Awesome...

 I experienced an awesome musical performance this morning, and I don't use the word awesome lightly.  This took place at First Presbyterian Church.  Not too surprising that it would happen on a Sunday morning since it was in church.  The entire worship service was a performance of "La Nativite du Seigneur" (The Birth of the Savior) by Olivier Messiaen, a French composer who lived from 1908 to 1992. He was an accomplished organist by the age of 11.   

Our grand Aeolian-Skinner organ has never sounded better and our newly hired Director of Music Ministries Colin Andrews has certainly assured everyone that he was an excellent choice for the position. 

This was a multi-media presentation with slides of appropriate art work, passages of scripture and descriptions of the nine movements.  It was all beautiful but I particularly enjoyed the fourth movement "The Word" and the sixth movement "The Angels."

A word that caught my attention in one of the explanations was 'fingurations.'  It may have been a typo but I wrote it down to follow up on later.  I have just finished Googling the word and have found an admittedly AI answer.  It was labeled as such. It said it is not a recognized English word but is probably a blend of finger and configuration describing complex musical finger patterns.  I'm pretty sure our organist was using some complex finger patterns, as well as fancy foot work, so in this context the word makes sense.

 Interestingly, we were discussing AI in our Sunday school lesson this morning and one of the things mentioned was the fact that AI (artificial intelligence) never wants to admit it doesn't know so will frequently make up reasonable sounding answers.  These are referred to as 'hallucinations.'  

So now I do not know and may never know if fingurations is a real word, but it is fun to say.  Try it.