St. John the Divine’s Organist Celebrates the Return of the Famed Cathedral’s Great Organ

When Daniel Ficarri was in high school, he took his first trip to New York City, and the first landmark he wanted to visit was the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, an iconic place that, until then, he had only read about.

A friend arranged for him not only to hear a demonstration of the famed cathedral’s Great Organ but to actually play the iconic instrument afterwards.

“It was just mesmerizing,” he recalled. “Even just to walk in that space, I’d never been in any sort of building like that in my life. I remember walking in and the light coming through the stained-glass windows, and there were all these purples and reds and blues.”

Ficarri, now a Harlem resident, could have never imagined that years later he would be working at the over-125-year-old cathedral, located in Morningside Heights, as its organist and associate director of music.

Ficarri moved to New York to attend Juilliard, where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees. When he began at the school, he was one of only two freshmen there to study the organ. “Myself and a guy from Boston. There were about eight to 10 in the department at any given moment,” he said.

After a six-year stint of serving as the organist at St. Paul the Apostle on the Upper West Side, he got a call from Kent Tritle, the music director at St. John the Divine, and the rest goes down in the musical history of the storied cathedral.

On Palm Sunday of 2019, the day before the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, there was a fire at St. John the Divine, which damaged its Great Organ. The instrument was restored, and to the delight of its over 120,000 annual visitors, returned on Dec. 1.

To celebrate its arrival, the cathedral hosted free concerts on Feb. 4, 11, and 18. Ficarri created the program for the Feb. 11 concert, and gave a glimpse into what audiences can expect.

You started taking lessons in violin first, so explain how you discovered the organ.

The church that I attended, north of Pittsburgh, was called St. John Neumann, and they had a digital organ that not many people knew how to use. I remember being amazed that it had all these different keyboards and pedals, so I kind of took to trying to figure out how to play the orchestra music that I was learning on the violin on the organ. And so I would try to play the cello part, the bass line, with the feet on the pedals. And then I would play one violin line in one hand and the viola part in another hand. I liked that the organ could be an orchestra on its own, so I think that was probably how I first got interested in it.

But also, Pittsburgh is a city that has actually a wealth of amazing pipe organs. When I was in 8th grade, I remember my grandmother cut out an ad in the newspaper that there was a concert that was going to happen at a cathedral in Pittsburgh, St. Paul Cathedral. And that’s maybe one of the greatest organs in Pittsburgh. So that was my first time hearing a pipe organ . . . and I remember I immediately came home and asked to take organ lessons.

Are your parents musicians?

No, my mom is a CPA and my dad just retired this year, but he worked as a systems analyst in IT.

What was your experience at Juilliard like?

It was an awesome and amazing six years that I spent there. Everything felt very fast-paced. A lot of movies and TV shows make it out to be a very competitive and cutthroat environment. I was grateful to find that the organ department especially, and really just the school as a whole, was very supportive and just a very stimulating place to be as a musician.

You served as the organist at St. Paul the Apostle.

Yes, I worked there for about six years or so. When I moved to New York City, I started working at a Presbyterian church in Scarsdale, Hitchcock Presbyterian Church, and I worked there for two years. And then I went to St. Paul the Apostle. I had started doing concerts there as a student and they asked if I would join their staff. And it was just about a five-minute walk from where I lived and from school. The organ and acoustics were amazing, but it was the community that I fell in love with. After finishing there, and I had just finished my master’s, I got a call from [St. John the Divine] to ask if I would be interested in working there. It was a pretty amazing sequence of events; I’m very lucky.

What does your role at St. John the Divine entail? What is a typical day like for you?

That’s a good question. I wouldn’t say that there’s a typical day per se. I mean, there are regular elements to the schedule, like there are regular Sunday services, regular rehearsals with choirs and with instrumentalists throughout the week. But the cathedral’s such a happening place, where there’s so many events that come up, between concerts, funerals, and weddings. It’s the home of the Diocese of New York, the Episcopal Diocese, and it’s a sort of meeting place for all in the community. It’s also just one of the biggest spaces in the city, so if there’s a notable person or a politician or somebody that’s passed, I’ve played for a lot of figures in that way.

Who are some notable names you’ve played for there?

I did a funeral last year, and I remember Bill and Hillary Clinton spoke, as did Nancy Pelosi. I remember I sat next to Amy Klobuchar. That was kind of wild.

What is something interesting you learned about the cathedral’s history?

Oh my gosh, so many things. The cathedral, from its founding, has had a real interest in not just music and liturgy, but in social justice and work in the community. Yesterday I was looking at a picture from when Martin Luther King Jr. preached at the cathedral. And it is one of the first places to ordain women in the United States.

Tell us about the fire that happened there.

It was the second fire that the cathedral had had that required the organ to be rebuilt. In 2001, not long after 9/11, the cathedral had the more destructive of the two fires that broke out in what they call the North Transept. It was a gift shop at the time and it required the cathedral to be closed down for a number of years. And there was like a period of seven years that the organ wasn’t played, that it had to be rebuilt. So once they got back on their feet, then again, on Palm Sunday of 2019, the day before Notre-Dame, there was a smaller fire, but still one that was serious, in the crypt underground. Though it didn’t directly damage the organ, thankfully, it filled the cathedral with smoke. And all that material can be very corrosive to the pipes and the mechanics of the organ. It’s almost like the Stradivarius of organs. It’s an instrument you can’t really let be exposed to those kinds of elements. So it had to be carefully taken apart and cleaned again. And so that was, again, another long process. But we’re very glad it’s back.

So, you also compose your own music?

I do. I write all sorts of music. Organ, of course, but music for choir or music for orchestra at times or singers. I really do love doing that.

In your bio, it says you have a condition that helps influence your music.

Some people like to ask about synesthesia. It’s something I’ve always been aware of, but until I was in school I didn’t know the name for it. There can be connection in the senses, and for me, it happens to be music and color that are often closely linked, that certain keys reflect a certain color in the mind’s eye. And that’s often the way I experience music or remember music.

Tell us about the concert on Feb. 11. Can you give us an idea of what the audience will be hearing?

I wanted a program that was unique to the cathedral and the cathedral’s organ. So much of classical music is very centered around Europe and music like Bach, which I love, which came from Germany, or a lot of French composers that wrote for the organ. And the cathedral’s organ is very American. Not only was it built by Ernest Skinner, who is one of the greatest American organ builders, in Boston, but it has this diversity of sounds and of colors that you can play, and it really can play any style of music. It’s very New York in that sense, it’s this melting pot of all different styles of music. And so I chose a program of all American composers that all have that sort of eclectic sound and a language that borrows from all different traditions.

Like I’m doing a piece by Philip Glass called “Mad Rush” that just has these slow waves of sound that change every few minutes. So I’m going to ask people to stand in the very back of the cathedral to hear the organ from a distance in that piece. Then there’s more intricate works that I want them to experience the organ from underneath the pipes. So I’ll ask people at the end of the program to move toward the front, under the pipes. So I think it’ll be a pretty cool atmospheric experience.

To learn more, visit www.danielficarri.com & www.stjohndivine.org