Happy New Year, Tacoma AGO Members!!
We will gather together this coming Monday night at the home of Paul Fritts for a 12th Night Party, celebrating the end of the Christmas season. We will celebrate our collective work over the month, bringing music to many people in our various contexts!! You are welcome to bring a carol or piece to play on Fritts Op. 7, the grand piano, or harpsichord. Reuse a piece that you learned for a service recently. You can sign up here. Drinks will be provided. You are invited to bring a light snack or dessert to share, but not required. Come join the fun and merry-making!
In February, our chapter event will be held jointly with the Olympia AGO Chapter on Sunday, February 8 at 3:00pm at St. John’s Episcopal in Olympia. Tacoma AGO members are welcome to sign up to play a hymn. Follow the instructions in the event listing to sign up!
One morning last month, I opened up the music section of the New York Times app and was thoroughly surprised to be greeted by the title of the headline article “A Pipe Organist Invites You To Bliss Out To Her Dreamy Colors.” The musician at the center of this article is Ellen Arkbro. I had never heard of her before, but immediately read the article and started listening to some of her recordings. Below are a couple of excerpts from the article, which you can click here to read for free:
“Ellen’s music really holds space,” the music writer and broadcaster Jennifer Lucy Allan said in a phone interview. “You have to sit down. It forces you to listen.”
Arkbro’s breakthrough piece, which became her first album when it was released in 2017, was certainly slow moving. Titled “For Organ and Brass” and inspired by her encounters in Stockholm with a meantone organ — an instrument tuned in pure tones, a musical system common during the Renaissance and early Baroque periods — it features trance-like block chords that can sound seductive, mournful, joyous or downright sinister. The music is both bracingly medieval, an effect of the organ’s spicy tuning, and curiously futuristic.
I encourage you to engage with her recordings, taking time to sit with something new, approaching it not with judgment but presence.
As always, keep your eye on the TAGO Calendar for a full list of upcoming events and social gatherings! Have a great New Year!
In music,
Wyatt