What’s love got to do with it? Tina Turner asks in the popular song.

“Everything,” would be Angela Sainsbury’s answer.

Well ensconced at Cincinnati Conservatory, where she was pursuing a Master’s degree in organ performance, the last thing the then-Miss Harding, a lifelong Roman Catholic, envisaged was becoming the new organist at an Anglican church on a tiny, mid-Atlantic Island.

But then, that was before she met and married the man of her dreams, Steven Sainsbury, with whom she is now raising their first child, Kaia — ironically not far from St. Mark’s Church.

Born in Hays, Kansas, Mrs. Sainsbury was born with music in her genes. Her mother sings and other close relatives played a variety of instruments. Her interest in music began in early childhood when she was so captivated by the postludes the organist performed at her local Catholic church that she pretended to play along with them. When her two older sisters studied piano, Angela decided at age seven that she wanted to join them. Her teacher was the church organist.

Three years later, because her church would pay for students to learn to play the organ, the young musician took up the offer, playing with her hands. By age 12 she was tall enough to reach the pedals.

Before school, Angela and her fellow students were required to attend 8 a.m. mass at the church, and when the regular organist took time off to nurse a fellow nun, the tall youngster was drafted in. She also played at Sunday services at the family church, where her mother was a cantor.

“Here I was, at 12 or 13 years old, playing for the 8 a.m. masses Monday to Friday, and again on Sunday mornings. I was always separated from my classmates, who sat together, and I guess I stuck out like a sore thumb, so I told my mother I didn’t want to play the organ any more.”

“Well then, you call Sister Stephanie and tell her yourself,” her mother responded.

“I couldn’t do it,” Mrs. Sainsbury recalls. “Mum said it was my stewardship, and how was I going to get into heaven?”

However, when at age 15 Angela learned that a convent for retired nuns was looking for an organist and the incumbent would be paid, she agreed to take it on — a decision she would honour for eight years.

Throughout her high school years and initially at Friends University in Wichita, Mrs. Sainsbury continued taking both piano and organ lessons, but there was also something else that was important in her life. From the age of five she had been a talented soccer player — so much so that her coach had told her she would get a scholarship if she went to university.

As her workload increased, however, she realised that it was too difficult to keep up with the demands of all three, and she needed to focus on one.

Two factors influenced her final decision. One was hearing a student play Vidor’s Sixth Symphony on the organ at an American Guild of Organists student recital, and the other was the fact that her organ teacher at university had taken her to exciting new heights with much more challenging music than she had been used to, including Bach’s ‘Toccata in D Minor’.

Recalling the Vidor piece, Mrs. Sainsbury says, “It was awesome. I called my teacher and said, ‘Can I major in organ?’”

In fact, she became the first organ major in a decade at Friends University, from which she would ultimately graduate with a Bachelor’ degree in organ performance.

She then entered Cincinnati College Conservatory on a full tuition scholarship to study for her Master’s degree in organ performance.

It was the furthest the young Kansas woman had ever been from home, and she did not like the “gloomy, grey” city, nor the run-down area in which the conservatory was located. She really missed the lawns and flowers of home.

As different as this experience was, the best was yet to come — thanks to her computer-savvy roommates who introduced her to the wonders of instant messaging programmes and ICQ.

The fascination of this new age technology began to pall, however, when Mrs. Sainsbury began receiving crude messages, and she was on the verge of zapping the site when a message came from Bermuda that would change her life forever.

“There was this guy in Bermuda who was interested in the outdoors. We chatted for three hours. It was a good conversation about music and food. We just knew our first names, and he didn’t ask me what I looked like,” she remembers.

“By Christmas I decided I was going to visit Bermuda, and I arrived on Boxing Day. My plan was to stay for two weeks, but I liked Steve so much that I decided to leave the Conservatory, even though I was only a quarter of the way through my first year, to be with him.”

Her mother was horrified.

“Angela,” she ordered, “you get right on that plane.”

Mrs. Sainsbury did not, the couple duly married, and she eventually began teaching piano at the Bermuda School of Music. Then she realised that if she was going to “end up teaching” she wanted to complete her Master’s degree. Delighted that her husband agreed to accompany her, Mrs. Sainsbury resumed her studies at the Conservatory.

During the second year, she became pregnant with Kaia, but managed to complete the course work and two recitals for her degree shortly before her daughter’s birth, and the family’s return to Bermuda.

Today, in addition to being a wife and mother, she has happily settled in as the new organist at St. Mark’s Church, and has overcome her initial nervousness at taking over from the very accomplished Jean Motyer, who retired.

“Jean had a reputation, and I didn’t know how I was going to live up to it, but they’re putting up with me,” Mrs. Sainsbury says modestly.

“At every church the service is a little different, but I’ve settled in now and I feel like I’m not going to miss my cues.”

With only a small choir of five sopranos and two basses to work with, the organist admits it can be a challenge choosing appropriate choral music, and she laments the fact that there is nowhere here to buy any.

Nevertheless, she is very pleased to have inherited Mrs. Motyer’s collection of music, and very much enjoys “making music with the choir” — just as she would welcome more voices to join the choir.

Mrs. Sainsbury is also “excited to have such a nice organ to play on”, and is looking forward to a very happy association with her new church.

Asked why she particularly loves organ music, she says it is because it is “a lot like a choir in the sense that you have individual voices”.

“The right hand is considered a voice and so is the left, and so are the pedals, so there is a lot of polyphony on the organ. A hymn is four-part music.

“You play the upper three voices with the hands, and the lower voice with the feet. You don’t treat each of the voices as their own instrument. The feet can be the string basses and the hands can be violins.”

She also loves the fact that she can “make a lot of noise” with huge sounds on the instrument.

“The way it rumbles in your body is really wonderful,” she smiles.

And does she have a favourite composer?

“Oh, every organist has to play Bach, but it is hard to have a favourite when you have so many composers you like. Bach is wonderful, and I like César Franck and Duruflé,” is her answer.