Against All Odds: A few inconveniences on the road to becoming an organist

Norberto Guinaldo

Editor’s note: Part I of this article was published in the March issue of The Diapason, pages 20–22..

 

Organ concerts

There were, I learned, only two concert organists in Buenos Aires (and probably in the whole country), who, once a year, would give recitals in churches and institutions they had access to, sometimes sponsored by large musical organizations such as Collegium Musicum and others. They were the Italian Ermete (Hermes) Forti  (1906–72), who settled in Buenos Aires in 1940, mentioned above, a student of Fernando Germani in Italy; and Julio (Jules Michel Adolf) Perceval (1903–63), a Belgian who settled in Buenos Aires in 1929 (and died in Chile in a car accident), a student of Paul de Maleingreau and Marcel Dupré. He became the organist of the Metropolitan Cathedral (19th-century three-manual Walcker organ) and the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, a 19th-century high school connected with the Universidad de Buenos Aires (19th or early 20th-century thee-manual Laukhuff organ). In 1940 Perceval moved to the University of Cuyo to establish the Conservatory of Music. Forti then took over at the Colegio Nacional.

Every winter these organists would play a series of concerts in these two venues. I will forever associate these places with the wonderful experiences of hearing for the first time real pipe organs in exquisite surroundings! They were played by Hermes Forti at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, whose assembly room was of palatial proportions in beauty and size, and by Julio Perceval at the Basilica de Nuestra Señora de la Merced, which housed a three-manual Walcker of considerable size. One of the unforgettable experiences of my life was to hear Perceval play, in this venue, the Toccata, Villancico y Fuga that Ginastera dedicated to him—in presence of the composer who, at the end of the concert, gave Perceval a theme for an improvisation. My young mind was at a loss to comprehend how it was possible to create on the spot such a monumental, amazing, and overwhelming piece of music!

Forti’s concerts at the “Colegio” were just as exciting, encompassing music from pre-Baroque to modern French. My first experience with that organ has stuck in my mind since: it was 1953, my first year of lessons.

I remember only one piece of that concert: the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C of J. S. Bach. I got there late, the massive doors to the auditorium were closed, and the porter wouldn’t let me in while the performance was going on. I begged with him to let me in, which he did. I came in quietly and stood there without moving in front of the doors. It was during the Adagio. The glorious tender sounds got to me, and I thought I was in another world—the one I yearned to inhabit. I think I worked very hard to contain sobs that wanted desperately to come out.

I knew then (and still think so) that organists are the most privileged people in the world! There were many other concerts there that even I participated in, as a registrant and page-turner. (As an aside, 33 years later I would be playing a concert in the same place. Who would have thought then!) 

 

A job and more lessons

Forti soon made me his assistant at the Basílica del Santísimo Sacramento with its Mutin Cavaillé-Coll organ. I played mainly weddings and weekday services. It was the parish of the well-to-do. What I got for playing weddings was, for a kid my age, incredible and helped me with some of my expenses. There was a seminary there, and true to the name of the church, it was a place of “perpetual adoration” either in the main sanctuary or in the crypt, which also housed a two-manual French organ. Practicing there, and in Catholic churches in general, has always been a problem. I never practiced on that organ (and I don’t think that Forti ever did!). With four manuals and mechanical action, it was extremely heavy when coupled with its many levers, couplers, “appels,” etc. One would go in “cold” to play for services! I never heard a concert on that instrument until after the Italian firm Tamburini rebuilt and electrified it in 1955, installing a new console.

The Escuela Superior didn’t offer degrees or certificates. Forti insisted that I should attend the School of Fine Arts in the city of La Plata (the capital of the Province of Buenos Aires), where he also taught, and work towards a degree. I registered and took organ, piano, harmony, and counterpoint.

The distance from my home to the school by public transportation was too long. I had to walk to the local train station (eight 100-meter blocks), ride the train for half an hour, walk a few blocks to the subway, ride for 15 or 20 minutes to the next train line, ride (for one hour!) the train to La Plata, then ride the streetcar to the school. One hour and a half for organ practice, time for the other classes on different days, and, of course, organ class once a week (on a two-manual Wurlitzer organ!) for which everyone stayed to hear everyone play. I would leave the house around 8:00 a.m. and come back around 6:00 p.m.

I did this for a couple of years, always thinking that I couldn’t keep it up. The excessive travel time did not make sense, and besides, I had to start thinking about earning some money. I was advancing pretty well with my organ playing to the point that I thought I needed “a real organ” to practice on. Going to various churches to ask permission to practice always elicited the same response: No. I prevailed on Maestro Forti to get me permission to practice at Colegio Nacional. He did. I thought myself privileged. What an opportunity! It went on for a while until one fateful day, September 19, 1955.

 

Political instability

It was mid-morning. I got out of the subway to walk the couple of blocks to the “Colegio,” and I began to hear shots and explosions. The Colegio Nacional was also a couple of blocks from the “Pink House,” the seat of government. The movement of people, perhaps a bit more harried that morning, did not surprise me. Buenos Aires has always been a busy city; but I saw a lot of people congregated on the narrow sidewalks around the Colegio, and arriving there, I went up the few steps going to the main entrance. I saw the porter, who asked me, “What are you doing here, kid?” I responded, “I’ve come to practice on the organ as always.” “The school is closed,” he responded, “and you better get out of here if you don’t want to get killed!” “What’s going on?” I asked. “Go home!” he said. I saw many trucks filled with men yelling and chanting slogans going by the narrow street. It was surreal; I could still hear the shots! I did not ask any more questions and headed back to the subway and straight home. Later that day I learned that Juan Perón had been forcefully deposed. The end of an era for the country, but not of its influence and consequences. It was also the end of my privileges at the Colegio.

The political instability of the country wasn’t good for those working in institutions run by the government. Many posts (I believe) obtained by political maneuvering and connections began to be unsteady, and many were lost. Maestro Forti lost his jobs except the one at the church. He experienced a period of great depression, and I don’t know how he managed his life. We, his faithful students, kept close to him. I continued being his assistant at the church. Just playing the Mutin-Cavaillé-Coll organ was a wonderful experience, and so was the money I got for the services.

 

A new school

After a while I learned that a new institution of learning was being organized in Buenos Aires, the Universidad Católica Argentina. There would be a music department, and the eminent composer Alberto Ginastera would be the organizer and head of it. There was going to be an organ department, and Ginastera chose Hermes Forti to be its head. I enrolled as a student there. Each department required an assistant, and Forti chose me. The institution began in another “mansion” owned by the diocese in an old residential neighborhood. The large living room was the concert hall. Back to lessons on the Hammond organ. At least I had something to practice on without the need of excessive travel.

At the end of the first year I was chosen to play an organ concert. Two things only I remember of that concert: I played the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue of J. S. Bach, and Alberto Ginastera was seated in the first row leaning his head on the wall (probably bored!). It was a hot December day. And no air conditioning!

Then and for some years I earned some money playing piano in nightclubs with tango orchestras. Upon reaching my 18th birthday and looking ahead to my 20th with the possibility of being conscripted into the army for one year, or into the marine for two, I took the option given by the government of being a policeman (in the city) for a year (a salaried job), relieved of the above required obligations. After three months’ training, I became a policeman! My studies had to wait and also my organ playing. I hated the job, but with the money I earned I bought a new piano. New Hammond organs (the only electronic brand available then) were outrageously priced. It was impossible for a student to buy one.

Years back, at a concert in Colegio Nacional I met a young American with whom I became friends, a relationship that lasted for years in Argentina and later in the United States. Our conversations, mostly about organs and opportunities in his country, made me think that I might have there the chance to get what was almost impossible to obtain here. The idea never left me.

 

Moving to the United States

Fast forward to 1959. Foolish, like most dreamers are, thinking only of the best side of things, and without counting the cost of the realities immigrants (with little means) have to face, I headed for the United States (with a visa, of course), not only with my dreams of pipe organs, but with a wife at my side! I was 22. We ended up in Los Angeles, California. Stanley Bellamy (Eddy as we called him), my American friend, helped us to get settled.

For all his talk about organs, Eddy was totally ignorant of the great community of organists in the U.S. However, he knew that I could get a paying job playing in a Protestant church (which I had never visited in Buenos Aires, because there weren’t many). Knowing nothing of the American Guild of Organists, we headed for the office of the Los Angeles Council of Churches.

Yes! There was a Methodist church in the town of Norwalk that needed an organist. We arrived at the church, an old small white-frame building, for an interview and audition. The pastor and the music committee were there. They wanted to hear me play. To my dismay the organ was a two-manual and pedal “Everett Orgatron!” In today’s parlance, it would be called a “harmonium on steroids,” a reed organ with amplification. They offered me the job and a salary of $75 dollars a month. I took it. That amount was exactly the rent price of a small two-bedroom bungalow in East Los Angeles, which we took. The rest of our income came from an eight-hour job at a lock factory. No time for organ practice, I just went in “cold” on Sundays to play for the services. The Protestant church was a good environment, and the people very gracious. I held that job for four years. Within those four years, the church built a new sanctuary a few blocks away and installed an Allen organ, a TC-1 model, I believe.

In the interim, a piano teacher from the church was moving to New York and left to my care all her students (30 of them!). With permission from the church I taught them on a piano in the basement. With some meager savings and a personal loan from a bank we bought a nice three-bedroom home close to the church and set up a studio there. I also got a job at a Jewish temple in a nearby town (a Hammond organ again!). The goodness of the USA was beginning to be shown in our lives. I was let go at the lock factory. The momentary shock turned to really be a blessing—now I was (in a sense) on my own.

Being a full-time piano teacher with two organist’s jobs brought some steady income. Besides, I was a few blocks away from the church and began to do some serious practice on the Allen organ.

 

A church with a pipe organ

Getting a job with a pipe organ and doing serious study with a good teacher was an ever-present goal in my mind. But . . . where to go? I did not know anyone in the profession! Eddy Bellamy, through a referral from a music school in Los Angeles, connected me with an organist at a Christian Science church in Beverly Hills that housed a four-manual Aeolian-Skinner of considerable size. The organist, Ronald Hall, had studied in New York with Lynnwood Farnam.

It did not mean anything to me at the time, ignorant as I was of this country’s outstanding artists. Ronald Hall was a very kind man and a romanticist at heart. The organ, an extraordinary instrument, was in an acoustically dead environment. I yearned then for the churches of Buenos Aires. (That organ is now in the Arboretum of the former Crystal Cathedral—now Christ Cathedral—of Garden Grove, California.)

I studied with Hall for about a year. It was he who introduced me to the American Guild of Organists. I joined the Los Angeles Chapter in 1961 with him as a sponsor. I am, as of this writing, still a member of it. I made a recording on that organ for a chapter project that was aired by a local radio station. 

Our family grew, and financial obligations forced me to stop lessons for a while. Membership in the AGO chapter and their monthly recitals of outstanding local, American, and European artists, plus reading The Diapason, gave me a picture of the scope of the profession here and abroad and spurred the desire to accomplish greater things of my own. All that, together with the church, fed my spirit and my hopes. 

Although I was a bit “green” in many respects, the Los Angeles AGO Chapter asked me to play a concert, my first in the United States, on three-manual Casavant at the First Methodist Church of Santa Monica, California. It was 1962. The week before, I attended the world premiere of Alberto Ginastera’s Cantata para la America Mágica for soprano and percussion at University of California, Los Angeles. I invited him to my concert since I was going to play his Toccata, Villancico y Fuga. He declined on account of his having to attend the recording of his work. I never saw him again.

Organists in churches with good organs hang on to their positions, sometimes for life. That’s what I learned in my quest to find a post with a good organ. There has to be something for me out there, I thought, and the search went on. In 1964 a position was open at Oneonta Congregational Church in South Pasadena, well known for having an excellent music program. The church had a three-manual organ. Exactly what I needed, and the salary was four times what I was getting!

Unfortunately it was for only one year. Their organist, Ronald Huntington, was taking a sabbatical leave. Besides being a great organist he was professor of comparative religions at Chapman College in Orange, California. It was a hard decision to make and “big shoes” to fill. What was I going to do at the end of that year? I would leave that up to Providence. I took the chance, auditioned, and was accepted. They had a great choir, and its director, Warren Marsh, was a hard taskmaster. I practiced Monday through Saturday, plus of course, two Sunday services. It was a great learning experience!

 

A new teacher

Since I now had a pipe organ at my disposal, I thought I needed a good teacher, and with a better salary it was a bit easier to pay for lessons (not so easy though, since by then we had three children!). I approached the best known in the Los Angeles area, Clarence Mader, and he took me as a student. I made excellent progress under his tutelage and learned many new things about interpretation of the various schools of organ playing.

Lessons about Romantic music took place in the main sanctuary, which housed a 1929 four-manual Skinner organ. Lessons on the music of 18th-century composers took place on the church’s fairly new three-manual Schlicker organ in the chapel.

It was here that I learned something that was totally lacking in my organ technique: the art of phrasing and, particularly, articulation. It was a revelation that I applied religiously to tremendous success in my work as an organist and later as a teacher.

 

The composer

The harmony lessons of a private teacher years back in Buenos Aires and later at both a school of fine arts and Catholic university (in the latter with Alberto Ginastera as teacher) did not go to waste. I had tried my hand at composing back then in Buenos Aires, but now in the U.S. I took a more serious look at it and worked more diligently. New music (fresh sounds) and the music of Bach on the “new sounding” instruments being built were the rage of the 1960s. The words “tracker,” “chiff,” “upperwork,” and “contemporary” were in every conversation and in practically every article in the trade journals.

Although I had written a decent piece of music in 1962 published in The California Organist, I thought I’d try my hand at writing a rather “large” piece: a Toccata and Fugue. I entered a contest sponsored by J. Fischer & Bro. of Glen Rock, New Jersey. It won a prize and was published. That year (1964), Warren Marsh put together a concert featuring a new choral work for Christmas, The Miracle, by a Los Angeles composer, and my piece, which sounded great on that organ and won me a few accolades. It happened that Clarence Mader got hold of that piece—which I did not know. During one of the lessons I mentioned my plight at the end of my year at Oneonta Congregational, the “dire” fact that I needed to find another church job, and quick!

 

A new job

I have to confess that up to that time, I did not consider myself anything but a “dilettante” in music composition, and winning that contest, nothing but beginner’s luck! Obviously, it gave Clarence Mader a different impression of my musical knowledge, one that was higher than the one I had of myself! He mentioned that he was impressed by the piece. He said that he was a consultant for a new organ to go in a church that was to be built the following year: a three-manual Reuter of 48 ranks for the First Methodist Church of Garden Grove, California (a fifteen-minute drive from my home). He said I should apply for it, and that he would put in “a good word” for me. I met with the music committee and pastor, who, after an interview, asked to play on the old sanctuary’s c. 1920 two-manual Kimball organ. I did, and they hired me!

Later I heard that the “good word” Clarence Mader put in for me was, “Grab him before he disappears!” What an honor! Finally I had the kind of instrument I longed for all my life. With this event ends one part of the story of the Argentine kid who wanted to be an organist, who put up with a few “inconveniences” to reach his goal.

At that very point another story had begun, perhaps the most important—one by now fifty years old and continuing! (A story perhaps only for family consumption.) A story inspired by this great country, the country of “Yes!”—its exceptionalism, its incentives, and learning opportunities. A story inspired by an instrument fifty years at my disposal, and a great church and congregation that believed in my ability to make music and allowed me to do it for over half a century. Inspired by the thousands of organs here and abroad, their builders, their artists, their glorious, inspiring, and overwhelming sounds, and the great churches that house them. By the recordings, the journals, the yearly gatherings of music making, learning, and fellowship; by family and selfless supporters. Yes, inspired and grateful for the ability of creating new music, and having the time and the will to do it.

Ah! The United States—what a blessed country! The American Guild of Organists—what a great and unique organization! May the new generations of organists be aware of the privilege and opportunities available to them and use them to bless the world with the majestic music of our beloved instrument. I knew all along that organists were the most privileged people in the world!

John Bishop

Follow the money

In August of 1974, Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States, ending a long process of suspicion, investigation, and Senate hearings into allegations that the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) used subterfuge and “dirty tricks” to sabotage the efforts of the Democratic Party leading up to the presidential election in 1972. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters for the Washington Post, were central to that investigation, jumping on the story of the notorious break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party at the Watergate complex near the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. They worked so closely together that they were known by their names melded as “Woodstein.” The story as they told it is widely regarded as the birth of modern investigative journalism.

Shortly after Nixon’s resignation, Woodward and Bernstein published All the President’s Men (Simon & Schuster, 1974), which was a precursor to the 1976 movie of the same name, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. There’s a scene in the film where Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) is interviewing an accountant who worked for CREEP, who revealed that there was a stash of money—a secret fund—that was used to bankroll those dirty tricks. As Bernstein questioned her, she said, “Follow the money.” I suppose that phrase had been used before, but it’s popularly understood that it originated in that movie.

Woodward and Bernstein followed the money, which led them to discovering how many White House officials and Nixon appointees were involved in the scandal, ultimately unraveling Nixon’s presidency. I’m writing this in mid-September, and I realize that you will likely be reading it a few days before Americans go to the polls to decide what must be one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in the nation’s history.

 

Don’t take it for granted.

When I was a kid, I had practice privileges in four different local churches. I came and went as I pleased and made plenty of noise while I was there. I even had keys to a couple of them. One was the church where I had my lessons. Looking back, I suppose my teacher had made the arrangements for me, but I don’t remember any of the details. If I remember right, I played for an occasional funeral—I guess that was in return for the right to practice. I’m pretty sure that money never changed hands, and I know I took it for granted. Wasn’t I lucky?

When I arrived at Oberlin as a student in the fall of 1974, I was flabbergasted by the number of organs. There were sixteen practice organs, four in teaching studios, a big Aeolian-Skinner in Finney Chapel, and the brand-new Flentrop in Warner Concert Hall. Organ majors had two weekly lessons—one in the studio and one in the concert hall. And of course, we needed practice time in the hall. That was the way things worked, and I never paid attention to how frustrating it must have been for students studying other instruments. If you wanted to rehearse a string quartet in Warner Hall, you had to sneak past all those organists.

Of course, Oberlin also had a lot of pianos—hundreds of them. There was a marble plaque on the wall near the dean’s office that read, “Steinway & Sons Commemorates Oberlin’s Century of Service to Music.”¹ I remember paraphrasing it: “Steinway & Sons Commemorates Oberlin’s Century of Service to Steinway & Sons.” There were close to two hundred Steinways in the practice building, Robertson Hall. There was a Steinway “B” in every teaching studio, and two Bs in every piano teacher’s studio. Two Bs, or not two Bs, there was no question that we had access to excellent instruments wherever we turned. I suppose there were close to three hundred pianos. I wonder what that cost? The pianos were there in support of all the students—flautists, singers, violinists—but the organists sure ate up most of the real estate. 

We all had our favorite instruments. I certainly knew which practice organs I preferred, but I also had a half-dozen favorite pianos. I knew them by room number and serial number. Wasn’t I lucky to have a half dozen favorites out of the multitude? I once had a dream that Oberlin was replacing all the pianos at once, and they were discarding all the old ones. To make the disposal easier in the wacky world of dreams, the pianos were placed on the curb in front of houses all over town for trash day, and we raced about, looking at serial numbers to claim our favorites. I found mine on the curb in front of Fenner Douglass’s house on Morgan Street—the one with the big organ pipe out front. Lucky guy.

WWFS? What would Freud say? That I took it for granted that lovely instruments would be provided for me wherever I went? That I felt it was somehow my right? That was the time when I was getting deep into organ building and started to realize how much money was involved.

I’ve heard colleagues say something like this: “I’ll accept that job, but I told them they’ll have to buy me a new organ.” Have you ever heard anything like that? Have you ever said anything like that?

 

A crazy business

Picture a parish church with 250 “pledging units.” The organ is a broken-down, tired relic, and someone gets the idea that it should be replaced. How do we get started? What’s it going to cost? However they get started, somewhere along the line they start receiving proposals from organbuilders. $650,000. $800,000. $1,200,000. Wow! I had no idea.

To pay for an $800,000 instrument, every family in that church would have to donate $3,200. To pay for $1.2M instrument, more like $4,800. Of course, it never works like that. More likely, one family gives a third of the cost, three other families split the second third, and the rest comes in small gifts from the other 246 families. The smallest gift comes from the First Grade Class of the Sunday School.

Let’s think about this. A small community of people ponies up an average of $3,200 a head to buy a musical instrument. Crazy. Are they doing that as a gift to the organist? I doubt it. They may be doing it in recognition and appreciation for the wonderful music. The organist’s artistry may have inspired them. And they may be doing it in part to be sure they’ll be able to attract the next good musician. Whatever the motivation, we shouldn’t fail to notice what a remarkable process that is.

 

One brick at a time

Last April, Wendy and I spent ten days in the UK. She was attending the London Book Fair, so I had a few days on my own to explore the big city. After the fair, we traveled to Durham, to York, and to Oxford, especially visiting big churches and their organs.

I wrote about that trip in the June and July 2016 issues of The Diapason and touched on how the British National Lottery provides funding for the restoration of the pipe organs and church buildings through a program called Heritage Lottery Fund, which is dedicated to preserving the nation’s heritage. Durham Cathedral was built between 1093 and 1133, and a major renovation project is underway now. Dubbed “Open Treasure,” the project is focused not only on the fabric of the building, but on programming involving the use of the spaces as well. You can read about the project on the website: www.durhamcathedral.co.uk/open-treasure. 

The Heritage Lottery Fund is supporting the project in large part, but Durham Cathedral is responsible for raising a huge amount of the money. And there’s a marvelous project as part of that campaign. In the gift shop, a large and ancient room that also houses a restaurant, there was a Lego™ model of the cathedral under construction. It’s more than 12½ feet long, 5½ feet tall, and includes more than 300,000 bricks. For a donation of £1 per brick, you could add to the model. We gave £20, and with the help of a cheerful volunteer wearing an “Open Treasure” sweatshirt, I followed architectural drawings to install my 20 bricks.

There’s a website describing that project: www.durhamcathedral.co.uk/visit/what-to-visit/durham-cathedral-lego-bui…. When I looked at it this morning, I learned that the project, which started in July of 2013, is now complete. That webpage includes a video in five parts that animates the history of the cathedral using Lego™ bricks, with terrific singing by the cathedral choir in the background.

A note to readers: I hope you open the links I publish with this column. And Google “Durham Cathedral Lego.” You’ll find lots of newspaper coverage of this unique project.

In the July issue, I shared the tenth-century story of St. Cuthbert and the missing cow, part of the legend of the founding of the cathedral. There’s a commemorative statue of a cow high on the exterior of the cathedral, and there’s a Lego™ cow in the model, along with a representation of the famous poly-chromed façade of the cathedral organ, notable because it sports two 16′ Open Wood Diapasons, one which extends to 32′! Now we’re talking.

 

Buy a pipe.

The idea of buying bricks is not new. There are a couple bricks with our names on them in the path leading to the Skidompha² Library in Damariscotta, Maine (population 2,218). And my grandparents donated stones in honor of me, my three siblings, and ten first cousins for the construction of the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. I have no idea where those stones are located, but whenever I’m there, I look up and think about it.

A common gimmick for raising money for an organ project is “Buy a Pipe,” or “Adopt a Pipe.” The organbuilder and organ committee team up to create a catalogue of prices. You could list anything from a 13/5′ Tierce ($800) to a 32′ Bombarde ($75,000); a keyboard ($3,500) to a blower ($5,000). Donors could mark boxes on a form, and send in their checks. I’ve seen organ benches, carved pipe shades, and swell boxes listed as family gifts in dedication booklets. I’ve even seen an antiphonal Trompette-en-Chamade with the knob engraved Trompette Boyd, in memory of the son who died in the war.

This exercise is always a little mythical—it’s hard to make a list that accurately covers the entire cost of an organ. Windlines, schwimmers, ladders, and walkboards don’t make appealing memorials. Maybe you inflate the value of a music rack to cover a tuner’s perch. But it certainly is meaningful to donors to know they supported something specific. I often quip that raising money to build an organ is easier if there will be lots of space on the case for a plaque.

Place a big organ pipe, at least an 8-footer, in the narthex. Mark it with increments of $100,000, and fit it with a gold tuning sleeve. As gifts come in, move the sleeve up the pipe. Nice visual.

§

There are lots of reasons for a church to purchase a new organ. The old one is worn out, or the old one was never any good. A new instrument would help revitalize the place. We care deeply about the meaning and role of music in our worship.

And there are reasons not to. A couple years ago I worked with a church, helping them to sell a large tracker organ. It was less than twenty years old, and very fancy, with carvings and moldings, shiny façade pipes, and turned rosewood drawknobs. But a significant number of members had been bitterly opposed to the acquisition. Many of those people left the church, and the opposition that remained carried on the battle. The installation of the new organ could be traced directly to the failure of the church and the disbanding of the congregation. Soli Deo Gloria. 

Wendy and I recently joined a church that installed a new organ a few years earlier. It was named the Bicentennial Organ, commemorating the bicentennial of the parish, and it was paid for by the wide membership of the parish and surrounding community. As a new member, I’ve enjoyed meeting people there. When they learn that I’m involved with pipe organs, they light up and speak eloquently about the church’s new instrument. They’re well informed about it. They not only know it’s a good and important organ, but they know why. They’re proud of it, and its presence in the building means a lot to them.

Care for the money.

The people who paid for the organ are entrusting it to you. Be sure that it’s always well cared for. That means tuning and mechanical issues, but there are some bigger, less obvious reasons. There’s someone on the property committee, the finance committee, or the board of trustees who is responsible for the church’s insurance policies. You are the advocate for the care of the organ. Take a moment to ask if the organ is properly insured. The organ should be specified on the policy, with a letter of assessment attached. If the organ is damaged by fire, by a roof leak, or by vandalism, they’ll find out very quickly how much it will cost to repair. If the organ was purchased for $200,000 thirty years ago, it may have a replacement value of over $1,000,000—$200,000 wouldn’t even cover the Rückpositiv. It’s remarkable how many organs are not adequately insured.

When the parish is planning renovation in the sanctuary, you are the advocate for the care of the organ. Be sure the organ is properly covered. If it’s going to be really dusty, the reeds should be removed to storage. New carpets, sanding the floors, painting, and carpentry are all enemies of the organ. I once saw a painter standing on top of the swell box in an antique organ, working over his head, a drop cloth and roller pan at his feet. Paint was dripping onto the Great pipes, and the guy had no idea how little structure there was under him. He could have fallen though and wrecked the organ. Might have gotten hurt, too.

Make sure that your music is well chosen and beautifully played—an inspiration to everyone in the pews. Use the organ to nurture and lead the congregation, not to aggrandize yourself. Use the organ as if it’s a privilege to play it. The people who paid for it are entrusting it to you. It’s there to provide beautiful music, but more fundamentally, it’s there as an expression of the congregation’s faith.

The new organ is a gift to future generations of worshipers. Your gift to those future generations is the inspiration you’ve provided—the magic, mystery, and majesty you’ve added to worship—that has encouraged the congregation to express their faith by supporting that new organ. Aren’t we lucky? ν

 

Notes

1. While writing this, I learned that Steinway provided a second plaque celebrating 150 years, honoring Oberlin as an “All-Steinway School.”

2. “Skidompha” is an acronym using the first initials of the names of the members of the club that founded the library. First Lady Laura Bush awarded the National Medal for Museum and Library Services to the Skidompha Library in 2008.

I’m impressed by those I know and witness who bring their performance, their production, their offering to society apparently unfettered by the logistical requirements of modern life

John Bishop

Feeding your passion

 

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I caught the pipe organ bug when I was a kid growing up in Winchester, Massachusetts. My father was rector of the Episcopal church, and the organist was a harpsichord builder. I sang in the choir, took piano lessons, took organ lessons, had summer jobs in organ shops, accompanied all the ensembles at the high school and countless rehearsals for musicals, went to college to major in organ performance, and never looked back. When my kids were teenagers and well aware of how my career track had started, they commented freely on how difficult it was for them to face adulthood without having such a clear track in mind.

Working in the organ world as a player and builder for decades, I’ve known many people with similar experiences. After all, the young musician who is most likely to be accepted as a performance major in a recognized school of music is a person for whom regular and serious practice at their chosen instrument was a priority from an early age.

When I was in high school, I was the most accomplished organist in town under the age of twenty, and I was mighty pleased with myself. In my first week as an entering freshman at Oberlin, I remember being impressed—flabbergasted—at how wonderfully some of my classmates played. Winchester was a pretty small pond. I wasn’t such a big fish at Oberlin.

 

Passionate feeding

James Andrew Beard was a cook. He was born in 1903 in Portland, Oregon, and he said that his earliest memory was watching Triscuits™ and shredded wheat biscuits being made at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland in 1905. Two years old? 

Having studied music and theater, Beard moved to New York City in 1937 (the same year that George Gershwin and Charles-Marie Widor died), hoping to forge a career in the wildly active Broadway scene. While he failed to find a niche on stage, he was a smash hit on the Broadway cocktail party circuit, to the extent that he founded a catering company called “Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc.,” specializing in producing elaborate cocktail parties. He followed this with a cookbook called Hors d’Oeuvres and Canapés. In 1946, he was the first to host a television cooking show, I Love to Eat on NBC.

James Beard wrote more than twenty cookbooks, he founded several cooking schools across the country, and was an important advocate for the careers of many influential chefs, including Julia Child and Jacques Pépin. He was the original modern American “foodie.”

He was a mountain of a man, a man of insatiable appetites, of unflagging energy, and focused passion. When he died in 1985, his estate became a foundation, based in his Greenwich Village townhouse. Today, the James Beard Foundation has provided over two million dollars in scholarships for promising chefs, and the James Beard House hosts countless dinners each year, promoting the work of chefs chosen from around the world.

 

Medium-rare at 140

You’re giving a dinner party. You’ve worked hard to gather a list of great guests, organize a menu, shop for the food. You’ve made “the house fair as you are able, trimmed the hearth, and set the table.” The guests arrive, you mix drinks, set out hors d’oeuvres, and the conversation picks up quickly. You go to the kitchen and realize you’re in a pickle—the broccoli is overcooked, you forgot to make salad dressing, and in spite of the care you’ve taken with the temperature-time continuum, the meat is simply not done. (Never happened to me, but I’ve heard it from others . . .) 

We went to a dinner at the James Beard House last Friday. Wendy’s assistant, literary agent Lauren McLeod, is married to Chef Danny Bua of The Painted Burro in Somerville, Massachusetts. His creative approach to Mexican cuisine attracted the attention of the scouts, and he was invited to present a dinner—a very big deal for a young chef.

Danny and his team prepped the food in their own restaurant kitchen on Thursday. Before sunrise on Friday their truck was on the road, and they spent the day toiling in the unfamiliar cramped kitchen of the James Beard House. The menu was sophisticated and complex. There were five hors d’oeuvres, including Crispy Native Oyster Tacos with Cabbage-Jalapeño Slaw, Baja Mayonnaise, Cilantro, and Lime; and five entrées, including Avocado Leaf-Roasted Short Ribs with Spiced Red Kuri Squash, Masa Dumplings, Heirloom Kale con Plátanos, Cotija Cheese, and Red-Wine Cola Mole. Altogether there were fifteen different dishes (each with at least five major ingredients), sixty guests, and everything was served warm, plated beautifully, each table was served as one, and the houseful of New York foodies were full of praise.

It was the culinary equivalent of getting off a train, walking cold into an unfamiliar hall, and playing the entire Clavier Übung (all parts) on an instrument you’ve never seen before, from memory. Danny is passionate about his art, and it’s a mighty amount of work.

 

A memorable effort

Last Monday night, colleague and friend David Enlow played a recital at his home Church of the Resurrection on the 1915 Casavant organ we installed there, completed in 2011. Our daughter Meg came to the recital with Wendy and me, which meant a lot because while she’s familiar with my work as she sees it in the workshop, it’s fair to say that serious organ music is really not her thing. It was really nice to have that support from a family member, and David made it worth her while. At home later in the evening, Meg talked about how impressed she was with David’s focus and command over what he was doing, and knowing perfectly well that there is nothing easy about what he was doing, she was impressed by the apparent ease of it. His fingers and feet just flickered around the console as if there was nothing to it.

David’s program included the entertaining, the academic, the sophisticated, and the sublime. He spared us the ridiculous—you can go somewhere else for that. His command of the repertory, the instrument, and his own person—his technique—was obvious at every moment.

 

It’s for the birds

Kenn Kaufmann is a client of Wendy’s literary agency, and he and his wife Kim are close friends of ours. With the support of his parents, Kenn dropped out of school at sixteen and spent a year hitchhiking around the United States in a quest for a birder’s Big Year—an effort to see the largest number of bird species in a year. Birding is a big business, and there have been several recent movies that give a glimpse into what it means to devote one’s life to such an effort.

Kenn can look at an apparently empty sky and pick out all the birds. He knows their calls, their habits, what they like to eat, what they’re afraid of. He knows what trees they prefer and why, and he knows their migratory routes, schedules, and destinations. He has written several field guides, developing a new technique for the computer-manipulation of photographs to create the “ideal” example of each bird.  

Like so many of our musician friends, Kenn’s genius is communication. All of that knowledge and intuition would be lost if he couldn’t write or speak about it in such a compelling way. We’ve been with him when he leads big groups on bird walks and gives slide-show-lectures, and there’s never anyone in attendance unmoved by all the information, but even more, by the rich personality that has learned how it all fits into the big scheme.

 

Measured success

Charles Brenton Fisk (1925–1983) studied nuclear physics at Stanford and Harvard, worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, worked at Brookhaven National Laboratories, and then committed to a career as an organbuilder. He clearly would have made more money working in the high levels of nuclear physics, but the pipe organ was his real love. Those who worked with him and still operate the company that bears his name remember him as a caring and thoughtful mentor who taught by asking questions, encouraging his students and co-workers to think well for themselves. Charlie was passionate about the pipe organ, and his contributions to the modern American organ can hardly be measured.

Charlie was one of the first modern American organbuilders to travel to Europe to study the “Old Master” organs, collecting meticulous measurements, and studying the relationships of the organs to the music of their day. I expect that his scientific background was integral to those studies—he must have had a great power of attention.

There are two Fisk organs in Winchester, Massachusetts, and at the time I didn’t know how fortunate I was to have such access to fine instruments. Ironically, my first real relationships with electro-pneumatic instruments happened in the practice rooms at Oberlin!

§

Every one of these people knew his career path early in life. I suppose we all know people who were forced into a career that was not their first choice: “I’m a lawyer, all your uncles are lawyers, your grandfather was a lawyer, and you’re going to be a lawyer.” Felix Mendelssohn’s father Abraham was a banker, and expected his son to follow in his footsteps. It was when he realized the depth of his son’s dedication that Abraham Mendelssohn made peace with Felix’s career choice. I don’t know if Felix would have had much to offer the world of banking, but we surely would have been the poorer without the music he left us. The thought leaves me without words.

In the concert hall, there’s nothing like hearing a performance by a master musician who in middle age is still working toward the unattainable perfection he envisioned as a six-year-old. In a restaurant, there’s nothing like tasting a dish created by someone whose earliest memory is based on a fascination with food. In an examination room, there’s nothing like being treated by a doctor whose early dreams were to care deeply for the health of patients. And if you’re meant to be a lawyer, for goodness’ sake, be a great lawyer. We know a brilliant young woman who finished law school with a large debt, held a lucrative job long enough to pay back the debts, then dove into the world of law in developing nations.

 

Lovely idealism, isn’t it?

But what happens when the money runs out? Most organbuilders would love the luxury of unlimited time to get things right, but the organ is built according to an agreed price, and as they say in the real world, “Time is money.” Remember Charlie Fisk’s definition of a reed? “An organ stop that still needs three days of work.”

The tuner might like to have another eight or ten hours to get things “just so,” but the church is supposed to pay for that at an agreed hourly rate, and organ tuning is a line-item on the annual operating budget. To propose an increase in the tuning budget, the organist makes a recommendation to the Music Committee, which meets bi-monthly and makes recommendations to the Finance Committee, the Finance Committee makes recommendations to the Parish Council, and the Parish Council makes recommendations to the congregation at the Annual Meeting. (I know an old lady who swallowed a fly.)  

It’s mid-October now. The vote will happen on June 15. And during the Annual Meeting, someone’s going to ask, “If it costs $150 to tune a piano, why do we have to spend $2,500 tuning the organ?” 

The organist might like to have another five hours to practice anthem accompaniments and postlude for the coming Sunday, but there’s a staff meeting, octavo scores to be filed, a bride to meet with, and then the sexton is vacuuming the nave. If I had a nickel for every organist whose dream was fulfilled by being offered a full-time position in a prominent church with a terrific organ, only to find that there was never time for practicing, I’d have a lot of nickels.

Ernest Skinner often added stops to his organs not specified in the contracts because he felt the building called for them. Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh were impoverished through much of their lives, and often couldn’t afford paint to put on canvas.

Throughout history, passionate, inspired people have had to find alternative means of support. That’s why I’m so impressed by those I know and witness who bring their performance, their production, their offering to society apparently unfettered by the logistical requirements of modern life, like the concert organist who balances practicing and travel with the demands of the liturgical year or a university teaching schedule.

J. S. Bach had a busy professional life, was subject to the civic bureaucracy that employed him, and we know he spent at least enough time with his children to give them music lessons. A family that size must have taken up some of the old man’s time and attention. But he left a body of work that has inspired many generations of great musicians.

Mozart also left a tremendous catalogue of some of the most beautiful music ever written, but he died a pauper. Were he living today, he’d be playing the accordion in the subways of New York. Wouldn’t that be a treat!

 

Feeding a national passion

Subscribers to The Diapason must be well attuned to the importance of the arts in modern society. As I write, we are in the midst of the great crescendo of political chaos, watching two otherwise dignified men duke it out in the public forum. We’re hearing a lot about the balance of public priorities, and how the federal budget might be skewed in support of different points of view.

One thing we have not heard in stump speeches, televised debates, or from the talking heads super-analyzing everything that’s said, is a candidate standing up for the arts. I cannot see how a nation can fail to support the arts and humanities and consider itself a leader on the international stage. Is military might or the balance of trade more important than the cultural heart of a great people? We are the country of Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, of Louis Armstrong and Leonard Bernstein, of Herman Melville, Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Virgil Fox, but I’ve read figures that compare the United States’ annual support of the arts with the hourly cost of warfare.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard an elected official talk passionately about the artistic culture—the passion—of our country. I think they’re missing something.

John Bishop

A Pokémon world

Last week, I visited a church in Brooklyn, New York, to talk with the rector, wardens, and organist about placing a vintage pipe organ in their historic building. After the meeting, I walked the eight blocks up Nostrand Avenue back to the subway. It was 97°, so I stopped at a corner bodega for a bottle of cold water. While I was paying, there was a series of great crashes just up the street, and I was among the crowd that gathered to see what had happened. A white box truck had rear-ended a car stopped at a traffic light and shoved that car into another that was parked at the curb. The truck must have been going pretty fast because there was lots of damage to all three vehicles—broken glass everywhere, hubcaps rolling away, mangled metal. Apparently, no one was hurt, but everyone present was hollering about Pokémon. 

“Innocent until proven guilty” is an important concept in our system of law enforcement, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that the driver of the truck was chasing a virtual-reality fuzzy something-or-other, and didn’t have his eyes on the road. When I told my son Chris about it, he asked, “So . . . , what did he catch?” 

Take away the deadly weapon of the automobile, and you’re left with at least a nuisance. Living in a big city, much of our mobile life is on foot, and we routinely cross streets with dozens of other people. It’s usual for someone to be walking toward me with ear buds pushed in far enough to meet in the middle, their nose buried in their screen. I often shout, “Heads up,” to avoid a collision. I wonder what’s the etiquette in that situation? When there’s a collision on the sidewalk and the phone falls and shatters, whose fault is it?

I know I’ve called home from a grocery store to double-check items on my list, but I’m annoyed by the person who stands in the middle of the aisle, cart askew, talking to some distant admirer. Perhaps worst is the young parent pushing a $1,000 stroller, one of those jobs with pneumatic suspension, talking on the phone and ignoring the child. No, I’m wrong. Worst is that same situation when the child has a pink kiddie-tablet of his own, and no one is paying attention to anyone. Small children are learning billions of bytes every moment—every moment is a teaching moment. It’s a shame to leave them to themselves while talking on the phone. 

The present danger is the possibility of accidents that result from inattention. The future danger is a world run by people who grew up with their noses in their screens, ignoring the world around them.

 

Starry eyes

An archeological site at Chankillo in Peru preserves the remains of a 2,300- year-old solar observatory comprising thirteen towers whose positions track the rising and setting arcs of the sun, their eternal accuracy confirmed by modern research. There are similar sites in ancient Mesopotamia. If I had paid better attention to my middle school Social Studies teacher, Miss Wood, who nattered on about the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers as if she were reading from a phone book, I’d have a better understanding of modern Iraq and the tragedy of the current destruction of ancient sites there. 

Early astronomers like Aristotle (around 350 BC) and Ptolemy (around 150 AD) gave us the understanding of the motions of celestial bodies. I imagine them sitting on hillsides or cliffs by the ocean for thousands of nights, staring at the sky and realizing that it’s not the stars, but we who are on the move. I wonder if there’s anyone alive today with such an attention span.

 

The man from Samos

In April of 2014, Wendy and I and three other couples, all (still) close friends, chartered a 60-foot sailboat for a week of traveling between Greek Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. These islands are within a few miles of Turkey, and many of us are increasingly familiar with that region as the heart of the current refugee crises. The island of Lesbos has a population of 90,000, and 450,000 refugees passed through in 2015. Lesbos was not part of our itinerary, but it’s adjacent to other islands we visited. We visited Patmos, where St. John the Divine, sequestered in a cave, received the inspiration we know as the Book of Revelation, but for me, our visit to Samos was a pilgrimage.

Pythagoras is my hero. He was a native of Samos who lived from 570 BC to 495 BC. He gave us the eponymous theory defining the hypotenuse of the right triangle, and importantly to readers of The Diapason, he defined musical tone and intervals in terms of mathematics that led directly to our modern study of musical theory. He was the direct forebear of the art of music. Approaching the island from the north, we entered the harbor of the main town (also called Samos) to be welcomed by a statue of Pythagoras. It shows the great man posed as one side of a right triangle, a right triangle in his left hand, and right forefinger pointing skyward toward a (compact fluorescent) light bulb. Okay, okay, it’s pretty tacky—even hokey, but you should see the Pythagoras snow-globe I bought there that graces the windowsill in my office.

Pythagoras deduced the overtone series by listening to blacksmiths’ hammers and anvils; he realized overtones are a succession of intervals defined by a mathematical series, and you cannot escape that his genius was the root of music. He noticed that blacksmiths’ hammering produced different pitches, and he first assumed that the size of the hammer accounted for the variety. It’s easy to duplicate his experiment. Find any object that makes a musical tone when struck—a bell, a cooking pot, a drinking glass. Hit it with a pencil, then hit it with a hammer. You’ll get the same pitch both times, unless you break the glass. So the size of the anvil determines the pitch. 

But wait, there’s more. Pythagoras noticed that each tone consisted of many. He must have had wonderful ears, and he certainly was never distracted by his smart phone ringing or pushing notifications, because he was able to start picking out the individual pitches. Creating musical tones using a string under tension (like a guitar or violin), he duplicated the separate tones by stopping the string with his finger, realizing that the first overtone (octave) was reproduced by half the full length (1:2), the second (fifth) resulted from 2:3, the third by 3:4, etc. That numerical procession is known as the Fibonacci Series, named for Leonardo Fibonacci (1175–1250) and looks like this:

1+1=2

1+2=3

2+3=5

3+5=8, etc., ad infinitum.

The Fibonacci Series defines mathematical relationships throughout nature —the kernels of a pinecone, the divisions of a nautilus shell, the arrangements of seeds in a sunflower blossom, rose petals, pineapples, wheat grains, among countless others. And here’s a good one: count out how many entrances of the subject in Bach’s fugues are on Fibonacci numbers. 

 

Blow, ye winds . . . 

If you’ve ever blown on a hollow stem of grass and produced a musical tone, you can imagine the origin of the pipe organ. After you’ve given a hoot, bite an inch off your stem and try again: you’ll get a different pitch. Take a stick of bamboo and carve a simple mouthpiece at one end. Take another of different length, and another, and another. Tie them together and you have a pan-pipe. You’re just a few steps away from the Wanamaker!

I have no idea who was the first to think of making a thin sheet of metal, forming it as a cylinder, making a mouthpiece in it, devising a machine to stabilize wind-pressure, and another machine to choose which notes were speaking, but there’s archeological evidence that people were messing around like that by 79 AD, when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, destroying the city of Pompeii, and preserving a primitive pipe organ. And 350 years earlier, in Alexandria, Egypt, the Hydraulis was created, along with visual depictions accurate enough to support the construction of a modern reproduction.

I’m sure that the artisans who built those instruments were aware of Pythagoras’s innovations, and that they could hear the overtones in the organ pipes they built, because those overtones led directly to the introduction of multiple ranks of pipes, each based on a different harmonic. Having five or six ranks of pipes playing at once produced a bold and rich tone we know as Blockwerk, but it was the next smart guy who thought of complicating the machine to allow single sets of pipes to be played separately­—stop action. They left a few of the highest pitch stops grouped together—mixtures. Then, someone took Pythagorean overtones a step further and had those grouped ranks “break back” a few times, stepping down the harmonic series, so the overtones grew lower as you played up the scale.

Here’s a good one: how about we make two organs, one above the other, and give each a separate keyboard. How about a third organ with a keyboard on the floor you can play with your feet? 

As we got better at casting, forming, and handling that metal, we could start our overtone series an octave lower with 16-foot pipes. Or 32 . . . I don’t know where the first 32-foot stop was built or who built it, but I know this: he was an energetic, ambitious fellow with an ear for grandeur. It’s ferociously difficult and wildly expensive to build 32-foot stops today, but it was a herculean task for seventeenth- or eighteenth-century workers. And those huge shiny pipes were just the start. You also had to trudge out in the forest, cut down trees, tie them to your oxen, drag them back into town, and start sawing out your rough lumber to build the case for those huge pipes.

How long do you suppose it took workers to cut one board long enough to support the tower crown over a 32-foot pipe using a two-man saw? It’s a good thing they didn’t have smart phones because between tweets, texts, e-mails, and telemarketers, they’d never have finished a single cut.

It’s usual for the construction of a monumental new organ to use up 50,000 person hours or more, even with modern shortcuts such as using dimension lumber delivered by truck, industrial power tools, and CNC routers. How many hours did the workshops of Hendrik Niehoff (1495–1561) or Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) put into their masterpieces? And let’s remember that Schnitger ran several workshops concurrently and produced more than 150 organs. Amazing. He must have been paying attention.

 

Pay attention

The pipe organ is a towering human achievement. It’s the result of thousands of years of experimentation, technological evolution, mathematical applications, and the pure emotion of musical sensibilities. Just as different languages evolved in different regions of the world, so did pipe organs achieve regional accents and languages. The experienced ear cannot mistake the differences between a French organ built in 1750 from one built in northern Germany. The musicians who played them exploited their particular characteristics, creating music that complemented the instruments of their region. 

Let’s think for a minute about that French-German comparison. Looking at musical scores, it’s easy to deduce that French organs have simple pedalboards. But let’s go a little deeper. It’s no accident that classic French organ music is built around the Cornet (flue pipes at 8′, 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, 13⁄5′). Those pitches happen to be the fundamental tone and its first four overtones, according to Pythagoras, and they align with the rich overtones that give color and pizzazz to a reed stop. The reeds in those organs are lusty and powerful in the lower and middle octaves, but their tone thins out in the treble. Add that Cornet, and the treble blossoms. Write a dialogue between treble and bass using the Trompette in the left hand and the Cornet in the right. (Can you say Clérambault?) Add the Cornet to the Trumpet as a chorus of stops (Grand Jeu). And while you’re fooling around with the five stops of the Cornet, mix and match them a little. Try a solo on 8′-4′-22⁄3′ (Chant de Nazard). How about 8′-4′-13⁄5′ (Chant de Tierce)? It’s no accident. It’s what those organs do!

History has preserved about 175 hours of the music of J. S. Bach. We can only wonder how much was lost, and certainly a huge amount was never written down. But 175 hours is a ton of music. That’s more than a non-stop seven-day week. I guess Bach’s creativity didn’t get to rest until about 9:00 a.m. on the eighth day! We know he had a busy life, what with bureaucratic responsibilities (he was a city employee), office work, rehearsals, teaching, and all those children. When he sat down to write, he must have worked hard.

Marcel Dupré was the first to play the complete organ works of Bach from memory in a single series of recitals. We know he had a busy life as church musician, professor, mentor, composer, and prolific performer. When he sat down to practice, he must have worked hard.

In 1999, Portugese pianist Maria João Pires was scheduled to perform a Mozart concerto with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly. She checked the orchestra’s schedule to confirm which piece, and prepared her performance. Trouble was, the published schedule was wrong. The first performance was a noontime open rehearsal. Chailly had a towel around his neck, and the hall was full of people. He gave a downbeat and the orchestra started playing. A stricken look appeared on Pires’ face, and she put her face in her hands. She spoke with Chailly over the sound of the orchestra, saying she had prepared the wrong piece. It’s not easy to tell what he said, but I suppose it was something like, “Let’s play this one!” And she did. Perfectly. You can see the video by typing “Wrong Concerto” into the YouTube search bar. Maybe Ms. Pires wasn’t paying attention when she started preparation for that concert, but she sure was paying attention when she learned the D-minor concerto. It was at the tip of her fingers, performance ready, at a panicky moment’s notice.

Often on a Sunday morning, my Facebook page shows posts from organ benches. Giddy organists comment between churches on the content of sermons, flower arrangements, or the woman with the funny hat. Really? Do you have your smart phone turned on at the console during the service? If your phone is on while you’re playing a service, is it also on while you’re practicing? I suppose the excuse is that your metronome is an app? Oh wait, you don’t use a metronome? To paraphrase a famous moment from a 1988 vice-presidential debate, I knew Marcel Dupré. Marcel Dupré was a friend of mine. You’re no Marcel Dupré.¹

 

A time and a place

I love my smart phone. In the words of a colleague and friend, I use it like a crack pipe. I read the news. I order supplies and tools. I look up the tables for drill-bit sizes, for wire gauges, for conversions between metric and “English” measurements. I do banking, send invoices, find subway routes, get directions, buy plane tickets, reserve hotel rooms, and do crossword puzzles. I check tide charts, wind predictions, and nautical charts. I text, tweet, e-mail, telephone, and “go to Facebook.” I listen to music and audio books, check the weather, look for restaurants, pay for groceries, and buy clothes.

The people who invented and developed our smart phones must have been paying attention to their work. It’s a world of information we carry in our pockets, and there must be millions of lines of code behind each touch of the screen. I’m grateful to have such an incredible tool, but I’m worried about its effect on our lives. We know a lot about the stars and orbiting planets, but I’m sure we don’t know everything. I hope there’s some smart guy somewhere, sitting on a remote hillside with no phone, wondering about something wonderful.

I’m not pushing strollers so often anymore, but I keep my phone in my pocket when our grandchildren are visiting. I keep my phone in my pocket when I’m walking the dog because it’s fun to be with him. And I keep my phone in my pocket when I’m walking the streets of the city alone. I wouldn’t want to miss someone doing something stupid because they weren’t paying attention. Hope they don’t drop their phone. ν

 

Notes

1. Poetic license: truth is, I never met Marcel Dupré.

Steven Egler

Steven Egler is professor of music at Central Michigan University and a former student of Dr. Ore. He contributed a chapter to the festschrift for Charles Ore.

On June 28, 2016, I met with Charles W. Ore at his home outside of Seward, Nebraska, to interview him on the occasion of his upcoming 80th birthday on December 18. We reflected on his career as an organist, improviser, composer, teacher, and church musician. Many of Charles Ore’s works can be found in the sets of Eleven Compositions for Organ, published by Concordia. 

His reminiscences cover his childhood and musical experiences, family, his career as a teacher and church musician, and reveal his deep conviction to music making, particularly the art of improvisation and its important role in his compositional process. Thanks to Kenneth Wuepper, Saginaw, Michigan, for audio transcription, and to Charles Ore himself for his helpful editorial assistance.

For further insights into Charles Ore’s life, visit www.charleswore.com to see Irene Beethe’s April 2015 video interview of him for the Center for Church Music, Concordia University-Chicago. Beethe is the compiler of the festschrift Charles W. Ore: An American Original, released in October 2016 and available from Concordia Publishing House (www.cph.org).

 

Steven Egler: You were born in Winfield, Kansas, southeast of Wichita?

Charles Ore: Yes, in 1936. 

 

What can you recall about your childhood?

I didn’t live in Winfield at all. I lived on a farm that was 15 miles east of Winfield and a mile and a half from Old Salem School. My mother was a teacher, so the concepts of reading and mathematics were instilled in me at a very young age. Her father, my Grandfather Werling, received his master’s degree in German literature from Columbia University in 1924. So there was a strong academic side to this family. Even though I lived at the farm with my parents, I was with my grandparents in Winfield every weekend. There were nine children in my mother’s family, and I believe that eight of them attended and/or graduated from college. My father’s side of the family was into agriculture, and very few of them attended college. My father attended school only through the eighth grade. 

There was no kindergarten in my school since it was a one-room school, Old Salem School in Cowley County (Kansas). I rode a horse named Colonel to school everyday, put it in the barn, and fed it oats. That was the routine. Later on, when I was a little older, I was responsible for bringing in coal for the stove and lighting it, since there was no central heat or electricity. On cloudy days we sat by the windows. It seems like it should have happened 200 years ago, but not quite so.

 

Tell us about your first piano lessons.

My Grandfather Werling gave me my first piano lessons. This consisted of taping the names of the notes on the keys of his piano. In the hymnal, he wrote the names of the notes that matched what was written on the printed page. So I learned to read notes, and at the same time learned how the hymn sounded. I had a very good tonal memory, so the learning process went fairly quickly.

When I was about 6, my mother took me to a piano teacher, Blanche Brooks, with whom I would study for the next 12 years. Eventually, I became one of her prize students. She was a great teacher, in that she was always demanding, helpful, and was never really satisfied with anything. She always emphasized the importance of practicing and also encouraged me to improvise. At the end of our lessons and even if she was running behind schedule—which she always did—she would ask me to play what “piece” (improvisation) I had brought with me that day. She also would take us to concerts in Wichita and Winfield. Through these trips she helped to open up a world that otherwise I may not have experienced at such an early age.

What I recall particularly about my early years was that, almost without exception, wherever you went, there was a piano in the living room, and people were invited to play. It was so different then, compared to today, in that we produced the music rather than pushed the button to listen to it. Active vs. passive.

 

Did you play other instruments besides the piano?

I played the tenor saxophone in the band, yet I was always jealous of the alto saxophone players, because it seemed as if they had all of the beautiful melodies. I ended up playing the tenor saxophone because the band director said he needed a person to play it, and there I was!

 

What did you experience first: organ, improvising, or composing?

Improvisation was definitely first. Composing came later, and it is a more organized, deliberate process. When improvising you can never be sure how things are going to turn out, you don’t necessarily finish every sentence, and you never go back to correct yourself. When you improvise you never make a mistake: you may bleed internally, but it’s rarely fatal. A composition is much more like an essay, in that you have an opening paragraph, a body of material, and a conclusion or a recap of what’s been going on. It’s a much more formal concept. 

It’s very satisfying with improvising and composing working together, especially after 1986 when Finale came on the scene and computers came into existence. Those two methods merged very well. You can get a lot of notes on the page quickly, and then the real work begins!

Also with improvisation you may have to go back and clarify or sharpen your ideas and continue to process things. Some music by a variety of composers should have been incubated a little longer. I won’t mention any names and maybe they won’t either!

 

When did you start to play the organ for church?

That’s a very good question, and it brings back some fun memories. I was 17 at the time. Pauline Wente played the organ at our church, Trinity Lutheran in Winfield, which had a two-manual Kilgen organ of 12 ranks. She was very predictable, and it seemed as if she played the same prelude every Sunday: a series of big chords and progressions, and then the piece more or less stopped. The Voluntary was always soft and sounded essentially the same, maybe with an occasional tremulant. The postlude always sounded like some type of march. I don’t want to be critical, but I watched this lady play every Sunday and was really fascinated with what she was doing.

My Grandfather Werling was also a pastor, so I had many opportunities to be around churches and play their organs. Pauline’s husband Walter was a choir director and on one occasion she wanted to go with him on a weekend choir tour, so she asked me to play for her that Sunday. 

I hesitated since I didn’t really play the organ, but she said she’d show me how to do it and that it wouldn’t take very long. We went to the church, and she showed me what to do for the prelude. “See these ‘stops’ over here? You pull them out. Any notes in the bass you play with your feet.” (I sort of had that idea.) She then asked me if I had any questions, and, of course, there weren’t any because I didn’t know enough to ask one! 

She demonstrated a bit more as to what the voluntary and postlude should be like. She then showed me some music, all of which I could easily play. 

I told my grandparents that I was going to play for church on Sunday, and I think that they went into shock. After all, they had a reputation to maintain in the community, and I was a member of that congregation. Just to be sure that I really did know what I was doing, my grandfather took me down to the church and I played for him. He approved, so I played for church on Sunday and after that I became a part of the rotation of organists. That first Sunday morning, the pastor asked me if I was sure that I could play the hymns and liturgy. I told him that I had been playing hymns since I was five or six, so there was no problem. He listened and agreed.

I noticed with many of my own beginning students that those who were skilled enough to play one of Bach’s Eight Little Preludes and Fugues or chorale pieces would say, “Oh no!” when asked if they played hymns. I knew from the very beginning of my teaching career that basic hymn playing was the key to being a successful organist. Many members of the congregation aren’t always attuned to what you play as incidental music, but if you can’t play the hymns and the liturgy, you may as well just fold up and go home.

 

Tell us about your organ teachers and the music you studied.

When I graduated from high school, I attended St. John’s College in Winfield, Kansas (closed in 1986), where my Grandfather Werling was on the faculty: he taught German. At St. John’s, I studied with my first real organ teacher, Alma Nommensen, who was a graduate of Northwestern University. She was a character, was fun, and was an artiste, if there ever was one—both in her mannerisms and in her playing. Eventually, she taught me the recital she played at Northwestern University.

I started by playing Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532—I was probably 18 by then. I also learned Mendelssohn’s First Organ Sonata, and I’m blessed in that there was no recording equipment in the studio. Alma knew how to play the organ, and she introduced me to the basic issues of registration, fingering, and pedaling. Before studying with her, it had been just whatever felt good. 

During the summer, between my sophomore and junior years in college, I studied with Garth Peacock who was teaching at Southwestern College in Winfield. After two years there, he began a long teaching career at Oberlin Conservatory. We worked on pieces that I was already studying with Alma Nommensen plus Bach’s E-flat trio sonata. My next teacher after Alma and Garth was Theodore Beck, who was at Concordia University-Seward and also a graduate of Northwestern University. He taught me his master’s recital, which included the Bach Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 543. From my study with Blanche Brooks, I had already played big piano pieces like Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, Chopin waltzes, and Mozart sonatas. So actually getting the notes was not that difficult: doing it well was something else, and again I’m blessed in that there were no recordings! I learned a sizable portion of Widor’s Fourth Symphony, and of course, I played the Toccata from the Fifth Symphony and worked on the sixth as well. I also studied the Sixth Sonata of Mendelssohn and the A-Minor Concerto by Vivaldi/Bach. 

 

What contemporary music did you learn?

I learned Suite Breve by Langlais, but it wasn’t until I went to Northwestern that I learned Messiaen. Wow! That was a revelation.

How did you come to study with Theodore Beck at Concordia-Seward (now Nebraska)?

Albert Beck, Ted’s father, was one of the principal organists at Concordia-Chicago at the time, and my Grandfather Werling knew him because Albert often played at conventions of the Lutheran Church. My grandfather wrote him a letter and told him that I was very interested in the organ, and that he’d like to send me to Chicago to study with him. Dr. Beck wrote back informing my grandfather that he was about to retire, and that I should attend Concordia-Seward to study with his son, Ted, who was on the faculty there, finishing his Ph.D. in music theory at Northwestern, and that we would get along very well.

At that time in 1956, Seward was a very ethnically closed community, both by tradition and theology and by a lack of ecumenism: for the most part, church professionals rarely socialized with those who were not Lutherans. There was also a strict code of social behavior, and I got into trouble right away when I was seen walking down the street holding my girlfriend’s hand: this was absolutely forbidden! She was told in no uncertain terms that she was not to allow that because boys would take advantage of you, and holding hands in public created the wrong impression. In four years, this girl, Constance Schau, was to become my wife.

 

What did you do after graduation from Concordia-Nebraska?

For two years (1958–60), I taught in an elementary school in Lincoln, Nebraska, and during the winter months I studied with Myron Roberts at the University of Nebraska. I learned quite a bit of contemporary music with him including Sowerby, more Langlais, and, of course, his own music, which I really treasured. 

During the summers of 1959 and 1960, I studied organ with Thomas Matthews and took classes at Northwestern. Tom was a fine improviser, and he helped me to be more organized in my approach. He was organist at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston where I heard horizontal trumpets for the first time. Tom then moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the end of the summer session of 1960. In August of 1960, I married my wife Constance, and that fall we moved to Evanston, where I became a full-time graduate student. 

In the fall quarter of 1960, I became a pupil of Barrett Spach. Barrett was an excellent teacher, and I learned the Dupré Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, the Sowerby Pageant, and Messiaen’s Le Banquet Celeste. 

In early 1961, I played my master’s recital in Lutkin Hall at Northwestern, so it was a long tradition: Alma Nommensen and then Ted Beck, both who were graduates of Northwestern. In the spring of 1961, Barrett had a heart attack and asked me to fill in for him at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago. Many changes were happening very rapidly for me: just three years earlier I had graduated from Concordia-Nebraska where I had my own stein at the local pub called Heumann’s. Now I was living in Evanston, the home of the WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) where you could not buy liquor within the city limits, married to the woman with whom I could not hold hands in Seward, and playing at Fourth Presbyterian Church on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. 

 

How were you hired to teach on the faculty at Concordia-Chicago?

Just to clarify: when I taught there it was Concordia-River Forest. Likewise, Concordia-Seward was changed to Concordia-Nebraska. 

I had finished my master’s degree at the close of the winter quarter of 1961 and started on my doctorate at Northwestern right away. Shortly after that, I got a telephone call from the president of Concordia University in River Forest. Theodore Beck’s father, Albert Beck, was on the faculty at River Forest. Through Ted I became acquainted with Albert who in turn encouraged the president of the university, Martin Koehneke, to interview me for the open position in organ at Concordia-River Forest. 

I wasn’t interested in the job at all! I was in my doctoral program and studying French and German, and getting more acquainted with the wide world of organ playing. Nonetheless, I interviewed with President Koehneke, Paul Bunjes, chair of the music department, and Herbert Gotsch, head of the organ department. We talked in general terms about music and about what their hopes and dreams were and how I might fit into the program there.

At the conclusion of the day, I was back in the president’s office where he offered me the job. I told him that I wasn’t interested because I wanted to continue my doctoral studies at Northwestern. That evening President Koehneke called to tell me that he had my contract on his desk and that it was ready for me to sign the next morning, which included everything that we had discussed during my interview! The classic offer that one could not refuse, I took the job, and it was a great position for five years (1961–66). 

I needed to quit my work at Fourth Presbyterian Church so that I could teach at Concordia-River Forest. There was great angst at Concordia that a Lutheran professor would play the organ in a Presbyterian church! 

I enjoyed teaching at Concordia immensely. Also during that time I bought a tracker-action Möller organ that had been in a church in Grand Island, Nebraska, hauled it back to Chicago, and rebuilt a part of it in my third-floor apartment. Initially, it had consisted of about 30 ranks, but I reduced it to about six. 

Paul Bunjes taught me a great deal about how a mechanical-action organ worked and the names of all the various parts, like “fan frame” and “cut up.” He was a wonderful teacher, and I wanted and needed to learn more about organ building; the knowledge I gained from Paul Bunjes served me well throughout my teaching career. 

 

What courses did you teach at Concordia-River Forest?

I’m sure it’s true today that deans always look at the ratio of how many students you teach, especially with one-on-one teaching of organ students and applied music in general. So I taught large courses, such as Introduction to Music, and perhaps as many as 50–60 students at a time. Actually, after teaching grades 7–9, you can teach anything!

There is one funny story about my first experience teaching at Concordia. I was 23 at that time and walked into the classroom on the first day and sat down in the front row. I blended in with everybody else who was there except that I was wearing a suit and tie. No one knew who I was, so I just waited until a little after the hour. Then I got up and told them that I was their teacher. I can only imagine what they must have thought!

During your tenure at Concordia-River Forest, you were also organist at historic First St. Paul Lutheran Church in downtown Chicago. 

First St. Paul on North LaSalle in Chicago, organized in 1864, is the oldest Lutheran church in Chicago; it has maintained a great tradition in music. I got acquainted with many people with whom I am still in contact to this day. I played the organ (Casavant, designed by Albert Beck) and directed the choir. 

The pastor told me that it was critical that I was liked by Lydia Fleischer, a soprano in the choir. He said if she sits down when you ask the choir to stand, that means she doesn’t like you and your job will be terminated. (She had financial clout in the congregation.) 

When I asked the choir to stand during the rehearsal, I walked over and put my arm around her ample yet well-corseted middle and held her tight during the piece we were singing. We became very good friends! She told the pastor that I was great! 

 

You began to work on your doctorate in 1961 and finished it at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1986. Please tell us about this.

I started to teach at Concordia-Seward in 1966 and had played my first D.M.A. recital at Northwestern in 1967, yet at that point—the late 1960s and early ’70s, the doctorate was becoming less of a priority. My family was growing in size—two children in 1967—and my composing and performing career was expanding.  

In the meantime, George Ritchie and Quentin Faulkner were creating a doctor of musical arts program at the University of Nebraska in the early 1980s. I had heard both of them play and had heard about their approach to early music. I was receptive to their “transformative ideas,” and for me it was a complete revelation. I asked George if he thought that we could work together—I asked because we were already friends—and he felt positive about the concept. 

Nebraska accepted the transfer of my doctoral study at Northwestern into the new program at Nebraska. In fact in the following weeks I became the first D.M.A. organ student at Nebraska (c. 1983) and the first to graduate with that degree in 1986. It was wonderful: the classes were excellent, the scholarship was demanding, and the musical environment was friendly and welcoming. I graduated with an A+ grade average in the same year that I turned 50.  

 

Bravo to you! You’ve mentioned Connie, your late wife. What can you tell us about her and your children?

Connie and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary in 2010, and shortly thereafter, she died of myelodysplastic syndrome and leukemia after having fought the disease for five years. 

She was also a fine musician and served for 22 years as director of music at St. John Lutheran Church, Seward, where she was organist, choir director, and junior high music teacher. She was an amazing woman—great cook, mother, and wife—and she fought for women’s rights and equality in the church. I wish that I could say that she had been successful. 

Heidi, our oldest (b. 1963), lives in Lincoln, has two children, and graduated from the University of Nebraska. Her husband, Jon Taylor, is from Omaha, and they live in Lincoln where Heidi is the office manager for the State of Nebraska Foster Care Review Board. 

Janna (b. 1966) is married to Todd Nugent, has two daughters, and just finished her master’s degree in computer science at the University of Chicago. Both Janna and my son John-Paul graduated from the University of Chicago. Janna is a senior bioinformatics specialist at Northwestern University. We’re all very close, and I get regular messages from them on my Apple watch!

John-Paul (b. 1974) decided to move back home in 2009 because Connie needed a lot of individual care, attention, and I needed help. In Seattle he worked as a digital production assistant and grip. He traveled across much of the planet in this position. He is now finishing his Ph.D. in computer science/robotics at the University of Nebraska and hopes to have one leg in industry and the other in academia. He is currently living with me.

 

Tell us about your 26 years at Pacific Hills Lutheran Church in Omaha.

Someone once said that it must have been like 200 round trips to the moon! It was an amazing experience. 

I drove from my home in Seward to Omaha at least once a week for 26 years. I left Seward by 5:30 a.m. on Sunday morning for the 70-mile, one-way trek. I rehearsed with the cantor or the choir for the 8:00 a.m. service and then rehearsed the large choir at 9:30 for the 11 a.m. service and was usually back to Seward by 2:00/2:30 p.m. They were wonderful people, and I had outstanding musicians to work with.

For example, Grant Peters, a wonderful trumpet player, was in high school when I first started at Pacific Hills. Dr. Grant Peters is now on the faculty of the University of Missouri at Springfield. His father Kermit was a magnificent oboe player who taught at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Both Kermit and Grant’s mother, Sondra, sang in the choir. Both Kermit and Grant played regularly for services at Pacific Hills. There were many other very talented singers and instrumentalists. 

Originally, I conceived The Seventh Trumpet for Grant Peters. He has such a beautiful tone, and he could hit all of the high notes with ease. I also have an unpublished version for organ solo. 

After driving back and forth to Omaha for 26 years and being in an automobile accident in 2001, it was decided, with a lot of insistence from my wife and the medical community, that I should give up my position at Pacific Hills. In the accident my car was totaled, but fortunately, I walked away without a scratch. I think that maybe God was trying to tell me something and that He protected me.

 

Please discuss your composing, hymn festivals, and recordings.

These days, I am more stingy with my time, and I think that it is age related.  Regarding recording, I don’t feel as confident. There is an assuredness that you feel at an earlier age. I don’t feel that way today. 

When I did the CDs (From My Perspective, 4 volumes, and Friendly Amendments) in the late 1990s and 2000s, I never needed to stop and start again because of a mistake. I played everything straight out. I would be reluctant to try that today, not only from the energy standpoint but also from the accuracy point of view. There comes a point when one decides whether to give it up or learn to live with it the way it is. I’m still playing very well—that’s my opinion, of course—but there was a time that if I missed one note, I’d be in a funk the rest of the day. Nowadays, I assume that I will miss at least one, or maybe two, which isn’t all that bad!  

I started playing hymn festivals because I thought it was important to use new music that I had written and also to use these compositions on a regular and ongoing basis. I don’t know if my A Mighty Fortress is a recital piece, but at hymn festivals I play a lot of compositions in that style and also write for specific instruments and occasions. I thought that was the tradition of organ music I wanted to follow. Hymn festivals have provided me with the opportunity to compose new music and to feel comfortable about it. 

I’m not opposed to playing music by European composers. I have tried to be as international as I can be—but I believe that we as Americans have a unique culture and that we should celebrate it. I have always been interested in creating new textures and techniques, and people have sometimes said that my music sounds like popular music or jazz and that they’ve never heard the organ sound quite like that before. I think, “Good! That’s exactly what I am looking for.”

 

Describe your compositional process.

Driving back and forth to Omaha for 26 years provided me with a lot of time to let melodies and ideas run through my head. Oftentimes, they would ferment for a while and then turn into compositions later. For example, What a Friend We Have in Jesus, Set VII, is a work that a lot of people think sounds like a calliope. Around 1996 a man in Texas said, “I really appreciate what you’re doing, but I just don’t think we’re quite ready for you here.” At this point in 2016, What Friend We Have in Jesus seems to be wearing well. 

 

I play it, too, and my students play it as well.

One of the reasons that I’ve called my pieces compositions is that they represent an evolution of ideas—change and growth—throughout Sets I to X. I’ve always been searching for a new language and new ways to use a hymn tune. I prefer not to call them chorales or hymn preludes because to me they are just simply new ways of using the organ.

Something that is missing today is a sense of daring on the part of publishers: they are so careful, maybe because they’re pressured about the bottom line and what’s going to sell. A publisher once asked me, “Can’t you write music that’s easier to play?” My response was, “I’ll take out all of the notes that I can, and what’s left is the essential part.” I’m sure that Max Reger would not have agreed with me, but I think that if Reger could have cleaned up a few scores, we could have played his music without tripling the root of the chord! 

I truly think that I have tried to make my music no more complicated than it has to be, but if you take more out of it, something is missing. Maybe every artist and composer feels that way. 

 

In A Mighty Fortress, Set VIII, and I Love to Tell the Story, Set V (with that one 15/16 measure!), there are unconventional rhythmic twists, but that’s part of the beauty, interest, and challenge in your music. Are your unpredictable rhythms reflective of the rhythmic Lutheran chorales?

Yes. I think rhythmic Lutheran hymns are a part of what made me who I am today, and I think I see more potential in some of those rhythms from that time. It’s exciting material.

 

I recall asking you once about the length of your pieces in Sets I and II as compared with the later sets, and you answered, “I have more to say.”

Not only that, but I think that the technology enables one to write music and to play it back immediately. It is amazing that Bach and Mozart could write music in ink and not rewrite it every other day.

With Finale and my computer, I can write it, print it, and take it to the organ. One of the dangers of this is that you have to be careful that you don’t start writing for that instrument—the “keyboard”—rather than for the organ. I then make corrections, enter them into the computer, and listen to it. 

 

What was your goal with the pieces in Sets I and II, in particular, the unconventional notation? 

Freedom. Freedom of the bar line. I was able to try things that I had not done before. The price of freedom of the bar line is worrying about whether or not one is in 3/4 or 4/4. That’s why my students had trouble: they wanted either 4/4 or 15/16, or they wanted it in 6/8. That’s the freedom I wanted, but I wasn’t sure that it really was as effective as I had originally hoped. Even though they are structured that way, all of the rhythm is there; however, you must have the musicianship and skill that’s solid enough to be able to play this music.

It was an experiment, and I have to compliment the publisher in 1971 for actually publishing it. They still sell many copies of Sets I and II every year.

 

A Mighty Fortress and Komm, Heiliger Geist are now revised and back in print in Sets VIII and IX respectively. How did this come about? Was it difficult?

No. Not at all. Even though A Mighty Fortress was written in 1990, I no longer play it that way. I’ve learned that many composers—Liszt among them—produced several versions of a given composition. The question has always been, “Which is the ‘real’ one?” Truth be known, they all are! Each version at one time was his final word.

With A Mighty Fortress, I was moving on and people would say that I didn’t play it like I had in the past. Just because one puts it on paper doesn’t mean that your brain says that it is finished.

Komm, Heiliger Geist was originally composed without bar lines, and I was beginning to change how it was played. Thus, I entered it into Finale, which meant that I had to “square it up” a bit. At least, Finale accepted the irregular meters.

 

Is there a Set X of Eleven Compositions in progress?

Yes. I sent it to the publisher in April, and it is now available from Concordia, as of October 2016.

 

How did you end up teaching for 36 years at Concordia-Seward/Nebraska, your alma mater?

Jan Bender had been at Concordia for five years (1961–66) as composer, professor of music theory, organ, and improvisation. Those were the parallel five years that I taught at Concordia-River Forest. In 1966, Bender accepted a teaching position at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. The chair of the organ area at Concordia-River Forest was a relatively young man, Herbert Gotsch. As a colleague Dr. Gotsch was good to me, but frankly I needed to break out on my own and try to implement new approaches. That opportunity came from Concordia-Seward, and my wife Constance and I decided it would be a good time for us to move our growing family: two children at this point. We would also be much closer to the grandparents in Kansas and Iowa.

The college in Nebraska had 14 new practice pipe organs—several arrived during my first year of teaching at Seward. On the campus was also a 1960 three-manual, 48-rank Kuhn mechanical-action instrument from Switzerland. 

Concordia-Seward had 180 organ students! I was in charge (fortunately not the only teacher) and a bit overwhelmed!  Shortly after my arrival in Nebraska I had an opportunity to study organ departments across America including such schools as Oberlin, Michigan, Eastman, Juilliard, and to completely redesign the Concordia-Seward organ curriculum using the best of what I had observed. 

Also during the academic year 1971–72, I had my first sabbatical and traveled throughout Western Europe studying methods of organ teaching, which included improvisation. Those were very important years for me. Throughout my teaching career I always tried to stress the need to improvise in addition to playing literature.  

 

Please tell us about the music department at Concordia-Seward.

When I started, there were 19 of us on the faculty. Now there are six full-time faculty with about 22 adjuncts. We bring in a lot more specialists than we were ever able to do. I think it is very unfair: many of the adjunct faculty have earned doctorates, but they receive no benefits and have no idea whether they’re going to have a job the next semester. This is a big change as compared to when I was hired at Concordia-River Forest. During my tenure as chair of the music department (1996–2002), we helped to initiate the basic changes in the curriculum so that we could have the department accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM). It worked: the president of the university, Orville Walz, found the money to make it happen.

 

You retired from Concordia-Seward in 2002, but have a church position and are still quite active.

With retirement, you just retire from one thing to something else. I find that I don’t have time to teach anymore. I have over 200 orchid plants, several of which are right behind you.

 

Besides tending to your orchids and maintaining your green thumbs, what else do you do?

I compose when I have an idea, and I take on a few commissions. One of the reasons that I decided to retire was during a long spring break and working on a commission, I learned that this is really what I wanted to be doing. Not worrying about fingering, pedaling, or playing on the ball of the foot, etc.!

I have several hobbies, one of which is all of the clocks that you see. I also have a Maelzel’s metronome, built in France by the inventor of the inverted metronome, Johann Maelzel (1772–1838).

 

At this point in your life and career, is there anything that you would do differently?

Yes, of course, because there is so much to do. I think that the hardest thing is to stay focused. On the other hand, it’s easy to keep pursuing different paths. I could live in Paris and go wherever I want to in the world.

I also enjoy accompanying the choir in my current position as organist at First Presbyterian Church, Lincoln, rather than having to be the choir director. Taking orders is fun, even though you may say to yourself, “I don’t think I would do it that way.” I’m lucky that I work with really nice people who are highly trained. 

I would do things differently because I’ve already done it this way! I may not have wound up here if had I gone in other directions. 

 

What pearls of wisdom might you impart to the younger generation of organists and church musicians?

Practice. Work. Teach (teaching is a great way to learn). Teach technique rather than pieces. If you teach a student a piece the student will know one piece. If you teach a student the techniques that are required to play the piece, the student can apply those techniques and play many pieces. The moment you think that you have mastered everything, it’s over. 

Things are constantly changing. In my lifetime I have seen the overall music scene continue to develop and expand and become more diverse. I would also suggest that as much as you possibly can, try to get in touch with your inner creative being. Be brave, put your fingers on the keys, and see what happens. See if you can find something that you like to do, and then just keep doing it. 

I first started publishing 11 Compositions for Organ in 1971, and I believe that I’ve kept growing and changing. My goal is to do “11-Eleven,” and I’ve already finished two compositions for that set, Set XI. At that point, I hope to start other projects. Life becomes a series of imagining what it could be, and then working toward it. What would it be like if . . . ? 

One of the exciting things I’ve been doing for several years, every other year now, will be my third European organ seminar next summer. We play original, unaltered instruments associated with famous composers. Our trip next summer will be to France and Switzerland, but primarily to Italy, so I’m getting out my Frescobaldi scores!

It’s a brave and demanding world out there. Don’t be afraid. Go for it! I’m going to have my first electric car soon, and I have my Apple watch. I Google things daily, and I like to do crossword puzzles. I feel energized just talking about these things.

 

What do you believe your legacy to our profession might be?

That is a tough question, yet I suspect that there are two answers. 

1. My students and the influence that they will have on the lives of others. In my years of teaching I have worked with over 900 students. Whatever is meant by legacy will happen with those students and the lives they come in contact with. 

2. My music. Art is very difficult to predict. With luck, possibly a few of my pieces might make it into collections that represent our era. Sometimes this music “shake out” takes generations to come to some resolve. Good luck to all those who place money on this horse race.  

 

Thank you, Charles, for sharing your wisdom and insight, for your inspiring music, and for your wonderful zest for life. Here’s to Charles W. Ore: Prince of the Prairie!

John Bishop

Cuthbert and the Cow

Cuthbert (634–687 AD) was a monk and later a bishop in the Northumbrian Church, in the northeast of England, the area of modern Newcastle, near the Scottish border. After his death, his remains had remarkable adventures, which seemed to contribute as much to his eventual sainthood as did his activities while breathing. Eleven years after his death, his tomb was opened in preparation for his reburial, and to the amazement of those present, his corpse was miraculously preserved, inspiring the swift development of a cult honoring his memory and making him the most popular saint in England at the time.

Several centuries after his death, his admirers dug up his remains again to take him on the lam, protecting him from a Danish invasion. Suddenly and mysteriously, the cart carrying the coffin became stuck in the road. According to the legend, it wasn’t mud, and it wasn’t a mechanical breakdown, it was just stuck. Bishop Aldun, the leader of Cuthbert’s groupies, had a vision that St. Cuthbert was asking to be taken to Dunholme. Trouble was, no one knew where that was. As they pondered, a milkmaid wandered by looking for her lost cow. When she asked if anyone had seen her cow, a young woman pointed up the road, saying she had seen the cow heading toward Dunholme (now Durham). Miraculously, the cart was freed, and the roadies continued to Durham. Cuthbert was buried there and a great church was built to honor his memory. The present cathedral was built on the same site a century later, and Cuthbert was unearthed again and moved to a shrine attached to the new building. Apparently that was the end of Cuthbert’s travels, more than 400 years after his death, though after all that, I wouldn’t stand too close to his grave, beautifully preserved or not.

The episode with the cart might have been the first time on record that the men stood around wondering where they were, while a woman asked for directions. By the way, she found her cow, whose role in the legend is commemorated by a Victorian bovine statue, in a niche high on the exterior of the cathedral.

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Durham Cathedral is an incredible place. William the Conqueror appointed William of St. Carilef as the first bishop there in 1081. Construction of the new cathedral started in 1093, and the nave was completed around 1130 (AD, not AM). It’s officially called the Cathedral Church of Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin, and St. Cuthbert of Durham. “Durham Cathedral” works for me. While the great buildings of the High Gothic defy gravity, relying on exterior buttresses to support the weight of huge high ceilings while walls are nearly all glass and apparently structure-free, the Norman architecture of Durham Cathedral is gravity-intensive. The ancient fabric of the building is solid, and it seems as though the engineers and architects were experimenting as they went. Some arches are round while others are pointed, and clerestory windows don’t line up above those in lower stories. Buttresses between the windows are integral with the building, amounting to “thickening” of the walls rather than flying free.

Wendy and I spent one night in Durham during our recent trip to England. After dinner, we walked up to the cathedral where bellringers’ practice was going on, and the building was bathed in light. I had the sense that we were witnessing the early development of monumental ecclesiastical architecture, a prelude for our visit the next day to the High Gothic masterpiece of York Minster. The 150 or so years between the buildings at Durham and York, just seventy miles apart, brought incredible advances in construction techniques. Those builders were true innovators, and I wonder how much communication there was between builders in England and those in France at the same time. There was no Chunnel facilitating travel between the two countries, but there must have been plenty of interchange. Maybe there were international job fairs for medieval stonecutters. Come visit us at booth #1081.

Durham is home to 65,000 people and is about 270 miles from London. It’s a long way to go for a one-night visit, but besides visiting the cathedral, I was being offered a cobblers’ dream holiday. Church musicians make pilgrimages to the Chapel of King’s College in Cambridge to hear the world-famous choir and organ. I got to see that iconic Harrison & Harrison organ in the workshop during its reconstruction.

 

Not that Harrison,

The American organ world celebrates a British immigrant organbuilder who started his working life as a patent attorney before “catching the bug.” G. Donald Harrison was largely responsible for the development of the American Classic pipe organ­—that unique style of instrument found in places like the Church of the Advent in Boston, known for sprightly Principal choruses and Baroque-inspired secondary choruses on Positiv divisions with low wind pressure. They represent a style unto themselves and helped inspire the mid-twentieth century revival of classic styles of organbuilding. Harrison was also responsible for the great organs of the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City and the Riverside Church in New York City.

I mention Mr. Harrison somewhat out of context here because we’ve just passed the 60th anniversary of his death. In June of 1956, he was working feverishly to complete the rebuilding of the Aeolian-Skinner organ at St. Thomas Church in New York City in time for the convention of the American Guild of Organists, while New York was suffering the unfortunate combination of a heat wave and strike of taxi drivers. After work on June 14, Harrison walked the eight blocks from St. Thomas to his Third Avenue apartment, stopping on the way to pick up a dose of smelling salts. After dinner, while watching Victor Borge on television with his wife, Helen, Harrison suffered a fatal heart attack.

Four days after Harrison’s death, the British organist John Scott was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, foreshadowing Scott’s brilliant career as organist and director of music at St. Thomas Church, so sadly cut short last August by his sudden death.

 

That Harrison (& Harrison).

In 1861, Thomas Harrison established a pipe organ building company in Rochdale, near Manchester in the U. K., and in 1876, he moved the company to Durham. He built a number of wonderful organs, and the company really took off when his sons Arthur and Harry took over in 1896. They were exceptionally gifted organbuilders, Harry at the design table and Arthur in the voicing room. The catalogue of Harrison & Harrison organs shows dozens of instruments built in the first decades of the twentieth century. Arthur and Harry must have been especially pleased to have the hometown opportunity to rebuild the 1876 Willis organ in Durham Cathedral in 1905. Arthur Harrison died in 1936, and Harry retired in 1946, and the cows came home when control of the firm was passed on to Harry’s son, Cuthbert in 1945. Cuthbert was director of the firm until 1975 and remained Chairman of the Board until his death in 1991.

Mark Venning ran the company from 1975 until 2011, when Christopher Batchelor was appointed managing director. Dr. Batchelor was my tour guide in the busy workshop, where, among other projects, the King’s College organ was being prepared for shipment back to Cambridge.  

A member of the Harrison & Harrison staff met us at the train station, dropped Wendy off at The Victoria Inn (a crazy little B&B above a six-stool pub), and took me to the workshop, a snazzy place built in 1996 to replace a 124-year-old building that had outlived its usefulness. There’s a small entry vestibule (narthex?) inside the front door that contained two items of interest. One was a four-stop dual-pitched continuo organ (which is for sale), and the other was a letter signed by Queen Elizabeth, framed with a special commemorative medal honoring the work done by Harrison & Harrison as part of the restoration of Windsor Castle following the devastating fire there in 1992.

 

An organ fit for a king

Reading that letter, I remembered thoughts I had while watching the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on television in 2011. That was some job for the organ tuners. The Harrison & Harrison organ at Westminster Abbey was installed in 1937 and was played for the first time for the Coronation of King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth. We were recently reminded of King George VI, as he was the central character in the 2010 movie, The King’s Speech. Remember, he’s the one who became king when his brother King Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson. 

All of us in the business of organ building have been involved in projects that must be finished by Christmas, by Easter, or in time for the wedding of the donor’s daughter. But who else besides the people of Harrison & Harrison have been faced with such momentous events, so many times? An internationally televised royal wedding or coronation is a terrible time for a cipher!

And speaking of kings, the marvelous Harrison & Harrison organ at King’s College was built in 1934. There are famous photographs that show the organ case perched atop the central screen. Graceful towers on either side of the case seem like upraised arms, while the center of the main case ducks out of the way of the view. It looks monumental, but in fact, the case is not large enough to house the massive organ, so much of the instrument is concealed within the screen, below the level of the organ’s console.  

Installing a large organ in an ancient building is charged with difficulties. Even though the chapel building is huge (those at King’s College, Duke University, and Valparaiso University are supposedly the world’s largest collegiate chapels), the original designers made no provision for placement of an organ. And if they had, they would never have conceived of our modern instruments with 32-foot pipes, heavy expression boxes, and all the other pneumatic goodies that take up so much space.

The organ at King’s College is used very heavily, and after 80 years, mechanical systems became increasingly difficult to maintain, so much of the mechanical structure of the instrument is new, including windchests, reservoirs, structure, expression boxes, and other appliances. Maintenance passage boards are mounted on hinges to swing up, providing freer egress of sound, especially allowing the organists to better hear the organ from the console. All of the new structure was standing in the shop during my visit. A large part of the project was complete before the organ was removed early in 2016.

The original pipes are being cleaned and repaired, ready for installation during the summer, with the project scheduled for completion in September. We (along with millions of others) can all look forward to hearing the renovated instrument in the broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve.

I found it strangely moving to see pipes in crates from particular stops I remember hearing on recordings and radio broadcasts, like the English Horn in Berlioz’s Shepherds’ Farewell. And who among us hasn’t wept to the strains of that Tuba pointing out the melody under descants in Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, or O Come, All Ye Faithful? (Special thanks to the late David Willcocks.) I also saw the famous gold-leafed façade pipes, many of which date from the original organ built in 1605, some of which had suffered terrible gravity-induced damage. A pair of cheerful metal workers showed me how they were cutting off time- and weight-ravaged toes, reinforcing the pipe feet, and soldering on new cast toes—a sort of galvanized pedicure.

 

A fund-lowering pitch

As Peterborough Cathedral celebrates its 900th anniversary, they’ve embarked on an ambitious campaign, raising funds for a large number of extraordinary projects. You can see the scope of Peterborough 900 on the cathedral’s website at www.peterborough-cathedral.org.uk/home/campaign-objectives.aspx. Two of the projects are directly related to music. One is a £1,000,000 Cathedral and Community Music School (when we were in the U. K. last month, £1 cost almost $1.50), and the other is lowering the pitch of the 1884 Hill Organ. The organ was originally built at “Old Philharmonic Pitch,” commonly used in the late nineteenth century. While modern concert pitch is A = 440 cycles per second, Old Philharmonic Pitch is A = 453 Hz, enough higher that singers are surprised by it, and many modern orchestral instruments can’t match it.  

Changing the pitch of a large pipe organ is a complicated process. Each pipe has to be made longer (the Peterborough organ has 5,286 pipes). It’s also a tricky decision because lengthening an organ pipe changes its scale, which is the ratio of length by diameter. During my tour, I saw many pipes from the Peterborough organ, both wood and metal, with their extensions and new tuning scrolls in various stages of completion. I was impressed that big projects on two huge and famous organs were underway in the workshop at the same time. There sure were a lot of organ parts stacked about. And that wasn’t all. A new two-manual tracker-action instrument was underway as well.

 

When one is not enough

The morning after my tour of the Harrison & Harrison workshops, H&H operations manager Jeremy Maritz met Wendy and me “by the font” at the west end of Durham Cathedral to show us the organ. The three of us crowded into the tiny console gallery above the quire and explored the kaleidoscope of tone color revealed by the luxurious ivory drawknobs. Isn’t it rich when a Great division has both First and Second 8′ Diapasons? But wait—this organ has four! It’s the Swell division that has “only” First and Second Diapasons. And here’s a new one—in the Pedal division, Open Wood 16′ I and Open Wood 16′ II. Those two huge stops are located on opposite sides of quire, in the surrounding ambulatory—and it’s Open Wood 16′ II that’s extended to 32-foot. Heavens! And as if that’s not enough, there’s also a 16′ Diapason made of metal. Reeds, you ask? 32′ Double Ophicleide (an extension of the Solo Tuba) and 32′ Double Trombone. It’s embarrassing.

I’m grateful to Jeremy Maritz, Christopher Batchelor, and the staff of Harrison & Harrison for their hospitality and for the great education I received at their hands.

 

Betting on the future of the past

Here in the United States, lotteries operated by governments are a mixed bag. In Colorado, proceeds from the state lottery are largely invested in parks and recreational facilities, while in Kansas significant lottery money goes to the construction and maintenance of prisons. In Great Britain, the Heritage Lottery Fund provides funding for countless projects related to the preservation of the country’s heritage, from steam-powered tugboats to church bells, from medieval cathedrals to pipe organs. Actually, the projects are not countless—the lottery’s website claims that £6.8 billion have been awarded to support 39,000 projects since 1994.

Durham Cathedral has an ongoing project called Open Treasure that involves restoration and preservation of the building itself as well as new programs and uses for the enclosed spaces. Exhibition spaces are being developed for the display of incredible treasures owned by the cathedral, and the lottery has provided £3,850,000. Peterborough 900 has received grants totaling £2.5 million from the lottery.

Go to the website www.hlf.org.uk, type “pipe organs” into the search field, and you’ll find a list of projects that have been supported by grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund—from £44,000 for the restoration of the 1881 organ built by K. C. Reiter in the parish church of All Saints’, Roos, to £950,000 toward the restoration of the Harrison & Harrison organ at Royal Festival Hall.

During our trip, we saw signs proclaiming the support of the HLF at York Minster, Blenheim Palace, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. We saw it at Westminster Abbey and at St. Martin in the Fields at Trafalgar Square.

The Heritage Lottery Fund is one of twelve specialty funds that disperse the proceeds of the National Lottery (www.national-lottery.co.uk). Other funds support arts councils, sports organizations, and the British Film Institute. As a short-term observer from the outside, it seemed pretty enlightened to me. Can you imagine our federal legislature coming up with something like that? I’d buy a ticket.