"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
===========================
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
==============================
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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