NOTE THIS: Researcher wants Church sheet music preserved

Bernard Ouimet believes that music isn't trash at all, but a treasure that links Catholics to their ancestors in faith.

A Canadian immigrant who is a parishioner of St. Joseph's Church in Cohoes, Mr. Ouimet has been a church organist in various parishes since his student days at Cohoes' Keveny Academy. He spent 30 years providing music at St. Anne's parish in Waterford before becoming the organist at St. Joseph's.

Retirement dream

For his final project, he is researching the music of the Albany area -- including old Church music, which is often thrown away when it's no longer used.

"Not only is it dusty, but it's covered with the remains of aviary digestive tracts," Mr. Ouimet said tactfully, shaking his head at the way churches treat their oldest hymnals, copies of Masses and Vespers, and organ music.

Clues to past

One Cohoes church, for example, threw out piles of very old choir music that had the name of a choir member on each copy. Now, that information on parish membership is lost.

Choir music can also tell us how big a parish's singing group was at a certain time in history, and people's handwritten notes on the music can provide insights into how the music was sung.

Players

For instance, he said, one organist may have been talented and played the music as written, but another may have simplified it to make it easier to play, or to overcome the limitations of playing complex music on a simple nine-bell chime.

"Some choirs may have butchered it!" he added, laughing.

Sounds of music

"I was just looking at [one] hymn, `Christ the Lord is Risen Today,' and it's not at all what we sing today!" Mr. Ouimet exclaimed. "We assume, but often we find what we assume is erroneous."

Music, he said, is a kind of social history.

"When did we start to research social history? Maybe 20 years ago," he lectured. "It's the same with local music history. Local social history is gone, by and large, because people didn't think of sitting down with 'Mr. Novasky who came from Poland' and saying, `What was it like to work in the mills?'"

Lost and found

Searching through old music may even reveal lost treasures, he noted. At the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Albany, Mr. Ouimet found a half-dozen garbage bags of sheet music going back to the 1800s. Knowing that the organist for the Cathedral back then wrote some Masses, Mr. Ouimet hopes to page through the music and perhaps find one of those -- the music of a Mass that exists nowhere else, written for a single parish in the Diocese.

The organist is especially concerned that ethnic parishes keep their old sheet music. Having come to the U.S. from Montreal when he was 11, Mr. Ouimet has retained a passion for ethnic music that matches the accent that colors his speech.

"It's very important that ethnic parishes keep their ethnic music, because often that music is not being sung in the mother country any more," he stated.

Saving history

However, he said, just transferring sheet music from the plastic garbage bags it's often stored in to cardboard boxes can go a long way toward keep the music from crumbling to dust.

At least, he begged, don't throw music away! "If [parishes] don't want it, people like me will take it," he said, pausing to add: "My wife's going to kill me. I'm not encouraging [parishes] to give it to me; I'm encouraging them to keep it. Don't throw it out, because it is valuable."

(To contact Mr. Ouimet about old sheet music, email [email protected] or write to him at 205 Meeting House Rd., Valley Falls, NY 12185.)

(05-09-02) [[In-content Ad]]