Some of my choristers hold on to so much of their music, it's like a rushing mighty wind with them flapping pages trying to find the right piece to sing. They are packrats and those music folders are layered like an architectural site.

Hahaha. I tried cleaning up folders once, then they started taking them home so I couldn't get to them.

There have been a couple times where I went to play the Amen without any stops. One time the cantor seamlessly sung it a capella and another time I got a couple looks because of the long delay.

1) Lenten Sunday, so no prelude. Forgot to turn the blower on before Mass (indicator light had long since died). Cantor announced the opening hymn, I depressed the keys, and ... nothing.

This one had compound interest, because I did not wait long enough after turning the blower on to try again. So, as the pressure increased, the chord bent up to the appropriate pitch.

2) My usual --- mixing up which manual I've set solo and which accompaniment. I've played more than two lovely flute solos accompanied by clarinets and oboes (or krummhorns).

3) Not really my blooper, but apparently had a sub once get confused and play "All Creatures of Our God and King" while the assembly, reading off of printouts, attempted to sing, "All People that on Earth Do Dwell."

Occasionally I will forget which level of pre-set memory I am on. One Christmas, after playing Willcock's 'O Come all ye Faithful', I forgot to change levels; a bit later I played Brahm's 'Es ist Ein Ros' on the tuba. Luckily, this was just a Christmas weekday (we have sung Masses every day except Monday) and not actually on the day itself, so it spared some humiliation.

The other thing that happens is the brain turning off, and suddenly I can't remember how a piece goes -- even though I've played it a million times I feel like I'm sight reading. And this can occur during anything from a big Bach Prelude and Fugue, to an accompaniment for Agnus XVIII.

And lately I've also been attempting to play without stops on, too. I am glad to see others here with the same problem: It gives me some hope that I'm not completely losing it.

Attempting to play with no stops, "flute solo accompanied by reeds," accidentally turned on "percussion" instead of "celeste tuning" on the allen electronic from the 80s... yeah... oops...

The Allen also has a great habit of hitting a piston and not actually bringing up the correct memory until you hit it again. (I could hit General 7 and it will bring up some of the stops and not all of them, sometimes some of the stops it turns on are not even in the memory. Then you hit it again and it's right.) That's always really great when switching in between hymn verses (or worse - phrases).

"the music stand went crashing down and my music went flying everywhere."

You could have improvised and switched to Tenebrae...

I once had a terrible case of hiccups during the organ prelude for a Tenebrae service. Also, the Tenebrae service had an organ prelude, but that wasn't my fault. (Technically, I guess the hiccups weren't either.)

Oh man having pages out of order makes me panic, ultimately making the situation much, much worse! I can't imagine losing my place in Buxtehude. Yeah definitely a do-over LOL!

Subbing as a wedding organist, was given the key to the loft and went to practice. Afterwards I had time to go outside for awhile, so I left the loft, closed the door, and went out. When I returned I found that the door had locked when it closed and the key was on the organ console inside. The church had no other key. A locksmith from the corner shop came and was unable to open it. "This is the Cadillac of locks" he said. The time for the wedding was approaching, so the locksmith propped a ladder on the marble floor up to the choir loft and sent his chubby son up the ladder to open the door from the inside. The poor kid was petrified, kept looking down as he went up, and I was very embarrassed. Was able to get back into the loft just in time for the wedding.

Father Frank sang in Latin for our Saturday evening vigil Missa Cantata with linguistic and musical sensitivity and accuracy. For example, cognisant of the length of the introit, he would always finsh the incensing of the altar 10 seconds before the introit finished , and have his hands folded ready to start after the dulcet tones died away. But week after week, he added to the drama that is in the Roman Canon. Due to a page turn, he intoned "spem" 4 seconds after "beatam", leading us truly to wait in expectation and blessed hope. All foibles can carry a blessing if we love each other sufficiently.

I try so hard to not miss cues...the result is that I start pieces solo sometimes at rehearsal.

How to deal with bloopers? Once a fellow soprano and I visited a Benedictine convent, and when the sisters there make a mistake they kneel down and bow profoundly. (My pastor told me that for major mistakes they might go up to the center of the choir to bow.) Upon returning to our choir we decided to try that for ourselves, but it didn't last long. Some of us do strike the breast when we err.

Our soprano section must make a lot of bloopers, because there is a hole in the church's ceiling right above us, and every now and then some crumbs will fall during Mass.

Then there are the high priest's names the reader bumbles every year, anus and Caiaphas. The choir and half the congregation get the giggles.

I always say that the little yellow bus comes from the home and dumps all the residents out in front of our building every Sunday morning. I can't find any other explanation for the crazy things that happen. LOL.

The first time I conducted a polyphonic mass with my choir, I was concerned to get to the organ to play the intonation of the Gloria for the priest. We completed the Kyrie and I rushed to the organ, played the intonation, rushed back to my music stand and turned the page of the Mass: there was the Christe.

As a cantor, announcing completely different songs (The songs the director wanted) than what the organist played (he's nearly deaf, bless his soul).
Also, as a cantor, announcing the song and then waiting 30 seconds or more before the organist realized he was supposed to play, by which time I had started singing the hymn a capella. He then entered in on the wrong part, and we sang about 3 measures apart, until the end of the verse.

Playing the Widor for the conclusion of Midnight Mass a few years ago. At that time, I had two young but excellent organ students. On occasion, I would invite them to turn pages or pull stops for me at the console. This time I invited one of them to operate the "forward" piston which advanced the generals through the sequencer on my cue. This went seamlessly at earlier rehearsals and masses. However, on this occasion, he reached up to the wrong keyboard and advanced the *level* rather than the general. Nothing happened. That would have been fine, but he realized his mistake and frantically mashed the "forward" general piston after he just changed the level to some other registration scheme.

Mid-phrase, we careened from full organ with roaring 32's to a single gurgling Gedeckt. I continued to play for a few measures while frantic pushes of the "forward" piston by my young assistant brought on a tierce combination, a pair of 8' strings. and finally a warbling Vox Humana with a full-tilt tremulant. At this point, my assistant abandoned his post and ran away to disappear into a sea of faces in the awestruck choir.

What was to be done? The overflow congregation turned around and gazed in incredulity at the gallery to catch a view of the errant organist, while father stopped his exit at the foot of the altar and turned his head slightly askew at the strange noises coming from the gallery. The baffled, bemused look on his face said it all. I stopped playing. The silence was deafening. I smiled at the choir, shrugged my shoulders, reset my combination and started over again. The toccata roared to a mighty conclusion as the congregation broke into a spontaneous ovation. Everyone was most appreciative and good-natured afterwards. I never mentioned my assistant's foible to people who inquired afterwards- just said there was a problem with the organ.

Conrady,

What part of the southern United States do you call home? I've only ever heard "mash" as a substitute for "press" when I used to live on the South Carolina/North Carolina border.

I was accompanying a school Mass once in the crypt of the National Basilica in DC. At communion time, the song chosen was Finest Wheat--I never turned down an opportunity to play the magnificent organ in this space, so I acquiesced. After a brief intro, the cantor warbled in to sing the refrain. I then looped back to the beginning of the refrain, this time on fuller stops to bring in the congregation.

Alas, it was not to be.

The cantor charged into the verse as I rumbled through the refrain. The effect was strangely ethereal; the walls are several feet thick and plated in solid marble, so the dissonant wailing of soprano against organ bounces back and forth in a way I am sure Ives would have found compelling.

In the shock of the moment, or perhaps weird hypnosis of the spontaneous atonalism, I kept playing, assuming that no solo singer would ever try to hold his own against an organ plenum. She kept singing.

When I finished the refrain, both the cantor and I had held our own for the entirety of the first verse, the congregation staring in disbelief. We both then decided to capitulate at the same time. Since she had been singing the verse, I assumed she would sing the refrain next. She thought I would proceed to the verse, since I had played the refrain. So I launched into the refrain again, and she into the verse, and by this time I was using my remaining mental faculties to think about when I could get to confession for blaspheming a sacred space.

We went through a whole second round of this cacophany, the soprano screeching to be heard because I had coupled the swell plenum to insure the cantor's compliance.

Finally, we reached the end of the second verse, and I gave a good three second pause in the playing as we both tried to divine what the other was thinking that the other was going to play or sing. Murphy's law, of course, we came crashing in on the wrong chord AGAIN. Not having it this time, there was a supremely awkward oscillation back and forth between the verse and refrain as we both tried to figure out what the other was doing. This was more difficult than it sounds in this space, because the cantor's mic blares out over the congregation, sails back a good 100 feet, and then bounces off the back wall and back 100 feet to the front again before the organist can hear it.

Finally the music resolved back into blessed consonance, though not before this organist's soul had curled up into fetal position.