Have you met Anna Lapwood?
She is the kind of minor celebrity you meet when aimlessly scrolling through Facebook.
It’s a waste of time, some say, and that might be right. But then you stumble across the organ in some vast and impressive cathedral and sitting on the bench, smiling, is the too-young-to-be-true musician by the name of Anna Lapwood.
She is 30 years old, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music and Oxford University (Magdalen College, no less, where the famous C. S. Lewis taught for so long and where she won First Class Honors).
Lapwood is now an organist for the Royal Albert Hall. I am no insider to British cultural benchmarks but even I know this represents the top of the stack, so to speak. It is the home to the Proms (and, naturally, the Last Night of the Proms, but that is another column, altogether)).
“I have no words to describe last night,” Lapwood posted on Facebook last July. “13,000 people showed up to the Cologne Cathedral for my concert…. I really didn’t want anyone to be turned away so 45 minutes before the start I made the decision to do 2 concerts back-to-back…. But apparently 5,000 were still waiting outside and didn’t make it in…..”
The video she posted showed thousands of adoring fans standing in a prolonged ovation of clapping and cheering. For an organ concert. In a German Cathedral. Hard to believe!
How do we know about this? Because Lapwood used her smart phone to record it and then posted it on Facebook. Imagine that! She is as skilled with her phone as she is on the keyboard. She simply sits her phone on a ledge near the organ so as to catch her fingers on the keys and a smile on her face.
This practice, now known as “organtok,” has made her famous.
“Two days ago,” she recently posted on FB, “I was in the queue for coffee in NYC. There was a young girl in the queue in front of me, and she kept looking at me. Then her mum said, ‘Sorry, but are you Anna Lapwood?’ Turns out they were in NYC to come and see my concert! We had a chat, and it also turns out that it’s the girl’s birthday. I asked what her favourite piece was and she said ‘Concerning Hobbits.’… I apologised that I wouldn’t be playing that piece in the concert as it’s not in my repertoire. But then, when I got to the church I thought … why not give it a go. So I wrote her a transcription of it to perform as the encore! And it mashes up perfectly with this:”
And here the video records Ms. Lapwood finishing the grand hymn “This is My Father’s World” and rolling into “Concerning Hobbits.” And she concludes her printed commentary on the video with: “This will now always be Katherine’s Mashup.”
I can imagine the joy jumping in the soul of that little girl when the grand organ in Trinity Church Wall Street left behind the hymn (which Lapwood learned no doubt through the ministry of her own father, a clergyman of the Church of England, which gives a double barrel bang to the title of the hymn!) and picked up the playful kicks of the music of the Shire.
I had to look this up, the historical background of this music, on Wikipedia, no less, then listened to the piece, the soundtrack from the movie “Lord of the Rings,” the piece known as “The Shire” by Howard Shore. The lead instrument for this particular selection is, would you believe, the tin whistle! You can listen here.
This is what I mean when I say the smart phone is my gateway to the world: from Magdalen College to Cologne Cathedral to Trinity Church in New York City and ending up in the Shire! Escorted the whole way by a PK who learned to love the organ while sitting in church where, they say, religion is on the decline.
But is this not one more piece of evidence that it is beauty rather than reason or tradition, experience or authority that pulls us toward the glory of which the Bible speaks and in which we encounter the Mystery we often call God.
True religion, and truly, Joy to the World. The whole world. Thanks be to God.
Have you met Anna Lapwood?
She is the kind of minor celebrity you meet when aimlessly scrolling through Facebook.
It’s a waste of time, some say, and that might be right. But then you stumble across the organ in some vast and impressive cathedral and sitting on the bench, smiling, is the too-young-to-be-true musician by the name of Anna Lapwood.
She is 30 years old, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music and Oxford University (Magdalen College, no less, where the famous C. S. Lewis taught for so long and where she won First Class Honors).
Lapwood is now an organist for the Royal Albert Hall. I am no insider to British cultural benchmarks but even I know this represents the top of the stack, so to speak. It is the home to the Proms (and, naturally, the Last Night of the Proms, but that is another column, altogether)).
“I have no words to describe last night,” Lapwood posted on Facebook last July. “13,000 people showed up to the Cologne Cathedral for my concert…. I really didn’t want anyone to be turned away so 45 minutes before the start I made the decision to do 2 concerts back-to-back…. But apparently 5,000 were still waiting outside and didn’t make it in…..”
The video she posted showed thousands of adoring fans standing in a prolonged ovation of clapping and cheering. For an organ concert. In a German Cathedral. Hard to believe!
How do we know about this? Because Lapwood used her smart phone to record it and then posted it on Facebook. Imagine that! She is as skilled with her phone as she is on the keyboard. She simply sits her phone on a ledge near the organ so as to catch her fingers on the keys and a smile on her face.
This practice, now known as “organtok,” has made her famous.
“Two days ago,” she recently posted on FB, “I was in the queue for coffee in NYC. There was a young girl in the queue in front of me, and she kept looking at me. Then her mum said, ‘Sorry, but are you Anna Lapwood?’ Turns out they were in NYC to come and see my concert! We had a chat, and it also turns out that it’s the girl’s birthday. I asked what her favourite piece was and she said ‘Concerning Hobbits.’… I apologised that I wouldn’t be playing that piece in the concert as it’s not in my repertoire. But then, when I got to the church I thought … why not give it a go. So I wrote her a transcription of it to perform as the encore! And it mashes up perfectly with this:”
And here the video records Ms. Lapwood finishing the grand hymn “This is My Father’s World” and rolling into “Concerning Hobbits.” And she concludes her printed commentary on the video with: “This will now always be Katherine’s Mashup.”
I can imagine the joy jumping in the soul of that little girl when the grand organ in Trinity Church Wall Street left behind the hymn (which Lapwood learned no doubt through the ministry of her own father, a clergyman of the Church of England, which gives a double barrel bang to the title of the hymn!) and picked up the playful kicks of the music of the Shire.
I had to look this up, the historical background of this music, on Wikipedia, no less, then listened to the piece, the soundtrack from the movie “Lord of the Rings,” the piece known as “The Shire” by Howard Shore. The lead instrument for this particular selection is, would you believe, the tin whistle! You can listen here.
This is what I mean when I say the smart phone is my gateway to the world: from Magdalen College to Cologne Cathedral to Trinity Church in New York City and ending up in the Shire! Escorted the whole way by a PK who learned to love the organ while sitting in church where, they say, religion is on the decline.
But is this not one more piece of evidence that it is beauty rather than reason or tradition, experience or authority that pulls us toward the glory of which the Bible speaks and in which we encounter the Mystery we often call God.
True religion, and truly, Joy to the World. The whole world. Thanks be to God.
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