Against All Odds: A few inconveniences on the road to becoming an organist Buenos Aires, Argentina, to California, USA, 1950–65, Part II

Norberto Guinaldo

Norberto Guinaldo holds the Master’s degree in Music Theory and Composition from the University of California at Riverside and the Diplome Superieure d’Orgue from the Schola Cantorum in Paris, France, where he studied with Jean Langlais. In the U.S.A. he also studied organ with Clarence Mader. He has been organist at the United Methodist Church of Garden Grove since 1965, and organist at Temple Ner Tamid in Downey, California since 1962.

Norberto Guinaldo has won first prizes in composition in 1964, 1966, 1967, 1970, and 1986. He has been a recipient of numerous commissions, including Oblations of Remembrance (AGO) premiered in 1989; Rhapsody on a French Carol (private patron), written for the inauguration of the horizontal trumpets of the great organ of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles; and Novissimis, a 45-minute work premiered on February 15, 1998, for the inauguration for the new Glatter-Goetz organ at Claremont (California) United Church of Christ.

He wrote and premiered Credo, an hour-long work in twelve sections for the Far-western Regional Convention of the AGO in 1983. In addition to organ music, he has written piano and choral works and music for symphonic and chamber ensembles. Several of his works have been featured in recent years by Michael Barone on Pipedreams.

Norberto Guinaldo has performed in the U.S.A., as well as in Europe, Argentina, and Mexico. Norberto now lives with his wife Melinda in Fullerton (Orange County), California. Their children Clay, Roy, Marcell, and Cordelia, their families, and eleven grandchildren also live in Orange County. His website, www:guinaldopublications.com, features one hundred titles, either in singles editions or in collections.

Editor’s note: This feature is presented this month as Norberto Guinaldo celebrates his 80th birthday. It will be continued next month.

 

Ah! The United States! Country without equal in the world. Its citizens, inheritors of a legacy hard to fathom in its totality. The birthplace of most of the greatest simple and complex inventions that have advanced civilization to a degree and with a speed never imagined before. Its institutions of learning, store-houses of knowledge that have provided the tools and means that have bettered the lives, not only of its citizens, but those of the most civilized countries in the world.

Public records tell us that there are close to 1,600 public universities and 2,400 private ones. Would one guess that there might be a music department in each one of them? Would there be a sacred music or an organ department within them? Not in each one, but could one guess that to be the case in the majority? How about half of them? Or maybe one-fourth? That would be a lot of organ departments, wouldn’t one think? And what about colleges?

Tell this to someone coming from a third-world country (ignorant of these realities), and he wouldn’t believe you. To even think of one-tenth of that would stagger the imagination. The abundance of things available to us makes it hard to comprehend that what we take for granted may be totally unavailable or very hard to obtain in some countries. Perhaps the following story will give you an idea of what it was like for a young man pursuing a dream (and maybe amuse you!).

 

Childhood

I was born in 1937 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, of an Italian mother and a Spanish father. Both were ten years old when their families migrated to that country in the 1920s. Considering that it was about two years after the end of World War I, economics were probably the reason for the move. Both were baptized Catholic, yet no one in their families practiced their religion in their adoptive country. Argentina was a self-proclaimed Catholic country in those days.

By the time I was born, my parents were attending a “storefront church”—a religious organization that, for decades, met in rented commercial buildings. That was “church” for me as a child and as a young adult. We never set foot inside a Catholic church and we, the children, wouldn’t dare to! You see, among the good things of our religious education in common with many other Christian organizations that base their beliefs in the Bible, we were also taught—actually subtly indoctrinated—with peculiar beliefs that put the Catholic Church in a pretty bad light. These peculiar beliefs acquired a coloring bordering on the bizarre when the subject would come up at home in conversations during our growing years. Young children are particularly sensitive during their formative years when given information they don’t really understand, and it can cause damage in unexpected ways. Unfortunately, I personally developed a fear of all things “Catholic.”

There was no music making at home or musicians on either side of the family. The radio brought us all kinds of music; my father would occasionally listen to a classical music station. And I, as a small child, had no interest in it.

My earliest recollection of any music other than popular was in our “storefront church.” There was a harmonium there to accompany the hymns and an old German gentleman who played it.

I still can picture looking at him from behind, how he moved his elbows up and down, and I always wondered why he did that. It occurred to me decades later, thinking of the poor fellow, that perhaps he had arthritic fingers and that when tried to cross the third finger over the thumb in both hands, the elbows would go up and come down then in a more normal position. He looked to me like a big bird slowly flapping his wings!

We lived just outside the periphery of the city of Buenos Aires. There wasn’t much culture there. The best of European civilization was found in the heart of the city, which people called “El Centro”—the universities, concert halls, theaters, the beautiful architecture, the great churches, and refinement.

My mother was a high-class seamstress who had years before worked for an exclusive clothing store in downtown Buenos Aires. Our house was always full of women cutting patterns to make dresses. (Seventy years ago that was the thing to do, if you wanted to dress well and pay little!) Among these women was a young girl who lived around the corner from us; she played the piano and had a beautiful German upright piano in her home (a luxury then, for a “blue collar” family). My mother asked her if she would teach me to play the piano, she would teach her to make dresses (as an even exchange, I suppose!).

 

Early music lessons

I was seven at the time and had no interest in music nor any desire to learn an instrument. In grade school there were no pianos, and patriotic songs (only) were sung to the accompaniment of recorded music. There were no incentives in this environment to awaken any desire to learn music. I obeyed my mother and surrendered myself to the experiment. After a month of lessons away from the piano learning note values and beginning solfege, Alba, my teacher, sat me at the piano. I remember to this day (and I don’t know why, considering the circumstances), I felt a thrill all over my body as I faced that keyboard! It was January 17, 1944—written on the first page of my theory book, which I still have in my possession.

From that time on, two lessons a week, and an hour practice every day at her house, of course, since we didn’t have a piano and wouldn’t have one for four more years. Logically, she learned to make dresses faster than I learned to play piano, so my mother paid her a small monthly fee for the lessons, which went on for years. Evidently I took a liking to the piano because by the third year I was playing a lot of music. Alba taught me well.

By age ten (1947) my parents, with much sacrifice, bought a used piano. I was so excited! Unfortunately, beautiful as it was on the outside, it was a disaster on the inside. It wouldn’t hold the tuning longer than a week. The sound was awful. But there was nothing I could do. Yet, it was good to have my own instrument, bad as it was, to move my fingers on and practice the music. Because of it, I started buying music and playing anything that caught my attention. I learned to sight-read with great speed. By then I was playing Bach’s three-part inventions, sonatinas, some Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as well as tangos and Argentine folkloric music.

 

First church position

Around that time my “church” had to find another “storefront” location. The old German gentleman disappeared, and I was asked to play the harmonium for services. It was 1948. This 11-year-old boy, in his last year of grade school was “drafted,” against his wishes, to be a church organist? Truly, the word “organ” was never mentioned. I was called to play the harmonium, and the title “organist” would never have occurred to me because I did not know what an organ was! After a few tries, I picked up the “legato” technique quite easily and naturally. 

In those days high school was not obligatory, and children, after grade school, would go on to whatever money-making jobs they felt inclined to do or were available. Fortunately my parents wanted me to go on with my education.

At 12, I was two years too young to go to high school, but it seemed that age didn’t matter to school officials as long as you could pass the entrance exam, and I did. I finished high school two years younger and perhaps still a bit immature also!

 

Political climate

Argentina was, through all my schooling years, under the leadership of dictator Juan Domingo Perón and his cronies in every position of government, and the ever-present non-elected personality Eva Perón, the famous “Evita,” the dictator’s wife. In 1952 while in my fourth year of high school, Eva Perón, then in her 30s, died of cancer. Suddenly the whole country went into mourning. All radio stations cancelled all programming and played classical music—24 hours a day for 30 days. (Even the Peronistas thought that it was a bit too much!) 

It was during this period that I began to hear real organ music for the first time. The great organs of Europe and their organists were now in my home via recordings. I was overwhelmed with the grandeur of this music and a glorious sound. It touched every fiber of my being and put me on a quest to find a way to learn more about the organ, but more importantly, to find one and to learn to play it! But where to go? Were there any in Buenos Aires? Were there any teachers? Schools? I had to find out.

 

The big city

I had been in the city as a child with my father, but now I began to explore it on my own, even though I was a bit too young to roam around a big city alone. Truly, it was a bit unnerving. Its architecture attracted me, especially the churches. With trepidation, I began to enter those magnificent buildings looking for organs. I was overwhelmed; I was seeing beauty everywhere! I found many organs and wondered who played them? I tried to imagine how they might sound in those spaces according to what I had heard on the radio.

Going to the city on Sundays to a Catholic Mass, even with the pretext of going to listen to an organ, was out the question. I was still under my parents’ control and still had my duties at the harmonium. Just the thought of bringing this subject up at home made me uneasy. It would have created an ugly situation, the “vibes” of which would have lingered for days! My young mind was being assaulted by all kinds of questions, especially, “Who are the lucky ones who worship in such magnificent places, while we had to do it in such dreadful ones?”

By 1953, my last year of high school, I continued to explore the city, even playing hooky from school many times. And the quest to finding organs was extended to finding organ music. It was the next obvious thing to do.

 

The search for organ music

There were various large music stores, well supplied with materials, printed music as well as instruments—mostly of European provenance, catering to musicians in a city proud of its artistic heritage. Conservatories of music abounded, both public and private. Teachers trained in Europe and also home-grown supplied well-trained musicians for its symphony orchestras, opera houses, and the many other ensembles, and soloists of all sorts. But where was music for the organ? The great body of centuries-old literature that forms the main part of an organist’s library was nowhere to be found!

I asked myself: what do these organists here play on Sunday? I found a few collections of transcriptions of Baroque Italian masters (for manuals only), a book of easy fugues by Rheinberger and others (for manuals only), which sounded good on the harmonium, a book of pedal exercises by Nielsen (which, obviously, I couldn’t use and bought anyway), and a locally published anthology for the organ edited by Ermete (Hermes) Forti (soon to be my teacher)—30 works for both manuals only and manuals and pedal, covering pre-Baroque to Romantic (mostly easy), German and French works, including Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E Minor (“The Cathedral”) and the not-so-easy Cantabile of César Franck, and lo and behold, I found Volume I of Buxtehude’s works—Ciaconas, Passacaglias, and Canzonas edited by Josef Hedar and published by Wihelm Hansen. Quite a find! But no Bach yet. 

However, the Forti collection provided a taste of it and of things to come. I also found the Toccata, Villancico, y Fuga by Alberto Ginastera, the famous Argentine composer. Quickly I started to play these pieces on the piano and the harmonium. But I needed an organ on which to practice, and most urgently, organ lessons.

 

Organ lessons

One day, at a rehearsal of a choir put together for a special occasion by my religious organization, talking to a girl from another town, the conversation went from mentioning the harmonium to mentioning the pipe organ, a subject obviously foreign to me at the time. However, she said she was taking organ lessons, “real organ” lessons! I knew at that moment that God was reading my thoughts and had brought me there that night to make the connection I needed to begin to do what I wanted to do!

My new-found friend Dolly Morris (of Irish descent) was taking lessons from Maestro Ermete (Hermes) Forti, a transplanted Italian, the organist at the Basílica del Santísimo Sacramento, which housed the 1912 Mutin-Cavaillé-Coll organ, the largest organ in Argentina: 69 ranks, 83 stops. Lessons took place at the Escuela Superior de Organo de la Ciudad Buenos Aires on Saturday afternoons in a house owned by the Catholic diocese in the old and “ritzy” part of town, on a Hammond organ of two manuals and a 32-note pedalboard.

It was December, the end of the school year, and there was going to be a concert by one of the students (yes, on the Hammond organ!). Dolly invited me to attend, and I was there promptly at the appointed time, with great expectations. (I asked myself later, why couldn’t this concert have taken place in a church and on a real pipe organ?) I really needed to hear a live performance on one of those good organs of Buenos Aires. That was to happen later. Now I wasn’t about to ask questions. I learned later by experience, that in Argentina’s organ world, there were no answers to a lot of legitimate questions. You just went with the flow.

A young lady organist played a wonderful concert, and at that time, just seeing the perfect synchronization of hands and feet making beautiful music made me ecstatic and somewhat envious, to the point of not caring that the music came out of an electronic instrument. I just loved it! To me, any organ with two manuals and pedals, at that time, was an organ I wanted to play, period!

What she had accomplished was what I wanted to do. I remember even today at the distance of 63 years, some of the hour-long program: a Bach chorale-prelude, his famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and Nicolai Rimski-Korsakov’s The Flight of the Bumble Bee!

Dolly Morris offered to introduce me to Maestro Forti, but this had to wait for a few months. I had to figure out how to pay for lessons since I wasn’t working; but I had to find an organ to practice on, and find Bach’s organ music. The question was, where?

 

A place to practice

My high school was in San Martin, the town adjacent to mine. There was a very attractive old church built around 1850. I decided to go take a look to see if there was an organ. Back in the wide and high loft there was one; I could see the pipes. It looked quite small judging by the height and width of the loft. It was obvious that if I were going to have an organ to practice on, it would have to be in a Catholic church. Now at age 16 the childhood fear of things “Catholic” was still there, and to ask for permission to practice the organ meant talking to a priest. The thought of it petrified me.

Catholic priests walking down the street in their cassocks and Roman hats was a daily and familiar sight then, but talking to one on his “own turf” was a totally different matter. I’d picture him asking me if I was Catholic, where I attended Mass, and since truly I couldn’t lie, it meant an embarrassing situation, and I would be denied.

Some of my classmates urged me to talk to Padre Clovis, the rector, because, according to them, he was “a nice guy.” I did, and he said yes. No questions asked. Wow! My practice time had to be after school, around 5:30 p.m. The first day I went up to the organ loft I found this rather small pipe organ with a reversed console. I noticed the straight pedalboard, 27 notes. Not bad. I opened the lid, one keyboard! Small disappointment—no problem; enough to synchronize hands and feet. I had dreamt of someday playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and the beauty and “novelty” of two manuals (probably to any new organist) was that of moving back and forth between them. That was shot right there! Well . . . I thought, can’t have everything!

I tried the first stop: Gedeckt 8′. I will never forget the sound of this stop. The beauty of it brought tears to my eyes, I could have played on it alone for hours. And did, actually, many times afterwards. There was also a Flute 4′, a String 8′, and a Principal chorus at 8′-4′-2′ and Mixture III. Heaven! Who could resist that ensemble! It was beautiful and loud—a long shot from the harmonium. I tried Bach’s E-minor Prelude and Fugue (“The Cathedral”). No problems with the hands, but since I hadn’t had any lesson I did not know the correct position of the feet on the pedals. I did what I could. I loved what I was hearing. One thing bothered me though—why were there so many people in the church at 5:30 p.m. on a weekday? The church seemed to be packed every afternoon. Obviously, I knew absolutely nothing about their religion! Practicing with such a large audience really bothered me. I was conscious of them (obviously praying), and my starting and stopping, and, of course, the volume. As a “newcomer” to the instrument, I couldn’t resist the lure of Full Organ—an experience never to be forgotten!

Nobody complained until one afternoon I heard a loud voice yelling from down below things I couldn’t totally decipher. I stopped playing, looked over the railing, and realized that the tirade was directed at me. An old man with a long beard and handlebar moustache was looking up and shaking his cane at me telling me to stop the “infernal noise” because he couldn’t concentrate on his prayers. I did stop and waited for a considerable time hoping he’d be gone after a short while. It seemed, though, that his prayers were quite long, because, as soon as I started playing he would again start to yell, shaking his cane towards the organ loft. The experience shook me up pretty good, and my fear of everything Catholic was reinforced within me again. From that day on, every time I went to practice I dreaded to find him there, fearful of his yelling at me as soon as I started to play.

It happened many times on and off through many months. Between him and the large pious audience, it was hard to concentrate, and my nerves were, every time, shaken pretty bad.

From time to time, proud of my new find and feeling pretty special being an “organist,” I bragged about it with my musical friends from school whom I took from time to time to the loft to show off. They were appreciative. They had never heard that little organ sound like that.

One Saturday I took a female classmate, a fan of the music of Bach, up to show what little I had accomplished (without lessons, I should mention). She was seated by me on the bench. After a while I heard heavy footsteps rushing up the wooden stairway, when suddenly I see the figure of Padre Clovis rushing towards us from the door at the top of the stairwell, red in the face and yelling things at the moment I couldn’t understand. He gave us a “dressing down,” heard probably by the celestial court above!

A true Argentine, when angry, will just yell to make a point and to show displeasure. I don’t remember now the words of his tirade but the word “immoral” or “immorality” stuck in my young mind never to be forgotten! It seemed that we had “committed a sin” of some kind by being there alone together. Was mixed company forbidden in the organ loft, I asked myself? I wasn’t totally clear about it. What I knew was that the situation was extremely embarrassing, and I felt terrible for my friend who, by the way, was a Lutheran.

I profusely apologized for myself and my friend and claimed ignorance (and may have even asked to be forgiven, I don’t remember clearly). Padre Clovis said something to lighten up the situation, and he was his old smiling self again. I don’t remember if that was the last time I played that organ or shortly afterwards. Too many nerve-racking situations! It wasn’t worth my mental health. Time to try the Organ School, but before I did that I had to find, somewhere, somehow, the organ music of Bach.

 

The search for Bach

For a long time, whenever I had the chance to go to the city, I would explore every used bookstore in the hope that someday, I’d find what I needed. In the process, I would go in and out of antique stores that I found on the way. I loved them; it was like visiting museums! One day I found a choir book (on the floor), the kind you see in medieval paintings on a stand with a group of monks reading from it and singing. The covers (about 24″ x 22″) were wooden, with wrought-iron hinges; the pages: parchment; the music: Gregorian. The book was being gutted and sold page by page. I asked: what for? The answer: lamp shades. I felt sick to my stomach. I asked: how much? Ten pesos each. I bought two, that’s all the money I had. I still have them framed in my office.

A sad and wonderful reminder of my “searching” days—a connection to a past that later would come alive to me, as I learned what this “Gregorian” stuff was all about: the beginning of Western civilization’s music. More and more antique stores. I loved the smell and the stuff in them. Who had been the owners of so many beautiful things?

I never missed the opportunity to ask about music books. The answer was always, “Sorry, no!” But one day the store clerk told me to look on a very small and low bookshelf out of the way in a corner. He thought he might have seen some organ music there.

I couldn’t believe what saw! Right there among old books were three beautiful hardbound tomes. On the back of each was printed: Bach Orgelwerke, marked Tome I, Tome II, Tome III. When I opened them I saw they were the twelve volumes of the original German edition of C. F. Peters, bound in groups of three. The binding was exquisite. One could see that they had never been used. There wasn’t a mark in them or sign of use. They were in mint condition!

I saw on the first blank page of each volume some pencil writing in German and Spanish stating briefly the content. Who may have been its owner? The clerk had no idea how they got there or when. If the owner had been an organist in Buenos Aires or even a student, there would have been marks of use. But nothing. What a find—I had to have them!

I asked the clerk, “How much?” “275 pesos,” he said. Oh, no! Where am I going to get that money? My Dad would never give that amount; he earned 1,000 pesos a month! That would be more than one-fourth of his earnings! I wouldn’t even ask! I wasn’t working yet, although I had a piano student at the time who paid me 10 pesos a lesson. My student was the daughter of an American couple that heard me play one day and asked me to teach the girl. They lived in a mansion in an exclusive area of the city. I thought she wouldn’t mind giving me an advance on the lessons if I explained the purpose for the money.

At the end of one lesson I worked up some nerve and said to the mother: “Mrs. Valentine,” . . . She cut me off before I finished the phrase and said, “I know, I know. . . . Amy is not practicing like she should. . . . I don’t think she’s really interested, and it’s wasting everybody’s time, so why don’t we just stop the lessons now.” I was stunned. It was of no use at that point to say anything but to agree with her and say good-bye. I not only did not get the money, I lost my student! There went my Bach books (I thought). I had to find the money somehow before those books were sold.

Aunt Rosa (actually my mother’s aunt), an old Italian woman, tough and hard working, had a grocery store in a nearby town and had always shown a soft spot in her heart for my brother and me. I thought I’d ask her for a loan (not a gift) to buy the books because I knew I could repay, somehow, a little at a time. I tried to explain what the loan would be for. But, like Mrs. Valentine, she didn’t let me finish my first sentence and said, “Are you asking me for money? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Next time I see your mother I’m going to tell her about this, and see what she’s going to say! Now, get out of here!” “OK, Aunt Rosa! OK! I’m sorry I bothered you.” There went my Bach books again! Afraid of losing them I went back to the antique store to see if they would hold them for me for a period of time if I put some money down. They said yes. I did. Now to find the rest!

At the corner near the high school there was a bookstore owned by the Martinez family. Maria Elena, the daughter, was a classmate of mine during the five years of school. Mrs. Martinez took a liking to me from the day I set foot in the store. Years later she said, reminiscing, that I looked “forlorn”—I’d say, probably scared to death of the new environment! I became a regular in her home, a social place for many students. Since they had a fine piano, it became a place of music making before and after classes. Mrs. Martinez became a second mother to me, a counselor and a mentor, and their home a second home. Her husband, a would-be professor with an incredible mind regarding any subject dealt with in high school, coached me for many of the exams I had to pass. He was a poet also and had written volumes. (I still have one of his manuscripts, which, many years later, he would give me, as a gift.) With this background it is no surprise that when I went to her explaining why I had to have those books of Bach’s music, the money to buy them was in my hand immediately. I had my Bach Orgelwerke!

 

Organ lessons

My parents provided money for basic things needed in high school, and that was all. They were totally “hands off” regarding my musical interests at that time. Did they even wonder why I was so crazy about the organ, an instrument so foreign to their experience? It was left to me to find the means to reach my goals and dreams, and they left me alone. 

Now was the time to check out the Escuela Superior de Organo. Dolly Morris introduced me to Maestro Hermes Forti one Saturday afternoon before classes. I watched (with envy) how people played Bach’s music on the Hammond organ. There were quite a few students that Saturday. I happened to see a practice schedule on a board with students’ names and took a quick look at it. At that moment I was hoping (probably against hope) to see my name there someday. I was so eager to learn! Dolly had told me about the monthly fee for the lessons. I knew for sure there was no way to find the money for that.

Feeling very awkward and embarrassed, I told Maestro Forti that I wanted to study organ but since I was still in high school and not working I had no financial resources. “Can you play something for me?” he asked. “I’ll try,” I responded, and sat at an organ totally new to me with a pedalboard, the type of which I had never seen and a manual touch that seemed odd. I stumbled through the “Little” Prelude and Fugue in C of Bach. He told to come next Saturday to begin lessons and wrote my name on the practice schedule. I had time assigned to me for my practice twice a week. I finally had what I needed to begin to work on my dream: Bach’s music, an organ, and a teacher!

 

To be continued.

Gavin Black

Gavin Black is the director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. His website is www.gavinblack-baroque.com and he can be reached by e-mail at gavinblack@mail.com.

Motivation, Practicing, Fun, Guidance, & Projection II

This month I will continue questioning, musing, speculating—almost free-associating—about aspects of our ways of working with our students, and about how that process connects with the students’ lives and their many paths to learning music and to getting something important out of that learning and that music.

 

Remembering Peter Williams

However, a sad coincidence makes me start with a comment or two, and an anecdote, about Peter Williams. Just before I sat down to write this, the news came across the computer screen that Peter Williams had died. [See Nunc Dimittis, page 10 in this issue.] That made me remember my first introduction long ago to the first few of his many books: my teacher Eugene Roan mentioned that he valued Peter Williams’s writings especially because he asked more questions than he gave answers. I was jolted by this realization: that in starting last month’s column noting that I would be asking more questions in this series of columns than giving answers, I was subconsciously paying tribute to that aspect of Williams’s work. And indeed, Gene Roan was not the only person to notice that about Peter Williams. Several comments I have read online say exactly that about him. My own feeling (not based on anything he said to me, since, to my regret, I never spoke to him or communicated directly with him) is that his approach was simultaneously based on the perpetual asking of questions—the refusal to view anything as settled or determined in the way that can seem like ossification—and on valuing real and copious information as a spur to understanding and to art. This seems to me to be a very fruitful and also rather life-affirming combination. 

I once attended a combination lecture/demo and masterclass that Peter Williams conducted at the Schuke organ in Voorhees Chapel at Rutgers University. It was thirty-something years ago, and I don’t remember the specific topic. I do remember being (as someone very young and very much a beginner) astonished that someone so august, with actual books to his name (and impressive ones at that) could be so relaxed, friendly, and informal. I think I was still then in the grip of a youthful reluctance to believe that anything with the authority of the printed page could have flexibility to it. I had heard what Gene Roan had said, and knew that I liked that approach. But I still couldn’t quite believe that an “authority” really thought that way. His tone at this class helped me begin to internalize that as a possibility.

Furthermore—and this impressed me a lot—he conducted this class wearing sandals and other very informal summer gear. When he sat down to play the organ, he played in those sandals. I don’t remember what I thought then about organ playing and footwear. I am not sure whether this confirmed for me or actually started me thinking that simple comfort while playing might be an underrated value. Since I base much of my thinking about technique and teaching on the importance of comfort, naturalness, and relaxation, I consider that moment in Voorhees Chapel to have been quite significant for me. 

Now to get on with some questions . . .

 

Fingering

I wrote last month that “I sometimes respond to a student’s asking me what fingering to use in a passage by asking ‘what do you most deeply want out of life?’” And, as I said last month, this is sort of a joke—but not entirely. Questions about fingering are often phrased like this: “What is the fingering here?” or “What is the fingering for this passage?” Of course this way of putting it is predicated (probably subconsciously) on the assumption that there is a “correct” fingering, or at any rate that other people have already deemed what the fingering should be. I understand that most students who ask such a question are not strongly asserting that they believe that there can be only one correct fingering and that someone else has already worked it out. It’s just an underlying flavor to the thinking. But in any case, my first response is to examine the question. Whose job is it to know what the fingering should be then and there for that student? Shouldn’t it be the student—of course with help from me, since I am there and can interact, not the kind of help that just gives one answer. However, if a student wants to work within a particular tradition, or has habits that stem from a particular tradition, then perhaps that student’s comfort will be enhanced by hearing about ways in which others with more experience in that approach have worked things out. I am inclined to be uncomfortable with this, and to believe that what a student should actually be learning is specifically how to work things out from scratch for him- or herself. However, that is of course one of my biases that I need to acknowledge and re-examine. 

Once or twice I have had a student who specifically wanted to use, by default, Marcel Dupré’s fingerings for Bach. This could have been because of something that a previous teacher suggested, because of something that they read, or just because those fingerings have the authority of something printed in a real book. My initial impulse is to be against this way of working out fingerings. Even if it is done with flexibility—with a willingness to view those fingerings as just a jumping-off point—it still strikes me as an inefficient path for arriving at what is right for a given student. However, if I myself have the flexibility to let that student start with something by which he or she is intrigued, then I discover a few things. One is a more complete picture of what is gained or lost by a particular approach to fingering. I also discover something about my student’s thinking, and about where past work and study have brought that student. And, most importantly, the student and I together learn something about the philosophy of fingering and of learning fingering. Will any of this outweigh the loss of efficiency when working on fingering is filtered through the ideas of a very different player—one who can’t participate actively in the discussion? I don’t know. But if it is in keeping with the student’s interests—and thus keeps the student interested and involved—it might work out well. 

Suppose that the Dupré fingerings are not for Bach but for a piece by Dupré himself? Then it might seem obvious that the fingerings are very fittingly authoritative—literally so. This leads, however, to questions about what fingering is for. Is fingering mainly about the piece and its interpretation, or is it mainly about logistics and comfort for the player (including how fingering habits might create predictability and repeatability)? Or is it about the instrument, and techniques for making the instrument speak? (All of the above?) Furthermore, suppose that the Dupré piece in question (such as Opus 28) was written for the express purpose of teaching a student how to begin working on Bach, and that the student does not want to adopt Dupré’s approach to playing Bach? 

 

Authenticity

This all leads to the question of authenticity, and why we should care about it. These can probably be summarized in two camps: authenticity for its own sake—seeking out and appreciating an awareness that what we are doing is what the composer would have done or wanted; and authenticity because we assume that what the composer really wanted is likely to be the most artistically effective, convincing, beautiful, communicative, and so on. (The former of these constitutes giving the composer authority, the second, trusting the composer.) Neither of these is demonstrably right or wrong, or excludes the other. Some players wish to start with the artifact as such—the music on the printed page—and reserve little or no role for authenticity or a reconstructed sense of what the composer would have done as a performer. 

The point here is not to sort all of that out. It is just that a student’s approach to fingering will inevitably reflect his or her approach to all of this—that is, to the student’s philosophy of life and of art. And as that approach evolves (perhaps with the help of the teacher), the approach to fingering should evolve as well (likewise with the help of the teacher).

 

Relaxation

What about relaxation? I have staked out (and mentioned repeatedly over the years) a position that relaxation is crucial to playing and to the learning process. I want students to be relaxed and happy and do things that they want to do not just because that seems like a nice state of affairs in itself, but also because I think that it leads to better learning. But I have no clear answer to how you induce relaxation. There is a paradox in that sentence—one that was embodied in a self-help book that was around when I was growing up called “Relax Now!”—the title sort of slashed across the cover in garish red letters. It looked like an attempt to intimidate people into relaxing. That, I imagine, can’t be done. 

The similar paradox in music learning is that we want students to relax, but also to believe that what they are doing is very hard, that almost no one ever succeeds, that they must be extraordinarily disciplined, practice a lot and always very well, that they must have succeeded by a very young age or they might as well give up, and so on. I or any other teacher may be quite good at not conveying that long list of dangers—it helps if, like me, you don’t actually believe in it. But it is still all there in our culture and its approach to music, especially music as a profession. 

And of course the basic part about work is not false: really learning music requires plenty of work. Part of my reason for wanting to make this work as efficient as possible—effective practice strategies—is to keep the process from being overwhelming in its sheer amount. However, I have to ask myself whether an emphasis on really good practicing can’t lead to pressure of its own. If I am not practicing perfectly, then maybe I’m losing out in some way. If not, why not? How can practicing be a relaxed or relaxing experience?

One thing that can help with relaxation is out-and-out silliness. What part can that play in learning an instrument or even in practicing? Quite a bit, I think. For example (minor silliness), it is quite a good thing for anyone who practices occasionally to play a piece focusing on nothing but physical relaxation. That is, let the hands, feet, and the whole self be almost completely lacking in muscle tone—almost slumped over. Certainly try to play the notes of the passage or piece, but give absolute top priority to being as over-relaxed as I have described. This will almost certainly lead to plenty of wrong notes. But it is a delightfully pure way to feel relaxed while playing. 

 

Other practice techniques

This is also good practice in keeping things going when you make a wrong note—possibly the single most important performance skill. Another paradox of working on music is this: if you really practice perfectly all the time you will in fact never make a wrong note. Technically, practicing well means keeping everything slow enough and broken down into small enough units that you never do anything wrong. But how can you ever practice the very thing that I just said was the most important performance skill? Surely that is the last thing that you want never to have practiced. So, is it possible to make wrong notes on purpose and recover from them? Is that a good idea as part of a practice regimen? I think that it probably is. (I continually demonstrate to students how much better it sounds when there are obvious wrong notes but no break in rhythm as compared to minor, fleeting wrong notes that the player allows to disrupt the flow of things.) Of course it isn’t pure: practicing making wrong notes on purpose and then continuing isn’t exactly the same as keeping going when a wrong note takes you by surprise. But it is useful, and, again, silly enough to be relaxing.

Practicing while it is really noisy is also a good idea—that is, a “bad” idea that can be fun and also serve as good training for some aspects of our work. A student can try practicing while there’s other music on—at home this can be the stereo, at the organ console it might be a device with headphones. I recently spent some time practicing clavichord while a recording of piano music played. It was interesting: I could tell that the (very quiet) clavichord was making sound, but I couldn’t tell that that sound had pitch. It was a great concentration exercise. (This reminds me of what Saint-Saëns reported, namely that in his days as a student at the Paris Conservatoire the piano practice facility contained twenty-four pianos in one big room. Everyone could hear everyone, and you really learned to concentrate and to listen.)

How about playing too fast? That is, playing a passage faster than you can play it and faster than you would want it to be. This of course can be fun. One of the big obstacles to students’ practicing slowly enough is that it is often just plain more fun to play fast. So perhaps playing too fast should be separated out: when you are really practicing a passage, do all of the things that I have described in past columns: slow enough, fingerings that are well-planned, and so on. But once in a while just let something rip. This ties in with the previous few paragraphs: if and only if you keep things physically relaxed are you able to go really fast, and if you try to tear through a passage much too quickly, you will make wrong notes, so you can practice keeping things going. (If you don’t make wrong notes, it may be fast but it is not too fast. So go faster!)

I have noticed (this month I seem to be writing more than ever about the production schedule of these columns) that during the part of next month when I usually write the column, I have a recording session. It is for a Frescobaldi harpsichord recording that has been in the works for quite a while. This juxtaposition has given
me the following idea: I am going to keep notes, a sort of diary of the latter stages of my preparation for those sessions, and then of the sessions themselves. The June column will be an edited selection of those notes—an account of some of my thoughts and experiences from the recording process. It will end up being a natural extension of some of the musings
of these last two columns. Its relationship to teaching as such will be, I assume, tangential but real: examples of thinking and working and trying
to make things come out well in a certain kind of musical situation. In any case, I hope that it will be interesting.

Steven Egler

Steven Egler is professor of music at Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant.

In honor of Marilyn Keiser’s 75th birthday (she was born on July 12, 1941), we offer this glimpse into her journey as a well-respected musician and person. One of our country’s foremost concert organists, Marilyn Keiser is a person of deep faith, humility, and tireless devotion to her family, students, and friends. In this interview, conducted on May 8, 2015, she talks at length about the importance of her family, her work ethic and practicing, and her love of and devotion to church music. She also discusses her longtime association with composer Dan Locklair and offers her pearls of wisdom to church musicians.

Marilyn Keiser is Chancellor’s Professor of Music Emerita at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, Bloomington, where she taught courses in sacred music and applied organ for 25 years. Prior to her appointment at Indiana University, Dr. Keiser was organist and director of music at All Souls Parish (now Cathedral) in Asheville, North Carolina, and music consultant for the Episcopal Diocese of Western North Carolina, holding both positions from 1970–83. She is currently organist and choirmaster at Trinity Episcopal Church, Bloomington, a position she has held for over 30 years. She is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists.

Acknowledgements and sincere thanks are due to First Congregational Church, Saginaw, Michigan; for the interview recording and photo, Kenneth Wuepper, Saginaw, Michigan; and for final editing, Marilyn Keiser.

 

Steven Egler: What can you recall about your early formative years, before you started music lessons?

Marilyn Keiser: When I was born, my parents, Oliver and Eleanor Keiser, lived in Benld, Illinois, which was a river town. My father was the minister of the Methodist church, but it was during World War II, and the church was not always able to pay my father. They generally paid him with potatoes or chickens, but he was clearly not going to be able to raise a family that way.  

So in 1943 or 1944, we moved to Springfield, where we lived with my grandparents for a while, and my dad went to work at Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company. We rented a little house close to Allis-Chalmers, where he was on the night shift. During World War II, the company was making tanks, so since he was a foreman, he didn’t have to go to the war.

When I was four we moved to the house on South Douglas in Springfield, where my parents lived for 54-1/2 years. There were great schools—Butler Grade School and Springfield High School—that both my brother and I attended.

I was 3 or 4 when I started taking piano lessons. My brother was taking lessons, and I was trying to play what he played, so my parents let me start piano. I loved it. I practiced every day, usually before school so that I could play with my friends after school.

 

Your father was a Methodist minister. Did your family move frequently?

Dad was an ordained Methodist minister, but for the first 25 or 30 years of his ministry he was a supply minister and wasn’t moved around like the other clergy were. While other clergy stayed only three or four years, he was able to stay in one place for a longer period.

When I was about 7 or 8, my father started supplying in small churches around Springfield, and at one time he had three churches whose services were at 9, 10, and 11 a.m. respectively. He started the 9 o’clock service and delivered the sermon, drove to the next church where their lay leaders had started the service, preached the sermon, then drove to the third church, where they also would have started that service at 11, and he finished the service there. 

A few years later he had two churches south of Springfield in the morning and one on Sunday night north of Springfield. I don’t know how he did all that because he had hospital visitations and other duties as well. In 1972, when he was 62, he retired from Allis-Chalmers and spent 15 years as a minister of pastoral visitation at Laurel Methodist Church, Springfield. 

 

How did you become interested in playing the organ? As a young organist, what do you recall about playing for church services? What were the organs like that you played?

When I was eight, I recall telling my piano teacher that I wanted to be a church organist because I heard the organ at Laurel Church where my family attended when my dad wasn’t preaching somewhere else. Laurel had a two-manual Möller organ, which I thought was magnificent. When I was in seventh grade, my family visited my Uncle Dave in Miami, Florida, and I played my Chopin piano pieces on his little Hammond organ. 

I wanted to start organ, but my parents couldn’t afford to pay the three-dollar organ lessons fee that was charged by one of the local church organists, so I took lessons at Bruce’s Music Store for 50 cents a lesson. I did that for four years from the age of 12 to the week before I turned 16. I pedaled with only my left foot, and the week before I turned 16, I had my first pipe organ lesson with Frank Perkins who was organist at First Methodist Church. He was a Union Theological Seminary graduate and a wonderful human being. 

I rode my bike to practice for two to three hours every day, and I learned how to pedal with both feet in one week. That was in mid-July, and at the end of the summer, I supplied for him on the big four-manual Möller at First Methodist when he went to New York City for some lessons with Alec Wyton. During my junior and senior years of high school, I played for First Congregational Church. This was my first church job, and I was paid $7.50 a week! They were meeting in the Jewish synagogue because their church had burned down in November 1956. My senior year in high school, First Congregational built a new church and I got to play and help dedicate a brand-new two-manual Casavant organ. 

Another important teacher in my life was Paul Koch, the successor to Frank Perkins at First Methodist Church in Springfield and another graduate of Union Theological Seminary. I studied with Paul during the summers between my college studies at Illinois Wesleyan University.

 

Tell us more about your family.

My parents both loved music and they both sang. My mom played piano, and my dad always wanted to play trombone: he could even make his mouth sound like a trombone! My brother played clarinet. I could not have had a more wonderful family. I had loving, nurturing, and supportive parents, who traveled to many places over the years to hear me play concerts and services. My mother was a fabulous cook and a bookkeeper for Sears; she managed the accounts for the large Sears store in Springfield along with six other regional stores. My dad worked two jobs most of the years I was growing up. He was a great communicator, and, having grown up on a farm, he could fix or build anything. He was a wonderful athlete and had a great sense of humor (as did all of his siblings.)

They are both deceased now: my dad died in 2003 at the age of 92, and my mother died in 2012 at the age of 98-1/2. They both had a wonderful sense of rhythm, and while they listened to music, my dad often tapped his hand or foot. Mom would also tap her heel on the floor. I have a wonderful video of her doing that a month before she died.

 

Please speak about the rest of your family. Were they musical as well?

I had an older brother Ralph (deceased September 2015), and we grew up in Springfield where we lived close to our maternal grandparents but were only an hour away from my dad’s father and his siblings. My dad’s mother died in 1938 so neither my brother nor I knew her, but all four of my grandparents were from musical families. 

My mom’s mother played the piano for silent movies when she was 16, and it was there that she met my grandfather who was a violinist and had a band. His family had lots of musicians:  my dad’s mother’s family, the Schellers, also had tons of musicians. One of her brothers was an organist and a piano tuner, and my father’s father had a beautiful bass voice. The Keisers and the Schellers had a double male quartet that sang at the Methodist Church in Mount Olive. In addition, my dad’s sisters all played piano and organ, and my mother’s first cousin played organ, so there was lots of music all around me. 

 

Did you study any other instruments besides the organ and piano?

I did study the violin, but I didn’t really play after eighth grade. My maternal grandfather was a great violinist and had a beautiful German violin that I gave to a 14-year-old, a fabulous violinist, who studied at Indiana University. He had it restored to its original, beautiful sound. I actually got a recording of it for my mom, and she was thrilled to hear Grandpa’s violin played by such a talented young man.

 

Did you ever feel any “competition” between organ and violin?

Not violin, but I did study piano all through high school. I did a lot of accompanying in college and played for two honor recitals my senior year. I also studied harpsichord with Bedford Watkins at Illinois Wesleyan University.

 

Do you recall any of the repertoire that you learned when you first studied with Frank Perkins?

I learned the Krebs/Bach Eight Little Preludes and Fugues and the Boëllmann Suite Gothique. I just loved that first movement! I learned the “Dorian” Toccata of Bach and played it for the dedication of the Casavant organ at First Congregational. Another piece I learned was the Carillon in the 24 Pièces of Vierne, the one with the big pedal part. I played it so many times that the sexton at Laurel Methodist Church called me the “boom boom girl!”

What I remember about practicing is that my dad would go with me after supper a couple of nights a week to sit with me while I practiced on the pipe organ at church. I also practiced at a music store close to my school. 

 

After graduation from high school, you decided to major in music at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington where you studied organ with Lillian McCord.

I loved chemistry, math, and history in school, but yes I decided to go into music. I auditioned at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois, and Illinois Wesleyan University, but Wesleyan gave me a full tuition scholarship, so I went there.

Lillian McCord was amazing. She had parties for all of her students after their recitals. She drove us around to hear André Marchal, Marilyn Mason, Virgil Fox, and Alec Wyton. Wyton came to Peoria my senior year, but I was not able to go due to a conflict. She took to him my copy of his Fanfare that I was learning for my senior recital, and he autographed it for me.

Lillian was so musical and so nurturing and encouraging. She also attended a lot of conferences and was always learning new things and new repertoire. She never hesitated to suggest pieces for me to study, even though she had never played them herself.

IWU gave me a great education in music history and theory, choral literature, and contemporary music. 

 

Tell us about your time after you graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University.

After IWU, I went to Union Theological Seminary in New York (1963–65). Lillian McCord had gone to Union, and Paul Koch, Frank Perkins, and Lewis Whikehart, my choral director at Wesleyan, had all gone to Union. 

Although I had been to New York City on a choir tour in my senior year of college, I hadn’t seen Union at that time; however, Robert Baker came to IWU my senior year, and I auditioned for him there. He also suggested, as did Lillian, that I study with Alec. I wrote a letter to Alec to ask if I could study with him, and he replied saying he would be happy to accept me as a student.

There were always 35 to 40 students in each of the two graduate classes at Union: two years of master’s students. You said it right: it really was a mecca for future church musicians. Daniel Day Williams taught systematic theology. Cyril Richardson taught liturgics, and Samuel Terrien, a great Biblical scholar, was also on the faculty.

After my parents drove me to New York City to begin my master’s degree and before they left the city, we went over to the cathedral so they could see where I would be taking organ lessons. Just as we were leaving, Alec Wyton was walking down the driveway. We waited for him inside the choir room, and he took us up to the organ. I’ll always remember this because when we were walking up the winding staircase to the organ loft, Alec said, “Isn’t music fun?” After that, my dad quoted him all of the time.

 

What was Alec Wyton like as a teacher?

He was a great teacher. I became his assistant later, but as a student I was impressed by his tremendous repertoire and how incredibly musical he was. I heard him improvise many times at daily services and on Sundays, and I never heard a trite improvisation. He had an incredible creative gift. 

What I remember specifically about his teaching was his concentration on musical line. Sometimes in a Bach trio sonata he’d say, “Let your right hand be an oboe.” He talked a lot about hand position and about preparing your hand position. This was especially helpful since I learned a lot of Messiaen during my doctoral studies. I did the whole Pentecost Mass along with many other Messiaen compositions. In regard to preparing hand and feet positions, he often quoted his teacher George Cunningham who would say, “Have your foot right over the note you need to play before you play it.”

Alec also was very drawn to new music and very supportive of it, and he commissioned a lot of new works. There were many concerts during the years I was in New York including Sunday afternoon concerts, and many included new music of various sorts. He commissioned Richard Felciano to write a piece, God of the Expanding Universe, for tape, organ, choir, and strobe lights. 

 

After receiving the Master of Sacred Music degree in 1965, you were assistant organist at the Riverside Church where you worked with Fred Swann for one year. How did this come about?

After my master’s I applied for a German government grant to study in Cologne, but during that spring I encountered Fred Swann. Evidently, Robert Baker had mentioned my name to him and that I might be interested in applying for the job as assistant organist at Riverside Church. Virgil Fox was leaving and Fred was going to become the organist, and so I was one of three candidates who applied for the job. Subsequently, I was offered the job the day my boat ticket arrived for Germany, and that was really a difficult decision. I remember lying face down on the floor trying to decide what to do, and I finally decided that the thing to do was to stay in New York: I would have opportunities to go to Germany again, but I wouldn’t have another opportunity to be Fred Swann’s assistant at Riverside.

The first Sunday I played was in mid-August 1965, and the preacher was Martin Luther King, Jr.! That year was wonderful. Fred was so funny and such a master. I learned so much by watching him play that big five-manual organ. Fred had such incredible control of the organ, and his accompanying of oratorios was spectacular. The choir sang an oratorio every Sunday afternoon.

He was gone quite a bit, and the first Sunday he was gone I was just starting the improvisation after the offertory anthem leading into the Doxology, and Richard Weagly, who was the choir director, leaned over and said that a man was having a heart attack and just to keep playing.

I had started to build the organ up really loud and kept playing, but it was starting to get really loud, and I thought, “Oh, my gosh! What if this man is really dying?” So I pulled the organ way back and just kept playing: it seemed like an eternity. Eventually, they were able to get him out on a stretcher, and he did not die. That was a memorable moment!

 

Did you have any other church positions while you were in New York City?

During the two years I was working on my master’s degree, I did have a church job at a Methodist church in Bergenfield, New Jersey. That was my first experience working with a children’s choir. I also played the organ and directed the adult choir.

 

After one year at Riverside Church, you were appointed associate organist and choirmaster of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine where you served for four years. You were now a colleague of your teacher, Alec Wyton.

Eugene Hancock was leaving St. John the Divine, so Alec asked me to become his associate at the end of that summer.He thought that they would not acknowledge that I was a woman and, instead, put M. J. Keiser on the masthead of the cathedral bulletin, but they did in fact print my name as Marilyn Keiser. When I first went there, I even had to wear a black beanie on my head during the service.

 

Times have changed, haven’t they?

Yes. I did that for four years (1966–70), eleven rehearsals a week with the choir boys—twice a day—and Thursday night with the men. My first week there Alec had just been elected president of the AGO. He was there one day and gone four. We sang two psalms to Anglican chant Monday through Thursday and plainsong on Fridays. Alec transposed every chant up a third, so not only did I have to learn how to do Anglican chant—which I’d never done—but also I had to learn how to do it and then transpose it up a third! I worked very hard that first week along with all of the choir rehearsals. It was a big learning curve for me.

 

You might as well have been called co-organist and choirmaster. 

Yes. He was gone a lot during his time as president but particularly that first year.

 

In 1970, you moved to Asheville, North Carolina. Tell us about the responsibilities there in those positions.

In my fourth year at St. John the Divine, I met the Reverend Alex Viola—at Alec Wyton’s recommendation—in New York. He had just moved to Asheville as the associate rector at All Souls Episcopal Church and said they were looking for a new musician. I had also looked at a couple of other options, but he persuaded me to go to Asheville to audition. I was really interested in this, because in addition, Alex had gone to the diocesan foundation to ask for a three-year grant for someone to travel around the diocese (Diocese of Western North Carolina) to work with small churches. 

That summer, I was the first person hired by an Episcopal diocese to serve as a music consultant and work with small churches throughout the diocese. So I had a joint appointment: I worked three-quarter time at the church and one-quarter time for the Diocese of Western North Carolina, and I traveled to the small churches at their invitation.

When I went to All Souls, the choir was pretty small. I recall there were maybe twelve people, whose average age was about 68. They did, however, have a few paid soloists—one student and some adults— and over the course of the years, we established a music committee that was instrumental in establishing a choral scholar program similar to what a colleague of mine had instituted in Milwaukee. We then brought in two students from Mars Hill College—now University—who received a $50 stipend each semester. After that, we soon had four and then eight by the time I left in 1983. The choral scholars with their young voices transformed the choir. 

My diocesan work turned out to be the topic of my doctoral dissertation at Union, which was called Singing the Liturgy in Small Communities: Pilot Project in the Diocese of Western North Carolina.

 

Describe your work as consultant to the Diocese of Western North Carolina.

I worked with choirs and organists as well as with clergy groups. I also worked with children’s choirs and had a children’s choir festival and acolyte festival, but most of what I did was leading congregational hymn sings. Of course, these were the years prior to The Hymnal 1982, and I led many hymn sings.

All Souls Parish—now Cathedral of the Diocese of Western North Carolina as of 1995—was the church built by George Vanderbilt and had a fine music tradition. F. Flaxington Harker was one of my predecessors there. Clem Sandresky, who later became the head of the School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was also a predecessor of mine, and in the early years he was also the organist at the Grove Park Inn, which had a big organ no longer in existence.

 

What sorts of music did you perform while at All Souls?

I had great support from the clergy, and in fact, I have had that in every position I’ve ever held. Neil Zabriskie was a fantastic rector and very supportive during my years there. We did Noye’s Fludde by Benjamin Britten twice: the first time was for the 75th anniversary celebration of the church. We involved 200 people in it one way or another and had kids from all over the city. We also had a team of about 20 women who made the most fabulous costumes.

We also presented Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors twice. When we did Amahl, I actually played the organ and had a small orchestra around me: I played and conducted from the organ. When we performed Noye’s Fludde, we had a full orchestra, so I stood in the pulpit in order to conduct the congregation. 

We commissioned and premiered the children’s opera Genesis (1971) from Malcolm Williamson and gave the first performance of his opera The Red Sea (1972). We did the first performance of Alec’s opera Journey with Jonah. In 1980 we did a performance with full orchestra of Mendelsohn’s Elijah and had a “Mostly Mozart” concert one year, and a Haydn concert another year. Then for six or seven years we presented a procession of Advent Lessons and Carols, an idea that I had gotten from Jim Litton at Princeton. I always had wonderful support from the parish and the community.

 

You also taught at the University of North Carolina at Asheville during this time.

I taught at Brevard College my first three years in Asheville, and then during the last two years of my tenure in Asheville I taught at UNC Asheville. During those two years, I conducted the community chorus of about 75 people and performed the Fauré Requiem the first year and the Honegger King David the second year. 

I recall starting to conduct the Fauré, and my baton hit the music rack and flipped over into the French horn section. I just kept conducting and the horn player handed the baton back to me!

 

How do you balance being a performer, a church musician, and an educator? 

I have had the best of all worlds. I used to think when I was driving to IU that so many people work in factories or clean houses and shovel coal, and I go to work and make music all day long. What a gift to be able to spend your life making music: I cannot imagine a more fulfilling and wonderful way to spend your life.

I first joined Phyllis Stringham’s management and was with her for just a couple of years. Then Karen McFarlane and Ralph McFarlane began their own management. I had met Karen when I was in St. Louis during the summer of 1963. Karen was also a student of Frank Perkins during her undergraduate studies at Lindenwood College. 

 

So this was before the Murtagh years?

Yes. Karen and Ralph had a management which, I believe, was called McFarlane Artists. The summer before I moved to New York I stayed in Frank Perkins’s house with another Lindenwood graduate, Linda Street, who was also going to attend Union Seminary that fall. She and Karen were good friends, so this is how I got to know Karen. 

Karen then moved to New York at the end of my year with Fred Swann at Riverside, and she became Fred’s secretary. We stayed in contact for a long time and became good friends, so I was with her management for a number of years. When Lilian Murtagh became ill, Karen of course, being at Riverside with Fred and Fred being in the Murtaugh “stable” as they called it, got to know Lilian and eventually took over the management in 1976.

 

Your performing career has taken you across the U. S. and abroad.

I’ve performed a lot in this country, but I haven’t traveled abroad too much. I’ve played a couple of times in England and once in Paris and Brazil and Singapore. Three years ago, I went to China with the Indianapolis Symphonic Chorus where I played the Brahms Requiem for them on the organ at the Shanghai Oriental Arts Center on two hours’ practice. It was the most nerve-racking thing I’ve ever done!

There were 1,100 people, even sitting behind the choir. It was jam-packed! Since the Brahms ends so quietly, I offered to play the Widor Toccata as an encore. It was well received.

 

What do you like about being a concert organist? 

I love playing beautiful organs, and I love finding beautiful sounds on those organs. I also love learning the geography of every organ, which is so unique and very challenging. Some people love crossword puzzles: I love getting to know new instruments. I also enjoy seeing former students and classmates and friends from over the years. 

 

What’s the schedule like in a day of Marilyn Keiser’s life?

When I was teaching I got up at 5 o’clock every morning and walked, had breakfast, dressed, said my prayers, and I always tried to get to school by at least 7:30 a.m. so I could get a parking place. I’d teach sometimes five or six hours with maybe a 15 to 20-minute break before my classes began in the afternoon. 

I always try to practice every day. One of the gifts I got from my parents—not just the gift of interest in and ear for music—was discipline. In my parents, I saw great discipline and the ability to keep working at something. My mother was a fantastic seamstress and quilter. She also crocheted, and with a project almost complete, she’d see where she dropped a stitch, take it up and go back and repair that spot. Her stitches and quilts are absolutely exquisite. 

I think both Ralph and I inherited the energy and the will to work hard at things. I admit that for me practicing has never been a burden: it is something that I just love to do. I have always loved learning new music and still do. 

 

In 1983 you were appointed to the faculty at Indiana University where you served until 2008, and in addition to applied organ, you taught classes as well.

I was brought to Indiana University to develop the church music curriculum. I added to the choral literature courses that Oswald Ragatz had created. He taught two choral literature courses: one in anthems and motets and the other one in large forms. 

I didn’t have any of his notes, so I just developed those courses on my own. I added courses in hymnody and organ improvisation, and I developed a church music practicum where we talked about hymn playing, conducting from the console, anthem repertoire, wedding music, handbells, working relationships with clergy, and other issues facing church musicians. I would also bring in a psychiatrist to talk about conflict and communication. In addition, I usually had 10–14 private organ students and a lot of doctoral dissertation and research director responsibilities.

 

Please tell us about your teaching. How is it rewarding for you?

I love teaching—I really, truly did and do love teaching. You’re a teacher: I know you love it since I can see it in your face. I loved seeing students grow. Their interest and eagerness to learn was always so inspiring to me. I learned so much from my students—I think that we all do—just in learning how to articulate something that might come naturally to you but that might involve a more careful explanation to a young student.

I tried to help students bring the music to life, to help them with interpretation, articulation, and timing, and to help them learn to listen to melodic lines and harmonic development. I found it a challenge to help students find their balance and learn to relax at the organ. 

Robert Baker used to say, “Find your nest and make a nest at the organ.” He also said, “If you don’t sit on the organ, the organ will sit on you!” I recall working with an older student who was playing the Mendelssohn Prelude and Fugue in G Major, and I noticed that his legs were very tight and stiff. I suggested that he imagine sitting on a soft brown pillow. All of a sudden, the pedal part just floated. I then realized that the sound that had been coming out of him was due to the tension in his legs and in his body.

That’s not easy when you’re working with young students. I think it’s hard to help them to get to that point.

 

I think that we, myself included, forget that images can really help a student. One image I use is sitting at the edge of a pond or on a dock and dangling your feet into the water.

The image that Marie-Claire Alain used for neutral touch was to imagine a string of pearls: neither do the pearls overlap nor is there space between the pearls. I think that is a fantastic image.

 

Are you still teaching? 

I do teach privately and have a few students. I did retire from IU in 2008, but I did go back this past semester (spring of 2015), and I am supervising the Sacred Music Practicum course this school year (2015–16). 

 

You have recorded several CDs that include a wide variety of repertoire. What is the recording process like for you?

It is very easy to record in a quiet church, such as St. Paul’s Episcopal, Indianapolis. It’s only frustrating when there is a lot of noise outside and you have to keep repeating passages over and over. Additionally, the recording engineer is very important. Some of them are so encouraging. 

 

Please tell us about your longtime collaboration with composer Dan Locklair.

Dan was a senior at Mars Hill College when I went to Asheville as music consultant for the Diocese of Western North Carolina in 1970. Dan called to ask me to come out to his church in Flat Rock, North Carolina, so that’s how I first met him.

I didn’t realize then that he was a composer. He went on to Union Theological Seminary for his master’s and then to the Eastman School of Music for his doctorate. It was after that that I learned about his compositions, after which he sent me a few things. 

The first piece that I really became deeply acquainted with was Rubrics (1988). He gave me a copy of it when he was at the Brevard Music Festival. I listened to a recording of it [Mary Preston’s premiere performance in 1989 in Pittsburgh] and was just blown away. I just loved it and wanted to learn it. The first time that I performed it was for the 1994 AGO national convention in Dallas. Before that I had gone to Winston-Salem to play it for him. Dan danced, sang, and carried on with such energy while I played it for him.

 

What is it about his music that attracts you?

His music has integrity and energy and freshness, and it’s so appealing to ordinary people. There’s joy and, at the same time, deep serenity. You’ll hear this serenity in his new composition, In Memory­­—HHL, originally composed for orchestra in 2005 after his mother’s death and revised for solo organ in 2014. 

I certainly don’t play all of his music, but I’ve learned a lot of it. Spiritual Pair (1994) was composed for and dedicated to me. It was a nice surprise. Tom Wood and I had been talking about my doing a recording on the new Goulding & Wood organ at Christ Church Cathedral in New Orleans, and because of the strong history and tradition of jazz in that city, I decided that the CD should include that music and be titled Spiritual Pairs. 

 

Retirement: this word means many things to many people. What does it mean to you?

Well, I haven’t really retired (hearty laughter)!

 

I assume that you are continuing in your post at Trinity Episcopal Church, Bloomington. 

I’m considered half-time at Trinity Church, but since I retired from IU, I’ve spent much more time there and have had much more time to plan. I have 11 paid choral scholars in my choir. We began the choral scholar program when I became the organist in 1985. I took over from Tom Wood when Goulding & Wood came into being. He had been co-organist with Robert Rayfield who was on the faculty at IU, so Bob Rayfield continued as the 9 a.m. organist and I was the 11:15 a.m. organist. Tom was around occasionally to substitute. 

That arrangement continued until Bob died very suddenly in 1999 of an aortic aneurysm. There was nobody to take over his service that next Sunday, so I agreed to take over both services until Christmas. In the end, however, I continued to play for both services on a regular basis.

Bob had a wonderful and very close-knit choir, and so for the remainder of that school year, I rehearsed his choir separately (as we had done previously). I kept Bob’s 9 o’clock choir separate from the 11:15 choir until the end of that school year, at which time I combined the choirs. We still have the 9 o’clock choir and the 11:15 choir.

When I went there in 1985, I spoke to the rector and expressed my concern that the 11:15 choir was down to about seven people, so I told him about the choral scholar program that I had started in Asheville. He then approached Genevieve Daniel, widow of former School of Music Dean Ralph Daniel, who gave $5,000 a year for 20 years. So, we were able to get choral scholars, starting with four, then eight. Now I have 11 choral scholars, but there are also seven or eight IU students who sing at either one or the other services. The choral scholars sing at both.

Then there is a fabulous group of volunteers, many of whom are retired professors—Latin, French, and Greek, physics, speech/theater lighting. It is a great group of people. 

 

Do you plan the same music for both services?

Yes. We all rehearse together and sing the same anthem at both services. With the choral scholars present at both, the continuity is there, even though the 9 o’clock choir is considerably bigger than the 11:15 choir. There are also several fine instrumentalists and singers in the parish, many who are music professors. 

One other thing that I wanted to say about my choir is that I often say to them, “If the whole world could hear you sing, wars would cease.” Of all the things that I do in my life, standing in the middle of that choir and hearing them sing on Thursday night rehearsals is very moving. I am so lucky—and so grateful!

We have a fantastic clergy presence at the church. Our rector, Charlie Dupree, studied organ with Janette Fishell when he was an undergraduate student in graphic arts at East Carolina University. He is a magnificent preacher, administrator, leader, and amazing colleague. He’s a composer and writes a lot of the Psalm refrains we sing. They are all beautiful, very singable, and very creative. 

 

Why is it important for you to still have a church job?

Well, I grew up in the church. My father was a Methodist minister, and I went to church with my parents every Sunday. I began piano when I was four and often played at my father’s churches. When I was eight I told my piano teacher that I wanted to be a church organist. I began organ at the age of twelve and had my first real church organist position when I was sixteen. I have been at Trinity Church now for over thirty years, and I feel so blessed. It is my calling. It feeds me. Also, I keep learning new organ music, new service music, and new choral music. 

 

What books do you like to read?

I love history—American history and world history—and biographies and the works of Barbara Brown Taylor. I really enjoy the writings of Tom Brokaw and Charles Kuralt. Right now I am reading his book entitled Charles Kuralt’s America. I also read The Smithsonian and National Geographic, which my dad would read from cover to cover.

 

Is there any aspect of your career you’d like to do another way?

No! I feel that I have been enormously blessed. The only thing that I would like to do someday before I die is to go to Leipzig.

 

What are your favorite organs?

I absolutely love the new Fisk organ in Auer Hall at IU. It is just a magnificent instrument—never overpowering, just a fabulous organ. St. John the Divine is another instrument I love. The sound of that instrument in that room is quite remarkable and thrilling!

 

Please comment about your service to the American Guild of Organists and other organizations.

I served as registrar on the AGO’s National Council, Dean of the Western North Carolina Chapter, and I’m currently serving on the National Nominating Committee. 

I’m also on a Task Force on Denominational Music Organizations that we started this past year. One of the important things about this Task Force is that we are trying to make connections between the various denominations, both in the sharing of information and in finding ways to work with each other. Those things are good for everyone.

 

You were also a consultant to the Hymnal Music Committee of the 1982 Hymnal of the Episcopal Church.

That was a phenomenal experience. I was on the Committee during my first year at IU (1983–84). It was so important to me because it kept me in touch with the church music scene; I did not play for a church during those first two years that I was at IU. It was a fabulous group of people: Jim Litton, Ray Glover, Richard Proulx, and David Hurd.

Early on, I served on the Standing Commission in the 1970s and then again during the actual Hymnal 1982 process. I was on the commission again in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was asked to develop a program for musicians in small churches, so I got together Ray Glover, who was then at Virginia Seminary, and Carol Doran, who was at Colgate–Rochester Divinity School. The three of us met in Indianapolis and put together a curriculum for what became the Leadership Program for Musicians Serving in Small Churches, which was eventually called LPM. 

We then added people from the Standing Commission and brought on two more people from the Washington, D. C., area: Martin Rideout, who was in Burke, Virginia, and Ed Kryder who taught liturgics at Virginia Seminary. They ultimately became the advisory board for the Leadership Program for Musicians Serving Small Churches, for which I served as chair for the first five years of its life. 

I also worked for 3–4 years with the Association of Anglican Musicians (AAM) to try to develop a mentoring program for young musicians just coming out of school. Our hope was to pair them with seasoned professionals. AAM continues its work to find internships for young church musicians. 

 

What advice do you have for the younger generation of musicians entering the organ and church music profession today?

I think that it’s really important to learn a lot of repertoire while you’re in school. When I began working full time, it was much more difficult to learn new repertoire. During my years in New York, we had recitals at the cathedral every Sunday before Evensong, and I usually played at least one—sometimes two—a month. So, I had many opportunities to learn new repertoire. Never stop learning new music: new organ music, new service music, and new choral music. 

Also, it’s really important to keep being flexible. That’s one of the things that I find in working with Charlie Dupree. Both of us feel that way. Sometimes, I see colleagues who feel that it has to be just one way. 

Developing a spirit of cooperation, collaboration, and flexibility is so important, especially when you’re working in the church. As I have mentioned before, I’ve taught church music practicum courses, and at the end of every semester, I left them with this quote that I found on the choir room wall in a church in Pittsburgh, “May you always be young and glad, and even if it is Sunday, may you be wrong, because when men and women are always right, they are no longer young.” Isn’t that great?

 

Can you comment about what your legacy might be to our profession?

At the end of each semester, I would always talk to my students about the importance of reaching out to area musicians who work in small churches or in small communities. So many of them had not had the opportunities that our college and university students have had, and they are so eager to learn. I love my life in music, my life as a church musician and teacher, and I love my church.  And I’ve tried to pass this love on to my students. And—embrace your gifts and share them freely and with joy.

Another quote that I always end my workshops with comes from George Cunningham, organist for the BBC and Birmingham Town Hall, a teacher at the Royal Academy of Music and President of the Royal College of Organists. He was Alec Wyton’s teacher. The old American Organist published four speeches of his, one of which ended with the following [I always get choked up when I read this]:

“Our work as musicians must be for us a call and a challenge: a call to more eager study and a search for the beauty and truth of music, and a challenge to carry everywhere its message of joy, of order, and of peace. That is our reasonable service.”

 

Thank you, Marilyn. You are a heroine for all of us. Godspeed to you!

Jay Zoller

Jay Zoller is organist at South Parish Congregational Church in Augusta, Maine, where he plays the church’s historic 1866 E. & G. G. Hook organ. He holds degrees from the University of New Hampshire and the School of Theology at Boston University. 

A retired designer for the Andover Organ Company, he currently designs for the Organ Clearing House and for David E. Wallace & Co. Pipe Organ Builders of Gorham, Maine. Zoller resides in Newcastle, Maine, with his wife Rachel.

In addition to writing several articles about Heinz Wunderlich for The American Organist, Choir & Organ, and The Diapason, he has played in all-Wunderlich recitals in Hamburg, Germany in 1999, 2004, and 2009. His article, “An Organ Adventure in South Korea,” appeared in the December 2011 issue of The Diapason.

Heinz Wunderlich died March 10, 2012 (see “Nunc Dimittis,” The Diapason, May 2012, pp. 10, 12). He served for many years as music director at St. Jacobi in Hamburg and as professor of organ and improvisation at the Hamburg College of Music. He concertized throughout the world, including several tours with his choir, the Kantorei St. Jacobi. In the United States alone he made twenty-six tours. Students came from all over the world to study with him—many to study the works of Max Reger, as Wunderlich was one of the few musicians in a direct line of succession with Reger. 

Wunderlich left an extensive body of organ works, as well as choral music. He remained active as a recitalist until his 91st year, when he decided not to play any more. See “Heinz Wunderlich at 90,” by Jay Zoller, The Diapason, April 2009, pp. 19–21; “80th Birthday Tribute—Heinz Wunderlich,” by David Burton Brown, The Diapason, April 1999, p. 18; “Heinz Wunderlich at 74,” by David Burton Brown, The Diapason, April 1994, p. 6; and “The Published Organ Works of Heinz Wunderlich,” by David Burton Brown, The Diapason, April 1994, pp. 12–13.

 

Beginnings

As a sophomore in high school, after seven years of piano lessons, I began my study of the organ with the organist at my family’s church. My teacher, David Whitehouse, was also a student—at the University of New Hampshire—and he did his best to impart to me the correct methods of playing the organ. In addition, he stimulated my interest by taking me, even before I had my own driver’s license, to hear concerts on the large organ at the Methuen Memorial Music Hall, which was about an hour’s drive away from my home in Durham.

My recollection of many of those recitals is hazy at best, often sitting in the front row so I would have a ringside seat—watching was as important to me as listening. However, one Friday night stayed in my memory like no other: October 20, 1961 at 8:30 pm—the program, which I saved, reads: Heinz Wunderlich, Organist, Jacobikirche, Hamburg. From my front-row seat on the right-hand side, I was transfixed as his program proceeded: Buxtehude, Prelude and Fugue in E Minor; Bach, Trio Sonata III in D Minor and Toccata and Fugue in F Major. After intermission he played his own Sonata on a Single Theme, a piece which, little could I imagine at the time, I would know intimately later in my life. Wunderlich ended his program with the Reger Fantasie and Fugue on B-A-C-H. For whatever reasons, the image I had of him there would remain with me.

 

1989  

My story now jumps ahead nearly thirty years. I was working for the Andover Organ Company in Methuen, Massachusetts, designing pipe organs. We had just finished a small two-manual organ of my design for St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in North Andover, Massachusetts. Unknown to me, Heinz Wunderlich had been engaged for the dedication recital through his friendship with Arthur Howells. In addition to the recital, a masterclass was to be held the day before. I was one of five or six people who offered to play. I did not realize this was the man that I had heard play so many years before. Nor did I think about the fact that he was a recognized authority on the music of Bach! So, imagine my embarrassment when I played the C Major Prelude and Fugue of Johann Ludwig Krebs rather than Bach. 

Despite being unfamiliar with the music, Professor Wunderlich was most gracious and offered helpful advice on many aspects of the piece. I still have his markings in my score. I was fortunate to see a program of the next day’s recital and noticed that it included one of his own pieces, the Sonata on a Single Theme. I asked him about his music and if it was published. Alas, nothing was published at that time, but he was very kind and brought me a cassette recording of some of his organ works. When I listened to it later, I was hooked! It became one of the most listened-to recordings in my collection. The music had a clear crispness to it; it was a fresh sound—a controlled wildness made it come alive for me. I couldn’t stop listening. It sounded the way contemporary organ writing ought to be.

I waited, hoping that it was being published, and finally wrote to Professor Wunderlich roughly two years later. I identified myself as the person who had played Krebs for him that day. Yes, he remembered me. And, yes some of the organ works were now published. I immediately ordered every one. The first piece that I learned was the very one I had heard him play, the Sonata on a Single Theme. I quickly discovered how difficult the music actually was.

I should say that my correspondence with Professor Wunderlich began late in his career. He had retired in 1982 and was devoting his time to concertizing and preparing his many compositions for publication. There was no reason that he needed to be kind to an unknown American who had somehow converted to his music so late in life. But, sometimes things work out differently than you expect. I wrote to him and told him what I was working on, asking questions about the music and the way he wanted it performed. Occasionally, I even discovered a wrong note in the score. I would send him my recital programs when I had included a piece of his and he always answered; and at the same time he answered my questions and thanked me for my interpretation of his music. 

Over the years I played quite a few of his pieces, even playing one lunchtime all-Wunderlich concert. As 1999 grew near, Wunderlich asked me if I would write an article about him in honor of his approaching 80th birthday. I did so and my article “Heinz Wunderlich at 80” appeared in the April 1999 issue of The American Organist. I had also made the decision to travel to Hamburg, Germany for his birthday celebrations and so bought my ticket expecting to have a relaxed trip. 

 

Birthday celebrations

I had played the Fuga Variata in a recital two months before my scheduled trip, but had no inkling of the phone call I was about to receive, literally the day before I was to leave. Heinz Wunderlich called from Germany to say that the organist who was scheduled to play the Fuga Variata was unable to do so, had backed out, and would I be willing to play? I was soon to discover that Wunderlich’s birthday celebrations consisted of many concerts over the period of nearly two weeks. In 1999 Heinz Wunderlich played an all-Bach recital on the Arp Schnitger organ at St. Jacobi; five days later he played another all-Bach program of harpsichord and violin with his violinist wife, Nelly, at the Museum of Art. One day later was an all-Wunderlich program played by former students at the Domkirche St. Marien on the four-manual Beckerath organ. And finally, on May 8 Heinz Wunderlich played an ambitious program of Reger and Wunderlich at St. Michaelis.

Without promising anything, and with my heart in my throat, I said I would bring my music and organ shoes and we would see what happened. When I arrived, I practiced for a couple of days on Wunderlich’s own three-manual organ, which was in the lower level of his home. I was still feeling insecure about the music when Wunderlich came down and wanted to hear the piece. In my nervousness, I must have played very badly, but he was always kind and offered suggestions. Finally, he took me to St. Mariens for a lesson on the large Beckerath organ. The organ was located in a rear gallery, which must have been 30 feet off the main floor. He would help me set up registrations and then take the long walk down to the main floor to listen. Returning to the gallery, we made changes, and moved to the next section, always checking on what it sounded like downstairs. I learned a lot about his ideas of registration and playing in an acoustically live building. Heinz Wunderlich was very precise. He wanted all of my old markings erased. Changes and balances were carefully worked out as well as precise fingerings, paying attention to every marking in the score.

I was thankful for the time and attention he was willing to give me, all this at the age of 80 and having several concerts of his own to prepare. At the same time it was terrifying to be performing with the composer himself sitting in the audience. For me it was the experience of a lifetime.

Later that year, I arranged an American tour for him. It included five concerts at churches where former students were playing and a concert at the Methuen Memorial Music Hall where I had heard him play 38 years before. Among other things, he played his newly composed Sonata über Jona; his wife Nelly joined him for his Variationa Twelvetonata for Violin and Organ, also newly composed, and some Rhein-berger sonatas for violin and organ, which brought tears to my eyes. For his 85th birthday in 2004 I wrote another article about him, this time published in Choir & Organ magazine, and once again traveled to Hamburg to play his newly written Emotion and Fugue in the all-Wunderlich program. This program was again on a large four-manual Beckerath, but this time in St. Petri, where former student Thomas Dahl is the director of music. Again, Heinz Wunderlich was of great assistance with interpretation and registration. 

In 2009, for Wunderlich’s 90th birthday, I again played the Fuga Variata on the St. Petri organ along with other former students. Although Professor Wunderlich was noticeably frail, he still played an ambitious recital on the Kemper Organ at St. Jacobi. Unfortunately, it was the last time I would hear him play. 

 

Epilogue

For me, knowing Heinz Wunderlich, one of the 20th century’s greatest virtuosos, became a transforming event in my life. To know the man, the gentle teacher, the consummate musician, the loving husband and father, gracious host, and the appreciation he had for my performances and articles, was reward in itself. But the real transformative aspect was the music. My interest in contemporary music expanded tenfold. His organ works alone have occupied me for over 20 years and constantly present me with ever-new challenges. In addition, I have been able to listen to performances of works that I will never play—works for organ and orchestra, for chorus, and his masterful improvisations. His interest has also given me the chance to travel to Germany and perform on organs that I had only dreamed of, as well as make many new friends. Thank you, dear man. I miss you.

 

 

John Bishop

Experts

In a suburb of Boston, there’s a three-manual Hook & Hastings organ that I rebuilt in the 1990s. It’s an electro-pneumatic organ built in the 1920s that had received a full-blown tonal revision in the 1960s, when American organbuilding decreed that eight-foot tone was no longer desirable. You know the drill. Strings were cut down to become mutations, an eight-foot Diapason was converted to the fattest Chimney Flute you’ve ever seen, and the resulting specification looked something like a cross between a Schnitger and a Schlicker. The organ was installed across the rear gallery at a time when the church had no choir, and access from the stairs to the console was a narrow, short, awkward passage through the organ, past an electro-pneumatic relay, over a few windlines, and a serious duck under the façade’s impost. The organist had hung a sign there that read, “Smack Head Here.”

We did a big job there that involved a new structure and new windchests intended to allow easier access to the gallery for musicians—there’s a choir now—and to allow easier access for maintenance. The church’s organist was a good friend and an excellent, imaginative musician who had been there for many years, and with whom I had lots of fun until his untimely death.

After a couple false starts with new musicians who didn’t last very long, the church was happy to announce they had engaged a young woman with strong credentials, especially as a choral conductor. When I met her, I was disappointed to realize that her keyboard experience was limited to the piano. She had no experience playing the organ at all. She asked me some questions about the stop knobs, such as, “What are these for?” I gave her a quick introduction to the art of registration, and offered to introduce her to colleagues who were good organ teachers. She responded that she didn’t think it was a big deal, and she’d pick it up naturally.

 

The American Idol syndrome

In the last several years, “reality TV” has taken a strong place in our entertainment life. There are a number of shows that focus on creating stars. I don’t watch them, so I don’t really know the difference from one to the other (maybe you think that means I’m not qualified to write about them!), but I do see contestants, ostensibly selected through earlier auditions and winnowing, performing in front of studio audiences and panels of judges. I’m sure that many of the finalists, who automatically become huge stars, are legitimately talented and well trained, but from what little I’ve seen, I know that plenty of them have learned their acts by imitating others. Through decades as a church musician, having been married to a singer, and friends with many others, I know enough about singing to tell when someone is well trained—or not.

Like that newly hired musician who didn’t think organ registration was such a big deal, I have the sense that our culture is accepting of the idea that great performers “just happen,” implying that there’s no real need to actually learn how to do something. Why should we study if we can answer any question by Googling with our phones? Why should we attend a conservatory of music if we can “just pick it up?”

I’ve been reflecting on expertise, on the concepts of excellence and the sense of assurance that comes with the intense education and practice that fosters them. Of course, I think of my many colleagues, who as organists sit at a console as though it were an extension of their bodies, whose manual and pedal techniques are strong enough that once a piece is learned, there’s no need to raise concern about notes. You know it when you see it. Playing from memory is accepted as the normal way to play. Several times now, I’ve seen an organist come to town to play a recital, spending days registering complicated pieces on an unfamiliar organ, but never opening a score—in fact, not even bringing a score into the building.

A great thing about the human condition is that we don’t have to limit ourselves to appreciating great skill in any one field. Whenever I encounter excellence, whenever I witness someone performing a complicated task with apparent ease, I’m moved and excited. 

 

Everyday and ordinary

There are lots of everyday things we witness that require special skills. In our work at the Organ Clearing House, we frequently ask professional drivers to thread a semi-trailer through the eye of a needle, driving backwards and around corners. It’s not a big deal if you know how to do it. And when I’m in the city, I’m aware of delivery drivers and the difficult work they have to do. Think of that guy who delivers Coke to convenience stores, driving a semi-trailer in and out of little parking lots all day, and all the opportunities he has to get into trouble.

I once saw a video of a heavy equipment operator cutting an apple into four equal pieces with a paring knife that was duct-taped to the teeth of a backhoe bucket. Take that, William Tell! If you want to get a sense of the skill involved in operating a crane, go to YouTube, search for “crane fail,” and watch some clips that show skill lacking. You’ll have a new appreciation for the operator who makes a heavy lift without tipping his machine over and dropping his load.

Where we live in Maine, there are lots of lobstermen. Their boats are heavy workhorses, usually thirty or forty feet long, with powerful diesel engines, and plenty of heavy gear on board. It’s not a big deal because it’s an everyday and ordinary part of their lives, but I marvel at how easily they approach a crowded dock. Recently I saw one fisherman run his boat sideways into a slot on a dock—imagine the equivalent in a car as an alternative to parallel parking.

Any homeowner will know the difference between a plumber with skill and one without. If he goes home wet, he needs to go back to school. And you want to hire a painter whose clothes are not covered with paint. If he’s covered with paint, so are your carpets.

I appreciate all of those people who do work for us, and love watching anyone doing something that they’re really good at.

 

Going to pot

One of my earliest memories witnessing excellence came from a potter named Harry Holl on Cape Cod, near where our summer home was when I was a kid. His studio was set up as a public display in a rustic setting surrounded by pine trees and lots of exotic potted plants. He always had apprentices, interns, and associates around, so there was lots of action. There was a row of pottery wheels arranged under a translucent fiberglass ceiling, so there was lots of sunlight in which to work. Clay was stored in great cubes. They were roughly the size of sacks of cement, so I suppose they weighed seventy-five or a hundred pounds. There was shelf after shelf of large plastic jars full of glazes in the form of powder. It was a favorite family outing to drop in there to see what was going on, maybe buy a coffee mug, then stop for ice cream on the way home.

Harry’s work is easily recognizable. For example, the signature shape of his coffee mugs is both beautiful and practical. It seems almost silly to say that his mugs are easy to drink from, but it’s true—the shape fits your lips, so there’s seldom a drip. That’s simply not true of every mug.

Harry Holl’s art is most recognizable through his glazes. He studied with a Japanese ceramicist whose experimentation with glazes inspired Harry. A material common in much of his work is black sand that’s found at a particular beach on the Cape. Harry would go there with shovel and buckets to harvest the stuff, and go home to blend it into the colored glazes. Firing the glaze in a kiln results in beautiful black speckles that enhance the rich colors.

The best part of witnessing the work of this unique artist was seeing him at the wheel. He wore leather sandals and a long gray beard. His hands and forearms were deeply muscled. And the relationship between his eyes and his hands was miraculous. He’d drop a lump of clay on wheel, wet his hands, and caress the lump into the center of the spinning wheel. With one hand cupped and the other thumb down, a coffee mug would sprout from the lump—and another, and another. Or you’d watch a five-pound lump of clay turn into twelve dinner plates or cereal bowls, measured quickly with a well-worn caliper as they sprouted. 

Other signature pieces were beautiful pitchers, bird feeders, birdbaths, and lamps. The Harry Holl lamp that my parents gave me as a wedding present thirty-five years ago is sitting on my desk as I write. And on the dinner table most evenings we use the dinner plates they gave Wendy and me as a house-warming present when we moved into our home in Maine.

 

Dodging the draft

My wife Wendy is a literary agent who works with writers, helping them sell manuscripts to publishers. One who stands out is Donald Hall, who has written hundreds of poems, essays, and books. He has written extensively about countless subjects—I think he’s particularly good with baseball (the most poetic of team sports), and he has written insightfully and eloquently about Work—comparing his work as a writer to that of his farmer grandfather, to sculptors, and other strong craftsmen. I recommend his book, Life Work, published by the Beacon Press.

His most recent publication is the essay, Three Beards, published in the online version of The New Yorker magazine. Read it at www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/06/three-beards.html. It starts:

 

In my life I have grown three beards, covering many of my adult faces. My present hairiness is monumental, and I intend to carry it into the grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.) A woman has instigated each beard, the original bush requested by my first wife, Kirby. Why did she want it? Maybe she was tired of the same old face. Or maybe she thought a beard would be raffish; I did.

 

Donald Hall’s writing is mesmerizing. It lilts along like a piece of music, casually using words we all know but never use, using them as parts of common speech just like they should be. When’s the last time you used the word raffish? You might imagine the brilliant old man—did I mention that he’s eighty-four years old?—whacking away on a computer keyboard, words flying across the screen like a stock ticker. But you’d be wrong. He writes in longhand on a tablet. And he wrote fifty-five drafts of this essay. Fifty-five!

I do a lot of writing, but I seldom write new drafts. Rather, I take the easy route and reread what I’ve written, editing on the screen as I go. A good final trick before hitting “Send” is to read a piece aloud to myself. That’s when I find I’ve used the same word twice in a paragraph, and that’s how I tell if something reads awkwardly. But fifty-five drafts? 

Hall’s fifty-five drafts are what makes it sound as though he writes in a flash, and when I read something of his aloud, it sounds like a friend talking to me.

 

For the birds

Another of Wendy’s clients whose work I admire is Kenn Kaufman, an ornithologist and chronicler of nature. He has little formal education—he dropped out of school as a teenager to hitchhike around the country building a “Big Year” list of bird species. His book Kingbird Highway (published by Houghton Mifflin) is the memoir of that experience. He traveled 20,000 miles, crisscrossing to take advantage of the particular times when rare species are most easily seen. Part of that experience was meeting a girl who lived in Baltimore and shared his passion for birds. While Kenn’s parents had allowed his crazy sojourn, Elaine’s father was more protective, and when Kenn was leaving her area to go to Maine for a round-trip on the ferry Bluenose, known to promise the best sightings of pelagic (open ocean) birds, Elaine’s father seemed unlikely to allow it.

Kenn writes that he slept in the woods the night before his boat trip, and when he arrived at the terminal, there she was, having found a way to get from Baltimore to down-east Maine on her own. He wrote: “If I could have looked down the years then, and seen everything from beginning to end—the good times, the best times, the bad times, the bad decisions, the indecision, and then finally the divorce—I still would not have traded anything for that moment.”

I don’t know if I’ve ever read a more eloquent or concise story of a love affair and marriage than that.

I’ve stood next to Kenn on the shore of the ocean, looking across an empty black sky, and Kenn rattles off the birds he sees. Have you ever heard of Confusing Fall Warblers, thirty or so different species that all look alike, and whose plumage is completely different at different times of the year? They don’t confuse Kenn. And I’m fond of the accurate scientific birding term, LBJs. Translation? Little Brown Jobs. Ask Kenn.

During his “Big Year,” Kenn realized that identifying birds is interesting and fun, but not very meaningful if you don’t know anything about them. He has observed, researched, and written about the lifestyles and habits of all the species. His book, Lives of North American Birds (Houghton Mifflin), looks like a reference tome, but it’s a wonderful read. And his field guides are handy, interesting, informative, and in a single paragraph description of a bird, Kenn inserts humor, sarcasm, and simple pleasure along with the facts.

Sitting with Kenn at a dinner table, or better yet, in the woods and fields or at the beach, I’m amazed and impressed by the depth of his knowledge, experience, and appreciation of his subjects.

 

Doctor, Doctor, it hurts
when I do this.

I know, I know, don’t do that.

In the June issue of The Diapason, I wrote about safety in the interior of pipe organs, and finished by describing the collapse of a 130-year-old ladder that dropped me six feet to land on my back—the experience that taught me once and for all that the older we get, the less we like falling. Oof! 

I described my encounter with EMTs, two of whom had grown up in that particular church, and all of whom agreed that my weight, when coupled with the lack of an elevator, was an issue for them. (I had a similar experience after a vehicle accident in 1979, when an overweight female EMT grunted from her end of the stretcher, “J____ C_____, is he heavy!”) I wrote about an ambulance ride across the river from Cambridge to Boston, and a long afternoon in the emergency room (thanks to Wendy for that long and supportive sit), ending with the news that I had a cracked vertebra.

That seemed to be healing well until a month later, when pain shot down my right leg and my right foot went numb. A herniated disc had pinched my sciatic nerve, and the shrill pain could have been described as stabbing, except for the fact that it was constant. It lasted four weeks.

My current favorite encounter with deep skill and knowledge was my brief relationship with an orthopedic surgeon at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, just blocks from our apartment. After an unpleasant visit with a specialist at another hospital, this was my quest for a second opinion. The guy walked into the room looking like a million bucks, dressed in a well-tailored suit and nicely matched, stylish, and colorful shirt and tie. He greeted me as though he cared how I felt, shared and explained my X-ray and MRI images, and then drew a terrific cartoon of “my” spine, naming the vertebra, showing exactly the issue that was causing the pain. Later when I was being prepped for surgery, one of the medical students (my doctor is a professor at the Harvard Medical School) said that he is famous for those drawings.

The doctor assured me that the surgery was simple and predictable, and that I could expect the pain to diminish quickly afterwards. In fact, when I awoke from anesthesia, the pain was gone. Simply gone. And two hours later I walked out of the hospital.

I could feel his confidence the moment I met him. His professional manner was both comforting and reassuring. He certainly has studied his subject. I’m so glad he didn’t think he’d be just be able to “pick it up.” He’s given me my leg back. His name is Andrew White, and if you’ve got trouble with your spine, you should go see him. Tell him I sent you.

A writer’s best friend

I’ve written here about a couple writers I admire, both of whom I met through my wife Wendy who is their literary agent, and who edits their work. She has edited many of our renowned and beloved writers, and she works hard to keep me honest. Late one afternoon, I was walking to her office in Boston to meet her after work, and ran into one of her clients, an admired juvenile judge—we had met recently at a party. He was carrying his latest manuscript in a shoe box, and said to me, “She’s given me so much work to do!”

I’ve learned from Wendy the value of a good editor. And it has been a privilege and pleasure to work with Jerome Butera, editor of The Diapason. My file shows that I wrote In the wind… for the first time in April of 2005. That makes this the one-hundredth issue of my column that has passed through Jerome’s hands. At 2,500 words a pop, that’s 2,500,000 words, which is a lot of shoveling. Through all that, Jerome has worked with me with grace, humor, friendship, and an occasional gentle jab. I value and honor his judgment, guidance, and support. Many of you readers may not be aware of his presence over so many years. Take it from me that Jerome’s contribution to the life and world of the modern American pipe organ is second to none, and the equal of any. Best of luck and happiness to you, Jerome, and thanks for all your help.

And welcome to Joyce Robinson, who has been there for years, learning the ropes while sitting next to the master. We’re looking forward to lots more fun. Best to you, Joyce, and many thanks. Here’s hoping you have a fun ride.

John Bishop

A saint of our own

Sometime in the middle of the second century Anno Domine, a young Christian woman who had made a faithful vow of virginity was married to a man named Valerian. During the wedding, she sat alone and sang to God professing her faith. The bride, Cecilia, substantiated her previous vow by appearing before Valerian with an angel protecting her. Around 180 AD, the young couple suffered martyrdom for their faith under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. At the time of her death, Cecilia asked the pope to convert her home to a church.

In 1585, Pope Sixtus V released a papal bull founding the National Academy of St. Cecilia, naming her as the patron saint of music. We celebrate the Feast of St. Cecilia on November 22, which is today, as I write.

St. Cecilia is often depicted in statues, paintings, stained glass, and tapestries. Typically, she is carrying a small portative organ, and often, she’s depicted mishandling it. Assuming the Saint to be of average height, the organ is 18 or 24 inches high, with perhaps 20 notes. She’s looking off to one side, and the organ droops out of her hands, a few pipes slipping loose—I imagine that in a few seconds the pipes will clatter to the ground. I’ve asked around a little, but haven’t found anyone who has a good explanation or theory for why it’s okay for the good saint to be so careless! If anyone in the Organ Clearing House did that, they’d be on a bus home pretty quick.

Musicians throughout the Christian world celebrate St. Cecilia Day, honoring her memory for professing her faith through song. Henry Purcell, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and George Frideric Handel are among the many who composed music dedicated to the saint. Benjamin Britten was born on the Feast of St. Cecilia in 1913 and aspired to write a piece in homage to the saint, but struggled to find an appropriate Latin text. W. H. Auden wrote the poem that Britten set to music in his Hymn to St. Cecilia.

November 22 is the date of a few auspicious musical events. In 1928, Ravel’s Boléro was premiered in Paris, and in 1968, The Beatles released their album, The Beatles, known by music lovers as “The White Album.”

Singer/songwriter Paul Simon wrote his own homage to St. Cecilia, released in 1970 in Simon & Garfunkel’s album, Bridge Over Troubled Waters. According to the website Genius.com, Simon has said that his lyrics are a reflection on St. Cecilia as an elusive muse, depicted as a troubling lover (“ . . . you’re breaking my heart, you’re shaking my confidence daily . . .”). I don’t know if Purcell or Handel had such struggles—both have much richer catalogues than Paul Simon—but we have heard from Benjamin Britten’s partner Peter Pears, that as W. H. Auden submitted his poem to Britten in installments, he included hints as to how Britten might become a better artist. Ouch!

 

Gathering horsefeathers

I was a freshman at Oberlin in the fall of 1974, and that year on November 22, the grand Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated. E. Power Biggs, Charles Fisk, Harald Vogel, and Dirk Flentrop were among the luminaries who participated in roundtable discussions, and Marie-Claire Alain played the opening recital. I don’t remember the program, but I do remember the encore. She eschewed the usual fireworks and offered Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ from Bach’s Orgelbüchlein (#40). Mr. Biggs received an honorary doctorate of music.

The Flentrop organ was dedicated to the memory of George Whitfield Andrews, longtime professor of organ at Oberlin, and was funded by Oberlin alumnus Frank Chapman Van Cleef, whose wife had studied with Dr. Andrews, and whose family members had been students at Oberlin in every decade but two of the school’s existence from its founding in 1833 until the 1970s! After graduating from Oberlin in 1904, Van Cleef earned a degree in law at Columbia and later founded a financial management firm in New York. He retired in 1948 and returned to Oberlin. I recall meeting him during that week in November of 1974 in the hallway by Haskell Thomson’s teaching studio. We were introduced, and I thanked him for his gift. He was 94, I was 18.

Frank Van Cleef is not the first wealthy elderly patriarch to be encouraged to write a memoir. Gathering Horsefeathers is the third installment in a trilogy, a goofy history of his life with his family, replete with tales of designing houses, arguing about shrubbery, killing rattlesnakes (really?), and ultimately, rallying his family to donate the funds for the new organ. I was amused to note that early in his career, while he and his first wife were planning the construction of their first house, they lived on the twenty-second floor (looking south) of One Fifth Avenue in New York. That building is a few blocks from where we live in Greenwich Village—I can see it through my office window if I swivel my chair. Looking south provides an expansive view of Washington Square Park, and in 1928, there wasn’t much else that tall except the 57-story Woolworth Building (built in 1913) on Broadway, between Park and Barclay Streets, across from City Hall Plaza, one and a half miles away.

The story of the Flentrop organ fills the last pages of Van Cleef’s book, presumably placing the experience as a high point in his life. He tells how Oberlin president Robert Fuller (his next door neighbor) and professor of organ Fenner Douglas came to him (by appointment) one evening, inviting him to support the project. As he tells it, his son John (Oberlin ’31) was present, and later the family agreed that Frank, his four children, and their spouses would support the entire cost of the project.

My musty copy of this little book has been on the shelves of all the offices in which I’ve worked. I bought it that weekend in Oberlin because I had met the man, and I suppose I read it then. As I read today, I reflect on the dozens of people I’ve met who have given generously to fund the design and construction of new organs.

Horsefeathers? The jacket flaps explain. They’re the long hairs on a horse’s fetlocks, and they have no particular purpose. (I know that Mr. Van Cleef was a horseman because he was on horseback when he killed the rattlesnake!) In his words, horsefeathers are “something you do for the public good, something that has no use for you.”

 

Some old friends

Mr. Van Cleef’s gift provided a platform for the education of hundreds of organists. 1974 was the heart of the Orgelbewegung movement—the time when American organists and organbuilders were in the thrall of classic styles of organ building and playing, when so-called “factory built” organs lost favor among many. In retrospect, I think that the movement was less about the oft-repeated battle between tracker and electric actions, but the realization that the collapse of the economy in 1929 and especially the economic impact of World War II led to the diminution of artistic integrity of American organs.

The Aeolian-Skinner organ in Oberlin’s Finney Chapel was considered “second-class,” and the town was crawling with Flentrops. Including the organ in the Episcopal Church, practice and teaching organs, and the big red one in Warner Hall, there were more than a dozen Flentrops in town.

It’s a long time since I played on that organ, but I remember it vividly. It was a thrill to sit surrounded by the cases, those huge pedal pipes visible in the corner of your eye. Leaving behind all the conflicting philosophies and vitriol that gushed in those days, that organ simply sounded beautiful. Each knob you drew brought a new touch of magic. The sound was lively, the action immediate and personal. That organ was mighty important to my formation as an organist.

 

Harvard Square

When I was growing up in the Boston area, Harvard Square was just the place. In 1956, Walter Holtkamp, Sr. installed a three-manual organ in St. John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School). Melville Smith, director of the Longy School of Music, was the organist of the chapel, the young Charles Fisk was Holtkamp’s apprentice, E. Power Biggs (who had taught at Longy) lived nearby, and Daniel Pinkham was Biggs’s young protégé. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall while that organ was being installed, with its (terribly) low wind pressures, exposed Great and Positiv chests, and open toe holes. Those musicians, at the core of the revival movement, must have had some fascinating conversations in that crowded loft.

My father taught homiletics at E.T.S, and when I was clamoring to have organ lessons, he took me to Alastair Cassels-Brown, the chapel organist. The Holtkamp was the second organ I ever played. The first, ironically, was the 1904 E. M. Skinner organ at the Parish of the Epiphany in nearby Winchester, Massachusetts, where Dad was rector, and I was about to “baritone” out of the youth choir to join the adults. The Skinner was in dreadful condition and was replaced in 1974 with a new organ by Fisk.

I was also excited to be allowed to practice on the big Aeolian-Skinner organ at Christ Church (Episcopal), Zero Garden Street, in Cambridge, the church famous for its Revolutionary War-era bullet hole and its “George Washington sat here” pew. Daniel Hathaway was the organist there and was very kind to me. Many years later, I was to maintain that organ, build a new console for it, and then arrange for its sale as the church purchased a new organ from Schoenstein in 2006. The Organ Clearing House dismantled the Aeolian-Skinner for shipment—it was rebuilt by Quimby Pipe Organs and installed in a church in Sugarland, Texas. 

 

The Busch

After having given weekly radio broadcasts for sixteen years on the Aeolian-Skinner organ in Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, in 1958 E. Power Biggs commissioned Flentrop to build a three-manual organ for the resonant but intimate room. Shortly after its installation, Biggs presented the Flentrop to the world through his record-breaking series of recordings on Columbia Masterworks, Bach Organ Favorites. (It’s still the best- selling series of solo classical recordings.) A few days ago, friend and colleague John Panning, of the Dobson Organ Company, posted photos of the organ on Facebook. His caption read: 

 

Yesterday I enjoyed the opportunity to play what I consider the most influential 20th-century organ in the United States. The 1958 Flentrop organ in the Busch-Reisinger Museum was not the first Organ Reform instrument in the country, but E. Power Biggs’ many recordings of it brought the gospel of the Orgelbewegung to an enormous audience, including me. Even today, jaded by subsequent developments, it still impresses as a tremendously beautiful organ.

I first heard that Flentrop as a young teenager when mentors took me to hear Biggs play several recitals. At the conclusion of one of those programs, chock full of Sweelinck, Buxtehude, and Bach, Mr. Biggs sidled out from behind the Rugwerk and told us that he’d be happy to play another piece, but that he’d “run out of baroque music” (yeah, right!), and gave us Charles Ives’s Variations on ‘America.’

 

Calliope

In Greek mythology, Calliope was one of the nine muses, representing eloquence and epic poetry. She defeated the daughters of the King of Thessaly in a singing competition, but instead of receiving a cash prize, professional concert management, and a recording contract, Calliope turned her opponents into magpies. Calliope was the name of the ship that left Rotterdam in the spring of 1977, crossed the Atlantic, and sailed up the St. Lawrence Seaway into Lake Erie to the Port of Cleveland where it delivered the Flentrop organ for Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.

I was working for Jan Leek, a native of the Netherlands, who had immigrated to the United States in 1961 to work for Walter Holtkamp. When they were installing the Holtkamp in Warner Hall at Oberlin, John noted that the school was looking for an organ technician, and knew that was the job for him. I worked for Jan part-time and summers when I was a student, and as he left the school to form his own company, I worked full time with him for four years after I graduated. Jan, as a true Dutchman, was friendly with the folks at Flentrop, and we were engaged to help with the installation of the big three-manual organ at Trinity Cathedral. 

It was the summer before my senior year, and the first time I had participated in the installation of a large organ. We arrived at the cathedral to meet the truck bearing the overseas container. I carried a couple things up those stone stairs that were not featured in the Oberlin Flentrop—including a tied bundle of Swell shutters. What goes around, comes around! And there was Daniel Hathaway on the front steps of the cathedral, just arrived from Cambridge to start his magnificent tenure as director of music.Daniel and I played several duo-recitals using the cathedral’s two Flentrops (there’s a fifteen-stop job on a platform that rolls about the nave), treating audiences to Beethoven symphonies (3, 5, and 6), and Rossini overtures played in Werckmeister III.

Michael Jupin had been the associate rector of the Parish of the Epiphany when Dad was rector—he was now dean of Trinity Cathedral. Pat Quintin and I were married in that church in October of 1979 with my father officiating, assisted by his former assistant, my grandfather, uncle, and godfather (all priests). For the rest of his life, Dad loved to tell the story of how I shouted registration suggestions to Daniel Hathaway down the length of the nave during the wedding rehearsal the evening before. (Yup, I did that. . . .)

The organ’s main case is twenty-five feet tall, and the whole thing is perched on a high loft. There was scaffolding and lots of heavy lifting. I was outfitted with a rig of leather straps like the flagpole carrier in a parade, so I could put the toe of a big tin façade pipe in a little cup strapped to my waist, and climb a ladder using both hands while co-workers preceded me sixteen feet above, balancing the top. My knees are almost sixty years old now, and things are different.

All the façade pipes were in place, and as we left the cathedral, we turned and looked back at the organ. The late afternoon sun was flooding the organ with red and blue light, and I burst into tears. Organs still do that to me.

 

And on the other hand . . . 

Those Flentrop organs are terrific instruments, and they played a huge role in the history of the pipe organ in America in the twentieth century. But in those days, I also learned about the beauties of electro-pneumatic action, especially working with Jan Leek in the big Aeolian-Skinner at Church of the Covenant in Cleveland. And when I returned to Boston in 1984, I was lucky to get to care for the tremendous organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square. The regular Friday noontime recitals were an important part of my education, as each week I heard a different artist playing the same organ. Some were terrified of it, some would have rather played a tracker, and some made magic happen.

Now, more than forty years out of high school, I’ve worked with and played hundreds of instruments. Of course, some are unremarkable, but most of them bring to mind a story, a lesson learned, a mystery revealed, or simply a great place to have lunch nearby. I remember where I was the moment I grasped the concept of electro-pneumatic actions, the time the blower was running backwards, and the two times I’ve fallen. It’s fun to think back about those that stand out and how their histories are interwoven with my experience. I’ve had plenty of conversations with friends and colleagues about the organs that influenced them and played important roles in their careers, and I bet lots of readers are remembering their favorites right now. I’d love to hear your stories.