NEW ORLEANS – The sound of music.
It’s a the sound of a one-man symphony.
It is from the man and the pipe organ he plays.
The pipe organs, that is.
He plays quite a few of them.
He is Marcus St. Julien.
WGNO’s Bill Wood wants you to hear the music he makes.
And he makes it, well, all the time.
What sounds like, all the time.
Marcus St. Julien has been at some kind of keyboard since he was a kid.
He says, “I grew up at St. Dominic’s Church and had one of the best organs and organists in the city and the bug bit when I was a kid and I became intrigued with the organ.”
His orchestra these days is the organ at Temple Sinai on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans.
The organ was built back in 1926.
And almost a century later, Marcus strikes up a chord to proclaim nobody has ever changed one note on this model of music history.
Marcus says, “very often, organists who’ve been at church with older instruments change things to accommodate tastes of the day, that has never happened here.”
Marcus has the pipes to proves he’s the organ maestro.
At Temple Sinai, two stories worth of pipes.
Really, two stories of tall pipes for this organ.
That’s when he plays here on Fridays.
Sundays, it’s down the street, St. Charles Avenue, at a Methodist church.
That’s Rayne Memorial United Methodist Church.
The rest of the time, he’s in his other sanctuary.
That’s a college classroom at Loyola University.
Marcus St. Julien is a music professor at Loyola.
His theory is when you get the chance, you better pull out all the stops.
And that’s just to make sure the music never stops.
