York Minster on Fifth Avenue

The music swelled through the Gothic nave and died away. At the organ console beside the apse, a white-haired little man of 79 turned off the organ switch and gathered up his music. Dr. T. Tertius Noble, organist for three decades at Manhattan's famed St. Thomas' Protestant Episcopal Church, had decided to give up playing in public "while I can still do a good job."

One of church music's most honored living men, British-born Dr. Noble was organist (for 15 years and some 14,000 services) at 600-year-old York Minster, celebrated for its architecture and its acoustics.* When he left in 1913 to come to the U.S., Archbishop of York Cosmo Gordon Lang (later Archbishop of Canterbury) charged him: "I want you to go to America and take some of York Minster into your church on Fifth Avenue. You must carry some of the old world into the new."

Dr. Noble took the archiepiscopal instruction to heart. He introduced cathedral evensong to St. Thomas' afternoon service, changed the style of the Psalter to conform to the Anglican tradition. Meanwhile, he was writing church music of his own--anthems, and the tunes to many such familiar hymns as Come, Labour On and Fierce Was the Wild Billow.

In the Protestant Episcopal hymnal there are as many hymn tunes by Noble as by Bach.

After a trip back to York Minster this summer, Organist Noble plans to go on composing at his ocean-front home in Massachusetts, "until the publishers start turning me down." In retirement, he may also have enough leisure to correct the oft-published story that he is the uncle of British-born Jazz Bandman Ray Noble. Says Dr. Noble with a smile: "We're no relation at all. I can't imagine why he should want to claim me."

* British Organist Sir Walter Parrat once said: "I think that if you put a cow into York she would moo beautifully."

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