Playing the pipes
Ken Cowan sat in a church pew every Sunday, quietly listening to the service at First United Church in St. Catharines. He was two years old and too young for Sunday school.
His mother, Donna, sang in the church choir. And his father, Dave, who was the church’s music director for 25 years before he retired in 2001, was busy either directing the choir, or playing the piano and pipe organ.
If Ken was a good boy, and sat quietly, his reward was to play with the 1927 Casavant organ at the end of the service.
His father let him touch the array of knobs, each representing a different instrument. When several are selected together they produce a symphony of sounds.
Dave demonstrated the sounds of individual instruments. An oboe. A flute. A trumpet. And then he took requests, playing a mini concert of children’s hymns as his son called them out by name.
“He was fascinated by all the sounds,” said Dave.
Then one day, the woman who sat next to his young son during the service, informed Dave that every time he played the organ, Ken would identify every individual instrument, calling them out by name.
A foreshadowing, perhaps, of his career as professional concert organist and professor.
These days, Ken, 43, lives in Texas, where he joined the keyboard faculty of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in 2012 as associate professor and head of the organ program. He gives performances at churches across Canada, the U.S., Europe and Asia.
He attended university on full scholarships. First at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia where he auditioned and was accepted into the school’s one organist-per-year position. On the day of his audition, there was a major snowstorm that cut out hydro to the school. A local Baptist church was available and he performed a 45-minute memorized selection of pieces on an organ he’d never played before, said Dave.
Next came the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, where he met his wife and professional violinist Lisa Shihoten.
Together, they will perform Friday at Knox Presbyterian Church in St. Catharines, Ken on the church’s 100-year-old Casavant organ.
While he learned to play the piano at age seven, it was eventually the organ and its ability to communicate a depth of emotions that won his heart.
“It can be played as soft as a whisper and as loud as a symphony orchestra,” he said.
“It has an incredible diversity in range.
“There’s a whole pallet of sounds. That always fascinated me.”
Ken was 13 when he started organ lessons with his father after church. It was when Ken learned the entire book of Bach’s “Eight Short Preludes and Fugues” by their next lesson, that his dad realized he had
“huge potential” and sent him for lessons across the border, in Buffalo.
There was not an organ at home to play, so Ken practised for hours on Sundays after church. During the week, he’d catch the bus from Thorold Secondary School, where he played the trumpet in the school’s band, to
First United, then at the corner of Church and Clark streets to practise more.
“Any chance I could get, I’d hitch a ride or catch a bus to the church,” said Ken.
With three levels of keyboards (some pipe organs have five) and more than two octaves of foot pedals, he enjoyed the challenge of transitioning from piano.
“When you play the organ, it’s like you have four appendages instead of two to worry about,” he said. “And practice makes it feel normal instead of awkward.”
At home, Ken listened to his father’s expansive collection of organ music, on cassette tape, LPs and CDs, often playing different arrangements of the same song at the same time, analyzing the compositions of each, said Dave.
About the only instruments not replicated well on a pipe organ, are strings. Which, provides ample reason to hear a pipe organ matched with a violinist, he says.
“A pipe organ can’t sound like a concert violinist playing a great instrument,” he says.
“To have an assertive sound, you really need a violinist.”