A hymn to the organist

Some people swoon over film stars. I swoon over organists. Good organists, that is, not bad organists. Bad organists I refer to as ‘dominant males’, because the only two chords they play are the tonic and the dominant. Good organists are upholders of some of the highest musical expertise in the land. When you hear the stops being pulled out for the voluntary on Easter Sunday (will it be Bach? Will it be Widor?), spot the organist, and see if you experience a frisson. Here are ten reasons for my partiality.

The muscle at the far edge of the palm of each hand. (The one giving strength to the little finger.) It’s amazingly strong. I’m much more interested in this muscle in a man than in his abdominals or, worse still, his biceps. This palm-muscle is a sign of decades of chord-playing. Not just semi-breves, but breves, and not just triads but massive multi-noted chords with double-sharps in them, dreamed up by some composer in a church in Paris in 1922, who was improvising at the time and possibly blind.