World-class church organist finds home in Marin – Marin Independent Journal

In the cathedral-like quiet of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Belvedere on a recent weekday afternoon, Jonathan Dimmock sat down at the church’s custom-built pipe organ and let the magnificent instrument play itself.

Not literally, of course. The renowned organist, recently named St. Stephen’s new minister of music, was at the keyboard, improvising lush chords, ornate trills and baroque riffs that filled the empty church with glorious sound. But the trim, 63-year-old musician likes to think of himself as disappearing into music so completely when he plays that it becomes a form of meditation, allowing the organ to speak through him.

“People laugh when I say that the organ plays itself, that I just happen to be there to assist the process,” says Dimmock as we sit on benches beside a burbling fountain in the church’s courtyard. “They think I’m just being humble, but it’s really not about humility. You fuse with what’s transpiring, and the music, hopefully, flows through you, especially if you’re improvising. I really feel the organ plays itself and I’m just going along for the ride. And I get the joy of being witness to the whole thing.”

In his globe-trotting career, he’s gone along for the ride as organist for three major American cathedrals — St. Mark’s in Minneapolis, Grace in San Francisco and New York City’s St. John the Divine, the largest cathedral in the world. As a freelance musician, he’s performed at Notre-Dame in Paris, St. Peter’s in Rome and New York’s Carnegie Hall. He is the only American ever to serve as organ scholar at Westminster Abbey.

An international touring musician, he’s one of only a handful of organists to tour on six continents. In 2020, he was all set to embark on another busy year of travel and performing when the pandemic abruptly put a stop to all that.

“I found I was slipping into some real depression when it started,” he says. “Everything canceled. I had several tours lined up in Europe that were canceled. The way we were doing church and synagogue disappeared. Everything went to recordings. All the gigs I had lined up in the Bay Area were canceled overnight.”

With his sudden and unexpected downtime, he took classes at College of Marin in music tech, learning how to use Logic Pro, a MIDI synthesizer software that enabled him to take individual singers and blend their voices together in a virtual choir. He also decided to do what he had done in grad school: locking in two hours every morning, from 9 to 11 a.m., to practice on the electronic organ in his garage.

“That made world of difference to me, and not only in terms of structure,” he says. “I started learning new repertoire and it gave me something to look forward to when I got up each day. It made me realize that music is a lifeline for me. It’s not just a connection to the divine or community building or transferring joy to other people. It’s what makes me tick.”

Now his work is coming back a little at a time. He starts at St. Stephen’s at the end of the month and restarts his weekly concerts on the Spreckels organ, considered one of the finest in the world, at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor on Nov. 3. And he’s been busy playing for High Holy Days at Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco, one of the oldest synagogues in the country.

‘Coming home again’

Dimmock comes to St. Stephen’s after 12 years at St. Ignatius, the largest Jesuit parish in the United States, on the campus of the University of San Francisco.

“I’ve been working outside the Episcopal Church for a number of years, so spiritually this fits me more,” he says. “It feels like coming home again.”

This is his second time around at St. Stephen’s, a handsome landmark overlooking the Belvedere lagoon. He was fascinated when I told him that the church has become a footnote in Marin rock music history as the place where the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia was married (to his third wife) and where the guitarist’s memorial was held in 1995.

Dimmock’s first stint was early in his career, for seven years from 1987 to 1994, when he was in his late 20s and 30s. During that time, he co-founded American Bach Soloists, a baroque orchestra that specializes in the music of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi and Mozart, and has performed Handel’s “Messiah” at Grace Cathedral every holiday season since 1998. And he designed the church’s organ, an instrument that was made in Denmark of mahogany and oak, and took two years to build and install in the church’s choir loft. Its gleaming silvery pipes, some reaching nearly to the church’s high-vaulted ceiling, are fashioned from tin and lead, and were “voiced” to fit the acoustic contours of the church’s capacious space.

“It’s been decades since I played here last,” says Dimmock, mentioning that the organ has mellowed and grown “sweeter” since then. “We tend to change things in memory, but this organ has stood the test of time. There’s something in the sound here that delights and amazes me. With a good choir and good acoustics, I’m excited about the possibilities of making music here on this organ, which I think is a really sensational instrument in the Bay Area.”

Mind-body connection

A graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Yale University, Dimmock has also studied medicine and worked for five years as a psychotherapist. He’s the founder of the Resonance Project (music-resonance.org), a nonprofit that brings people together to resolve conflicts through live music and neuroscience. When he was making his mark at St. Stephen’s in the ’80s and ’90s, he became a friend and protégé of the late George Leonard, a Mill Valley author and journalist considered the founding father of the human potential movement.

“All of George’s mind-body connections really influenced me profoundly,” he says. “He gave a lecture at my instigation for a conference I was holding here in 1998, talking about metaphysics and topics that would often be taboo in church settings. But this is the kind of place that embraces those ideas about the spirit, feeling connected and building community within those bounds.”

His calling

Dimmock knew what his calling in life would be when he first heard an organ in church when he was 3 years old, informing his mother that he wanted to be “an organer” when he grew up.

“I was reading Pablo Casals’ book, ‘Joys and Sorrows,’ and he said that every musician, when they hear their instrument, something inside knows that there’s no other instrument they can learn instead,” he says. “There’s no turning back. I knew I wanted to be an organist. And I never changed my mind.”

Unlike most other musicians, church organists can’t take their instruments with them when they travel or perform. Pipe organs are part of the architecture of the churches, cathedrals and theaters where they reside, and all of them have a distinct history, character and soul. Dimmock examines that phenomenon in a blog post, “Music and the Magic of Place,” on his website (jonathandimmock.com).

As a world-class church organist, he’s played historic instruments in the grandest of places for some extraordinarily stately ceremonies and solemn occasions. He won’t soon forget being 24 years old and playing in Westminster Abbey at the memorial service for British poet laureate Sir John Betjeman.

“The queen was in attendance, Laurence Olivier preached the sermon, Prince Charles read the Lessons, it was live broadcast on the BBC,” he says. “That was my most nervous moment. It was before I had the cerebral philosophical mindset I have now. But, fortunately, it went beautifully. And it was a thrill to be part of that world, to see intimately how that world functions and to plug into thousands of years of musical history and tradition. And to be accepted as an American is quite unusual for that place.”

At St. John the Divine, a cathedral so huge it generates its own weather systems, Dimmock played on the fittingly named “great organ,” an instrument that has been acclaimed as a natural treasure and has more than 8,500 pipes, including one called the state trumpet above the cathedral’s west end.

“It’s so far away that there’s a quarter of a second delay between the time you play a note and the time you hear it,” says Dimmock, smiling at the memory. “That’s a fair amount of time. The first time I pressed the keys and nothing happened, it freaked me out.”

While at St. John the Divine, Dimmock often played with new age and jazz saxophonist Paul Winter on Winter’s “Earth Mass,” composed while Winter was artist-in-residence at the cathedral.

“He was brilliant to work with as an improviser,” he says. “Working with him gave me a lot of open mindedness about music. I don’t think there’s a lot of room in the world for people who refuse to cross over. For one thing, it makes you approachable. You’re not off into some other world. For most of us who decided to be professional musicians, you have to figure out how to talk to all people.”

Native American shamanism

In his life and career, Dimmock, who lives in San Francisco with his husband, has had to come to terms with discriminatory Christian policies and hurtful attitudes toward the LGBTQ community.

“There was this disconnect between my calling as a musician in the context of the church and the church’s teaching and direct disdain of gay people,” he says.

The Episcopal Church, though, of which he’s a member, has been a leader in supporting gay rights, voting in 2015 to bless same-sex marriage. It also allows transgender people to be ordained in the priesthood.

Coming from a fundamentalist background, Dimmock struggled to come out, waiting until he was 25 and well into his career. His father never accepted his sexuality, although, at 91, he served as a witness when Dimmock was married in San Francisco City Hall. Although he grew up in the Christian church, Christianity didn’t provide the answers he was seeking when it came to finding his place as a gay man in his faith. Surprisingly, he found it through Native American shamanism.

“I discovered in Native American culture historically that shamans are between two worlds, and not just the spiritual and material world, but even the male female polarity,” he says. “That there may be something that gay people have to offer has been ignored for a long time. When I started to see that, it changed my notion of seeing myself as an outsider, but as someone with something unique to offer.”

As he begins this new chapter in his career, he feels a real “simpatico” with the Rev. Phillip Ellsworth Jr., the church’s rector, in their common desire to use the Anglican choral tradition as, Ellsworth says, “the highest possible artistic statement to the glory of God.”

“What I’m excited about is crafting a place where really great music and spirituality come together,” Dimmock says. “It sounds like a cliché, but isn’t that what a church is all about?”

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net

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