Rhonda Sider Edgington: Brief portrait of a friend, Holland musician
Not long after moving to Holland, I met someone who would become one of my closest musical friends here. I was writing emails to help organize practice and teaching sites for a music camp. Steve Jenkins wrote right back and was unusually (I thought) chatty and interested. In retrospect, none of that was out of character.
He loved supporting young musicians whenever possible, so an organ academy for high school students would have been right up his alley. And he often felt on the periphery of Holland and the musical world for various reasons, so would have been excited to be included, though I think some of this perception was untrue, that more people respected him and took him seriously than he ever imagined. Regardless, Steve and I were soon trading emails regularly.
Thus began a valuable friendship for both of us, which included discussing musical matters as well as literature. Steve was a fanatical reader and lover of books, whose house looked a bit like a used bookstore, and I have always loved reading, and been a sucker for used bookstores. We’d get together to play piano or organ duets together for fun, we’d share musical gossip about the goings-on in town, trade musical scores, if one had something the other needed or was interested in, or talk about and pass around books.
Eventually, I learned about some of Steve’s life story. He’d grown up as a preacher’s kid in the Church of God, worked as a church musician in the Detroit area, earned a Masters in Liturgical Music Ministry at University of Notre Dame, and then got a job in Holland at Our Lady of the Lake. But in music as well as literature, Steve always followed whatever interested him, wherever that led.
He quit church music in mid-life and spent a number of years playing music in coffee houses and in downtown Holland as one of the original Street Performers. In those venues, he showcased his wildly eclectic musical interests, tastes, and abilities in many styles, as well as his own compositions, which he had been writing since youth.
One of my first introductions to his compositions was when he happened to mention that he’d written a piece for organ and marimba for a friend, but it had never been performed. Of course I took the bait! I was eventually able to premiere this fascinating piece at Hope Church, with David Hall, the principal percussionist of the Grand Rapids Symphony, playing marimba, and Steve in attendance.
When Grace Episcopal Church, where Steve worked when we met, (Rev. Jen Adams was able to coax Steve out of church musician retirement to work with her there) was in the process of looking for a new organ, Steve generously invited me to join the organ committee, and we had a blast taking field trips to play pipe organs by various builders. The organ at Grace, built by Martin Pasi in 2018, is one of the best in Holland, a gorgeous representation of American organ building, and a prime example of how to build a small instrument that is full of color and beauty plus amazingly versatile. It was due in no small part to Steve’s leadership that it ended up in Holland.
Not long after he retired from Grace, with many plans I’m sure for how to spend his retirement, one unfortunate health prognosis or complication after another came along, and the talkative Steve that we’d all known started to fade away. To the end though, he loved reading and listening to music. He sometimes sat with the New York Times on his lap, even without the energy to read, as if having it there brought comfort — the exchange of ideas, the love of words. I went myself or took my kids to play music for him at home, knowing how important live music was to him, and he always responded.
Steve was a unique and eccentric person with fierce interests and passions — a lover of books, music, and learning, who kept these traits to the end. I think he’d want to admonish us, in no uncertain terms, to use our public libraries, support local bookstores, listen to live, local music and pay musicians fairly, make music for the fun of it, and find the books and music that we like, not what anyone says we’re supposed to like. Steve welcomed me to Holland, and I think I made Holland a little bit more welcoming for him.
— Rhonda Sider Edgington is a church musician, organ teacher and concert organist who performers around West Michigan and the U.S., and also enjoys writing, about music and life.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Rhonda Sider Edgington: Brief portrait of a friend, Holland musician
