Celebrating Marilyn Keiser at 75

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Ore: Yes, in 1936. 

What can you recall about your childhood?

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

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

Tell us about your first piano lessons.

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

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

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

Did you play other instruments besides the piano?

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

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

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

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

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

When did you start to play the organ for church?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What contemporary music did you learn?

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

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

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

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

What did you do after graduation from Concordia-Nebraska?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What courses did you teach at Concordia-River Forest?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please discuss your composing, hymn festivals, and recordings.

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

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

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

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

Describe your compositional process.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there a Set X of Eleven Compositions in progress?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Childhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early music lessons

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

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

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

First church position

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

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

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

Political climate

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

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

The big city

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

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

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

The search for organ music

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

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

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

Organ lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

A place to practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The search for Bach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organ lessons

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

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

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

To be continued.

When I was a kid . . .

KLH and WCRB

I grew up in the rectory of the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, where my father was rector. Prominent on the shelves on the living room wall nearest the street was a KLH Model 24 “Hi-fi” and a collection of LPs. Dad wrote his sermons in the living room on Saturday nights using a typewriter set up on a card table facing the speakers of the KLH, listening to the live broadcast of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) on classical radio station WCRB. It was well understood that one entered that room on pain of death.

Once, a thief broke into the house, and the KLH was among the missing items. The police recovered a cache of stuff they thought might be ours, and asked my mother over the phone for details that would help identify it. She remembered that there was a Joan Sutherland recording on the turntable, and that turned the trick. The cache was returned with the record intact. Dame Joan saved the day.

WCRB was, and still is, the classical music radio station in Boston. When I was a kid, it was at 1330 AM and 102.5 FM (like so many things, those numbers have changed). The AM side was important because the Ford Falcon only had an AM radio. The theme music for WCRB’s afternoon rush-hour program, Drive Time, was the last movement of Handel’s Organ Concerto, op. 7, no. 6 (B-flat major), in a recording featuring Pierre Cochereau with a big orchestra. I thought his cadenzas were thrilling, but later realized they were “of a period,” romantic and virtuosic, un-Handelian. We heard that piece pretty much every day, singing along, and carrying the earworm through supper. WCRB was such a part of our family life that I played that concerto on my senior recital at Oberlin as a gift to my parents. I used a three-stop Flentrop chamber organ on the stage of Warner Concert Hall joined by a string quartet of friends and wrote my own cadenzas—a decidedly un-Cochereau-esque performance.

Richard L. Kaye was the manager of WCRB, and ultimately the chairman of its board of directors. He hosted a program called WCRB Saturday Night, which came on after the BSO concert, in which he presented humorous takes on classical music and introduced the Boston audience to British comedy. It was at his hands that I learned of the King’s Singers, Florence Foster Jenkins, the “Bricklayer” letter (www.lectlaw.com/files/fun28.htm), and heaps of other hilarity. Allan Sherman (“Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh…”) was a favorite, and Monty Python a staple.

Mr. Kaye’s greatest contributions were marathon fundraisers for the BSO. Each year WCRB would devote an entire weekend to the effort, featuring interviews with orchestra members and giving the audience the chance to make pledges in return for prizes, very much a model for the now ubiquitous NPR fund-raisers. One tee-shirt bore the phrase, “Beethoven Lives: 1770–1827.” I’m guessing that was Beethoven’s bicentennial year. There were contests for musical limericks and puns, with symphony tickets as prizes. One of my entries as a 16-year-old was “Of Korsakov only between movements.” I didn’t win. I’ve read that Richard L. Kaye was responsible for raising more than $3,000,000 for the BSO—in 1974 dollars.

Vinyl

My parents’ collection of recordings included lots of the favorite classical symphonies, and Dad subscribed to the Musical Heritage Society, a mail-order record company with a “disc of the month” club. Two or three randomly selected discs would arrive in the mail each month. They were heavy on the baroque, which was fine with me, but I remember one in particular that featured the late McNeil Robinson and the choir of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Times Square in New York City. While I don’t remember the programming, I do remember that Neil improvised on that smashing Aeolian-Skinner organ between choral pieces. As a young pup of an organist, I was in the thrall of the sound of that organ and of the very idea that someone would create a piece of music out of thin air like that.

In those days, Gerre Hancock was organist at Christ Church (Episcopal, now Christ Church Cathedral) in Cincinnati. That was dad’s home parish, and he had gotten his hands on a couple LPs of “Uncle Gerre” leading the church’s annual Boar’s Head Festival. The “Title Song” was the Boar’s Head Carol, with organ improvisations between verses, and again, I was thrilled with the sound, the concept, and the power of that music. I feel lucky to have grown up to know both of those organists, and you can bet I told them both about how their recordings helped inspire my career.

Organs I knew

Ernest Skinner’s Opus 128—that’s an early one. It was built in 1905, the year that Robert Hope-Jones joined the Skinner Organ Company as vice-president, and it was in our home church. It was the first organ I played, and I thought it was pretty great. But from the beginning of my “organ awareness,” I knew it was in poor condition. It made all sorts of strange groaning and dying sounds, it had heaps of dead notes, and it ciphered. 

I have a vivid memory of the organist leaving the bench during a service, crossing the chancel (bowing to the altar), fetching a ladder, crossing the chancel (bowing to the altar), setting the ladder, and climbing to the chamber to pull a pipe, quelling the cipher, still wearing his black cassock—then repeating the solemn farce in reverse to return the ladder to its hook. Looking back on that, I’m sure he was delighted to stage that piece of theater. The Skinner was replaced by a two-manual tracker organ by C. B. Fisk (Opus 65) a few years later (www.cbfisk.com/instruments/opus_65).

As a treble chorister, I was itching to take organ lessons. Dad was adjunct professor of homiletics at the Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he arranged for me to have lessons with Alastair Cassels-Brown, professor of sacred music and chapel organist at the seminary, where the chapel organ had been built by Walter Holtkamp in 1956. That organ is just as old now as Skinner #128 was when I first played it. (Yikes!) It has electro-pneumatic action, a slider chest for the Great, and a Ruckpositiv, unusual for American organs at that time. Melville Smith was the organist when the Holtkamp was installed—he was also director of the nearby Longy School of Music. A young Charles Fisk was Holtkamp’s apprentice, E. Power Biggs lived in the neighborhood, and his disciple Daniel Pinkham was also around. They were all leaders of a great revolution in organ design and playing, and I love to imagine evening conversations in that little organ loft during the installation. 

I rode my bicycle seven miles from home in Winchester to ETS for those organ lessons (when I was a kid . . . ). When I drive those narrow busy roads today, I can hardly believe I survived then—in the days before helmets.

A couple years later, my lessons moved to the First Congregational Church in Winchester, home of a three-manual Fisk organ built in 1972 (www.cbfisk.com/instruments/opus_50). John Skelton, a former student of Alastair, was the church’s organist, and he was my teacher through my graduation from high school in 1974. I was given practice privileges there, which was mighty convenient, as the church was just two blocks from our home.

George Bozeman was an organbuilder in the area, and his wife Pat was a member of the choir at the Parish of the Epiphany. George was one of several musicians in the area who encouraged my enthusiasm. He was organist of the First Congregational Church of neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, which has a marvelous three-manual organ built in 1860 by E. & G. G. Hook (http://database.organsociety.org/SingleOrganDetails.php?OrganID=8041). He offered me the chance to serve as his assistant, covering for him when he was away on organbuilding trips. It was about an hour walk or fifteen-minute bike ride from home (when I was a
kid . . . ), and I loved playing and practicing on that grand instrument. There was a Dairy Queen along the route. The Woburn Unitarian Church was across the square, home to another large three-manual Hook—that’s the one that was relocated through the Organ Clearing House to the Church of the Holy Cross in Berlin, Germany—Die Berliner Hook.

William H. Clarke had been the organist of both those churches in Woburn through the 1860s and 1870s, oddly shuttling back and forth between the two. He was responsible for the installation of the organ in the Unitarian Church in 1870 and was the great and good friend of George P. Kinsley, the head voicer for E. & G. G. Hook. Sometime just after that, Clarke moved to Indianapolis to start his own organ building company, taking Kinsley with him. Among the few dozen organs he built was a ten-stop job for the Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian) in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, where my parents bought a summer home in 1969. That church only operated in the summer, and I was organist there for four summers. That was only a twenty-minute walk.

The First Congregational Church in Yarmouthport has a two-manual Hook & Hastings organ that I played on a lot, practicing in bare feet, and playing recitals once in a while. The pastor’s name was Carlton Cassidy—we called him “Hopalong.”

Biggsy

My father’s teaching position at the seminary came with a parking space. Harvard Square, a favorite haunt of our family, was a couple blocks from there. I loved the record department at the Harvard Coop (now Barnes & Noble) and spent all the money I could spare. It seemed that every time I went there, E. Power Biggs had released another recording. I snapped them all up, racing back to the KLH for hours of listening. One of my favorites was Vivaldi’s D-minor concerto as arranged for organ by J. S. Bach (BWV 596). Biggs recorded that, along with chorale preludes by Ernst Pepping, on the Schnitger organ in Zwolle, Holland. I played it on a recital in 1972—I was 16 and never did get those pesky descending thirds in the fugue—and have played it dozens of times since. The organ in Zwolle was built in 1721—it’s 295 years old—and that contemporary music is just as viable there as Bach’s, which was written when the organ was new. Thanks to E. Power Biggs, I learned as a teenager that the pipe organ is all about timelessness. (I can play those thirds now!)

MBTA Commuter Rail trains run from Winchester to North Station in Boston. From there it was easy to take the Green Line subway to Boylston Street where I loved hanging out at the Boston Music Company and Carl Fischer’s, where George Kerr ran the organ music desk. He was a patient guide to an enthusiastic young musician on a tight budget, sharing stories of the famous musicians who came and went from his desk and offering me freebies—most of which I realized later was second-rate stuff he couldn’t sell. 

I bought Biggs’s editions and collections from George, dutifully dating each purchase. On March 4, 1970, I bought Festival Anthology for Organ ($3.00), and Treasury of Early Organ Music ($3.50), and on December 27, 1970 (Christmas money?), I bought A Treasury of Shorter Organ Classics ($2.00). Forty-six years later, they’re still on my shelf, chock full of my youthful fingerings (whose hands were those?) and naïve observations. Over the decades I’ve played from those volumes countless times, I treasure their presence in my library, and I can hardly express all I learned from Biggs through his publications and recordings.

I was surrounded by a group of organists who encouraged my interest in the organ, especially by taking me to concerts. I heard Anton Heiller and Fenner Douglass play the (first) Fisk organ at Harvard University, and thrill of all thralls, Biggs playing on “his” Flentrop organ at the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Adolphus Busch Hall). One evening we heard him play all sorts of early music—Sweelinck, Bruhns, Buxtehude. At the conclusion of the published program, he sidled out from behind the Rugwerk and said to the delighted audience, “I’m happy to play another piece, but I’ve run out of baroque music!” (Baloney!) He gave us Charles Ives’ Variations on ‘America.’ I had never heard anything so cool. I’m guessing that was early in 1972, because the older of my two copies of “The Ives” is dated April 2, 1972. I must have been on the train to Carl Fischer’s the next weekend.

A favorite post-concert haunt of organists was The Wursthaus (long gone) in Harvard Square, an old-fashioned, old-world place that served beer by the bucket and classic soggy German dishes by the greasy pound. I sat with groups of organists at big round tables after concerts, and I recall one evening when someone noticed there were nine people present who played for area churches that had organs built by C. B. Fisk, Inc.

A few years later, in the fall of my freshman year at Oberlin, the magnificent Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated on St. Cecilia Day, capping a week-long festival of workshops, round-table discussions, and concerts. Biggs was there as participant and to receive an honorary degree, and a classmate and I were deputized to meet Mr. and Mrs. Biggs and show them around the Conservatory. He asked us to demonstrate the practice organs for him (his fingers had been ravaged by arthritis) and answered our questions patiently and generously, moments an eighteen-year-old would never forget. When we were finished, he asked if there was a place to get a beer. Oberlin was a dry town then, but my friend and I walked the mile to Johnnie’s Carry-Out on the township border, and brought beer back to their room at the Oberlin Inn. I shared the story with my girlfriend Amy who was still back in Winchester finishing high school. She didn’t believe me, so she went to a record-signing event at the Harvard Coop, and asked Biggs if he knew me. “Oh yes, the bearded one.” Hah! Told you.

The summer of 1976 (I was twenty) was my second stint working for Bozeman-Gibson & Company. That summer, the company moved from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Deerfield, New Hampshire, and my co-worker John Farmer (now an active organbuilder in North Carolina) and I installed a new one-manual organ in the chapel on Squirrel Island, just off Southport Island and Boothbay Harbor, Maine. The only way to reach the island was by ferry, a small privately operated thing like a lobster boat. We caused quite a spectacle carrying the organ parts from the rented truck down the dock to the ferry and stacking them among the other passengers. It took three trips. That was lovely foreshadowing, as Wendy and I have had a house in that area for fifteen years, and we often sail around Squirrel Island.

Before the trip to Squirrel, Farmer and I took the organ on a detour to Boston where we installed it in the crossing of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in preparation for the 1976 American Guild of Organists national convention, where Barbara Bruns played a Handel Concerto with the Handel & Haydn Society Orchestra. I had my AGO convention debut that week as Farmer and I played the organbuilder parts in a piece for organist, organbuilders, and electronic tape by Martha Folts. We stood inside the Fisk organ at King’s Chapel in Boston with the score on a music stand, slapping at square rails and rollerboards, stirring up a fine racket!

The highlight of the 1976 convention was “AGO Night at the Pops” at Symphony Hall with Arthur Fiedler, the Boston Pops, and E. Power Biggs. For one of his signature “Pops Extras,” Fiedler addressed the thousands of organists present, inviting us to sing along with the “next number,” and launching the orchestra into the introduction of “Hallelujah” from Handel’s Messiah. Lord, what a thrill. Biggs played a Rheinberger concerto with the orchestra in what I believe was his last public performance. He died on March 10, 1977.

§

I was lucky to come up playing a fleet of wonderful organs, both new and old. In those days, new organs were being sold like fried dough at the State Fair, and I was treated to more than a dozen dedication recitals during those years. I was fortunate to live in that area where so many talented people were doing so much interesting work in and around organs. They were generous to me with their time and interest in my development. I’m grateful to them all and have tried to pass on the torch in their names to young people I meet who are interested in the organ.

It’s sobering to realize how many of those organs were new—some brand new—when I first knew them, and they’re all over forty years old now. Their leather, like mine, is showing signs of age.

David Wagner holds a DMA in organ from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Marilyn Mason. He has had a career as a performer, a university professor of organ, and as a classical music broadcaster in Detroit, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and in Miami. 

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra is the author of Bach and the Art of Improvisation, published by CHI Press of Ann Arbor, Michigan. (See Figure 1.) She earned degrees in organ performance and pedagogy, choral music education, and music theory, sacred music, and conducting at Dordt College (BA) and the University of Iowa (MFA, DMA). From 1996–2002, Ruiter-Feenstra served as senior researcher at the Göteborg (Sweden) Organ Art Center, taught improvisation courses at Göteborg University, and launched research on Bach and improvisation. While serving as professor of music at Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas (1989–1996) and Eastern Michigan University (1996–2008), she taught organ, harpsichord, theory, improvisation, and sacred music and directed the Collegium Musicum. 

In Volume One of Bach and the Art of Improvisation (Volume Two will be available in early 2016), she explains the importance of improvisation and how musicians would be well served to study and practice the art to improve their ability as players of repertoire. Ruiter-Feenstra meticulously details how Bach learned and taught improvisation. Using historic documents, she reconstructs an improvisation pedagogy method that has passed the test of time. For musicians today who were never taught how to improvise, Ruiter-Feenstra offers a sound and effective improvisation pedagogy that students and professional musicians alike can learn and own. The following conversation explores Ruiter-Feenstra’s development of this pedagogy.

David Wagner: Everyone has a story on how they first fell in love with music and then with the instrument that they play. What is the narrative that will give insight into where you are today?

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra: When I was six years old, I started to play the piano. After I was able to play a few tunes, I was asked to play hymns. In my ancestors’ Dutch schools, everyone sang metrical Psalms and hymns. The Dutch immigrants had their own schools, their own churches, and their own traditions. I was born in Michigan into the Dutch Christian Reformed tradition and grew up in various Dutch immigrant villages in Michigan, Illinois, and Iowa. (From this tradition, by the way, comes Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and Dordt College in Iowa.) I remember learning Dutch words in which there was no equivalent in English and just thinking that these were English words.

Were your parents musicians?

No, they were teachers. My dad was passionate about what is now called special education and then worked in retirement homes. My mother served as an elementary school teacher and also worked with ESL (English as a Second Language) programs.

So, you were interested in music, they recognized that, and they said, “Let’s make sure that Pamela has music lessons.”

Yes. My mother was taking piano lessons when I was in the womb, and I always thought that had some role in developing my ear (she laughs). I started piano lessons at age six, played the violin all the way through elementary school, learned classical guitar, and then I started to play the organ when I was in eighth grade. I played the organ at first because our church needed more organists, and they said to me, “You play the piano, so why not take organ lessons?” I had played hymns in the classroom since third grade, so it felt pretty easy to transfer that to the organ. I had to figure out the pedals, and away we went. My first organ piece was the Karg-Elert Now Thank We All Our God.

How interesting—you learned, very early on, proper four-part chorale writing and doubling by playing hymns, and in some ways, you learned thoroughbass by example. Was this pretty much traditional music? 

Oh, yes, the Dutch congregations were singing from the Genevan Psalm tradition when I grew up, and those Psalms have fabulous sixteenth-century harmonies. Sixteenth-century harmonies feature primarily root position and first inversion harmonies, so this is a great way to begin learning harmony. Genevan Psalms have only two note values, which was also important for improvisation. If you are going to improvise and “decorate” something, it’s much easier to work with one or two note values than with many different rhythms. That’s what I would do: I would learn the Psalms and then go home and make variations on them. I practiced my piano repertoire first and then made my own pieces, my variations on hymns. 

You really started to improvise at a young age! Did you know at that time, as a youngster, that there was this great tradition of organists and improvisation? 

I had no idea. I just thought it was fun to do. I couldn’t leave my hands off the piano, and I would run out of pieces to play, so then I would start improvising. My parents had their stereo right next to the piano, and I would play their old LP records and later their 8-track tapes of mostly sacred choral music or hymns. I would play a track of a recording, and then go to the piano and try to play the same thing “by ear.” I would go back and forth until I figured out the harmony and the melody. Then, I would start embellishing on it. 

So early on it seems that you had decided, “This is for me.” When did you decide to do this for a living and become a professional musician?

Dave, this is the funny thing. I practiced my improvisation just for fun throughout elementary school, middle and high school, but I never played it for my teachers. They always, of course, asked for repertoire, and the discussion of improvisation never came up. When I got to college, I took piano, organ, and voice lessons, and thus, I had a lot to practice. Again, all of these teachers expected repertoire. No one assigned improvisation. 

This was not the time for improvisation, was it?

Right. The teachers hadn’t learned it, it wasn’t in the music curriculum, and so no one was teaching it and no one was learning it. I was at Dordt College in Sioux City, Iowa, and my organ teacher was Joan Ringerwole. She selected terrific repertoire and offered me many opportunities to play in chapel and with the Concert Choir. Thankfully, my organ playing with its heart and soul of congregational singing continued. I arrived at Dordt just after the installation of a three-manual Casavant organ designed and voiced by Gerhard Brunzema. Prior to joining Casavant, Brunzema had partnered with German organ builder Jürgen Ahrend, and together they restored many Arp Schnitger instruments. Brunzema, therefore, had a strong historic-instrument basis, and he built and voiced essentially a Dutch-sounding organ with a modern case at Dordt: it has beautiful Dutch vocally inspired principals and a Dutch Vox Humana that sounded reedy. I had heard adults who had this quality of reedy voices. At one of the Dutch churches I had played at, I remember a male member of the congregation who had such a reedy voice that he could cut through the entire congregation with his voice. He was a POW survivor of World War II, and he sang Genevan Psalms as if his life depended on them. His voice was in the tenor range, singing the Genevan Psalm cantus firmus, and other men would sing bass. Hearing that type of singing helped me to understand the Goudimel harmonies (often with cantus firmus in the tenor), as well as how many Dutch reed stops really had vocal models. (See Figure 2.)

I have heard people comment on what a wonderful instrument the Dordt College Casavant is, and I hope to be able to hear it in person some day. In growing up, you probably played electro-pneumatic and not mechanical action organs.

At my home church, we had an electronic organ. Sitting down and beginning to play this mechanical action organ was nothing less than a revelation. I became an organist for life because of this instrument.

It was that profound of an impact? 

It’s why I pursued organ and church music foremost. I had started out as a piano and choral education major, and I soon thought, “Wow, this organ has such beautiful, human sounds.” It was immediate, it was present, it was alive, and it breathed because it had flexible winding, just like the congregation. Those Dutch people used to sing with gusto. They had passion, and it was exciting to hear them sing. This organ sang in the same way, full of personality and color. 

So, what happened next?

Well, as in most universities and conservatories, at that time at Dordt College, no one was teaching improvisation. I worked a lot with choral music and still improvised in the practice room for the first few weeks that I was there. I spent a lot of time in the practice corridors, as I had so much to practice while studying three instruments. When I’d step out of my practice room to get a drink of water, I’d hear other people practicing, and it gradually dawned on me that no one else was improvising. 

How interesting! You were a “secret improviser.”

Exactly! I thought to myself, uh-oh, maybe professional musicians don’t improvise. I guess I had better stop. Since no one else was doing it, I thought that if I improvised, maybe people would think that I’m not a serious musician. I wondered if this improvisation “stuff” was akin to just fooling around at the keyboard when I should have been practicing “real music.” So, I stopped improvising for the first two years I was at Dordt. I was hungry for it, so I still was a closet improviser on the piano when I went home on breaks.

So what changed?

During my junior year, Joan Ringerwole invited Klaas Bolt, the famous Dutch organist who improvised at St. Bavo Church at Haarlem in the Netherlands, to come and give a concert.

Bolt wanted to have a “Psalmfest” at the concert, where people were invited to sing with the organ. He featured Genevan Psalms, and he improvised on them with great expression and keen understanding of the colors of the organ and how to use his articulation and registrations to make the organ sing the texts. His organ playing was so alive that I thought, “This is the kind of life I heard in the great Dutch singing of my childhood.” His playing had that level of affect and passion and breathing that I missed hearing in a lot of organ playing when it was just repertoire. Hearing Klaas Bolt improvise was a life-altering revelation to me. Here was a professional musician, and to my ears, his playing was more alive than almost any playing I had heard on the organ. Then I realized every musician has to learn to improvise. Even if musicians never improvise in public, they will play their repertoire in a more profound and musical manner from having practiced improvisation. They are going to breathe; they are going to know the music from the inside rather from the outside. If we just learn music with our eyes and our fingers, we know it a little bit from the outside. We don’t know it from the inside the way an improviser does.

Why do you think that is so?

An improviser has to know what makes music work, and what doesn’t make it work. Sometimes you learn most from what doesn’t work. You can’t just say that it didn’t work; you have to ask the question why it didn’t work. How can I fix it, and how can I avoid doing what doesn’t work the next time?

After hearing Klaas Bolt, what was the next step for you?

The first thing I did was to begin to improvise again. 

In other words, it was like saying “Hello, my name is Pamela, and I’m an improviser!” You became a member of Improvisers Anonymous!

[She laughs] Wholeheartedly! 

What did your teachers think of your revelation?

They still wanted to hear repertoire. So, I was still improvising privately in the practice room, but I was improvising and not thinking any longer that it was something I should not be doing. It was really quite the opposite. I no longer felt that I cared if anyone heard me improvising outside the practice room. I started decorating hymns when I played for chapel services at Dordt. When I went to graduate school at the University of Iowa, Delbert Disselhorst and Delores Bruch offered a strong sacred music program. They encouraged me to make variations on hymns, and I was able to practice improvisation within a liturgical context. It was OK to make variations on hymns. 

Improvisation and the art of improvisation was something that never really died out in Europe, correct? 

Oh, yes, until recently, it was still required in France and the Netherlands and some parts of Germany. My European colleagues, mentors, and friends were also teaching improvisation, which was so important. That entire pedagogy of teaching improvisation side-by-side with theory, history, and repertoire, however, never really caught on in the United States. 

It is starting to be taught here now, isn’t it?

Yes, that is true, although we don’t have a long “apprenticeship” tradition here in the States the way they did in France and in the Netherlands. What is needed is an integrated improvisation pedagogy from which teachers can learn it first, and then learn how to teach it. That’s why it is essential to have a pedagogy that anyone can own. Initially, I think it is great to have a teacher for improvisation, but ultimately it is important to have a pedagogy with steps that you can take and apply on your own. Once you understand those steps, then anyone can become her own improvisation teacher. I had to figure that out for myself, because I didn’t have an improvisation teacher, and I wanted to improvise. 

Did you find your improvisation teacher?

I did study improvisation briefly with Klaas Bolt. I also studied with Harald Vogel in Germany and worked a few times with William Porter. 

Both Klaas Bolt and Harald Vogel had their European methodology that grew out of a long tradition.

That is why I wrote Bach and the Art of Improvisation. What I wanted to get at in the book was this premise: Johann Sebastian Bach was probably the greatest organ improviser the instrument has ever known and will ever know. So, what was his methodology, and how did he teach his students? I was fortunate to work in Sweden with the GOArt project. GOArt gathered an international group of scientists, musicologists, performers, acousticians, physicists, organbuilders, woodworkers, artisans, and historic preservationists together. We had an entire team of amazing experts studying the tradition of the antique organs and trying to decipher why so many of the antique organs sounded so much better than modern organs. Hans Davidsson started asking these types of questions, and we all joined in with various ideas for figuring out how the instruments were made, how they sounded, and how and in which contexts they were played.

So it started from the standpoint of the sound of this musical instrument.

Yes, and then it branched out into how was that sound used, and what did that sound inspire? One of the things that inspired me to keep improvising was that I loved to test out historic organs with improvisation. With improvisation, I have “nothing between my fingers and my ears and the instrument,” so I can more keenly assess the soundscape. This way, you spend more time listening. If you start out with repertoire you are thinking, “Did I hit the right note?” and then you forget to listen sometimes. Improvisation is a great way to test an organ. I do this every time I encounter a new instrument, even if I am playing a concert on it and I will be playing mostly learned repertoire. I begin by improvising through the stops, because I want to hear what is the character of the sounds and in which soundscapes do they coexist most naturally and happily? What does the organ tell me about touch and technique, what does it want to say, and why? 

How many years were you involved in this project?

I was in Sweden with GOArt for six years, and it was a fabulously stimulating collaborative project. GOArt is the acrostic for the Göteborg (Sweden) Organ Art Project, which Hans Davidsson initiated and led. The stunning, colorful North German organ built with antique techniques by Munetaka Yokota, Mats Arvidsson, and a highly skilled team represents the apex of the GOArt research in the late ’90s into the new millenium. Those of us who were among the interdisciplinary team of researchers followed the organ building stages of hand-planed wood, sandbed-cast metal, fire-forged iron rollerboards, the physics of wind flow, and we tested sounds, wind pressure, and key action along the way. When the organ was completed, it was thrilling to hear the range of strong, yet vulnerable, transparent, singing sounds of the organ. In my double CD recording of Tunder’s organ works (see Figure 3), I savored the colorful palette of soundscapes by exploring in turn the various families of stops represented on each of the four manuals of the organ. Selecting like stops side-by-side reveals the infinite variation in aural nuance that one can hear in the best instruments, strong congregational singing, and in historic improvisation.

Goodness! You really immersed yourself in this project!

I truly did. We had regular symposia. The organists would learn what the physicists were discovering, and they in turn were listening to what performers, pedagogues, and improvisers were discovering. That is how I was able to dig so deeply into the archival material on how Bach and all of his predecessors learned improvisation, and then how Bach and his pupils and successors and other traditions built on this basic methodology. This is an ongoing story of evolution on how musicians learned and taught improvisation. I’ve spent years and years discerning how improvisation pedagogy works. I’m grateful for many opportunities over the years to test out those ideas with wonderful students in the States and in Europe.

In Volume One of Bach and the Art of Improvisation, you write, “Improvisation is really extemporaneous composition.” I really love that idea. 

You have to be able, to some degree, to think out the music in your head away from a keyboard before you even play your first note. Here is an example. We have our presidential State of the Union address. The President is reading his speech from a teleprompter for his State of the Union address, but he has a hard copy of the address on paper in front of him. This idea of oration, or the art of giving speeches, goes way back before the days of teleprompters, before the Common Era, to the time of Greek orators. Greek orators had to have a memory that worked in a way different from what we think about when we memorize music. In memorizing music, many people memorize every note. The Greek orator’s memory was much more like a blueprint or an outline for a speech, because they didn’t have computers, or printers or teleprompters. They had to memorize the outline of their speech, and then they decorated the interior lines of that speech. Johann Sebastian Bach was still using that art of memory when he was improvising, and that is what I do also when I improvise. 

So you improvise from a mental outline?

Yes, I have a blueprint in my brain; I want to know the beginning, the middle, and the end of what I am doing before I even begin, even though I don’t know specific notes, or even sometimes where the improvisation is going to take me. Within that mental/aural blueprint, there is an “introduction” (Exordium) where you want to grab the listener’s attention. The Greeks did this too. You want to play something “flashy” to say, “OK, this is going to be the mood and the character of the piece, and the key of the piece,” and after that, you launch into something of a narration (Narratio). In the narration, you “tell” the listener what you are going to do, just like the orator is saying, “This is what I plan to discuss.” You are staying in your home key at this time, as you are telling the story at the beginning. Then you have a proposition (Propositio), a new idea that you want somebody to know about. Then, scientifically, to show people that your idea or ideas hold some weight and truth, you have to argue your point (Confutatio). Again, this is what the Greeks would do, they would argue against their proposal, but brilliantly, they would turn the argument on its head to confirm (Confirmatio) the truth of their original proposition. So, in these “confutatios” in music, you can explore other ideas or other snippets of ideas, or take those ideas to new keys; this is what we would call the development section in what is known as sonata-allegro form. However, you come back and confirm it with your recapitulation and return to your home key. After you have confirmed your main proposition, then you end with a conclusion (Peroratio) that has a “bang” and some sort of bookend effect that hearkens back to your original opening attention-grabbing statement.

I have heard that composers don’t have to be good improvisers, but good improvisers have to be good composers. 

That is true. Yes. C. P. E. Bach said that. Improvisers learn a great deal from investigating existing compositions and asking questions about specific works in the manner a curious child or tenacious archaeologist might keep asking, “Why?” 

Here’s an example. Knowing that Georg Böhm taught the young Bach made me wonder what influences Böhm’s compositions had on Bach. Böhm’s keyboard works provide excellent material for improvisers, as they are fairly easy to analyze. With a strong thoroughbass foundation, one can emulate some works of Böhm in improvisation. I explored this approach to improvisation pedagogy in Bach and the Art of Improvisation and in my harpsichord CD, Bach’s Teacher Böhm & Improvisation. (See Figure 4.)

I selected a præludium, partita, dance suite, and fughetta of Böhm to perform and then chose specific chorales that would work well with those genres. On the second half of the CD, you can hear my improvisations on those chorales in the style of Böhm, recycling the same genres in new ways. In my Bach, Improvisations and the Liturgical Year CD, I took inspiration from Bach works to improvise on chorales on the Pasi organ at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lynnwood, Washington. (See Figure 5.) Improvisers make their nests from snippets of material and enduring designs from the
finest composers.

Getting back to what you said earlier about copying what you had heard, it makes me think of Mozart. One of the great composers was an improviser at a very young age.

It is said that Mozart had many things worked out in his head before he ever put a note down a paper—very much like a great improviser. 

I always figured that people were born with some sort of “improvisation gene” and you either had it or you didn’t.

No, it is like any other skill. It takes work. You cannot become an Olympic ice skater the first time you put on a pair of skates and venture out onto the ice! Just like Olympic athletes, accomplished improvisers have invested thousands and thousands of hours of practice, studying, and coaching. Even as an improviser, “going down the wrong path” can be very instructive. Like any skill, it doesn’t drop from the sky, it is a matter of giving the skill deep, regular focus and attention, sprinkled heavily with perseverance.

Can you speak to the benefit of actually copying out a piece of music instead of just making a photocopy?

In Bach’s time, everyone had to copy music. I have my students copy music, for instance, copying out one of Bach’s Inventions from his own hand. They can see that in Bach’s handwriting, there is gesture; it isn’t just some sort of robotic computer-generated notation. You can learn from how notes are written and beamed together. You also learn different clefs like the C clef, so you learn relationships; you are not reading by note names, but rather by intervals and relationships of distance on the page and how that translates to the keyboard. It is as if you are reading words and phrases instead of looking at individual letters. (See Figure 6.) Remember how it was when you first began to learn typing? You first have to think of each key individually, and after a while your fingers know where the keys are, and you can type a word and then later a phrase. It is the same thing with improvisation. No matter how proficient someone is as a player of repertoire, one has to start from the very beginning as an improviser. 

This really is very humbling. 

Yes, it is, but it is also very much worth it!

It was interesting to learn from your book Bach and the Art of Improvisation that Bach was very demanding of his students, and yet also was extremely practical in what he taught.

Oh, yes, Bach was genuinely interested in getting right to the work of experiential learning. Bach usually took a chorale melody and a thoroughbass. That was the blueprint; the chorales had a soprano and a bass line, and students would have to fill in the alto and tenor part. Wouldn’t it be great if theory could now be taught in conjunction with improvisation? If students had their hands on the keyboard, they would learn theory much better and as an integrated part of musicianship, because they would store information in various memory sources—the tactile, the visual, the aural, and the analytical. The more synapses you have firing, the more aspects of music will make sense on multiple levels. 

Also with Bach as a teacher, wasn’t it true that you could not move on “to the next step” without mastering what had been assigned to you?

Ah, yes, Bach’s students weren’t allowed to proceed to repertoire and improvisation before they had their fingering in place!

Did Bach know about different fingering traditions, or what today we would call “early fingering”?

Yes, he most certainly did. In fact,
C. P. E. Bach was still documenting it after Bach’s death. This type of fingering was still being used during the time of Bach’s son.

Didn’t J. S. have a profound effect on what we consider today as “modern fingering?” 

Bach was one of the first to use the thumb to the same extent as the fingers, which astonished other musicians at the time. Some of Bach’s music doesn’t work exclusively with early fingering described in 16th- and 17th-century treatises. Because of this, the so-called modern scale fingerings used today were already chronicled by C. P. E. Bach as one of several options. Significantly, though, this was not the one and only option. The performer was offered different fingerings for the same passage, and could select the most appropriate fingering to the style and tempo of the piece, to the note values and function of particular passages, to the size of the musician’s hand, and for the articulation desired. Using a palette of fingering choices offers much more sophisticated playing results that can imitate bowing, tonguing, and most importantly, singing.

The clavichord is the instrument Bach advocated most for keyboard practice, as the instrument itself is the finest technique pedagogue. The clavichord offers its best blooming sound when the player plays with relaxed arm weight, with the hand and arm lined up above the key to be played. (See Figure 7.) If the player uses less than ideal fingering and arm weight, the sound will be weak and dull, instead of rich and colorful. The clavichord tangents press up on the strings, allowing for infinite light and shadows in the dynamic range, as well as Bebung, an ornamental vibrato accomplished by pressing weight in and out of the string. Practicing on the clavichord translates to an ideal organ technique and organ playing that sounds much cleaner (clarity of touch and articulation) and more expressive. 

You suggest that it is helpful to learn to improvise in the Baroque style. Why?

Most students learn theory from a Baroque perspective first, culminating in analyzing Bach chorales. My vision is to have theory and practice, history and performance integrated as one art. Already, students start with Baroque harmonies in Bach chorales. From there, it is relatively easy to stretch out those tertiary harmonies vertically as well as stretching the harmonic rhythms horizontally to take more space as melodies develop, which is what happens in much nineteenth-century music. The improvisation pedagogy developed in Bach and the Art of Improvisation is a series of steps derived from the repertoire. This pedagogy can easily be transferred to any pattern-based music improvisation (music organized in modes and scales) from medieval music to Messiaen.

In your pedagogy, what is the first step? 

I always begin where the student is at and build appropriate steps from there. If the student needs a better foundation in relaxed technique, fingering, hymn playing, note reading, and analysis, we work with those aspects immediately and introduce improvisations such as musettes, ostinatos, and two-voice counterpoint. My students, other professional musician friends, and I have had great fun in developing “improvisation societies” in which we improvise for and with one another on various themes. This puts the improvisation psychology into a friendly environment and allows participants to inspire each other by becoming a “counting choir” to help the improviser keep track of the meter and tempo, by playing rondos, in which each person can try out a small phrase at a time, by offering constructive feedback, fresh ideas, and accountability for practicing.

Where do you then proceed from there? 

I use chorales with soprano and thoroughbass and cadences so that each improviser can hear and sing the cantus firmus as well as the harmonic basis, and know with each sense how to fill in inner voices. Gradually, improvisers can work to harmonize a given soprano and to create upper voices from a given thoroughbass. From thoroughbass and chorales, I introduce how to decorate one line at a time using appropriate figures to fit proper voice leading and harmonic function, both with two-part counterpoint and with four-part harmonies. This leads to chorale preludes and dance suites, which get into exciting meter and rhythmic variations. 

Bach and the Art of Improvisation, Volume Two is ready to go to press. What is the focus of the second volume?

In volume two, I offer free works, but still within a thoroughbass and chorale framework: interludes and cadenzas, preludes, fantasias, continuo playing, partimento, and fugue.

I’d like to hear more about those last three. What about continuo playing?

Many modern continuo-playing realizations simply designate block chords for the thoroughbass harmonies indicated. Some of these are not even careful with appropriate ranges to fit with the soloists, voice leading, or doubling. In contrast, Bach’s continuo playing was described as creating a quartet out of a trio. Instead of resorting to block chord-type continuo, he would most often play the left-hand bass line given and improvise a right-hand part that would fit ideally in dialogue and duet with the other solo voices. When I started improvising in this way in continuo with ensembles, I was astonished at how much more sophisticated it sounds, as well as how much more it enhances what the other instrumentalists are doing.

What is partimento?

Partimento is an improvisation pedagogy practiced by many Italians, notably Adriano Banchieri, Bernardo Pasquini, and Girolamo Frescobaldi, as well as several German musicians in the 17th and 18th centuries. Italian composers influenced the art of improvisatory flourishes in keyboard free works. Froberger is a wonderful example of that Italianate influence from his teacher Frescobaldi, as I demonstrate in my Froberger on the 1658 De Zentis CD played on an original 17th-century Italian harpsichord. (See Figure 8.) In his toccatas, Froberger introduced cosmopolitan influences: Italianate improvisatory virtuosic passagework, French dance and overture rhythms, and strict imitative counterpoint practiced by German composers and the Palestrina lineage of contrapuntalists.

The cross-pollination between Italy and Germany was evident in partimento works, including fugue. After Bach taught his students how to work with thoroughbass in chorales, free works, and continuo playing, he introduced partimento fugues in his early fugal pedagogy. (See Figure 9.) In partimento fugues, the subject and answer are introduced. After the initial entrances, the partimento features thoroughbass only. The improviser’s role was to solve the puzzle by placing additional subject entrances in the fugue according to where they fit with the harmony indicated by the thoroughbass. For example, with a four-voice fugue, the improviser fills in the missing voices and remaining harmony in four-voice counterpoint. Most improvisers enjoy puzzles, riddles, or Sudoku. Partimento is a similar musical game and valuable improvisation pedagogy tool. 

So you can use partimento for fugues?

Yes, Bach did, as did Handel. In Volume Two of Bach and the Art of Improvisation, I show examples of partimento fugue as a starting point for fugal improvisation. Bach certainly moved beyond that in teaching, composing, and improvising fugues, and in my final chapter, I offer applications for how to create increasingly professional fugues. 

I think most people would feel daunted by the thought of improvising fugues.

Yes, and they did in Bach’s day, too. It is truly possible for anyone who is willing to practice with great attention and perseverance. The results are exhilarating.

But the solution is, as Bach did, to build up each of the improvisation pedagogy steps so incrementally, that fugue becomes simply the next rung of the ladder. 

And that’s exactly what you do in Bach and the Art of Improvisation!

This interview was first published in Dutch in Het Orgel 96 (2000), no. 5. Leonhardt had been made an honorary member (Lid van Verdienste) of the Royal Dutch Society of Organists in the previous year. Apart from small adaptations in the first few paragraphs, an occasional correction, and explanations, no attempt has been made to update the content of the article for this translation. The interview on which the article was based took place during the 2000 Leipzig Bach Festival. Leonhardt read the article before it went to the editor and was very pleased with it. I am grateful to the Royal Dutch Society of Organists and the editor of Het Orgel, Jan Smelik, for permission for its republication.*    

Gustav Leonhardt (1928–2012) was perhaps after Wanda Landowska—the most influential harpsichordist of the twentieth century. As Professor of Harpsichord at the Amsterdam Conservatory he introduced countless young musicians from all over the world to the interpretation of early music, especially the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. From his work with the Leonhardt Consort—with his wife Marie as first violinist—grew a limited but no less significant career as a conductor: Leonhardt’s contribution to the complete recording of Bach cantatas for Telefunken and his renditions of operas by Monteverdi and Rameau are milestones in the history of recorded music.

As an organist, Leonhardt has not become nearly as famous—perhaps because organists in general don’t tend to become famous in the way other musicians do, perhaps also because he limited himself to early music. Even among Dutch organists, Leonhardt remained an outsider. Therefore, his being made an honorary member of the Royal Dutch Society of organists in 1999 was an important recognition of a man who has helped define the way we have listened to and performed early music for more than half a century.

I spoke with Leonhardt in the summer of 2000 in Leipzig. He was chairman of the jury of the prestigious Bach competition for harpsichord; ironically, Leonhardt’s former student Ton Koopman held the same position at that year’s organ competition. I met the master after one of the competition rounds and we walked together to our hotels. Leonhardt is often said to have been formal; it is well known how he used to address his Dutch students with the formal pronoun u (pronounced [ü]; the equivalent of the German Sie); this must have come across as utterly prehistoric in the 1970s. But in fact, Leonhardt was extremely friendly; he conversed easily and openly about a host of topics. As we passed by the Thomaskirche, Leonhardt volunteered his opinion of the new Bach organ by Gerhard Woehl.¹ The conversation quickly moved from Woehl to Silbermann, and Leonhardt mentioned the organ at Großhartmannsdorf, which he played in the film The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach: “You know, that Posaune 16 . . . ” His face and gestures spoke louder than a thousand words. I asked why no organbuilder today seemed to be able to make such a Posaune. “Look,” he said dryly yet firmly, “first of all, you have to want it.”

In 2000, at 72, Leonhardt was very much alive and well, still playing some 100 concerts a year. For a concert in Göteborg that year, he didn’t even have a hotel: he arrived in the morning, played a concert in the afternoon, and flew on to Portugal in the evening for a concert the next day. I asked whether he enjoyed traveling; he shrugged: “I mean, it’s simply part of it.” Leonhardt was happy to have the interview on his ‘free’ Friday, when there were no competition rounds. “But if you don’t mind, could we do it early?” What is early, 9 am? “Well, earlier would be fine too.” 8:30, 8 am? “Just fine.” It sounded as if 6:30 would have been OK too.

Jan-Piet Knijff: How did you become interested in organ and harpsichord?

Gustav Leonhardt: Through my parents, I think. They weren’t professional musicians—my father was a businessman—but they were enthusiastic amateurs. What was rather unusual was that, even before the Second World War, we had a harpsichord at home, a Neupert, a small one.² My parents played Beethoven and Brahms for pleasure, but from time to time also Bach and Telemann. Apparently they thought they had to buy a harpsichord for that. I had to learn how to play the piano as a boy; I mean, had to, it was simply a part of life. I don’t remember liking it very much. When the harpsichord came, they let me play written-out figured-bass parts. I didn’t care much for it, but of course, it must have shaped my musicality. During the last few years of the war there was no school, no water, no electricity. Marvelous, of course—especially that there was no school! Moreover, I turned sixteen that year, so I more or less had to hide from the Germans. My brother and I took turns being on the lookout. It was all very exciting. During that time, I was so attracted to the harpsichord. And since there was little else to do, I simply played all the time. And of course, there was the enormous love of Bach. Dad was on the Board of the [Dutch] Bach Society, where Anthon van der Horst conducted.³ At fifteen, I started studying music theory privately with van der Horst. Yes, that I enjoyed very much. I often pulled stops for him at concerts. That’s really where my love of organs comes from.

J-PK: You went to study in Basel. Would it not have been logical to study in Amsterdam with van
der Horst?

GL: Maybe, but harpsichord was high on my wish list too. And the Schola Cantorum in Basel was at the time the only place in the world where one could study early music in all its facets, including chamber music and theory. It pulled like a magnet: I had to go there.

That was in 1947, only a few years after the war, and Holland was really still a poor country at the time. There was very little foreign currency, so studying in Switzerland was not all that easy. Thankfully, my father had business contacts, so from time to time, I went on bicycle from Basel to Schaffhausen to pick up an envelope with Swiss francs . . .⁴ I studied both organ and harpsichord with Eduard Müller, for whom I still have the greatest admiration and respect.

J-PK: Can you tell me more about him?

GL: He was first and foremost an excellent organist, who in addition was asked to teach harpsichord, I think. He was the organist at a terrible organ, but whenever a new tracker was built—Kuhn or Metzler in those days—we went to try it out, right away, you know.

The way people played Bach on the organ was still pretty dreadful at the time, with many registration changes, swell box, that kind of thing. But even then, Müller played completely differently. For example, he would tell you that it was common to change manuals in this-or-that bar, but that that was simply impossible, because you would break the tenor line in two! So I learned from him to analyze very ‘cleanly’ and to use that as the basis for my performance.

Harpsichord playing was still very primitive in those days. The instruments I played on in Basel were simply awful. It wasn’t until later that I came to know historic instruments. The idea that you used different types of harpsichords—French, Italian—didn’t play a role at all. I did collect pictures of historic instruments, but really without wondering what they might sound like.

Strangely enough, Müller was not at all interested in historic instruments as far as harpsichords went. On the other hand, he was very precise with articulation. You had to play exactly the way Bach wrote. Bach was the order of the day. A little piece by Froberger or Couperin every now and then, but mostly Bach, really. August Wenzinger,⁵ with whom I studied chamber music, was much broader in that regard. He played the whole repertoire: French, Italian, and the seventeenth century as well. We also had to sing in the choir, Senfl and Josquin, but also monody. That was a revelation. We had Ina Lohr,⁶ who was the first to use the old solmisation system again as the basis of her theory classes. Everything was incredibly interesting.

Look, things were kind of black-and-white at the time. On the one hand there was Romanticism, and that was horrible, so you wanted something different. The Neue Sachlichkeit played an important role. I think I actually played very dryly in those days.

J-PK: Many people would argue that you still played dryly many years later.

GL: Everyone is free to think whatever they want, but I personally think I have allowed much more emotion in my performances over the years.

J-PK: Were there still others who influenced you as a young musician?

GL: [Immediately] Hans Brandts Buys.⁷ We lived in Laren, near Hilversum [between Amsterdam and Utrecht—JPK]. I played cello as well, and I sometimes played the cello in cantata performances he directed. I never studied with him, but he had an enormous library, most of all about Bach. In one word: a dream. I used to spend hours there, browsing, making notes. Brandts Buys also had a two-manual harpsichord, something quite unusual at the time. He had an enormous respect for what the composer had written. I learned that from him.

After my studies I got to know Alfred Deller, the famous countertenor.⁸ I had heard a tiny gramophone record of his and was incredibly impressed. It showed that singing could be more than a dead tone with tons of vibrato. Diction: that was what it was all about. The tone helps the diction. Deller was a master in this regard. That is incredibly important to me. We organists and harpsichordists have to think dynamically too. We have to shape the tone.

J-PK: After your studies you became Professor of Harpsichord in Vienna.

GL: Well, I mean, I taught there and yes, it was called ‘Professor.’ I actually went to Vienna to study conducting, even though it did not interest me very much. I don’t even remember now why I did it. It may have been at the urging of my parents. Organ and harpsichord, how was one ever going to make a living that way? With conducting one could at least pay the bills, that kind of thing.

But the most important thing in Vienna was the library. I’d sit there all day, from opening till close, copying music—by hand of course—and making notes from treatises. I still use that material today. Much has been published since, but not nearly everything.

J-PK: What kind of things did
you copy?

GL: Oh, everything. Froberger, Kuhnau, Fischer . . . Tablature too, I could read that easily back then—I’m completely out of practice now. I also copied lute tablatures, just out of interest.

In Vienna I got to know Harnoncourt.⁹ We were just about the only people interested in early music and played an awful lot together, viol consort also. That was relatively easy for me because of my cello background.

But after three years Leonhardt had had enough of the Austrian capital and returned to the Netherlands, where he was appointed Professor of Harpsichord at the Amsterdam Conservatory. At the end of the 1950s he became organist of the Christiaan Müller organ of the Eglise Wallonne, the French Protestant Church of Amsterdam.

GL: My wife is francophone and we both belong to the Reformed Church, so we went to the French church as a matter of course. I knew the organ already, but it was in very poor condition at the time. The action was terrible and it played very heavily. So when the position became vacant, I said that I was willing to do it on the condition that the organ would be restored properly. That was fine. I knew Ahrend already, so he restored the organ, with Cor Edskes as consultant.¹⁰ 

J-PK: How did you meet Ahrend?

GL: I don’t remember exactly. In any case, I had seen an organ they had built in Veldhausen.¹¹ That was a revelation back then, but I have recently played the organ again and it was still a revelation. That doesn’t happen very often, that one thinks the same way about an organ so many years later.

J-PK: What made Ahrend & Brunzema so special?

GL: I don’t know. They just understood organs somehow. They had ears and just knew how to get the sound they wanted.

J-PK: Ahrend has often been criticized for imposing too much of his own personality on an instrument when restoring it, for example
in Groningen.

GL: Well, I mean, he does have a strong personality, and in the Martini [the Martinikerk at Groningen—JPK], a great deal had to be reconstructed. In such a situation one can hardly blame anybody for putting his mark on a restoration.

J-PK: Was that also the case in Amsterdam?

GL: No. A lot of Müller pipes had survived in excellent condition and the new pipes Ahrend provided matched the old pipes very well indeed. Yes, the Waalse [Eglise Wallonne—JPK] is definitely the best-preserved Müller in my opinion—not that there is a lot of choice, unfortunately.¹² 

J-PK: You made a whole series of recordings on the organ, including composers such as Froberger, Couperin, and de Grigny . . . 

GL: . . . who really don’t belong there at all. You are totally right about that and I really don’t remember why we did it. Perhaps Telefunken wanted some diversity in the repertoire. On the other hand [he continues almost triumphantly], what should I have played on the Amsterdam Müller instead?

J-PK: The Genevan psalter, I suppose.

GL: [He laughs, covering his mouth with his hand.] Precisely—or Quirinus van Blankenburg.¹³

J-PK: As a harpsichord teacher, you have had a tremendous influence on a whole generation of harpsichordists from all over the world.

GL: Oh, come on . . . For a long time, I was simply the only one.

J-PK: Have you never wanted to teach organ?

GL: I’ve never really thought about that. But even for harpsichord I never had more than five students at the same time. That was more than enough. The rest of the time I was so busy with concerts and recordings.

[The conversation moves in a different direction; Leonhardt clearly wants to discuss something else.]

I don’t know if it’s on your list, but the difference between organ and harpsichord, I wouldn’t mind saying something about that. Look, the harpsichord has in a way stopped at some point in time. The organ went on, but changed completely. In my view, organ and harpsichord are intimately connected. To a large extent, the instruments shared the same literature and performers played both instruments. That stops at the end of the eighteenth century and in my mind it’s only because of its function in church that the organ has continued to exist. In other words, without the church, the organ would have died out as well. Interest in the organ at the beginning of the nineteenth century was practically zero, really.

All right, so the organ continued to exist. But over time, it changed so much that, really, it became a different instrument, at least in my view. That is a problem for the present-day organist that really does not exist for harpsichordists. How can a man serve so many masters? I don’t believe that is possible; at least, I can’t.

The problem is, we aren’t theorists. Musicologists can study different styles—that’s not a problem. But we musicians have to take the work of art in our hands . . . [an expressive gesture] . . .
and present it. That is something completely different; it demands much more ability to empathize. I have to say, when all is said and done, the colleagues whom I admire the most tend to be those who specialize at least to some extent.

[I mention an early-music specialist who at the same time is a jack-of-all-trades. Yes, Leonhardt agrees: a great musician.] But even so, you can hear that he plays so much other music as well.¹⁴ It’s a problem, of course. Take the flute: How much literature is there from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Three Bach sonatas! We harpsichordists can bathe in a wealth of early music. One can easily spend a lifetime with it.

J-PK: Don’t you think the old composers are so far away from us that it is more difficult to empathize with them?

GL: No, I don’t. If you really study the time and the art of the period in all its facets—painting, architecture, and so forth—a composer like Froberger can come just as close as, say, Widor. And look, Widor has become early music too by now. One has to study that just as well. It’s no longer our own time; it’s not self-evident.

J-PK: You had to practically put yourself in Bach’s shoes when you played the lead role in Jean-Marie Straub’s film, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.

GL: It wasn’t acting, you know. Performing in costume, that’s all. Just because I happened to do the same things as Bach did: playing organ and harpsichord, and conducting. Well, except for composing, of course. [A gesture of profound awe.] I found it a very respectful film, it was made with a lot of integrity, and I enjoyed contributing to it, also because Bach has determined my whole career.

J-PK: I think Frans Brüggen once said in an interview, ‘Leonhardt is Bach.’¹⁵ 

GL: [A gesture makes clear that he couldn’t disagree more.] I consider Bach the greatest composer who ever lived. But I also see him as a composer in his time, not just as some remarkable phenomenon. In that sense, I’m not a Bach man.

J-PK: Your career has mostly focused on harpsichord playing and conducting.

GL: Well, no, not conducting, that has always been a side path; I don’t do it more often than once or twice a year. The Bach cantata project, too, was really only one or two weeks a year. Conducting to me is in a way the same as playing chamber music, except I happen not to be playing.

J-PK: My point is that as an organist you have been relatively free to do whatever you wanted.

GL: That is true. The harpsichord is my livelihood; the organ is in a sense a luxury. It’s also a different kind of instrument. [Enthusiastically:] One can be crazy about an organ, I think. Harpsichords don’t really have that. That is because an organ usually has a much stronger personality than a harpsichord; that is part of what makes it such a fantastic instrument. On harpsichord, one has to work much harder to get a beautiful sound. A good organ does half the job for you if not more. A good organ dictates—in the best sense of the word—much more than a harpsichord.

J-PK: With all your interest in past centuries it seems that there is one aspect of our time that interests you in particular.

GL: I think I know what you mean.

J-PK: Fast cars?

GL: [Big smile—for a moment he looks almost boyish.] As the Germans say, Wenn schon, denn schon.¹⁶ If one needs a car at all, surely a beautiful one is better than an ugly one. I just got a new Alfa 166, three liters, and it really is a great pleasure. It’s a rather fiery one, you know, the kind that just wants to go out for a ride. In the city, he has to stay on the leash, but out of town . . . Yes, a real pleasure. ν

* I am also grateful to Hans Fidom, the former editor of Het Orgel who suggested that I interview Leonhardt. Finally, I thank my wife Brigitte Pohl-Knijff and the following colleagues, students, and friends for their comments on earlier drafts of this translation: Margaret Barger, Robert Brown, Jim Nicholls, Jodie Ostenfeld, and Paul Thwaites. For any dutchisms that remain I take sole responsibility.  

1. Gerhard Woehl built the new Bach organ (IV/61) for the Thomaskirche in the Bach year 2000.

2. The founder of the firm, Johann Christoph Neupert (who was apprenticed to Johann Baptist Streicher in Vienna) and his descendants were avid collectors of historic keyboard instruments. Still in business today, the firm built its first harpsichord in 1906.

3. Dutch organist, conductor, and composer Anthon van der Horst (1899–1965) was conductor of the Dutch Bach Society from 1931. He taught organ at the Amsterdam Conservatory, where his students included Albert de Klerk, Piet Kee, Bernard Bartelink, Wim van Beek, and Charles de Wolff. 

4. Schaffhausen, on the Swiss-German border, is some 60 miles from Basel.

5. August Wenzinger (1905–1996) was a cellist, viol player, conductor, and a pioneer of historically informed performance practice. He taught both cello and viol at the Schola Cantorum from 1933, where his most famous student (apart from Leonhardt) was no doubt viol player Jordi Savall, who succeeded him in 1974.    

6. Ina Lohr (1903–1983) studied violin in Amsterdam and theory and composition in Basel. One of the founders of the Schola Cantorum, she taught theory there on the basis of solmisation. She was also assistant conductor to Paul Sacher with the Basel Chamber Choir.

7. Johann Sebastian (Hans) Brandts Buys (1905–1959) came from a large Dutch family of musicians, which included some fine composers. A pioneer of harpsichord playing in the Netherlands, Brandts Buys was also active as a conductor. As a performer and musicologist he specialized in the music of his namesake, J.S. Bach. Brandts Buys had an unusually strong interest in historically informed performance and was the first in the Netherlands to conduct the St. Matthew Passion with a small choir and orchestra (1947). Leonhardt presumably took part in performances with the Hilversumse Cantate Vereniging (Hilversum Cantata Society), which Brandts Buys led during the war years 1943–1945.

8. The countertenor Alfred Deller (1912–1979) was central in reviving and popularizing the countertenor in the twentieth century. He founded the Deller Consort in 1948. Benjamin Britten famously wrote the role of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Deller (1960), who recorded it with the composer conducting.  

9. Nikolaus Harnoncourt (b. 1929), cellist, later conductor, founder of the period-instrument ensemble Concentus Musicus Wien (1953, first public performance 1957). Harnoncourt’s Concentus and the Leonhardt Consort collaborated for a recording of Bach’s St. John Passion (1965) and shared the complete recording of Bach’s sacred cantatas for Telefunken’s Das alte Werk. 

10. Jürgen Ahrend (b. 1930), German organ builder, active 1954–2005. In the 1950s and ’60s Ahrend and his then-associate Gerhard Brunzema (1927–1992) were perhaps the most serious, consistent, and successful in reviving the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North-German organ style.  

11. In Bentheim county, Germany, near the Dutch border. The organ was built by Ahrend & Brunzema in 1957, and enlarged with a Rückpositiv by the Dutch firm Mense Ruiter in 1997.

12. Other surviving Müller organs include those in Haarlem, Leeuwarden, Beverwijk, and the Kapelkerk at Alkmaar. 

13. Apart from more imaginative works such as the cantata L’Apologie des femmes (The Women’s Apology, 1715), Quirinus van Blankenburg (1654–1739) published a Harpsichord and Organ Book of Reformed Psalms and Church Hymns (The Hague 1732).

14. Fortunately, I no longer recall whom I mentioned to Leonhardt.

15. The Dutch recorder player, flautist, and conductor Frans Brüggen (b. 1934) performed extensively with Leonhardt in such groups as Quadro Amsterdam and the trio with cellist Anner Bijlsma.

16. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’

Robert Clark taught at the University of Michigan from 1964 to 1981, and at Arizona State University, Tempe, from 1981 until his retirement in 1998. One of his most noted achievements as a performer was his recording, Bach at Naumburg, on the newly restored organ built by Zacharias Hildebrandt in 1747, an organ tested and approved by J. S. Bach and Gottfried Silbermann.  

In the United States Clark served as a consultant to many churches, and was directly responsible for the building of the first two modern mechanical action organs in Arizona: Victory Lutheran Church in Mesa and Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale. He was also advisor for the Richards & Fowkes organ at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Knoxville, Tennessee.

Clark has served on many juries for organ competitions, including St. Albans and the Grand Prix de Chartres. In 1992, he received a plaque from the Central Arizona Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, inscribed “Master Teacher.” Clark recently moved from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Houston, where his daughter, Barbara, will continue her career as a teacher of voice at Rice University beginning in fall 2013.

On May 19 and 20, 2012, the author spoke with Professor Clark at his home in Cincinnati.

Douglas Reed: Thank you for this opportunity to talk. Please tell about some of your early musical experiences that shaped you as a musician.

Robert Clark: It began in kindergarten. In the classroom there was a mockup of a pipe organ that fascinated me. I spent the entire playtime pretending I was an organist. When I was about six years old, I went behind the stage where things were going on at church [First Methodist Church, Fremont, Nebraska] and saw for the first time a Universal Air Chest of an Austin organ. I pushed the flap that opens the door, and, of course, I noticed a great change in pressure. I was totally fascinated.  

You’ve mentioned motion or movement training in school.

Yes. The term was not used, but it was pure Dalcroze eurhythmics involving step-bend, step-step-bend, making phrases with your arms, going in circular motion and in advanced cases, walking two steps against three bounces of the ball or vice versa. Dalcroze eurhythmics was part of my training as early as fourth grade, as was moveable-Do solfège. My claim to fame was being able to hear and sing descending major sixth and ascending minor third intervals.

It was a very unusual public school system in Kansas City. I don’t know whether the name Mabelle Glenn means anything to you, but she edited several volumes of Art Songs for School and Studio. In the 1930s, she conducted the Bach St. Matthew Passion at Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kansas City. During her long career, she was renowned in music education and, surprisingly, convinced the administration to include music in the daily curriculum of the grade schools in Kansas City.

What other things influenced you as a youngster? Did you study piano?

Oh, yes. From the fourth grade until I finished high school, my teacher was Margaret Dietrich, who had been a pupil of Josef Lhévinne at Juilliard. Much of the elegance and detail in his playing was transmitted from her to her students. Believe me, she was a strong personality and pushed me very hard at a time when I was quite lazy.

Miss Dietrich would probably be 105 years old now, although I did see her when she was in her nineties after she and her husband had moved to Flagstaff, Arizona. It was very good to see her again. She even told me I could call her Margaret! 

Did you study the organ during that time?

Yes, much to my piano teacher’s dissatisfaction (laughter), I did take organ lessons. My first piece was Song of the Basket Weaver, one of the St. Lawrence Sketches by Alexander Russell. I had my first church job when I was 14, playing a two-manual and pedal Estey reed organ. That’s when I became fascinated with playing the famous Toccata by Widor.  

Then you majored in organ in college. What led to that?

That’s what I wanted to do! I went to a small school, Central Methodist College, in Fayette, Missouri, and from there to Union Theological Seminary, where I did my graduate study in the School of Sacred Music. Orpha Ochse was one of my teachers at Central. I alternated organ lessons between Orpha and Luther Spayde, who was a strict Dupré advocate. Orpha suggested many subtleties not otherwise available. She was also my first-year theory teacher. 

Did you study with N. Louise Wright and Opal Hayes at Central Methodist College?

I certainly did. Miss Wright was one of those very colorful, flamboyant people who made you think you were better than you were. Miss Hayes taught Bach and technique, and Miss Wright taught interpretation.

Then you went from Central to New York City?

I did. My first teacher was Clarence Dickinson. I was much too immature and opinionated to understand his breadth of knowledge and approach to teaching. He knew the tradition of Widor and other European masters of his era. Lessons were at Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City, where there was an E. M. Skinner organ, recently replaced.

That was 1953. Interestingly, I went to the other extreme with Ernest White, who was known for playing as if the keys were hot! He did not force his theories upon me and respected my individuality. I played a debut recital in his studio at St. Mary the Virgin, and that’s probably the only recital I played from memory without dropping a single note.

Ernest White had a series of studio organs, right? 

Yes, this was the largest. It was up on the second floor of St. Mary the Virgin. It was quite the thing; it was very controversial and very well should have been!

Tell us about other experiences that you had in New York.

While a student at Union Seminary, I had many meaningful experiences. For example, I heard the New York debut of Jeanne Demessieux at Central Presbyterian Church, the “Carnegie Hall” for organists in those days. Quite a number of us went to hear Demessieux, and we all fell in love with her. She played with very high spike heels, the type that would pull up a grate from the sidewalk! Her pedal technique was built around that. I heard her play her repeated-note etude for the pedals—with the spike heels. Indeed!

One time, you mentioned the Langlais Suite Médiévale in association with your time in New York.

Yes. I was possibly the first student organist to play that work in the United States. Messiaen was even more controversial. The first piece I learned was the Apparition de l’église éternelle. I wrote my master’s thesis on Messiaen and also translated his Technique de mon langage musical before the “official” translation became available.

Let’s talk more about your teachers. You’ve mentioned studying with Gustav Leonhardt.

I knew him when he was not yet 30, on his first trip to the United States. He taught a course on performance practice at a Union Seminary summer session. I had a few lessons on an organ that he disliked and some harpsichord instruction. All of a sudden it wasn’t a case of limiting but of greatly enhancing the possibilities of what a performer could do. He had an incredible stash of information about early sources. Being typically Dutch, he could speak four different languages. So in the class he would read something off in the original language, and finally it occurred to him that no one could understand what he was saying, so he began translating. 

We had many good experiences, including a chance encounter one Sunday afternoon as I was taking the uptown subway. We ran into each other on the way up to see the famous medieval complex, The Cloisters. We had a very good time doing that. He had a great deal of knowledge about medieval art. I simply admired his whole approach to music making, which was very elaborate.

When you say he opened up all kinds of possibilities rather than limiting them, what exactly do you mean? 

He spoke about different ways ornaments could be played, places where you would or would not play notes inégales—all of the options open to the musician. Would you play over-dotted, double-dotted, neither, or something in between?  

I remember a subsequent class he did at the University of Michigan. He spent an entire session on about three measures of music. It was the sarabande from the C-minor French Suite. He talked very much about the expressive nature of this: if we over-hold this, such would happen, but if we don’t overhold, something else will happen. I remember something he told me in the early 1950s and which I strongly believe: dynamics are achieved by variations in touch and articulation and by rhythmic adjustment.   

Did Leonhardt perform at that time?

Oh, yes! I heard him perform many times. I heard him perform the one and only time on an electro-pneumatic organ at St. Thomas Church in New York City, and he said, “Never again!” And he didn’t. He commented on what a nice place this would be to have a fine mechanical action organ, and finally Taylor & Boody fulfilled that dream. Leonhardt was also a very fine fortepianist, incidentally.  

Are there other teachers or musical experiences you would like to mention?

One of my good experiences was being a fellow judge at the Fort Wayne competition with Arthur Poister. He was very insightful and was usually right in his perceptions of the musical personality and even gender of the competitors. 

Let’s talk about Bach. I’m curious about how your perspective on Bach has changed over the years. You mentioned learning with the Dupré edition. What has happened?

We have reached a new level of understanding of articulation in terms of listening. After all, a pure legato or even over-legato are types of articulation, but if one reads treatises like J. J. Quantz’s On Playing the Flute, one learns how wind players rehearsed. It was tonguing that made a difference, and of course listening to string playing makes a difference. Where does one change a bow? These are all deviations from a pure legato. Even a seamless legato is a form of articulation and, in fact, harpsichordists deal with over-legato. 

How has the revival of mechanical action influenced your thinking?

It has influenced my thinking entirely. My first European trip came quite late, in 1977. I played many of the great organs in Europe. The organ at Kampen, the Netherlands, was the last organ I heard in Europe before returning to the United States. The next day, I heard a chiffy Positiv Gedeckt on the organ at Hill Auditorium and thought, “This will not do.” So, I found a way of getting to a tracker-action organ even though it wasn’t a very good instrument. Students would have lessons in an unheated church in the winter simply for this experience. And then I took many groups of students and others down to the Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Toledo, where the important Brombaugh organ, now in Rochester, used to be. We learned a great deal from this opportunity.

What did you learn?

I learned about the sensitive interplay between winding and touch, and realized I could find detail in the music that could not be found any other way. Indeed, the fastest key action is not electro-pneumatic. With a good mechanical action, the response is immediate, providing complete contact with the instrument. Contrary to conventional wisdom, many of the great European instruments are not hard to play. Of course, as the pallets become larger, the action becomes heavier. For example, with a typical basse de trompette, the touch and speech of the lower notes affect timing and interpretation. This is as it should be! It shouldn’t be all the same. I tell my students that the only “perfect” action that does everything consistently is the electronic organ! 

And when you’re playing with manuals coupled and a huge sound, you tend to play differently.

Of course. If you listen to my Naumburg recording, the last variation of Sei gegrüsset was played with all three manuals coupled, and it becomes very grand. One plays quite broadly when the action is heavier, whereas the other variations call for a lighter registration and touch. In the partitas, particularly in Sei gegrüsset, there are also many things that relate directly to the playing of string instruments. 

Think of the difference between playing a violin and playing a cello or a gamba. I’m always very happy with students who have played a wind instrument or string instrument or have had experience singing. Anyone wanting to be an organist should learn another instrument. 

Can you speak more about singing?

Articulation involves attack as well as release. If you were singing all legato, there would be no consonants, no words. It would be just one stream of sound, which is vocally impossible.

You’ve said, “Put a D or a T on that note.”

Yes, but only on a good organ with suspended mechanical action is that possible, because it has to do with the speed of attack and release. I recommend A Guide to Duo and Trio Playing by Jacques van Oortmerssen for comprehensive understanding of early fingerings and their impact on articulation.

Let’s talk more about teaching and learning. What are the three most important things to consider when learning and performing a piece?

Traditionally, we say “rhythm, rhythm, and rhythm.”

How do you start an organ student? Do you have a teaching method?  

Some of the older teaching methods are outdated. So many deal with absolute silence and space, up and down, no give and take. Music doesn’t work that way. I don’t agree with the idea that we delay learning Bach until we understand historic fingerings. There’s one method that starts with some rather uninteresting music of the Romantic era, but the student is not ready for Bach until he or she knows how to use historic fingerings. Who knows what is “historic” anyway?! Nobody has the same hand. Finger lengths are different. The balance of the hand is different. I think just simple things that are good music are the best way to start: Renaissance pieces, easier Bach, some pieces in the Orgelbüchlein. It is not necessary to delay learning Bach. Early and modern fingering should be included within modern teaching approaches, not as separate entities.

In recent decades, there has been a great deal of emphasis on early fingerings.

You may be surprised, but since I came back from Europe, I’ve been almost exclusively into historic fingerings for early music. That doesn’t mean always doing the same thing the same way, but there are times when paired fingerings—3-4-3-4 ascending and 3-2-3-2 descending in the right hand—work on a good sensitive instrument. The trio sonatas include marked articulations that are very much related to wind and string playing. For me, usually the marked articulation determines the fingering anyway. I tend to write slurs rather than numbers in my music.

Do you have any particular memory techniques? You mentioned using solfège.

Yes, I use solfège, but memory, like doing anything else well, simply takes time and practice. I have no gimmicks whatsoever in memorization. It is an extension of the learning process. The ultimate test is to be in a quiet room without scores, and being able to hear every note in a performance the way you want to hear it. And that’s the most secure way to memorize. Without this ability, one tends to rely entirely on a mechanical approach.

You have a nice selection of artwork in your apartment. How important is study of the other arts—the visual arts, even film—for a musician?

A good example of Baroque performance practice that few people mention lies in the art of Peter Paul Rubens, whose works are among the finest Baroque paintings. They are full of motion, huge sweeps of the brush, and great detail within those. A good place for any musician to visit would be the Rubens gallery at the Louvre. 

Please talk about the sense of motion as it relates to rhythm. Many performances are very speedy and metronomic, but without a sense of movement. 

Well, Duke Ellington once said, “Man, if it don’t got that swing, it ain’t music.” (laughter)

You have mentioned the term “lilt.” How does one achieve that?

The harpsichordist Isolde Ahlgrimm had her students learn the steps for the dances used in Bach’s keyboard suites. They would learn the choreography of the allemande, sarabande, the courante, and gigue in their various forms, bourrée, gavotte. This is a very good idea. The more we can see things moving, the better! 

What about conducting and singing a line? You’ve recommended the Kirkpatrick edition of Scarlatti sonatas. He recommends walking.

Oh, yes. That’s very good basic reading. It’s an essay on rhythm in the first volume of the Schirmer edition of the Scarlatti Sixty Sonatas edited by Kirkpatrick. That’s very good information. It’s in a question/answer format. Question: “How do I sense the shape of a phrase?” Answer: “By dancing it.” Learn the difference between rhythm and meter: meter is regular; rhythm is essentially irregular. Rubato does exist in Baroque music but not exactly as in Chopin. Kirkpatrick said, “Rhythm is the superimposition of irregularity upon regularity.”

Dare we talk about the metronome?

What you should do if you have a metronome is to throw it in the dumpster. It creates arithmetic, not rhythm. 

You’ve often mentioned continuo and the value of accompanying, working with other instrumentalists and vocalists. 

Working with other musicians, one discovers many of the subtleties of articulation derived from bowing and tonguing. I learned the hard way not to jump ahead of one’s fellow musicians; you have to listen to the breathing of the musician. I would often jump ahead of the wind instrument player, and I’d be playing before he completed taking a breath! Many organists have this panicky thing: “If I don’t get moving, it’s not going to go!” You must leave space for breathing. Not every instrument is like the organ, where you can have a continuous supply of wind.

There has been a great resurgence of interest in improvisation in the American organ world. Can you speak about your views on improvisation and how it relates to performance in general?

In our country we used to have maybe an annual “be nice to improvisation day” and that was the beginning and the end of it. But in France, where the study of improvisation is obligatory, this begins in childhood and continues throughout a musician’s entire career. It’s not a thing acquired quickly or easily.  

Particularly in music before the Romantic era, improvisation was par for the course. But if Liszt and other Romantic virtuosos were to play in a modern-day academic setting, matters would be quite different.

These are some fairly major changes from the Dupré method at Central Methodist!

Well, I studied with Dr. Dickinson in 1952. How many years has it been? We’re not doing anything the way we did 60 years ago. Airplanes are not the same. Cars are not the same. The way we dress and the way we think are not the same.  

You taught at the University of Michigan for 17 years. Who were some of your closest colleagues at Michigan?

My closest friend in the organ department was Bob Glasgow, who was an inspiration even though we were occasionally different in our approach. Another very dear friend was Ellwood Derr, who was really a historian but taught music theory. He knew an incredible amount about music in general, and you could go to him with almost any question. Another colleague, John Wiley, was very much an expert on Russian music. 

At Arizona State University, Frank Koonce, the classical guitar teacher, and I became good friends. The late Bill Magers, the viola teacher, taught my daughter and was recognized as one of the great viola teachers in the country. There are many other former colleagues including Robert Hamilton, a noted pianist.   

You have mentioned Louise Cuyler a number of times.

Yes. There are many stories about her. One time she brought to class a 78 recording of a Beethoven string quartet, which did not meet her standards. She grabbed the shellac record off the turntable, tossed it into the waste basket, and then went apologetically to the library.

And what about Eugene Bossart?

Oh, he died recently at the age of 94. He helped so many people. His few detractors were poor musicians, as he demanded only the very best. And 99% of the time, he got it. Yet, he was the kindest person! I remember him calling me once after I had played harpsichord continuo for the St. Matthew Passion. He yelled on the phone, “Hello! Is this Marcel Dupré??” What he really liked was the recitative regarding “The Veil of the Temple.” Yet, he could be super critical and get away with it.

Let’s talk about your recordings, particularly your experience at Naumburg.

Jonathan Wearn, the British recording producer, was very particular in recording. After the initial tapes were made, I spent several days with him editing at his home in England. Many of my recordings have some editing, although my Clavierübung III recording has almost none.

Had you made any recordings earlier in your career?

No. The Naumburg recording got good notices, I thought, so I went back home to one of my favorite organs, built by Paul Fritts, one that I’d had a voice in designing, and made “Bach on the Fritts.” And then “Bach and Friends on the Fritts.” There are seven recordings in all. I really had wanted to record on the Treutmann organ in Grauhof, but this was not possible because of the illness of my wife. 

Speaking of the Fritts—after teaching at Michigan, you moved to Arizona State and taught for 17 more years. It was during this time that you led the creation of the new performance hall and the Fritts organ. Could you speak about
that process?

That was a battle. In the first place, nobody trusted that type of acoustic. It was not designed for piano recitals. The harpsichordists usually like it, but everybody was concerned, “We’ve got to deaden that some way or the other!” I don’t know how many suggestions were offered. We finally made sort of a dual system where drapes could be drawn manually, and I used that very often in teaching when the room was empty.  

What led you to start that project? Was there no good concert hall or teaching instrument at Arizona State?

All we had was an Aeolian-Skinner in Gammage Auditorium. It was one of the late, very thinly voiced Aeolian-Skinners. But since the scalings were surprisingly large, it was revoiced and opened up quite a bit by Manuel Rosales. There was no substantial tracker organ available, except for a few old ones that were quite good up in the northern part of Arizona. There is now a second Fritts in Tucson.

During our first year of recitals, we had overflow audiences. Performances had to be played twice every Sunday, one at 2 pm and the other at 5 pm. There was great appeal among the musical public!

Can you give some background on the Orgelbüchlein edition that you and John David Peterson prepared?

I visited the Stadtsbibliothek in East Berlin, and the librarian there was very American-friendly. In fact, he had travelled in the United States. I was allowed to pick up the original manuscript of the St. Matthew Passion. It was like touching the Holy Grail! Luckily, the librarian mailed me a microfilm of the Orgelbüchlein. I shared it with John, who was working on the same project. I might say that the Orgelbüchlein that we prepared goes back to 1984, and it is an edition that needs to be revised—not a great deal, though, because we were dealing with the autograph, and there are simply variants of the autograph that need to be acknowledged.

Were the Stasi after you in East Germany?

Oh, yes! They were after any American. It was the typical situation where one saw a face in public and then two days later that same face appeared again. One time I was trapped inside the Wenzelskirche in Naumburg because I didn’t know how to work the key, and a man came, speaking perfect English, to explain how to turn the key. As a matter of fact, the tower of that church is the highest point in the town, and the chief spy looked out from there. She knew everything that went on in that city, including my presence!

After the big change I went to what’s called the Runde Ecke. This museum showed many of  their methods of interrogation, uniforms, and obscene paintings. Every phone in the country was wired. 

What were some of the musical experiences you had in East Germany?

I had wanted to go to Stralsund to hear the organ there. The organist was Dietrich Prost, and we hit it off very well. His English was probably as deficient as my German, but we understood each other; we got to the organ and without saying a word we agreed that there was something important there. And he said, “You play like a German!” “Du bist Deutsch!” We had coffee and cake. Many of the musicians in local churches were eager to meet with Americans. Often we went for conversation, coffee, and cake. I remember being in one of the towns near the border and the local organist was complaining, “Here we are only a few kilometers from West Germany, and we cannot see our closest friends and relatives!”

Did you play any of the Silbermann organs?

I think I played every one in existence except one that wasn’t playing. In Crostau, they said, “The organist is sick, and the organ is sick.” Strangely enough, one of the finest Silbermanns is the least known, in Pfaffrode. There is some speculation that it might have been the original Rückpositiv for the organ in Freiberg.

What about Hildebrandt organs?  You mentioned Naumburg. 

Oh, yes. That was before the restoration and there was enough there that I could get an idea of what the original was like. Of course, the organ had been provided with electric action in the early 1930s, but there were enough original pipes left that I got a pretty good idea of the sound. Another colleague, Thomas Harmon, did quite a bit of research on that. The restoration didn’t take place until after the reunification of Germany. Christian Mahrenholz was one of the leaders in promoting the restoration as early as the 1930s.

Did you go to Dresden on that trip?

I went to the Katholische Hofkirche, now Holy Trinity Cathedral. We were told by the tourist guides, “Don’t go in there. Nobody’s there.” But we went in, and we met the organist, Dietrich Wagner, who had lived through the infamous fire in Dresden and told us all about that. He was very friendly and made suggestions on my playing—that I deal with the acoustic because I was playing too legato. I sent him some editions of things not available in East Germany. So, that
was good.

We’ve been talking about all kinds of professional stuff. Would you like to talk about your family and their part in your life?

I have four children and three grandchildren. My son, Robert, lives in Los Angeles and does technical work with pathologists. My daughter Susan lives in Oxford, Michigan. She is Mrs. Music through the entire area and manages the Rochester Michigan Symphony Orchestra. She’s a fine cellist and plays the piano. She sings and teaches maybe twenty or
thirty students.

The twin of my son is Jill, who is very focused and controlled with everything she does. At the beginning of her career in New York, she won a grant from the Bosch Foundation. Then her husband was moved back to Deutsche Telekom in Germany, and she now works in an executive role in the famous tower in Bonn.

What about Barbara?

I could write a book about her. She’s a singer, very gifted and very devoted to teaching at the Cincinnati Conservatory. I wish she would perform more, because she is at the prime of her career vocally. She knows how to communicate a song in an ever-positive stage presence. That would include eye contact, gesture, and movement.   

And your wife, Evelyn?

Evelyn was a singer. She studied at Westminster Choir College and was a good organist in her own right and also had a beautiful soprano voice. She was busy raising the children, but made a point of keeping a voice studio for many years. 

What do you think of the combination of organ and piano?

We performed William Albright’s Stipendium peccati for piano, organ, and percussion.

Did you participate in one of the Seven Deadly Sins before that?

The preface of the score encourages all the performers to experience each of the seven deadly sins—but not necessarily together. So, we imagined walking out on stage pretending to be angry, hamming it up, growling at each other, shaking fists, and that sort of thing. We had a lot of fun imagining that, and then we settled down and went out to perform. I also did a work for organ and brass conducted by William Revelli, the only person I know who used the moveable-Do system as I do. 

That was in Hill Auditorium?

Yes. John David Peterson was at the piano, and Bill Moersh, a graduate of the Berklee School in Boston, was
the percussionist. 

You’ve often mentioned Catharine Crozier. 

The first time I heard her, I think I was 14 years old, and I was so moved by that. She played the Roger-Ducasse Pastorale. But I could not figure out what she did with the Brahms
Schmücke dich, because it was not what was on the page, and of course, she played the chorale tune in the pedal. I revered Catharine. She was a perfectionist and had incredibly high standards. Some of her interpretive ideas might be out of fashion today, but I love every inch of ground she walked on!

Are there other fine performers you admire?

Any of the fine violinists—Zino Francescatti, Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern. Rachel Podger and Andrew Manze, both fine Baroque violinists. Pablo Casals. Fine pianists of any stripe. I like to hear good musicians of any type. I like to hear good oboe players and good flute players. And of course, singers!

Finally, please give your perspective on the current state of the organ profession, especially regarding teaching and learning.

David Craighead advised even his most gifted students to be able to do something else if necessary. Considering the realities of today’s organ world, is this anything but being honest, especially to students who dream about being on the back page of the organ journals?

There are teachers who attempt to transfer their own prejudices to their students. It is our duty to deal with gifted students who are free to ask questions. I can say that some of my best students are ones who disagreed with me or others. In fact, at least two of my students have a background playing the accordion! Sometimes these people can be very annoying or irritating, but they can be brilliant musicians.

Too much teaching is, “Me teach. You do.” Or with some students, it is, “You play. I copy.” The most important thing is to TEACH IMAGINATION!

Recordings by Robert Clark

Bach and Friends on the Fritts. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 018.

Bach at Naumburg. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 041.

Orgelbüchlein & More Works by J.S. Bach. Robert Clark & John David Peterson at the Fritts Op. 12 in Organ Hall, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 019.

Robert Clark Plays the Brombaugh Organ, Op. 35 at First Presbyterian Church, Springfield, Illinois. ARSIS SACD 405.

Robert Clark Plays Organ Works from the Land of Bach. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 034.

Bach Clavierübung III. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 042.