ALL THE RIGHT NOTES
Robert E. Gladden, who has played the organ at St. Rose of Lima Church in Haddon Heights since 1965, is a low-key fellow with a quiet voice.
Robert E. Gladden, who has played the organ at St. Rose of Lima Church in Haddon Heights since 1965, is a low-key fellow with a quiet voice.
But the mighty instrument he custom-built - and fluently commands - can speak volumes in pretty much any musical language.
"It's a big sound," Gladden, 63, says from the console in the choir loft, where he makes music for Saturday and Sunday Masses, as well as weddings, funerals, and other occasions.
"This organ has the quietest things like chimes, harp, celesta, a little glockenspiel . . . to the biggest sounds, like the 32-foot pipes you can feel in your chest," the Merchantville resident says, giving me a dazzling demonstration.
The St. Rose community has been listening as well; a reception in Gladden's honor is set to follow the 11 a.m. Mass on Sunday.
"Bob is a great church musician," says the Rev. Joseph Byerley, pastor of the 4,400-family Catholic parish. "He makes everything as beautiful as it can be."
"Bob is an artist," says cantor Pat Innocenzo, 73, of Westmont, a St. Rose parishioner since 1968. "And for a musician, he is so easygoing. Nothing is ever a problem."
"That's because I've had lots of time to practice," says Gladden, a Haddonfield native who grew up attending Mass at St. Rose and listening to the organ.
"The sound was kind of like a magnet," he recalls. "As soon as I heard it, it was what I wanted to do. I can't say why. I just did."
At 9 years old, he began organ lessons at the Richard L. Moore Music Center in Collingswood. "I took to it right away," he says. By age 12, Gladden was regularly playing at St. Rose, which at the time had several other part-time organists - all of them adults - as well. He's been the only organist at St. Rose since 1996.
"At my first Mass by myself, I was petrified," Gladden says. "I thought I had played all the right notes. But the cantor who sang the Mass said, 'You could have played faster.' "
Turns out Gladden also loved speed, but in a different context: Drag-racing muscle cars along Philly's Front Street.
"I had a 1966 Oldsmobile 442 with a six-pack on it - three two-barrel carburetors," the 1970 Bishop Eustace graduate says. "I built engines. I was always mechanically inclined."
These inclinations also came in handy after Gladden earned a church music degree from Westminster Choir College in Princeton in 1974.
"I started going around with some of the older guys in Philly who were in the business of repairing and tuning pipe organs," he says.
"Organ repair involves carpentry, metalwork, wiring, electronics, computers . . . and then there's the musical end of it," adds Gladden, who travels the country repairing and tuning pipe organs.
Beginning in the late 1970s, he also put his expertise to work as he began to expand and customize the St. Rose organ.
"When I started, it had about 700 pipes and two keyboards," Gladden says.
The organ now has nearly 3,000 pipes - the tallest are 32 feet and the tiniest are "the size of a small pencil" - four keyboards, and 120 stops, he notes.
"I'm most proud of the fact that I took pipes from all over the place, including churches in Philadelphia that were being closed," he says. "I was able to make them sound like they all belong together."
A love of harmony also is evident in his careful selection of traditional and modern hymns for the four weekend Masses at which he plays.
"It's an eclectic mix of stuff," he says. "I try to keep everybody happy as much as possible."
Spiritual, as well as musical, satisfaction helps keep him happy after playing for more than half a century.
"I still feel the same way about the sound of the organ that I felt in the beginning," says Gladden, who has no plans to retire.
"I still feel that magnetism."
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