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[F_MINOR] OT: Patience! All questions will eventually be answered!



"What songs the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture."
 
-- Sir Thomas Browne
 
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Down below is a post to f_minor from August 2002 ... I was just shootin' the breeze, wondering who the real organist was when Captain Nemo (James Mason) sat down at the ornate organ in his inner sanctum on the fantastic submarine Nautilus and played the Toccata & Fugue in D-Minor in the Disney movie "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."
 
The f_minor archive is very thoughtfully plugged into The Web, and Googleable, so Lo! Yesterday I get a lovely post from Beatrice R. in Italia, with the answer!
 
The organist, she says, was Jimmy Boyce, longtime organist at the huge Wurlitzer of Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center (NYC). Beatrice's source says Boyce also owned the organ -- I guess Radio City employed his services as a musician and contractor.
 
Beatrice says Boyce's organ work appears in several other movie soundtracks, and there's some stuff about him on several websites.
 
Elmer, broodin' over the Wurlitzer in his watery kingdom
 
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OT -- Captain Nemo plays Toccata & Fugue
mailto:F_MINOR@email.rutgers.edu
Mailing list devoted to the discussion of Glenn Gould's work and life
Elmer Elevator mailto:bobmer.javanet@rcn.com
Fri, 9 Aug 2002 15:18:47
 
Okay this is off-topic bigtime, but somebody was just talking about the Toccata & Fugue in D-minor.
 
One of my all-time favorite childhood movies was on the cable deep in the middle of the night the other night, Disney's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1954). A brooding Captain Nemo (James Mason) sits down at the huge organ of The Nautilus and plays the Toccata and Fugue.
 
(A little surfing discloses that the great-looking pipe organ can still be seen at Disneyland in the Haunted Mansion.)
 
Does anybody know who the real organist was? Pretty durn good passionate scenery-chewing rendition if you ask me. Perhaps geared for the sensibilities of an eight-year-old boy, but ... are we not humans, too?
 
(Please don't make me join the Bach List to ask.)
 
Bob / Elmer

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