(PREVIOUSPAGE)^ COURTESY^ OF^ MARK^ ABLEYH
arry Abley had a range of
identities. He was a son, a
husband, a father (mine),
a devoted football fan, a
migraine sufferer, a proud
Canadian and a lifelong Englishman,
a close friend of almost no one.
At various moments, he worked as a
medical-records clerk for Saskatoon
City Hospital, a demonstrator of elec-
tronic organs at the Eaton’s depart-
ment store in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.,
and an assistant to the North American
zone controller in the export branch of
the Standard Motor Company in Cov-
entry. He had no affection for any of
these jobs. He did them for the money.
Above all, my father—who died more
than two decades ago—was a musician.
He played, he conducted, he taught, he
accompanied, he composed. When I
was a boy, he would sometimes appear
at the dining table with a pencil behind
his right ear and a distracted look in
his eyes. After a few bites of food and a
cursory exchange of words, he would
excuse himself, return to the piano—
the central item of furniture in the
house—and play, over and over, some
musical phrase. Just a few bars at a time,
with tiny variations. When a melody or
chord had been fixed to my father’s
satisfaction, and he had scribbled it
down on the back of a used envelope
or the previous Sunday’s church bulle-
tin, he would resume his meal.
The piano took pride of place in our
living room. But the instrument of hislife was always a walk, a bus ride or a
drive away: the pipe organ. My father
had been learning the piano for four
years when, as a boy of 12, he started
organ lessons. He fell in love; he
remained in love. A small man with
the habits of an introvert and the rem-
nants of a boyhood stammer, he could
sit down at the organ bench and fill a
cavernous church with as much sound
as an entire orchestra.AS A TEENAGER, Sunday after Sunday,
I heard him play and watched him
conduct the choir. Pipe organs are like
no other musical instrument: listeners
in an audience or congregation rarely
see the performer at work. The organ-
ist sits at a semi-enclosed console—a
term that refers to the keyboards,
pedals and draw knobs, or “stops,” on
either side of the musician—usually
hidden behind a pillar or screen or
placed high up in a gallery at the back
of a church.
There, my father would use both
hands to play the keyboards and both
feet to play the pedal board. On rare
occasions, he might push in a stop
with an elbow. The mental discipline
required to play a difficult piece on the
organ is matched only by the physical
coordination. The resulting waves of
sound emerge from metal or wooden
pipes attached to a wall, some distance
from the console. To a casual listener
in the pews, organ music is born inde-
pendent of the performer.reader’s digest
84 october 2019