If Only Pan were here

Acclaimed pianist to accompany the PSO [Portland Symphony Orchestra]”

The headline caught my attention! I love the piano and enjoy concerts, but I had never been to a PSO concert. This surely would be a great Maine winter event!

We ordered tickets online and then made reservations at the Press Hotel—across the street from Merrill Auditorium, where the performance was being held! What a night! The pianist George Li was amazing—he felt the music, the magic of the notes as they followed each other. Rather than display his incredible dexterity, he preferred to draw his audience into his world, to have us feel the music, to run up and down the keyboard with him. As I watched Li and the fifty or so musicians accompanying him, I could not help but notice the organ backdrop. It was huge. No one played it that night, but the next day, I did a bit of research. It is a Kotzschmar organ. When it was built in 1911, it was the second-largest organ in the United States. Today, it remains the largest in Maine. It has five keyboards and more than 7,000 pipes (less than two percent of which are visible in the photo here)! To be sure, the upcoming organ concert is on our “to go” list!

As I listened to Li, my eyes kept looking up to the pipes. Yes – they were “staring” at me. ”You know us,” they seemed to be saying. “Our origins, anyway.” “Why, of course, I thought!” And my mind traveled back in time to ancient Greece and the merry-maker Pan...

Pan certainly was a different-looking fellow. He had the legs, ears, and horns of a goat, but the rest of him was human. He loved the woodlands and spent much of his time with sheep and goats. The Greeks—and later the Romans—honored him as the god of shepherds and hunters.

But there was another side to Pan. According to the ancients, he loved to roam the lands inhabited by the ancient Greeks. As he did so, he would see nymphs (nature deities) roaming about the meadows and playing in the streams. Infatuation seems to have come easily to Pan, and he fell for many nymphs.

The Kotzschmar organ led me to thinking of a nymph named Syrinx. One day, so the ancients said, Pan saw her crossing a field on her way back from hunting. It was “love at first sight.” He ran straightway toward her. But Syrinx had heard of Pan and immediately ran in the opposite direction. The race was on!

Aware that Pan was drawing closer, Syrinx headed for the stream where she knew her sisters would be frolicking. The sisters heard the commotion and recognized the danger their sister faced. Using their “nymph-powers,” they changed Syrinx into a beautiful reed, growing majestically along the water’s edge.

When Pan reached the river bank, he saw only reeds. Pan knew Syrinx was one of them, but which one? Frustrated, he pulled up a bunch of reeds. Unsure what to do next, he began pacing the area. As he did so, he felt the wind rustling in and through the reeds in his hand. The “singing” enchanted him. “That’s it! I know exactly what to do to keep Syrinx with me forever!”

Pan carefully took seven reeds (some myths say nine), trimmed each a bit, and then arranged them from shortest to longest. To keep the seven in place, he used other reeds as binders. With sorrowful, yet, at the same time, joyous lips, he blew across the tops of the reeds! Oh – what beautiful sounds! Surely Syrinx was one of the cut reeds! He had his Syrinx! And, the world had its “first organ”!

As these thoughts and the music swirled about me, I looked again at the Kotzschmar organ! Who knows, maybe Pan has a special seat at Merrill each time the organ master plays!

Join me next time when Maine—Window to World trains its lens on another part of the world.

To read past blog entries, go to: ivycloseimages.com/blog-maine-window-to-the-world.html

Comments are welcome: rosalie@ivycloseimages.com