Ask Andrew Galuska his idea of a great weekend, and the answer will doubtless involve church music. A dozen Sundays into his new role as music director of Community Church, Galuska, 40, is ramping up for the weekend, bounding from a test drive on the just-installed new organ in the chapel to a sound check (using gospel verse) on new high-tech speakers in the sanctuary.
“I am fun, fun, fun,” he says.
To be clear, Galuska’s idea of a mix tape for this party isn’t Christian rock or even a folk mass. His party music involves voices raised in stirring sacred song, or centuries-old music played on a magnificent pipe organ.
He also likes to deliver the unexpected now and then. Next month, on three consecutive Thursday mornings, Galuska will introduce Vero to a new concept: a concert of organ music with poetry readings to mark the period of Christian hopefulness known as Advent. Helping help him pair local poets with music is Sean Sexton, a member of Community’s congregation and the county’s newly anointed poet laureate.
While it wouldn’t be accurate to say music is in Galuska’s DNA – his parents only played an instrument because their parents made them – the joys of organ music struck him at a time when his peers were singing along with “Sesame Street.”
“I was in kindergarten in Catholic school in southeastern Massachusetts, and we had to attend Mass, well, all the time,” he says, not skipping a beat at his hyperbole. “I was sitting in a wonderful church with a massive organ, and I had the call. I knew I had the call.”
Quickly, his parents provided him with both a piano and organ in the home “as soon as they saw the talent start to emerge,” Galuska says.
Within the towns of Fall River and then Somerset, Mass. – which bears the nickname “Musictown” for all its bands and choirs – support came from a veritable village of adults. “Not just my parents, but my grandparents, aunts and uncles all chipped in with driving me around for lessons and concerts,” he says. “My mother has always told people, ‘I never had to ask Andrew to practice.’”
By 12, he had his first job, playing the organ at Saturday evening Mass. The thrill went beyond having pocket money, and even beyond playing for an audience. It went to the pleasure of playing an actual pipe organ in a dark old New England church, knowing how many others had played it before him.
“It was a very historic instrument, built in 1883. It was a dream, just sitting there alone in the dark practicing,” he says. He went on to perform his first public concert at 13 – and noticing his foot wouldn’t stop shaking.
In high school, he hung out with “the orchestra geeks,” though for them, he was more than another geek – he was the orchestra’s music director.
He went on to get his undergraduate degree in organ performance at Rhode Island College, a master’s degree in organ performance and choral arts at the University of Houston, and his all-but-dissertation in the doctor of musical arts program at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.
He spent five years in Detroit as minister of music at the Metropolitan United Methodist Church, playing on the 15th largest pipe organ in America. The church, funded through the Kresge family, is in downtown Detroit, which had yet to begin its revitalization. “I saw things that I never want to see again in my life, but I served a great church,” he says. It was there that he first began his poetry and organ concerts. He also directed and conducted a baroque ensemble.
From Detroit he moved to Rochester, Minn., where for three years he was director of music at St. Mary’s Chapel, affiliated with the Mayo Clinic next door.
Today, Galuska plays on what for the Community Church congregants is a dream: the 4,000-pipe Lively-Fulcher organ, installed in 2010 at a cost of $1.7 million. The music director at the time was José-Daniel Flores (he is visiting this weekend to play in a traditional organ-vs.-piano competition with his brother, Marcos Flores, director of music at Christ-by-the-Sea).
When Flores left two years ago to direct Albany, N.Y.’s Pro Musica community choir, his former associate director, Ryan Kasten, took on the music director job at Community. He has since left to become a realtor and serves as organist at St. John of the Cross Catholic Church.
Galuska arrived to a program “wiped clean,” as he puts it – the choice of this season’s concerts was entirely his, he says.
They include the three Advent poetry and organ concerts in December, as well as a “Peace on Earth” celebration Dec. 11 with Community’s three choirs plus its brass ensemble and bell groups. Pianist Rochelle Sallee, now living in Sebastian, will also perform as she will in a duo concert with Galuska in February. The Nautilus group will give a concert of the Henry Purcell opera accompanied by baroque harpsicord.
In the spring, there will be a Lenten reprise of the poetry and organ concert series. And on Good Friday, he has scheduled the contemporary requiem Mass by Mack Wilberg, director of music at the Mormon Tabernacle; Galuska calls it “transportingly otherworldly.” It will be performed by a full orchestra and the church’s Chancel Choir that by Easter will have swelled from its current 65 to 120, Galuska predicts.
Last week Galuska was sitting down to write the job description to post online for a new assistant, expected to start in January or February. That person will serve as accompanist for the ensembles so that Galuska can focus on voices.
“I have every expectation that this will become the best music program on the East Coast,” he says. “I cannot believe how much the Chancel Choir has accomplished in just two months. In a year it will be a nationally known choir. We are at a prime time musically to build, build and build. The sky is the limit.”
