As a young boy growing up on a farm outside of Hershey, Karl E. Moyer would listen with fascination to the pipe organ at Salem Reformed Church of Campbelltown, where his family attended for six generations.

"Why that sound got to me, I really don't know," recalls one of Lancaster's best-known organist, his mind skipping back more than six decades.

"I can remember to this day walking around at home, while driving cows at milking time, humming to myself trying to create in my head the sound of that organ at church."

During the past 60 years, Moyer has done more than recreate the sound in his head, as local Lutheran worshippers and followers of classical music well know.

Moyer, a professor of music emeritus at Millersville University, has plied the pedals and keyboards of many of Lancaster's church organs, mostly in Lutheran congregations.

Moyer retired from his recital career in 1998 but has performed on occasion, the last time being five years ago at St. Joseph Church as part of the Organ Historical Society's national convention.

On Sunday afternoon, in celebration of his 60 years at the organ console, Moyer will present a major program (see related story) at his current home church, Grace Lutheran, 517 N. Queen St., where he once served as organist and choir director and is still active in the choir.

It was 1948 when Moyer, then a fifth-grader, and his father were walking through Market Square in Harrisburg and spied in a store window a piano with a now-antiquated Solovox keyboard attachment, which added electric organ accompaniment.

The young Moyer went in and tried it, surprising the salesman with his "organ touch." Moyer not only took piano lessons — "simply what a boy did in our home" — but he spent hours on an heirloom reed organ that his mother played while growing up outside Mount Joy.

Incidentally, Moyer's paternal grandfather was on the committee to bring the first pipe organ to Salem Reformed in 1906, and his father, as a boy, would hand-pump the organ while his sister played.

Organ lessons started soon after that fateful store visit, followed by recitals at area churches, including a June 1950 program at St. John's Episcopal Church in Marietta, where he still serves as a supply organist every other Sunday.

He attributes his talent to what St. Paul described as "a gift of the spirit." That gift included the coordination needed to simultaneously operate an organ's keys, pedals and stops.

"For some people it just doesn't come," says Moyer. "For whatever reason, it came to me."

As a teenager, he was proficient enough to serve as organist at what was then Annville's First Lutheran Church, now St. Mark's.

Later, as a student at Lebanon Valley College, he was organist and choir director at Seventh Street Lutheran Church in Lebanon, a valuable practicum for his studies. It's also where he officially joined the Lutheran church.

"I joke about getting sung into the Lutheran Church," says Moyer.

He may have missed traditional confirmation classes, but his interest in church doctrine, whether it's expressed musically or from the pulpit, has never waned. He served three times as a delegate to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America national conventions.

His musical recollections continue back to high school, where his mentor, the late Paul Fisher, also a retired Millersville music professor, took advantage of Moyer's perfect pitch by enlisting him to play timpani as well as the cymbals and bass drum.

Fisher, Moyer says, "talked turkey to me about job security," urging him to study music education so that as an organist, he could better work with church musicians.

"Did he ever turn out to be right!" exclaims Moyer.

At Lebanon Valley, he continued his organ studies with late R. Porter Campbell, with whom he studied while in high school.

Moyer went on to earn graduate degrees: a master of sacred music, Union Theological Seminary's School of Sacred Music; a master of music in music history, Temple University; and a doctor of musical arts in organ performance and sacred music, Eastman School of Music.

Moyer is also a Fellow of the American Guild of Organists, currently the only F.A.G.O. in the Lancaster chapter.

Moyer's organ playing on two E & G G Hook organs in New England was captured on a CD titled "As the Dew From Heaven Distilling."

Moyer served a church in South Williamsport and taught organ at Susquehanna University before coming to Lancaster in 1964 to take a position at Millersville State College, where he taught for 32 years, primarily music history, music literature and music and culture. He retired in 1996.

In his retirement, he indulges his interest in genealogy, and he frequently writes letters to the editor and occasional newspaper columns. (He served as the Sunday News' music critic for 16 years.)

A lifelong runner who participated in the Boston Marathon in 1982 (3 hours, 18 minutes, he notes proudly), Moyer runs three miles most days, and will again run the Red Rose Run in June.

His local church music service ran concurrent with his college career and continued beyond. Upon moving to Lancaster, Moyer became the organist and choir director at the city's former St. Stephen's Lutheran Church, where he served until 1971.

At the time, he was serving in the National Guard, and on weekends that he had training at the Stahr Armory, he would be allowed to leave Sunday mornings to play organ at St. Stephen's. On a few occasions, he didn't have time to change from his uniform.

"Playing the organ in combat boots is not a good thing to be doing," says Moyer. "It sure does a job on your spit shine."

Moyer also served as organist and choir director in Lancaster at Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd from 1975 until 1989 and at Grace Lutheran Church from 1997 until 2002.

Because of hearing loss, Moyer wears hearing aids in both ears that allow him to discern the organ's higher-frequency overtones. Sometimes, when he's practicing on the church's 1967 Hermann Schlicker organ, considered one of Lancaster's finest, he'll send Grace's current music director, Murray Foreman, down into the nave to give him feedback.

Moyer wholeheartedly subscribes to Martin Luther's saying, "Music is the handmaiden of theology."

"That's a pretty good line," says Moyer, who maintains that sacred music plays a much greater role than entertainment or a warm-up to the sermon.

"Music carries its own messages of faith," he states.

That's exemplified by his favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, whom he dubs "the musician's and the composer's composer."

Bach's music, particularly the Prelude and Fugue in E-Flat ("St. Anne") that he'll close with Sunday, "crawls with disciplined spirituality."

When he studies such a piece, "there are a lot of moments when I wish I had a composer's mind," he says a bit wistfully. "All I have is an analytical mind."

But therein lies his strength.

"I seek to understand the music as best I'm able. …and try to haul that out in performing as though it were the composer sitting here playing. …

"I want to be transparent and let the composer's expression pass through me to the people." blog comments powered by Disqus