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An Organist's Journey Iain B. Galbraith

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An Organist's Journey Iain B. Galbraith An Organist's Journey Iain B. Galbraith An Organist’s Journey (Beginnings) If a thousand years are as a watch in the night, then the past fifty years have passed just as rapidly, as I look back on a long musical journey. How fast the years fly away. All journeys have a starting point. This particular journey began for me in early boyhood, when I first became aware of the sound of the fine Harrison organ in Bonhill Old Church in the Vale of the Leven. From the family pew high in the gallery I looked down upon the choir stalls where Isa w my father, three aunts and three uncles all singing in the choir. I also saw the console of the organ with its two keyboards, its pedalboard and its very fine organist Andrew M Kinloch who had been a student of John Pullein, organist of St Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow. All this made a deep impression upon me in a church of quiet dignity, filled with fine music. Even then I knew that someday I wanted to be like Andrew M Kinloch and play an organ that sounded like the Harrison organ and had several keyboards. This powerful influence produced an immediate effect which alarmed my parents. One Sunday afternoon they came upon me suddenly when I was attempting to play the piano in the front room with a large dishtowel hanging from my shoulders. Thinking that their young son had indeed taken a strange turn, they asked in an apprehensive way what this meant. They were told that I was now Mr Kinloch. Mr Kinloch wore the purple and mauve hood of Trinity College of Music. Not knowing what a hood signified and thinking that such apparel was necessary for fine keyboard performances I had obtained the services of a dishtowel. Not long after this defining event, I became a piano pupil of Mr Kinloch and for the next twelve years I was soundly taught by this most musical man. In the summer of 1958 a vacancy arose in Millburn Church, Renton for organist and choirmaster and Mr Kinloch advised me to apply for this vacancy. Again my parents were apprehensive. I was but fourteen years of age and this they considered too young an age for such responsibility. But Mr Kinloch's wisdom prevailed and I became part of a leet of three chosen to play at a morning service during the month of August. The successful candidate was to be chosen by congregational vote (Millburn had been a Free Church and had egalitarian ideas) and to my astonishment I was the successful candidate. This was perhaps a sympathy vote for a fourteen year old. Millburn Church was a fine example of French Gothic built in the immediate aftermath of the Disruption of 1843. George Meikle Kemp was said to have been the architect and the spire of Millburn was certainly very similar to Kemp's Scott Monument in Edinburgh. (This provenance has never been properly established and J T Rochead of Glasgow is the more likely architect of Millburn.) Internally Millburn was of an inverted cruciform shape with fine plaster vaulted ceilings and an impressive pulpit still possessing its original corona sounding board. There was a series of burial vaults below the church and many clandestine visits did I arrange to these for my classmates in 3A of Vale of Leven Academy, and we crept around in the darkness shining torches like something out of a Hammer Horror film. Thus I became very popular. The organ was a large two manual harmonium showing signs of wear and tear in 1958, and inhabited by woodworm. But it had been manufactured in Stuttgart and on its good days was an instrument of considerable sweetness of tone which I much enjoyed playing. The choir numbered over twenty and the members were intensely loyal. Seldom was a Thursday evening practice missed, some of the men coming direct to choir practice from shift work in the local factories and showing signs of hard labour. This loyalty I have never forgotten. For forty five pounds per annum I played at two services each Sunday and conducted Thursday practices for ten months of the year. This seemed untold wealth in 1958 but visions of flashing pound notes in front of my peer group quickly vanished when my mother who was a very wise woman appropriated most of this salary to augment household finances which were never large. Thus I also learned the value of thrift. I also played at every congregational 'bun-fight' that was going - Women's Guilds, Concerts, Drama Group productions, Men's Forum, Burns Suppers, Youth Fellowship, Singalongs. This was an excellent foundation on which to build an organist's skills. Occasionally this young organist's dignity was impaired. A black eye received as a result of a school fight of necessity was paraded on the Sunday. "Did ye dent a door, Son?" asked the men of the choir when I appeared before them. Much laughter followed when I informed them that the other pugilist had received a squashed nose and both of us were the recipients of a good belting from the Rector (whose father had once been minister of Millburn Church). I became a communicant member during my time in Millburn under the excellent ministry of Alan B Forrest, then in his first charge. Together we made many mistakes as we learned our different crafts, and we are still in touch and good friends after fifty years. This was an excellent first appointment for a young organist who could cycle to church in five minutes along irregular wooded footpaths. The journey had indeed begun. An Organist’s Journey - 2 - A Large Place He brought me forth also into a large place (II Samuel 22.20) Millburn Church and its homely, friendly folk proved to be an excellent apprenticeship for a young, beginning organist, and there I learned many useful things and accomplished difficult tasks. Try accompanying Stainer's Crucifixion or several Messiah choruses and arias on a large harmonium! The result of this latter accomplishment was the development of large calf muscles which - unlike Katisha's left elbow - remain hidden from view! But it was time to move on. Harmoniums possess no pedalboards, and it was necessary now to seek an appointment in a church where there was a pipe organ with a full RCO pedalboard. Thus in the autumn of 1963 I became organist and choirmaster of St David's, Knightswood, appointed from a short leet of four. There was no shortage of organists in those days. By this time I was a student at RSAMD in Glasgow and undertaking advanced studies within the graduate course in Musical Education. It was a very different RSAMD in 1963, in the Athenaeum building in Buchanan Street, presided over by the patrician figure of Dr Henry Havergal (related to Francis Ridley Havergal and grandson of a bishop) and staffed by some brilliant and sometimes eccentric people. There was an almost Edwardian atmosphere and an intimate sense of belonging. The major influences upon me - and they remain so to this day - were John Gordon Cameron (late of St Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow, and the last of C. V. Stanford's students at Cambridge in the early 1920s) for composition and organ lessons; Herrick Bunney (St Giles, Edinburgh) for musicianship; Raymond O'Connell (Australian by birth and a splendid concert pianist) for first study keyboard; and Kenneth Barritt (Vice-Principal of RSAMD) for conducting. How fortunate I was as a student to have such excellent teachers! It was their influence and teaching that enabled me to secure such a post at St David's at the age of nineteen, and from within a large list of applicants - as I later discovered. St David's was large in every way. It was the parish church for all of South Knightswood. It had a congregation not far short of two thousand. It had a very large Kirk Session (all male in those days). There were large and thriving youth organisations and a huge Sunday School. The church building itself was a large rustic brick edifice with concrete arches, built in 1938 as part of Church Extension policies (Gardiner & Mclean were the architects) and possessing a cool and elegant interior, cruciform in shape and with a deep chancel, where the two-manual Norman & Beard organ was situated, and where the choir of over thirty members sat facing each other in cathedral choir stall fashion. The church had seating for 700, and was usually well filled on Sunday mornings, with some 200 returning for evening worship, and generally full choir stalls a t both services. At communion services the church was packed to capacity, the large Kirk Session singing at full voice in the chancel, the choir displaced to front transept pews, the organ – even organo pleno - almost submerged beneath this immensely powerful sound of massed voices. This was a vibrant and exciting time, where an excellent choir, containing splendid soloists in all four parts, sang large anthems and full choral services (including most of Messiah), and where organ recitals took place on a regular basis. The minister of St David's in those days was the formidable and intellectual Dr James Grant- Suttie Stewart Thomson - or JGSS as he was called behind his back, but never to his face! Dr Thomson was a man of many parts - scholar, expositor, author, preacher and teacher, evangelist and missionary. He was related to the East Lothian Grant-Suttie baronets, and had unconsciously about him a faintly aristocratic air.
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