Nine-year-old Charles-Anthony DiMarco stopped the congregation at St. Catherine Labouré Church in its tracks last month when he climbed onto the organist’s bench after a recent weekend Mass.
Dressed in his Cub Scout uniform, having genuflected to the Tabernacle at the conclusion of the Diocese’s Scout Recognition Mass on June 28, the astute boy approached Father James Lease, pastor, for permission to play the parish’s Quantum organ.
After a couple deep breaths and a few moments of strategic finger placement over the organ’s three keyboards, Charles-Anthony began to play the hauntingly familiar notes of Toccata and Fuge by Johann Sebastian Bach. When the lingering congregation realized the sounds were coming from the fingers – and feet – of a gifted nine-year-old, they stopped in awe.
It’s a common reaction that Charles-Anthony elicits from onlookers.
“When I play and people are listening, I hope it brings them joy. If they’re sad or down, I hope they hear my music and it brings them happiness,” Charles-Anthony told The Witness after playing several minutes of Bach’s two-part composition.
He has astonished and delighted onlookers in several local churches where pastors have given him permission to play after Masses, at pianos in train stations and airports in Europe on family vacations, and most recently at grand church organs in Malta, France and Italy while his family visited his mother’s homeland.
“It’s just something I enjoy doing. It gives me great pleasure,” said Charles-Anthony, a member of St. Ann Byzantine Catholic Church in Harrisburg.
Charles DiMarco, 9, sits at the organ at the Cathedral de Notre-Dame-de-la-Seds in Toulon, France, where he played a weekday Mass in May.Musical instruments have always been part of the DiMarco home, where parents Michael and Evangel are currently homeschooling. They said Charles-Anthony was two years old when he composed his first piece.
“He created something fairly long, and it stayed in his mind because he remembered it and played it again and again,” Evangel said.
A few years later, after returning home from Mass at St. Patrick Cathedral in Harrisburg, Charles-Anthony sat down at the family’s piano and played from memory a hymn he had heard during the liturgy.
“I just kept playing, remembering the music and then playing it,” he said.
“I enjoy the organ because it’s like an orchestra. I heard an organist say that each key is like one person in the orchestra,” he said. “I also like the organ because you can play with your feet and there are three or four keyboards for your hands. It’s so cool because all the pipes make sounds and it sounds like people playing flutes, or sometimes thunder.”
Charles-Anthony recently received a Shenk Scholarship from the Harrisburg Chapter of the American Guild of Organists for free instruction this summer. Through the program, he’s receiving ten weeks of lessons with professional organists that will culminate in a recital.
He said his current goal is to play, without sheet music, Bach’s eight-minute Toccata and Fuge and the 15-minute Toccata, Adagio and Fuge. He is also aiming to play the composer’s 15 Inventions – a collection of short keyboard pieces.
“I like Bach the most,” Charles-Anthony said. “He uses a lot of fugues. It’s when you play something with one hand and play the exact same thing with your other hand and accompany it.”
Nine-year-old Charles DiMarco practices a piece by Bach after the Diocese’s annual Mass for Scouts at St. Catherine Labouré Church in Harrisburg in June.Charles-Anthony practices daily – sometimes several hours a day in the summer – and the family is grateful to the local priests and parishes who have welcomed him to play after Masses at several churches, including St. Catherine Labouré, Prince of Peace-Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Steelton and Pine Street Presbyterian Church in Harrisburg. His favorite hymn is Immaculate Mary. “It sounds very happy and joyful in honoring Mary,” he said.
“I can listen to music and play what I hear, and I can also read music,” he said. “I want to read music very well so I can just look at it and play, and then learn it enough to take the sheet music away and play.”
“Music just uplifts me. As Bach once said, ‘I play the notes, but it is God who makes the music.’ Everything I play is for Him, and for people to listen to and enjoy,” Charles-Anthony said.
(Photo and video from St. Catherine Labouré Church by Jen Reed, The Catholic Witness. Photo from the Cathedral in Toulon courtesy of the DiMarco family.)
By Jen Reed, The Catholic Witness
