Let's write about organ music in Maine! A dedication blog

Father Thomas M. Murphy (b. June 5, 1953 – d. September 20, 2021):

On Eagle's Wings!* (Recorded LIVE as a prelude to the Papal Mass with Pope Francis, held at Madison Square Garden on September 25, 2015. Mass had over 20,000 in attendance! Vocalist: D'Train Williams Orchestra: New York Philharmonic Words & Music by Fr. Michael Joncas. (c) 1979, Oregon Catholic Press. www.ocp.org

BRUNSWICK. Maine – Father Thomas M. Murphy, pastor of All Saints Parish in Brunswick, passed away unexpectedly on Monday, Sept. 20, 2021 at the age of 68. The son of Louis and Phyllis Murphy, Father Murphy was born in Houlton, Maine, but grew up on Portland’s Munjoy Hill. He attended Cathedral School and then Cheverus High School, before earning a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Southern Maine. He then received a master’s degree in sacred theology from St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Father Tom Murphy Rest in Peace

A feature story reported in the Diocese of Portland Maine's September/October 2021, Harvest Magazine, described the restoration of a "Down East treasure".  In my opinion, Father Tom would have appreciated this church organ history and the article.

 An 87 year old organ in a Machias, Maine Roman Catholic church, has been restored to its original luster.

This particular echo report is dedicated to the life of Father Tom Murphy, the pastor of All Saints Parish, in Maine's Mid Coast, including six churches. Sadly, Father Tom died unexpectedly on Monday, September 20, 2021, although he had been reported by the parish to have received hospital emergency care on the Friday before his death. In fact, Father Tom had a robust singing voice. In his obituary, he was described as having a great appreciation for church music, opera and the theater.

This echo history about the organ restoration at the Holy Name of Jesus Church in Machias, ME, is dedicated to his love of music and to honor Father Tom's dedication to helping others.

"Aeolian-Skinner made some of the finest organs in the country, says Greg Notes, an organist. ,“It was the Cadillac of organ building.”

“It is a magnificent instrument,” says Father Philip Clement, administrator of the parish. “We owe a great deal of debt to the Sullivan family.”

"They specified that it should be a very fine instrument, and that is what they got,” says Timothy Smith, of the Smith & Gilbert Organ Company. 

The appreciation the church community had for its new organ was such that in November 1934, the pastor extended an invitation to Bishop Joseph McCarthy, the sixth bishop of Portland, to travel Down East, to dedicate it, an invitation he accepted.

Regrettably, with passing years and generations, many parishioners no longer realized the quality of the gift in their midst. That is, until last winter, 2020, when Noyes asked Father Clement if he could practice on the organ because pandemic restrictions had kept him from traveling to Saint Andrews, New Brunswick, where he is the organist at All Saints Anglican Church. 

Noyes has a connection to St. Peter the Fisherman Parish, because he also plays at Sacred Heart Church in Lubec.

Noyes says the quality of the organ at Holy Name of Jesus Church shone through even though it was evident that it was in dire need of cleaning and tuning.

“I went right up to [Father Clement] afterwards and I said, ‘Do you have any idea how good this organ is'?’ Noyes recalls. “It’s a prize, and the people didn’t realize it.”

After consulting with Father Clement, Noyes reached out to Smith, an old friend who has an organ company in upstate New York. Smith, who used to own a home in Eastport, made the trip to evaluate the organ and came to the same conclusions as Noyes.

“I knew that the organ deserved to have its pipes cleaned, so that’s what we did, but it’s amazing how intact the organ is mechanically,” he says. “It’s a remarkable slice of history from 1934, because the organ is completely original. The attention to detail in the construction and the use of materials is all uncompromised.”

Smith says it is clear the small pipe organ was specially built for Holy Name of Jesus Church. “There is a rose window, a larger circular window in the gallery wall, and this organ was configured mechanically to go around the window. That took a fair amount of engineering to alter the shape of the pipes and the structure of the organ so that the organ acts as a frame around the stained-glass window,” he says.

Smith says the interior of the organ was not just dusty but dirty, possibly the result of soot from a small fire in the adjoining rectory or a furnace incident decades ago. Over a three-day period in July, with the help of parishioners, the organ’s nearly 600 pipes were removed and carried down a narrow staircase to the parish hall for cleaning.

“He and his mother worked for three days, taking these pipes down, cleaning them, bringing them back up and tuning the organ afterwards. He had some assistance from parishioners, who thoroughly enjoyed that as well. They learned about the inner workings of our organ by watching him take it apart and put it back together again,” says Father Clement.

“Tim (the master organ fixer-upper guy) made working on the organ a lot of fun, and it was a pleasure to help him,” says Gabriel, a teenager who volunteered.

“I wasn’t expecting the organ to be opened up like that, and I really liked helping to tear it apart,” says Christian, his younger brother.

The metal pipes were cleaned by swishing them in a tank of hot water to loosen the dirt, while the wooden pipes had the dirt blown out or them. Moreover, the metal pipes were then buffed with soft cloths, while the wooden pipes were wiped down and lightly oiled to remove the dryness of the wood.

“It’s a remarkable slice of history from 1934 because the organ is completely original.” - Timothy Smith.

After the organ was tuned, Smith, who is an accomplished musician, performed a recital for the parishioners to help them appreciate what makes pipe organs so special.

"A small organ is like having a chamber orchestra and a larger organ is like having a symphony orchestra," he says.  Wind is blowing through the pipes and resonating in a space and creating that magical sound that can't happen through speakers."

"It adds to the character of our parish," says Father Clement.  "It's part of our history.  It's an original and very simply put, it helps us to do what we do.  The organ helps us in our worship of God, in the Mass."

The enhanced cleaning cost was $3,000, money that was rased through an organ fund and fundraising including a $1,000 gift from a parishioner. 

Now that it has been thoroughly cleaned, Smith says, there is no reason why the organ, with regular minor maintenance, can't continue to serve the parish for decades to come.

It's an organ that is just a beautiful blossom of tone, if you will, in that lovely church," he says.

I'm delighted that the parishioners are now aware of this treasured gift, " adds Father Clement.

*You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord

Who abide in His shadow for life,

Say to the Lord, 

"My refuge, my rock in whom I trust!"

 And He will raise you up on eagles' wings..."

Let's Write about "Remembering"

When I read "How to Be an Anti Racist" by Ibram X. Kendi, the author taught me about how my anti-racist arguments are, in fact, rooted in racism. Yes, in other words, by defining my anti-racism in my own reality, I am really amplifying racism. This startling new reality came home again when I read this review published in The New York Times, about "People Love Dead Jews".

Kendi's autobiographical story and Horn's essays provide teachable moments, when we are faced with the pain of truth. Remembering is not necessarily validating reality.  

In other words, our reality is not real at all but, rather, a prism where memories are framed by what we want to believe.

Here is an echo essay about "remembering":

Review of "People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present", by Dara Horn- review by Yaniv Iczkovits

In 2014, Horn traveled to Belarus to learn more about pre-World War II Jewish culture around Minsk. 

In the town of Motal, she spoke with a small group of locals, who recalled the Jewish neighbor who’d been a good friend of their parents, or that great klezmer band that had played at their uncle’s wedding, or the amazing raspberry torte cake you could buy at the Jewish bakery. Just before she parted, the oldest in the group, a 93-year-old woman, approached her and, in a trembling voice, fighting back tears, said something softly in Belarusian.

“What did she say?” The translator who accompanied her replied: “She said that ever since the Jews left this place, the place is dead.”

Horn was understandably moved. The elderly woman expressed — even confessed, perhaps — the enormous void left by the deportation and annihilation of Motal’s Jewish population. But her words became more disturbing. 

"I tried to understand why, but I — a writer, after all — couldn’t seem to find a way to describe my discomfort. I felt as if I’d reached the limits of my ability to express myself," wrote Horn.

Reading Dara Horn’s “People Love Dead Jews,” Yaniv Iczkovits could feel the words, "ever since the Jews left this place, the place is dead", as if reacquiring a language. 

Not a new language, in which you must learn a vocabulary and grasp the rules of grammar. But as in Platonic epistemology, where learning is essentially a recollection, I felt as if I were recollecting, retrieving something I had been asked to forget. From childhood on, as Horn points out, we are told to replace this language with a more symbolic one, consisting of all the familiar codes and tropes: “Those who do not learn the lessons of the Holocaust are bound to repeat them,” say, or: “We will never forget.”

Horn’s main insight is that much of the way we’ve developed to remember and narrate Jewish history is, at best, self-deception and, at worst, rubbish. The 12 essays in her brilliant book explore how the different ways we commemorate Jewish tragedy, how we write about the Holocaust, how the media presents antisemitic events, how we establish museums to honor Jewish heritage, how we read literature with Jewish protagonists and even how we praise the “righteous among the nations” (those who saved Jews during the war), are all distractions from the main issue, which is the very concrete, specific death of Jews.

Even though each chapter reveals a different blind spot in our collective memory — ranging from Horn’s visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan to her travel to the Jewish sites in Harbin, China — all the essays in the book show that when we learn to remember certain things in certain ways, we set the limits of what can be said, and what cannot be said, even as we might have the urge to say it. Horn thinks it’s about time to say it, and this is why her book is at the same time so necessary and so disquieting.

Anne Frank

Let us take Anne Frank’s diary, for example. Horn examines the enormous success of “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which has been translated into 70 languages and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide. Perhaps its most famous, most quoted sentence — “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” — has inspired many people; considering how things ended for Anne, we find it astounding that she’s still able to believe in people’s essential goodness. But, here is Horn’s straightforward response: “It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being ‘truly good at heart’ before meeting people who weren’t. 

Tragically, three weeks after writing those words, Anne Frank met the people who were not at all good.

Horn’s view is that Anne’s words are inspirational exactly because her perspective is not only incomplete but also false. We take the easy way out rather than plumbing the depths of evil. 

We look for universal lessons in lieu of attending to the actual persecution of Jews. Horn wants us not to be encouraged by what seems to be the proliferation of these forms of remembering, a proliferation spawned by an idealized, graceful perspective that has as its aim to reaffirm the values of the very culture that, in spite of it all, shattered so many Anne Franks.

In three other essays, Horn deals with the upswell of anti-Semitism in the United States. Here it becomes clear that her concern about the ways we remember is inextricable from the way we relate to what is happening today. 

Horn claims that setting the Holocaust as the bar for anti-Semitism means that “anything short of the Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust. The bar is rather high.” According to Horn, this might explain the limited shelf life, so to speak, of current events like the gunning down of Jews in Pittsburgh, in San Diego, in New Jersey.

And then there’s the moment of relief that Jews feel when we arrive at the famous questions in Act III of “The Merchant of Venice”: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? … If you poison us, do we not die?” So Shakespeare was not really an antisemite, but rather, more benignly, a satirist when he limned Shylock’s stereotypical Jewish character. After all, he is Shakespeare, and we want him on our side.

Or how we recognize the Chinese government’s investment of $30 million to restore “Jewish heritage sites” in Harbin, a city that was built by Russian Jewish entrepreneurs, who flourished there until they were no longer required.

“People Love Dead Jews” is an outstanding book with a bold mission. It criticizes people, artworks and public institutions that few others dare to challenge. Reading this book, I started to find the words I should have said to that woman in Motal. I should have responded that maybe Eastern Europe has been left with a void, but I have been left with hardly any family.

But there is a rare moment in Horn’s book in which she admits the austerity of her own perspective. It’s in “Legends of Dead Jews.” The common family story that so many American Jews have heard about their surnames being changed at Ellis Island is a myth, she writes. The names weren’t changed by mistake. American Jews preferred to change their names to be able to fit in, to blend in, to assimilate.

I expected Horn to criticize the purveyors of this legend. After all, they distorted the past to avoid the discomfort of its truth. But she writes: “Our ancestors could have dwelled on the sordid facts, and passed down that psychological damage. Instead, they created a story that ennobled us, and made us confident in our role in this great country.” Perhaps revision of this sort does not always have to be about self-blinding. Perhaps, as Horn suggests, it is “an act of bravery and love.” Some things are just too painful to say.

Reading Horn’s beautiful words, I thought that maybe, after all, what this woman in Motal wanted, and needed, was a simple thank you, a handshake and a humble nod.

Yaniv Iczkovits is the author of “The Slaughterman’s Daughter.”

Let's Write about lovers!

An literary peek into the love between Frieda von Richthofen and D. H. Lawrence.  

This excerpt echo is published in the History News Network by Annabel Abbs, the author of Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailbazing Women*, published by Tin House Press.

On August 5, 1912, Frieda von Richthofen (aka Weekley), a thirty-three-year-old German aristocrat and married mother of three, awoke to the sound of rain. It was four thirty in the morning. Quivering strips of pearly light seeped through the sides of the shutters. She opened her eyes, dimly aware of her young lover strapping up their rucksacks and humming beneath his breath. At last she was about to embark on a real adventure, the sort of escapade she’d dreamt of for the last ten years. It had been a long, dry decade in which her emotionally restrained life in a comfortable suburban house on the edge of industrial Nottingham had almost driven her mad.

Her lover was the fledgling writer D. H. Lawrence, a penniless coal miner’s son whom she’d met four months earlier. The pair of them had been poring over maps and guidebooks for days, plotting a route that would take them through “the Bavarian uplands and foothills,” over the Austrian Tyrol, across the Jaufen Pass to Bolzano, and down to the vast lakes of Northern Italy.

Later, this six-week walk would become much mythologised as their “elopement.” But the evidence suggests this was less an elopement than a feverish bid for freedom and an inarticulate yearning for renewal. On the first misty, sodden step of that six-week walk, Frieda began the process of reinventing herself as a woman without children, scissoring herself free from the restrictions and responsibilities that accompanied being a mother in Edwardian England. Almost overnight she transformed herself from a fashionably dressed and hatted mother and manager of multiple household staff to someone else entirely: a woman who put comfort before fashion, who took responsibility for her own cooking and laundry, who swapped warm, soapy baths for ice-cold pools and the latest flushing lavatory for speedy squats among the bushes.

Frieda’s isolation was exaggerated by her choice of paramour. Lawrence spoke with a Derbyshire accent. He dressed in cheap clothes and came from a rough mining village. He was also six years younger than she was, at a time when women were expected to marry older men. To leave children, a comfortable home, and a successful husband broke every taboo. To leave them for a man like this was unthinkable.

In 1912, this was not how women behaved. Least of all mothers.


D.H. Lawrence (b.1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England, United Kingdom -d. 1939 of tuberculosis in Vence, France)

Frieda and Lawrence put on their matching Burberry raincoats. Frieda donned a straw hat with a red velvet ribbon round the brim. Lawrence wore a battered panama. They squeezed a spirit stove into a canvas rucksack, planning to cook their supper at the side of the road. They had twenty-three pounds between them, barely enough to reach Italy.

The pair chose a punishing route that would fully occupy them with its steep climbs and its perilous twists and turns. Neither of them had walked or climbed in mountains before, neither was a skilled orienteer, and neither was particularly fit. Lawrence found the mountains bleak and terrifying, seeing there the eternal wrangle between life and death. Later, he made full use of his Alpine terror in Women in Love, sending Gerald Crich to a lonely death in the barren glaciers of the Alps. 

Frieda, however, thought it was “all very wonderful.”

On this walk, the pair averaged ten miles a day, much of it uphill and strenuous, much of it cold, always with their packs on their backs. On some days they walked farther still. Only when the weather was particularly hostile did they allow themselves the luxury of catching a train to the next town.

Even as Frieda and Lawrence celebrated their new-found freedom—from their past lives and from the passionless provincialism of pious England—they were acutely aware of how hemmed in they were. Frieda’s presence had a profound effect on Lawrence, sparking a creative surge that resulted in dozens of short stories, poems, and essays, as well as his three acknowledged masterpieces: Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. But as he led Frieda farther and farther away from her previous life, he began to see how necessary she was to him. Not only for his happiness but for the continued blooming of his genius. Many of his poems are testimony to this feeling of necessity, a feeling that occasionally tips into a terrified dependency:

The burden of self-accomplishment!
The charge of fulfilment!
And God, that she is necessary!
Necessary, and I have no choice!

Frieda discovered that her new-found liberty was similarly compromised. She left her husband, children, and friends to discover her own mind, to be freely herself. 

But, freedom is infinitely more complicated than simply casting off the things we believe are constraining us. Hurting others in the pursuit of freedom and self-determination brought its own struts and bars, its own weight of guilt. Frieda never shared the great weight of her guilt. She couldn’t. Lawrence wouldn’t allow it. His friends joined forces with him, insisting that she put up or shut up, that her role was to foster his genius. At any price.

After six weeks, Frieda and Lawrence arrived in Riva, then an Austrian garrison town on Lake Garda. Vigorous ascents over steep mountain passes in snow and icy winds followed by nights in lice-ridden Gasthäuser had left them looking like “two tramps with rucksacks.” Within days a trunk of cast-off clothes from Frieda’s glamorous younger sister had arrived, swiftly followed by an advance of fifty pounds for Sons and Lovers from Lawrence’s publisher. In a big feathered hat and a sequinned Paquin gown, an exuberantly overdressed Frieda and a shabbier Lawrence sauntered round the lake, celebrating their return to civilisation and rubbing shoulders with uniformed army officers and elegantly dressed women.

So why did Frieda devote less than twenty-five lines of her memoir to this pivotal time in her life? She writes in the same book: “I wanted to keep it secret, all to myself.”

This journey was so vivid and intense, so personal, that neither Frieda nor Lawrence wanted to enclose it or share it. When Lawrence fictionalized a version of it in Mr. Noon, he never sought publication (unusually for him as they invariably needed the money). Instead, he consigned it to a drawer. Nor, after his death, did Frieda try and have Mr. Noon published—despite publishing other writings Lawrence had chosen to keep private. Mr. Noon stayed unpublished until 1984.

Twenty months after their Alpine hike, and at his insistence, Frieda married an increasingly restive and cantankerous Lawrence, arguably exchanging one form of entrapment for another. It wasn’t until his death in 1930 that she became free to live as, and where, she wanted. In a bold attempt to finally assert her own identity she used the name “Frieda Lawrence geb. Freiin von Richthofen” on the opening page of her memoir. 

That, I suspect, was her definitive moment of freedom.

After Lawrence died, she lived in the same ranch (“wild and far away from everything”) in Taos, New Mexico, for much of her remaining twenty-six years. Here she cultivated a close group of friends, a surrogate for the family she’d sacrificed. And she walked. Her memoir is peppered with references to walking: “We were out of doors most of the day,” she says, on “long walks.” Her first outing with Lawrence, shortly after they met, had been “a long walk through the early spring woods and fields” of Derbyshire with her two young daughters. It was on this walk that she discovered she’d fallen in love with Lawrence. Later she wrote of “delicious female walks” with Katherine Mansfield, walks through Italian olive groves, walks into the jungles of Ceylon, walks along the Australian coast, walks through the canyons of New Mexico, or simply strolls among “the early almond blossoms pink and white, the asphodels, the wild narcissi and anemones.” Frieda walked in the countryside for the rest of her life.

But the pivotal walk of her life—the six-week walk she skirted in twenty-five lines—was the most significant. 

From here, Frieda emerged as herself, as the free woman she had always longed to be—dressing in scarlet pinafores and emerald stockings, swimming naked, making love en plein air, walking as she wished. She had also become the free woman Lawrence needed for his fiction. He made full use of her in his writing, continually remoulding her, most famously as Ursula in Women in Love, and Connie in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. His novels shaped history, but Frieda was the catalyst.

*Maine Writer opinion- For reasons unknown to me, this excerpt created a loose association as a quasi fictional sequel to the enduring Wuthering Heights, by Emilie Bronte. Okay! So, it's just my opinion. I wonder, did Freida read the novel?  I assume she was well read.