Photos and postludes

Ryan and I went to the National Cathedral this morning with the idea of going to church, going to brunch, and then coming back to the cathedral for their gargoyle tour. Well, Ryan changed his mind and decided he didn't want to spend money on brunch, so we wandered around the cathedral and the cathedral close after the (previously reported) service taking videos and pictures.

Ryan recorded part of the organ postlude from the aisle by our seats. I wandered back to the chancel and recorded a bit from there (I'm not a filmmaker like Ryan, so my purpose was capturing the organ sound for you, not to give you a pretty picture to watch). I have the two YouTube videos below. Also, here are a few photos we took from around the cathedral.

Okay, first, let me explain the picture up above. You're looking at the rose window and clerestory windows over the balcony in the north transcept.

Now, while you're looking at pictures, you can listen to some music. There are two video files here, both short snippets of various parts of the organ postlude following today's service. The organist was playing Con moto maestoso from Sonata III in A Major by Felix Mendelssohn. I'm not sure who the organist was; I saw the cathedral's organist turning pages for him, and I suspect from his youth that he's the cathedral organist's student. Ryan filmed the first clip from the nave. His is somewhat artful. I, on the other hand, went back to the east end of the chancel and recorded with the goal of capturing the music and not trying to do anything creative with the video, so just "listen" to mine.





And now for the photographs.



This is an oddly colored photo (from the flash in a dark chancel) of the organ pipes along the north wall of the chancel. After the postlude, I went downstairs to the Bethlehem Chapel, where Ryan took this picture of me:



On the left below is the lecturn from which the Bible lessons are read. I thought the flowers were pretty. On the right is Canterbury pulpit, which is much bigger than it looks. One interesting bit of trivial about the pulpit is that on the Sunday prior to his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his last sermon here.



While we were wandering around the chancel, I had an interesting chance encounter. A guy from Connecticut came up to me and said I looked familiar. We chatted a bit and he asked if I was on television or if I was a senator or something! It turns out he's a fan of The West Wing, so I can only imagine that he's one of those people who watches the Tivo or DVDs over and over and over and that's why he recognized my face.

One of the big tourist attractions at the National Cathedral is the stained glass "Space Window" on the south wall of the clerestory. In the center of the top circle (you can't really see it very well in this photo) is a slice of real moon rock brought back from the moon by astronauts.



There are carvings all over the cathedral, inside and out. I didn't take any gargoyle pictures since we were supposed to be taking a gargoyle tour later, but we did catch this one bas-relief carving of the Holy Family on one of the walls.



There will be another post (possibly tomorrow) with a video recording of the carillon and some photos from the Bishop's garden. And, here is a final shot of me in front of the sanctuary.