoustics so strongly most of his recordings were laid there. I’ve found while just looking he made one recording on the Casavant (I’ve never heard it …but now will have to look it up).

If the keys and stops etc are original than I grew up touching (or heard the pipes, - many times) something which a man played whose recording of Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1.(Gould) piano. 4:48 is carried both by Voyager One and Two, the farthest distance man-made objects in the galaxy on 12” gold-plated copper records.

Life is very interesting!



[This message has been edited by Smart Little Lena (edited July 19, 2003).]