Austin Lovelace, March 19, 1919–April 25, 2010: A Remembrance

Jason Overall works with the pipe organ builder Goulding & Wood, Inc., in tonal design and project development. He graduated from Furman University of Greenville, South Carolina with a degree in music theory, studying organ with Charles Tompkins and composition with Mark Kilstofte. From there he went on to study composition with John Boda at Florida State University, also studying organ with Michael Corzine. In addition to his work with Goulding & Wood, Mr. Overall is an active church musician in the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis.

Robert J. Powell is one of the most recognized names in contemporary church music. He has a countless number of publications in every genre and has led sessions in conferences across the country. Since 1968, Mr. Powell has been organist-choirmaster at Christ Church, Greenville, one of South Carolina's oldest and largest Episcopal churches. During his nearly thirty-five year tenure, Mr. Powell has taken the program from a single children's choir that led the 9:00 am Morning Prayer service to a comprehensive array of adult and children choirs, instrumental ensembles and a thriving concert series. Prior to his position at Christ Church, Robert Powell served the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York as assistant organist and Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, Meridian, Mississippi as organist-choirmaster. Yet it is his compositions that have done the most to secure his reputation.

Mr. Powell has written well over 1,000 anthems and service music for the Episcopal church. His setting of the Gloria in excelsis is thought to be "The One True Gloria" by many people in the pew. Nearly every church musician has come to rely on the dependable, accessible music of Robert Powell, and with such an encyclopedic output, it is easy to find the perfect piece for even the most difficult situations.

If Bob's reputation is earned through his composition, it is his generosity of spirit that most touches those who know him. His warmth and genuine Christian spirit provide the basis of his career, his music-making and his composition. In his music, Bob weaves together a sensitive spirituality, no-nonsense practicality and a liberal dose of good humor.

At the end of 2002, Mr. Powell will retire from Christ Church, leaving behind a flourishing music program. He makes it clear, however, that he isn't retiring. Bob says that he is looking forward to spending even more time composing and the opportunity to try his hand at substitute playing.  In May, I was able to ask Bob about his career and experiences. Following is a portion of our conversation.

Who are some of the composers or teachers that inspired you?

Well, of course Alec Wyton was my mentor and he always encouraged me. He is a wonderful person, and he was always a great inspiration. In fact, when Abingdon Press was first starting their music publishing business, they asked Alec to send them an anthem. He said he didn't want to at that time, but that he had a young student--meaning me--that would send them one, and I did. They took "Ancient of Days" or some anthem that's out of print, so I sent them another. Pretty soon I sent them twelve at once, and they took about ten of them. Finally Earl Copes, who was one of the editors at that time, called up and asked, "How fast does (and he named an anthem) go?" By that time I had written fifteen others, and I didn't even remember it. He had to sing to me over the phone to show me how it goes. I never put [tempo markings] on pieces because speeds don't mean anything to me. I don't play the same speed anyway each time. If you ever see a piece of mine with a metronome indication, it is usually because publishers want it.

Who else besides Alec Wyton?

This will be a surprise: I came up in rural Mississippi playing in what was called a Union church. That is, it was Baptist two Sundays a month and Presbyterian, which I was, one Sunday a month, and Methodist the other Sunday with circuit riding preachers. It was wonderful, and of course all of the congregation came to all of the services, whether it was Baptist or Presbyterian or whatever. So I came up playing the Sunday School piano, like everybody does, it seems. They bought a Hammond organ and said "You can play the thing: it's got a keyboard!" I'd been taking piano lessons, but I said, "I can't play this thing." So I went to a town near us, Greenville, Mississippi, and found an organ teacher. He played at St. James Episcopal on an old two-manual Estey, and I learned how to play on that. He was a wonderful person who was also a band director and a good organist. His name was Walter E. Parks. I would go in for my organ lesson and do the usual things: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues and all of that. Then he'd say, "Now it's time for our composition lesson." And for the same price I'd have another three hours. We did Preston Ware Orem's book and the Prout books, the Percy Goetschius book of composition. It was wonderful fun for me. He was a great influence.

Did you keep up with him?

He died at the keyboard after I left high school. I went to Louisiana State University, and I ended up with Frank Page, the organist at the Catholic student center and a great teacher. He would give us assignments, like harmonize a melody, and I would transpose it and harmonize it six different ways. I was ambitious in those days--you learn not to be after a while, I guess--but it was fun. I studied composition and organ at the school and got degrees in both of them, then I went off to the Army. I went to Atlanta first and was a junior choir director: my first experience with a junior choir. My hometown church didn't have a choir of any kind. In fact, the first choir of any kind that I ever heard was the LSU concert choir. In the army, [I was stationed] first in Atlanta, then in Japan, which was a wonderful experience. The Korean conflict was over then, and I had a choir of Japanese women who worked at the Army base and American soldiers, which sang for chapel services. It was a great experience in choir training. As far as other people who have influenced me? Publishers particularly have encouraged me; I could just go down the line. All of them are encouraging, and of course that doesn't mean they take everything you send them. I'm used to rejections, because obviously everybody can't publish every piece. I understand that. Usually if an anthem is rejected twenty-two times or so, I change it into an organ piece and send it somewhere else. So you get organ pieces out of anthems sometimes. I try to recycle things.

Who are some composers you enjoy listening to?

Amazingly enough, right at the moment I'm on a Dvorak kick. I think Dvorak was a great composer--underrated in a lot of ways. Mahler I have trouble with. Of course there's Bach. My old saying used to be "there are two categories of organ music: all the music that Bach wrote for organ and all the music that everyone else wrote for organ." Bach is always an influence, but you have to be careful with Bach because you can copy him easily and end up sounding like bad Bach. I try to listen to a variety of things, to check out all styles. I try just to sit there and listen and not do too much. I try to keep a balance. You can't do music all the time. I never take music with me on a trip or a vacation. I do not take any manuscript paper. I do not think about it.

When you're not on vacation, do you have set times for composing?

I try to get writing at about 9:00 and I go until about 11:00. Then I go out and have coffee with friends, come back around 2:00 and work a couple of hours, and that's it.

Do you compose four hours every day?

Well, it's like practicing. You lose it if you don't do it. I used to have a good time writing for junior choir when I had a junior choir to work with. Now it's difficult to write for junior choir. I do as well as I can with it, but it was much easier when I actually had one, even though we weren't singing my music, because you know what they can do. It's easy to write for SATB choir when you have one. It's more difficult when you don't. You're in a vacuum writing away.

What criteria do you look for in a text that you want to set?

It has to say something to the people who are going to be singing it and hearing it. If it's a regular anthem, something that rhymes well and makes good sense when it rhymes, and if it's a classical text, something I think I can set, I think that's basic. Also if it has some little dramatic thing in it like They Cast their Nets in Galilee, you can always make a little [motive] out of "nets." "Glory" is always a great word for me to use--"glorious" or something like that--because you can always make it soar out. So the text is very important in writing church music.

Although you have always been involved with the Episcopal Church, you've only done a couple of [settings of the] Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, one Jubilate Deo and of course the things that are in the hymnal. Was it a conscious decision to not write more canticles?

Not a conscious decision. I found that when I first started sending these canticles like "O be joyful" (the Jubilate Deo) or the Benedictus est, there were already many in the catalogs, and most of the publishers simply didn't want another one. How many "O be joyful"s can Concordia have after all?

Have you ever consciously tried to develop a Bob Powell style or a sound?

Heavens, no. I consciously try to make sounds like what the particular publishers publish. Obviously I wouldn't send a Concordia-type piece to a publisher that's used to publishing renewal music. So I have to study other composers' [pieces]--read them through and throw them away so I wouldn't be copying them, but just to get the general style of the music for a particular publisher. Also, I subscribe to a lot of these choral packets so I can see what Augsburg and Concordia or whoever is publishing, and I would write something like that.

With both the texts and with style, it seems like a very practical approach.

Yes, I write for small choirs, as you probably gathered. Choirs of twenty-five because that's what most choirs are. When you come right down to it, most choirs are not of Cathedral ability or size. I just can't write for fifty voices. I don't think in that way.

What about beyond that? Bach and Telemann and composers of their ilk weren't necessarily writing pieces that they thought would last for all eternity. They were writing music for next Sunday. Whereas people like Brahms and Beethoven were writing pieces that they intended to be around for a while.

No, I'm more on the Bach line. I know they're not going to be around forever. They'll be in print five years if you're lucky. If they don't sell, they don't sell. Then the publisher will put them out of print because they have to pay taxes on them whether they sell them or not. My pieces are all practical things and useful for specific occasions. Peace I Give to You, the Paraclete publication, is a Maundy Thursday text. I think the rector [at Christ Church] asked me to write something that we could use on Maundy Thursday, so I wrote that. Of course there are a few commissions here and there, and they want this, that and the other thing. So I say, "Sure, I'll do that." I don't know how to say no. I'm going to learn by the time I'm seventy-five. I might say no, but right now if anybody asks me to do anything I'd be glad to do it. It's fun.

How much lead time do you require to have something ready?

To write a piece? The Suite for American Folk Tunes was written in two weeks for Austin Lovelace. He said he needed something for organ and brass, and would I write him something. That was lucky. Sometimes it takes a month. The organ duet went along about six months.

What about a typical anthem?

A typical anthem is a week. I do like Searle Wright used to suggest. Just put it down quickly: everything that comes into your mind, put it down. You can always go back and fix it later.

How much editing do you do?

Very little. [laughs] Once it's in the ground there is very little revision made. It's not like Mozart where I hear it in my mind. I just keep improvising on the piano until it comes. I think John Ferguson said something like that--that you keep hitting away until it sounds right to you. And when it sounds right to you, then you go on to the next measure.

So you always compose at the piano?

Almost always. Sometimes at the organ. It's more difficult to compose organ pieces at the organ for me. It's easier to do it at the piano. All the choral pieces are done at the piano. Other people go out to the middle of a lake on a boat and write a piece, but I can't do that.

When you write organ pieces, do you ever . . .

Do I ever think of timbres? Not really. I hear a flute maybe once in a while, and maybe a reed here and there. But I never hear a timbre particularly, because it's all the notes. That's the important thing to me: the notes themselves, not the sounds. I leave it to good interpreters to decide what to make it do. They make it sound right. A good interpreter is really re-creating the music. The person that interprets it is like a composer. In fact, Walter Erich pays the same amount of royalty if you arrange a piece as if you write a piece, because an arranger is just as important as a writer and sometimes more important than the writer of the piece.

So in your view, a sensitive performer can be an arranger.

That's exactly right. I don't want them to change the notes, although, my notes are not written in stone. I have no problem with people who change a note here or there. They say, "Did you mean this?" I will usually say, "What do you want? What sounds good to you?" And they'll say whatever it is and I'll say, "That sounds good to me too, so let's just put it down." Everything is flexible in this world. That's because I'm a parish organist, and you've got to make concessions.

What is the typical process you go through in writing an anthem?

The first process is to find some kind of text. That's basic. Richard Rodgers did that, and I feel good about that. Richard Rodgers didn't think of "Oh! What a Beautiful Morning" without having the text in front of him. Then the second thing is how are you going to divide the text--will you divide it into verses, will it be a long piece that you'll have to divide into some kind of sections? You have to have breathing points, and you have to figure out where the poet meant it to come to the end of an idea. Next process is to see if the first line gives you any inspiration. Does that phrase give you a tune in mind? Then you get your tune and you have your first inspiration and then it goes from there. Then bang away, and after a while it begins to sound right and take shape. I usually write the middle part first then add the introduction after I've written everything else, because you have something to draw from then. I try to avoid clichés. It's so easy to get clichés when anthem writing, particularly in concertato writing. You just do the same thing: there's going to be brass playing an introduction and everybody's going to sing unison, then the second verse is going to be different, and the third verse will be a harmonized verse for the choir, and the last verse will be unison-descant-plus-coda. I try to avoid doing that. One great anthem is Harold Darke's Christmas anthem "In the Bleak Midwinter" which is a hymn anthem, but it's very cleverly done because you don't have this four-verses-of-the-same-thing. Each verse is very different from the others. To me it's a very good hymn anthem.

What is the balance between inspiration and craft in your composition?

Inspiration--that's a hard question. I think Rutter said at one of those conferences that once you get the first idea, the rest of it is easy. Which is quite true, but it's a whole lot better if you have a good first idea. The inspiration is the first thing you get--the first idea. If you're going to write a pastorale and you get a little pastorale theme--a measure or so, a motive--then that's the inspiration part. Then the rest of it is craftsmanship. Well, of course, all of it is inspiration, but the rest of it is extension of the idea.

I think it was Schoenberg that said composition is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration.

That's right. Exactly.

But do you feel that the first idea is always inspired? Or do you feel like you can craft a good motive?

Oh, I think it has to be a certain amount of inspiration. It comes from God, I believe. I have no idea where these ideas come from. If I had some great well that I could put my hand in and draw one out, I'd do it. But it just comes. And sometimes you sit down at the keyboard and you say, "Okay, I'm going to be inspired now." And I wait for inspiration to come, and it does not come. I think Austin Lovelace said once that this stuff cycles. Sometimes you can really hit it right off and other times you sit there for a day or two or a week and you have no idea--no ideas. It's funny.

Do you ever receive inspiration unexpectedly? The cliché is waking up in the middle of the night with this great idea that you have to write down, but perhaps also when you are driving around town or,

[interrupting] No. Well, actually that's true. I have driven around town and gotten a good inspiration, with the radio off, of course. Sometimes driving from home to work you can get an idea and then you go in and put it down. Sometimes you play a service, and services are really quite inspiring in more ways than is normally thought. Sometimes you get an idea in the service, and I used to write them down after the service was over, at least a snippet of it. For a while I recorded some of them then tried to transcribe it, which is difficult. I like to play church services because I don't get nervous there. You have to keep going. You can't go backwards. Improvisations often turn into real pieces. I think that happened with lots of composers, not just me.

I remember coming over from Furman [University] to hear your service playing because it's so excellent. As you hear other church musicians play services--and struggle through services--do you have advice to share?

Well, in the first place I would say that relationships should be the first priority. Relationships are so important. After all the staff meetings and all the going to music conferences and all the practicing and all the choir training and all the other things, in the end the most important thing in all are the relationships. There are two ways of presenting God's word. One of them is by what the priest and the liturgy says. But equal to me is what the music says. It is an equal partner in proclaiming the word. It's another way of proclaiming Christ's gospel. Secondly, lots of people play too slowly for the church itself. Obviously if you are in a resonant building you have to play more slowly, but most churches are not resonant buildings. Some don't give the congregation a chance to breathe. Alec Wyton taught me a great thing: he said you must play with the text. So I was taught by him to play by the text itself no matter what the music does. Although I remember bad occasions when I've not done that. At St. John the Divine, when I was assistant there, [I played] 13 verses of "O come, O come Emmanuel" until people started looking at me wondering when I was going to quit. I had lost my place and wasn't playing by the text. So I learned the hard way. The other advice I have is to give the same amount of time between the verses each time. I also never ritard until the end of the last verse. I think if you ritard at the end of the introduction, you confuse the congregation. They don't know what speed it's really supposed to be.

What about larger issues in service playing? What about pacing the service, planning your registrations?

You have to be like you're on television. You have to be right with it right away. There are two [issues] there: you have to be with it when you're supposed to be with it and not have a grand pause while everybody looks for things or while you look for music, and people in general don't understand that silence is a part of music. A quarter rest is a beat of silence for example. And there are times in the services when there should be silence and not music. Silence is music in a sense.

Do you feel like there is a particular liturgical aspect that some weeks could be silent and other weeks could be musical? Or are there some times which should always be silent?

Depending on the service itself, I think there should be some moment of silence. Particularly in preludes that people play for funeral services when they want continual music or in a communion service where they want continual music. I don't want continual music in a communion service. If I were playing four pieces, there wouldn't be a modulation between numbers 1 and 2 or 3 and 4. I play one piece and put it down. You want to give people's ears a chance to breathe even though they're not singing. It comes back to participation. Participation does not always mean that people have to be yelling at the top of their voices. One form of participation is when we are all singing "Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven" and are just having a great time. We are participating--great. But if an organist is playing a great organ piece, like Bach, and we are all into it, we are also participating even though we are just sitting there. That's a form of participation.

That's something that in the liturgical world seems to divide the Roman church, which emphasizes active participation, and the Anglican world, with what you are talking about.

Yes, that's right. With Evensong, the congregation is not singing all the time, but they are involved in all kinds of ways: emotionally, spiritually we hope--every kind of way. And that's the point of these kinds of services to me anyway. That's a very difficult concept for many people. They only feel like if they are singing that they are participating in music making.

Are there ways musicians can foster that sense of visceral participation?

If they have a chance to write a little article in the bulletin or newsletter, that's always helpful. Tell it to the choir; tell it to the clergy.  The clergy listen and if they understand, the whole church ends up understanding.

How do you approach polishing a choir or your own playing but avoid it being a performance?

Automatically when the choir sings it's a performance of a sort. And of course you want the best; we all want the best of every kind of music. Every presentation of a choir or organist is a performance by the very nature of what it is, and you want it as perfect as possible. I'm not sure there is any sort of a thing as perfection in this world in this way, but anyway you want it as perfect as possible. Then you've got a good performance. But does it relate to the what's going on with the rest of the service or is it just a performance? You have to be very careful that it relates textually and that it creates the right ambiance. You must be a team player and not isolated. That's what I mean by relationships. You are related to the people who are in the service, the congregation, the clergy. You are related to proclaiming the gospel, and you are not just doing a little performance somewhere. This isn't something you can just slop around. You have to do it quite well. And hope for the best. Pray a lot.

If it is a performance, it sounds like Søren Kierkegard's idea that in a service the musicians and the clergy are just the prompters, the congregation are really the actors and the audience . . .

The audience is God. God is the audience and so you want to make sure that you do as well as you can to please God. And the congregation is involved in it too. When an anthem is sung or an organ piece is played, everybody in the church building is involved in some way. As long as you think of being involved with them and them being involved with you, then what you're doing is proclaiming God's and Christ's gospel. Then you're not doing performances. You are helping along their spiritual worship. Which is why choosing anthems is so important.

How much of your time throughout the year will be spent choosing anthems?

In my best days, I spent a long time and looked at a lot of pieces. Not only as a composer but to see what we could use--that's what I'm paid for. And it goes throughout the year. I'm kind of like the publishers in that in July I should have my Christmas music ready and at Christmas I should be at least beyond Easter, so you are always ahead of the game. You are never living in the present; you are always sort of living in the future in this business. That way if you're going to have brass you can get it arranged. You don't have to sort it out the last week, and they are out there with their stands open and no music on them.

How would you describe your technique for improvisation, and how do you prepare your improvisations for a Sunday service?

If I'm going to improvise a prelude, now this is a strange technique, I take the hymn book upside down, and the bass becomes a soprano part and improvise on that. Other times I take a part of the tune and change the keys and go into different sequences of that just like every hymn prelude you've ever seen: you do your introduction, you do your tune, you do your tune with echoes in between. There are hundreds of techniques. You just try to keep a little form so you don't keep splatting away. You just have to study books by Gerre Hancock, David Cherwien and others.

Do you consciously have to rein in your counterpoint to make sure your voice leading is good, or do you now find that natural?

I don't think about counterpoint or harmony or any other thing. The notes will lead you to another place. So you go down another path. That's the fun thing about improvisation: where the notes will lead you. As you're going along, you think, "I've got this note," you don't think, "This is B-flat and it's going to go to so and so." The note itself, the chords and the notes just kind of lead you to the next thing so you don't have to. And that's where form becomes very important, because then you don't just go wandering off anywhere. What you actually want to do is get back home sooner or later.

In your longer improvisations, is it common for you to do free improvisation not on a hymn tune?

Of course, I'll do that. You have to be sure in a longer one that you contrast things: soft and loud, fast and slow, high and low. That kind of contrast is very important. I remember I [played a service] once in Columbia, and they had an electronic organ there that only had two sounds: loud and soft. It was a long procession with all the priests in the whole Southeast it seemed like. It went on for about twenty or thirty minutes, dealing with this organ which only had loud and soft. That's all it was. And finally you get to just playing chords because you just run out of . . . [shudders]. It was one of those horrible experiences. I was glad when it was over.

In both improvisation and in composition, do you find it difficult to come up with interesting textures?

For me it is sometimes difficult to come up with interesting textures. Sometimes you have to use things that you would normally not find in a piece written for organ by Franck or somebody. Use the Vox humana not like a Vox humana is usually used, but like a snarly something. I'm pretty conservative, I'm afraid. I use strings and flutes and diapasons in a kind of normal way, but every once in a while I try to break out of it. High and low is important. Most of us play in the middle of the keyboard all of the time. Those Thalben-Ball preludes have a lot in the high register and in the low register. Obviously he was dealing with what I'm struggling with. Of course you want to use the tune in the tenor or in the bass rather than always in the soprano, and have little frills around it.

Is there anything else you want to say?

Well, I just hope we continue to get a bunch of great young organists coming along who are going to go into church music and who work as well as they can in choosing music. When you choose music you want the very best of every kind, whether it is renewal or not renewal or classical or not classical. You don't want to choose second-rate anything. As I said in a 1967 interview I was re-reading the other day, I don't think there is really any one style of church music. I certainly don't think in this day and age that there is any "Episcopal" church music as there was twenty years ago. I think the renewal is here and--I know my colleagues are not with me on this, and that's all right, I'm retiring anyway--I don't have a great objection to blended services--that is to say, [services] with some renewal music in it and classical as well. At Christ Church on Sunday at the big service, it occurs mostly in the communion sung by the choir alternating with classical hymns from the hymn book. A lot of it is played on the piano, and some of it is played on the organ. We almost never use guitars or the string bass or the recorders in the big service. There are two other renewal services in the week, where all renewal music is appearing. I don't have any problems with this because everybody doesn't like Bach. That's just a plain fact. Like all organists, I wish it were otherwise. Everything that I like--Tallis and Byrd and everybody--I wish everybody would like it as much as me, but they don't. Some of them really get a lot out of the different songs, and we think my colleagues here do it here very tastefully so the whole service blends, and I guess the word "blend" is about the right word for it. You have a service where something in it appeals to everybody. In the beginning I was resigned and thought, "Well, that's what it's going to be," but the truth is the whole service becomes an entity, a unity. Without the renewal music, that particular service isn't right. Now at the 11:00 service, which does not have any renewal type music, to put it in there would not be right. We're a big enough church that we can have five services on Sunday, so it's easy. People, like water, seek their own level; they find the service they like and go to it. In these large churches it's necessary that services have their own character--that every service doesn't sound like the last one anymore than every Episcopal church in Greenville should sound like the next one. This [individual character] is its appeal: the spiritual appeal of people. I feel that the renewal music has its place, at a certain time but not all the time. I don't mean just out at the campfire or something. I mean in a church service on a Sunday morning. I think it has an appeal and a place.

You've drawn a clear distinction about doing it tastefully and not using guitars and so on.

That might be a failing. I know of churches which use guitars and flutes and violins and everything and dress it all up very nicely. In a sense we're bringing the secular world into the sacred and in a sense we're not. Music that Vivaldi wrote, the guitar concertos and so forth, was not a lot different than the Vivaldi Gloria. It was the same style in and out of the church. That has always swung back and forth as everybody knows. I think God uses all kinds of music to proclaim His gospel and to draw people to him. So I think that secular music--that gentle secular music--is useful. Songs such as "As the deer" and so on make an appeal that deals with the spiritual side of the person. I think it is important that we acknowledge that. These pendulums swing. A lot of the stuff the Roman Catholics had in the sixties has gone away, and some of the Roman Catholic churches that I know of are now swinging back to Gregorian Chant and to their heritage that they have from that, which I think is wonderful. I think classical music, like the Brahms motets, appeals to me, and if I were going to a service, not as an organist, I would go to Church of the Advent in Boston and hear the music played and sung there. As I said, people seek their own level in music. I know there is a terrible controversy raging about it. People say, "I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to have it." Well, it's not easy to say that. I think we have to deal with it the best way we can. We have to make it useful to God's purpose--not our purposes but God's purpose as we see it.

Given that there does seem to be such controversy about it, are you still optimistic about the church?

I am. Lots of my friends are not optimistic about church or church music, but I am because I know these things cycle. The really fine [examples] of any style of music or any style of worship is going to stay. It has stayed over the years. We still sing "A mighty fortress" for example. Any church should present the classical hymns: "A mighty fortress," "O God, our help in ages past," all the Lutheran chorales, the hymns in the 1982 Hymnal and the 1940 Hymnal. These should always be in the forefront of everything that's done. Then when the other music comes in, you actually have the icing on the cake in a sense. I am optimistic about church music. There are lots of great teachers, and there are lots of great players that really are church organists as opposed to performers. All you have to remember is to work with people--the relationships--that's the main thing. That doesn't just mean the choir members. It means the clergy and the staff, the program staff, the janitorial staff, all of them. And then you find out how things get done easily.

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of THE DIAPASON.

James and Marilyn Biery are two very active composers, performers, and church musicians. Husband and wife, they share leadership of the music program at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, Minnesota. They met at Northwestern University, where both studied organ (that organ department, as most know, no longer exists).
Marilyn Biery, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in organ and church music from Northwestern, and a DMA from the University of Minnesota, served as director of music at First Church of Christ in Hartford from 1986–96; she is now associate director of music at the Cathedral of St. Paul. James Biery, who also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in organ and church music from Northwestern, served as director of music at Holy Trinity Church in Wallingford, Connecticut from 1982–89, and from 1989 until 1996 as organist and director of music at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Hartford, assuming the position of director of music at the Cathedral of St. Paul in 1996.
Both Bierys are prolific composers (see the complete list of their works on their website, <http://home.att.net/~jrbiery/&gt;. Their works are published by MorningStar, GIA, Oregon Catholic Press, Boosey & Hawkes, Alliance, and Augsburg Fortress. Marilyn has also been a contributor to The Diapason (see “The Organ in Concert,” January 2005). We visited with the Bierys in St. Paul in July 2007.

Joyce Robinson: How did you get into this? Marilyn, you were a pastor’s kid, so you had that early exposure. James, how about you?
James Biery: I was a kid of parents who went to church! (laughter) Actually, my grandfather on my mother’s side was a minister, so that’s in my blood. We went to church, a fairly little church in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, but it was fortunate enough to have a pipe organ, a five-rank Reuter. It could shake the pews, in its own way, and it made an impression.

JR: How old were you when you got on the bench?
JB: Eleven, maybe ten.
Marilyn Biery: I was eleven. I looked through my diaries and I had the date of my first organ lesson! Isn’t that cool.
JB: It’s a funny thing, but you get the bug somehow. And it was pretty strong. After I’d seen a real music program in Omaha, and started studying with a real organ teacher, then I really got hooked.

JR: I find it interesting that you, Marilyn, have a doctorate in organ, and James, you went the route of getting a master’s and then the AGO’s Fellow and Choirmaster certificates.
JB: I went through a little period when I thought it was fun to do that. Schooling is not my cup of tea.
MB: But I like school. James reads books and does all these things on his own—like the [AGO] Fellow and the Choirmaster; he did that all on his own.
JB: That’s not really true. We had gone to New York at that point, to study with Walter Hilse, improvisation and various things. I enjoyed that.
MB: But he still reads books. I only do if I’m taking a class.
JB: Everyone has their motivators.
MB: So I needed a class—a regimen and a schedule. Actually, I started my doctorate in conducting; I didn’t want another degree in organ. I started it in Connecticut; then we moved, and I thought that I was going to finish it in conducting, but at that time they didn’t have a doctorate in conducting in Minnesota, believe it or not. The state with St. Olaf and such places, yet a conducting doctorate just didn’t exist! So when I moved here, I was for one very short semester looking at the orchestral program, but decided pretty quickly that I wasn’t interested in being an orchestral conductor. I switched back to organ. It was a good thing. It was fun.

JR: You’d both been in Connecticut in separate positions. When you came to Minnesota, was it just you, James, taking this job?
JB: Yes.
MB: He was nice. I said I’d be happy to move if I could just go and not have to work, because I was in the middle of the degree, and at that point I had decided that I was going to be a director of choral activities in a college. That was my career goal. I wasn’t thinking “church job.” We agreed that we would move and figure out if we could live here on his salary, and I’d go to school and find something else. There was a budget for an assistant position, which they had before, so he started interviewing people as soon as he got here; and along about November, said, “let’s just hire Marilyn.” So it was a temporary thing and I just never left.
JB: It worked out nicely because we went through the process—we advertised the position, we were interviewing and auditioning, and I had a committee. We reached a certain point where one of the people on the committee said “Why aren’t we just hiring your wife?” But it was better that it didn’t come from me; rather, it came from the parish.
MB: So I did that part-time for three years; when I finished the degree in ’99, the pastor said, “please put in a proposal to increase your hours to 20 hours a week.” At that point it was perfect to just keep it at 20, because our daughter was ten. It was so nice to work in the same place. We knew we could work together, and in fact we’ve done things together almost our whole married life. The building needs two people; in fact, more than two people.

JR: But you knew that working together would succeed.
MB: Oh, yes. We’ve done it for years. When we were students together, we’d do things together, and then before I finished my degree we were in one church and we used to do some things together. We’ve been together for 30 years. I’ve always helped out at his churches, and he’s always helped out at mine. I always knew we’d enjoy working together. I just like being in the same room with him all the time! (laughs) I like to hear him play the organ and we like to do things together.

JR: James, you are director of music at the cathedral, and Marilyn, you are associate director. Are you the entire music staff?
JB: Well, yes and no. We have music staff at the diocesan level too. Michael Silhavy is in charge of diocesan events. We are also fortunate to have Lawrence Lawyer as our assistant in music, helping with a multitude of musical and administrative duties.

JR: Who does what?
JB: In order to cover everything that happens in the building, there really are four of us who are regularly employed here.
MB: Who are actual musicians and not administrative.
JB: We’re talking about organists and directors.
MB: For diocesan events, where the bishop comes, we have Michael, who’s next door, who does those, with our help. But he can ask anybody in the diocese, so if he knows that it’s a really busy time for us, he can ask someone at the seminary to come in and play for an ordination Mass. Michael doesn’t get involved with anything on a parish level. There is a separate choir he conducts, which is mostly volunteers, about 60 or 80 people. We do the day-to-day work, but we get involved when he asks us. Michael used to work at GIA years ago, then he moved to the cathedral in Duluth, then moved down here as the worship center director. We’ve known him for almost twenty years.
We do four weekend masses with organ; there is another one with cantor only, just a sung Mass. Right now all three of us are going to be at the choir Mass, which is our high Mass. We both play the organ, we both direct; Lawrence Lawyer, our music assistant, at this point doesn’t do any directing, but we’re hoping he will. We have the Cathedral Choir at the 10 am Mass and we both switch off and do everything—if we’re not playing, we sing. I do another weekend Mass, and we rotate, and he’ll do two Masses a weekend and Lawrence does one. The St. Cecilia Choir is the kids’ choir, and all three of us do that. You can listen to sound bites of that on the web. (See <www.cathedralsaintpaul.org/calendars/sounds.asp&gt;.)

JR: What’s the size of your main adult choir?
JB: 30–35.
MB: It fluctuates. There are nine section leaders, and then we have 20 or 25 really good volunteers. The main core is 30.

JR: How many children’s choirs are there?
JB: One.
MB: We started branching off by using the older girls for some things, so we’ve developed a group of six or eight older girls that we call the Schola. We also invented something new for the boys, because a lot of them are home-schooled kids. So they come with their families.
JB: We just really didn’t have the heart to turn them loose when their voices changed. One family, just the sweetest people, asked if there was something we could do. My first answer was no, I’m sorry, it’s a treble choir. Then I thought about it for a week or two, and talked to the person who was then running it with me, and we decided to figure out a way to deal with this. We’re doing the Voice for Life program, the RSCM program, which is very nice. So at first we occasionally had them sing on some things, but it’s gone even beyond that now. We had three of these boys with changed voices last year, and they were doing some things on their own, too.
MB: We had them ring handbells—if you listen to one of our pieces that’s on the website, his O Come Divine Messiah—that’s everybody. That’s our daughter playing the oboe, and the main chorus singing the whole thing; the Schola sings the middle section, and the boys are ringing the bells. We’re doing two pieces this year where we taught them the bass line—I’m sure one of them’s going to be a tenor—but James taught them how to read the bass line.
JB: Another wonderful thing as you know with Voice for Life—they have some musical skills, rudimentary, but in some ways, better than some of our adult singers.
MB: They learned the bass part of an Ave Verum of Byrd, and then of the Tallis If Ye Love Me, and With a Voice of Singing. The girls who were trebles sang the soprano part with the adult choir, and the boys—I put them in with the basses, and the basses loved it. Some day, some choir director in some church somewhere is going to thank us because she’ll have these three boys who then, grown-up, will still have it in them.
As cathedrals go, and I could be wrong about this, we have one of the more active parishes in the United States. But it’s just like any kind of city church—the parish, for the children and for the parish choir in a building like this, is usually smaller than in suburban churches. We have 30 kids in the choir, which we think is really good. I’d love to have 50!
JB: The parish tends to be more singles and folks who move in and out—a large turnover; some families too.
MB: For a while, our biggest parishioner group was the 29 to 39 single female. We had a lot of young professional women in the choir.

JR: How do you divide the conducting and accompanying tasks?
JB: One thing that we discovered along the way is that for the most part it doesn’t work to switch off conducting and organ playing in the middle of a concert. (chuckling) We used to do that, and it just makes things harder. There’s something about the continuity and how to budget time and that sort of thing. So we did stop doing that a few years ago. Working backwards from that, the one concert that we do every year is around Advent/Christmas. It will work out that whoever is conducting that concert will do a lot of the rehearsal through November–December. But that’s the exception. During most of the year, we just split things up—sometimes it’s back and forth in a rehearsal, sometimes she’ll take half of the rehearsal and I’ll take the second half—it depends what we’re doing.
MB: He sings baritone, and I sing soprano. You know the Allegri Miserere, the one with the high Cs—right now we only have one person in the choir who can sing the high Cs. So it means that he has to conduct, because I have to sing those. My voice tends to be better for the Renaissance things; I don’t have much vibrato, and it’s a small, light tone. During Lent I do more singing with the choir, because we do more Renaissance works then, and he’ll do most of the conducting, whereas we need him more for pieces of other periods, so then I’ll conduct more of the things we need him to sing on; if we have brass and such and it’s a big celebration that needs improvisation, we’re more comfortable having him at the organ and me conducting. The things needing a lot of filling in or improvisation—he tends to get those. The last deciding factor is whoever’s not sick of something. Sometimes I’ll say, “I conducted that last time, you do it”— it’s more a matter of what would be most fun to do next time.
JB: One thing that sets us apart from 99% of the rest of the world is that neither of us likes to have an anthem marked—with all the breathing, and the interpretation. And then everybody has it marked, we sing it the way we did last time, and the time before that, and the ten times before that! That just drives us both nutty—because every time we bring out a piece, you have different singers, things are always a little different, you have a little different idea of how the piece should go, or maybe you’ve actually even learned something about it! Part of it sometimes is boredom—you know, “I’ve done this piece five times in a row, it’s time for you to do it.” It drives our singers nutty, because most of them come from other choirs where you have markings in your part, and you can expect that the conductor will do it that way. And people who have sung with us for 11 years will say, “But I have marked a breath there”—well, we don’t want a breath there this time! (laughter)

JR: Since both of you are composers, how do you handle pieces you’ve written? If you wrote an anthem, do you play it, do you conduct it?
JB: That’s a great question, because sometimes if you’ve written a piece, you learn more if you’re not the one who conducts it. I think frequently we might do it that way. If it’s a piece that I’ve written, that I want to try out, I will have her conduct it, because then I’ll find out how clear I have been in the notation—there are written indications that somebody else will interpret totally differently from the way I think it should be.
MB: He tends to write more choral things right now, and I tend to do a few more organ pieces. So he tends to play my organ pieces, more than I do.
JB: Another thing I like is if it’s a piece that we’re trying out, I would prefer to just listen, or if it’s accompanied, just sit at the piano or organ, and not be in charge.
MB: I generally tend to do more of the conducting in his pieces, too. When we celebrated our tenth anniversary at the cathedral, we had decided that I would do all the conducting. In fact, the program says that I did all the conducting. But then there were two pieces, which aren’t marked in your program, that at the last minute we decided Jim should do, partly because of the makeup of our sopranos—he always conducts the Ubi Caritas—and they’re more used to him.
JB: It kind of breaks the rule of what I was just saying. In that case, they’re kind of used to doing it in a certain way. We had to do all these things in a short rehearsal time, so—
MB: It was easier. The other piece was Ave Maria, and the sopranos needed me, so at the last minute we decided to switch, and he conducted those two pieces, and I did the rest of the conducting. We have a recording of that. We also have done hymn festivals, with Michael, where we put our two choirs together.
JB: Michael is very interested in hymnology. He has a gift for being able to put things together in interesting ways, and he can also write a really nice script for a program like that.
MB: For one of our Christmas programs, we had a set of poetry commissioned, Near Breath, which is really wonderful, from Anna George Meek, one of our section leaders. The whole program was based around that, and she intertwined the music we were doing.

JR: The cathedral is quite a presence—for instance, you’ve had the Minnesota Orchestra playing here, doing the Bruckner symphonies, and those were conceived for a cathedral-type ambiance.
JB: We are really excited about that. Osmo Vänskä, that’s his baby.

JR: Is that something you originated?
JB: No, he was behind the whole thing. He came to us with his proposal to do this. The performance is done two or three times, only once in the cathedral, but the cathedral one is the “main” performance—it’s the one that gets broadcast, and so forth.
MB: There are organizations that use the building a lot—Philip Brunelle uses it a lot for VocalEssence. Every time they bring over a boy choir group, they use the cathedral; I’m not sure why not the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, except that probably we seat more people.
JB: I think also he has sort of a Minneapolis group, so it’s an outreach to come over to “this” side.
MB: It’s just too much of a cavern for a small sixteen-voice group. We’ve had other groups like the National Lutheran Choir try it, and they ended up over at the Basilica of St. Mary too, because the room’s too wide, too big. You can have too much acoustic.

JR: Did either of you formally study composition? James, you reportedly taught yourself—studying organ literature and orchestral scores.
JB: Marilyn thinks that’s how it started out, and I think she’s right!
MB: We used to play duets. When we started out as players, we wanted to play organ duets and we still do—we do two-organ things now too—but there isn’t much repertoire out there that’s really very interesting.
JB: We got bored in a hurry. So I just started looking around for different things to do, and the transcription idea was appealing, and it ended up being intensive score study.
MB: I’ll never forget his very first piece—his parents had died and he was in a situation where the church was full-time but it didn’t take up his whole day. And we lived nearby and I was gone most of the day.
JB: At times it was very, very busy, but then there were other times when, frankly, there wasn’t that much to do.
MB: I remember coming home, and he had said to me earlier, you know the famous Make Me a Channel of Your Peace—he said, kind of on a dare to himself, “I think I could write something on that text and I think I could get it published.” He’d never written anything before except little choral sentences or whatever. I came home from Hartford one day, and he said, “I wrote a piece today.” And that kept happening for a while. I’d come home and say, “What did you do today, dear?” “Oh, I wrote a piece.” (laughter)
JB: One day, she came home, and I said, “I wrote a Christmas piece, only it needs words. No hurry!”
MB: “—but I want it for my rehearsal next week.” (laughter) He said “I want to do it for our Christmas program,” and could I do some text? He showed me the tune, and I sat right down and wrote something, and we got that published pretty fast. He always says “I don’t need it right away—but could you do it tomorrow?”

JR: Do you have any compositional process, or do you just hear a tune going through your head and take it from there?
JB: Grief.
MB: Grief and angst and paranoia—both of us. He’s just as bad.
JB: Everything’s a little different. So I don’t know if there really is any “process.” Choral music is different from organ music.
MB: We do things without the keyboard, sometimes. But I always use it, as I need to.
JB: I have found that the things that I’m most proud of and happiest about are pieces where the bulk of the whole thing has been done at one session—like in one day. It takes weeks or months to finish it and flesh out all the details, but I do find that the best things are done at one sitting.

JR: Do you have a keyboard hooked up to “Finale” at home?
JB: We do.
MB: He just built us a “virtual organ.” He ordered the pedalboard and the keyboards, and he has it hooked up—which organ are we playing right now, whose is it?
JB: It’s a Casavant organ, from Champaign, Illinois.
MB: It’s a great little practice instrument. Our basement’s small. It beats an electronic. It sounds just like a real organ.
JB: I can play that thing for hours on end and not get sick of it, which is saying a lot. I never have run into any electronic where I could do that. It has the advantage of being connected to the computer.
MB: We can compose on it. I’ve just started using it. I’m not as computer-happy as he is; I love to use it once it’s all set up, but he has to show me and then I’m fine.
JB: It has been interesting to grow with this technology, because I always used to write things out, paper and pencil, first, and then gradually move to the computer program. I found as the years have gone by that the computer portion of that has crept in earlier and earlier in the process. In fact, it’s right at the beginning now; even if I do write things on pencil and paper, generally there’s a computer file to start with.
MB: It looks nice, and my handwriting’s terrible, and for me I just put everything in after I plunk away, and then I can fiddle with it.
JB: We have our laptops, and once you get a piece to a certain point, you can just sit there and listen to it, and change things around, and you don’t have to be anywhere near a keyboard.
MB: I’ve been doing more words lately—organ music and more texts. The one I’m happiest with is my setting of the Beatitudes—everybody wants to sing them, and there just are not many choral settings that don’t get pretty redundant.
JB: It’s a hard text to set. The form doesn’t really lend itself too well. She did a strophic hymn that’s inspired by the text, to get around that problem. And I think it’s really very nice.
MB: That took a year. But anyway, Jim has a piece based on it, too, with descant, and middle stanza parts.

JR: Tell me about Stir Up Thy Power, O Lord, which is a nice anthem for a small choir.
JB: That anthem is almost entirely in unison. In fact, it could be done in unison. It’s kind of surprising. We have a composer friend who heard the premiere of that, and he has a very sophisticated ear, and one of his comments at the end was that he wasn’t really quite aware that it was almost all unison! I thought that was a very nice compliment.

JR: Congratulations, you got ASCAPLUS awards in 2006 and 2007.
JB: Yes. It is really a nice little program, because it recognizes composers who have pieces that are actually being performed, but in places that don’t generate performance fees, namely in churches. I fill in an application, then I Google my name and try to find all these places where things are being done, and it’s amazing! But they’re all at church services, or occasionally recitals and things.
MB: College choirs do his O Sacrum Convivium a lot, and O Holy Night.

JR: Marilyn, let me ask you about your new music championing. You wrote an article for The Diapason about MorningStar’s Concert Organ series, and last I looked it has three dozen titles in it. Is it doing well?
JB: The publisher is not pulling the plug on it, so I think that’s a good sign.
MB: I’ve been so disappointed all along in the way people are NOT interested in new music—we’ve noticed it in our own things, and I’ve noticed it a lot with organ music. I am disappointed in the lack of widespread interest in simply supporting these composers.
JB: My theory is that the problem is that there was a period where there was so much avant garde music and music that was just plain hard to listen to, and so many people got turned off to the idea of new music. It’s too bad, because many composers are writing very easy-to-listen-to music now. If anything, I’d say that’s the preponderance of what’s being written.
MB: I think it’s coming back.
JB: I don’t think the market has caught up with the new trend yet.
MB: And it’s hard to get things published.
JB: And organists—well, churches—tend to be on the conservative side, so that enters into the picture too.
MB: I think that the more original you are as a composer, the harder it is for your piece to get published. One composer I was working with for so long wrote this incredible organ duet and other pieces that were so amazing, and one response from a publisher was, “it’s a magnificent piece of music, but it simply won’t sell.”
JR: How did you get into writing texts?
MB: We took a hymnody class together at Northwestern. After that hymnody class, and feeling “gee, I’d like to do this,” I would do a few a couple times a year, and I had maybe a dozen, but in my mind I felt that I’d written a hundred in my life. All of a sudden I thought, “wait a minute, I’m in my forties, I write one a year—how am I going to get up to a hundred? This is not going to work.”
At that time my dad died. And—I think you have to have suffered a little before you can write any kind of hymnody. And I had quite a bit of suffering. My dad had Alzheimer’s, as his father did, and I was there at the end. His pastor said this wonderful prayer over him as he was dying, about how he knew that Al was in two wonderful places: he was very present on earth, that he can feel all his family’s love, and yet he’s one step into heaven and he can see the glory. It set off a hymn, which I knew was inspired from that. So I wrote a bunch of hymns; I must have written three, four, five dozen. I’m not quite up to a hundred, but I’m not dead yet!
JB: For a while, Marilyn was doing it as a daily discipline. You were going through the meters—sitting down and writing one every day.
MB: That was hard to keep up every day. It’s like practicing an etude every day, after a while you have a certain amount of technique. But I miss the discipline of it; I’ve gotten out of that habit. I did that for about a year or two. Now I do things on request, or if he has something and he wants help. And this year, do you know the Eric Whitacre piece that everyone sings—Lux aurumque—he had this piece that he’d written, which was in English verse that he had translated into Latin. I wrote a text, and then a woman in the choir translated it into Latin for us. That one will be published in a little bit. It’s a cool thing to have somebody in your choir who can translate something into Latin for you.
JB: So she did an English text, and then Maryann Corbett did a Latin translation, and then I wrote a piece on the Latin, Surge inluminare, for choir and harp. The next step was that the publisher wanted an English translation—an English text that could be sung. So then they had to go back and recreate another thing, so it was like going around in a circle back to the English. It was interesting!
MB: We like to do a lot of different things: we both like to sing, to play, to conduct, to write, and I like to do the hymn texts. It keeps us from getting burned out. So right at the moment, I’m writing general things.

JR: What about your duets? You sometimes perform as a duo, is this just occasionally?
JB: Not so much recently.
MB: We used to do two-organ things, and we got a little tired of that, because we’d done all the repertoire multiple times.
JB: Two-organ repertoire, you just can’t take it on the road. Every situation is totally different. We did do a two-organ program in Milwaukee last year. That was fun, but there are limits to what you can do with that.
MB: The registration time is immense. It takes a good five or six hours just to register pieces, and then if you’re lucky you’ve got four or five hours the next day to work all the bugs out. It takes a lot of time. So we tend to play duets here, simply because it’s easier—it’s our instrument, we can register them over a period of a couple months, or whenever we feel like it. We’ve given up on the touring because it takes so long. If we were going to do something, we would have to allow three full days of just practicing. We can do it in two, but it’s hard.

JR: One last question—how do you keep a general balance in life, physical health along with everything else?
JB: I bike ride. It helps.
MB: I’ve been riding a couple times a week. And the Y’s right down the street.We walk a lot—walk and talk. In winter it’s hard to get out, because the wind is so bad and it’s hard to walk. That’s when we’re better about going to the Y. But we eat as healthfully as we can, so we try to do as much as we can. The mental health—I have no clue!
JB: Neither of us has ever figured out how to be well rounded!
MB: Well, we’re two perfectionists, and we tend to be very precise, and it’s not easy to work with that. Our choir does really well with it, but in an office situation that can be hard for people who aren’t as interested in getting details done.

JR: Do you have any other hobbies?
MB: I’m the parent organizer for our daughter’s swim team, so other than that, no, just exercise and eating right, and wine! And keeping up with our daughter. When she leaves, I don’t know what we’ll do. Internet stuff.

JR: Thank you!

Marcia Van Oyen earned both master’s and doctoral degrees in organ and church music at the University of Michigan, where she studied organ with Robert Glasgow. Marcia currently serves as Director of Music and Organist at Glenview Community Church and is Dean of the North Shore AGO Chapter. She also writes reviews of organ music and books for The Diapason.

“Frank Ferko inhabits a unique and unusual musical world.  In the background is his love of the music of Olivier Messiaen. In the foreground appears mystery, and thus his intense interest in the visions of Hildegard, her music, and the world of medieval chant. None of this is unique or unusual in the decade of the 1990s, but his vivid musical imagination, sometimes terrifying, in other instances timelessly static and meditative, is unique.”1

The preceding quotation offers a microcosmic portrait of Frank Ferko as a composer. Elements of his compositions have evoked comparisons to Poulenc, Messiaen, James MacMillan, and Arvo Pärt, yet Ferko’s style defies neat categorization.  His coloristic approach, especially in his organ works, links him with the French.  His bent towards ethereal sounds and other-worldly texts allies him with the current phenomenon of “CD spirituality,” as evidenced by the popularity of Gregorian chant recordings and the music of Pärt and Tavener.2 The portrayal of programmatic themes, especially those of a symbolic and spiritual nature, looms large on his agenda. On the other hand, he is very aware of the need for practical liturgical music, and bears that in mind when writing sacred compositions.

The catalog of Ferko’s works includes choral anthems on liturgical, chant, and hymn texts; settings of poems by symbolist writers Rimbaud and Mallarmé; hymn preludes and programmatic works for organ; a symbolist one-act opera and a sprinkling of compositions for various solo instruments and ensembles, including an intriguingly titled piece for horn, clarinet and piano, “The North Side of Heaven (Near the Rotunda).”  He has been commissioned to write works for Valparaiso University, His Majestie’s Clerkes, and the Dale Warland Singers, as well as many churches. He has been the recipient of annual ASCAP grants since 1987 among other grants, and has won awards for his compositions, including the 1989–90 Holtkamp/AGO award for “A Practical Program for Monks,” a song cycle for tenor and organ.

Although Ferko now spends most of his time composing, he has twenty-five years of experience as a church musician, most recently serving as director of music at the Church of St. Paul and the Redeemer in Chicago, and continues to perform as an organist. Ferko received his Bachelor of Music degree in piano and organ performance from Valparaiso University. He received the Master of Music degree in music theory with a minor in organ performance from Syracuse University and holds a doctorate in music composition from Northwestern University, where he studied with Alan Stout. His teachers have included Richard Wienhorst (composition) and Philip Gehring (organ) at Valparaiso, and Howard Boatwright (theory) and Will O. Headlee (organ) at Syracuse University. This traditional foundation, an openness to diverse influences, and a willingness to experiment combine to create Ferko’s unique style.

I spoke with Frank Ferko about his compositional style and two of his most recent works, the Hildegard Organ Cycle and the Hildegard Motets.  Excerpts from that interview follow.

When did you start composing?

I got started dabbling in composition as a teenage church musician at a little country church in Ohio. I started playing organ at fourteen, directing the choir at sixteen, and began exploring different kinds of church music, especially new music. My earliest compositions were take-offs on Richard Wienhorst’s works. I later studied composition with him at Valparaiso. He guided me into writing my own modes and writing pieces using those modes. Wienhorst encouraged me to explore Bartok (who wrote his own modes) and that eventually led to study of the music of Messiaen.

I also studied sixteenth-century counterpoint with Wienhorst. As a final project, we had the option of writing a 5-voice motet or taking the principles of sixteenth-century counterpoint we had learned and writing a modern work. I opted for the latter, and I’ve been building on that ever since, taking ideas from early music and working them into a modern context.

Have you always had a strong interest in new music?

I have been very interested in new music. While in the doctoral program at Northwestern, I was encouraged to stay in touch with what living composers were doing. But being a church musician, I’ve also been very interested in chant, so there are these two polar ends of things—the very early music and current music—that fascinate me.

Besides Messiaen, what other composers do you look to for inspiration?

Many different eras have influenced me. I’ve played Bach, and Bach’s counterpoint has been a very strong influence. Having a strong piano background, I’ve played Chopin and Brahms. These large sounds and rich harmonies have always stuck in my mind, but I’ve veered more towards the French as time has gone on. What I like to listen to most are French pieces from the twentieth century. Some people say there are elements of Poulenc in my sound, and of Messiaen from time to time. The Messiaen influence is strong because my master’s thesis was an analysis of his piano cycle, “Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus.” I studied his compositional techniques very thoroughly. There are techniques that he invented, explored up to a certain point, and stopped. Why not take those further and do something else? Or take a particular technique and combine it with minimalism and see what happens? I like many of the early works of Philip Glass and I don’t mind exploring that territory. I pull ideas from all over the place.

What do you have in common with composers like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener?

I feel a common bond in terms of the philosophical approach, the way I’m approaching writing music. Arvo Pärt very definitely is an intensely religious person. John Tavener also. In that respect, I’m approaching the writing of pieces in the way that they are.  We all use common modality in our writing, and there are certain ways that we form melodic lines that may be similar, but we’re putting things together in different ways.

I hear some similarity with Tavener in the way you approach writing for voices.

I know what you mean.  I think this has to do with the fact that we have learned how to write for the human voice. Many composers have learned instrumental writing and try vocal writing and don’t understand the voice. You have to understand the limitations.  You have to be very careful how you set text, especially vowels. That comes from studying early music and counterpoint—examples of glorious music for the voice. In that sense, there’s a certain similarity between Pärt, Tavener, James Macmillan and myself in the use of the materials. We all write well for voices.

As I’ve listened to your music, I’ve noticed that acoustics seem to a play a key role. Are live acoustics required for a true performance of your works?

I like live acoustical settings, the reverberance. This goes back to my love for chant and how a single line can spin and create other sounds. I can take a single line, a choral sound or an organ sound and create some interesting ear perceptions with the acoustics. The reverberance needs to be there. I’ve played the organ cycle successfully in relatively dead rooms, but there’s a whole dimension that’s missing. For example, the first movement of the organ cycle has a water drop idea, intended to reverberate through the room. It’s written at a very slow tempo to allow that to happen.

Do you have a special affinity for writing for the organ? What is there about it that works especially well for your music?

One of the reasons I’ve written so much for the organ is because it is my instrument and I like writing things that I can play, though I don’t write with myself as performer in mind. I understand it, and I’m very well aware that there aren’t that many composers today who feel comfortable writing for the organ. I enjoy it, so I’ll write pieces for the organ. With the organ, if I’m unsure about something I’ve written, I can sit down and try it out.

The musical ideas presented in the Hildegard Organ Cycle could best be presented successfully on the organ. The colors of the instrument and the acoustical setting in which organs are often found make it possible to express certain ideas in a way that cannot occur in other situations. The organ works are usually tailor-made with the tonal colors of the organ in mind. The approach I use in incorporating specific colors into my organ works allies me closely with the French composers who have always been colorists.

Do you think you almost have to be an organist to write music for the organ?

I tend to think so, although there are some people out there who are not organists and yet have written some very fine music for the organ. I’ve tried to get composers I know to write for the organ. They’re a little interested and they think the various colors and stop names are interesting, but it’s complicated for them. How do you deal with all these keyboards and these pedals? The thing that’s usually the biggest stumbling block is the registration—they don’t know what to suggest.  Some composers leave it up to the player. I object to that. I think it really is the composer’s responsibility to inform the performer as to what tone colors to use, because there’s so much choice involved there. Particularly when writing interesting harmonies, chromatic lines, and dense textures, I think it behooves the composer to let us know just what kind of color he wants. A composer wouldn’t write a piece for orchestra and give the conductor a piano score, leaving it up to him to decide who’s going to play what.  It’s not the conductor’s job to do that. An organ composer has to be the orchestrator. Composers usually have colors in mind, but are reluctant to write them down because they’re unfamiliar with stop names and know it’s going to differ from one instrument to another. Poulenc sat down with Duruflé and registered the organ concerto. Composers should sit down with organists and do that. Somebody who does play the organ knows the instrument and its capabilities so well that they can incorporate things that a non-organist wouldn’t do. But the same thing happens with writing for other instruments. A player can write more intimately for an instrument than a non-player.

You also perform as an organist, playing your own works.  What else do you perform?

On an upcoming recital, I’m doing one movement from the Hildegard cycle along with works by Bach, Brahms, Helmut Walcha, and Heinz Werner Zimmerman. Mostly Germans because it’s a germanic organ. Yes, I play other people’s music—especially when a church organist. I still improvise, that’s one thing I’ve always done—postludes—that’s kind of fun.

I studied improvisation with Philip Gehring, and he improvises all the time. He always said you can’t really teach it, but every Sunday in chapel services we heard him doing it. It was the best example. His postludes were always improvisations on the last hymn. When I became an active organist, I started doing the same thing. The early ones I did I’m sure were just horrors, but you just keep doing it and you learn. I would hear something I thought was interesting and I would work that into a Sunday morning improvisation and just see where it would lead, combining the idea with a hymn tune, which I always used as the basis. It was a good way to pick up ideas I was hearing and develop them into my own compositional style.

Was the organ cycle composed through improvisation or sitting down and writing?

Some of it came from improvisation, some from just sitting down and writing. Actually, the tenth movement, the terrifying one, did begin as a postlude for a church service. I started the postlude with the repeated chord figure with big gaps between the chords. Heads went up. It was a gripping effect. I remembered that later and thought it would be a good way to end this organ cycle.

The music and writings of Hildegard von Bingen are currently receiving attention. 1998 is also the 900th anniversary of her birth. What prompted you to write music based on her writings?

I wrote most of the organ cycle back in 1990, before Hildegard became a big cult thing. I wanted to do something that would make people aware of who this woman was, what she did, and what she experienced.

What led you to choose Hildegard’s “Visions” as the basis for your works?

In the late 80s, my church choir in Hyde Park did a concert every spring.  There were a couple of women in the choir who were vocal feminists, and they said, “We never sing any music written by women composers.” I started exploring, finding music written by women composers. I had discovered the name Hildegard in the early 80s. In putting together this concert, I started researching her music and transcribed chant melodies into modern notation. The choir was fascinated. I found other women composers from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We did an evensong and concert in which all the music was written by women. That got me looking into Hildegard, and I wanted to find out more. I did more research and looked at her last book,  “De Operatione Dei,” which includes the ten visions. I had been wanting to write a large work for organ, and later that year I decided to write an organ cycle based on the ten visions.

You've written a detailed preface, a “guidebook” if you will, which provides information as to what’s being portrayed in each of the movements of the organ cycle. Without this guidebook, what can an average listener discern?

Most of the music I write is written on at least three levels—there’s the surface level, where anybody can just walk in and they will hear something they can appreciate. It will wash over them and they’ll either like it or hate it. They’ll form an opinion right away, but they’re really not appreciating what’s in the music.

The second level at which I write is an assocation with technical devices, for example writing numbers rhythmically or pitch-wise into a piece of music. There are other numerical phenomena which have also found their way into my music such as the Fibonacci series and certain kinds of numerical proportions such as 2:1, 3:2, or 4:3—proportions that were used for tuning in the medieval period.

The third level is extra-musical assocations—the programmatic elements. The whole organ cycle is program music: specific depictions of ideas that Hildegard presented in her descriptions of her visions. Most people haven’t read the “Visions,” which is why I wrote the “guidebook.” I thought I should condense some of these ideas into a concise format and provide the information for people so they have some idea of what the basic program is.

What are the most effective means for communicating ideas through music?  Without knowing the program, what images in the organ cycle can a listener recognize?

There are certain obvious techniques that can be built into the music. The water drops [in the first movement] come across pretty clearly. The fifth movement with the repeated clusters has a tendency to sound like somebody’s angry, and Hildegard was. She was talking about the anger and judgment of God. I wanted to show that anger. Writing great big clusters that are very dissonant and shaking away with full organ is a way of doing that. Another technique is to present thematic material in an obvious way, such as an unaccompanied single line melody, repeated. Repetition is an important way to impress a musical idea on people. In the organ cycle there’s one chant melody that comes back throughout the cycle—and people remember that. They recognize it in different guises and are aware of it

What was the impetus for composing the Hildegard Motets? How were the texts selected?

The fifth one was the first one to be written, and that came about purely as an experiment. I was in a group, now defunct, called Chicago Composers Consortium, and we did three concerts a year at the Three Arts Club. In 1991, His Majesties Clerkes had done the first Chicago performance of Arvo Pärt’s “Passio,” at Orchestra Hall. One of the people in the consortium had heard the concert, raving about the Clerkes’ performance of the Pärt. We decided to do a whole concert of choral music and hire His Majesties Clerkes to perform seven new works. Since I had been working on the Hildegard Organ Cycle, I had also looked at some of her poems in the back of the book which contains the visions. I bought a critical edition of the poems and found them amazing. I wanted to write a substantial piece for the Consortium program, so I was looking for a longer text. The Holy Spirit text, a sequence hymn, seemed like a good choice. I knew what the Clerkes were capable of, and figured they could do just about anything. I wanted to take advantage of that and wrote a fairly challenging piece. They really liked it and asked to keep the copies of the piece to perform again in their regular season. That was in the fall of ’91. In February ’92, I decided I wanted to write a whole cycle on these texts because they’re so vivid, intense, and wonderful. I decided on the number nine as a mystical number, then chose the texts. The Clerkes were celebrating their tenth anniversary, and decided to commission the set of works for their final concert in 1993. The texts were selected with liturgical use somewhat in mind, variety in terms of the language Hildegard used and variety of lengths—some long and some short. I wanted some continuity and some contrast.

Are the Hildegard works liturgical music or concert music?

The Hildegard pieces were originally intended to be concert works I knew when I wrote them that people—particularly church organists with the proper instrument, acoustics and a good choir—would probably want to use these pieces in the liturgical setting. Many of the pieces in the organ cycle are fairly quiet and not terribly long. They could work as prelude music. The first movement could be used with a baptism, with the water symbolism. There’s an implication of Advent in the seventh movement, the slow, lush movement with the long melody in the celeste chords. Even though the motet cycle was written as a concert cycle for His Majestie’s Clerkes, I thought people might want to use the individual movements in church settings, so I found texts of Hildegard that had assocations with liturgical settings and outlined that in the preface notes. These pieces have crossover quality—they can work in concert or in a church setting.

Widor once said “To play the organ properly, you need to have a vision of eternity.” Does that statement apply to performing your Hildegard works?

Yes, I think there’s truth to that statement. There’s a certain amount of that with the Hildegard pieces. Performers will have a much better understanding and be able to bring out what’s in the music much better if they have the textual associations, the implied ones in the organ cycle or the expressed ones in the motets, if they know where Hildegard was coming from, they have a good translation to work from, and they understand the texts. The performance will be much, much better. Many little musical points are strongly associated with the texts.

Some people have used the term “organist-theologian” to describe composers such as Widor, Tournemire, and especially Messiaen. Do you identify with that role, being an organist and composer yourself?

To a certain degree, yes. I think I’m creating similar kinds of things, at least with the Hildegard pieces. When I perform those works, I know exactly what is going on there because I’ve read all the visions and commentary of Hildegard. Reading them was a very intense, moving experience. It  moved me to write the organ cycle. I wanted to put the theology into music. I want people to know about what I felt from reading the texts when they perform or hear this music.

I was intrigued by the statement in the liner notes of the Hildegard recordings, “Frank Ferko inhabits a unique musical world . . .” (quoted at the beginning of  this article). What is your response to that?

I was flattered. The remark addresses the organ cycle specifically. When I was practicing in preparation for recording it, the producer came up to the organ loft and said, “I want to hear the last movement on this instrument. This is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard. I want you to use as much organ as you can, a lot of reeds.” I agreed, that’s what the movement really needs. That last movement is terrifying, and yet there are other movements that are gentler that take you off into some ethereal land somewhere. I think that he was thinking of all the different moods that are created in that work and how different they are when you stop and think about them from beginning to end.

Every now and then I do pull in, into my own little world when I’m writing. There are a number of people who’ve taken an interest in my writing and they’ll ask me if I’ve heard the latest recording of James MacMillan because they find a similarity between his style and mine. I tell them I can’t listen to that for a few months because I’m working on something of my own. I have to completely pull myself away from other things and just immerse myself into my own little world while I’m writing. I don’t want to listen to anybody else’s music while I’m doing that. There is a little bit of reclusiveness that’s implied in that statement, but not to an excessive degree. I try to be sociable.

Would you describe your music as mystical?

There is definitely an ethereal quality that I try for. “Mystical” carries with it some other connotations, and I suppose that the things that I’ve written have a certain amount of that because of the text associations, especially Hildegard’s texts. There is mysticism involved in it, but generally, I’m coming at the music from a technical viewpoint. I’m trying to create a certain mood.

I noticed several settings of poetry by Mallarmé and Rimbaud in your list of works.  Is their poetry of particular interest to you?

I like symbolism, and Mallarmé is very symbolistic. Rimbaud wrote very colorful poetry. The symbolist poems are particularly interesting to me.

You seem to have a strong preference for ineffable ideas and symbolic texts.

I’ve always been fascinated by that kind of thing—the intangible things that we perceive in some way, either through an association or imagination. When we are thinking of intangible things, such as God, angels, saints, good, evil, love, and so on, I think it is natural for us to try to represent these intangibles in some tangible way. That’s why we have church buildings, stained glass, religious paintings, statuary, and religious drama. These are ways in which artists have tried to represent things which are in a way abstract. Music is perhaps the best way to express or represent abstract ideas. Music has the capability of expressing things that words or pictures just cannot accomplish. By connecting music with symbols it is possible to create a very powerful form of expression. Is there such a thing as a symbolist musician? Maybe that’s what I am.

•

Frank Ferko’s compositional style is woven from diverse threads: ancient mystical texts and medieval compositional techniques, minimalism and Messiaen, ineffable mysteries and concrete images, the highly complex and the startlingly simple. The result is a musical tapestry of exceptional depth and beauty, a vibrantly spiritual contribution to the musical palette of both concert hall and sanctuary.

Musical examples are reprinted by permission of E. C. Schirmer Music.

For more information about Frank Ferko and his music, visit his web-site: 

http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~dahling/biography.html

Notes

                        1.                  The Hildegard Organ Cycle, Arsis CD 101, a statement made by producer Robert Schuneman in the liner notes of the recording.

                         2.                Patrick Russill, “Cantos Sagrados: Patrick Russill reflects on the holy songs of James MacMillan,” The Musical Times 1837 (March 1996): 35–37.

                        3.                  Philip Greenfield, “Review of The Hildegard Motets” The American Record Guide  6 (Nov./Dec. 1996):  p. 122.

Neal Campbell holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Manhattan School of Music, is a former member of the AGO National Council, and is the Director of Music and Organist of St. Luke’s Parish, Darien, Connecticut.

Charles Dodsley Walker turns 90 years old on March 16. In his long and varied career, he has collaborated with many of the legendary figures in the organ and choral music world and is himself one of the key players in the golden era of New York church music. His career began when he entered the Choir School at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine at age ten. His education continued at Trinity School in New York, Trinity College in Hartford, and—following service in the United States Navy—at Harvard University.
He held positions at the American Cathedral in Paris, St. Thomas Chapel and the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York, Lake Delaware Boys Camp, the Berkshire Choral Institute, Trinity School and the Chapin School in New York, Union Theological Seminary School of Sacred Music, Manhattan School of Music, and New York University. He is a Fellow of the American Guild of Organists and is the founding director of the Canterbury Choral Society, which he began in 1952 at the Church of Heavenly Rest—a position he still holds, preparing and conducting three concerts per season.
In what others would call their retirement years, Charlie Walker has served at Trinity Church in Southport, Connecticut, and since 2007 he has worked alongside me at St. Luke’s Parish in Darien, Connecticut. In the summer of 2009, Charlie and I sat down in my office over several days and began a series of conversations, not unlike those that are typical between us on any given day—only this time the digital recorder was on. They were conversations between friendly colleagues, and I have tried to keep the conversational tone in the edited transcript that follows.

Neal Campbell: I first knew your name as president of the American Guild of Organists; when were you president of the AGO?
Charles Dodsley Walker: 1971–75.

NC: And you were active in the Guild before that?
CDW: I joined the Guild [Hartford Chapter, 1937] in order to take the Associateship exam while I was at Trinity College. I was pleased when the Headquarters Chapter had a dinner in 1939 honoring the recipients of the certificates, and they sat me next to Ernest M. Skinner, who proceeded to regale me with limericks. He used to come around the Cathedral quite often when I was a little boy chorister just to see how his organ was doing.

NC: What other offices did you hold in the Guild?
CDW: When I came back from France in January 1951 to be the organist at the Church of the Heavenly Rest, I immediately connected up with the Headquarters Chapter of the Guild, and that’s where S. Lewis Elmer comes into the picture. He lived near the church and he was most interested in me as the new 31-year-old organist of the church. He was very friendly and seemed to want to get me into the leadership of the Guild. When the national librarian, Harold Fitter, resigned, there was a vacancy, so he appointed me National Librarian. And then another vacancy occurred, and I was appointed National Registrar. The next thing I knew I was National Secretary—for ten years.

NC: What were the biggest things you had to work on immediately when you were elected, do you recall?
CDW: At the time I was elected, there were two important groups in the Guild wanting to secede. One was a tri-cities chapter in California. They had been so upset about the perceived (and actual) running of the Guild from New York City, that they had managed to get a Californian, Gene Driskill, elected to the council—this was during Alec [Wyton]’s regime—and his chapter paid his travel expenses so he could come and be a member of the council.

NC: Up to that time the council was all New York organists, wasn’t it?
CDW: Almost, yes. And then the Twin Cities Chapter wanted to secede too. So I felt that it was our job to address this issue by really revolutionizing the setup of the whole organization as regards the board of directors, which is the National Council. At the time there were fifteen regional chairmen who were simply appointed by S. Lewis Elmer. We reduced that to nine regions, which it still is, and figured out a way for each region to elect its own representatives. That’s been amended and changed since then, of course, but it’s basically the same system we have in place now.

NC: You’re a native New Yorker, aren’t you?
CDW: Yes. Born right in the city . . .

NC: But your folks moved to New Jersey shortly after that?
CDW: Yes, Glen Ridge.

NC: And you and I share that connection with Christ Church in Glen Ridge, where you were baptized.
CDW: Right. I also have a musical connection with it, because as a child I sang for a couple of summers in the choir there. And, just last night I came across two 3 x 5 cards signed by the organist at the time, Herbert Kellner.

NC: This is before Buck Coursen, my predecessor? [The Rev. Wallace M. Coursen, Jr., F.A.G.O., organist of the church 1936–80]
CDW: Yes. Anyway, it was Mr. Kellner authorizing this Master Charles Walker to play the organ on Fridays for one hour and a half . . . and the other 3 x 5 card allowed me to play there for one hour on Tuesday and one hour on Friday . . . or something like that, during the summer. That was around 1934 or 1935.

NC: Was this likely the first organ you heard, at Christ Church?
CDW: Yes, it was. My first memory of it is that the swell shades were visible to the entire congregation. They were sort of dark brown, but you could see them opening and closing, and Mr. Kellner liked to use them, and they were opening and closing a lot. So I was quite fascinated with that. [Laughing]

NC: What was the organ, do you remember? The present organ is a Möller from about 1953.
CDW: I have no idea, but by 1934, when I had practice privileges, they had obviously bought a used four-manual console—they didn’t have anywhere near a four-manual organ there, but I just loved it! It had the reed stops lettered in red, and I thought that was very impressive, and it did have a Tuba! [More laughter]

NC: What led you to seek application to the Cathedral Choir School?
CDW: My next elder brother, Marriott . . .

NC: You were the youngest of three brothers?
CDW: Yes. Marriott liked music a lot and played the trumpet. We had friends in Montclair who had a boy in the school. So Marriott went over to see about entering the school, but he was already twelve or thirteen, and they just said, “you’re too old.” So then along came Charles, and I was very interested in going to that school. It’s hard to answer exactly why my parents were interested in sending me to the school, except they thought I was musical and that I would enjoy it.

NC: It was a boarding school?
CDW: Yes. People did ask “why do you want to send your boy to boarding school?” I suppose they still ask that today, for example at St. Thomas. You have to take a boy away from his Mama!

NC: At the Choir School, it was Miles Farrow who admitted you. What sort of musician was he?
CDW: I don’t know. I was only ten, and I admired him very much. I can still distinctly remember the way he harmonized the descending major scale when we warmed up. There are different ways of harmonizing it—or not harmonizing it! He did a I chord, then a V chord, then a vi chord, then a iii chord, then a ii-6 chord, and a I-6/4, then a V and then a I. That’s the way he did it, every time! I happen to like to do it different ways rather than always the same way, but that’s the way he did it.

NC: So it wasn’t too long after that that Norman Coke-Jephcott came along?
CDW: Right. But then there was an interim when, among others, Channing Lefebvre was the chief substitute. He was at Trinity Wall Street, but I seem to remember him coming up for Evensong.

NC: When you look back on your career as a choirboy, do you think of Coke-Jephcott as your teacher?
CDW: Oh, yes! Cokey came in 1932, and almost immediately I started lessons with him.

NC: Organ lessons?
CDW: Yes, organ, and harmony and counterpoint. He required that you have a weekly lesson in harmony and counterpoint as well as an organ lesson. John Baldwin was his student about this time.

NC: What were the daily rehearsals like? Were they just learning music?
CDW: Yes, but with quite a bit of emphasis on tone quality.

NC: Did they sing Evensong everyday, or most days?
CDW: Not all 40 boys—maybe half a dozen or so would sing in St. James Chapel as I recall, and I’m not sure it was everyday.

NC: On Sunday mornings, was it Eucharist or Morning Prayer?
CDW: I think they did Morning Prayer followed by the Eucharist. I remember that they intoned the entire prayer of consecration and the pitch would go up and down. And I had extremely good sense of pitch in those days and could tell if the celebrant was flatting or sharping.

NC: But the choir sang morning and evening service on Sundays?
CDW: Oh, yeah!

NC: Did you ever join with any of the other boy choirs in New York?
CDW: Aside from our basketball league with St. Thomas and Grace Church, the only other time we were on the same program was Wednesdays in Holy Week for the Bach St. Matthew Passion with the choir of St. Bartholomew’s Church and the boys of St. Thomas Choir. The Cathedral Choir—the whole choir—sang second chorus. As you know, there are double choruses. And that was the first time I ever saw T. Tertius Noble in action.

NC: What was he like in those days?
CDW: I would say “avuncular” would be the word. He seemed (at least on those occasions) a nice fatherly presence.

NC: And these were at the cathedral?
CDW: Oh, no—at St. Bartholomew’s, played by David McK. Williams, astonishingly! I was bowled over by his accompaniment. The thing I remember most vividly is the movement toward the end of Part I—where you have the soprano and alto duet and the chorus interjects fortissimo “Leave him, leave him, bind him not” and he socked the crescendo pedal and then, boom, he would close it. It just seemed to me to be flawless. He was amazing.

NC: They did this every year, didn’t they?
CDW: Every single year. In fact, after my voice changed I did it a couple of times as an alto, just because I wanted to participate in it.

NC: Did Dr. Williams direct you all? What was his personality like?
CDW: He was magisterial, he was definitely in command. Everybody paid close attention.

NC: Was the idea of doing all these organ accompaniments what inspired you to start the Canterbury Choral Society?
CDW: Well, when I was only 15 or 16, I thought that’s just the way it is in church—you do it with the organ. I realized what I had been missing (it must have been in 1939 or 1940) when I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra do Brahms’ Requiem not in a church, but in a concert hall. With all due respect for the organ, that music as orchestrated by Brahms was a wonderful musical experience! I thought to myself “boy, I would like to have a big chorus and do that kind of stuff!”

NC: So after the cathedral you went to Trinity School. Did they have an organ there?
CDW: They had one of Ernest Skinner’s early organs. It was built, I believe, before 1910, a two-manual. [Opus 141, 1907]

NC: In the school auditorium or in the chapel?
CDW: The chapel. I also went to the Cathedral Choir School and to Trinity College—all of these were Episcopal schools! They all had compulsory chapel services, which none of them have any more.

NC: Your parents were obviously Episcopalians.
CDW: Both my parents were cradle Episcopalians. In fact, my grandmother taught Sunday School in Dakota Territory before North and South Dakota were separated. And I have the melodeon that she played when she was teaching Sunday School.

NC: Did you continue to study organ through high school at Trinity?
CDW: Yes. When I went to Trinity School, I continued organ and I practiced all the time after school. Trinity is exactly one mile south of the cathedral, in the same block. I would go to school and then I’d practice at the cathedral, and then go and do my homework.

NC: Did Cokey prepare you for the AGO exams specifically?
CDW: No, [Clarence] Watters did. You see, I had four years with Cokey and four years with Watters. That’s what my organ instruction was—two years in the choir school and two years at Trinity School. Then I went to college. It was Channing Lefebvre who sent me to Trinity College in Hartford. My father said, “You know the organist at Trinity Church. Let’s go ask for his advice.” And I’m glad he did. We wanted a liberal arts college with strong organ, not a conservatory, and Trinity was perfect.

NC: You must have seen the cathedral nave being built.
CDW: Yes, we sang for the dedication of the Pilgrim Pavement—the great slabs of stone with the medallions in it. We also sang at the dedication of the great bronze doors, which are very impressive portals for the cathedral.
The nave was being constructed when I was a choirboy. There were elevators outside going up and down the scaffolding. The nave actually opened several years later—around 1940, I believe.

NC: Did you have a church job at this time?
CDW: No, just Trinity School with its daily chapel.

NC: Did you list preludes and postludes?
CDW: Just preludes, I think. Still, a lot of repertoire for a high school kid.

NC: So when was your first church job, in college?
CDW: Yes. That was a wonderful thing. In my freshman year, the adjunct professor of German at Trinity College, named Kendrick Grobel, who also had a doctorate in theology from Marburg, asked Clarence Watters to recommend someone to be organist of the church of which he was the pastor. He also had a bachelor of music degree, and was a tenor—and Clarence recommended me. I went out there and played a recital in the spring of 1937 at the age of 17 for this church—Stafford Springs Congregational Church, Stafford Springs, Connecticut—halfway between Hartford and Worcester. This was the first time I ever played for money. They took up a collection and I got $14—quite a lot of money! So they offered me the job at $10 a Sunday, and that, too, was a lot of money. That was the most felicitous thing that could happen to a 17-year-old. I also made some money in a dance band on Saturday night, so I was doing OK. And I was able without any trouble at all to convince my father to buy me a car. As soon as I was 17, I had a Ford convertible, a seven-year-old Model A.

NC: What kind of background did you already have under your belt when you went to Trinity College?
CDW: Well, Cokey was very thorough; I was really lucky. First of all, he was on the exam committee of the AGO forever. He was a Fellow of the AGO and of the Royal College of Organists, and all that. He played accurately and well, but I was also lucky to study with Clarence Watters—which was very different. Clarence was really a brilliant virtuoso. And this is not to play down Coke-Jephcott, who was a wonderful improviser, very fine. And he played Bach very accurately—he just didn’t have the sort of brilliance that Clarence had. Cokey was a very colorful service player and used the organ wonderfully.

NC: Did he do most of the playing, or did he have an assistant?
CDW: Soon after Coke-Jephcott came to the cathedral, Thomas Matthews came to be his assistant. Cokey had been organist at Grace Church in Utica, taught Tom there, and brought Tom to the cathedral when I was 12 and he was 17. He was a very good organist, and I admired him and I loved to turn pages for him—we were really close considering I was 12 and he was 17.

NC: How did they divide up the service? With the vast spaces, did one play and the other conduct as is the style now, or did Cokey play and conduct from the console?
CDW: There was a little of each. Cokey probably played about half the time. I do remember distinctly Tommy playing Brahms’s How lovely, so I guess Coke wanted to get out front and conduct that. I have a funny feeling they used the vox and strings liberally! He had been a bandmaster in the army in England, so I guess he knew how to conduct, although I never saw him conduct an orchestra.

NC: Did they ever use brass in the cathedral services?
CDW: I don’t recall that they did. They used the Tuba Mirabilis though, by golly! You don’t need brass instruments with that! [Hearty laughter]
Anyway . . . getting back to Coke’s teaching . . . he wasn’t a stolid Englishman, but he was solid and he was punctilious about fingering Bach correctly and not allowing me to get away with anything. I remember playing the Bach Toccata in C for Paul Callaway when I was 15 and I had that well under my fingers. Paul was at St. Mark’s in Grand Rapids about that time, and my uncle was in his choir in Grand Rapids. My father was from Grand Rapids.

NC: Had you known of Clarence Watters prior to your study with him?
CDW: I hadn’t known of him until my father and I visited Channing Lefebvre to consult about college.
They had a wonderful Skinner organ in the chapel at Trinity College, one of the first on which Donald Harrison and Ernest Skinner collaborated. It might amuse you to know that at this time I didn’t know what a mixture stop was! There was one on the cathedral organ—it was there on the stop knob, along with Stentorphone and some other interesting stop names! But it wasn’t until I got up to Hartford and worked with Watters that I learned what mixtures were all about. It was a whole different experience.
It was a fine organ. It had a wonderful 32′ Open Wood, the low twelve pipes of which were lined up in a straight row against the back wall of the chapel. I was in heaven there; I was one of the assistant chapel organists, along with two others. At the cathedral, it had been a very rare privilege to play the big organ, as I had my lessons on one of the chapel organs. But here at Trinity College, I could just go in and play the big four-manual organ whenever I wanted to.

NC: What possessed Watters to get the present organ?
CDW: I’m not sure, but Don Harrison had died and Clarence admired Dick Piper, the tonal director of the Austin firm, which was right there in Hartford. I think he got a donor and was able to create the exact organ he wanted. It is very French, and wonderful!

NC: Did you keep up with Clarence over the years?
CDW: Oh, yes! Very much so. In fact I had him play at Heavenly Rest a lot.

NC: Didn’t you say that he was also a candidate at Heavenly Rest when you got it?
CDW: Yes. [Laughing] I had written him from Paris asking him to write a letter of recommendation for me when I applied for the position. You see, I had some pretty good connections by then, like Frank Sayre [the Very Rev. Francis B. Sayre, Jr.] from my Cambridge days and Canon West at the cathedral, and Clarence, too. So I asked him to write, and he wrote back saying “Charlie, I’d be glad to, except that I, too, have applied for the position.” That’s absolutely true.

NC: Tell me more about Watters as a teacher.
CDW: Ah, yes. Well, first of all, it was a revelation to find out about the whole idea of mixtures and mutations. Somehow or another I had not learned this from Cokey. Cokey was absolutely wonderful, but . . . I didn’t learn anything about French Trompettes and that sort of sound. I was used to Cornopeans, and so on. Watters, a pupil of Marcel Dupré, acquainted me with the French tonal qualities of an organ. In a word, Clarence was like a French organist as a teacher.

NC: He was already recognized as a master organist by that time wasn’t he, and he was pretty young?
CDW: Yes. He was in his 30s . . . [pausing to calculate] . . . and of course he had studied with Dupré and lived in Paris. Repertoire: again, very French oriented. And I think this is good. I am glad to have had the English orientation of Coke-Jephcott. And his improvisations reeked of Elgar! You know, the pomp and circumstance aspect of cathedral improvisation was his specialty. Whereas, of course, Watters reeked of the French school.

NC: Was Clarence a good improviser?
CDW: Yes, very! I remember once Dr. Ogilby [the Trinity College president] put a sign up on the bulletin board in his own hand saying that “this Sunday there will be an improvisation for three organs: CW, RBO, CW”—meaning Clarence Watters, Remsen B. Ogilby, and the other CW referring to me. Dr. Ogilby had been a chaplain in World War II and he had a portable organ—you know one of those things that unfold, a harmonium—and he set that up in the middle of the chapel. There is a small two-manual practice organ in the crypt that was for me to play, and Clarence of course played the big organ. Ogilby played a hymn, which he could manage—he actually played the organ and carillon pretty well—and I would do a little improvisation on it from the chapel, which would come rolling up the stone staircase from the crypt, and then Clarence would play something more elaborate on the Aeolian-Skinner organ. Then, we repeated the sequence, and finally Clarence would play an improvisation on both of the hymns together! It was really very clever.
The thing about that story is that this was Ogilby’s idea! He said “let’s do it” and he wrote the notice about it. Not many college presidents I know of would have that kind of imagination!

NC: Did Clarence improvise in the formal style?
CDW: Yes, he could improvise a fugue. And he played all the extant works of Dupré including the preludes and fugues, the Variations sur un Noël, and the Symphonie-Passion; the Stations of the Cross was a specialty of his. He played them extraordinarily well. He played everything from memory, and he insisted that I play from memory. I wasn’t disciplined enough to apply that to everything I learned, but what I played for him I played from memory.

NC: Did Cokey play from memory?
CDW: I don’t believe so. But Clarence had a huge and amazing memorized repertoire.

NC: Who had he studied with? We associate him with Dupré, but he must have started somewhere else.
CDW: He grew up in East Orange, part of that New Jersey tradition we were talking about. [Looking up Watters biography1] He was born in 1902 and studied with Mark Andrews. He was also the organist of Christ’s Church in Rye, New York, and Church of the Ascension in Pittsburgh. And from 1952–76 he was at St. John’s in West Hartford, while he was at Trinity College 1932–67 as head of the music department.

NC: You told me that he was the whole music department at Trinity, and he directed the Glee Club?
CDW: Yes. And this was good, because prior to that I just knew what we had done at the cathedral, but Clarence taught a lot of the choral and orchestral repertoire, which I didn’t know at all before that. In the Glee Club, he did very good repertoire. I knew for the first time Monteverdi—something from Orfeo, which we sang in Italian. And good folk-song arrangements, and Brahms songs. The college was all men at the time, so we did TTBB arrangements.
When I went there at age 16, he immediately appointed me accompanist of the Glee Club: this was good for me musically and socially. At Trinity, the Glee Club went off to all the girls’ schools and did joint concerts so we could do SATB music—and we had dances—that sort of thing, which I liked. And after I got my car for the Stafford Springs job, I had a friend who was adept at chasing girls, so he took me on as an apprentice. [Much laughter] That was also something I gave thanks for . . . all the way through high school I was so busy learning to be an organist that I was sheltered.

NC: Were there any other organ students in your class at Trinity?
CDW: Yes, my fellow assistant organist at the college was Ralph Grover, and he had been in the choir at St. Paul’s in Flatbush, Brooklyn, under Ralph Harris, who was a well-known and respected organist of that era.

NC: What did you study during your first year with Clarence? Did he give you Dupré to begin with?
CDW: Well, the first thing he did, which sort of annoyed me to be honest with you—and I don’t advise this—he decided to re-teach me some Bach works I had learned with Cokey, such as the Toccata in C and trio sonatas.
That reminds me of an interesting story. There was a Miss Kostikyan, who taught piano to boys in the Cathedral Choir School. (This was during the Depression, and I didn’t think to ask my father for lessons, and it wasn’t until Cokey suggested it to my father that he sprang for organ lessons.) One day I was practicing on the two-manual organ in St. Ansgarius’ Chapel, and Miss Kostikyan came in with this young man, and she said, “Charles, I want you to meet Virgil Fox,” and I said, “Oh, glad to meet you, Virgil.” He was maybe 20 or 21. I got off the bench (Miss Kostikyan had told me he was an organist) and asked if he wanted to play. And he said “I want to play the big organ.” I told him I couldn’t authorize him to play the big organ, so he deigned to play the chapel organ saying “you can’t make music on a little thing like this.” But he played very well and that was my introduction to Virgil Fox.
Of course I met him many times later. After he left Riverside, I allowed him to give lessons at Heavenly Rest. And he was on the AGO national council during part of the time I was—he was not notable for his regularity of attendance at meetings! Nor was Biggs. I also have a letter from Biggs apologizing for having problems attending council meetings!
When the Lincoln Center Philharmonic Hall organ was dedicated, Biggs, Fox, and Crozier played the opening. And Biggs, I swear, he played like an automaton. There was no feeling, or brilliance, or anything else. Virgil . . . well he played it damn well, or course, but tastelessly. Crozier, to me, was perfection, and far beyond these other two in musicianship, and technique, too. I just thought she was wonderful. This was in the early 60s.

NC: Anything else about Watters before we go on? He was really instrumental in introducing the music of Dupré to this country.
CDW: Well he would talk for hours about Dupré, not only music, but about marvelous dinners with seven different kinds of wine, and that sort of thing. He and his wife Midge socialized with Marcel and Jeanette Dupré and were really good friends.
He was also a bug on fingering—my impression is that Dupré taught Clarence his approach, and then Watters taught me Dupré’s approach. During lessons, Clarence would write out for me, in detail, all of the fingerings of the complicated stuff.

NC: Did he insist that you play things his way?
CDW: I don’t know—I just didn’t have any reason to challenge anything he taught. He was very confident of his gifts. There is a picture of him sitting at the organ in one of the college yearbooks, with the caption Optimus Sum, so everyone got the idea! [Huge amounts of laughter]
You know he played the dedicatory recital on the big Skinner at the Memorial Church at Harvard. That gives you an idea of his renown at the time.

NC: Well, that’s a nice introduction into your Harvard years. You must have known that organ?
CDW: I only know it because I remember Archibald T. Davison. He was the organist and choirmaster as well as the director of the famous Harvard Glee Club. I had met him previously, so I went up to him at the chapel and he was playing this big organ, but I never played it. I wasn’t an organ student at Harvard.

NC: It’s while you were at Harvard that you were assistant organist at Christ Church in Harvard Square?
CDW: Yes, under Bill Rand [W. Judson Rand] whose first name was actually Wilberforce, and I occasionally called him that! Incidentally, E. Power Biggs had previously been organist of the church.

NC: What was Frank Sayre’s connection in the chronology?
CDW: He had just graduated from Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge and was an assistant at Christ Church, was learning to chant the service, and our paths just crossed. His brother Woodrow Wilson Sayre was also around. They were each grandsons of Woodrow Wilson. Frank and I corresponded throughout the war when he was a Navy chaplain. He later invited me to play at Washington Cathedral after he became dean.
The organ in Christ Church was a new four-manual Aeolian-Skinner [Opus 1007], although the fourth manual was prepared for. The church had terrible acoustics, but the organ was good and was used as the first of Aeolian-Skinner’s demonstration recordings, before the King of Instruments series.

NC: Yes, it’s recently been re-released by JAV, I think. That’s where you met G. Donald Harrison?
CDW: Yes. Don seemed sort of lonely—his wife lived in New York—and he and Bill Rand were great friends and I tagged along, all the time. They each loved to drink and talk, and I was just a kid, but he was so nice to me. There were all these bawdy limericks! And I’ve got lots of letters from him.
After the war, I got appointed to St. Thomas Chapel (during the war my father bought a nice piece of land on Ridgewood Avenue in Glen Ridge), and I conceived the idea that I would like to have an organ studio and be a big fat organ teacher in Glen Ridge together with my New York job. And I talked to Don about this—how to get an organ for this studio. Gosh, I learned a lot about organs from hanging out with Bill and Don putting the organ in Christ Church.
I invited Don to dinner to show him my ideas, with the idea of building an organ along the lines of his specification in the Harvard Dictionary.2 I suggested a couple of changes and he was always willing to consider my ideas.

NC: What was Don like in these social settings?
CDW: It was mostly he and Bill, who was a real extrovert, bantering back and forth. What I remember most was that it was limerick after limerick, and usually pretty bawdy!

NC: Did you get to any of the Boston churches?
CDW: Oh yes, Carl McKinley, Everett Titcomb, Francis Snow . . . and I was active in the Guild.

NC: Was George Faxon around in those days?
CDW: Yes. And Bill Zeuch,3 who had been one of the interim organists at St. John the Divine, along with Channing before Cokey. I’d known him as a choirboy, called him Mr. Zeuch, but had no idea he was involved with Aeolian-Skinner until I met him during these Harvard years.

NC: Biggs?
CDW: Yes. Bill Rand for some reason had a key to the Busch-Reisinger Museum, his choir sang there from time to time, and Bill and I went in one night. The organ was playing, and it was Biggs practicing for his CBS Sunday morning broadcast. (I later played a recital there, and Don Harrison praised my playing, which was a huge compliment.)
Anyway, we came in to use the organ late one night, and found Jimmy Biggs practicing, and his first wife, Colette—who was French and had a very fiery temperament—was yelling at him about his playing “non, non Jeemee, not like zeehs!” She was really letting him have it. As you know, that marriage did not last, and he later married this nice lady, Peggy.

NC: Daniel Pinkham must have been around then.
CDW: Yes, he was an undergraduate. We became friendly. He had a harpsichord in his room in Harvard yard. He pronounced it hopsycawd! We actually played a duet recital at Christ Church, including the Soler that you and I played recently. Anyway, later, when I lived in Paris, I found out that Janet [Janet Hayes, later Mrs. CDW] had been his soloist when she was at New England Conservatory.

NC: Let’s talk about the Lake Delaware Boys Camp, since they just celebrated their 100th anniversary, which was written up in the New York Times [Sunday, July 26, 2009]. You applied once and were turned down because you were too young?
CDW: That’s right. The director of the camp asked Channing [Lefebvre] if he knew of an organist, and he recommended me. I went and saw the director, and he said that I appeared to be qualified, but that they couldn’t possibly use someone who was the same age as the campers. At that time the campers’ age range went up to 17. So I tucked my tail between my legs and went off to college. After I graduated from college, I came back and proclaimed, “I am now twenty years old and how about putting me on your staff.” So they did and therein hangs the tale. That was 1940 and I played my last service there in 1990!

NC: You were there for 50 years!?
CDW: Not every year of the 50. I was in the war and in Europe, but I was there for most of it.

NC: That’s an unusual combination—camp and church.
CDW: The unique quality of the camp is that it’s designed as a military organization, and they have military drills and carry little fake rifles and do all sorts of military maneuvers. Then on top of that they have this very elaborate, Anglo-Catholic ritual. And the campers were taken from the strain of society that needs help, although the majority are born and brought up Episcopalian. My son and my nephew went there. Quite a few of them are clergy children. They all are taught to genuflect at the Incarnatus of the creed. Now they may be Baptist, or Pentecostal—God knows what, but boy, you genuflect at the Incarnatus! And they have the Angelus three times a day—whatever anyone is doing, the chapel bell starts going morning, noon and night and everything stops and everybody stands very quiet. Some of them recite the “Hail Mary.”

NC: They had chapel, or Mass everyday?
CDW: Mass everyday.

NC: What was the organ?
CDW: Well, that was one of the most interesting things about it. It was an 1877 two-manual tracker by Hilborne L. Roosevelt that had been ordered by Commodore Elbridge T. Gerry to be installed in his mansion on the estate. He also had a mansion on Fifth Avenue, the land of which is still owned by the Gerrys, on top of which stands the Pierre Hotel. It was Commodore Gerry’s son, Robert Livingston Gerry and his wife Cornelia Harriman Gerry, who founded the camp.
Gerry was the commodore of the New York Yacht Club and had the biggest yacht in the city—it was 190 feet long. Incidentally, I just found out an interesting thing about his yacht—it had a full set of Eucharistic vestments as part of its equipment. He was a very devoted high churchman!

NC: What parish did he attend?
CDW: They were closely connected with the Church of the Resurrection, and he actually built the Church of St. Edward the Martyr on East 109th Street, which is where the camp’s New York headquarters was for many decades. In fact that is where I was interviewed for the job.
In 1886 it was decided that the organ wasn’t big enough, so he had Roosevelt add a choir organ, which had among other things a 16-foot reed on it. It was a Bassoon (I think), a free reed. What is most notable about the organ is that it has never in the slightest way been electrified.

NC: Even to this day?
CDW: Yes, even to this day, oh yeah! It has three large bellows that are attached to a crankshaft with a very large wheel, the rim of which has a handle that is eighteen inches long. You could put two boys alongside it. The effort required depends on how loudly the organist is playing—if the organist is playing loudly, the thing has to be pumped quite vigorously; if it’s being played for meditative music during communion, the kids found that they could sit right on the window sill right by this big flywheel and put their feet on the handle and just rock it back and forth. There’s an air gauge, which has a green light at the end of it, and an amber light part way down, and a red one further down, and the bottom of it has a huge skull and bones!

NC: For when it’s empty?
CDW: That means the organist has no air at all and you are in trouble! Anyway, it’s a wonderful organ. I made a recording in 1960 that has a lot of solos in it . . . at least three or four different boys sang, one of whom was nine years old and later killed in Vietnam. Really sad.
And there have been a lot of good organists associated with the camp. Clement Campbell, who was also organist at Resurrection [in New York] back in the 20s and 30s, was organist and choir director at the camp. One of the things that pleases me about the camp was that—even though I did not usually give organ lessons up there—I in one case gave the first organ lessons to this young 16-year-old who was quite a good pianist who went on to become organist of Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago: Eddie Mondello. He was a marvelous soprano for me and was interested in the organ, and I started him off.
Back to my musical duties at the camp. I trained the kids and played. But I didn’t select the music, because they are still doing the music they did back in 1909: Caleb Simper’s Mass and Will C. McFarlane’s Magnificat.

NC: You were into your first year at Harvard when the war intervened. What about your Harvard years after the war,4 and your teachers there?
CDW: Walter Piston, whom I had for most of my courses—harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and orchestration—was great at all those things. And Archibald T. Davidson, with whom I studied choral conducting, and choral composition. My other teacher was Tillman Merritt, who is not terribly well known now. He taught 16th-century harmony, as well as a course on Stravinsky and Hindemith, who were the latest things at that time—really cutting edge.

NC: What was Piston like? He’s probably the most famous.
CDW: He was wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. He had a very quiet way about him and he would come up with funny things. When a student would be up at the blackboard writing something, he would use some phrase like “that’s a somewhat infelicitous situation there, we have a parallel octaves between the alto and the bass in that progression.” He was very quiet about it. We all loved him. He was a very fine teacher. When I went there before the war, I don’t believe his book was out, which is now a standard textbook at colleges all over the place.5 But, we learned harmony according to that.
And in fugue, he was always quoting André Gedalge. I believe Gedalge’s book is now available.6 In those days, I think he was the only one in the country who knew about Gedalge. I remember what little fugal study I had previous to Piston was with Coke-Jephcott, using a textbook by James Higg.

NC: Any memorable fellow students with whom you went to Harvard?
CDW: Yes, Robert Middleton, who later taught at Vassar. Dan Pinkham was way behind me because he was a freshman when I was a graduate student.

NC: Then you went to the war and came back and finished your Harvard master’s degree; did you then go back to New York for a couple of years?
CDW: Yes, the same month I got my master’s from Harvard I got the F.A.G.O. too! Boy, what a sigh of relief I had!

NC: Did you continue to coach with Clarence Watters on the organ tests as part of the scheme?
CDW: Yes, I think the main piece was the Dupré G-minor Prelude and Fugue, so I went down to Hartford and took a few lessons with Clarence.

NC: Do you recall where the F.A.G.O. exam was held, what organ you played?
CDW: Yes, I came down and took it in New York. It was on the old Synod Hall organ at St. John the Divine. [Skinner Opus 204, 1913]

NC: Who were the examiners?
CDW: Harold Friedell, who was chairman of the examination committee, Seth Bingham, J. Lawrence Erb from Connecticut College, Philip James, and Norman Coke-Jephcott.

NC: So you got your master’s degree and F.A.G.O., and then you took the job in New York. Where was this?
CDW: St. Thomas Chapel. The vicar at St. Thomas Chapel had gone to Trinity College and he knew Watters. He came up to Cambridge and auditioned the service I played unbeknownst to me.

NC: Was it a boys’ choir at St. Thomas Chapel in those days?
CDW: Yes, it was. But it had a few women helping them out. I think I increased the size of the boys’ choir at least 300%, maybe more. I was an eager beaver back then. I would chauffeur the kids around town. Thomas Beveridge and Charles Wuorinen were each choirboys of mine, and they were both very bright and very good musicians.
They had an E. M. Skinner organ [Opus 598, 1926], and the console was in the chancel and the organ was up in the rear balcony, with a small accompaniment division up front. It was still a chapel of St. Thomas Church in those days. Now it’s All Saints Church on East 60th Street.
Anyway, I was in the Harvard Club (I was single, just out of Harvard and the dues were then quite low), taking my ease one day, when a man walked in who had been a tenor in my choir at Christ Church in Cambridge when he was at Harvard. While I was off at the war, he was off at seminary.
He walked into the club, his collar was on backward . . . it was the Rev. Richard R. P. Coombs. He later became the dean at the cathedral in Spokane. We sat down and talked and he said, “I was just offered the job of Canon of the American Cathedral in Paris,” and I said “You took it, of course,” and he said, “No, I like it where I am, but the dean is looking for an organist.” He told me that the dean was in New York at the moment, and I went to see him that very night at his hotel. I told the dean I majored in French and was crazy about French organs and French organ music. And by golly, I got the job. What a piece of luck!

NC: Sounds like you were pretty well set in New York, with a church and the school, but this lured you away?
CDW: Yes, I was well set. I was making more than the vicar of the St. Thomas Chapel and he couldn’t stand it!

NC: How did that happen?
CDW: Well, as a matter of fact, this will be amusing to anybody living in 2010. When I landed this wonderful job at St. Thomas Chapel, the salary was $2,000 a year, and when I landed this wonderful job at Trinity School as the director of music, the salary was $2,500 a year. So I was getting $4,500 a year, and the vicar of the St. Thomas Chapel told me somewhat ruefully that he was getting $4,000 a year.

NC: So, your combined salary . . .
CDW: Yes, combined salary. That’s what we musicians do, you know—we take these teaching jobs . . .

NC: But even so, you wanted to go to Paris?
CDW: Oh, yes! And of course the salary there was less.

NC: So, you took a cut to go there.
CDW: Oh yes. I never regretted that, though.

NC: Tell the story of how you went to Paris traveling first class!
CDW: The dean, Dean Beekman, who was a large man and just a slight bit pompous, said after hiring me, “You know, you must come by boat and you must come on the United States Line. I have a friend who is important in that company. Just give him my name and he’ll take care of you.” So I called up this man whose name was Commander de Riesthal, and I said, “Dean Beekman told me to call you because I want to reserve passage on the SS America to leave New York on September 8.” And he asked, “What class do you want to travel?” And I answered, “What class does the dean travel?” “Why, first class, of course,” came the reply. And I said, “Well, I’ll go first class.”

NC: Did anybody question you about this? Was it okay with Dean Beekman?
CDW: I don’t know. But I thought to myself, gee, I don’t know how long I’m going to be away in Europe, and here I’ve got this wonderful cabin . . . I’ll just invite all my friends and have a party for my departure. So I did, and one of the people invited was Ellen Faull, a soprano, whose debut at the City Opera I had heard. Incidentally, since then she became the head voice teacher at Juilliard, a very good singer, and she sang a whole lot for me when I started the Canterbury Choral Society.
Anyway, she pranced into the party and said, “Oh Charlie, I just met the most wonderful girl whom I knew at Tanglewood this summer. I was walking down 57th Street and she was walking down 57th Street.” Ellen said, “I’m going to a party; a friend of mine is going off to Paris. You’re going to Paris, too, aren’t you, Janet? You should look this guy up because he’s going to be organist at the cathedral over there and you might get a job as soloist.” So when Ellen got to the party on the boat she gave me Janet’s number in Paris. I looked her up and the story is that I took her out, we went to Versailles in my new French Simca, and we got married a few months later in the American Cathedral.

To be continued.

On October 13, 2012, Robert Powell was interviewed as part of a weekend celebration of his music and in honor of his 80th birthday (July 22, 2012). Special thanks to First Congregational Church, Saginaw, Michigan, where the interview was conducted; recording technician Kenneth Wuepper of Saginaw; Dr. Richard Featheringham, Professor Emeritus in the School of Business, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, who transcribed the interview; Robert Barker, photographer; and Nicholas Schmelter, director of music at First Congregational Church.

The weekend included a recital October 13 at First Congregational Church, Saginaw, featuring Nicholas Schmelter  performing the first portion of the concert on the church’s chapel organ, Aeolian-Skinner Op. 1327 (1956), and the second portion on piano with flutist Katie Welnetz and soprano Rayechel Nieman.

A concert of choral and organ music on October 14 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Bay City, Michigan, featured the Exultate Deo Choral Ensemble, conducted by Robert Sabourin of Midland, Michigan. Steven Egler and Nicholas Schmelter were the organists, and flutists Robert Hart and Lauren Rongo performed on several compositions.

These events were co-sponsored by First Congregational Church, Saginaw; Trinity Episcopal Church, Bay City; and the Saginaw Valley Chapter of the American Guild of Organists.

Robert Powell, born July 22, 1932, in Benoit, Mississippi, has approximately 300 compositions in print for organ, instrumental ensembles, handbells, choir, and flute and organ. He earned a Bachelor of Music degree from Louisiana State University and later a Master of Sacred Music degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York as a student of Alec Wyton. From 1958–1960 he was Wyton’s assistant organist at St. John the Divine in upper Manhattan, and from 1960–1965 was organist-choirmaster at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Meridian, Mississippi. For three years (1965–1968), he served as director of music at St. Paul’s School, Concord, New Hampshire, and then from 1968–2003 served as organist-choirmaster at Christ Episcopal Church, Greenville, South Carolina, until his retirement in 2003.

A longtime member of the Association of Anglican Musicians, Powell holds the Fellow and Choirmaster certificates of the American Guild of Organists, and is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), from which he has received the Standard Award for the past twenty years. His well-known and popular service for the Episcopal Eucharistic liturgy appears in The Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church.

He and his wife Nancy recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary and are the parents of three, grandparents of four, and great-grandparents of one. Robert Powell was interviewed by Jason Overall shortly before his retirement (see The Diapason, November 2002).

Steven Egler: We are happy to have you with us this weekend for a late celebration of your 80th birthday and to enjoy your music.

Thank you. It’s a wonderful celebration for me.

You retired as organist-choirmaster at Christ Episcopal Church, Greenville, South Carolina, in 2003, but you are still playing. Is that correct?

That’s right. I’m playing in a small Methodist church. I started out to retire, and I managed three weeks. The first week I played for the Presbyterian church, and the second week I played for the Episcopal church I now attend. The third week I stayed home and wrote songs on Mary Baker Eddy texts for a lady who came later to Greenville as one of the actors in the Phantom of the Opera. She came over and we played through some songs. She gave us free tickets to Phantom of the Opera and took us backstage to show us how they made the boats go around and how the mechanics worked. That was enough retirement for me.

So it may be moot to ask if you miss being in church work, whether it’s full time or part time.

It’s different being in full-time church work. When I went to Christ Church, membership was about 1,500; when I left it was 4,000. There were lots of staff meetings and such. I felt like I never worked a day in my life, except at staff meetings. (laughter) Otherwise, I was writing, directing the choirs, and all that. I don’t miss it, but at the same time I do. I went straight into a small position where I don’t worry about choir members coming or going, and just play the organ—that is great fun. We have a good choir director, too; she and I are great friends. It’s five minutes from home, and they keep the church at 72 degrees all day and all night year round. 

We discussed that you were going to learn how to say “no” by the time you were 75. Have you learned how?

I have NOT learned how to say “no,” but it’s led to some interesting things. One time someone wanted me to write a setting of “Abide with Me” and to include the Agnus Dei. I didn’t think that the Agnus Dei had any relationship to “Abide with Me,” but I wrote it anyway and it was published.

Another instance was at the library snack shop. A man came over with a stack of papers. On the music paper he had written down a tune by Louis Bourgeois, and on the other stack a French poem he had translated and wanted me to set to the tune. This would have been a wonderful opportunity to say “no,” and I said “Ah,” but I did think that it would be a challenge. I set the text and it worked out because the poem was good. 

He told me exactly what to do. He wanted an introduction, a soprano solo in French, and then the choir—a tenor/bass choir—would sing in English; there would be an organ interlude, and the second verse would be sung by the choir in unison, and then the oboe and the organ would play. So I did all of those things and filled in the blanks. It was great fun.

If you had said “no,” it wouldn’t have happened.

No. On the other hand, people have come up with ideas for years, and I haven’t always agreed; but many projects have turned out to be blessings in disguise.

You just go forward and never stop composing.

Oh, yes. I go to the church in the morning and always write at the keyboard. I just write notes, so writing at the keyboard of an organ is the same as writing at the piano keyboard. I am not thinking that this will use a 16-foot stop here, a cromhorne or flute. I just push General 3 and hope for the best. (laughter)

You are still very prolific.

Some people don’t know when to put the pencil down! 

Austin Lovelace told me one time that this writing thing cycles. There are times when you are writing things and it is going really well. Sometimes you get to some part and you can’t do it; you go to sleep at night and the next day it’s already done because the subconscious takes care of it. 

Are you writing more music now?

That’s right. I have more time to write. I just go down to the church; I spend less time at it but write more. I am not as careful as Duruflé or someone like that would be. My teacher, Searle Wright, would say, “Write it down as fast as you possibly can and go back and correct it later.”

So I do it as fast as I possibly can and then I go back and correct my work. I have six publishers to submit music to. If they don’t want an anthem, I turn it into an organ piece and send it somewhere else. Sometimes that is accepted, so this recycling continues.

What are your current projects?

For the AGO Region IV Convention in Columbia, South Carolina, in 2013, I wrote a set of variations on “On This Day” (tune: Personent hodie). It’s a wild tune and was a challenge, but I managed to get six variations on the theme. It’s going to be played by Charles Tompkins: he suggested me for the commission. I’m also working on some pieces for GIA for brass and organ. 

How much does improvisation play into your composing?

A lot. John Ferguson told me one time what he does—I don’t know if he composes at the piano, but he must because he improvises and he writes his improvisations down. The hard thing about writing is getting an initial idea. John Rutter said that. Get the initial idea—a little motive—and improvise on a theme to get the initial idea and fill in the blanks. 

Improvisation has become more important both in organ playing in general and also in academia, where a certain amount of improvisation is expected.

Organists must improvise sooner or later. The wedding is going to start late and you have played all your music twice, the second time with different registrations, and the bride still hasn’t arrived, so you have to play something. You will feel better if you add something besides a C major chord, an F major chord, or a G major chord. In Searle Wright’s course, we had to learn how to improvise in different situations. It was fun and he was such a great teacher. He would use students’ names at graduations at Columbia at the cathedral [St. John the Divine] and he improvised on the names of three boys who had gotten doctorates: Cline, Davis, and Harrison. He would improvise on the syllables in their names. It was so clever, and then he’d throw in a fugue at the end. It was wonderful and so good. We were all pleased to be in his class.

Did those people know that was happening?

No, of course not. Only he knew it. It was so clever. I was fortunate to have such teachers in New York. I had Seth Bingham, too, after Harold Friedell died. Friedell played at St. Bartholomew’s Church and taught us all to improvise. Improvising is so important not just for weddings and funerals and things, but there are people who must have music to move from one place to another in the service—they must have some kind of walking music. You can just flop around or you can make some kind of form out of it. When the little kids come down for a kids’ sermon, then you can really have fun with that. It is always fun to create something on the spot.

I was very curious about your comment in The Diapason’s 2002 article concerning relationships.

If you have a good relationship with your choir, they will sing for you no matter what. Alec Wyton said that the choir director is 90 percent personality and 10 percent musical ability. So I have been fortunate in that I like the choir and the choir seems to like me, and we get along very well.

I was watching Bob Sabourin rehearse this morning—he is mentoring the entire choir, and thus they want to sing for him. He works them hard, which they should do; they don’t just chatter and carry on. They work hard because they want to, and come back because they like to. That’s the relationship that we organists and choir directors need with our choirs.

Now, in regard to the clergy, I have always had collegial relationships; I have always been able to say let’s have a cup of coffee and talk about something. I have always worked with good clergy who were very supportive. 

The church secretary/administrative assistant is absolutely wonderful. She’s from Mississippi like me and she will do things outside of her job description. In the Methodist church right now the minister, of course, and the secretary are Methodists, and the two Episcopalians are the choir director and the organist. We have a great relationship—all four of us—and we don’t have staff meetings.

That makes it even better.

You’re absolutely right. Sometimes the pastor, the choir, and organist can be very distant from everyone else. In the church where I am serving now, before the service starts we go down in the congregation and “play the crowd.” Then the minister gets up and says the announcements, the call to worship, and then I play the prelude, which means they have to listen.

That is a wonderful way to establish rapport with your church members. 

It works better in a small church. Going out into a church with 600 in the congregation—it’s hard to do that. But you can do it in small churches, where everybody knows each other. I am as fortunate as anybody could be. My advice to church musicians is to get to know everybody you can, work as hard as you can, and be cognizant of relationships with everybody in the parish—not just the choir.

I love the story about your playing too many verses of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

Bishop Pike was at St. John the Divine before he became a bishop. I played “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and played and played and lost my place and wasn’t looking, and I played 13 verses before I finally decided maybe I had better end. But I was forgiven. Then one time I played a hymn in the wrong place, and the clergyman whose name was Howard Johnson—a wonderful fellow—said when I told him this sad story, “The heavens didn’t fall.” 

And yet playing the text is important. I have students who come in and all the notes are just right, but they haven’t read any of the text and don’t know where to punctuate or breathe.

They’ll do something like “Thy kingdom come! On bended knee” (author: Frederick Hosmer). I don’t want the kingdom to come on bended knee particularly. My mentor told me to breathe with the congregation and to make them breathe and leave the same time between verses. I found the trick to that is to hold onto the last chord. When I let it go they know that I am trying to start. 

Tell us about your time with Alec Wyton.

We had Evensong every day except Monday, so I played the Evensong along with Morning Prayer. He wanted to make sure I knew how to play Anglican chant, so he didn’t play every service.  Of course, he conducted many services and I played a lot of them when he was conducting and that was a difficult task:  but he was down on the floor, and I was up in the loft. 

Let’s discuss teaching and mentoring.

I was fortunate to have people who saw something in me that I didn’t see.  The first one I had in high school was an organist named Walter Park. He was a wonderful fellow. He became the band director to just keep eating, but it didn’t suit him very well. He played in a small Episcopal church and I had a one-hour organ lesson every week. After the organ lesson, we would then have a three-hour composition lesson—all for the same price. I finally learned to write a little march like a Sousa march, and I used these ancient books that taught you voice leading. It was wonderful. Preston Ware Orem was the author of the book, Harmony Book for Beginners (1919). 

Mr. Park was a great person and encouraged me to write things, and I would bring them and we would look at them and talk about them. He made me feel that what I was doing was worthwhile. That is what mentors do. Later, of course, I studied with Alec Wyton who thought that I could be an assistant without falling completely to pieces. I told him at one time that I was scared of that place—blocks of stone! You know it scares you to death. There were other people who over the years were kind and helpful. But those two are the main ones.

So a teacher isn’t always a mentor?

These people and I were working together—we were learning the pieces together, writing the pieces together. I wrote the pieces and we would go over them. You might have done something here entirely different, let’s try that and see what happens—it was as if we were learning them together. That is true mentoring. It is difficult to be a mentor. I’m not that. It is probably easier for people who are full-time teachers.

I use the term “psyching out” the choir for a Sunday morning: that is mentoring. You are doing something that might be more difficult, and they’re hesitant about it.

They have the full confidence in you as the choir director. They will do their best, but they are not confident. One terrible thing happened during the Bach cantata “Praise Our God.” We were singing it in English and the choir got lost—completely lost in the final movement. Somewhere along the line a soprano came in and had the right place, and they all picked it up. I didn’t stop, I just kept on going. That kind of thing is challenging. Another time we did the St. John Passion with half the orchestra on this side and half the orchestra on the other side. Half the orchestra had gotten one-half beat behind the other half, and so we got through the first 26 pages and they had this extra beat. We started in for the da capo and we did it right the second time. I wasn’t going to stop!

What would you say afterward to your choir members when things didn’t go well?

I told them that it’s ok to make a mistake; I don’t dwell on it. “The heavens didn’t fall.” We have something else to do next week anyway. Don’t say too much about the mistakes. Think about the good things and move on.

What are your thoughts on the status of things in the church today?

I try to keep up with what is going on. There is some good writing among the church composers today, and I could name ten of them. One publisher told me a long time ago that they had put the music submissions in three piles: some of them they certainly don’t want, and the middle one could go either way. So much of that stuff is ok, and those tend to be both boring and exciting; and so choosing music is very difficult. 

What are their criteria for selecting music for publication?

I would say how they set the text, where the accents fall, and what kind of voicing they have. I can write for college choirs sometimes and make it interesting, but I don’t have a college choir to experiment with, and I never really had. I have always had between 15 and 20 people, so you write for what you have. Is the range bad or good, does it have an independent organ accompaniment?  

Publishers respond to various trends, and they are watching what happens.  Right now it seems that organ composers are writing music based upon gospel hymns. I have recently published three of my favorite gospel song arrangements. I enjoyed doing the gospel settings—I had fun with them.

It’s great to have them, and particularly the churches where they sing these hymns. To play “Sleepers Awake” is one thing, but not if they don’t know the hymn. They DO know “Fairest Lord Jesus,” “Open My Eyes That I May See,” and “Standing on the Promises,” and they can relate to these old favorites. Publishers may choose these arrangements in particular.

When you were in the Bronx, you had two anthems in the choir library.

On-the-job training. That’s what we would do, and Everett Hilty was the on-the-job supervisor [at Union Theological Seminary]. All I had was just one tenor, a few women, and a couple of basses. And the tenor anthem was “Seek Ye the Lord” by J. Rollins—one of the two anthems that I had. The other one was Wallingford Rieger’s “Easter Passacaglia,” which was for 16 parts. If they had had two sets of choirs, they couldn’t have sung that one. So in the end, I wrote two parts real quick. You know what sounds good and what doesn’t. You don’t have to make a canon of it, but you have to make the sound good.  

In the 2002 interview, you mentioned that a balance between “renewal” and “classical” music is more desirable. Can you elaborate?

We had that at Christ Church. They had everything—classical, Anglican; but the other service—the bigger one—had plenty of guitars, basses, flutes that would play during the communion or special occasions, offertory or something, and the rest of it would be traditional. We used Hyfrydol or some of the traditional hymns. I didn’t play for it since they didn’t use organ; they had a piano player. It worked out very well. 

That parish was large enough to accommodate different services.

A small parish would probably end up going one way or the other. We attended a service in a nearby city, and we expected it to be a traditional Episcopal service and it wasn’t. It was the guitars and a singer with a microphone up front. I think they had a string of eight guitars, too. Flashed the words on the screen. Some classical person might be turned off, but it didn’t turn me it off. It was a very devotional service, and there was nothing wrong with it. It was just unusual—going in expecting something and coming out having experienced something else.

I tried different things when I was a choir director. If I had to advise anybody, it would be to try different things. One time we had handbells, and we were going to do “Of the Father’s Love Begotten.” The handbells and singers were going to come in and play something, and on the other side of the church they would come in from the other transept singing and playing the handbells. We were supposed to have been together all the time. Well, it didn’t work. Nobody was together. Handbells were playing, the people were singing, and there wasn’t much happening!

Then another time we had 40 in the choir and were going to do the Schütz Psalm 100. We had three choirs that were echoes—one choir and two echoes. The piece is wonderful, but I did it wrong. I put the main choir down front facing each other, and I put the first echo choir in the back, facing the congregation, and I put the third echo choir in the anteroom. We had loud, moderately loud, and soft, but we did it anyway.   

We experimented with Richard Felciano’s pieces, and they went very well. We had gospel choirs come in and sing with us, and we did all of this wonderful community stuff. It is good fun to try these different experiments and see what might happen. I had a brass group come in to play—half downstairs and half in the balcony and it did work. All these experiments worked out. Doing the same anthem six times a year: that’s not good fun.

Right now we’re in a situation where the congregation likes a wide variety of anthems—and sometimes you use the junior choir. We have a choir of 12 when they are all there—no tenors, and four good basses, and the sopranos are great. For a junior choir, you take an SATB anthem and make an SAB anthem out of it. You have to experiment; it is good training—you have eight people here in the choir and none of them tenors; what do you do? You can do all kinds of things.

One has to have an eye [and ear] for what will work.

You have to compose FOR them. Same thing as playing a descant in something; for instance, everybody knows Fairest Lord Jesus and it has a descant floating above, just for organ—that makes you sort of a minor composer compared to a major composer.

Regarding hymnals—you worked with the 1982 book for the Episcopal Church.

I thought The Hymnal 1940 was a treasure; Leo Sowerby was the general editor. The Hymnal 1982—my good friend Ray Glover was general editor—is very good. Other good influences upon the 1982 book were James Litton, David Hurd, and Marilyn Keiser, among others. Most of the hymns I find are very fine, including some of the hymns by Calvin Hampton. Some of the other denominational hymnals have included more Spanish hymns in their hymnals.

What do you have to say about that in terms of the future of hymnbooks?

We just don’t know what’s going to happen with the hymnbooks. It depends on how big your congregation is and if you have people from different cultures. I think there should be hymns for everybody—American hymns, Spanish hymns and Mexican hymns, Scandinavian hymns—because you never know when some enterprising organist will want to make them better known in their parish. I think they should be there.

Tell us about your involvement with organizations.

Oh, yes. I was with the Choristers Guild board for six years and that was a wonderful thing. I was on the AGO certification committee for four years and that was fun, too. There were some wonderful people there—Joyce Shupe Kull and Kathleen Thomerson—and I enjoyed meeting in New York at the AGO headquarters. I was involved with the orchestration portion of the exam.

I was on the National Council for six years (Councillor for Region V), and there were so many very good people who conducted the examinations. We divided the responsibilities according to our areas of expertise and discussed the questions/answers. 

You have been involved with the Association of Anglican Musicians.

They met in Greenville last year. I wrote them two anthems (published by Selah), and I was very pleased and excited. Some other people wrote music and then there was talk about professional concerns: problems that we all have, such as getting fired without due notice—to know what the people are doing about it; and they usually have very good sermons. Jeffrey Smith, the late Gerre Hancock, Marilyn Keiser, and others—always concerned with preserving good Episcopal church music. It is a great organization.

Tell me about your ASCAP award.

Alec Wyton asked if I wanted to be in ASCAP. They have a list of approved pieces for each composer—I have 170 pieces approved by ASCAP. When so many of my pieces are performed each year, I receive an award. They have given me the same award for the last 20 years.

Your biography mentions restoring a link to St. James. 

St. James, the oldest Episcopal church in the country, is in New London, Connecticut. They asked me to write a Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis 35 years ago. As far as I know they never performed it. Then about five years ago a group of people called me up there, and they performed my music. It was great, but it has taken them 35 years. It was discovered in the church basement—when they were cleaning out the church basement, which they clean out once every 35 years! But they were kind enough to perform it, and they asked me to write another piece for them, so I ended up writing the Benedictus es, Domine. I set the text in English, and they said they took it to Bristol Cathedral in England. They are wonderful people out there and very good group of singers.

Tell us a little about your family.

I’m going to be a great-grandfather. Yes, we have three kids—one of them is still going to school, and he is about 50. The oldest one is married and has two children. She is a nurse practitioner in San Diego. My wife was a nurse, and my mother was a nurse. The granddaughter works in a hospital. You can’t be sick in our family with all those nurses. Of the three children, the youngest works for the patent office. They have sent him to Tokyo five times and to St. Petersburg and Moscow. He’s had a happy career. His wife works for a defense contractor, and they have two kids.

Would you change anything?

I would do it all over again. I can’t think of anything I would want to change. I would not go to staff meetings, if I didn’t have to.

How do you see your legacy as a church musician and as a composer? 

I don’t know what to say. I don’t think people should copy what I do specifically, because everybody has his/her own style—they should focus on what they are doing and hope that what they do will be memorable or useful to their generation and to following generations. You just don’t know what you have done that is going to be appreciated, such as with my communion service. I am pleased and flattered, and nothing can be better than to have your music sung. 

I hope that people who continue after me will write for real people. Craftsmanship is important, but music should be easy for real people to sing, not so complicated that only the collegiate choir can sing it. 

Erik Routley commented that he knew that there would be other hymnbooks and yet hoped they will keep a lot of the traditional material.

Traditional is good, and it fills that criteria—to be singable by real people, not just choirs. 

Congregations do not know how to read music that is going to jump a ninth or a seventh—not unless they are really lucky. You do want to make the congregation happy—they DO pay the salaries. Yet you don’t want to go overboard and dumb down to them; you want to meet them at their same level. You don’t want to take something like “Open My Eyes” and make a caricature of it. That is not a good thing. 

This has been a huge pleasure. I will look forward to the next major birthday.

That’s right. At 90 we’ll do this all over again! 

David Kelley is Director of Music at Concordia Lutheran Church in Wilmington, Delaware, and Assistant Conductor of CoroAllegro, Delaware’s premier chamber choir. His compositions have been included in The Crowning Glory, a collection of hymn descants, and the Delaware Organ Book, a collection of solo organ works by Delaware composers. Mr. Kelley recently began doctoral study in organ at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland.

An increasingly popular composer of organ and choral music, Craig Phillips was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1961. By the time he was in his early thirties, Phillips had won First Prize in the Clarence Mader Competition for organ composition (in 1994). Since then, he has published works with increasing frequency, and has completed commissions for the American Guild of Organists, the Association of Anglican Musicians, several American cathedrals, and such notable performers as the Chenaults and Tom Trenney. Phillips’s compositions are engaging and satisfying, and they demonstrate his understanding not only of the voices and instruments for which he writes, but also his audience. He recently launched a website about his work: www.CraigPhillipsComposer.com. Dr. Phillips and I spoke in February 2008.

David Kelley (DK): You have extensive musical training, including a doctorate among other things, but you were not trained as a composer.
Craig Phillips (CP): I was never a composition major; I did study composition when I was an undergrad, for two years as a minor. Then I was a theory minor at Eastman during my graduate studies. I also studied orchestration at Eastman and then coached with Byron Adams here in Los Angeles. Organ was my primary focus during my student years, but I also had been composing since the age of fourteen, and I wanted to keep it going all the time. I think I was mainly known as an organist, especially early on, and it’s just fascinating that I’ve ended up in some ways much more well known as a composer: that’s pretty much since the mid ’90s.

DK: What motivated you initially to start composing? Fourteen is a very early age to begin that!
CP: I’d been playing the piano since I was seven; I would just sit down and improvise and come up with little ditties and so forth; I decided to start writing them down on my own. Then I was encouraged a lot in that direction by the organist at the church I grew up in, a woman named Sharron Lyon, and then when I started studying organ as well, with Peter Fyfe, he also encouraged me in that direction, so that had a lot to do with it.

DK: The liner notes for your CD “A Festival Song: The Music of Craig Phillips” suggest that your theory background is a large contributing factor to the development of your style. Do you think that those studies really enabled you to grow as a composer—or do you even use theory when you compose?
CP: (laughs) You know, I don’t think about it that much at this point! It’s all in my craft, I guess, and because I studied counterpoint and all the theory courses, there is a very solid foundation.

DK: So do you use theory as a tool?
CP: As a tool? Definitely. It’s really the tool that allows you to look at and understand something of how the great masters put their scores together, which in turn can provide an underpinning and foundation for your own work. That being said, once you have that foundation, I think it ultimately frees you to “break all the rules” as it were and forge your own path.

DK: To my ear, one of the things that I admire about your style is its very fluent and mobile harmonic language. You travel very quickly to different places and move very easily.
CP: Yes.

DK: How would you describe your own style?
CP: Well, I don’t think it’s anything you could put a label on—yes, there are modal inflections and that sort of thing, perhaps a sort of romantic, lyrical leaning. I think it’s really an amalgamation of a lot of my influences: the music that I’ve loved growing up and as an organist as well. I think a lot of the organ composers influenced me to a large degree.

DK: I have often heard a little whispering of Herbert Howells, perhaps, in there; maybe a little Duruflé . . .
CP: Absolutely, others have said that as well. I play their music, I know their music—so that becomes a part of me.

DK: Are there any other composers that have been particularly influential?
CP: Of course—Bach—probably the greatest!

DK: The counterpoint?
CP: Yes, and then I’ve always loved the Romantic repertoire as well; I think that’s also a major influence on my style. And I listened to tons of pop music when I was growing up, and even that, I think, has a certain role in what ultimately makes up my style.

DK: Perhaps contributing to your ability to move from one place to another quickly?
CP: (animated) Maybe! I don’t know, because I grew up in the ’70s listening to all kinds of music, Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Mahler, Bartók, and so forth, and lots of rock/pop—even film music had an influence I would say, so . . . who knows!

DK: (laughs)
CP: You know, I don’t sit down and analyze my own music that often.

DK: There probably isn’t time for that!
CP: (laughs) This is true, and I’d just as soon leave that to others! I tend to be very instinctive and intuitive about the whole process.

DK: Your organ works are very idiomatic, and they lie under the hands quite well.
CP: I hope so! (laughs)

DK: That indicates to me that you have a performing pedigree, if you will; I have to wonder if you do your composing at the keyboard, or if you do any improvisation—certain elements of the fantasy pieces, the Fantasy on Torah Song in particular, seem almost improvisatory in style. Do you bring those types of elements into your composition?
CP: Let’s see . . . I improvise, but not on that level—I really was not trained in improvisation—I could not just sit down and improvise a piece on the level of, say, the Torah Song. I have to work these things out very carefully, and usually at the keyboard; not necessarily at the organ, but at the keyboard most of the time. But yes, I do think there is an improvisatory aspect towards the way I develop a lot of my ideas—especially the fantasy pieces such as you’re talking about. So it doesn’t bother me if these pieces come off as improvisatory, I think that is just the way my imagination tends to work.

DK: It gives them a spontaneity that is very enticing.
CP: Yes, I think that’s right, and I’ve written several pieces in that same vein actually—some recently—that aren’t yet in print. It seems to be a successful formula for me in terms of organ pieces.

DK: You compose on commission quite a bit.
CP: Yes. I am lucky to have pretty much a steady stream of commissions.

DK: How do you go about tailoring a piece for a commission? I would imagine your own technical ability might lead you astray if you’re writing for a particular audience. Is that ever a problem or something you keep in mind?
CP: Sometimes they stipulate the difficulty level of a piece or specific voicing and so forth. The commissions I’ve had don’t often put limits on me—but I think it’s great discipline to be able to write something that’s very simple if that’s what they’re looking for. I remember the Torah Song fantasy: I think the rules specified that it would be a concert piece, but of moderate difficulty, which is kind of an odd combination—I think I managed to strike a happy medium in that piece.

DK: And that one won a prize.
CP: Yes, the 1994 Clarence Mader Foundation prize in organ composition.

DK: How generalized must you be in assigning registrations to organ works, and how much leeway do you imagine your performers and interpreters having? Some composers, especially French composers, are very specific; many American composers give nothing more than dynamic indications. How do you make those types of decisions?
CP: I have typically put in registrations in most of my pieces, at least as a guideline, but I’ve always told the people I have written these pieces for that they should have leeway to do what works on their instrument, or if they feel strongly about doing something a certain way I’d like to leave a certain amount of freedom to the performer. But I usually suggest various colors or the kind of sound I’m thinking about, and a lot of my pieces do have that sort of French romantic registration ideal behind them.

DK: How much does the instrument at All Saints’ [Beverly Hills] influence—
CP: Oh, probably it does! (laughs)

DK: That’s where you spend most of your time, I imagine.
CP: So it does, I think—the colors that are on that particular instrument often influence what I indicate in my pieces—it’s a pretty comprehensive instrument, I might add! But they can be expanded on.

DK: Well, every organ’s different.
CP: Yes.

DK: I know you have been commissioned by the Association of Anglican Musicians, by Washington National Cathedral, and your works are often performed at All Saints’. Do you feel that you are part of a continuing Anglican musical tradition in the church?
CP: I think I could put myself into that category. Most of my choral commissions have been from Episcopal churches or cathedrals. And the choir that I work with here at All Saints’ is one of the best—I don’t mind saying that I think it’s one of the best choirs in the country in the Anglican tradition, so that’s had a big influence on me, and on my choral writing. We perform a great deal of the English repertoire, as well as American music that flows from that tradition, and I think my own music certainly falls into that continuum.

DK: How would you describe the essential elements of that style?
CP: In terms of the way that I write for the choir, I’m used to a straight-tone sound, and really favor that sound. In the Anglican approach to choral singing there is also a great attention to word accentuation or localized word stress, and that is something that I pay a great deal of attention to in my setting of texts. And as far as texture goes, I use a combination of polyphonic and homophonic textures that ebb and flow—and not strictly one or the other.

DK: A hybrid.
CP: It is sort of a hybrid in a way.

DK: Many English organs are designed primarily as liturgical instruments and choral accompanying instruments, and that certainly has affected many of the composers coming out of those places; do you think that that’s something that you relate to as well, or are you more in that French category where the instrument is more soloistic?
CP: I think maybe I’m a hybrid as far as that goes as well, perhaps leaning to the French side. A lot of my commissions have pretty substantial organ parts—a lot of my choral pieces in general: I like to think of the organ and choir as basically equal partners most of the time, unless specifically it’s not intended to be that way. But, generally speaking, that’s the way I like to treat the organ.

DK: Do you think that there are specifically American traits to the Anglican tradition here that distinguish it from our British counterparts, and perhaps in your works in particular?
CP: I’m sure. I think we take their tradition and make it our own in certain ways, because we have our own unique set of influences—American folk tunes, jazz, spirituals, and popular music. I’m thinking of the New York composers Calvin Hampton, Larry King, and all sorts of people . . . David Hurd and others. I think a lot of that music flows out of that Anglican tradition but is also highly original and very much American, I pretty much see myself falling into that tradition.

DK: Perhaps there’s a little more adventuresome spirit in the American style?
CP: I think you could possibly say that. (pauses) Not to say anything negative about the English at all!

DK: No, no. Well, there’s that classic Anglican restraint, which sometimes we Americans don’t do quite as well.
CP: Probably we’re less restrained. Perhaps. (laughs) I don’t know!

DK: Do you have particular favorites among your own works, pieces that came off particularly well in terms of your expectations when you sat down to write them, or perhaps an organ piece that you like to play a lot?
CP: One of my special pieces is not a solo organ work, but the Concertino for Organ and Chamber Orchestra, which was my first big commission, and it led to all sorts of other things and opened a lot of doors—I think of that as an extremely special piece. Well, I try to make every piece (laughs) something to think of in that way. The chorale preludes are in some ways among the most popular things that I’ve done, and I use those all the time. The Toccata on Antioch, for instance: I sat down and wrote that little set of pieces [Joy to the World: Three Preludes for Christmas] a few years ago, but I use them all the time, they’re very popular, they get played often. Also the Triptych [for Organ] that I wrote in the mid ’90s I use frequently. Those can be played together or separately; I use them separately all the time. They’re quite effective in the service context, and I’ve used them as recital pieces as well. Of my pieces for organ and instruments, the Suite for Organ, Brass [Quintet] and Percussion has certainly been one of the most successful for me.

DK: We spoke earlier about your Fantasy on Torah Song, which is one of my favorites; another I particularly like is your Fanfare. Can you tell me a little about the origin of that work—it was a commission, wasn’t it?
CP: It was commissioned by Pat Gillis, a parishioner at All Saints’, Beverly Hills when we installed a new fanfare trumpet on the organ. It’s a big high-pressure hooded trumpet—it’s quite a brilliant stop—and he actually was the one who paid to have it added to the organ. It was his wish to commission a piece to feature the new trumpet; also it was dedicated to his mother, who was a long-time church organist. So I designed this work to really “show off” the new trumpet stop. It’s basically a rondo with a “big tune” on the solo trumpet making several appearances, and other splashy, colorful things in between. That’s another piece that I think works extremely well as either a recital piece or in the context of a big service or what have you—if you have the right organ.

DK: So, what’s next for you? What’s on your horizon?
CP: Well, I just got today—believe it or not, it was today—confirmation of a commission for the 2010 AGO convention in Washington, D.C. This is for a new work for organ and instruments. It looks like it will be a piece for chamber organ and four winds, probably ten minutes in a single movement . . . the idea is still under development! (laughs) So, that’s kind of a big thing that’s coming up, and there are some other interesting things in the works.

DK: And I believe you told me that you’re launching a website?
CP: Yes, it’s actually up and running now, and has a complete list of my compositions, both published and unpublished, as well as a list of current commissions and other information. You can find it at
<www.craigphillipscomposer.com&gt;.

DK: When you get a commission, how do you decide what to do? I’m sure some of these commissions can be very specific, but others may be rather general.
CP: It depends. If it’s, for instance, a choral piece like what I’ve just been working on, the primary task is to come up with a good text. The people who commission a piece are usually looking for something for a particular occasion, so [we have to find] an appropriate text; usually something in the public domain, or, once or twice, we’ve done things where the text was commissioned simultaneously. So that can be fun, too.

DK: That would be a rather rare opportunity.
CP: I wrote a big Easter anthem a few years ago called On This Bright Easter Morn, which has been very popular. The text was also commissioned and written by a poet named Janine Applegate, who lives in Portland. I collaborated on two pieces with her, which was a lot of fun. But generally speaking I tend to go with things that are in the public domain.

DK: That’s always a safe bet.
CP: It’s a safe bet—less complicated. I’ve set a couple of works to texts by more recent poets—secular pieces—whose foundations, alas, don’t yet allow their texts to be set to music for publication. But they generally specify a length of a piece, and I ponder . . . (laughs) . . . ponder the text or whatever the idea for the piece is, and then just get going. Coming up with the initial idea for a piece, I think, is always the most difficult part—once you have it, and you know it’s right, things begin to flow. With most commissions usually people have a general idea of what they’re looking for. I received one recently through a church and an arts foundation: they’re going to send me some paintings from local artists to look at and then devise a set of pieces based on probably two or three of these paintings— it will be something totally different; I don’t yet know what I’ll do with that!

DK: It will be your own version of Pictures at an Exhibition.
CP: Very much; that’s the idea they had in mind. So that will be something quite different, at least something I have not done before.

DK: Is there anything that you would communicate to a young crop of organists, given the chance?
CP: I don’t know if many of them are interested in composition or not, but I would say it’s good to stay open—to new organ compositions in general, and to the idea that being an organist and a composer is a long, long tradition. Being a performer and a composer was really the norm until fairly recently in the scheme of things, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t still be that way, in my opinion. Being an organist and a performer and a composer . . . it all works together for me, so . . . (laughs) I think it’s a great combination.

DK: Well, it’s working for a lot of other people, too: they think it’s a good combination for you (laughs) as well!
CP: It’s a good combination for me, but others can do it!

DK: Thanks very much for speaking with me today, and keep up the good work!
CP: Well, thank you very much!

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Craig Phillips Organ and Choral Works, and Recordings
Organized by scoring and title, with publisher and catalog number

Organ Solo
Fanfare (Selah, 160-640)
Fantasia on the tune Finnian (Selah, coming soon)
Fantasia on Sine Nomine (Selah, 160-676)
Fantasy Toccata (Selah, coming soon)
Fantasy: Torah Song (Yisrael V’oraita) (Selah, 160-857)
Fantasy: Terra Beata (Paraclete Press, PPM00431)
Festival Piece (Selah, 160-860)
Glad Praises We Sing (Selah, 160-814). Four Preludes for Organ: Kremser, Hyfrydol, Nettleton, Engelberg
Joy to the World (Selah, 160-815). Three Preludes for Christmas: Divinum Mysterium, Forest Green, Toccata on Antioch
Organ Music for the Seasons, Vol. 4 (Augsburg Fortress, 9780800637507). Prelude on Richmond
Partita on Lobe den Herren (Selah, 160-691)
Partita on Veni Creator Spiritus (Selah, 160-440)
Prelude on Victimae paschali (MorningStar, MSM-10-513), from Three Plainchants for Organ, ed. Lynn Trapp
Psalm Prelude (Selah, 160-875)
Toccata on Hyfrydol (Selah, 160-675)
Tribute (A lullaby for organ) (Selah, 160-682)
Triptych for Organ (MorningStar, MSM-10-941)
Trumpet Tune (MorningStar, MSM-10-926)
Wondrous Love (Fred Bock Music Co., BG0945). 12 Preludes for Organ (includes “Aria”)
25 Harmonizations and Descants (Selah, 160.731). Volume XI of series

Organ and Instruments
A Song Without Words (E. C. Schirmer, #6750), for cello and organ
March for Trumpet & Organ (Selah, 160-970)
Night Song for Oboe and Organ (or harpsichord) (Selah, in preparation)
Pastorale & Dance (Selah, 160-975), for bassoon & organ
Prelude & Exultation for Organ, Brass Quintet, and Percussion (Selah, full score 160-985, organ score 160-986, instrumental parts 160-987)
Serenade for Horn and Organ (Oxford, 0-19-386763-X)
Suite for Organ and Brass Quintet and Percussion (Selah, full score 160-981, organ score 160-982, instrumental parts 160-983)

Unpublished Works for Organ Solo or Organ and Instruments
Concertino for Organ and Chamber Orchestra (1995) c. 13 minutes. 2 flutes, clarinet in A, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn in F, 2 trumpets, trombone, strings. Score and parts available on rental.
Sonata for Cello and Organ (2004). Score available for sale.
Sonata for Organ (1983). Score available for sale.
Second Sonata for Organ (2001). Score available for sale.
Variations on a Kyrie (1995). Concert work for organ duet. Score available for sale.

Choral
A Festival Song (E. C. Schirmer, #5440 & #5441), SATB chorus, soprano and baritone soli, and orchestra
A True Hymn (Selah, 418-624), SATB and organ (text of George Herbert)
And I Saw the Holy City (Oxford, ISBN 0-19-386712-5), SATB and organ
Antiphon: Let All the World in Every Corner Sing (Paraclete, PPM00435), SATB and organ
The Beatitudes (Selah, 410-516), SATB and organ
Benedictus Dominus Deus (A Song of Zechariah) (Selah, 410-887), SATB and organ
Christ, mighty Savior (Paraclete, PPM00538), SATB and organ (alternate version with strings and organ)
Dies Gratiae (Requiem Reflections) (Selah, 440-901), SATB, soprano and baritone soli, and orchestra
Festival Eucharist (Paraclete, PPM00624), choral score with congregational parts, with organ
Festival Eucharist (Paraclete, PPM00624FS), SATB, congregation, descant, brass quintet, timpani and organ
For God So Loved the World (Paraclete, PPM00606), SATB a cappella with solo soprano
Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken (hymn concertato) (Selah, 425-888), SAB, 2 trumpets, timpani and organ
Gracious God (Paraclete, PPM00132), SATB, organ and flute
Great Is the Lord (Paraclete, PPM00813), SATB and organ
Hodie Christus Natus Est (Trinitas, 4502), SATB and organ
The Holly and the Ivy (Paraclete, PPM00018), SATB and organ
The House of Faith Has Many Rooms (Selah, 410-691), SATB and organ
How the Grandeur of Creation (Selah, 410-639), SATB, organ (optional strings)
I Love All Beauteous Things (Trinitas, 4610), SATB and organ
Keep Watch, Dear Lord (Selah, 420-526), SATB and organ
Light’s Glittering Morn (Paraclete, PPM00427), SATB and organ
(A version with brass quintet and timpani is also available from the publisher)
Missa Brevis (Washington National Cathedral) (Trinitas, 4583), SATB and organ
Morning Glory, Starlit Sky (Paraclete, PPM00835), SATB a capella
On This Bright Easter Morn (Trinitas, 4501), SATB, organ, brass quintet
People, Look East! (Selah, 405-103), unison, organ, and optional descant
The Preces and Responses (Paraclete, PPM00211), SATB and organ
Psalm 34 (E. C. Schirmer, 5364), two-part treble and organ
Psalm 84 (Paraclete, PPM09729), SATB and organ
Psalm 103 (Trinitas, 4507), SATB and organ
Ride on in Majesty (Trinitas, 4580), SATB anthem with organ
The Risen Sun (Selah, 420-337)
Rorate Caeli (Trinitas, 4500), SATB a cappella
So Much to Sing About (E. C. Schirmer, #5365), SATB and organ
Teach me, my God and King (Paraclete, PPM00303), SATB motet, unaccompanied
Thee Will I Praise (E. C. Schirmer, #5718), SATB and organ
Version with organ and brass quintet (E. C. Schirmer, #5719 & 5719A)
There’s a Voice in the Wilderness Crying (Selah, 422-903), two-part choir and organ
Transfiguration (Selah, 405-390), SATB and organ
Two Advent Anthems (Selah, 405-146), SATB, organ and oboe
The Unsearchable Riches (Paraclete, PPM00625), SATB and organ
We Walk by Faith (Trinitas, 4611), SATB divisi and organ

Unpublished Choral Works
Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life (2005), SATB motet, unaccompanied
Lord, You now have set your servant free (2006), SATB anthem, with organ, brass quintet and timpani
Magnificat (1993) c. 9 minutes, score and parts available on rental, SATB chorus, string orchestra and organ
Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in D (2003), SATB canticles with organ
Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in D-flat (2002), SATB canticles with organ
O Light Invisible (2003), SATB motet, a cappella
The Preces and Responses (A-flat) (2002), SATB, unaccompanied
Rune of Hospitality (2003), SATB anthem, unaccompanied
Send forth your light (2002), SATB anthem with organ, based on Psalm 43
Sweet Music, Heavenly Rare (2006), SATB motet, unaccompanied
The Passion According to St. John (2008), SATB chorus, three soloists, unaccompanied
Though every tongue shall spend its fire (2003), SATB anthem with organ
You Shall Know the Truth (2005), SATB anthem with organ

Recordings
A Choral Feast (2001) (Gothic, G-49126), The Choir of Men & Boys, Washington National Cathedral, Douglas Major, conductor. “Gloria” from Missa Brevis
A Festival Song: The Music of Craig Phillips (2004) (Gothic, G-49207), The Choir of All Saints’ Beverly Hills; Tom Foster, conductor; Craig Phillips, organist.
Song of Zechariah: Benedictus Dominus Deus
Teach Me, My God and King
Serenade for Horn and Organ
Psalm 34
Pastorale for Bassoon and Organ
The House of Faith Has Many Rooms
And I Saw the Holy City
Ride On in Majesty
Fanfare for Organ
Keep Watch, Dear Lord
A Song Without Words for Cello and Organ
A Festival Song
Be Still My Soul (2006) (Gothic, G-49251), The Choir of All Saints’ Church, Beverly Hills, Dale Adelmann, conductor. The Risen Sun, Transfiguration, We Walk by Faith
Blasts from the Past Century (2006) (Pro Organo, CD 7197), David Heller, organ. Fantasy Toccata
Burnished Bright (2006) (Paraclete, GDCD 040), Gabriel V Brass Quintet, David Chalmers, organ. Suite for Organ, Brass and Percussion
Easter (1997) (Gothic, G-49097), The Choir of All Saints’ Church, Beverly Hills, Thomas Foster, conductor. On this bright Easter morn
On A Sunday Afternoon (2005) (JAV Recordings, JAV 149), Todd Wilson, organ; Yvonne Caruthers, cello. A Song Without Words for Cello and Organ
Organ Americana (2004) (Pro Organo, CD 7196), Tom Trenney, organ. Toccata on “Antioch,” Prelude on “Kremser,” Fantasy on “Torah Song”
Seasons of Festivity (1997) (Arkay Records, AR6162), Marilyn Keiser, organ. Prelude on “Kremser”
Silence & Music (1993) (Gothic, G-49064), The Choir of All Saints’ Church, Beverly Hills, Thomas Foster, conductor. Hodie, Christus natus est
Sinfonia Festiva (2005) (Summit Records, DCD 436), Paul Skevington, organ; Washington Symphonic Brass. Psalm Prelude, Fanfare, Suite for Organ, Brass and Percussion
Small Wonder (2003) (Pro Organo, CD 7190), Christmas at St. Paul’s, K Street, Washington, D. C. The Holly and the Ivy (arr. Phillips)
Spiritual Pairs (1996) (Pro Organo, CD 7067), Marilyn Keiser, organ. If you will only let God guide you