Day six France

Day 6 – Sunday May 7, 2006

I arose early in the morning and heard Mass at Notre-Dame Cathedral across from my hotel. The service was very simple, but I had the chance to listen to the Dupré house organ. Albert Dupré, the father of Marcel, had a small Cavaillé-Coll in his home that was given to the Cathedral after his death. It had a grand tone and filled the front of the Cathedral with sound. It was a thrill to hear it played.

Following the Mass, Chris Frommen and I met at St. Ouen to take photographs. I rented a shift lens in New York City that permits me to take architectural photos of large objects without the parallax distortion that normally occurs when shooting with the camera tilted at an angle. I took several great pictures from the floor using this special lens. Then we went upstairs and I walked around the triforium, beginning at the west end of the church all the way to the very front center of the apse. What a trip it was. There were lights installed along the entire perimeter of the narrow triforium at waist level. Every few feet I had to duck under one of these lights and use my tripod as a cane. I thought about how this church was built from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries without any modern technologies. What remarkable people must have designed and erected it! Finally we reached our objective at the apex of the nave, high above the floor. There we took many pictures at different exposures.

After that, we packed more equipment then I thought could possibly fit in Chris’s van and set off for a five-hour drive through Belgium to Chris’s home in Juechen, Germany. On the way we drove past Amiens. For miles before we reached the town we saw the massive cathedral rise up above the farmland. I had a flashback to the cornfields of Nebraska, where the grain elevators look like cathedrals in the distance. This time they were the real thing! Later that evening we drove through World War I battlefields and saw numerous cemeteries in the countryside, each with hundreds of neatly laid-out crosses and headstones. It made me think about what went on there ninety years earlier. At last we arrived at my hotel in Kelzenberg, the town next to where Chris lives. The owner and his wife greeted us warmly. They insisted on buying beers for both of us. It was a very pleasant beginning to my stay in Germany.

During our drive, Chris and I discussed many recording ideas and how we might reach more people to generate more interest in the pipe organ. Stay tuned to JAV Recordings and Aeolus. Over the next few years there are great things coming down the “pipeline!”

Joe Vitacco