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Celebrating a milestone birthday: “Guardian Angel”

Oswald Ragatz

Oswald G. Ragatz served as professor of organ and chairman of the organ department at the School of Music at Indiana University from 1942–1983. Sadly, Mrs. Ragatz passed away after a long illness in 1998. When the Positive division was added to the organ at First Christian Church, where Mary so lovingly played for so many years, the Reuter organ was dedicated in her memory. Dr. Ragatz can be reached by contacting him at Meadowood Retirement Center in Bloomington, Indiana. David K. Lamb is currently the organist/choir director at First United Methodist Church in Columbus, Indiana. Graduating from IU in 1983, the year Ragatz retired, he completed the Doctor of Music degree at Indiana University in 2000. Dr. Lamb was recently appointed the District Convener for the State of Indiana by the American Guild of Organists.

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Introduction by David K. Lamb
For more than 40 years, Oswald Gleason Ragatz served as chairman of the Organ Department of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. On October 30, 2007, “Ozzie” celebrated his 90th birthday. Witnessing many changes through those years at Indiana University, Dr. Ragatz has also seen many changes in the organ world and in church music practices in the years since his retirement from IU in 1983.
I recently enjoyed the chance to visit with Dr. Ragatz in his home at Meadowood in Bloomington. Full of stories and anecdotes, as always, he was ready to recount his years at IU in full detail. What a joy it was listening to those reflections as Dr. Ragatz revisited the events in his early life that led him to his 40-year teaching position at Indiana University.
“Guardian Angel” is a wonderful exposé by Dr. Ragatz, detailing the sequence of events that made up the path leading him to Indiana University in 1942. In the words of Oswald Ragatz, please prepare to travel with him on this journey to Indiana University.

During my 25-year employment as organist-choirmaster in Presbyterian churches, I never heard the term predestination mentioned from the pulpit. But I understand that belief in predestination is one of the tenets of the Presbyterian faith. My Unitarian and agnostic friends shake their heads in patronizing dismay, when, instead of attributing some event to predestination or to sheer luck, I refer to my “Guardian Angel.” Probably influenced by all those charming angels in Renaissance paintings and those lovely little winged cherubs in the rococo churches in Europe, I personally would rather attribute the chain of events that greatly determined my life to an angel than to luck or to predestination. Luck never did me any good in those very brief encounters with the slots in the casinos in Las Vegas, and of course no serious angel would look after anyone foolish enough to wager hard-earned cash on those automated bandits. And I’m not a Presbyterian. But let me recount those events that directed my life, and the reader or listener can decide, Guardian Angel, Lady Luck, predestination, or whatever.
I guess I must start way back in the midst of the Great Depression and the Democratic landslide of 1932 that brought Franklin Roosevelt into the presidency, and that cleaned out all of the Republican county office holders in Logan County, Colorado, including my dad. The ensuing years found the Ragatz family trying to make a meager living from a small, 40-acre farm at the edge of my hometown, Sterling, Colorado. Farm labor, dust storms, locust plagues, and fundamentalist, straight-laced parents contributed nothing to the wished-for joie de vivre of high school student Oswald Ragatz. It must have been about then that Guardian Angel was assigned to look out for this puny kid, whose interests were music and architecture, thus contributing to the general scorn of his macho classmates.

High school days
The angel first appeared in the guise of a high school math teacher, Miss Smith. It was she who set me on the path that would lead to my escape from the dead-end existence of life on the dreary eastern plains of Colorado. It was Miss Smith who asked me to stay after algebra class so that she could talk to me, as she had some very exciting information to impart. My grade average was one-half point above that of one Verda Guenzi, and Verda and I had the highest grade average of our class. I probably should at this point give credit to the newly hired empathetic gym teacher, who had taken me in hand and had introduced me to gymnastics. This had had a marvelous effect on me. I was no longer the class wimp with C and D grades in gym. I now got an A in gym, which got me that one-half grade point above Verda Guenzi. (Was possibly Mr. Durfee the gym instructor an assistant Guardian Angel? Whatever.)
At any rate, Miss Smith pointed out that the University of Denver gave a four-year, full-tuition scholarship to the graduating senior valedictorian in the six largest high schools in the state. If I maintained a straight A average for the remaining years in Sterling High School, I would be able to go to college at the prestigious university in Denver, a city where there could also be numerous musical opportunities. That put on hold my interest in architecture; the nearest school offering architecture was Kansas U., which of course was out of the question. And anyway, no one was employing architects during the Depression.
My parents were elated by this news, and my mother, who was your basic taskmistress, went into a full cry. For the next two and half years, I became no longer the class wimp but now the class grind, the resident ant being held in some awe by the grasshoppers, my classmates. Verda Guenzi didn’t have a chance, poor girl.

Off to the University of Denver
Now things were getting under way in this chain of events. My dad’s brother lived in Denver and was married to a professional musician, a singer of some note in the city. They suggested that I live with them while attending the University of Denver. Their four sons were grown and out of college. I could pay for my room by accompanying students in my aunt’s studio and eventually accompanying her on singing engagements. There would be other duties—in-house chore boy, chauffeur for Aunt Ruth on occasions, etc.
Sterling, a town of less than 8,000, had a remarkable music program in the schools; the high school band and orchestra perennially won first place in the state competitions. I had begun playing oboe when just out of the sixth grade, and in six years had become quite proficient. In 1938 a symphony orchestra was formed in Sterling to accommodate the sizable number of graduates of the school’s music program who still lived in town and who wanted an outlet for their talent. Though still in high school, I was playing oboe in this symphony that had been organized during my senior year.
Guest conductors were brought in for the three concerts that we played. The most important of these guests was Horace Tureman, director of the Denver Symphony. I don’t remember what we played, but there must have been an important oboe part. At any rate, when I enrolled in music theory the first semester at the university, who should be the teacher but Horace Tureman! And wonder of wonders, he recognized me. After class, he asked to talk to me, saying that he remembered me from the orchestra concert he had conducted in Sterling, and would I like to fill the opening in the Denver Civic Symphony for the second chair oboe? The pay was not great, but it enabled me to pay my uncle for my board. Did my Guardian Angel arrange for all this? But I continue.
I had played piano since I was six years old, my mother being a piano teacher. And I had my first organ lessons the summer after the eighth grade, and became the organist at the Methodist church that fall. During my last year in high school, my parents managed to scrape up enough cash to enable me to drive the 140 miles up to Denver once a month for oboe lessons and organ lessons with the organist-choirmaster of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral. Now, living in Denver, I hoped to be able to continue organ lessons, although payment for same would be a problem. But not to worry, said my teacher. There was an opening for an organist at Broadway Baptist Church. He told me to try out for the job; I did and got the job. Those four years of playing for First Methodist in Sterling for little more than a Christmas remuneration had prepared me for the paying job in Denver.
So now I had enough monthly income to pay for organ lessons, textbooks, and music. I had been pretty burned out by the tension of making straight A’s during high school, so now I had decided to slack off a bit in college. However, shortly after the first semester had begun, I received a nice letter from the University Chancellor congratulating me on having won the scholarship and indicating that academic excellence would be expected of me. Furthermore, he indicated that since scholarship students were expected to give some services to the university, and in view of my experience as an organist, I would be expected to play the organ for university functions as needed—before lecture in the chapel, for example.
This was OK by me. It gave me unlimited access to the chapel organ for practice and resulted in my being asked by the Dean of Women to furnish background music on the Hammond electric organ in the posh Renaissance room in the library where teas were the style in those days. For each of these events I was paid $3 and engendered a high profile among the female elite of the student body who were wanting to go to the teas—the girls of the Pan Hellenic Society, the Associated Women’s Students, etc.
So my fingers (on the ivories) were doing the walking—well, the earning, and my parents did not have to fork over that first dollar for my undergraduate training, just an occasional dressed chicken sent by my mother to Aunt Ruth, but that was it. I felt that I was independent, I was living in a sophisticated environment at my uncle’s, and I no longer felt inhibited by my strict parents’ restrictions—and I had a ball! I was pretty naïve and thoughtless though; things had worked out so well for me, so why worry about the future? Incidentally, I did graduate eighth from the top in my class, due to the chancellor’s veiled admonitions four years earlier. But I must continue.

Clarence who?
I am not quite finished with undergraduate years. The next vignette may seem inconsequential, but keep in mind, it turned out to be very significant. The setting: a picnic in the mountains. Who was there? I don’t remember, just a bunch of college students. What? I was sitting on a big rock eating a hot dog when a blonde girl I didn’t know joined me and initiated conversation. She was quite hep, and shortly had me telling her about my interest in organ playing. At that point, she became very excited and said that I must meet her uncle from New York, Clarence Dickinson, who would be in Denver in a couple of weeks. Her enthusiasm caused me to think that Uncle must be a man of some importance. And indeed the name was familiar to me: Dickinson was the author of the organ method text given to me by my cousin, my first organ teacher, that summer after my eighth grade.
I was only mildly impressed, however, but I did mention this information to my organ teacher at my next lesson. Well, his reaction let me know that Clarence Dickinson was indeed a person of importance, being the head of the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. So, a week later, I was playing two of my biggest pieces at St. John’s Cathedral for Dr. Dickinson, my teacher having somehow made contact with him in Denver. Tall, dignified, with white hair and mustache, Dr. Dickinson was cordial, and, I thought, politely complimentary. But I was still only mildly interested; I was probably preoccupied thinking about the impending fall Pan Hellenic formal. By the way, I never encountered the blonde niece on campus again. Was she my Guardian Angel in disguise? If so, she must have been pretty bored by my lackadaisical lack of enthusiasm. But guardian angels must be patient, and fortunately Guardian Angel didn’t forsake me, as will soon become evident. She just became a bit more devious. So I continue.

Aunt Ruth: gateway to Eastman
I have mentioned my Aunt Ruth previously. There is no doubt that she was my mentor if indeed not my Guardian Angel. She introduced me to the facets of the professional musical world, and she and Uncle Arthur took considerable pains to civilize their shy and unhep nephew from Sterling. By my senior year, Aunt Ruth had sensed my lack of a clear picture of what I was going to do the next year after graduation. My Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences had presumably prepared me for getting a job in some small-town high school teaching history or social studies. But it was obvious that my interest and talents lay elsewhere—in music, of course.
Aunt Ruth had a former voice student who had gone to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and had high praise for the school. It sort of became understood during my senior year that I should go to graduate school the year after graduation from Denver. So I applied to Eastman and was accepted. However, I don’t remember now that I was particularly concerned about the financial requirements this expensive school would entail. I guess that I naïvely assumed that it would work out some way. It always had, hadn’t it? Of course, if there were sounds of fluttering angel wings, I didn’t notice.
I taught some organ students during the summer and played oboe in the Sterling summer band. So I had a little money in my pocket when I started out for New York with my two friends in the model A Ford. We traveled economy class, camping out, cooking our own food, and cheating on entrance fees at places like Mount Vernon. After two weeks of travel and visiting the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, we arrived in Rochester. The semester had not yet started, but I went into the Eastman office to see what a student did about housing. There was no men’s dormitory, but I was given a sizeable list of rooming houses near the school that catered to Eastman students. The person I talked to about this looked at a register of entering students (probably to see if I were indeed a legitimate entrant), and seeing that I was to be an organ student she immediately told me that an organ job was open and would I like to try out for it?
And OK, yes, a lady had called for an organ student to come to her home and play her pipe organ during tea that she was hosting. It was intimidating that in view of the address this would undoubtedly be in one of the mansions out on East Avenue where the old elite of Rochester held forth. Well, I had brought with me my “tea time” music, thanks to those $3 gigs I’d played for at the University of Denver—I’d “been there, done that.” This gig was indeed in a mansion on East Avenue and was on an Aeolian pipe organ, the instrument of choice in those days for those who could afford such a pipe organ in their home. And needless to say, the pay was considerably more than $3. And, when I had my audition at Emanuel Lutheran Church, I got that job. So I had money to pay for my room and board—board by eating on $1 a day at a cafeteria across the street from the school.
Did Guardian Angel arrange it that I got to Eastman several days before the other students arrived, so I had no competition for these jobs and the opportunities to make some money?
By this time things had improved for my parents. Sterling was having a modest oil boom, and new houses were being built. Three blocks of our farm abutted on a subdivision, and it became possible to sell some of our property for city lots. I felt able to ask for tuition money, since I’d cost my parents nothing for my undergraduate education.

Life at Eastman
I found life at Eastman a far cry from my Denver experience. As an undergraduate in Denver, I had played an organ concerto with the Denver Junior Symphony, the Grieg piano concerto with the University Orchestra, and the organ part to the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony with the Denver Civic Symphony. Big deals!!! Big toad in what I now found out had been a fairly little puddle. My uncle, who was somewhat of a VIP in some circles in the city, reported stiffly one evening at dinner that when he had that day been introduced to someone, he was asked, “By any chance are you related to Oswald Ragatz that young organist?” May I say, that that “made my day.” Country nephew, indeed!
But things now were different in Rochester. I was just a new student in one of the top professional music schools in the country. And believe me, there is no place more competitive than a big music school. Nearly all of my fellow graduate students had undergraduate degrees in music, many from Eastman itself. During my time at Eastman I learned discipline, humility, and respect for what the music profession really was like.
My Guardian Angel was no doubt cheering a bit seeing her/his protégé getting his comeuppance. But I was not being crossed off the list that year. Oh no! So I must continue this saga.
About the Lutheran church: it had an organ the likes of which I had not encountered. At that point, the organ world in the United States was just beginning to become aware of a renaissance in organ tonal design that had begun in the middle of the 20th century. The new instruments that were being built by many European builders and by a few avant garde builders in the United States were referred to as Baroque organs because the builders were attempting to design their organs on the tonal principles of the great old European organs of the 17th and 18th centuries. The organ at my church was a newly built instrument by the Walter Holtkamp Company, one of the first of these avant garde American builders. After a year with this organ at Emanuel Lutheran, I understood how to use it. This experience became very valuable for me, as will be noted later on.
The choir director at church was a talented young man who was the choral person in one of the big Rochester high schools, and his church choir was made up almost entirely of high-school age singers. I was getting some very good experience in choral techniques by observing how Ernie Ahern worked with the choir. I had had no training in choral work up to this point. The second year in Rochester, I actually did some private coaching with Mr. Ahern, and what I learned became the basis of my career as choirmaster through all my life.
One other facet of the Rochester experience must now be mentioned to make clear how the chain of events developed. If one link in the chain had not been there, there would have been no chain. When I obtained the list of rooming houses suitable for an Eastman student, my choice was purely arbitrary (or was Guardian Angel getting into the act again?). The first place I investigated was a big, old, three-story Victorian home, housing a dozen or so men, half of whom were students, the others single professional men. The maiden lady that ran the establishment had a nice vacant room (due, I presume, to the fact that I had gotten there before other students had arrived in the city). It was a congenial bunch of fellows, who all seemed to be on a tight budget, so we frequently ate supper en masse (I could hardly honor the meal as dinner) at the aforementioned cafeteria.

Wilson College
One of the students, a fine violinist, and I became very good friends. It turned out that John’s father was the head of the music department of Wilson College, an undergraduate woman’s college in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. When John came back from Christmas holidays, he told me that the organ teacher at Wilson College was going on sabbatical the second semester the next year, and his father, Prof. Golz, thought I might want the job as substitute for a semester. Of course I was most interested, and as a matter of fact I went down to Chambersburg with John during spring break to be interviewed. I played for Prof. Golz, and he seemed pleased and offered me the job. A real teaching job with a salary—$850 for the semester as I remember it! But that was 1940, and remember, I was eating on a dollar a day, so that seemed like a gold mine. I was just beginning to cope with the competitive stress of Eastman and the demanding teaching of Harold Gleason, my organ professor, so I was very glad to stay on at Eastman for the summer and fall semesters, which enabled me to get a second major, namely in music theory. Then in January of 1941, I arrived at Wilson College, with its faculty comprising chiefly elderly ladies. Now that was an interesting experience for a 23-year-old kid hardly dry behind the ears. It could furnish material for another different document, but that would have no relevance in this tale, except for two non-Wilson people with whom I made friends.
There was a young lawyer in Chambersburg who was very interested in music, and since there were not many opportunities for social contacts with people in their twenties, he immediately contacted me, and we became lifelong friends. He lived with his mother in Chambersburg, and they were frequently visited by his sister Selma, a music teacher in Baltimore and a graduate of N.Y.U. Selma was about my age, and we became good friends also—we dated in fact.
The semester at Wilson College was all too short, and I was having to face a very uncertain future. World War II was in full cry, and I had registered for the draft while in Rochester. So that dark cloud was hovering over my head. But I had had no word from Uncle Sam, so in the meantime I had to hunt for a job. I registered membership with a teacher’s placement agency in Chicago—Clark Brewer. And in May I went to New York to interview with a couple of agencies there. But they wouldn’t even take my registration. Colleges were retrenching because of the war and were hiring no new faculty.
That was a very low moment in my life. For the first time I was faced with having no idea what to do next. I was suddenly out in the big world. I started walking aimlessly up town on Fifth Avenue, my mind swirling. I may even have contemplated how near the Hudson River was and how long would it take one to drown oneself. But maybe I wasn’t that far down or that stupid. At any rate, by the time I’d walked from the ’40s where the agencies’ offices were and reached 59th Street and the beginning of Central Park, my befuddled mind began to remember that Selma, who of course had lived in New York City while attending N.Y.U., had at some point asked me why didn’t I look into Union Theological Seminary. That had seemed like a dumb statement. A seminary? I didn’t want to be a preacher! Far from it!

Oh, that Clarence
But now my tiny memory began to function, and by the time I got up to the Metropolitan Museum, I thought of the blonde at that picnic in the mountains years ago, and her uncle, Clarence Dickinson, who was the head of the School of Sacred Music at—yes—Union Seminary in New York City. With a quick visit to a phone booth, where wonder of wonders there was a phone directory, I determined that Union Seminary was at 120th Street and Broadway. The next 50 or so blocks were covered with considerable resolution, and crossing over west to Broadway, past the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Columbia University, I found the Gothic towers of Union Seminary and its quadrangle, which occupied two city blocks.
Hot, tired, still dispirited and thinking that this was totally mad, I entered the main entrance and located the offices of the Music School. When I made it known to the secretary that I might be interested in becoming a student there, things began to move very rapidly. I was ushered into Dr. Dickinson’s office, where I was warmly greeted by Dr. Dickinson and then was introduced to Mrs. Dickinson, who, it developed, actually seemed to manage the business end of the school. The introductions were barely over when Dr. Dickinson said he remembered my playing for him in Denver, and that I had played very well. Where had I been since then? Eastman? Teaching at Wilson College? Interesting. Well, of course they would be delighted to accept me as a student working on the two-year curriculum leading to the Master of Sacred Music degree.
I had no money? No problem! The dormitory had two-room suites for students at $10 a month, and I could work a shift in the refectory for all my meals. And all of their students were placed in churches in Manhattan and in communities around New York City—on Long Island, in Westchester County, in Connecticut or over in New Jersey. Auditions for a job would be set up for me during the next month.
I could hardly believe all this. An hour earlier I was plodding the streets of New York wondering if I should be heading for the Hudson River. And had I listened, I might have heard Guardian Angel wildly flapping wings and snarling, “Oh ye of little faith, you silly twit. Why do you think I had that blonde girl join you on that rock that afternoon in the Rocky Mountains? And all of that other stuff we went through to get you this far!” Of course I wasn’t listening, but I do hope that I had the good grace to think that too many good coincidences were beginning to occur. My parents once had told me that the German name Oswald meant “Chosen of God.” What’s in a name? Maybe I should have paused to think. But of course, pausing and thinking were two things I’d not yet learned to do.
So I was set for two more years, Uncle Sam willing. I went back to Rochester for the summer to finish my master’s thesis. I had enough money saved up from that great salary at Wilson College to pay for a room at the Y, eat at the cheap cafeteria, and pay train fare to New York City twice for auditions.
The second audition was at Hitchcock Memorial Presbyterian Church in Scarsdale, a posh suburb in Westchester County. As it turned out, this was one of the prime jobs the Union students had. I would be replacing Robert Baker, a doctoral candidate at Union, who had just been hired at First Presbyterian in Brooklyn, a real, full-time professional position. I felt the audition went well, but nothing definite was said at the conclusion of my playing and answering questions. I would have a junior choir, a choir of twelve high school girls, and a professional quartet—VERY professional. The soprano had just sung a solo recital at Town Hall and the contralto was singing at the Metropolitan Opera a couple of years later, and several years later I read a rave review of her Carmen sung in Vienna.
This would not be the first time I was faced with a task for which I was not really prepared. But I will say, without professing any modesty, that I never ducked. I learned how to conduct from the console by doing it—not that that quartet needed as much conducting as I thought I should be doing. At the end of the interview the chairwoman, an elegant middle-aged lady, said she would like to take me to dinner at the Scarsdale Country Club. That didn’t scare me: my aunt and uncle had seen to it that I knew how to behave at dinner, hold the chair for the lady, use the flatware from the outside in, etc. I seemed to pass muster with my hostess, since she informed me at the conclusion of the evening that I was hired. Eureka! Not only was the salary quite sufficient to pay for the organ lessons (which were outrageously high even for those times), tuition, and incidental living expenses, but even for a concert and opera now and then and a few heady evenings taking a date dancing to big name bands on the Astor roof.

Life in New York City
Guardian Angel now left me for a time as I devoured the life in New York. Our church jobs only required our presence at Sunday morning services, so a number of very compatible friends from Union would rush back to Manhattan by 3 o’clock, meeting at one of the big churches that had afternoon vesper services, oratorios, etc. A typical Sunday afternoon would be St. Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue at 3, where the 60-voice choir sang an oratorio every Sunday with a stunning organist on an enormous triple organ—chancel, rear gallery, and dome, playable from a single console in the chancel. Then over to St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue to hear a fine boy’s choir sing the 5 o’clock vesper Evensong. Then after a quick snack at our favorite bar, Tops, it was to St. Mary the Virgin Church on 46th Street, where the young avant garde organist, Ernest White, presided over a high-church late Evensong service. When I heard Mr. White play, I knew that I would have to study with him someday—which I did one summer after I had been at I.U. for a couple of years. These experiences taught me more than all the courses at the School of Sacred Music about what music could be in an enlightened church—with money. I HAD A BALL, needless to say.
It was the summer after the first year in New York, and I had had a very lucrative June playing for eight or more fashionable Scarsdale weddings. I was set indefinitely at the Scarsdale church and at Union, and after the M.S.M. degree I could continue working on a doctoral degree at Union, as had my friend, Robert Baker. I had dreams of eventually also moving on to some big Manhattan church. But this had to wait for a few decades for one of my students, who now is at the First Presbyterian Church in New York and is a big name there. Guardian Angel had other plans.

Hoosier holiday
Mail time was always a time of anxiety. Several of my friends had been drafted, but there was no message from the government for me. BUT, there was a letter from Clark Brewer Teachers’ Agency in Chicago telling me that there was an opening for an organ teacher at Indiana University. INDIANA? That was just a state to quickly get through when one was en route from Colorado to New York (with the exception of that adventure at Spring Mill Park in 1939). But I could get my expenses paid to Bloomington, and—always on the lookout for a deal—I figured I’d go to Indiana and then on to Colorado to visit my parents. I hadn’t been home for two years. I would go by train and stop off in Rochester to take my orals on my master’s thesis. Sneaky. Smart. I wasn’t even remotely interested in a job in Indiana.
So that is what I did, and after a night sitting up on a train from Rochester to Indianapolis, and then a bus to this village in the wilderness, I was even less inclined to take it seriously. After a night in a hot room in the Graham Hotel, I wandered out to the campus, past yellow clay around the old business school and the auditorium, both of which had just been completed. With the help of a kind lady who thought I was a new student (my ears were slow to dry), I found the new music building. First I was interviewed by Dean Sanders, a smooth, formidable, sophisticated young man, and then by the chairman of the theory department. Then I was taken up to a small practice room where the only organ on the campus existed. And guess what? The instrument was a Holtkamp almost identical to the one I’d had in Emanuel Lutheran in Rochester. And of course I knew how to handle it. (Did Guardian Angel snicker smugly?)
So I played a couple of big pieces, and because I didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about the job, I was cool, probably to the point of being arrogant. Consequently, I greatly impressed the interviewers. It was explained to me that there was one organ major who would be a senior. Her organ teacher, who was also a pianist and taught theory, had been drafted. The organ “department” had been set up two years before when one Mary Christena had come over from the main campus wanting to major in organ. An organ curriculum was hastily fabricated, the Holtkamp was promptly purchased, and now they needed a regular organ teacher to get Miss Christena through her senior recital.
I would teach any other organ students that might show up when it was learned that there was an organ teacher (there were nine of them), I would teach two sections of freshman music theory (after observing the chairman of the department teach another section of the same class each day), a music appreciation class for the general student body (there were about 70 enrolled, it turned out), and I would conduct the Choral Union, the only choral group on campus. This would result in my conducting in the auditorium a performance of Messiah, with orchestra, just before Christmas. I had never conducted an orchestra, to say nothing of an orchestra with a big chorus of 90 or so singers. But as I said earlier, I was not one to duck. I was new at academia and didn’t know that this teaching load was brutal and now would be considered illegal. It was a job, and I intended to be a success at any cost.
But I wasn’t offered the job on the spot, which was of no concern to me. I wanted to go back to New York. As a matter of fact, I called my parents and suggested that they come east instead of my going on to Colorado. They would meet me in Chambersburg, where I would go to visit Rudy and Selma Wertime. Did I tell Dean Sanders about this? NO, of course not. (Guardian Angel almost gave up on me at this point.) Three days later, my family and I were at the Wertimes in Chambersburg, when I got this irate call from Dean Sanders wanting to hire me. I don’t know how he found me. He probably contacted someone at Union who knew I had a girlfriend in Chambersburg and knew the name. I never asked. Maybe Guardian Angel slipped him a note.
So I was being offered a real job, a permanent job, albeit in the hills of Indiana. Well, I stalled a bit. My parents pushed, Guardian Angel was pushing, I am sure. I thought that surely that draft would get me any day, and a job at Indiana University would look good on my résumé some day, so I gave the dean a reluctant “yes.” The Dickinsons called me a day later suggesting that I postpone the appointment for a year, so I could finish the degree, but that was out of the question since Miss Christena would be awaiting her new teacher in September. So after a week in the city with my parents, I was off to Bloomington, Indiana, for an entirely new life, and as it turned out, a wife.
Mary Christena turned out to be a fine organist, and again I was faced with a situation I wasn’t quite ready for. But I didn’t duck, and she got a performer’s certificate with distinction for her senior recital. It was not until after Mary’s graduation that the student-teacher relationship segued into a more personal one. After a summer of dating, Mary went to New York to Union Seminary on my recommendation. I wanted her to experience the school, and especially the milieu of New York City and the great church music. However, she spent only one semester at Union, terminated by my going to New York to propose at Christmas. And that event can be subject for another paper—shorter than this one, I assure the reader. We were married June 4, 1944. (I never had trouble remembering that date. The assault on Normandy was to take place that week.)
There is one loose end that must be taken care of in closing: THE DRAFT. During my first Christmas vacation at I.U., I had three recitals scheduled in the East—for the American Guild of Organists Chapter of Baltimore, before the New Year’s midnight service at First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and in Chambersburg. Of course I had as yet not learned how to cope with the stress of this sort of behavior, and I took sick on the B. & O. train returning from Washington to Indiana. A few days later, my landlords called a doctor, and I was promptly swished off to the hospital in an ambulance with a severe case of pneumonia. (Guardian Angel was taking severe measures!)
I was very ill, and had not the sulfa drugs just come on the market, I might have died. But after three weeks, I was released, only to go back to my room to find THE letter from Uncle Sam telling me to report for induction in Indianapolis. Why had it taken them so long to find me? I had registered in Rochester, giving my address as Sterling, Colorado, but I found out later that my registration had been sent to Sterling, Pennsylvania, wherever that is. And when they finally found me, it was discovered that I had registered as a conscious objector—and that is another story—so interviews had to be made with all sorts of people in Colorado to see what sort of a jerk I was. (Was Guardian Angel back of all this? Surely not . . . ) But now I was going through induction in Indianapolis, then, pale, and suspect. The late January quota for draftees was unusually low that month, and after the examining doctors took a good look at me and they took a look at my 1-A-O classification, I was told that I probably wouldn’t do much good for the U.S. Army and to go back to I.U. “and teach them how to sing the Star-Spangled Banner.”
So that’s how I met my wife. Do I believe in a Guardian Angel? Sometimes I almost think that I do. Maybe everyone has a similar chain of events that direct them through life. They just don’t spill the whole tale in a writer’s club. I leave it up to you, with apologies for being too forthcoming.?

What a pleasure it has been to prepare this essay for publication in The Diapason to honor and celebrate the 90th birthday of Dr. Oswald G. Ragatz. This inspirational tale provides a glimpse of the organ and church music scene in New York in the early forties, as well as the documentation of the beginning of the I.U. Organ Department at that same time. When Dr. Ragatz retired in 1983, that organ department that he found in Bloomington in 1942 with the Holtkamp organ in the practice room had grown to a department with a notable historic concert organ in the I.U. Auditorium, two respectable studio organs, and eleven pipe organs in practice rooms for student use. Ragatz built the department to a level where it could take its place along with the other large university organ departments in the United States. Currently, the organ department of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University is one of the largest institutions offering degrees in organ in the United States.
With approximately 400 living IU alumni organists, the former students of Oswald Ragatz can be found all over the U.S. and in several foreign countries. Teaching and playing in both churches and universities, these Indiana University organists carry the Ragatz legacy with them in all of their endeavors. We salute you, Dr. Ragatz. Happy birthday and many happy returns.

—David K. Lamb

 

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Celebrating a milestone birthday: “Guardian Angel”

Oswald Ragatz

Oswald G. Ragatz served as professor of organ and chairman of the organ department at the School of Music at Indiana University from 1942–1983. Sadly, Mrs. Ragatz passed away after a long illness in 1998. When the Positive division was added to the organ at First Christian Church, where Mary so lovingly played for so many years, the Reuter organ was dedicated in her memory. Dr. Ragatz can be reached by contacting him at Meadowood Retirement Center in Bloomington, Indiana. David K. Lamb is currently the organist/choir director at First United Methodist Church in Columbus, Indiana. Graduating from IU in 1983, the year Ragatz retired, he completed the Doctor of Music degree at Indiana University in 2000. Dr. Lamb was recently appointed the District Convener for the State of Indiana by the American Guild of Organists.

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Introduction by David K. Lamb

For more than 40 years, Oswald Gleason Ragatz served as chairman of the Organ Department of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. On October 30, 2007, “Ozzie” celebrated his 90th birthday. Witnessing many changes through those years at Indiana University, Dr. Ragatz has also seen many changes in the organ world and in church music practices in the years since his retirement from IU in 1983.

I recently enjoyed the chance to visit with Dr. Ragatz in his home at Meadowood in Bloomington. Full of stories and anecdotes, as always, he was ready to recount his years at IU in full detail. What a joy it was listening to those reflections as Dr. Ragatz revisited the events in his early life that led him to his 40-year teaching position at Indiana University. 

“Guardian Angel” is a wonderful exposé by Dr. Ragatz, detailing the sequence of events that made up the path leading him to Indiana University in 1942. In the words of Oswald Ragatz, please prepare to travel with him on this journey to Indiana University.

 

During my 25-year employment as organist-choirmaster in Presbyterian churches, I never heard the term predestination mentioned from the pulpit. But I understand that belief in predestination is one of the tenets of the Presbyterian faith. My Unitarian and agnostic friends shake their heads in patronizing dismay, when, instead of attributing some event to predestination or to sheer luck, I refer to my “Guardian Angel.” Probably influenced by all those charming angels in Renaissance paintings and those lovely little winged cherubs in the rococo churches in Europe, I personally would rather attribute the chain of events that greatly determined my life to an angel than to luck or to predestination. Luck never did me any good in those very brief encounters with the slots in the casinos in Las Vegas, and of course no serious angel would look after anyone foolish enough to wager hard-earned cash on those automated bandits. And I’m not a Presbyterian. But let me recount those events that directed my life, and the reader or listener can decide, Guardian Angel, Lady Luck, predestination, or whatever.

I guess I must start way back in the midst of the Great Depression and the Democratic landslide of 1932 that brought Franklin Roosevelt into the presidency, and that cleaned out all of the Republican county office holders in Logan County, Colorado, including my dad. The ensuing years found the Ragatz family trying to make a meager living from a small, 40-acre farm at the edge of my hometown, Sterling, Colorado. Farm labor, dust storms, locust plagues, and fundamentalist, straight-laced parents contributed nothing to the wished-for joie de vivre of high school student Oswald Ragatz. It must have been about then that Guardian Angel was assigned to look out for this puny kid, whose interests were music and architecture, thus contributing to the general scorn of his macho classmates.

 

High school days

The angel first appeared in the guise of a high school math teacher, Miss Smith. It was she who set me on the path that would lead to my escape from the dead-end existence of life on the dreary eastern plains of Colorado. It was Miss Smith who asked me to stay after algebra class so that she could talk to me, as she had some very exciting information to impart. My grade average was one-half point above that of one Verda Guenzi, and Verda and I had the highest grade average of our class. I probably should at this point give credit to the newly hired empathetic gym teacher, who had taken me in hand and had introduced me to gymnastics. This had had a marvelous effect on me. I was no longer the class wimp with C and D grades in gym. I now got an A in gym, which got me that one-half grade point above Verda Guenzi. (Was possibly Mr. Durfee the gym instructor an assistant Guardian Angel? Whatever.)

At any rate, Miss Smith pointed out that the University of Denver gave a four-year, full-tuition scholarship to the graduating senior valedictorian in the six largest high schools in the state. If I maintained a straight A average for the remaining years in Sterling High School, I would be able to go to college at the prestigious university in Denver, a city where there could also be numerous musical opportunities. That put on hold my interest in architecture; the nearest school offering architecture was Kansas U., which of course was out of the question. And anyway, no one was employing architects during the Depression.

My parents were elated by this news, and my mother, who was your basic taskmistress, went into a full cry. For the next two and half years, I became no longer the class wimp but now the class grind, the resident ant being held in some awe by the grasshoppers, my classmates. Verda Guenzi didn’t have a chance, poor girl.

 

Off to the University of Denver

Now things were getting under way in this chain of events. My dad’s brother lived in Denver and was married to a professional musician, a singer of some note in the city. They suggested that I live with them while attending the University of Denver. Their four sons were grown and out of college. I could pay for my room by accompanying students in my aunt’s studio and eventually accompanying her on singing engagements. There would be other duties—in-house chore boy, chauffeur for Aunt Ruth on occasions, etc.

Sterling, a town of less than 8,000, had a remarkable music program in the schools; the high school band and orchestra perennially won first place in the state competitions. I had begun playing oboe when just out of the sixth grade, and in six years had become quite proficient. In 1938 a symphony orchestra was formed in Sterling to accommodate the sizable number of graduates of the school’s music program who still lived in town and who wanted an outlet for their talent. Though still in high school, I was playing oboe in this symphony that had been organized during my senior year. 

Guest conductors were brought in for the three concerts that we played. The most important of these guests was Horace Tureman, director of the Denver Symphony. I don’t remember what we played, but there must have been an important oboe part. At any rate, when I enrolled in music theory the first semester at the university, who should be the teacher but Horace Tureman! And wonder of wonders, he recognized me. After class, he asked to talk to me, saying that he remembered me from the orchestra concert he had conducted in Sterling, and would I like to fill the opening in the Denver Civic Symphony for the second chair oboe? The pay was not great, but it enabled me to pay my uncle for my board. Did my Guardian Angel arrange for all this? But I continue.

I had played piano since I was six years old, my mother being a piano teacher. And I had my first organ lessons the summer after the eighth grade, and became the organist at the Methodist church that fall. During my last year in high school, my parents managed to scrape up enough cash to enable me to drive the 140 miles up to Denver once a month for oboe lessons and organ lessons with the organist-choirmaster of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral. Now, living in Denver, I hoped to be able to continue organ lessons, although payment for same would be a problem. But not to worry, said my teacher. There was an opening for an organist at Broadway Baptist Church. He told me to try out for the job; I did and got the job. Those four years of playing for First Methodist in Sterling for little more than a Christmas remuneration had prepared me for the paying job in Denver.

So now I had enough monthly income to pay for organ lessons, textbooks, and music. I had been pretty burned out by the tension of making straight A’s during high school, so now I had decided to slack off a bit in college. However, shortly after the first semester had begun, I received a nice letter from the University Chancellor congratulating me on having won the scholarship and indicating that academic excellence would be expected of me. Furthermore, he indicated that since scholarship students were expected to give some services to the university, and in view of my experience as an organist, I would be expected to play the organ for university functions as needed—before lecture in the chapel, for example. 

This was OK by me. It gave me unlimited access to the chapel organ for practice and resulted in my being asked by the Dean of Women to furnish background music on the Hammond electric organ in the posh Renaissance room in the library where teas were the style in those days. For each of these events I was paid $3 and engendered a high profile among the female elite of the student body who were wanting to go to the teas—the girls of the Pan Hellenic Society, the Associated Women’s Students, etc.

So my fingers (on the ivories) were doing the walking—well, the earning, and my parents did not have to fork over that first dollar for my undergraduate training, just an occasional dressed chicken sent by my mother to Aunt Ruth, but that was it. I felt that I was independent, I was living in a sophisticated environment at my uncle’s, and I no longer felt inhibited by my strict parents’ restrictions—and I had a ball! I was pretty naïve and thoughtless though; things had worked out so well for me, so why worry about the future? Incidentally, I did graduate eighth from the top in my class, due to the chancellor’s veiled admonitions four years earlier. But I must continue.

 

Clarence who?

I am not quite finished with undergraduate years. The next vignette may seem inconsequential, but keep in mind, it turned out to be very significant. The setting: a picnic in the mountains. Who was there? I don’t remember, just a bunch of college students. What? I was sitting on a big rock eating a hot dog when a blonde girl I didn’t know joined me and initiated conversation. She was quite hep, and shortly had me telling her about my interest in organ playing. At that point, she became very excited and said that I must meet her uncle from New York, Clarence Dickinson, who would be in Denver in a couple of weeks. Her enthusiasm caused me to think that Uncle must be a man of some importance. And indeed the name was familiar to me: Dickinson was the author of the organ method text given to me by my cousin, my first organ teacher, that summer after my eighth grade. 

I was only mildly impressed, however, but I did mention this information to my organ teacher at my next lesson. Well, his reaction let me know that Clarence Dickinson was indeed a person of importance, being the head of the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. So, a week later, I was playing two of my biggest pieces at St. John’s Cathedral for Dr. Dickinson, my teacher having somehow made contact with him in Denver. Tall, dignified, with white hair and mustache, Dr. Dickinson was cordial, and, I thought, politely complimentary. But I was still only mildly interested; I was probably preoccupied thinking about the impending fall Pan Hellenic formal. By the way, I never encountered the blonde niece on campus again. Was she my Guardian Angel in disguise? If so, she must have been pretty bored by my lackadaisical lack of enthusiasm. But guardian angels must be patient, and fortunately Guardian Angel didn’t forsake me, as will soon become evident. She just became a bit more devious. So I continue.

 

Aunt Ruth: gateway to Eastman

I have mentioned my Aunt Ruth previously. There is no doubt that she was my mentor if indeed not my Guardian Angel. She introduced me to the facets of the professional musical world, and she and Uncle Arthur took considerable pains to civilize their shy and unhep nephew from Sterling. By my senior year, Aunt Ruth had sensed my lack of a clear picture of what I was going to do the next year after graduation. My Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences had presumably prepared me for getting a job in some small-town high school teaching history or social studies. But it was obvious that my interest and talents lay elsewhere—in music, of course. 

Aunt Ruth had a former voice student who had gone to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and had high praise for the school. It sort of became understood during my senior year that I should go to graduate school the year after graduation from Denver. So I applied to Eastman and was accepted. However, I don’t remember now that I was particularly concerned about the financial requirements this expensive school would entail. I guess that I naïvely assumed that it would work out some way. It always had, hadn’t it? Of course, if there were sounds of fluttering angel wings, I didn’t notice.

I taught some organ students during the summer and played oboe in the Sterling summer band. So I had a little money in my pocket when I started out for New York with my two friends in the model A Ford. We traveled economy class, camping out, cooking our own food, and cheating on entrance fees at places like Mount Vernon. After two weeks of travel and visiting the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, we arrived in Rochester. The semester had not yet started, but I went into the Eastman office to see what a student did about housing. There was no men’s dormitory, but I was given a sizeable list of rooming houses near the school that catered to Eastman students. The person I talked to about this looked at a register of entering students (probably to see if I were indeed a legitimate entrant), and seeing that I was to be an organ student she immediately told me that an organ job was open and would I like to try out for it? 

And OK, yes, a lady had called for an organ student to come to her home and play her pipe organ during tea that she was hosting. It was intimidating that in view of the address this would undoubtedly be in one of the mansions out on East Avenue where the old elite of Rochester held forth. Well, I had brought with me my “tea time” music, thanks to those $3 gigs I’d played for at the University of Denver—I’d “been there, done that.” This gig was indeed in a mansion on East Avenue and was on an Aeolian pipe organ, the instrument of choice in those days for those who could afford such a pipe organ in their home. And needless to say, the pay was considerably more than $3. And, when I had my audition at Emanuel Lutheran Church, I got that job. So I had money to pay for my room and board—board by eating on $1 a day at a cafeteria across the street from the school.

Did Guardian Angel arrange it that I got to Eastman several days before the other students arrived, so I had no competition for these jobs and the opportunities to make some money?

By this time things had improved for my parents. Sterling was having a modest oil boom, and new houses were being built. Three blocks of our farm abutted on a subdivision, and it became possible to sell some of our property for city lots. I felt able to ask for tuition money, since I’d cost my parents nothing for my undergraduate education.

 

Life at Eastman

I found life at Eastman a far cry from my Denver experience. As an undergraduate in Denver, I had played an organ concerto with the Denver Junior Symphony, the Grieg piano concerto with the University Orchestra, and the organ part to the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony with the Denver Civic Symphony. Big deals!!! Big toad in what I now found out had been a fairly little puddle. My uncle, who was somewhat of a VIP in some circles in the city, reported stiffly one evening at dinner that when he had that day been introduced to someone, he was asked, “By any chance are you related to Oswald Ragatz that young organist?” May I say, that that “made my day.” Country nephew, indeed!

But things now were different in Rochester. I was just a new student in one of the top professional music schools in the country. And believe me, there is no place more competitive than a big music school. Nearly all of my fellow graduate students had undergraduate degrees in music, many from Eastman itself. During my time at Eastman I learned discipline, humility, and respect for what the music profession really was like.

My Guardian Angel was no doubt cheering a bit seeing her/his protégé getting his comeuppance. But I was not being crossed off the list that year. Oh no! So I must continue this saga.

About the Lutheran church: it had an organ the likes of which I had not encountered. At that point, the organ world in the United States was just beginning to become aware of a renaissance in organ tonal design that had begun in the middle of the 20th century. The new instruments that were being built by many European builders and by a few avant garde builders in the United States were referred to as Baroque organs because the builders were attempting to design their organs on the tonal principles of the great old European organs of the 17th and 18th centuries. The organ at my church was a newly built instrument by the Walter Holtkamp Company, one of the first of these avant garde American builders. After a year with this organ at Emanuel Lutheran, I understood how to use it. This experience became very valuable for me, as will be noted later on.

The choir director at church was a talented young man who was the choral person in one of the big Rochester high schools, and his church choir was made up almost entirely of high-school age singers. I was getting some very good experience in choral techniques by observing how Ernie Ahern worked with the choir. I had had no training in choral work up to this point. The second year in Rochester, I actually did some private coaching with Mr. Ahern, and what I learned became the basis of my career as choirmaster through all my life.

One other facet of the Rochester experience must now be mentioned to make clear how the chain of events developed. If one link in the chain had not been there, there would have been no chain. When I obtained the list of rooming houses suitable for an Eastman student, my choice was purely arbitrary (or was Guardian Angel getting into the act again?). The first place I investigated was a big, old, three-story Victorian home, housing a dozen or so men, half of whom were students, the others single professional men. The maiden lady that ran the establishment had a nice vacant room (due, I presume, to the fact that I had gotten there before other students had arrived in the city). It was a congenial bunch of fellows, who all seemed to be on a tight budget, so we frequently ate supper en masse (I could hardly honor the meal as dinner) at the aforementioned cafeteria. 

 

Wilson College

One of the students, a fine violinist, and I became very good friends. It turned out that John’s father was the head of the music department of Wilson College, an undergraduate woman’s college in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. When John came back from Christmas holidays, he told me that the organ teacher at Wilson College was going on sabbatical the second semester the next year, and his father, Prof. Golz, thought I might want the job as substitute for a semester. Of course I was most interested, and as a matter of fact I went down to Chambersburg with John during spring break to be interviewed. I played for Prof. Golz, and he seemed pleased and offered me the job. A real teaching job with a salary—$850 for the semester as I remember it! But that was 1940, and remember, I was eating on a dollar a day, so that seemed like a gold mine. I was just beginning to cope with the competitive stress of Eastman and the demanding teaching of Harold Gleason, my organ professor, so I was very glad to stay on at Eastman for the summer and fall semesters, which enabled me to get a second major, namely in music theory. Then in January of 1941, I arrived at Wilson College, with its faculty comprising chiefly elderly ladies. Now that was an interesting experience for a 23-year-old kid hardly dry behind the ears. It could furnish material for another different document, but that would have no relevance in this tale, except for two non-Wilson people with whom I made friends.

There was a young lawyer in Chambersburg who was very interested in music, and since there were not many opportunities for social contacts with people in their twenties, he immediately contacted me, and we became lifelong friends. He lived with his mother in Chambersburg, and they were frequently visited by his sister Selma, a music teacher in Baltimore and a graduate of N.Y.U. Selma was about my age, and we became good friends also—we dated in fact.

The semester at Wilson College was all too short, and I was having to face a very uncertain future. World War II was in full cry, and I had registered for the draft while in Rochester. So that dark cloud was hovering over my head. But I had had no word from Uncle Sam, so in the meantime I had to hunt for a job. I registered membership with a teacher’s placement agency in Chicago—Clark Brewer. And in May I went to New York to interview with a couple of agencies there. But they wouldn’t even take my registration. Colleges were retrenching because of the war and were hiring no new faculty. 

That was a very low moment in my life. For the first time I was faced with having no idea what to do next. I was suddenly out in the big world. I started walking aimlessly up town on Fifth Avenue, my mind swirling. I may even have contemplated how near the Hudson River was and how long would it take one to drown oneself. But maybe I wasn’t that far down or that stupid. At any rate, by the time I’d walked from the ’40s where the agencies’ offices were and reached 59th Street and the beginning of Central Park, my befuddled mind began to remember that Selma, who of course had lived in New York City while attending N.Y.U., had at some point asked me why didn’t I look into Union Theological Seminary. That had seemed like a dumb statement. A seminary? I didn’t want to be a preacher! Far from it!

 

Oh, that Clarence

But now my tiny memory began to function, and by the time I got up to the Metropolitan Museum, I thought of the blonde at that picnic in the mountains years ago, and her uncle, Clarence Dickinson, who was the head of the School of Sacred Music at—yes—Union Seminary in New York City. With a quick visit to a phone booth, where wonder of wonders there was a phone directory, I determined that Union Seminary was at 120th Street and Broadway. The next 50 or so blocks were covered with considerable resolution, and crossing over west to Broadway, past the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Columbia University, I found the Gothic towers of Union Seminary and its quadrangle, which occupied two city blocks. 

Hot, tired, still dispirited and thinking that this was totally mad, I entered the main entrance and located the offices of the Music School. When I made it known to the secretary that I might be interested in becoming a student there, things began to move very rapidly. I was ushered into Dr. Dickinson’s office, where I was warmly greeted by Dr. Dickinson and then was introduced to Mrs. Dickinson, who, it developed, actually seemed to manage the business end of the school. The introductions were barely over when Dr. Dickinson said he remembered my playing for him in Denver, and that I had played very well. Where had I been since then? Eastman? Teaching at Wilson College? Interesting. Well, of course they would be delighted to accept me as a student working on the two-year curriculum leading to the Master of Sacred Music degree.

I had no money? No problem! The dormitory had two-room suites for students at $10 a month, and I could work a shift in the refectory for all my meals. And all of their students were placed in churches in Manhattan and in communities around New York City—on Long Island, in Westchester County, in Connecticut or over in New Jersey. Auditions for a job would be set up for me during the next month.

I could hardly believe all this. An hour earlier I was plodding the streets of New York wondering if I should be heading for the Hudson River. And had I listened, I might have heard Guardian Angel wildly flapping wings and snarling, “Oh ye of little faith, you silly twit. Why do you think I had that blonde girl join you on that rock that afternoon in the Rocky Mountains? And all of that other stuff we went through to get you this far!” Of course I wasn’t listening, but I do hope that I had the good grace to think that too many good coincidences were beginning to occur. My parents once had told me that the German name Oswald meant “Chosen of God.” What’s in a name? Maybe I should have paused to think. But of course, pausing and thinking were two things I’d not yet learned to do.

So I was set for two more years, Uncle Sam willing. I went back to Rochester for the summer to finish my master’s thesis. I had enough money saved up from that great salary at Wilson College to pay for a room at the Y, eat at the cheap cafeteria, and pay train fare to New York City twice for auditions.

The second audition was at Hitchcock Memorial Presbyterian Church in Scarsdale, a posh suburb in Westchester County. As it turned out, this was one of the prime jobs the Union students had. I would be replacing Robert Baker, a doctoral candidate at Union, who had just been hired at First Presbyterian in Brooklyn, a real, full-time professional position. I felt the audition went well, but nothing definite was said at the conclusion of my playing and answering questions. I would have a junior choir, a choir of twelve high school girls, and a professional quartet—VERY professional. The soprano had just sung a solo recital at Town Hall and the contralto was singing at the Metropolitan Opera a couple of years later, and several years later I read a rave review of her Carmen sung in Vienna. 

This would not be the first time I was faced with a task for which I was not really prepared. But I will say, without professing any modesty, that I never ducked. I learned how to conduct from the console by doing it—not that that quartet needed as much conducting as I thought I should be doing. At the end of the interview the chairwoman, an elegant middle-aged lady, said she would like to take me to dinner at the Scarsdale Country Club. That didn’t scare me: my aunt and uncle had seen to it that I knew how to behave at dinner, hold the chair for the lady, use the flatware from the outside in, etc. I seemed to pass muster with my hostess, since she informed me at the conclusion of the evening that I was hired. Eureka! Not only was the salary quite sufficient to pay for the organ lessons (which were outrageously high even for those times), tuition, and incidental living expenses, but even for a concert and opera now and then and a few heady evenings taking a date dancing to big name bands on the Astor roof.

 

Life in New York City

Guardian Angel now left me for a time as I devoured the life in New York. Our church jobs only required our presence at Sunday morning services, so a number of very compatible friends from Union would rush back to Manhattan by 3 o’clock, meeting at one of the big churches that had afternoon vesper services, oratorios, etc. A typical Sunday afternoon would be St. Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue at 3, where the 60-voice choir sang an oratorio every Sunday with a stunning organist on an enormous triple organ—chancel, rear gallery, and dome, playable from a single console in the chancel. Then over to St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue to hear a fine boy’s choir sing the 5 o’clock vesper Evensong. Then after a quick snack at our favorite bar, Tops, it was to St. Mary the Virgin Church on 46th Street, where the young avant garde organist, Ernest White, presided over a high-church late Evensong service. When I heard Mr. White play, I knew that I would have to study with him someday—which I did one summer after I had been at I.U. for a couple of years. These experiences taught me more than all the courses at the School of Sacred Music about what music could be in an enlightened church—with money. I HAD A BALL, needless to say.

It was the summer after the first year in New York, and I had had a very lucrative June playing for eight or more fashionable Scarsdale weddings. I was set indefinitely at the Scarsdale church and at Union, and after the M.S.M. degree I could continue working on a doctoral degree at Union, as had my friend, Robert Baker. I had dreams of eventually also moving on to some big Manhattan church. But this had to wait for a few decades for one of my students, who now is at the First Presbyterian Church in New York and is a big name there. Guardian Angel had other plans.

 

Hoosier holiday

Mail time was always a time of anxiety. Several of my friends had been drafted, but there was no message from the government for me. BUT, there was a letter from Clark Brewer Teachers’ Agency in Chicago telling me that there was an opening for an organ teacher at Indiana University. INDIANA? That was just a state to quickly get through when one was en route from Colorado to New York (with the exception of that adventure at Spring Mill Park in 1939). But I could get my expenses paid to Bloomington, and—always on the lookout for a deal—I figured I’d go to Indiana and then on to Colorado to visit my parents. I hadn’t been home for two years. I would go by train and stop off in Rochester to take my orals on my master’s thesis. Sneaky. Smart. I wasn’t even remotely interested in a job in Indiana.

So that is what I did, and after a night sitting up on a train from Rochester to Indianapolis, and then a bus to this village in the wilderness, I was even less inclined to take it seriously. After a night in a hot room in the Graham Hotel, I wandered out to the campus, past yellow clay around the old business school and the auditorium, both of which had just been completed. With the help of a kind lady who thought I was a new student (my ears were slow to dry), I found the new music building. First I was interviewed by Dean Sanders, a smooth, formidable, sophisticated young man, and then by the chairman of the theory department. Then I was taken up to a small practice room where the only organ on the campus existed. And guess what? The instrument was a Holtkamp almost identical to the one I’d had in Emanuel Lutheran in Rochester. And of course I knew how to handle it. (Did Guardian Angel snicker smugly?) 

So I played a couple of big pieces, and because I didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about the job, I was cool, probably to the point of being arrogant. Consequently, I greatly impressed the interviewers. It was explained to me that there was one organ major who would be a senior. Her organ teacher, who was also a pianist and taught theory, had been drafted. The organ “department” had been set up two years before when one Mary Christena had come over from the main campus wanting to major in organ. An organ curriculum was hastily fabricated, the Holtkamp was promptly purchased, and now they needed a regular organ teacher to get Miss Christena through her senior recital. 

I would teach any other organ students that might show up when it was learned that there was an organ teacher (there were nine of them), I would teach two sections of freshman music theory (after observing the chairman of the department teach another section of the same class each day), a music appreciation class for the general student body (there were about 70 enrolled, it turned out), and I would conduct the Choral Union, the only choral group on campus. This would result in my conducting in the auditorium a performance of Messiah, with orchestra, just before Christmas. I had never conducted an orchestra, to say nothing of an orchestra with a big chorus of 90 or so singers. But as I said earlier, I was not one to duck. I was new at academia and didn’t know that this teaching load was brutal and now would be considered illegal. It was a job, and I intended to be a success at any cost.

But I wasn’t offered the job on the spot, which was of no concern to me. I wanted to go back to New York. As a matter of fact, I called my parents and suggested that they come east instead of my going on to Colorado. They would meet me in Chambersburg, where I would go to visit Rudy and Selma Wertime. Did I tell Dean Sanders about this? NO, of course not. (Guardian Angel almost gave up on me at this point.) Three days later, my family and I were at the Wertimes in Chambersburg, when I got this irate call from Dean Sanders wanting to hire me. I don’t know how he found me. He probably contacted someone at Union who knew I had a girlfriend in Chambersburg and knew the name. I never asked. Maybe Guardian Angel slipped him a note.

So I was being offered a real job, a permanent job, albeit in the hills of Indiana. Well, I stalled a bit. My parents pushed, Guardian Angel was pushing, I am sure. I thought that surely that draft would get me any day, and a job at Indiana University would look good on my résumé some day, so I gave the dean a reluctant “yes.” The Dickinsons called me a day later suggesting that I postpone the appointment for a year, so I could finish the degree, but that was out of the question since Miss Christena would be awaiting her new teacher in September. So after a week in the city with my parents, I was off to Bloomington, Indiana, for an entirely new life, and as it turned out, a wife.

Mary Christena turned out to be a fine organist, and again I was faced with a situation I wasn’t quite ready for. But I didn’t duck, and she got a performer’s certificate with distinction for her senior recital. It was not until after Mary’s graduation that the student-teacher relationship segued into a more personal one. After a summer of dating, Mary went to New York to Union Seminary on my recommendation. I wanted her to experience the school, and especially the milieu of New York City and the great church music. However, she spent only one semester at Union, terminated by my going to New York to propose at Christmas. And that event can be subject for another paper—shorter than this one, I assure the reader. We were married June 4, 1944. (I never had trouble remembering that date. The assault on Normandy was to take place that week.)

There is one loose end that must be taken care of in closing: THE DRAFT. During my first Christmas vacation at I.U., I had three recitals scheduled in the East—for the American Guild of Organists Chapter of Baltimore, before the New Year’s midnight service at First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and in Chambersburg. Of course I had as yet not learned how to cope with the stress of this sort of behavior, and I took sick on the B. & O. train returning from Washington to Indiana. A few days later, my landlords called a doctor, and I was promptly swished off to the hospital in an ambulance with a severe case of pneumonia. (Guardian Angel was taking severe measures!) 

I was very ill, and had not the sulfa drugs just come on the market, I might have died. But after three weeks, I was released, only to go back to my room to find THE letter from Uncle Sam telling me to report for induction in Indianapolis. Why had it taken them so long to find me? I had registered in Rochester, giving my address as Sterling, Colorado, but I found out later that my registration had been sent to Sterling, Pennsylvania, wherever that is.  And when they finally found me, it was discovered that I had registered as a conscious objector—and that is another story—so interviews had to be made with all sorts of people in Colorado to see what sort of a jerk I was. (Was Guardian Angel back of all this? Surely not . . . ) But now I was going through induction in Indianapolis, then, pale, and suspect. The late January quota for draftees was unusually low that month, and after the examining doctors took a good look at me and they took a look at my 1-A-O classification, I was told that I probably wouldn’t do much good for the U.S. Army and to go back to I.U. “and teach them how to sing the Star-Spangled Banner.”  

So that’s how I met my wife. Do I believe in a Guardian Angel? Sometimes I almost think that I do. Maybe everyone has a similar chain of events that direct them through life. They just don’t spill the whole tale in a writer’s club. I leave it up to you, with apologies for being too forthcoming. n

 

What a pleasure it has been to prepare this essay for publication in The Diapason to honor and celebrate the 90th birthday of Dr. Oswald G. Ragatz. This inspirational tale provides a glimpse of the organ and church music scene in New York in the early forties, as well as the documentation of the beginning of the I.U. Organ Department at that same time. When Dr. Ragatz retired in 1983, that organ department that he found in Bloomington in 1942 with the Holtkamp organ in the practice room had grown to a department with a notable historic concert organ in the I.U. Auditorium, two respectable studio organs, and eleven pipe organs in practice rooms for student use. Ragatz built the department to a level where it could take its place along with the other large university organ departments in the United States. Currently, the organ department of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University is one of the largest institutions offering degrees in organ in the United States.  

With approximately 400 living IU alumni organists, the former students of Oswald Ragatz can be found all over the U.S. and in several foreign countries. Teaching and playing in both churches and universities, these Indiana University organists carry the Ragatz legacy with them in all of their endeavors. We salute you, Dr. Ragatz. Happy birthday and many happy returns.

—David K. Lamb

 

Those Green Pastures

Oswald G. Ragatz

Oswald G. Ragatz served as Professor of Organ and Chairman of the organ department at the School of Music at Indiana University from 1942–1983. Sadly, Mrs. Ragatz passed away in 1998 after a long illness. In recent years, Dr. Ragatz has written and published two mystery novels, Reunion With Murder and Murder Twice Two, and his organ method book, Organ Technique—a Basic Course of Study, is in its fourth edition. His article, “Celebrating a milestone birthday: ‘Guardian Angel,’” appeared in the April 2008 issue of The Diapason. David K. Lamb is currently the Director of Music and Organist at First United Methodist Church in Columbus, Indiana. Graduating from IU in 1983, the year Ragatz retired, he completed the Doctor of Music degree in organ at Indiana University in 2000. Currently the AGO District Convener for the state of Indiana, Dr. Lamb is the founder and past president of the Indiana Organists United.

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Introduction
For more than forty years, Oswald Gleason Ragatz served as chairman of the organ department of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. Witnessing many changes through those years at Indiana University, Dr. Ragatz has also seen many changes in the world of concert organists in the years since his retirement from IU in 1983.
When Dr. Ragatz retired in 1983, the organ department at Indiana University had a notable historic concert organ in the IU Auditorium, two respectable studio organs, and eleven pipe organs in practice rooms for student use. Ragatz built the department to a level where it could take its place along with the other large university organ departments in the United States. Currently, the organ department of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University is one of the largest institutions offering degrees in organ in the United States.
With approximately 400 living IU alumni organists, former students of Oswald Ragatz can be found all over the United States and in several foreign countries, teaching and playing in churches and universities. Established by the Indiana University Alumni Association, the Indiana Organists United is an alumni club for graduates of the IU Organ Department. The IOU has established the Oswald G. Ragatz Distinguished Alumni Award that has been presented at the biennial reunion of the Indiana Organists United. Organ alumni who have received the OGRDAA honor are William Entriken and Herndon Spillman in 2006, and Peter Richard Conte and Jesse Eschbach in 2008.
In October 2008, at the age of 91, “Ozzie” made the move from Bloomington, Indiana to live near family members in the Minneapolis area. Before the move, I enjoyed the chance to visit with Dr. Ragatz in his home in Bloomington. Full of stories and anecdotes, as always, he recounted concert escapades throughout his forty years of concertizing across the United States. What a joy it was to listen as Dr. Ragatz relived these performances. The humorous tales of “Those Green Pastures” provide a candid review of his life in the “not-so-fast” lane as a concert organist from the 1940s to the 1980s.
—David K. Lamb

Glamour
Just look at the typical shelves in your drugstore or grocery and take note of the proliferation of magazines dealing with the lives of our contemporary stars—Hollywood, TV, the Broadway stage, professional sports, or almost any wanna-be who reports some event in his or her recent life, preferably titillating. On the way past the checkout counter, you may surreptiously pause to read the latest scandalous gossip in the tabloids. Let’s face it, we are all to some degree or another voyeurs. So what is this all about? Well, it is our fascination with glamour, using the word in the broad sense of something being unusual, enticing, or provocative. Often the subjects in these articles are in some way or another in The Arts, and as such are clad in an aura of glamour. But just how real is this glamour?
I have spent a lifetime associated with and competing with world-renowned performers in the musical world, all the while hoping to convince “them,” and myself, that an organist can indeed legitimately flourish in the area of the arts. But how did we get this way? First, one has to be born with an ego that can only be satisfied by communicating with people, from a stage, with brush and canvas, with the pen (well, word processor), or with a musical instrument. (Ah yes, or with a voice! Now there’s the quintessential egoistic medium for expression!) Yes! Born with that ego, the desire for glamour.
Let me tell you about my need to create glamour at an early age. (Remember, I am using the word glamour in the broad sense.) At age five, near death with a very serious illness, I made myself totter out of bed and into the living room to play my little Christmas piece on the piano for relatives who had brought Christmas gifts. Three years later I went to some lengths to convince my third grade teacher that I could indeed play something on the piano for a grade-school assembly. After a few years had passed, I had become somewhat aware of what went on out there in the world of the performing arts, and I would imagine that I was already there. After practicing a piece on the piano, I’d slide off the bench and bow graciously to the imaginary audience as they acknowledged my efforts with thunderous applause. By the time I’d finished high school and was off to college, a few of these fantasies had indeed materialized into some reality, though hardly to thunderous applause. I was rapidly convincing myself that indeed I was becoming an important part of the world of the arts, musical arts. These green pastures on the other side of the fence, in spite of demanding and critical teachers, were looking greener and greener. And so it came to pass that I actually had a job teaching in a university and playing recitals (I didn’t call them concerts yet, a matter of semantics) and was making a living doing what I had dreamed of doing ever since at age three when I banged on that toy piano in the play room.
But the imagined glamour now often seemed illusive. There were a number of peripheral courses I had to teach, not a few untalented and disinterested students to coach, students who didn’t have that necessary over-developed ego that had to perform. And the instruments on which I was asked to play (for pay) were often appalling monstrosities of unbelievable inadequacy. But there was that applause after one had survived the torture of some miserable organ in Saint Something’s in South Somewhere, Kansas. For a moment, as I had done when as a teenager I slid off the piano bench in our living room, I could slide off the organ bench and experience that ego satisfaction and could imagine that here indeed there was glamour.

The downside of glamour
It took experience and time to achieve some objectivity in all this. The adoring wife of one of my teachers once remarked that they never took vacation trips because sooner or later they knew they would be invited (paid) to play a concert at such and such a place. I assumed that that was what life would be in that future real world. It was shortly after my marriage that I took my wife with me to a recital somewhere. After she had spent two days in a boring hotel while I practiced on the unfamiliar instrument, we were at the recital, decked out, she in formal gown, and I, of course, in full dress tails. I played, then came the obligatory receiving line, and I heard an effusive lady greeting my wife, “It must be wonderful to be married to a man like that!” I would have been filled with inflated ego had I not looked at my wife’s face at that moment, which exhibited boredom and actual distaste. Mary was herself a fine organist, and she well knew the work that had enabled that “wonderful man” to play that recital, and that he had forgotten to put out the trash before we left home two nights before, and that she could have played the program just as well if indeed not better. So much for adoring adulation! And it was shortly after that that I was gently informed by said wife that unless it was to some really neat place, where there was scenery, or friends, or shopping to take up the tedium during her husband’s eight to twelve hours of final preparation practice, I could expect to make the trip alone. I was surprised but not offended or hurt. I fully understood the reasoning. Many of the recitals in those days were not in the glamour spots of the country, and anyway, I could now give my full attention to the matter at hand, i.e., preparing for a creditable performance, if my wife were not along.
With wry humor I often think of an episode that occurred early during our years in Bloomington. The world-famous organist from Paris, Marcel Dupré, was to play a concert on the organ in the IU auditorium. The organ was in a miserable state of disrepair. Dupré, accompanied by devoted wife, arrived by train from Chicago, exhausted from a three-month tour in the U.S. Mary and I took our guests to the auditorium to see the organ. After fifteen or more minutes on the organ bench, Dupré said in French to his wife, “I will not play. We go back to Chicago!” To which Madame, assuming that we yokels in the heartland of America wouldn’t understand French, replied firmly, “PAPA, remember the check!” So much for the glamour of the grand tour, even for the great and famous.
This doesn’t mean that all concertizing is best to be forgotten. Au contraire, although I have spent many a dark night in a hotel room hashing over my stupidity for having made such and such a mistake during a performance. André Watts, one of the foremost American pianists, a couple of years ago had a complete memory slip during a performance of a Brahms concerto with the IU Philharmonic. The orchestra had to stop, and Mr. Watts went to the conductor’s podium to look at the score before the concert could resume. He was so humiliated that he didn’t even show up at the party/reception given for him afterwards. Now let’s hear it for glamour, and for ego satisfaction! I once heard the late great tenor of the Metropolitan Opera, Lawrence Tibbett, during a concert in Denver Civic Auditorium, crack badly on a high note. After finishing the aria, he instructed the accompanist to play it again, he got to the same high note, and he cracked again. As I said, let’s hear it for glamour. I’ll bet he had a few shots of good French wine back at the hotel that night.

Oswald Ragatz, organ technician
I doubt that, other than vocalists, any other performers in the musical world have to put up with as many variables and hazards as does a concertizing organist. In the first place, there are tremendous differences in the instruments one is expected to perform on. Organs vary from modest two-manual instruments to huge instruments of four or five manuals. There is no standardization of console arrangements, how the stops are arranged, what mechanical aids are available, configuration of console vis-à-vis the bench, flat or concave pedalboard, even the range of the keyboards—61 keys on most American instruments and 32 pedals to only 56 keys and 30 pedals on many European organs. The voicing of the stops varies greatly from one builder to another. Even more important is the basic tonal concept used by the builder—early 20th-century Romantic, French or German neo-Baroque, American “eclectic,” and whether electric or mechanical action. Is the organ in good repair and tuning, or will the performer have to risk life and limb to climb around in the pipe chambers to spot tune, fix a cipher, or what not? Glamour? Survival is a more realistic term. A few examples of some of this will follow.
Early in my days of playing for a fee (a very low fee), the embryonic management service of the School of Music booked me to play a program for an exclusive club group of some sort in a town in northern Indiana. I wasn’t playing music of much consequence, but I did have to prepare it on the organ to be used, a miserable, antiquated disaster. I kept having major mechanical problems with the key action, and eventually I obtained a screwdriver from the custodian and indeed thought I had fixed the problem. Came the evening, the seventy-five or more guests in full dress swished up from their banquet in the basement. I started to play; oops, my “fix” of the afternoon hadn’t held. I slipped off the bench, plaintively asking if someone could find me a screwdriver. Miraculously a screwdriver was located, while the audience sat in embarrassed silence. (I should have made small talk or told jokes or something, but I didn’t have that much aplomb at that point in my life.) Having figured out the problem in the afternoon, I was able to quickly open the console case, poke around inside at whatever it was that needed to be poked, played a chord or two just to see if indeed I had fixed the problem (which I had). At that point the bejeweled audience rose from their stunned silence, and I received a standing ovation. Well, it wasn’t just as I had dreamed it would be in my teenage musings, but we take what we can get, and I finished the program in glory.
It was a few years later and the scene was a big, rather new Presbyterian church in South Bend and a good three-manual organ. But the gremlins were at work. Halfway through the program, the organ suddenly ceased to function, no sound, no mechanics, nothing. The lights were still on in the church, and I could hear the blower motor growling away somewhere in the basement, so it was not an outside power failure. My instinct told me it could be only one thing—the generator that provides low-voltage current for the mechanical portion of the instrument must not be functioning. This promised to be more than a simple screwdriver fix. But I was cool. “We’ll have to take a brief intermission while I check out the generator, and if I can’t fix it, we will reconvene in the chapel down the corridor where there is smaller chapel organ.” A hasty trip to the blower room in the basement revealed that the belt from the blower motor to the low-voltage generator had indeed broken, and no amount of tinkering on my part would repair it. So it’s back up to the chapel, the audience (audiences at organ recitals are seldom very large!) and soloist settle themselves, and I play my last piece, a big French toccata as I remember, on a seven-rank, two-manual organ. I hoped my listeners were impressed; I was just bored by the episode.
Over the years there were other mechanical problems—some small, some very vexing. I was playing one of the featured recitals for a regional convention of the American Guild of Organists in Knoxville, Tennessee, on a fairly large instrument (but not a new organ by any means). The combination action was completely inoperable. Although it was a formidable program, being played for an important convention, I had to make all stop changes manually, grabbing stop knobs right and left as best I could, or just using the crescendo pedal.
Playing the dedicatory recital on a new organ in a church up the river above Milwaukee, the combination action on one or two of the manuals ceased to work a couple of hours before recital time. I knew the workings of this particular make of organ, and I was still tinkering with the innards of the console when the audience began to arrive. Ciphers are endemic. This is very likely to happen with a new instrument, since there are bits of sawdust still in the reservoirs. Suddenly in the middle of some piece one is playing, a pipe will start to sound and can’t be shut off from the console. Depending on the type of action, this may be taken care of by a torturous trip inside the organ proper—locating the sounding pipe, one removes the mechanism that operates the pallet, blows out the offending moth, and returns to continue the program. Or maybe one just pulls the pipe out of the pipe rack, and that pitch on that stop is dead. Now that is not fun, especially when it is in the middle of the performance.

. . . Or not
So far I’ve recalled situations when I was able to control the problems one way or another. But how about that church in Greenwood, South Carolina? During my practice that afternoon before the recital, a trumpet pipe went way out of tune. Normally one out-of-tune pipe is no big deal. This was a big deal, however, because the program was to open with Trumpet Voluntary by Henry Purcell, and that particular pipe was sounded often in the course of the work. I could tune it in a matter of minutes if I could get into the organ chamber. But the door was locked, and the custodian wouldn’t open it for me. After loud protestations, I convinced him that he should call the Chairman of the Board of the church to get permission to let me into the chamber. But do you know what? The chairman declared that they didn’t let anyone into the organ chamber but the service representative, and of course he was in Columbia. I’d been hired to come from Indiana to play this program, but I couldn’t be trusted to make a simple tuning adjustment to their precious organ! I was furious, but anyway I played the Trumpet Tune, squawking pipe and all.

The struggle for practice time
Then there is the matter of practice time. As I mentioned earlier, the player must have at least eight hours with the instrument if possible before a performance. I was to play in the auditorium at the University of Minnesota. For some reason that I have forgotten, it was not possible to get to the organ the night before I was to play. I think my train was delayed by one of those Minnesota blizzards. (Remember trains?) But I was to have all day in the hall before I was to play in the evening. Ah, but when I arrived in the morning, lo and behold the Minneapolis Symphony was rehearsing on the stage, and when the orchestra finally cleared out about noon, the stage crew roared in to remove chairs, etc., setting the stage up for the evening concert. I went into a formidable program that night with about two hours practice on a big organ. Needless to say, I did not play well, and I did not get a good review in the paper the next morning. People arranging organ recitals just don’t get it!

And the vagaries of weather . . .
But organ mechanics and bad tuning were not the only enemies in one’s career. There is the weather. I was doing my first nationally noted concert at the December meeting of the Deans and Regents of the American Guild of Organists, held that year in New York City. Mary was going to go with me, since it was in New York, so we unwisely drove. We had barely left Bloomington when a blizzard set in. It followed us all the way to New York, laying 29 inches on the city by the time we got there. We were staying at the Biltmore and managed to find a garage for the car in the vicinity. But the city was shut down—no cabs, no cars, nothing. I supposed the subways were running, but they wouldn’t take me to where I had to go, namely upper Fifth Avenue to Temple Emanu-el, probably the most important synagogue in the city. I trudged on foot up Park Avenue and over to Fifth Avenue for two or three days to practice on the splendid, very large organ. After all that, there was a sparse attendance at the conclave. Usually the Guild officers come from all over the country to these biennial meetings, but not that year to a city shut down by the worst snowstorm in years. But I did get a number of good dates for the next season because of the exposure.
In all fairness I should point out that the city with its myriad Christmas lights sparkling in the snow was spectacular, but that wasn’t quite the point of this safari. A few years later I was again invited to perform for the same big meeting, this time in Chicago. And I would play in Rockefeller Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago. But would you believe that 23 inches of snow awaited us in Chicago this time, with similar results on the attendance!? Both times I played very well, but big deal! There was no cheering throng to be bowled over by my prowess. (But I did get a splendid review in the national journals.)

And sartorial difficulties
Matters of clothing can interfere with one’s aplomb. In the middle of playing the feature piece of a dedication concert of a big new organ in Dallas, the collar button of my dress shirt popped loose. And there was the time in Bloomington, when I had just settled myself on the bench after what I hoped had been a gracious entrance on stage and was checking stops, pedalboard etc., when I saw that my trousers were unzipped. This necessitated my slithering back off stage so that I could adjust my clothing—and my aplomb.
And speaking of aplomb, there was that time in Seoul, Korea. I was playing the Copland concerto with the Korean National Philharmonic. Just before I was to go out on the stage, someone handed me a thick business-sized envelope. With a quick glance I determined that it was filled with American currency. Normally one is discreetly given a check either before or after a concert, or the check is mailed to a manager. But not in Korea! I’m in full dress, of course, and the breast pocket of the coat is small and at an angle. Should I leave several thousand dollars in cash on a chair back stage? Well, no. Should I carry the envelope with me as I make the grand entrance and then lay it ostentatiously on top of the console? Well, no. So the envelope is jammed into the small breast pocket, I walk very stiffly on stage, and take my bow with hand firmly pressed to my chest (over the bulging pocket). This operation, of course, had to be repeated at the post-performance bow, which because I was in Korea I thought should be particularly low. I hoped that the audience figured that my hand over my heart was expressing obeisance to Korea, or to Copland, or to St. Cecilia. Why I was paid in soiled American currency I will never know. Maybe it was scrounged from the American military on the DMZ. I spent the remaining time in Korea with the money pinned inside my suit breast pocket, scared to death that I’d be robbed at the next corner.
By now I was no longer the “brilliant, young performer”—I’m quoting from a publicity brochure put out by my manager. I was now having to settle for being a “well-known university professor,” with a quote from the IU Press cover on my method book. One gets one’s jollies wherever one can.

. . . among others
But the biggest hazard of all is human error, especially when compounded by unavoidable circumstances. Consider Drury College in Springfield, Missouri. The professor of organ at Drury was short, so the organ bench was cut low. I have long legs and need a high bench. The bench was not adjustable, but no problem—I thought. I carry four inch-thick, foot-long slabs of wood that could be put under the bench supports to raise it higher. Over the years I’ve done this sort of thing dozens of times in similar situations. But this time I must have not been careful. In the middle of my biggest number, having built up to a grand climax, I allowed myself some theatrical histrionics, throwing my shoulders back vigorously. But too vigorously as it turned out! The bench slipped back just enough to cause the two boards to slip sideways. The bench tipped backwards precariously. I am still holding on to the big dramatic chord all the while trying to figure out how in the world I could reach down and slip the boards back in place while I’m still sitting on the bench, which of course was impossible. Nothing to do but get off the bench without falling flat, readjust the boards, slide back on the bench and go on, big dramatic moment of music shot to hell.
In spite of this faux pas, I was invited to play again at Drury several years later, and Drury got its revenge. The main line of the Missouri Central railroad crosses through the Drury campus, going quite near the auditorium where I was playing. I had just begun to play the first of a group of several quiet Bach chorale preludes when a blatant diesel horn announced the approach of a train, a freight train it was, and it must have had a hundred cars. The organ was completely drowned out by the clatter of freight cars. There was nothing to do but stop and wait—and wait—and wait—until the train had passed.
I must add that I got one more chance in Springfield. The last concert I played after I had retired was in a fine large church on an excellent big organ. I played the way an old pro should play after over forty years in the racket—excuse me!, in the profession. A big round of applause, much adulation at the reception afterwards, etc. Ah, glamour! What a way to conclude the concert career! But not always. Consider the following tales.

Life as a star
The University of Pittsburgh has a beautiful Gothic chapel on campus, given by the Heinz family. An impressive organ, given by an elderly Mrs. Heinz, was being installed in the chapel. The instrument consisted of two organs, a large three-manual instrument in the chancel and a two-manual Baroque organ in the balcony, which could be played separately by an organist at its own console, or from the big chancel organ—a complicated wiring maneuver. My wife Mary and I had been engaged to pay the auspicious dedication recital.
We had resurrected some music by an eighteenth-century Spanish composer actually composed for two organs. (Spanish cathedrals often had dual organs, one on each side of the chancel.) Mary and I went to Pittsburgh several days before we were to play, which was fortunate because the Möller organ company was still working to get the complicated wiring worked out. Much of our planned practice time was taken up with technicians’ efforts to stop the music being played on the balcony organ from also sounding on the chancel organ.
The night finally came, the chapel was packed with the musical and industrial elite of the city. I was ready to begin the concert when an usher came rushing up to the console to say that we had to wait because Mrs. Heinz hadn’t yet arrived. So we waited, and waited, and after a half hour while the audience rustled impatiently, a great flurry was heard and the donor, Mrs. Heinz, swept in. So I finally played my opening group, Mary played her group of Baroque pieces, on the balcony organ, and we got through the antiphonal Spanish numbers, although the wiring was still not right. I had to remember not to use the top manual of my console because it would also play the balcony organ. I finished the program with a couple of big French numbers, with, I thought, a burst of glory.
The audience stood in obeisance as Mrs. Heinz was ushered out, followed by the throng of admiring citizens. Mary and I changed our shoes, the chapel emptied, we awaited someone to come greet us and take us to the reception that was to be at the home of the University President. But no one came, and the chapel was empty, and lights were being dimmed. Fortunately, the band director, whose office was somewhere in the bowels of the building, came through and rescued us. He drove us to the President’s mansion.
There was much hubbub from inside, and we were admitted by a liveried servant who directed us to the cloakroom. We wandered into the drawing room, no one greeted us, a lot of people were in formal dress so our clothing didn’t make us conspicuous. At the far end of the room, Mrs. Heinz was grandly holding court as she received congratulations on her great gift to the university. Finally one of the men who had arranged for Mary and me to come saw us and wandered over, indicating that he thought one of the others had met us after the concert. Well, Mrs. Heinz stole that show. After a glass of punch, we indicated to one of our “hosts” that we were tired and wanted to go back to our hotel. I was furious. I don’t really know what Mary felt. She hadn’t wanted to do the concert in the first place. I had cajoled. So as far as the Ragatzes were concerned, glamour did not reign in Pittsburgh that night!
But I can’t stop before relating one more horrendous event. This is the most unbelievable event of my whole forty-five year career as a concert organist. And this time things turned out very well indeed, but oh my, a lot transpired en route to the forum—read on!
The American Guild of Organists has a biennial convention in some major city in June. Being invited to be a recitalist at one of these events is the highest honor an organist can receive. Between 1,500 and 2,000 members of the profession from the United States and Canada and even from Europe attend the four-day events. It was 1956, and the convention was in New York City when I got the bid. I was to play at St. James’ on Madison Avenue on a large, new Möller instrument. Pipes were still being installed when I arrived, I thought for practice, the day before I was to play. But the builders did clear out at five o’clock, and I was able to start to work. Mary and I were staying with very good friends, Mary and Robert Baker, who lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn. Bob Baker, along with Virgil Fox, was co-chairman of the whole event, a taxing and stressful job including, among many other things, arranging a concert in the NYU stadium with the New York Philharmonic and two organists playing concertos. The Bakers and my wife Mary left me at St. James’ for a long evening of practice while they went on to the stadium concert.
I was picked up by them after the stadium concert, probably after 11 o’clock. I had had no food since lunch, so the Bakers gave me a key to their brownstone and dropped us off at a steak house near the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn. We would get a cab to the Bakers after we had eaten. It was well past midnight when we arrived at the brownstone and confidently inserted the key into the front door lock. But alas, clunk! In his great fatigue Bob Baker had put on the burglar chain when he locked up for the night. There was nothing to do but ring the doorbell. We rang, and we rang, and we rang. No answer! It turned out that they had a big fan running in their bedroom and couldn’t hear the bell. Even the neighbors in the adjoining brownstone had heard the bell, we later understood.
So what to do? Mary had a metal nail file in her purse, and I was able to get my hand around the door. I actually managed to remove the screws from the mount holding the chain. Voila! We opened the door and stepped into the little vestibule. But there was another door into the house proper, and of course, another chain! This time I wasn’t able to maneuver the nail file; the mount was varnished in. So now what to do? It is past one o’clock.
We left a note to the Bakers stuck under the door and walked several blocks to a thoroughfare, where we were fortunate enough to catch a cab back to the St. George Hotel. Looking very fatigued and not a little disheveled, and with no luggage, we checked in. The skeptical desk clerk insisted that we pay in advance. All but one of our traveler’s checks were back at the Bakers’, but my one check would cover. I signed it and handed it to the clerk, who refused to accept it because in my fatigue I had penned in the wrong date. So now it was scrounge through pockets and Mary’s purse to scrape up enough change to get us a small, very hot room with a small electric fan mounted up in the corner. We assumed that it was a room reserved for the “hot pillow trade.” No toothbrush, no sleepwear, exhausted and full of anxiety, we fell into the bed and actually slept until 7 am.
At that point we were awakened by the sound of sirens and fire trucks that were arriving to extinguish a major conflagration in a warehouse across the street from the hotel. Shortly thereafter a phone call came from a contrite Robert Baker, and we were soon ingesting breakfast in the Baker dining room.
But it doesn’t stop there. My good suit hadn’t come back to the Bakers’ from the cleaners as promised, but we must be driven back to Manhattan and up to St. James’ for my last run-through of my program that was scheduled for 3 o’clock. An hour before I was to play, I was sitting in a sort of cubicle in a little cleaning shop near the church when who should walk in but my teacher from Eastman days. I had no pants on, of course. Said trousers were from my wedding suit of twelve or more years before, and they definitely showed their age, to say nothing of the wear and tear of a car trip from Indiana and eight hours on the St. James’ organ bench.
So there followed the most important concert of my life, played in a big New York church with every seat filled, and my most demanding and intimidating former teacher somewhere in the midst, along with most of the prominent organists of the country.
And wonder of wonders, I played marvelously. I’d been too involved with the crises of the preceding 24 hours to get stage fright. I even got a big round of applause after one piece, the only applause of the whole convention. (People, even organists, didn’t applaud in a church in those days.) Was it worth the struggle and tension? Glamour was slowly arriving, but we had made it just in time, so, yes, it was worth it; my career was launched. (Not an especially high trajectory, but a trajectory followed for the next forty years or so.)
This exposé has been a very distorted report of my life in the not-so-fast lane. These crises are from a handful of several hundred performances, some ordinary, a few possibly notable. And I finally discovered that there was a lot more to life than playing organs here and there. But to recap my introductory remarks: Things are often not as glamorous as they appear to the outsider. Did I prove my point?

 

Robert Glasgow at 80 (section one of two)

A conversation with Steven Egler

Steven Egler

Steven Egler is Professor of Music at Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1976. He was a student of Robert Glasgow from 1969 to 1981, during which time he completed the B.M., M.M., and D.M.A. degrees at The University of Michigan. Egler is also Councillor for Region V of the AGO.

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Robert Glasgow, Professor of Music at The University of Michigan, will celebrate his 80th birthday on May 30, 2005. In honor of this occasion, I was delighted to be invited by Jerome Butera, editor of The Diapason, to interview Professor Glasgow, and did so on February 12, 2005. We had a wonderful afternoon at his organ studio in the School of Music, and he answered many questions about his life and career. Thanks to Prof. Glasgow for the interview, and we wish him Godspeed upon the occasion of his birthday and best wishes upon his forthcoming retirement.

Robert Glasgow has taught at The University of Michigan since 1962, after teaching at MacMurray College in Illinois and having graduated with distinction from the Eastman School, where he was also awarded the Performer’s Certificate. MacMurray College named him an honorary doctor of music, and his Michigan colleagues honored him with the Harold Haugh Award for excellence in the teaching of performance. He has concertized abroad several times, has toured the United States and Canada every season, and has appeared as a featured performer, lecturer and clinician at numerous national and regional conventions of the American Guild of Organists. Mr. Glasgow was named International Performer of the Year in 1997 by the New York AGO Chapter.

 

Personnel coded as follows:

SE--Steven Egler

RG--Robert Glasgow

RB--Robert Barker, who also took the photos that accompany this article.

SE: Bob, please tell us about your childhood in Oklahoma City and your early music training. Did you come from a musical family?

RG: I would say so. Both my parents played musical instruments. My mother was a pianist and somewhat of an organist. My father played violin rather well and also clarinet. In fact they played piano and violin in the church orchestra, and that is where they first met.

My mother heard about a new Presbyterian church being built in Ada, a little town in southeast Oklahoma. They were going to have a new organ; it was going to be a Hillgreen-Lane. When my mother learned about it she called to ask if they needed an organist. Of course, being a little town out there in the middle of nowhere, they said, yes, they needed an organist. My mother decided to take some organ lessons and be down there in about six weeks. So she did; took six lessons from a lady in Oklahoma City and learned how to play the pedals and the manuals--enough to play a service. So she became organist of that church.

SE: So your mother was an organist?

RG: She was a natural musician and she had a lot of piano study. When she was in high school, her piano teacher told my grandmother that she didn’t think that she was making the progress that she should. She said, “Your daughter has too much talent for her own good . . . that it was too easy for her.” By the way, when I started to play the accordion, she learned the accordion herself; then she’d listen to things on the radio and then she’d play them to me, and I’d learn them by ear. She’d learn them by ear and then transfer them to my ear when I’d come home from school. It was great fun!

Well, it’s easy! It’s the easiest way to learn music rather than read through all of those notes--the printed page! I still think that there’s something to be said for learning by ear at a young age. In the first place, making music is perfectly natural. It’s not going to become any more natural than it is right then.

You want students who can play with great persuasion and do not sound affected and contrived. Those who do play this way started off as youngsters playing by ear, singing tunes they’ve heard, listening to the radio.

SE: Who were some of the organists who inspired you as a young man?

RG: The organist at First Presbyterian Church, Oklahoma City, Mrs. J. S. Frank. Mr. Ken Wright of radio station WKY, who played a 4-manual Kilgen organ in the radio station studio--this organ produced some very beautiful sounds. His playing was very tasteful, he had good organ technique, and presented a good variety of popular style repertoire. For every broadcast he played his own theme song that was not published, but I learned to play it by ear. Jesse Crawford, a very famous theatre organist of the time. I had many of his recordings. Marcel Dupré came to Oklahoma City in 1939 to play a recital at First Christian Church. He had just played the wedding of the Duke of Windsor (Edward VIII) and Mrs. Simpson. The recital was a sell-out event. He brought his daughter Marguerite on the tour, and they played Franck, Dupré, etc.

SE: Did your parents encourage music study as a boy?

RG: Well, I guess so. They didn’t discourage it. It was a perfectly natural thing in our home when I was growing up. I was an only child.

SE: What instruments did you play?

RG: Accordion! I wanted to study and play the organ, but I could not reach the pedals, so I talked my folks into buying me an 80-bass accordion. That’s how I learned to play the pieces my mother taught me by ear--on that accordion.

SE: So that’s as close as you could get to the organ sound.

RG: Yes, it’s like an organ. It’s a wind instrument. I loved doing it, and I got pretty good at it. I was popular playing for church basement suppers and things like that.

SE: You were well known early on.

RG: Oh yes, I started playing at age nine, and by eleven I was hot stuff!

SE: Who was your first teacher?

RG: My mother. She taught me some piano. We had a little baby grand. She taught me how to read the notes. I had these little pieces that I was supposed to learn, but I’d sort of half learn them and I’d fill them in myself and fix them up. Mother would say, “You’re not playing what’s there.” I told her one time, “My way is better!” Talk about cheeky!

SE: So you learned your notes then after you played the accordion: you learned the accordion by ear.

RG: Almost everything that you played on the accordion had to be arranged for the instrument anyway. There was very little written for the accordion all by itself. My piano book had wonderful illustrations in it with the keyboard going up into the sky. It was wonderful, lovely, and all very visual. But the last piece in there was the Minuet in G of Beethoven. It has a B section--all 16th notes--and I looked at that and thought, “Oh boy, if I ever get to play that piece I’ll be really good.” That was the last piece in the book, and if you got that far you were a finished pianist.

SE: So you were done. That was it!

RG: Yes. All done.

SE: Then you were ready for the organ, the real thing.

RG: I was ready, but I still couldn’t reach the pedals, and I hadn’t enough piano according to the piano teacher. Our church organist was a wonderful musician--Oberlin-trained from way back. She took me later on, but she said then that I didn’t have enough piano.

We’re missing a very important part right in here when I took up the string bass, and that’s had much more of a lasting effect upon me than anything else. The junior high school orchestra wasn’t all that good, but by the time we got to high school, the orchestras were very good. We went to state competitions at the University of Oklahoma and won A-1 ratings. We played Mozart Symphony No. 40 and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik--music of that caliber--and also the Franck D-minor Symphony.

SE: So did you just start playing the string bass?

RG: No. Oklahoma City Public Schools offered instruction in strings: first of all, violin, some viola, and you got free lessons, class lessons. This was fourth grade and there were little-sized instruments. I didn’t care anything about that: I wanted to play the big strings. By seventh grade, I could do string bass or cello, so I took up string bass because I liked the look of the scroll at the top. I’d take that instrument home on weekends and practice it and learned to play it.

SE: There must have been something about the bass notes.

RG: Oh yes, indeed. It was a physical thing. It was wonderful to play in an ensemble like that, and we really became quite good. Then they had a junior symphony (Oklahoma State Junior Symphony), and you had to audition to get into that. I got into it, and that was more fun than anything. We did get to play the major repertoire then.

That had a lasting effect. By the time I got out of high school, I was finished. I couldn’t keep using the string bass in the school. I didn’t have one. And, anyhow, guess what came on then?

SE: World War II?

RG: It was already going. But one thing that I got out of that was the GI Bill--a godsend for everyone of that generation.

SE: And that paid for your education at Eastman?

RG: Yes, just did. The amount of time you got was the amount of time that you had been in the service, and mine worked out just right. Eastman cost more than anything; in those days it was $500 a year!

I came back and I didn’t know what I was going to do where music was concerned. I thought I’d be an architect and was very serious about it. I kept drawing all the time. I couldn’t get away from it. I’d draw house plans, church plans, and outsides of buildings. Some were not bad, as I look back on that. I was about ten or eleven years old when I started drawing pictures of houses and floor plans.

SE: What sort of time was there, Bob, between your time in the service and going to Eastman? Was there much of a gap there?

RG: Well, I didn’t go to Eastman right away because it was too late by the time I got out of the service. It was March, and I had been working on Eastman for well over a year before that; there were thousands of GI’s out of the military service, and they all wanted to do something, go somewhere with the GI Bill. By that time, I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do.

I decided I’d try for Eastman and then got the usual letter back stating, “No. We’re sorry, but you’re the low man on the totem pole. You’d be a transfer student.” That year I went to Oklahoma City University and was a piano major and had good teaching there. The faculty were all Eastman graduates. I then got busy with applications at Eastman and sent audition recordings of both my organ and piano playing.

I got this letter, “Sorry for you. You’re too late . . . way too many students . . . I don’t want to discourage you . . . but send your audition recordings to us right away.” Instead of sending it to the admissions office, I sent it to Harold Gleason. In days, I had this note back from him! The first big thrill that I had was that he wrote to me and said to check that I had all of my papers in, and that they wanted to have me there in the fall. WELL, that did it! He saw to it that I got in. So I found myself at Eastman that summer and got a church job right away. That plus the GI bill got me through without too much trouble or hardship.

SE: When did you start at Eastman?

RG: Summer of 1947. I started in with the program right then, but they classified me as a sophomore. Of course, I had the freshman year at OCU, and all that work was accepted. I took their basic exams.

SE: That must have been very exciting. 

RG: Well, it was! It was scary, too. I thought, “What am I doing here with all of these talented people? Good grief, they are going to find out about me. They are going to catch up to me and send me home.” I didn’t think that I was that good.

SE: It looks like that didn’t happen.

RG: It didn’t, fortunately. I was trying to figure out how I would explain it to the folks at home. It turned out that I stacked up pretty well with the rest, but at first I didn’t think that I was going to.

I went there because I had advice from people at home who were graduates of Eastman and who told me that there was only one place to go and only one teacher for me. There weren’t nearly so many organ teachers then and nearly so much good organ teaching then as there is now. 

SE: Who was your teacher in Oklahoma City?

RG: Dubert Dennis. He was an Oklahoma boy--Cherokee Indian--but he put me on the straight and narrow with the Gleason Method. I’ll tell you! Hand position. Finger action. I’d never had anyone be so fussy with me before. I thought, “I’ll get to Eastman. I’ll show them.” Turned out to be just the other way around, of course. I had to get off of my high horse. I did pretty quickly.

SE: We’ve all had someone like that in our background.

RG: You need to sit back where you belong and not where you don’t belong. It’s one of the best things a teacher can do for you sometimes. To say, “Wait just a minute. You’ll be there in a minute, but not right this minute.”

RB: Humility?

RG: I don’t think humility. It’s just honesty about where you are in terms of your development, and not imagining you are further along than you really are.  That’s often the trouble some students have: they think they are so much further along that they really are, and are unwilling to do “repair work.”

SE: That might be one of those later questions . . .

RG: Another big thrill while at Eastman was when I auditioned for the Performer’s Certificate. I thought that it would be fun to play with the orchestra. In those days you did not choose the concerto before you got accepted as a candidate for the Certificate.

I got chosen, and I thought that I would do the Poulenc, but it didn’t have any pedal cadenza. I wanted something that would show off the pedals. I found the Flor Peeters Concerto in a music store, so I chose that, and Howard Hanson liked it better than the Poulenc. Hanson was not a fan of Poulenc. 

He was a wonderful conductor and wonderful musician to work with on that concerto. It was the American premiere, and it did have a big pedal cadenza in it and a rousing climax. It just brought the house down. Flor Peeters knew how to write for organ and orchestra very effectively.

Dialogue avec une artiste: A conversation with Ann Labounsky

Andrew Scanlon
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The following conversation, conducted both in person and by telephone in March 2013, explores the career of one of America’s most eminent musicians and teachers, Ann Labounsky. Dr. Labounsky was my undergraduate organ teacher at Duquesne University, and she is now in her 44th year as professor and chair of sacred music and organ at that same institution. Some years after completing graduate study and working in church music, I had the privilege of returning to Duquesne as a faculty member, teaching alongside Dr. Labounsky for four years. We maintain a close collaboration, and therefore, I have been in the unique situation of knowing Dr. Labounsky on several levels since we first met in New York City at the 1996 American Guild of Organists Centennial Convention. As a teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend, Ann has challenged, encouraged, and supported me in many ways. In this interview, we discuss Ann’s life and career. Several life chapters particularly dominate our discussion: Ann’s student days at Eastman as a pupil of the young David Craighead, and the full circle of Ann and David’s long friendship; Ann’s time as a Fulbright scholar in Paris, studying organ under André Marchal, Jean Langlais, and Marcel Dupré; and finally, Ann’s inimitable teaching career in Pittsburgh. 

 

 

Andrew Scanlon: When people ask me why I decided to learn to play the organ, I most often reply, “Actually, the organ chose me!” Most of your life has been devoted to the organ. What was your first encounter with the organ, and when did the organ first “choose you?”

Ann Labounsky: As a young girl, our family was living in Port Washington, Long Island, and my mother used to take me to a Methodist church across the street from our home. This was before I could read; and I must have heard the pipe organ, but I don’t have much of a memory of it.

Later, we attended Christ Church (Episcopal) in Oyster Bay, where Paul Sifler (also a composer) was the organist-choirmaster. My mother, my brother, and I all sang in the choir, and it was then that I became interested. I was fascinated by the way Paul played. I would come early for choir rehearsals or lessons to watch him practice. I began studying the organ with Sifler at age 15. He was a very good teacher for me, and I loved his compositions. One summer, I went away to a camp, where I couldn’t play the organ for about two weeks, and I missed it so much. I think at that stage, I knew I would be an organist.

 

The conventional wisdom seems to be that before learning the organ, a strong piano background is useful, even essential. Were you already accomplished on the piano? 

My piano teacher in high school was John LaMontaine, Paul Sifler’s partner. He was also a wonderful composer and had a great command of technique. He followed the Tobias Matthay school of relaxation. I would take the train to go to their apartment on 57th Street in New York to take the lessons. It was he who encouraged me to go to Eastman. 

 

Since your piano teacher encouraged you to apply to the Eastman School of Music, did you audition on both piano and organ? What was required for the audition?

Yes, we were required to perform on both instruments. For the organ portion, I remember playing Mendelssohn’s Sonata No. 6, but can’t remember which Bach I played. I do recall that I played a recital my senior year of high school and had played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and Wir glauben all an einen Gott on that recital, so I must have played one of those works. For the piano portion, they required that you know all scales and arpeggios, as well as the performance of a work by Bach and a Beethoven sonata. I was very nervous for the audition.

 

Before you went to Eastman, what, if anything, did you know of David Craighead? Did you want to study with him, or were you taking the advice of your teachers?

Well, no; actually, I didn’t know anything about David Craighead. But John LaMontaine had studied at Eastman, and he thought it was a very good school. He wanted me to study with Eastman’s piano teacher, George MacNabb. (It was from MacNabb that I learned the Brahms Fifty-one Exercises, which I still use.) Paul Sifler thought that Catharine Crozier would have been a good organ teacher for me, and I looked into studying with her. However, by the time I entered Eastman as a freshman, Crozier had already left the Eastman faculty for Rollins College in Florida. 

 

Did you audition anywhere else besides Eastman?

No. It always makes me laugh now, because these days, students audition at several schools. But for some reason, I didn’t.

 

Had you given any thought to what might happen if you didn’t get in?

No, that didn’t occur to me! 

 

In 1957, you moved upstate from Long Island and began your new life in Rochester. What are your memories of those undergraduate years? 

Eastman was a wonderful school. For many years, I stayed in close touch with the friends that I made there because we all struggled together. It was very demanding; in fact, I had nightmares. I was so afraid that I wouldn’t do well enough and that David Craighead would make me study with Norman Peterson, the secondary teacher! 

 

Can you recall your close friends and colleagues from that time?

Some dear colleagues included Bill Stokes, Joanna Tousey, Bill Haller, Maggie Brooks, Bruce Lederhouse, Jim Johnson, Gretchen Frauenberger, and Robert Town. Roberta Gary was working on her doctorate and David Mulberry was a senior, but they were beyond me. They were the great legends at the time!

 

How many students were studying organ then?

I think there may have been about ten—smaller compared to what it is now. 

 

Can you recall periods of particular growth in your playing during the Eastman days, or conversely, any precise struggles?

I don’t recall any struggles specifically; everything was difficult. We had to have all our repertoire memorized. I would get very nervous before performances. I wish that I would have found a way to get over that more easily, as I look back now. But all of this contributed to my growth as a musician. 

 

When you arrived at Eastman, in the studio of David Craighead, he was still fairly new to Eastman’s faculty, correct?

Yes, he had arrived in 1955, and I entered in 1957. He always told me this funny story about when I first arrived. Evidently I went up to his office and knocked on his door and introduced myself. I said, “I’m Ann Labounsky: Ann without the ‘E’!” David said he always remembered that.

 

What was Craighead like as a teacher in 1957? What aspects of learning did he emphasize as a young teacher?

He was always very precise. At that time in his life, he was rather nervous, quite inhibited. He would tell you all the things that were not right, but you always wanted to strive to do better in the next lesson. We spent a lot of time on the registration. He used the Bonnet Historical Anthology of Music, which was highly edited, and not a good edition. He used the Seth Bingham edition of Couperin’s music and I hated that music back then; it wasn’t until I went to Paris to study with [André] Marchal that I knew what it all meant!

 

That anecdote reminds us of how David Craighead evolved tremendously, over the years, both as teacher and a performer.

He did. I remember seeing him some years later, perhaps in the early 1970s. He had come to perform in Pittsburgh, and we attended the Pittsburgh Symphony together. He spoke of the Offertoire from Couperin’s Mass for the Parishes, and how he had learned about the notes inégales. For Bach, we changed registration frequently and each change was well marked in the score. Also, phrasing was carefully marked. Craighead was meticulous about every detail, but was patient in working with us until we got it right. He was most effective when he would quickly slide onto the bench to demonstrate a passage.

 

Can you remember your degree recitals?

They were all in Kilbourne Hall on the Skinner organ. For my senior recital, I played the Bach Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 543, and of course, a lot of American music. David Craighead loved the music of Sowerby. I played Sowerby’s famous Arioso, which was gorgeous on that organ. At Eastman, there was a kind of “shopping list” of music that we all had to work on. Ironically, when we got to Langlais’ music, I hated it! I had performed some of the Hommage à Frescobaldi, and I didn’t like it at all! I also remember playing in the weekly performance class in preparation for my senior recital. At one such class, having completed a play-through of the Bach “A Minor,” I remember David Craighead saying, “That was bloody but unbowed!” 

 

When you were wrapping up your days at Eastman, did David Craighead advise you about what you should do in terms of furthering your education?

David Craighead was very different from Russell Saunders, who told the students exactly what they should do. David took a far more hands-off approach. He gave his students the confidence to make their own decisions. I thought about staying at Eastman for my master’s degree, but decided to go to the University of Michigan. It turned out to be a very good thing to do that, as I would meet my future husband, Lewis Steele, at Michigan.

 

After four years at the Eastman School, I imagine that you had a much broader sense of the organ world, and you knew what you wanted?

I certainly knew that I wanted to go on to earn a master’s degree, but at that time, I didn’t know much about church music or improvisation. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, except that I wanted to learn music.

 

In few words, can you summarize the church music curriculum at Eastman in those days?

It didn’t exist! 

 

Your next move was from Rochester to Ann Arbor. Tell us about what life was like at the University of Michigan in 1961.

In those days, the president of the AGO was Roberta Bitgood. She did a wonderful thing for the new students at U. of M. When we got off the train in Detroit, she met all the students. She had gathered members of the clergy from churches in the area that were looking for organists. She introduced all of us, and as a result, I began a church job right away in Dearborn, Michigan, about an hour from Ann Arbor. 

U. of M. was a very different school than ESM. My teacher there was Marilyn Mason. Mason was less of a teacher for me, but more of a coach. David Craighead had really formed my technique—so she didn’t have to work on that. We worked on musical details and interpretation. We always had our lessons on the organ in Hill Auditorium.

 

Were there other organ teachers?

Yes. Ray Ferguson and Robert Noehren were on the faculty at that time. 

 

Besides organ playing, were there any other memorable aspects of the Michigan graduate degree program that helped you grow?

The courses at Michigan were wonderful! I especially recall Hans David the musicologist, and Louise Cuyler, and I learned a great deal from both of them.

 

You mentioned that you also met your husband while at Michigan?

Yes, I earned the degree in one year and two summers, and I was getting ready to play my recital. I met Lewis Steele on the steps of Marilyn Mason’s studio. I needed soloists to sing in my church every Sunday since we didn’t have a summer choir. I heard his resonant voice, and asked him to sing a solo. That’s how our romance started! 

 

Would you care to elaborate?

Well, three children and four grandchildren later, we are very happy together. 

I could never have done the things I have done without Lewis’s support. He always said that in a marriage, it’s not a 50/50 partnership, rather it’s 100/100. You have to give all of yourself, all the time. He did so much in raising the children. I had no idea even how to change diapers. He taught me. So many of the things I didn’t have (for example, expertise in theology, scripture, choral directing), Lewis did have. It has been a wonderful partnership over the years. I always remember what Marilyn Mason said: “I’d marry him for his laugh!”

 

Can you sum up the church music curriculum at U. of M. in those days?

They had two tracks. You could earn the MM in organ, which I did, or the MM in church music. However, it seemed to me that the only difference was you didn’t have to memorize the recital if you were in the church music track. All students took Robert Noehren’s course in organ building, which I almost failed! You had to know the composition of mixtures, which was too much for me! He was a very good teacher, though. He had a significant influence in the organ department there at that time. 

 

As your time wound up in Michigan, the next big step would be the Fulbright process. What were you doing in Michigan to prepare for the program in France?

By the time I got to Michigan, I knew I wanted to go to France for additional study. In fact, I had applied for a Fulbright while still an Eastman student, but I didn’t get it. I applied a second time while at U. of M. I had been passionate about the French language and was determined that I would go to France one way or another. Every week, I would get together with Deedee Wotring, one of André Marchal’s former students. We would meet for coffee, and she would force me to speak French! 

 

But your love of France and the French language had begun long before Michigan, through your beloved Aunt Julia, correct?

I’m glad you mentioned Julia. You knew her and played at her funeral. She had studied art in Paris after the war, and following her arrival back home in New York, she spent every weekend with us in Long Island. Julia was determined to teach me how to speak French! My father (a geologist and engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project) was Russian, his second language being English. I was determined I was going to Paris to study, even if I had to be an au pair

In April, having applied for a Fulbright, saying I wanted to study with Marchal, but not yet knowing my fate, I went to a recital at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, performed by Jean Langlais, whom I met for the first time. I told him I had played his Miniature on my graduate recital at the University of Michigan, and that I hoped to soon be in Paris studying. He replied that he hoped he would see me! When I returned home to Long Island from that recital, I found out I had gotten the Fulbright grant! That was such a great blessing to be able to go, with everything paid for; it was just a marvelous thing. 

I should speak a little bit about how we got to France. The first time we went over was on the “Queen Mary,” and on the “France” a number of times. It took five days, and there was no jet lag, because each day you changed the clocks only one hour. It was a wonderful way to travel. Ruth Woods (Harris) and I went together, both studying with Marchal on a Fulbright grant. We remain close friends.

 

Though you are perhaps best known as the leading American disciple of Jean Langlais, when you set off for France, your initial intent was to study with André Marchal, and you did. Tell us about studying with Marchal.

When I heard Marchal play for the first time, it was at Oberlin. He played in a way I had never heard anyone else play. Each line breathed. I heard music differently when he played, and I wanted to learn what he knew. Fortunately, my French was good enough that I didn’t need a translator, but his daughter Jacqueline often translated for the other students. Lessons were in his home at 22 Rue Duroc. I also wanted to study improvisation. Even though Marchal improvised very well, at that time he no longer taught improvisation. He said: “Well, you may study improvisation with Langlais.”

You must understand about the teachers all over Europe at that time: they were very possessive of their students. You were not able to simply study with anyone you wanted; definitely not several teachers! You went abroad to study with ONE teacher. I studied organ repertoire with Marchal, but Marchal gave me his permission to study with Langlais. After that time, while continuing to study with Marchal, I would then go to Ste. Clotilde in the evenings for my lessons with Langlais, which was wonderful. Playing on the organ that Franck, Tournemire, and Langlais knew so well, and hearing their music on that instrument, made all the difference in learning that music.

 

What musical facet did Marchal underscore the most in how to play the organ?

The touch. He had a way of phrasing each line independently. And he had such a concept of the whole piece. I remember working on Bach’s great Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor (BWV 542) with him. He had the whole piece completely engraved in his mind—every voice. It was amazing to me that this blind man knew music so well. For example, if you used a fingering that was not effective, he could tell!

 

You mentioned having studied Couperin as an undergraduate at Eastman. I know that with his interest in early music, Marchal would make the classical French school an essential part of what you studied. How did your point of view evolve with respect to this music?

Marchal just knew that music. I don’t know how—because he had studied with Gigout, and of course, everyone was playing completely legato then. Marchal attributed his style of playing to studying the harpsichord, saying that as a result, he had learned a different way of playing. And in the 1960s, no one else was playing like that. We usually associate Marie-Claire Alain as a leader in the early music revival for the organ—but even in the 1940s when Marie Claire Alain was very young, it was Marchal who was the first great leader in this movement. There was something about the way he played that helped me understand that “this is how you play!” With Marchal, I studied all Couperin, as well as all the music of de Grigny, Clérambault, Daquin, etc.

 

I recall from other conversations over the years that you recall practicing constantly during the time you were in France. You learned a great deal of music—how much repertoire did you absorb in two years?

In addition to all I mentioned just above, with Marchal, I studied all the Bach trio sonatas, all the big preludes and fugues—tons of repertoire! With Langlais I studied all of Franck’s music, much of Tournemire, and other pieces, too. In terms of how lessons worked, with Marchal (and Donald Wilkins said it was the same with Duruflé), you brought in a piece to a lesson, one of these big pieces, and they told you everything you needed to know. If you brought in the same piece again to another lesson, they said, “Well, I already told you everything I know about it last week!” We knew that we wouldn’t be there forever with those brilliant musicians. Our goal was to cover as much repertoire as possible in the shortest amount of time.

 

Do you still play the pieces you studied with Marchal or Langlais the same way as when you learned them? Or do you perform them differently now?

Wonderful question. I think that the spirit is the same; some things changed a little. I’m constantly trying to think in a fresh way, but the spirit of what I learned from Langlais and Marchal has stayed with me.

 

Concerning Marchal’s teaching, did he have any idiosyncrasies?

Many have said of Marchal that if a student was not gifted, he would be very lenient with that student; but the more diligent a student was, he would be much more strict. And that certainly was true. One funny story was about phrasing in one of the trio sonatas. I had asked why he played it that particular way, and he thought for a long time. After quite a long period of silence, finally he answered: “Because it pleases me!”

 

Many people are very well acquainted with your work and expertise on the music and the life of Jean Langlais. Much of this information can be learned from your book, Jean Langlais: The Man and His Music (Amadeus Press, 2000), as well as from the liner notes on your CD recordings. Would you share with us, in a broad sense, what it was like to be Langlais’ pupil, and how that relationship developed over many years?

Langlais was extremely supportive. He always made you feel that you could do anything! If you made a mistake, he knew, but he was just thinking about the music. Always so encouraging and supportive, he was continually trying to find places for his students to play, and to help them in whatever way he could. As I learned his music, I became more and more interested, and I wanted to learn as much as I could. 

 

Over the years, how much cumulative time did you study with Langlais?

I have no idea. I usually had a weekly lesson on Wednesday evenings, when the church was closed. In addition to that, on Saturday afternoons, we were at the Schola Cantorum, and that’s where we worked on improvisation. Over the years, I returned many more times to study.

 

After remaining in France for an extra year, what path did your career take upon returning to the States?

Langlais asked me to be his guide for his fall 1964 American tour, and I did that. Shortly thereafter, I took a job in a very large Roman Catholic church in New Hyde Park, Long Island. I had a choir of men and boys that I had to develop and direct. That was hard work. 

 

How did you end up in Pittsburgh? Did you move there to take up your position as organ teacher at Duquesne University?

In 1967, Lewis and I moved to Pittsburgh to take up a joint church position at Brentwood Presbyterian Church. Lewis was the choir director, and I was the organist. We had only one child, six months old. Two years later, in 1969, the head of graduate studies at Duquesne University called and asked if I would like to teach organ at Duquesne—but I had never heard of Duquesne! Honestly, I was not thinking about teaching in a college and university. I had done some private teaching, but had not thought beyond that. I wanted to be a church musician and recitalist. Looking back on it, I don’t know why I hadn’t considered university teaching. I was busy at the church and raising our kids. So, in 1969, I began teaching part-time, and it initially cost our family money for me to teach at Duquesne, because I had to pay for child care! At that time, there was a degree program in organ, but no sacred music program or sacred music courses. 

In 1972, around the time of the birth of our third child, the dean of Duquesne’s school of music at the time, Gerald Keenan, called me into his office and said they wanted to hire me full-time. After that time, I was the only organ teacher.

 

What was your strategy for building up the sacred music degree programs at Duquesne? 

I didn’t really have a strategy. I worked slowly, adding courses as it made sense. Even before I was full-time, I had brought Jeanne Joulain to Pittsburgh for a recital and workshop—in that way, I was already developing a tradition of guest artists. The first class that I started was the “Service Playing” course. I was always interested in improvisation, having studied it with Langlais, and I had won the very first AGO improvisation competition in 1966 in Atlanta. I began an improvisation course, focusing on rather simple aspects of improvisation. 

For a few years, we moved along slowly, trying to figure out the curriculum and course requirements. In 1976, the 25th year of the Duquesne School of Music, I decided that Langlais should come to Duquesne. This coincided with the official establishment of the sacred music degree programs. While Langlais was in residence, we awarded him an honorary doctorate, and we had a whole week of concerts featuring premieres of his music. This started things off in a huge way, attracting a lot of national attention. Gradually, more and more students wanted to come to Duquesne, continuing over the years. I couldn’t say in what specific year things really blossomed. Another aspect of our program’s emphasis in church music came after I realized there had been a huge void in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council—no choirs, no hymnals, a very low level of music. I saw that Duquesne had a responsibility and an opportunity to take a lead in this area. The dean, Robert Egan, agreed with me, and we worked for several years on strengthening the program. I called many people at different universities to see what other programs were offering. In those early days, I taught all the courses myself, as we didn’t have that many students. 

 

For many years, you have been a serious campaigner for the cause of the AGO certification program. From where did your advocacy of this program emerge?

Initially from Walter Hilse. I met Walter while we were both students in Paris. Walter, also from New York, was studying composition with Nadia Boulanger and organ with Maurice Duruflé. On Wednesday afternoons, Boulanger taught an analysis class for foreigners at her apartment, for which she had a huge following. She had a small house organ, having been a student of Vierne. Students would play pieces (Fauré, for example), and then she would pull the pieces apart and ask questions. She was a huge personality. I still have the scores. (We had to buy the ones she was going to discuss.) At these classes, Walter Hilse encouraged me to become certified. I distinctly remember him saying “You really should take the AAGO [Associate of the AGO] exam.” He has always been a huge promoter of the exams and has had many private students. Anne Wilson and Todd Wilson, for example, prepared for the exams with Walter. While my husband and I were still living on Long Island, I decided to do this. Once I began teaching at Duquesne University, it occurred to me that those skills were so vital to all students, that they should be learning these skills while studying for university degrees. 

 

Did the desire to help students become fluent with keyboard skills such as those tested on the AGO exams prompt you to require the AGO exams as part of the sacred music degrees at Duquesne?

In the early 1980s, I was on the National Committee on Professional Certification. Only one other school in the country was making it a requirement to take the exams. So, I decided to initiate the exams at Duquesne. When you tell people they have to do it, then they just do! Not everyone passed, and people took different exams, depending on their level of expertise. I met many wonderful people on that committee, including Max Miller, Sister Theophane Hytrek, John Walker, and David Schuler, for example. Different years, various others rotated on and off that committee, such as Todd Wilson. 

 

When did you ultimately attempt the Fellowship exam? 

Since I had already made the exams a degree requirement at DU, and I was the National Councillor for Education, I decided that it was time. You can’t just say to someone, “you should do this!”—you need to set an example. During a very busy time, when I had three children, was teaching full time, playing recitals, and was on the national board, I worked with two former students in Pittsburgh, John Miller and Robert Kardasz, to prepare together for the FAGO. Eventually, we all passed! It gave Pittsburgh more people with the FAGO diploma, where previously only Charles Heaton and Don Wilkins had earned it. We needed more highly certified people for a city our size.

 

Why do you consider it so important to take the certification exams?

There are a number of reasons:

1) In order to keep growing you need both long-term and short-term goals. As a student, it’s a short-term goal. Before earning a degree, it helps you have a point of arrival.

2) After my student, John Henninger, graduated from Duquesne, he went on to Westminster Choir College for graduate school and had applied for a church job in Princeton. He had passed the CAGO while at Duquesne, and he was appointed to the job because of having the Colleague Certificate. 

3) The exams represent a very structured way of testing both theoretical and practical skill. You can work at your own pace, and everybody I know who has done this, whether or not they have passed, has profited by it. It seems like a natural thing to do this, when you consider that so many other professions offer certification.

4) Earning an AGO certificate is a way that we show we’re at a certain level in our profession.

5) Earning certification does level the playing field and sets a high standard.

Our professional organization is extremely important. I get upset with people who complain about aspects of degree programs, churches, even the AGO—when the only thing you can do is to get right in the trenches to make things better!

 

Several graduates of Duquesne have gone on to earn the highest AGO certification. How has that made
you feel?

Very proud. You [Andrew Scanlon] being one of them, and now even serving on the national exam committee—that has made me especially proud. My current colleague, Ben Cornelius-Bates, has recently earned the FAGO also. 

 

Reflecting on your almost 45 years of teaching at Duquesne, how would you say your teaching and playing has evolved?

On teaching, David Craighead always said that you learn so much from your students, and I really have. In the beginning, I felt I didn’t know much, but I learned along the way. I found some things that worked well, and I fought the scars of things that didn’t work well. I have found it important to document what each student does. Recently, I got a computer in my studio, and using the “Blackboard” tool has been transformative. I have begun taking notes for each lesson and posting them for each student to view.

In the early days of my teaching, I was still very much in the mode of the teachers I learned from in Paris—Langlais, Marchal, and Dupré. They were very directive. They told you exactly what they wanted you to do. Initially, I taught the way they taught, because it was so fresh in my mind. As things have evolved, I have wanted to help each student find his own voice. I might not always agree with the student, but feel strongly that it’s in the best interest of each student to let them develop their own musical instincts. 

Ironically, when I performed all the recitals that Langlais had organized for me, I still felt I was his student. Langlais said, “You have to do this the way you want to do it.” But he had not taught that way. For example, he was known for saying so emphatically in his teaching that “Franck is tremendously free—just like this!” In improvisation, he taught the Thème libre, which, of course, is not free at all!

As you grow older, you grow in wisdom. You learn a lot from your children, also. They keep you humble, and they really tell you when you mess up! 

When I look at David Craighead, I keep thinking of how he was when I first studied with him at Eastman. Then, he was a new teacher. I had the joy of knowing him so well for the last 14 years of his life, and he had changed so much. He started by telling the students when they had made mistakes, but ended up changing lives. I try to do that too. I try to be a mentor, to do everything I possibly can to encourage my pupils, and help them get along well together. Music school can be almost like a monastery, when you’re all working together, and it’s so important to have a good rapport with your colleagues, to show great compassion for one another. 

Secondly, in answer to your question about my own playing, several things have contributed to the way I have played over the years. One of these was earning my Ph.D. in musicology, and beginning my biography of Langlais as the dissertation. All my years of teaching, the wisdom I gained from colleagues such as Robert Sutherland Lord and Don Franklin, making all the Langlais recordings—all of that contributed to the evolution of my playing. Other factors include the 1985 Bach Year, when I was asked to play an all-Bach recital on the Beckerath organ at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Pittsburgh. I changed my approach to Bach playing, using all toes, and different fingering. Change was in the air at that time. 

 

Have there been still more recent developments?

Yes. I have been working with Don Franklin on the tempo relationships in Bach preludes and fugues. We have been looking back to Kirnberger’s tempo relationships. I am constantly trying to learn more. If you have everything figured out, you may as well just retire, and I’m certainly not ready to retire!

In addition, after being asked a few years ago to do a peer review of a string methods class, I became fascinated with the violin. I realized that I had always wanted to play the violin, but I was afraid to try! I started taking violin lessons with David Gillis, a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and I’m still studying! I’m working on the Vivaldi sonatas, Opus 2, which I love! It’s a whole other world. 

The most recent development is the establishment of Duquesne’s chant schola under the direction of faculty member Sister Marie Agatha Ozah, HHCJ. We study the St. Gall notation to incorporate those interpretive elements into our singing. In May 2013, I led a study trip to Paris to play the important organs there and gave a short concert at the Benedictine Abbey in Solesmes. 

 

How do you know what to say when a student plays? What not to say? 

Always, I do it by intuition, and I think David Craighead did too. I’m careful not to say too much, and not say too little. 

 

How do you decide not only what to say, but how to say it? How do you break through?

Teaching is so dynamic, because you have to figure out where the student is and how the student will perceive what you say. You always have to be honest, but you need to be helpful—not damaging. You can’t say something is good when it’s not. Some teachers are more didactic, but I find that I do almost everything by intuition.

 

Realizing that you could retire, what keeps you going?

I love what I’m doing. I’m finally at a point when I can do it more easily.

I still have a lot to give to the students. I can still make a difference in their lives, and I still enjoy it. When we look around the country, and see the teachers who have retired, only to see their programs eliminated, that is always a danger. 

 

What are your hopes for the future of Duquesne’s sacred music and organ programs?

We are working very hard to get a world-class organ on campus! We have plans, and hope to be able to do this in the near future. The last piece of the puzzle is to put a doctoral program in place. That has been in discussion for many years, and it has been very challenging because there are many hoops to jump through. Our library holdings have been critical, but we now have many sacred music collections (the Langlais Collection, the Craighead Collection, the Boys Town Collection, the Richard Proulx Collection, to name a few). We have the faculty, and the quality of teaching, but we need more financial support. 

 

What else would you like to say?

Duquesne University has always been a religious institution. Our mission is to train church musicians. There are other schools whose main issue is getting students ready for competitions, which is wonderful, and I admire them very much. But even David Craighead agreed that he wished the Eastman School had done more with church music and preparation for the AGO exams. I want to prepare students to be musicians in churches of all denominations. We are trying to evolve, as the church continues to evolve. Students have to learn both pastoral skills and musical skills. These are difficult to teach. Our internship, for example, is a requirement partially because of NASM accreditation, but it’s also a critical area that we use to help each student in that very way. 

 

Ann, thank you for sharing these details of your life in teaching and performing. Albert Einstein said, “I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” My experience of you as a teacher and mentor has been just so. You always gave the students exactly the right amount of guidance, and offered the right words precisely when they were needed; and yet you always allowed each student to discover his own path. You have led the way gracefully, setting a high bar and leading by example. Most importantly you have shown me the importance of constant, ongoing learning. I look forward to many more years of collaboration and friendship and wish you many blessings for continued joy in your work. 

Robert Glasgow at 80 (section two of two)

A conversation with Steven Egler

Steven Egler

Steven Egler is Professor of Music at Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1976. He was a student of Robert Glasgow from 1969 to 1981, during which time he completed the B.M., M.M., and D.M.A. degrees at The University of Michigan. Egler is also Councillor for Region V of the AGO.

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SE: Please comment about the Gleasons, their teaching, and working with both of them.

RG: They’re both gone now. Harold way back [1980] and Catharine more recently [2003].

SE: How did they compare as teachers?

RG: Quite different from one another. She was very exacting. He was, too, but he was older--a generation older. I didn’t study with her except for some special repertoire. He would suggest that I take a particular piece to Mrs. Gleason that she’d been playing, so I could see what she had to say about it. That was interesting. I studied with Catharine for the whole summer after I had already finished the degree.

But Harold was somebody with a certain presence, because there was a wonderful human mind, sense of humor, and many, many years of experience--and not just in organ. In fact, some of his instructions would be to listen to some orchestral piece because it had something to do with what I was working on; so I did exactly as he told me to do. He had studio class every week--small class, five students.

Catharine’s main influence was in her playing. She played through her recitals before every time that she went on a tour, which was three or four times a year. She would play the tour programs for us up there in [Organ Studio] 427. We could watch everything that she did. Technique was all there. Everything was PERFECT. It was a wonderful example. No frothing at the mouth. Very elegant. THAT was most instructive.

SE: And it was always from memory, right.

RG: Yes.

SE: That’s interesting to me, about memorizing. What about extemporization?

RG: I wouldn’t give you a dime for an organist who couldn’t extemporize a little bit, who has to have every note written down on a piece of paper before he can play anything, who can’t even touch the manuals without having the notes down on the page. I-IV-V-I, if nothing more than that.

But they don’t seem to stress that enough everywhere. I don’t see why they can’t do it. Just scared to death. Make music, as it were. You know what I mean? If you leave your scores at home, on Sunday, go make music. Maybe find a hymn tune and just play on your own. But you know, we’re afraid of it, even though we’ve got music in us and enough technique in our fingers--but of course that takes daily practice.

SE: You’re absolutely right!

RG: It’s partly about your early experiences as a child. There was nothing wrong with sitting down and playing on the keyboard without having anything on the music rack.

SE: Your first teaching position was as professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois, from 1951-1962. It must have been very exciting to get a teaching position right after receiving your graduate degree from the Eastman School. Please describe how this appointment came about.

RG: The appointment was in May of that year, and I started teaching in September [1951]. I knew about the place because I knew of at least one student at Eastman from Jacksonville who had been a student of Ruth Melville Bellatti who was the teacher there before I was. There had been Eastman teachers there in the department of music.

The school was about to get a new four-manual Aeolian-Skinner organ in the chapel. It was a beautiful organ, and I was lucky to have it while I was there--the last 10 years that I was there.

I went back to play there, and they gave me an honorary doctorate [Doctor of Music]. [The recital and conferring of the degree took place on October 3, 1975.] It was a high point for me. That concert was the first concert on the Jacksonville/MacMurray Civic Music Series. They had all kinds of things, you know: orchestra, pianists, from all over--not just one area. They had a full house, as I recall. Do you remember Ruth Melville Bellatti?

SE: No. I only recall hearing the name.

RG: She was my predecessor there once removed. She was a classmate of Catharine [Crozier]. She was a superb player, and she was the one that really got the ball rolling on that new organ.

SE: Didn’t Harold Gleason design that organ?

RG: He had a lot to do with it. He made some suggestions.

SE: That would explain the connection to Eastman. 

RG: Many of the teachers had been from Eastman way back into the 1930s. Joe Clelland went there back in the 1930s and brought Ruth to the faculty. That was one of the best things they ever did. Then she got married to Walt Bellatti and started raising a family. That’s when they got Wilbur Sheridan for four years, and then just the time before the organ was to arrive, he left--went to a college in Washington state, and that’s how I got the position. I saw the new organ specification on paper and thought, “You’re leaving this?” Those were wonderful years. Catharine Crozier played the opening recital.

SE: Didn’t you direct the orchestra at MacMurray?

RG: That was the first year that I was there. The director/chairman called me in and asked, “Wouldn’t you like to conduct the orchestra?” “Sure, I can’t wait.” “Well, you’re the only one around here with any orchestral experience.” I said, “What, I haven’t had any orchestral experience.” “Yes, but you’ve PLAYED in one.” That means you are a conductor if you’ve played in an orchestra.

Well, such as it was. They had five violins, clarinet, bassoon, that was it. String bass, cello, and PIANO--fill in, you see. It was kind of pitiful there for a while, but I was game--I had no choice! They had to grab players anywhere you could find them--faculty, local residents, students--and nobody was any good. It was pretty bad, and I wasn’t much better.

We had a concert coming up right away--Christmas Vespers--and we had to get together right away. In the first place, I had to find something that I thought they could play amongst this VAST repertoire in their library. At the first rehearsal, about half of the instruments were there. The next week, it was just be another arrangement of people, sort of like pick-up. I thought that this was hopeless, so I told the pianist to play loud! We’ll have to have something to carry us through. That was my experience with that orchestra. 

I also taught counterpoint, which I wasn’t planning to do, but this other teacher had left. He was the string teacher and taught counterpoint.

SE: How were your organ students there that first year?

RG: The first year, I think that I had six, and I was lucky to have that many. They didn’t know me, and the organ was coming next year. Then I started playing over the radio every Sunday afternoon, and that got a lot of attention for that area. Then the students began piling in, and there were some very good ones.

One of the prides of that school was the chapel building, which is a handsome building, and the organ. In the meantime, they have acquired a new music and arts building.

SE: How did your appointment to The University of Michigan come about?

RG: It was late in the year and I had been out in Los Angeles to play for my first national convention of the AGO. Then I played for Clarence Mader at his church in Los Angeles that summer, Immanuel Presbyterian Church, Wilshire Boulevard.

Marilyn Mason had played in Springfield, Illinois that spring, and I went over to hear her, and I met her afterwards. Then, in a few days’ time, she called and asked if I would like to be considered for a job at The University of Michigan. There were no vacancies then, but that summer--June--it opened up. So they called me up, flew me back. I met with the dean and the executive board, and was offered the position. Just like that!

SE: Who was the dean of the School of Music then?

RG: James Wallace--a grand guy. Just first rate. He was an ideal dean. The door was always open to students and faculty alike. He was not impressed with himself. His trump card: he was very humane. He would never miss a faculty recital. If there were two on the same night, he would go to the first half of one and the second half of the other. It was the same with some of the older students. He’d show up! 

SE: What have been any highlights of your years at Michigan?

RG: There have been many, such as receiving the Harold Haugh Award for Excellence in Teaching; I appreciated getting that award. And the Eastman School of Music Alumni Achievement Award.

In February 2002, Eastman and the Rochester Chapter of the American Guild of Organists (organized by Tom Trenney) invited me back to do a masterclass for their students. They wanted me to do a roundtable discussion with David Craighead (“Conversation with the Masters”), talking about the “old days.”

Right at the end of that, the Director of the School of Music, James Undercofler, surprised me and presented me with [that year’s] award for Distinguished Alumni Achievement. It was like a diploma, and he read off the citation. This was a surprise, a big surprise.

SE: How have organ teaching and playing evolved over the course of your 50-plus years of teaching? Compare your current students to former students.

RG: Students have changed in the 40 years I’ve been here. They’re not as open and natural. They’re more guarded--not all--more so than they used to be. They had more fun then. It’s all very serious now.

SE: How has the Organ Reform Movement affected organ building and performance?

RG: Well, the level of organ building and tonal design has improved somewhat; but I still enjoy a good E. M. Skinner with certain repertoire, and I have some students who feel that way. They are really fascinated with E. M. Skinner’s philosophy (if you want to use that word). I don’t find anything very charming in the neo-Baroque ideal. Cavaillé-Coll built organs according to his own ideal. He didn’t copy something from before. We wouldn’t have the great 19th-century heritage in France if he hadn’t followed his own creative urge.

SE: What advice would you give to young organists entering the profession today?

RG: Try to think of yourself as a musician first and don’t worry about what’s the latest thing. Follow your own musical instincts. I grew up playing on a flat, straight pedalboard in Oklahoma City, on the only mechanical action organ in town at that time, and I think that it’s still there. It never wore out. It was one of those Hinners--workhorse of an organ--and they just didn’t wear out. Like Austin--it doesn’t wear out.

SE: Can you say anything about your long-standing friendship/collegial relationship with Orpha Ochse?

RG: I first met Orpha when she was new at Eastman, as I was. I was sitting there (fourth floor), and she came up and asked me, “Does it make any difference which of these organs we can practice on?” I said, “No, as far as I know.” We just became friends. The organ department had a lot of new students that fall (1949), but of course, I’d been there since late June--taking lessons, practicing, working--and that’s when I got my church job, which was why I was there so early.

Her personality, sense of humor--very droll sense of humor--you’d think that she was dead serious about something, but she wasn’t. And she had this incredible ability to see into things--the phony side of things, which I appreciated very much, at that time especially.

SE: That must be an incredible thing to have a friend like Orpha over such a long period of time.

RG: Well she’s a rare bird, that’s one thing for sure, and she is also an extremely intelligent bird. She has an unbelievably sharp mind, and therefore it is fun, but you don’t fool her for a minute.

And her books are universally regarded and essential in any organist’s libary: The History of the Organ in the United States; Organists and Organ Playing in 19th-Century France and Belgium, a great resource; and more recently her books about the Austin and Murray Harris companies.

SE: What were some of your favorite organs to play throughout your career?

RG: The 1911 Austin at First Presbyterian Church, Oklahoma City.

The 1920 Kimball organ at the Shrine Auditorium, Masonic Temple, Oklahoma City.

The 1918 Kimball at First Church of Christ, Scientist, Oklahoma City.

At the Eastman School of Music, the 1936 G. Donald Harrison Aeolian-Skinner in Strong Auditorium. This was a totally different idea of organ design. I hear they’re going to restore it.

Church of the Advent, Boston, Massachusetts, 1936 Aeolian-Skinner. It has some of the loveliest sounds that you will hear anywhere. It, along with the Groton School instrument (1935), represented Harrison’s new “American Classic” design.

High on this list would be Merner Chapel, MacMurray College, Jacksonville, Illlinois: 4-manual Aeolian-Skinner (1952).

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1934 Aeolian-Skinner. It has been through many transformations/revisions but is now restored (under the supervision of current organist and former student, Peter Stoltzfus).

Bridges Hall, Pomona College, Claremont, California, 2002 C.B. Fisk. I just heard this a few weeks ago, demonstrated beautifully by college organist Bill Peterson--such an organ and such playing!

 

SE: What various influences led you to devote your efforts to the romantic repertoire?

RG: I like the music! I loved the Franck D-minor Symphony and heard it performed before I actually played it in the high-school orchestra. The Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3--a recording that I had on 78 record--the reeds of that organ were compelling. I identified with the sounds of those instruments right away. I did not know much about Cavaillé-Coll, but I knew that I liked those sounds.

SE: Do you want to say anything about your performing career, Bob?

RG: Well, I enjoyed it while it lasted. I’m not performing any more. I have what is called atrial fibrillation. Have you heard of that? My heart doesn’t have any rhythm: it doesn’t know where the beat is. It goes crazy because you can’t get enough oxygen for it to operate correctly, so I’m taking all of this medication--I have been now for a couple or three years. It keeps me sort of on an even keel.

The last performance that I did, I almost couldn’t play. I’d been out to West Texas. What a trip--nightmare of a trip! Flying out there, changing in Houston, missing the connection, galloping through the terminal, then missing the connection, then pain all over every inch of my body. It was heart failure. The heart was trying to do the best that it could, but it couldn’t keep up. I didn’t know that at that time. 

I got to the church the next morning. The organ man was there and the organ wasn’t ready to play. He said that I’d have to come back later on in a couple of hours and that they needed more time. I never got to the organ until the night before the performance. It didn’t go very well. I was too tired, by the time I got to second half, I thought that the other pieces were ho-hum, ordinary. Then I thought that maybe this was the right time to “turn the corner.”

I then went to North Texas State University, Denton, Texas, which was presenting a conference on Cavaillé-Coll. I did a recital of that repertoire on that organ in the main hall, and that was hard to do, too. I was just exhausted, and I couldn’t get rested. I thought then, “Just cool it. You don’t need to do this the rest of your life.” The more that I thought that way, the more comfortable I felt.

I played Widor Seventh, complete, on the last part of the program. I got into the next-to-last movement (slow movement) and the organ ciphered, so I had to stop, of course. By this time, I was so dizzy that I didn’t know which way was up, so they came up to see about me. I told Jesse Eschbach, my former student, that I couldn’t go on and that he would have to help me out and that I couldn’t finish the recital. Meanwhile, the audience was wondering what was happening since I didn’t return. I was supposed to teach a performance class the next morning. I did get up and do that.

Then I went to Memphis. I got things worked out, but there was trouble with the organ and one of these impossible situations where the console is where you can’t get to it--you needed to be an acrobat! Nice acoustics, though. Nice organ--Schantz. So I didn’t go. I didn’t play. I cancelled out about an hour before curtain time--too dizzy!

They all seemed to understand when I told them what had happened. But that was the last time I attempted to play anywhere, and I thought then, “That’s it. I’ve done this now since I was that high, so that’s fine.” Having made that decision, I felt as if there was a big weight lifted off of my shoulders. But I’m sorry that I didn’t know more about it (my situation) before that performance because people were down there and waiting. So I got on the plane the next morning and flew back here, and that was it.

SE: So, what about retirement and the whole concept of retirement?

RG: The concept of retirement? Well, at The University of Michigan we have what they call a retirement furlough. It’s a nice deal. You have another year to do things that you want to do and get paid full salary. You teach as much as you want to or not at all. And they’ll furnish you with a studio or office.

SE: So, will you do that then?

RG: I’m going to stay right here for the time being--and then, we’ll see. I have no idea what I’m going to do after that. I think I’m going to get together all of my annotated copies of all the scores of Franck, some Widor, and some Sowerby, and get those out. That’ll take me the next 10 years!

SE: What about recording?

RG: The only thing that I regret is that I didn’t go on and record more than I did. I wish I had gone ahead and done all the Franck. I had that in mind, but I didn’t get to it soon enough. And I’m not too happy with what I did, although I’ve been told over and over again how wonderful it is, so I thought, “OK, if you think it’s so wonderful, I’ll shut up.”

That was a wonderful organ (All Saints’ Episcopal, Worcester, Massachusetts) for Franck, rather than packing up and going abroad. I didn’t want to do that. There’s a lot more to a “telling” performance than a particular organ. The particular organ does help, but I don’t think you have to have only THIS organ. If you do, you’re kind of stuck.

SE: Your legacy as a teacher and a performer are legendary, and you have been an inspiration to countless numbers of organists, myself included. What do you feel has been your greatest contribution to the organ world?

RG: Students (without hesitation), and I don’t hesitate a minute to say that, in spite of a few huge disappointments; yet some times I can’t stand them! But that’s more lasting. And maybe, to a certain extent, my performance, because you demonstrate what you’ve been teaching. One should be able to do that: put up or shut up. But I’ve done that over a period of how many years, so I didn’t feel too badly about realizing I couldn’t do it anymore or shouldn’t do it anymore.

RB: It’s like a chain of succession.

RG: Well, we now have the next generation of mine. I’ve been blessed the past 54 years with some extraordinarily talented students--almost too numerous to list here.

A Conversation with Todd Wilson

Jerome Butera

Jerome Butera is editor of THE DIAPASON.

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One of America’s leading concert organists, Todd Wilson is head of the organ department at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He also teaches at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, and serves as organ curator of the Norton Memorial Organ (E. M. Skinner, 1931) in Severance Hall, Cleveland, Ohio, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra. He has recently been appointed as Artist-in-Residence at Trinity Cathedral (Episcopal) in Cleveland, and as House Organist at Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens in Akron.
For nineteen years he was director of music and organist at the Church of the Covenant (Presbyterian) in Cleveland. From 1989 through 1993 he was also head of the organ department at Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music in Berea. Prior to these positions, he served as organist and master of the choristers at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York. In New York, he taught on the faculties of Adelphi and Hofstra Universities and was organist of the George Mercer School of Theology.
Todd Wilson has been heard in concert throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 1992 he was a recitalist for Austrian Radio in Vienna, and he has performed for the American Guild of Organists national conventions. He has recorded on the JAV, Delos, Disques du Solstice, and Gothic labels.
Todd Wilson has won numerous competitions, including the French Grand Prix de Chartres, the Fort Wayne Competition, the Strader National Scholarship Competition, and the national competition sponsored by the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. A sought-after adjudicator, he has been a member of the jury for many of the world’s most prestigious competitions such as the Nuremberg Competition (Germany), the Calgary International Organ Festival and Competition, the St. Albans International Organ Festival (England), the Grand Prix de Chartres and the Toulouse Festival Competitions (France), and the American Guild of Organists National Young Artists Competition. Todd Wilson is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists, <www.concertorganists.com&gt;.
I met with Todd at the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland in May 2008 and at Trinity University, Deerfield, Illinois in April 2009.

Jerome Butera: Tell us about your childhood and early training. Where did you grow up? Did you come from a musical family?
Todd Wilson
: I grew up in Toledo, Ohio. My father was an amateur musician—he played the French horn in his early years and always loved the horn. During the years I was growing up, he didn’t have the time to keep up his playing. Then, much later, ten years before he passed away, he went back to horn playing and enjoyed it greatly. My early musical recollections are LPs of Sousa marches and the Mozart horn concertos played by Dennis Brain. My dad played those all the time. To this day I still adore Sousa marches and all the standard horn repertoire.

JB: Did you start with piano lessons?
TW
: Yes—my real start in music was at age nine or so. The church we attended was Trinity Episcopal in downtown Toledo, which had a wonderful Skinner organ and in those days a thriving men and boys choir. When I was in the fourth grade I was recruited for the choir. The choirmaster was a wonderful man named Wesley Hartung. He came to our house, we all sat down in the living room, and he said “I think Todd would be a good boy for the choir.” I was just transfixed by the whole thing—I loved the choir, the camaraderie, the singing, and the organ. This was quite a grand old Skinner organ that had many beautiful sounds and a thrilling 32-foot Bombard that shook the whole building.
You can imagine this 9-year-old drinking all this in. I went to Wesley Hartung and said “I want to play the organ.” I can still remember him looking down at me and saying “You shouldn’t even touch the organ until you’ve had many years of piano.” So I said “OK, let’s get going with the piano right away.” He was a wonderful teacher, a very strict old-school teacher, and you didn’t pass one piece until every “I” was dotted and every “T” crossed and you could play it perfectly from memory. Everything had to be just so. He started me off by setting the bar very high, and I’ve always been hugely grateful for that.

JB: Did you study organ with him also?
TW
: No, unfortunately he passed away before I was able to start on the organ. I always kept up the piano, and to this day I still love playing the piano. The literature and the feel of the piano—it’s so good for the fingers. I continued piano study with Hugh Murray, who was the organist at Rosary Cathedral in Toledo, and started the organ in high school with a wonderful man also there in Toledo named James Francis, who was the organist at Collingwood Presbyterian. Collingwood Church has a Holtkamp, Sr. organ from about 1955 in the balcony—Rückpositiv on the railing, all exposed, so it was the opposite of the big Skinner organs that I had experienced at that time.
I can still remember walking in for that first lesson with Jim Francis when I was a freshman in high school. I remember the sound of the organ and the feel of it—I remember being struck by how different and how clear this organ was. That was another little turning point for me as an organist—my first exposure to a “modern organ,” as it were.

JB: What kind of teacher was he?
TW
: He was a terrific teacher, very encouraging to me. He allowed me to play some things that were a little beyond what I should have been doing through high school, but at the same time that stoked my enthusiasm in a big way. I remember I did a recital my senior year in high school and really worked hard on it—that was the first full organ recital I played. Jim Francis was a wonderful man and fun—a very different personality than Wesley Hartung. He was younger with a vivid sense of humor.

JB: Were you playing at a church in high school?
TW
: Yes, all through high school I always had little church jobs around Toledo, and Jim would set me up with substituting here and there. I remember a few jobs where an organist would be out for several months. Jim would get wind of it and recommend me.

JB: That’s great experience; you got to see a lot of different organs.
TW
: Different organs, different services, different denominations, hymnals and all that. My senior year in high school I had a nice little Methodist church that was my first time being responsible for a choir week by week. I still keep in touch with a few people from that choir. There was a nice two-manual organ and the choir was right in front, and I got to do lots of standard choral literature, Palm Sunday cantata, all sorts of things like that. For a senior in high school to be in charge of planning, rehearsing, performing, publicizing—it was all a valuable and exciting experience.

JB: What led you to the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music?
TW
: Jim Francis had studied there in the early ’50s with Wayne Fisher, with whom I went on to study.

JB: What kind of teacher was Wayne Fisher?
TW
: He was a remarkable teacher. I was so lucky when I think back on it, to have stumbled on these fabulous teachers—my folks didn’t know much about organ teachers so they weren’t in a position to choose one who was better than the next, and I didn’t know enough—it was all just mostly dumb luck to follow on these people one right after the other. I always felt very fortunate about that. Jim Francis suggested I should go down to Cincinnati for a high school summer music institute. I went for two summers in high school, and Wayne Fisher and I hit it off right from the beginning.
He was a fabulous teacher. He was one of those bachelors whose students were his family, and it was a multi-generational family. He kept in touch with all the students from years before; there’d be parties and it was such fun. I would say that I worked very hard and played very hard in those college years. I practiced like mad and learned a lot of things then that are still at the core of my repertoire—because I learned them so well in those years and memorized them solidly.

JB: As a player, was Wayne Fisher flamboyant or scholarly?
TW
: No, not scholarly, he was not of that scholarly generation. He grew up in the ’20s and the ’30s and studied with Dupré in France in the ’30s; his bachelor’s degree was in piano, and his master’s degree was in organ. So he had wonderful fingers, very live fingers I would say—he was that kind of player. His playing at its best was full of rhythm, full of vitality, full of color. He was a musician who loved the organ and played it very well, but his interest in music and I think his general approach to music was not that of an organist only. He had a huge record collection, and only a small bit of it was organ. He was a great fan of the piano literature and Rachmaninoff in particular. I remember Wayne Fisher telling me about traveling in the early ’30s to hear Rachmaninoff play a solo recital at Severance Hall in Cleveland.

JB: Todd, you’ve been in Cleveland for almost 20 years. Can you tell us a little bit about the positions you had before you came to Cleveland?
TW
: I had always been much involved with and enthusiastic about the English cathedral repertoire and Anglican music in general. I really wanted to go to England and spend some time soaking up things day by day in an English cathedral. During my master’s degree preparation I thought more seriously about that, and several people helped me out, Gerre Hancock in particular.
I wrote letters to several English cathedral organists asking if I could come over and hang around. Nowadays that sort of thing is pretty common, but in those days there weren’t so many opportunities. I remember Jim Litton had done that early in his career and John Fenstermaker had as well. I talked to both of them and they suggested a few people to write to.
One of them was Allan Wicks at Canterbury Cathedral. Of the folks I wrote to, the first one who wrote back and said yes was Allan Wicks. So, after finishing my master’s degree, I spent about a year in Canterbury, playing some and accompanying some, watching the rehearsals day by day, and listening to every service the choir sang. I helped out in various ways and also had the chance to travel around England and Europe and hear the music in other collegiate chapels and cathedrals.
It was during that fall that I thought I should enter the Chartres Competition. I was feeling burned out from competitions because I had entered a lot of them in college, and I thought I’d do one more and really give it my best. So I worked hard that summer preparing. There were three rounds, and you had to play everything from memory, and it was a very demanding competition. I was very fortunate to win, and that enabled me to play some concerts around France—it was great fun. But I spent that year mostly in England, based at Canterbury, and it was a wonderful experience.
When I came back to the U.S., I took the job that my former teacher had had at Collingwood Presbyterian Church in Toledo for a year. I was able to do lots of things because I was full of youthful enthusiasm, and we did concerts and many ambitious programs that I never had the resources to do at a church before.
But I really wanted to be in an Anglican situation, so I was very happy a year or so later to get the job at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York. That’s a cathedral with quite a long and interesting history—not a terribly large building, but very beautiful. I loved working with the men and boys choir. The years there were some of the happiest of my life. I still look back with the fondest memories and still keep in touch with some of the kids who were in the choir—those were very special times.

JB: Did you go from Garden City to Cleveland?
TW
: Yes, after brief stays back in Cincinnati and in Paoli, Pennsylvania (outside Philadelphia). Our first child had been born in Garden City, but even in those days, of course, Long Island was a very expensive place to live, and we paid what seemed a fortune for a small one-bedroom apartment. We came back to Ohio where housing prices and the cost of living in general were much more modest and still are.

JB: In Cleveland you were able to combine Church of the Covenant and the Cleveland Institute of Music. Was that a joint appointment?
TW
: There was the possibility of it. I started teaching at CIM the second year I was here. Karel Paukert who had taught at CIM was ready to give that up, and it was very nice that it worked out.

JB: And you were able to have some of your organ students as organ scholars at the church.
TW
: We’ve had church music interns over the years at several churches here in Cleveland––Covenant being one of them—a terrific succession over 20 years of wonderful students, several of whom have gone on to fine careers of their own.

JB: Was the choir an all-professional group?
TW
: No, it’s a mixed group, with usually ten paid singers. We often had some students who sing with us, but I tried to have section leaders who were not students to lend continuity over the years. We had some wonderful singers who stayed with us for a long time.

JB: How do you balance the demands of your church work, teaching schedule, recitals, recordings, and family—what’s your secret formula?
TW
: As you well know, it’s never easy and it’s a constant juggling act. It’s very rare that I feel I’ve done a perfect job of it.

JB: What do you enjoy doing the most?
TW
: I enjoy all of those things. As an “older” father with kids spanning quite a number of years, I love the time with each of them. It’s a challenge to do everything and feel like you’re doing your best all the time. Sometimes when you’re doing that many things you feel you’re stretching yourself a little thin. Often it’s good for us to be stretched; you realize it forces you to be economical with your time and make really good use of a limited number of hours.
I love the teaching, I love the church work; the balance of those two things over the years has been very rewarding. We’ve had some terrific students who have been such a joy, and the annual cycle of the church year has been very helpful, sort of an anchor in life. I love playing the Sunday service. No matter how scattered you may feel in other ways, having the chance to play great hymns on a wonderful organ with a really good choir—it keeps you grounded. So much inspiring choral literature comes up again and again; you think of all the wonderful Advent anthems, and you think “oh boy, it’s about to be Advent again,” and the same for every season. I’ve enjoyed all of that tremendously.

JB: When did you come under management?
TW
: A long time ago—just before Karen McFarlane moved the agency to Cleveland, it must have been about 1982 or so. I was in Garden City. I remember quite vividly Karen called me and asked if we could have lunch, and we met at a little deli in New York. She invited me to be part of the management, which I accepted very gratefully, and have been happily a part of the management ever since.

JB: You’ve played recitals all throughout the United States, Europe and Japan, including some of the significant orchestra hall installations—Walt Disney Hall, the Meyerson, and here in Severance. Could you single out a few especially memorable recitals on fine organs?
TW
: Well, there are so many organs that are really a delight in various ways. I always find that question a little hard to answer, because I usually forget to mention some organ. In recent years I certainly loved playing the Disney Hall organ because I was able to play with the L.A. Philharmonic—and I especially love playing with orchestra. I think for any of us those gigs are always infrequent, especially when you get to play with a top-level orchestra in a beautiful hall on a wonderful organ. It’s rare that all those things happen to come together. So that was a real treat. I played a number of years ago for the OHS national convention at Girard College in Philadelphia, and that was a big thrill. Just recently I have to say the new Fritts organ at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Columbus is sensational—certainly one of the great organs I have played in this country or anywhere else.

JB: Tell us about your role as organ curator at Severance Hall and about the restoration.
TW
: I wasn’t really a part of the restoration. They invited me to take this position as curator when the organ was done, and it’s a joy to be connected to such a fine organ in a beautiful hall, and with one of the world’s great orchestras.

JB: And you’ve done recordings here too, haven’t you?
TW
: A couple of recordings. The Musical Arts Association of the Cleveland Orchestra asked me to do one of Christmas music, which I believe is still the only solo recording of that organ, and then a couple of years ago a CD with Michael Sachs, the principal trumpet player of the Cleveland Orchestra. We did a recital at Severance of organ and trumpet things and recorded that program.

JB: I’m looking over your discography, and there’s such a range. You’ve done the complete Duruflé works, a disc of Widor, Jongen, Langlais, Bonnet, Demessieux and Dupré, the complete Thalben-Ball, the complete Frank Bridge, a 2-CD set for Delos (In a Quiet Cathedral), Double Forte with David Higgs, and National Cathedral Live. You’ve mentioned the trumpet and organ CD here and you’ve done an organ and cello recording with your daughter Rachel. Tell us about that one.
TW
: That was really fun to do, and we did it in your neighborhood at St. Luke’s in Evanston. Rachel is my oldest daughter, and she recently graduated from Ohio State University. She studied cello from about age five and is a very gifted cellist, really a beautiful player with a very fine ear. Her ear is certainly much better than mine. I remember when Rachel was nine or ten she’d hear a soloist in a choir, someone I’d think was singing magnificently, and she’d say “you know, that note was a little sharp.” It sounded fine to me, but that’s the kind of ear she has.

JB: The list of recordings represents, one would have to say, a very eclectic repertoire. Do you find yourself drawn to any particular period of music or any particular composer?
TW
: I think as the years go by my interests in music and organ music are more and more eclectic. I’ve always enjoyed playing 19th and 20th century music, and I suspect that if I were going to name any area I might say that, but I certainly would not want to be limited only to that repertoire.

JB: You’ve had experience with Skinner organs and have played many Ernest Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner organs—do you have particular fondness for that type of organ?
TW
: I enjoy them very much, and appreciate all the remarkable craftsmanship and the beautiful sounds, often very extraordinary sounds. But I enjoy playing lots of different organs, and as the years go by I am more and more persuaded of the great value of playing mechanical-action organs on a regular basis. So I wouldn’t want to limit myself to playing electric-action organs by Skinner or anyone else. Mechanical action makes you more aware of details that even with your best efforts you’re not sensitive to in electric-action instruments. You listen in a different way, your perception is much heightened, I think. I’ve certainly noticed that in teaching. I can see such a difference in students when they play regularly on a mechanical-action organ.

JB: Do you have any comments on the current organ scene—the renewed interest in Cavaillé-Coll, certainly in Skinner and Anglican-style organs, as well as the continued interest in historical building styles?
TW
: It all seems to me very healthy. I remember so well growing up that there were very rigid camps: this was OK, and that was not OK, and there was very little sympathy or empathy between those various camps.
There’s not much of that anymore, and so many fabulous organs are being built in all these different styles, with a remarkable degree of quality and musicality. It’s all very good. It’s wonderful as players, as musicians in the broadest sense, to be able to play all these different kinds of organs with an appreciation for what it takes to play a particular type of organ really well. It makes us broader and more complete musicians. The organ profession is much livelier, I think.

JB: Do you have any observations on the general style of teaching and playing from your college days to where you are now?
TW
: I think the teaching and the playing reflects that same thing. The standard, the versatility, and the knowledge required to be an adaptable organist nowadays are a great deal broader than they were 30 years ago, and that’s all to the good.

JB: Has your playing changed in the last 30 years?
TW
: I hope so! It’s hard to be your own best judge, but one learns so much through teaching. It’s listening, it’s thinking how does this music work, what is it all about, how can I help this student to zero in on that. Of course, you deal with that in terms of your own playing as well, and I think the instruments are a great prod to better playing, better teaching, better listening with all these different styles. You travel around and play recitals and you’re going to play a wide variety of organs nowadays in all the styles that you mentioned.

JB: Now you’ve also done some silent film accompaniment. Tell us how you got involved in that.
TW
: I’ve always enjoyed improvising, and the first year I was in Cincinnati was Gerre Hancock’s last year there before he went to St. Thomas in New York. Another influence for me was Jim Francis, my teacher in Toledo. When I went down to Cincinnati as a high school student, he said “Now you’ve got to visit Christ Church and hear Gerre Hancock play.”
I was so bowled over, I can still remember that first service I heard. It was the middle of the summer, nothing big going on, but his service playing was such a departure from anything I had heard before. I was smitten by it, and have been a huge admirer of Gerre’s ever since. We had him here at Covenant for a weekend a year ago. He worked with the choir and improvised and gave a talk at our AGO annual dinner. It was such a treat for me to have him work with the choir—we did a whole program of his music.
Hearing Gerre play really fired my interest in improvisation, and I’ve always kind of dabbled in it. I started doing the silent films at Covenant on our summer concert series. Sure enough a lot of people showed up, and one thing led to another. Every so often someone asks me to do a silent film.

JB: What music do you play for that?
TW
: My repertoire of films is not very large, so I usually have some themes for each film and I do leitmotifs, a kind of quasi-Wagnerian approach. I have a little theme for each main character, drama themes, and love scene themes; but mostly I try to have some identifiable themes for the main characters and then fill in around that. And then it’s fun to put in little snippets of standard organ literature depending on the audience. If I’m playing for an AGO chapter, I try to put in dibs and dabs of famous organ pieces, just sneak enough in that they might guess what that is.

JB: You’ve referred to your cellist daughter Rachel; can you tell us more about your families?
TW
: Anne and I had two children, Rachel and Clara; Clara just finished her sophomore year at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and is working on a pre-med track. She’s a fine pianist and loves to play. I’m married to a wonderful woman, Jenny Eppich, who is an urban planner, and we have two children: Ben who just turned nine, and a little daughter Ruth who is four.

JB: Are they musical children too?
TW
: Ben has a very sweet voice, and I think he could be a fine member of a boys choir. He matches pitch well and also plays the trumpet. We did Britten’s St. Nicolas a while ago at Covenant, and Ben sang the boy Nicolas to great acclaim—that was a very special moment for me as his proud papa, as you can imagine.

JB: You’ve had an interesting year. Tell me about the time at Indiana University.
TW
: It’s been an interesting and challenging year! I taught at CIM one day per week, and continued as curator of the organ in Severance Hall, while commuting to Bloomington and teaching there for three or four days each week. I enjoyed teaching at IU, but ultimately we were not able to move to Bloomington on a permanent basis. I sure became a fan of books on tape during those long drives back and forth!

JB: What are some of your goals now in Cleveland?
TW
: I look forward to the continued evolution of the CIM organ department. We have a wonderful new president of the school, and it really is the start of a new era there. We’ve been fortunate to have terrific students, and I enjoy working with them as performers and church musicians. It’s an ongoing pleasure to look after the organ at Severance Hall, certainly one of the most beautiful concert halls in the world. I’m thrilled to be part of the music program at Trinity Cathedral! It’s a beautiful building with two Flentrop organs, a very lively and diverse congregation, and a superb new musician in Dr. Horst Buchholz. Another fun new project will be to create a concert series and other uses for the newly restored Aeolian organ at Stan Hywet Hall in Akron. Stan Hywet is the amazing Tudor Revival-style home built by F. A. Seiberling, the co-founder of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. The house organ is located in a spacious and remarkably beautiful music room.

JB: Do you have any recording projects on the horizon?
TW
: I’m making a recording on the new Fritts organ at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Columbus, Ohio. It’s a sensational organ, pretty eclectic, really more so than Fritts’s earlier work—very successful and very exciting. You can play quite early music, Renaissance and pre-Bach, and everything right down to the present day. It’s a very large and complete 3-manual organ in a superb acoustic. We’ve already recorded the music for organ, cello, and English horn, and I’ll record the solo pieces in the next few months.

JB: What’s on the recording?
TW
: The Reubke Sonata, which people have been after me to record for a very long time. It’s been one of the cornerstone pieces of my repertoire since college days. So often people ask after recitals if I’ve ever recorded it, and I never have. When I played that organ in Columbus I thought it would sound fabulous there. So, the Reubke, some Widor, a piece for organ and cello by Craig Phillips, and Calvin Hampton’s Variations on Amazing Grace for organ and English horn, which is a piece I’ve always been very fond of and I don’t believe there’s any commercial recording available. This will be on the Delos label.

JB: Any humorous experiences you would care to share?
TW
: I don’t have the best memory for funny events, except when they happen to float to the surface prodded by something else. I was recently reminded of one quite funny story, which is funnier now that I look back on it some years later.
This would have been ten or twelve years ago when we got a new console at Covenant, a movable console that’s been such a joy to play, built by the Holtkamp company. The organ is essentially an Aeolian-Skinner. In the mid-90s Holtkamp provided a console and made a few tonal additions as well. We had a dedication service for new console, with fancy music and blessings. Tom Trenney was my student assistant at the time, and we both played lots of stuff.
There is a big hooded trumpet in the rear balcony that’s by far the loudest stop on the organ—a wonderful stop, and it plays from the gallery Swell. One of our frequent habits was to put that on with the Unison Off so we could have it available when we wanted it, but it wouldn’t play through the normal Swell to Great coupler. Unbeknownst to us, there was a little electronic bug in the console, and all the gallery Swell played through the front Swell coupler—so when we had that big trumpet ready it turned out to be playing all the time. The console is positioned around the corner and we really couldn’t hear all that well. So, I think we played nearly every verse of every hymn with that great big Chamade trumpet on without knowing it—which would have been deafening in the congregation and most atypical certainly. The grande dame of the congregation said after the service that the organ now had “that Holtkamp edge.” Chick Holtkamp and Karen and everybody laughed greatly afterward.

JB: What are some of your non-musical interests?
TW
: I treasure time with my family, as the years seem to pass ever more quickly. We all especially look forward to our annual summer get-away to Wellfleet, Cape Cod. Jenny and I love bike riding and gardening together. I’m an avid reader, particularly of anything historical. Sports-wise, I am a lifelong baseball fan, and also enjoy golf, even though my golf game has gone mostly downhill since I was in high school. Pie baking has become my cooking specialty, and I hope to find time to broaden my cooking repertoire in the years to come.

JB: Todd, thank you for the interview. We wish you continued success and will follow your career with great interest.

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