Church Music in the United States, 1760-1901. Essays by David W. Music and Paul Westermeyer

Ann Labounsky

Mystic Modern: The Music, Thought and Legacy of Charles Tournemire, edited by Jennifer Donelson and Stephen Schloesser. Church Music Association of America, P.O. Box 4344, Roswell, NM 88202 (musicasacra.com), 2014, $40.00, ISBN 978-0-9916452-0-6, 456 pages.

Visions of Amen: The Early Life and Music of Olivier Messiaen by Stephen Schloesser. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2014, $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8028-0762-5, 572 pages.

 

These two new books present the results of academic research on Charles Tournemire and on the life and works of Olivier Messiaen. Through the efforts of Jennifer Donelson, the guiding light behind the academic outreach of the Church Music Association of America and the managing editor of Sacred Music (the official publication of the CMAA), there have been two conferences on Tournemire, the first in Miami in 2011 and the second in Pittsburgh in 2012. Mystic Modern is a reproduction of the papers given at the Miami and Pittsburgh conferences. Stephen Schloesser, author of Visions of Amen: The Early Life and Music of Olivier Messiaen, is a Jesuit priest and professor of history at Loyola University, Chicago, and also the author of Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933. 

Mystic Modern was published in the summer of 2014 in time for the annual CMAA Colloquium in Indianapolis. Schloesser’s Messiaen book was also published in July 2014, coinciding with the American Guild of Organists’ national convention in Boston. Beyond the coincidence in publication dates, what is remarkable about the two books is the relationship between Tournemire and Messiaen. Tournemire influenced Messiaen to a much greater extent than is normally assumed; but Messiaen eclipsed his mentor by gaining greater fame during his lifetime. Book after book has been written about Messiaen, while Tournemire has remained in relative obscurity until fairly recently.

A first glance at both of these books reveals that there is much more to understand about Charles Tournemire and Olivier Messiaen than one can know only through a study of their musical scores. This “much more” element encompasses knowledge of the personal lives of the two men and the personal relationship between them. It also focuses on how history, culture, theology, literature, symbolism, and aesthetics affected them both. Mystic Modern and Visions of Amen are a must read not only for scholars or devotees of Tournemire and Messiaen, but for those interested in liturgy, music, and theology. Fortunately both books can be read in small sections, slowly and with the help of excellent indices. In the case of Visions of Amen, Messiaen’s important duo-piano work from 1943, a link to an audio recording of a live performance is included in the text.

Tournemire was certainly a modern composer who influenced Messiaen, Langlais, and many other 20th-century French composers. The extent of his “modernism” led many to dismiss his music as obtuse, and his mysticism certainly was another reason that many dismissed his music as unapproachable. Stephen Schloesser explains Tournemire’s “modernism” in his 2005 book, Jazz Age Catholicism:

Tournemire imagined the musical devices representing ‘passion’—chromaticism, polytonalism, and the perceived resulting ‘dissonance’—as the most appropriate material carriers of the ‘eternal’ and unchanging Latin forms. Images of dress abounded in ancient chants were imagined to be ‘clothed’ in ‘modern’ musical fashions.¹

The main Tournemire scholarship consists of a doctoral dissertation by Ruth Sisson, a picture book of photos by Ianco Pascal, and the notated catalogue of his works by Joël-Marie Fauquet from 1979.² Stephen Schloesser devotes a large part of Jazz Age Catholicism to the study of Tournemire. Lastly, Marie-Louise Langlais has published on the Internet portions of Tournemire’s Memoires that specifically address music (http://ml-langlais.com/Tournemire). The French journal L’Orgue is in the process of issuing the complete Tournemire Memoires. The editors of Mystic Modern had access to the complete version and quoted extensively from it in their essays, The Composer as Commentator: Music and Text in Tournemire’s Symbolist Method and How does Music Speak of God.

Charles Tournemire (1877–1939) died in the same year that I was born, and perhaps for this coincidence, I felt a special connection to this man. My first exposure to the “mystic modern” Tournemire was during the 1950s, in hearing my first organ teacher Paul Sifler play some of Tournemire’s music on several recitals. I remember the music sounded strange and exotic, like the music of Olivier Messiaen that Sifler played, which I, as a teenager, did not understand. It was later, as a pupil of Jean Langlais in Paris during the early 1960s, that I came to know Tournemire’s music in a different way. Langlais often played Tournemire’s music at Sainte-Clotilde on the organ that Tournemire knew and loved and often played the Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani from the Sept Paroles of Tournemire. This blind teacher taught me the first movement and the last movement (Consummatum est) at Sainte-Clotilde during late Wednesday evenings in a dimly lit, empty church with the incomparable sounds of the Cavaillé-Coll organ. And he spoke about Tournemire as someone he knew well—little things about how he taught, how his personality was particularly quirky and unpredictable. He encouraged me to meet Tournemire’s second wife, Mme. Alice Tournemire, in her apartment—the apartment where her late husband had lived and taught. She read portions of his Memoires regarding the Symphonie-Choral, which I was planning to perform at Sainte-Clotilde. The more I played and heard Tournemire’s music, the more fascinated I became with it. His music was not instantly appealing; rather, it permeated my being slowly and compellingly.

 

Mystic Modern

The contents of Mystic Modern are divided into three sections, which develop the theme of Tournemire’s legacy as liturgical commentator, music inventor, and littéraire. In the preface, “Tournemire the Liturgical Commentator,” Donelson discusses Tournemire’s role as organist in the Roman Catholic Church and especially his place in the long line of composers incorporating Gregorian chant into both their composed works and their improvisations. 

 

The liturgical commentator

“The Organ as Liturgical Commentator—Some Thoughts, Magisterial and Otherwise” by Monsignor Andrew R. Wadsworth, begins with Wadsworth’s recollections of Messiaen’s improvisations during a Low Mass at La Trinité and then discusses the liturgical norms with an historical overview of the documents pertaining to them. He implores organists to follow Tournemire’s example in L’Orgue mystique: to improvise on the chants proper to each Sunday’s liturgy.

“Joseph Bonnet as a Catalyst in the Early-Twentieth-Century Gregorian Chant Revival,” by Susan Treacy, explains Bonnet’s decisive role in encouraging Tournemire to write L’Orgue mystique. Through explanations of Bonnet’s work as a liturgical organist in churches where he served, Treacy explains why Bonnet did not write any chant-based organ music. Although Bonnet was an abbot in the Benedictine order and was devoted to the propagation of Gregorian chant, he made a distinct difference between his published secular pieces for recital use and his improvised chant-based pieces for the liturgy. As a pupil of Charles Tournemire and fellow native of Bordeaux, Bonnet’s relationships with Dom Mocquereau and Justine Ward were also important in the founding of the Gregorian Institute. Even Bonnet’s church wedding, with a schola from the Gregorian Institute and with Tournemire as one of the organists, reflected his devotion to the propagation of Gregorian chant.

In “Tournemire’s L’Orgue mystique and its Place in the Legacy of the Organ Mass,” Edward Schaefer gives an exhaustive summary of the development of the organ Mass, its specific usage in various countries, and the ecclesiastical documents governing organ Masses. A number of charts give illustrations of the use of the organ at the various parts of the Mass. There is a long list of the ecclesiastical ceremonials governing the use of music in the Mass and a chronological list of organ settings of the Mass. Schaefer concludes that with the renewed interest and practice of the Extraordinary form of the Mass, the practical use of Tournemire’s L’Orgue mystique is possible. This was demonstrated during the first Tournemire symposium. Some of the material is based on Schaefer’s dissertation from Catholic University.³

“Liturgy and Gregorian Chant in L’Orgue mystique of Charles Tournemire,” by Robert Sutherland Lord, was originally published in 1984 in The Organ Yearbook, edited by Peter Williams. The seminal importance of this article lies in Lord’s identification of all the chants from L’Orgue mystique and their origin, Tournemire’s original plan for the composition of the work, and the ways in which the composer departed from his plan in the choice of chants. The chants from the Liber Antiphonarius (Solesmes, 1897) were the sources of most of the chants that Tournemire used for the Elevation. This volume of chant is out of print, but Lord obtained a copy from the former assistant organist at Notre Dame, Paris, Pierre Moreau. Lord includes copies of these chants in the article.

In “The Twentieth-Century Franco-Belgian Art of Improvisation: Marcel Dupré, Charles Tournemire, and Flor Peeters,” Ronald Prowse discusses differences in techniques between written compositions and improvisations in the works of Dupré, Tournemire, and Flor Peeters and cites musical examples from the chant Ave Maris Stella. Using works by those three composers, Prowse deftly compares the techniques that all three of them used in treating the same chant. He often cites his own experiences studying improvisation with Pierre Toucheque, who had been a pupil of Peeters. He often quotes Tournemire, from his book on improvisation, Précis d’exécution, de registration et d’improvisation à l’orgue, stating that a master improviser creates illusions.⁴ The issue of the difference between written composition and improvisation echoes throughout this collection of essays and remains in some ways an unanswered question.

 

The musical inventor

Prowse’s essay leads logically into the second section, “Tournemire the Musical Inventor,” which deals with Tournemire’s musical language, including his choice and sense of tempo—as well as his compositional process and impact, not merely on the Sainte-Clotilde school, but on modern French organ repertoire in general. 

In his essay “Performance Practice for the Organ Music of Charles Tournemire,” Timothy Tikker describes his lessons with Langlais and Langlais’s reports of his study with Tournemire. Tikker’s account matched what I had learned from Langlais, including the story of Langlais’s meeting with Tournemire and the invitation to become the latter’s successor at Sainte-Clotilde. The two works Tikker analyzes in detail regarding interpretation (No. 7 from L’Orgue mystique, Epiphania Domini, and Mulier, ecce filius tuus, Ecce Mater tua, from Sept Chorals-Poèmes, op. 67) were pieces that I also had studied with Langlais, and I agree with his conclusions. Tikker gives detailed graphs with measure numbers indicated and, in some places, metronome markings. Of particular interest in this essay is Tikker’s extensive discussion of the Sainte-Clotilde organ. Tournemire’s specific registrations in L’Orgue mystique include the use of sub couplers and the term petites mixtures, which indicates soft mutation stops such as gamba with a nazard. It is interesting to note that Tournemire played all of L’Orgue mystique on his nine-stop house organ, regrettably never at Sainte-Clotilde. Tikker quotes this specification from Tournemire’s Précis. One of Tikker’s particularly insightful points is his comparison of German Romantic organs and their influence on the compositions of Reger and Karg-Elert, which used the full organ in the lower registers, and Tournemire’s use of full organ that was based on the “treble-ascendant voicing for its success.”⁵

“Catalogue of Charles Tournemire’s ‘Brouillon’ [Rough Sketches] for L’Orgue mystique BNF, Mus., Ms. 19929,” by Robert Sutherland Lord, is the result of Lord’s studying the 1,282 pages of rough sketches of Tournemire’s L’Orgue mystique found in the Bibliothèque Nationale after Lord had written an extensive article on this seminal work of Tournemire. From these sketches Lord was able to determine the exact date of each office and how Tournemire departed from his original plan. Lord’s conclusion stated: 

 

After having completed the manuscript catalogue, we can verify that the “Rough Sketches” document—in sharp contrast to the “Plan” considered in my 1984 study—is far more than a mere framework for L’Orgue mystique. The “Rough Sketches” provide the harmonies, the rhythms, and the paraphrases for forty-two of the fifty-one offices. The BNF Ms. 19929 remains the only evidence we have of Tournemire’s musical preparation for any organ work he composed.⁶

From the harmonic and rhythmic details of Tournemire’s plan for L’Orgue mystique, Bogusław Raba’s article, “Creating a Mystical Musical Eschatology: Diatonic and Chromatic Dialectic in Charles Tournemire’s L’Orgue mystique” continues the discussion of the conflict between the diatonic and chromatic dialectic in Tournemire’s L’Orgue mystique. Raba uses the term dialectic as follows: 

 

Tournemire’s musical poetics in L’Orgue mystique are constructed by means of a dialectical process of diatonic and chromatic textures. This procedure (along with its symbolic functions) seems to be inherited from the Romantic Liszt-Franck tradition and is used in the service of a large narrative formal structure.⁷

Raba equates diatonicism with “eternal peace” and chromaticism with emotional “passion.” For Raba, the melding of these two elements creates pandiatonic textures, which he believes are Tournemire’s legacy to Messiaen. Finally, Raba confesses that Tournemire’s style goes beyond any structural system, and he calls this a “mystical musical eschatology.” Raba makes interesting parallels between Tournemire’s use of dissonance and that of Scriabin and earlier composers such as Frescobaldi in the Elevations from his organ Masses.

Raba’s observations on dissonance from the numinous leads into the next essay, “From the ‘Triomphe de l’Art Modal’ to The Embrace of Fire: Charles Tournemire’s Gregorian Chant Legacy, Received and Refracted by Naji Hakim” by Crista Miller. Miller’s article locates Middle Eastern elements and Arabic improvisation (taqasim) present in Hakim’s organ works with common elements with Tournemire’s Sitio (I thirst) from the Sept Paroles and Hakim’s Embrace of Fire. Miller compares these techniques with Langlais’s Soleil du Soir. She also probes the creative process of these composers. Were they aware of the techniques that they were using? In interviews with Hakim, she explains that Hakim claimed that his process was “subconscious”—in other words, he was not consciously aware that he was using a particular technique, so much was it a part of his psyche.

I had also asked this question regarding synthetic and octatonic scales with both Langlais and Daniel Lesur, both of whom reported that they were unaware that they were using these scales. The question of awareness is one that pervades our study of these composers’ works and is especially relevant to their improvisations. Miller also examines the specialized use of the Vox humana in works by Tournemire, Langlais, and Hakim.

Miller and Vincent E. Rone both discuss the use of octatonic and synthetic scales in their complementary writings. Rone’s essay “From Tournemire to Vatican II: Harmonic Symmetry as Twentieth-Century French Catholic Musical Mysticism, 1928–1970” focuses on the means by which Tournemire, Duruflé, and Langlais expressed Catholic musical mysticism and, in the case of the two younger composers, the ways in which they did so in response to their frustrations during the period of the Vatican II council. Rone concentrates on the use of octatonic and whole-tone scale patterns in the three composers’ music; he uses examples from the final pieces in Tournemire’s Nativitas and Resurrectionis offices. As examples of post-Vatican II disillusionment, Rone cites Duruflé’s Messe ‘Cum Jubilo’ and Langlais’s Imploration pour la croyance, referring to the former as privileging the Ordinary’s “transcendent and eschatological imagery through harmonic symmetry and stasis, combining a synthetic scale with subtle linear unfolding of two whole-tone collections, third-related, and bitonal harmonies.”⁸ In the latter, however, the expression is pure anger. Rone refers to Ruth Sisson’s dissertation and the discussion of the “Tournemire chord,” which employs a C#-major triad with a G-major 6/3 chord over it. The musical examples are particularly helpful to the reader in understanding these compositional and aesthetic concepts. 

 

The littОraire

The final section, “Tournemire the Littéraire,” deals with the literary aspect of Tournemire’s music and dwells on the relationship of the symbolic character of Tourmemire’s musical “commentaries” (and the legacy of this role in Messiaen’s oeuvre). It also includes Charles Tournemire’s obtuse and convoluted language in his biography of Franck. Finally, it analyzes Tournemire and Messiaen’s shared inspiration, drawn from Ernest Hello’s writings and Tournemire’s eschatological reading of history. The editors took great care with the ordering of the essays to provide cohesion to the book, and the end of each essay includes a summary. 

Stephen Schloesser’s first essay, “The Composer as Commentator: Music and Text in Tournemire’s Symbolist Method,” shows the importance of the texts in Dom Guéranger’s L’Année liturgique to Tournemire. So what then is this symbolist method? Schloesser describes it simply as “ . . . an essential relationship between a work and the literary text upon which it is based.”⁹ And he further states: 

 

For the symbolists, realism, naturalism, and positivism evacuated human existence of any mystery, fantasy, imagination, or dream world. In opposition to the positivists’ exclusive privileging of the visible, Symbolists gave pride of place to the invisible.¹⁰

 

As has been stated, Schloesser’s research on Tournemire was first published in Jazz Age Catholicism (2005). As a historian with appealing linguistic, writing, and musical skills, Schloesser has a gift of getting behind the events he is describing and going to the heart of their meaning. Here Schloesser shows how the literary texts in Guéranger’s L’Année liturgique directly inspired L’Orgue mystique. Schloesser hand-copied one example from Guéranger’s work—the Introit for the Feast of the Assumption—to demonstrate this important link between the text and the music. (It is possible to study the entire Guéranger work hand in hand with L’Orgue mystique and easily follow the plan for the entire work.) The important point is that the music is a commentary or a paraphrase of the linguistic text. All the tone painting and symbols that Tournemire uses are related to the texts, and it is important to study the texts first. Lest there be any confusion, Schloesser quotes Tournemire’s preface, which clearly states: “ . . . plainchant is, in sum, freely paraphrased for each piece in the flow of the works forming this collection.”¹¹ 

Schloesser then contrasts Messiaen’s straightforward use of textual references in all his organ works and explains how Messiaen was indebted to Tournemire for this example. Schloesser subsequently refers to numerous recital programs of Tournemire in which the term paraphrase is used in the program. The notion of symbolism, for Schloesser, comes from Tournemire’s models, Claude Debussy and Richard Wagner. Evidence of Tournemire’s deep involvement in the symbolist movement is carefully presented in the next six pages. Schloesser documents examples of Tournemire’s extensive use of the Wagnerian style of leitmotif, with the chant Ego Dormivi, the antiphon from Holy Saturday based on Psalm 3, used in ten of the L’Orgue mystique offices. Schloesser goes beyond what others have previously explained regarding Tournemire’s use of this leitmotif, relating the composer’s decision both to personal and professional circumstances. Schloesser refers to other music programs and cites the texts that Tournemire used to plan those programs. Particularly moving is the intent behind his concert at the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in 1932, which opened with a tribute to Leon Boëllmann, the deceased organist of the church. The program is a good example of Tournemire’s manner of presenting an organ recital; it included three selections from L’Orgue mystique with explanations of the importance of the texts behind them. Tournemire’s choice of works by other composers showed his sense of his place in history alongside Bonnet, a musicologist (Bonnet was editor of the multi-volume set of Historical Organ-Recitals), a symbolist, and a truly modern composer. Also touching was Schloesser’s description of the reasons for Tournemire’s choice of themes for the last office of this great work and his four-year struggle to complete it. It is clear in studying Schloesser’s excellent essay that any serious student of L’Orgue mystique must become intimately acquainted with Guéranger’s 15-volume pivotal work, which is available in several English translations.

Again, acknowledging the superb manner in which this book is organized, it is appropriate that Elizabeth McLain’s Messiaen-oriented essay “Messiaen’s L’Ascension: Musical Illumination of Spiritual Texts After the Model of Tournemire’s L’Orgue mystique” follows that of Schloesser, whose discussion of Messiaen’s early life and influences in Visions of Amen is also covered in this review. McLain’s main point is that Tournemire’s use of commentaries on sacred texts in his compositions profoundly influenced Messiaen, but that unlike Tournemire, Messiaen’s quest was to take music inspired by sacred texts out of the church and into the concert hall. McLain’s essay explains that this early opus of Messiaen had its birth as an orchestral work, premiered in Paris before he had arranged it for organ. McLain gives many musical examples from the orchestral version of the work and clear structural and harmonic analyses of the entire work.

“Desperately Seeking Franck: Tournemire and D’Indy as Biographers” by R. J. Stove is the shortest of all the essays, but it is a fascinating comparison between Tournemire and D’Indy’s biographies of Franck. Anyone who has read any of Tournemire’s own writings can certainly agree with Stove’s description of Tournemire’s writing style as an “exotic jungle.” And further, “His high-flown French is a burden to imitate in any other language, let alone a language which lays as much stress on understatement, irony, and clarity as modern English usually does.”¹² Stove’s critical assessment of the two biographers, themselves students of Franck, explains much about the differences in their personalities and a possible jealousy on the part of Tournemire toward D’Indy, on account of the differences in the successes of their respective careers and their relationship to Franck. D’Indy had known Franck for two decades, while Tournemire had known him for only two years.

In her essay, “How Does Music Speak of God? A Dialogue of Ideas between Messiaen, Tournemire, and Hello,” Jennifer Donelson compares in great depth the approaches to addressing God through music in the writings of Tournemire, Messiaen, and the mystic writer from Brittany, Ernest Hello (1828–1885). She explains how the writings of Hello, particularly his 1872 work L’Homme: La Vie—La Science—L’Art, “encapsulates an understanding that was friendly to the Symbolist and anti-positivist tendencies of both composers.”¹³ Hello’s influences on Tournemire are found in Tournemire’s writings, particularly in his unpublished memoirs and correspondence between the two composers. Donelson explains with great care the differences in philosophy between Messiaen, seeking a perfect expression of the Catholic faith, and that of Tournemire. In conclusion she sums up the answer to the title of her essay in quoting Hello:

In a “clear vision of the role of the Catholic faith in art and culture, Hello saw spiritual realities as more real than material (indeed, as their source) and concluded that, for art to be truly beautiful or ‘sincere,’ the artist must have a clear vision of the world as redeemed by God with the Incarnate Christ at the center of God’s plan for salvation.”¹⁴

Peter Bannister’s essay, “Charles Tournemire and the ‘Bureau of Eschatology’” explains the meaning of eschatology in the historical context of the first half of the twentieth century in France. Bannister quotes frequently from the 20th-century Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. The author’s reference to “Bureau of Eschatology” refers to Balthasar’s quote from Troeltsch’s dictum, “The bureau of eschatology is usually closed,” explaining that “this was true enough of the liberalism of the nineteenth century, but since the turn of the century the office has been working overtime.”¹⁵ Bannister explains the notion of life as a progression from darkness to light, often quoting from Léon Bloy, the French agnostic who converted to a strict form of Roman Catholicism, and Tournemire’s unpublished memoirs, and symphonies. Bannister laments the paucity of writings about Tournemire, citing the lack of primary source material. Bannister does not mention that this problem will soon be rectified; a forthcoming issue of the French review L’Orgue will be devoted to the difficult and highly secretive diary of Tournemire, Memoires.

I, for one, am not as pessimistic as Bannister when he states: “The likelihood is that for years to come, Tournemire will sadly continue to be regarded as an obscure figure outside the (dwindling) organ world . . . ”¹⁶ The two Tournemire conferences and these essays belie his conclusion. Consider that such composers as Bach, Mendelssohn, Rheinberger, and Langlais were less appreciated during their lifetimes than after their deaths, and certainly today they are not considered as “obscure figures.” 

Tennille Shuster’s cover, a surrealistic picture of the front of the Basilica of Sainte-Clotilde with dramatic reddish-brown clouds in the background, reflects the book’s mystical nature. The typeface and illustrations are exquisitely reproduced. 

Drs. Donelson and Schloesser are to be commended on the physical beauty of the book and the depth of scholarship that the book represents.

 

Visions of Amen

Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen is an esoteric, extremely difficult seven-movement work for two pianists at two separate pianos, and its difficulty lies both in its technical demands (requiring extremes in dynamic range and tessitura) and in its obscure symbolism (which deals with astrology, theology, angels, saints, and birds). In the biographical aspect of this latest book on the early life of Messiaen, Stephen Schloesser develops the themes surrounding the composer’s connections with the mystic Charles Tournemire. 

The driving force behind the book came from Schloesser’s collaboration with pianists Hyesook Kim (Calvin College) and Stéphane Lemelin (University of Ottawa), with whom Schloesser received a $5,000 grant from the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship for a project entitled “Olivier Messiaen’s Religious Perspective and Performance of Visions of l’Amen.” In 2004–2005 the two pianists performed the work at a number of locations in the U.S. and Canada, with Schloesser giving lecture notes on the work and Messiaen’s life. Their original plan was to produce a compact disc with liner notes written by Schloesser. The Messiaen centennial in 2008, however, yielded a plethora of new material for Schloesser, and the project subsequently grew into the present book format, with a link to the audio recording on the Internet. A detailed analysis of the work with timings from the recording makes it possible to follow the work without the score.

The title of the book leads one to believe that Schloesser focuses on the early life and music of this composer. But the extent and depth of the material goes far beyond a discussion of Messiaen’s early years. Schloesser examines Messiaen’s entire life, giving explanations of literary, symbolist, surrealist, mystical, and theological forces that inspired his compositions. In many of Messiaen’s biographies and his own writings, the writers Paul Éluard, Dom Columba Marmion, and Ernest Hello are mentioned, but Schloesser goes farther with extensive quotations from these authors, showing their influence on Messiaen’s music. For example, in the discussion of Messiaen’s Nativity of the Lord (1935), Messiaen frequently quotes Marmion’s book Christ in His Mysteries:

 

But the main reason for keeping alive such feelings within us is our status as children of God. The Divine Sonship of the Father’s only-begotten is of the essence and eternal. But, in an infinitely free act of love, the Father has willed to add a sonship, a childship, of grace.¹⁷ 

Schloesser divides the book into four sections. The first, dealing with Messiaen’s parents, Pierre Messiaen and Cécile Sauvage, covers 1883–1930. This section can be read by itself without reference to Messiaen’s compositions as an introduction to the psychological underpinnings of his personality. Part two, “Budding Rhythmician, Surrealist Composer, Mystical Commentator: 1927–1932,” continues this psychological approach and discusses in some detail his earliest works. The third part, “Theological Order, Glorified Bodies, Apocalyptic Epoch, 1932–1943,” delves into a detailed description and analysis of Visions of Amen. For musicians, a study of Messiaen’s score is helpful, but even without the score, Schloesser gives a detailed analysis of each movement, with timings from the recording in an appendix. Part four, “Legacy, 1943–1992,” includes a discussion of Messiaen’s last work: Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum. Throughout the book, Schloesser’s use of extensive footnotes on the same page as the text is helpful. The appendix of scriptural references is logical and welcomed.

The recording by pianists Kim and Lemelin is of high quality, with a wide range of dynamics and tessituras. This is a work that Messiaen and his second wife Yvonne Loriod played together frequently, and it is dedicated to her. Much of Messiaen’s piano music is extremely difficult technically and demands the utmost in coordination between the two performers here on two pianos. One could wish that a compact disc had been included with the book, so that one could listen to the performance without using a computer.

But even if the reader has no interest in this difficult piano work, composed during the darkest period of World War II when Paris was occupied by the Nazis, there is more than enough material about Messiaen’s personal life and that of his parents to engage the reader. It is well known that Messiaen’s mother was a poetesse; the drama of her life and the struggles she endured with her husband Pierre is explained in great detail. In the introduction, Schloesser explains his approach as a “history of emotion.” In this age of a “confessional” approach to biography, it is impressive how Schloesser combines very personal material with scholarly writing.

Visions of Amen can be read on two levels: first, theological—the birth of creation, the passion of Christ, angels, saints, birdsong, judgment; and second, as a personal statement of Messiaen’s love for Yvonne Loriod. In general, “Amen” signifies “So be it,” but for Messiaen and other French composers, it was also a code name for an expression of love. This code reference using his second mode of limited transposition is also found frequently in Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony and throughout Messiaen’s oeuvre. 

 

Notes

1. Stephen Schloesser, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 281.

2. Ruth Sisson, “The Symphonic Organ Works of Charles Arnould Tournemire” (Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 1984). Ianco Pascal, Charles Tournemire ou le mythe de Tristan (Geneva, Editions Papillon, 2001). Pascal knew Madame Odile Weber, the niece of Tournemire’s second wife Alice Tournemire, who shared many of her photographs with him. Joël Marie Fauquet, Catalogue de l’œuvre de Charles Tournemire (Geneva, Minkoff, 1979).

3. Edward Schaefer, “The Relationship Between the Liturgy of the Roman Rite and the Italian Organ Literature of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1985).

4. Charles Tournemire, Précis d’exécution, de registration et d’improvisation à l’orgue (Paris, LeMoine, 1936).

5. Tikker, in Mystic Modern: The Music, Thought and Legacy of Charles Tournemire, edited by Jennifer Donelson and Stephen Schloesser (Church Music Association of America, 2014), 131. 

6. Lord, in Mystic Modern, 137.

7. Raba, in Mystic Modern, 186.

8. Rone, in Mystic Modern, 230.

9. Schloesser, in Mystic Modern, 266.

10. Ibid., 267.

11. Ibid., 257.

12. Stove, in Mystic Modern, 312.

13. Donelson, in Mystic Modern, 317.

14. Ibid., 318.

15. Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Some Points of Eschatology” in Explorations in Theology, Vol. I: The Word Made Flesh (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1964), p. 255, translated by Bannister. 

16. Bannister, in Mystic Modern, p. 352.

17. Stephen Schloesser, Visions of Amen: The Early Life and Music of Olivier Messiaen (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), p. 230.

 

Ann Labounsky earned a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Pittsburgh, an M.Mus. from the University of Michigan studying with Marilyn Mason, and a B.Mus. from the Eastman School of Music, studying with David Craighead. She studied in Paris with André Marchal and Jean Langlais on a Fulbright Grant and holds diplomas from the Schola Cantorum and Ecole Normale. Author of the biography Jean Langlais: the Man and His Music (Amadeus Press, 2000), she recorded the complete organ works of Jean Langlais for the Musical Heritage Society (reissued on the Voix du Vent label) and narrated and performed in a DVD of his life based on this biography, a project sponsored by the Los Angeles AGO Chapter. Labounsky is chair of organ and sacred music at Duquesne University, active in the American Guild of Organists, the National Pastoral Musicians, and the Church Music Association of America, and serves as organ artist in residence at First Lutheran Church, Pittsburgh. 

Artis Wodehouse

Pianist and harmoniumist Artis Wodehouse has a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from Yale, and a DMA from Stanford. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant led to her producing CDs and publishing transcriptions of recorded performances and piano rolls made by George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton, and Zez Confrey. In 2000, Wodehouse began performing on antique reed organs and harmoniums that she had painstakingly restored and brought to concert condition. She founded the chamber group MELODEON in 2010 to present little-known but valuable music from 19th- and early 20th-century America, using her antique instrument collection as the basis for repertoire choice. 

During its prime in the nineteenth-century, the reed organ was the preferred instrument in American homes and also deemed a fit substitute for the more expensive pipe organ. Large reed organs became common in civic gathering halls and smaller churches. Despite the popularity of reed organs in America,¹ music for them consisted primarily of simplified arrangements of European art music, easy-to-play popular and sentimental ditties, polkas, marches, and waltzes, or hymns and other service music associated with worship or civic gatherings.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century it became apparent that design variation from company to company and from organ to organ, even within a given company’s fleet of models, was preventing composers from writing idiomatic original music for the American reed organ. The limited market for music crafted for one or another of the competing designs was too small to sustain widespread printing and marketing of scores.²

Without its own literature, such as had been created during the nineteenth century for its European counterpart, the harmonium, the American reed organ had an uncertain future. It would continue to be regarded at best as “a sort of weak substitute for the church organ.”³ Then, in the mid-1890s, at essentially the beginning of the end of the reed organ era, Mason & Hamlin⁴ began to address the problem by introducing an action design⁵ whose capabilities would “insure the greatest advantages to the composers, at the same time enable the manufacturer to place his instruments on the market at as low a price as possible.” The new action design was called the “Normal-Harmonium.” This was the action design for which the American composer Arthur Bird (1856–1923) wrote his compelling body of reed organ music. Figure 1 shows the Mason & Hamlin American reed organ, with Normal-Harmonium action design. Two knee levers are above the foot pedals. The right lever controls the internal swell shades; the left lever activates the Grand Jeu.

Mason & Hamlin’s Normal-Harmonium action design and Arthur Bird’s creation of a substantial, idiomatic music for the American reed organ came too late. Piano sales that had roared ahead after the Civil War rapidly displaced the reed organ. In the 1880s, reed organ sales slipped below that of pianos. By World War I, the glory days of the reed organ were over.⁶

 

Two competing
19th-century instruments: 

The American reed organ
and the European harmonium 

In the 1840s, United States inventors and businessmen founded companies that offered distinctive fleets of reed organ models. Reed organs were built in a bewildering variety of brands, sizes, and stoplist configurations. They ranged from diminutive four-octave home models that traveled to the West in covered wagons, to large, expensive instruments with powerful tone, full pedalboards, and many stops. 

The American reed organ used one or more sets of brass “free reeds” in order to generate tone. The performer’s foot pumping activated suction bellows that generated a stream of moving air, much like a vacuum cleaner. When the performer depressed a key, this moving air passed through a small chamber in which the reed was affixed at one end, but free to vibrate on the other end (hence the designation, “free reed”). The reeds varied in length, and the longer the reed, the lower the tone. Air rushing through the chamber caused the reed to vibrate, and tone to be produced. When a reed organ had more than one set of reeds, a set could be brought into play or silenced by allowing or blocking the moving air via stop pulls. As with the pipe organ, a set of shutters or swell shades located within the action facilitated dynamic contrasts. The performer opened or shut them on a gradient via a knee paddle. 

The largest and most prominent reed organ companies were Mason & Hamlin in Boston and Estey in Brattleboro, Vermont, but scores of others proved successful. As the nineteenth century progressed, American reed organs became increasingly complex. Inventors developed voicing techniques that produced a broad range of distinctive and contrasting timbres, named using terms derived from pipe organ nomenclature.⁷ Instruments built with multiple sets of differently voiced reeds featured multiple stops and a divided keyboard⁸ so that the player could choose contrasting timbres in the treble and bass of a single keyboard. Large reed organs were sometimes built with multiple keyboards, like pipe organs. The more reeds in an instrument, the more expensive it would be. 

Another keyboard instrument employing differently voiced sets of free reeds in airtight chambers arose in Europe during the nineteenth century. A Frenchman, Alexandre Debain, patented this instrument in 1842, naming it a “harmonium.” (See Figure 2.) 

Like the American reed organ, the European harmonium came to offer a broad range of distinctive and contrasting timbres controlled by stop pulls, and a divided keyboard that enabled the choice of different timbres in the treble and bass. (See Figure 3.)

Despite some similarity in design to the American reed organ, the European harmonium did not employ the American-style bellows system (suction) that pulled moving air in and through the reed chamber. Instead, in the European system, air was pushed through and out via pressure, producing sound like a trumpet or an oboe. The different airflow systems require different technical skills of the performer and produce distinctly different tonal characteristics. (See Figure 4.)

Foot pumping on the harmonium manages two important functions because of the way harmonium bellows were designed to work: the performer maintains constant airflow while simultaneously adjusting the relative airflow speed responsible for dynamic contrasts.⁹ Manipulating airflow velocity to effect dynamic changes was called “expression,” and this function had its own specially assigned stop pull. An additional European innovation for facilitating dynamic contrast was the invention of the so-called “double expression.” It was installed in the more costly European harmoniums. Double expression, a capability arising no doubt from a desire to mimic the piano’s ability to balance melody and accompaniment, allowed the performer to control not only the overall loudness but also the relative volume of the treble and bass on a gradient. Double expression is controlled by two knee levers installed under the keyboard and above the two foot-pump pedals. The skill required to play smoothly and expressively on the harmonium demands much practice.  

Late-speaking reeds, i.e., those with a time lag between the act of depressing a key and the sounding of its corresponding tone, hampered performers on both the American reed organ and the European harmonium.¹⁰ Although quick airflow delivery to the reeds was a design priority for both reed organ and harmonium builders, the Americans felt that beyond a certain point, slight lags were an acceptable characteristic of the instrument for which the performer was expected to make appropriate adjustments. The Europeans, however, took a different approach. To mitigate the problem of late speech (and to provide an additional tonal effect) they positioned small felt-covered hammers next to each of the reeds of the set most frequently used in performance. These little hammers were controlled by a stop pull, referred to as “percussion.” When the percussion stop is pulled and a key is depressed, the little hammers simultaneously strike the sounding reed, causing it to speak more quickly and incisively, like a crisp piano attack. The harmonium’s percussion makes performance of rapid passagework more predictable when compared to the American reed organ.

The most far-reaching advantage the harmonium held over the American reed organ was the standardization of stops generally agreed upon by the European companies. Standardization had two benefits: it made it possible to print in music scores commonly understood registration that could be used across instruments built by different companies. Secondly, performers could move from one harmonium to another with a minimum of adjustment.¹¹

It should be noted that the terms “harmonium” and “reed organ” were and continue to be used interchangeably. Lack of a clear and consistent terminology must be laid at the door of the overlapping and competing terms originally used. In their heyday, American reed organs were most frequently referred to as simply “organs,” but other names were used as well. These included Organ-Harmonium and Cabinet Organ, two different terms used by the same company, Mason & Hamlin. There were also fanciful names such as Phonorium, used by Estey.¹²

 

Harmonium and American reed organ repertoire

The capabilities of the European harmonium and the move towards standardization¹³ attracted several important nineteenth-century European composers. Elgar, Strauss, Schoenberg, Webern, Mahler, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Rossini made good use of the harmonium in some of their orchestral and/or choral works. Berlioz, Franck, Saint-Saëns, Guilmant, Widor, and many others wrote high quality solo and chamber music for it. Finally, the German composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877–1933) made it his mission to develop a body of repertoire that would exploit the unique sonic and expressive capabilities of the Art Harmonium. During the early twentieth century Karg-Elert wrote what has proved to be the single most significant body of solo and chamber music for the instrument. The popularity of the European harmonium peaked about 1900, slightly later than the American reed organ’s peak of popularity.

Relatively few harmoniums made it across the Atlantic during the nineteenth century. On the other hand, American reed organs were exported and sold in fair numbers throughout Europe, particularly those built by Mason & Hamlin.¹⁴ Also, several European manufacturers such as Lindholm, Mannborg, and Shiedmayer adopted the American suction bellows system for their instruments.¹⁵ Nevertheless, despite significant cross-Atlantic distribution of the American reed organ and the availability of native European instruments with some shared characteristics, the American reed organ never established an artistic foothold through a representative body of high-quality music comparable to that written for the harmonium. This cannot be fully explained by the technical differences between the two as outlined above. Although the American instrument may have lacked the harmonium’s more refined control of dynamics and its useful percussion stop, the best American instruments, such as the Mason & Hamlin Liszt Organ, have a distinctive tonal beauty and a multiplicity of sounds equal to those of their European counterparts. 

The promotional prominence and enlarged, relatively standardized capabilities of Mason & Hamlin’s flagship Liszt Organ may therefore have been the impetus behind Boston-based American publisher Arthur Schmidt to print a few works for it during the 1890s. Schmidt’s publications for the Liszt Organ included both original compositions as well as arrangements of famous European works for organ solo, duets with piano, and chamber pieces. But apart from Eugene Gigout’s excellent Romanza for the Liszt Organ, unfortunately none of the rest rose to a similarly high quality.

 

Arthur Bird, American expatriate composer (1856–1923) 

Around 1896, Mason & Hamlin likely encouraged and may have actually commissioned the American composer Arthur Bird to write idiomatic art music for the standardized action they introduced during the 1890s, called the Normal-Harmonium. 

No documentation has yet surfaced indicating payment to Bird for his work by the firm. Nevertheless, key musical and personal circumstances link Arthur Bird to the most significant people associated with the Mason & Hamlin Company. Central to the connection between Arthur Bird and Mason & Hamlin was Franz Liszt. A canny seer, Liszt bet correctly on the ability of eager young American pianists and composers to hold high the torch of pianism and to carry forward the music of the future. Liszt welcomed them, offering his inspired pedagogy and worldly professional connections free of charge. Liszt’s generosity forged a well-documented bond among his pupils. Liszt’s first American student was the pianist William Mason (1829–1908). Mason studied with Liszt beginning in 1849, and brought back to the United States Liszt’s pedagogic principles through an extensive career of teaching, performing, and publishing. William Mason also happened to be the brother of Henry Mason, who in 1854 co-founded the Mason & Hamlin Company. Henry and William Mason were in turn sons of Lowell Mason, an important American hymn composer and musical educator during the first half of the nineteenth century. 

Liszt owned and wrote music for numerous keyboard instruments provided for him by both European and American companies.¹⁶ Among such instruments in his sizable collection was a Mason & Hamlin cabinet organ that he acquired in the 1870s. Later, Mason & Hamlin’s flagship high-end model came to be named the “Liszt Organ,” a likely outcome of the close connection between Liszt, his pupil William Mason, and the Mason & Hamlin Company.¹⁷ The Mason & Hamlin Liszt Organ was introduced about 1880. Complex, colorful, powerful, and versatile, the Liszt Organ was designed to compete with the best European harmoniums. While the Liszt Organ shared many tonal and functional features with the Normal-Harmonium design, it had a different tessitura (five octaves, C to C, versus the Normal-Harmonium’s F to F) and a different split point (E–F versus B–C for the Normal-Harmonium).

Arthur Bird was also one of Liszt’s American pupils, coming to him during Liszt’s later years.¹⁸ Bird’s musical and personal background strikingly resembled that of William Mason. Born in Belmont, Massachusetts in 1856, Bird’s early musical training came from his father and uncle, who were born-and-bred American church musicians. Arthur’s father, Horace Bird, and his uncle, Joseph Bird, were active in the New England of the 1840s and 1850s as voice teachers, composers of hymns and songs, and editors of singing books written to develop score-reading literacy. Upon the advice of William Mason’s father, Lowell Mason, young Arthur Bird was sent in 1875 to study in Germany at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Returning to North America two years later, he took a church music position in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he began to compose. He returned to Berlin in 1881 to study composition and orchestration. It was during this time that Bird came into the Liszt orbit.  

By his early 30s (in the mid-1880s), Bird had become well established as an organist and pianist. His compositions were published and performed widely in Europe. Bird spent most of his life abroad, mainly in Berlin, where he married a wealthy German widow and apparently lived lavishly. In 1897 Bird returned for some time to the United States in what proved to be a failed attempt to have his comic operetta, Daphne, performed in America. Reading between the lines of William Loring’s biographical work on Arthur Bird, is it possible that Bird wished to forge a closer connection to his native country? Certainly a major production of an opera by a United States-born composer within the United States would be an excellent vehicle for that scenario. During the late 1890s, when the quest for “genuine” American composers was in full swing, Bird may have sensed an opportunity. In any event, in that same year (1897), the first of Bird’s pieces for the Mason & Hamlin “American Harmonium” (op. 37) were published by Breitkopf and Härtel, an important German firm still operating that publishes high-art European music.¹⁹

 

Characteristics of Arthur Bird’s “American Harmonium”

The historic trajectory mating Arthur Bird with the Normal-Harmonium came just at the point when the piano had overtaken reed organ sales. Mason & Hamlin realized that in order to survive in the long term, the reed organ needed some good original music. The publication of Arthur Bird’s music for the “American Harmonium” came at a historic crossroad for the American reed organ, largely due to the rise of the American piano. From the 1850s, pianos, and particularly American pianos, started to benefit from standardization and mechanical manufacturing methods of the industrial revolution. Prior to this time, pianos were mainly handcrafted items. Likewise around 1850, the design of the piano, particularly the American piano, moved rapidly toward increased durability and a greater dynamic and pitch range. Piano types coalesced into three categories: square, grand, and finally, upright. Each of these types served a clear purpose. As a result, consumers began to turn to the piano as a viable keyboard alternative to the reed organ, particularly in the home market, where the reed organ had ruled uncontested.²⁰ Sales of pianos grew steadily through the nineteenth century.

In contrast to the piano industry, American reed organ manufacturers from the 1850s to the 1900s offered consumers instruments of a wide variety of sizes, competing capabilities, nomenclature, and above all, case styles.²¹ After the Civil War, American manufacturers also developed complex instruments of considerable beauty, sophistication, and expense. These large instruments with enhanced performance capabilities were aimed at a smaller “niche” market, for placement in the homes of the wealthy, civic or religious meeting halls, and small churches. But after a sustained growth period lasting about 40 years, sales of the American reed organ began to decline in the 1880s.

The Normal-Harmonium action design of the 1890s for which Bird wrote was conceived to meet these market challenges. Mason & Hamlin worked with and adopted the Normal-Harmonium design in collaboration with two entities associated with the company: their German representative Paul Koeppen and the Bender firm in Leiden, Holland.²² Mason & Hamlin’s goal was to provide a standardized instrument that could compete with the piano and its plentiful repertoire. Their instrument had to be sophisticated enough to attract composers to write good music for it and be of a reasonable cost. 

Mason & Hamlin met both of its goals. First, the cost of an instrument with Normal-Harmonium specifications was indeed lower by half or more than that of the top of the Mason & Hamlin line, the Liszt Organ. The price of the Liszt came in at $700, but instruments with Normal-Harmonium capabilities could be had between $260 and $300.²³ Second, the Normal-Harmonium action provided attractive and useful performance capabilities. These included a pitch range of five octaves from F to F and multiple sets of reeds offering an elaborate stoplist. American reed organs with the Normal-Harmonium action design began to be manufactured in the 1890s and continued to be built until the company ceased reed organ production in the early 1920s.

As mentioned previously, inconsistent nomenclature and lack of a simple explanation for actual performance capability plagued the field. Although Mason & Hamlin offered a standardized action design in the Normal-Harmonium, Bird’s music itself was identified on the score as being intended for the “American Harmonium” and/or the “Normal-Harmonium.” Nomenclature had still not jelled. Therefore it must be stressed that the terms “American Harmonium” and Mason & Hamlin “Normal-Harmonium” do not refer to any one specific instrument, but rather to an action design embodying certain specific capabilities. 

Figure 5 shows the overhead view of interior of the Mason & Hamlin American organ with Normal-Harmonium specs. To the upper right is the paddle that is activated to rotate by the Vox Humana stop. The upper left box houses the very large Sub Bass reeds. The specific capabilities of the Normal-Harmonium are as follows. 

 

Stoplist:

Diapason Dolce 8′—the Diapason, mechanically softened. 

Sub Bass 16′—consists of 13 notes, the chromatic octave upward from low C. This stop uses the largest, longest reeds, producing a deep, rich, and powerful sound.

Eolian Harp 2′—two detuned sets of reeds producing a shimmering, ethereal vibrato.

Diapason 8′—pure, organ-like tone. 

Viola 4′—resembles the sound of the orchestral instrument for which it is named.

Viola Dolce 4′—the Viola, mechanically softened.

Vox Humana—adds a vibrato or tremolo. Can be used in combination with any of the other drawn stops in the treble. Activated by the turning of a windmill-like paddle located inside the action.

Seraphone 8′—differs from the Diapason in timbre. Focused and slightly nasal.

Flute 4′—resembles the sound of the orchestral instrument for which it is named.

Melodia 8′—continuation in the treble of the Diapason reeds.

Vox Celeste 8′—another stop combining two sets of detuned reeds that creates a vibrato effect. 

Octave Coupler—when pulled, mechanically connects a note to that of one an octave higher.

Melodia Dolce 8′—mechanically softened Melodia. 

 

The split point on the keyboard is between B and middle C. Stops from Seraphone 8′ up activate the treble, the stops from Viola Dolce, down, the bass.

 

Mechanical devices:

Grand Jeu—activated by a knee paddle located under the keys above the left foot pump pedal. The Grand Jeu causes all the reeds to sound at once, producing the instrument’s fullest and loudest sound.

Swell—activated by a knee paddle located under the keys above the right foot pump pedal. This device controls the internal shutters responsible for dynamic contrasts. (See Figure 6.)

 

Arthur Bird as composer

During his lifetime, Arthur Bird was recognized as an active, widely published, and well-received composer of some stature, particularly in Europe. Incidentally, his successful European career was launched in no small part because of the positive public and private endorsements Bird received from the influential Franz Liszt. 

Bird’s oeuvre is extensive, including opera and theatre works, orchestral music, songs, piano materials, chamber works (particularly those for wind instruments, for which he is best-remembered today), organ, and many other forms. Bird wrote a sizeable number of short solo piano pieces in well-established standard dance forms and topical styles—march, waltz, minuet, gavotte, lullaby, and mazurka. His extensive experience composing in this genre prepared Bird well to write for the American reed organ. Bird’s music is available in score at the Library of Congress through the generous donation of his widow and has been amply documented through the International Music Score Library Project.²⁴

Relatively little of Bird’s music has been recorded.²⁵ What is available tends to confirm the critical reception his work received during his lifetime. Reviewing a performance of [Bird’s] Serenade for Wind Instruments, op. 40, the Berliner Borsen Courier said: “It is distinguished for the freshness and spontaneity of its invention, as well as the clever craftsmanship and the clear and compact disposition of its different parts . . .” Another critic comments: “Characteristically his music is pleasing and melodious in composition. It is coherent and well developed in form. It lies easily within the range of the instruments, and displays no little knowledge of their resources.” Of him, [Arthur] Farwell wrote: “Arthur Bird is known as the possessor of a fertile and truly musical imagination and a thorough technique . . .
Bird is a musician of German training and French sympathies and calls himself a conditional modernist.” Mentioning that Bird composed in almost all forms, [Louis] Elson says of him: “He is an excellent contrapuntist, yet uses his skill in this direction as a means rather than as an end, seldom making a display of his knowledge. It is a pleasure to find an American composer who is not anxious to out-Wagner and who goes along the peaceful tenor of recognized and classical ways.”26 Bird was even described as “the most promising American composer of the middle and late Eighties” by no less than the important conductor,
Arthur Nikisch.²⁷ 

The amount and dating of Bird’s production seem to confirm Loring’s supposition²⁸ that after 1900, Bird’s work dwindled, though his reed organ works of 1905 (op. 45) maintain his previously held high standard. On the other hand, his simplified arrangements, American Melodies Specially Adapted and Arranged for Normal-Harmonium of 1907, appear to have been written simply for profit and lack the artistic value of his earlier work for the American Harmonium.

 

Arthur Bird’s music for the American Harmonium

Those who either possessed or might  have considered purchasing an instrument with the Normal-Harmonium action design would likely be individuals of some performance ability and/or a level of musical sophistication high enough to appreciate the artistic features of the instrument. They would also likely appreciate piano music of the better salon variety, up to and including Schumann’s, Chopin’s, or Grieg’s short works for solo piano. Finally, they would most likely be of the social class that would appreciate hearing this music, most likely in the home setting. 

Bird’s conservatism—informed by fine craftsmanship, deft handling of instrumental color, and fluency in miniature forms—may not have been enough to place him into the compositional pantheon of his trailblazing European contemporaries (Mahler, Debussy, etc.), but his abilities ideally suited him for writing salon-oriented character pieces of the type popularized by Mason & Hamlin’s Normal-Harmonium. An already accomplished American composer, Bird’s impeccable, media-worthy credentials and network of connections to Mason & Hamlin were a further plus. Bird was a perfect fit.

Bird published six opus numbers for the Normal-Harmonium.²⁹ All contain interesting and beautiful music, but the best of these was his first, the ten pieces of op. 37.³⁰ In the first printing, the op. 37 pieces were identified directly on the score’s front pages as being intended for the “American Harmonium”³¹ or for the Mason & Hamlin “Normal-Harmonium.” A page is devoted to an explanation of the stops required and their manner of notation in the score. Bird used circled letters derived from the stop name. For instance, Diapason is D; Viola, V; Voix Celeste, VC; and so forth. Later print runs of op. 37 contain the same explanatory page, but also indicate standard stop numbers, i.e., 1 for Diapason, 3 for Viola, 5 for Eolian Harp, etc., that would correspond to numbers appearing on European suction instruments of equivalent capability.³²

While no piece in the op. 37 set lasts more than three minutes, each exhibits a mastery of craft: beautifully spun-out melodies, masterful counterpoint, subtly personalized inflections of nineteenth-century harmonic practice, and traditional formal structures handled with deft assurance. Bird’s forms are not unusual (ABA, sonata, rondo). But because the Normal-Harmonium’s unique instrumental colors are an integral component of Bird’s structural designs, the listener experiences an additional dimension of thematic transformation. In his music for Normal-Harmonium, Bird’s assimilation of instrumental color as a component of structural rhetoric relates his music to that of the nascent French impressionists at the turn-of-the-century. The following briefly describes salient features of each of the pieces in Bird’s op. 37:

1. Meditation—a sarabande. In this mini-Wagnerian contrapuntal ramble, Bird employs kaleidoscopic stop changes that underscore the evolving melodic twists and turns.

2. Preludium—brooding and dramatic four-part writing in an ABA structure. Registration is simple, but Bird uses the octave coupler at the recapitulation, reinforcing and underscoring the harmonic excursions introduced as the piece moves toward an impassioned final cadence.

3. Adagio—elegiac four-part mini-sonata. Development section comprises a series of recitative-like meandering arpeggios over sustained chords. Recapitulation re-registers the opening material over low pedal points. With more recitative-like arpeggios at the coda, the piece concludes with a simple fadeout on the ethereal Eolian Harp stop.

4. Reverie—features a long-breathed, haunting, and tentative treble melody on the flute stop set against slithering countermelodies registered on the atmospheric Eolian Harp stop. In ABA form, the melody’s return is entirely recast in a fuller texture with the foundation 8′ and 4′ stops. In partnership with a walking bass line, the melody’s tentative first appearance is thereby transformed into an affirmative point of arrival. The coda brings the listener back to the ethereal Eeolian Harp, rounding the piece off as it began.³³

5. Postlude—hearkens back to Bird’s American past, a spirited march that suggests a full wind band.³⁴ Bird’s registration indicates that the piece must be played in its entirety using only one setting, the circled G indicating “Grand Jeu.” Because Grand Jeu causes all the stops to sound at once, finger strength and vigorous foot pumping are required throughout. 

6. Improvisato—a fierce, somewhat virtuosic piece. Registration involving the basic 8′ and 4′ stops is augmented at the recapitulation by use of the Grand Jeu. Rapid, conjunct passagework in the wild coda comes off surprisingly well, despite the lack of a percussion stop. Bird was a hands-on composer and knew what the Mason & Hamlin organ could do.³⁵ 

7. Offertoire—This piece would be suitable for use in a church setting. It is an atmospheric sweet/sour composition with change of mode. 

8. Scherzo—This is the most technically demanding of the set, an extended rondo. Rapid sixteenth notes scattered throughout the piece when the octave-coupler is drawn or the Grand Jeu is activated require finger strength and precise articulation. Not only the performer’s skill is tested: Bird takes the instrument itself to the edge of its mechanical ability to sound quick notes on the fly. Registration is extraordinarily full and rich, suggesting an orchestra. 

9. Auf dem Lande—a melancholy, minor “folksong” melody is transformed to a grand, affirmative conclusion in major mode.

10. Pastoral—perhaps the most inventive and idiomatic of the entire set. Bird’s motivic ideas have a symbiotic relationship with the instrumental colors he brings to bear. Set above continuously sustained low pedal points, a flowing conjunct melody in the treble twines about an ostinato pattern in the mid range. In order to keep the pedal points depressed while so much action is occurring that requires two hands, lead weights must be used to hold down the pedal-point notes.

 

The American reed organ, Arthur Bird, and the future

The composition of high-quality, original repertoire for the European harmonium during the nineteenth century has proved to have far-reaching consequences. Once thought lost to history, beginning in the 1980s the harmonium has been going through a steady revival, centering in the Netherlands. It seems likely the harmonium will continue to reestablish the place it once held in the classical repertoire. While there continues to be a small but passionate interest in the American reed organ,³⁶ a revival similar in scope and momentum has not yet begun.

As the rise and fall of the American reed organ demonstrates, the key to an instrument’s survival is not its mechanical capabilities, but rather the repertoire written for it. Not just any music will do. What is needed is music that will continue to offer listeners an aesthetic experience independent from the era in which it was created.

In the case of the European harmonium, the point where form and function met occurred when distribution was growing and the instrument’s capability achieved sufficient standardization. This favorable environment attracted a fair number of composers to write significant music for it. Unfortunately for the American reed organ, standardization arrived at the very point when distribution was falling. 

Nevertheless, we are grateful that one composer, Arthur Bird, stepped in during a brief moment of opportunity in the history of the American reed organ. With his ideal combination of skills, commitment, and inspiration, he provided us with music that stands poised to move into the future. ν

 

Special thanks to Carson Cooman and Whitney Slaten

 

Notes

1. American publishers also churned out a deluge of reed organ method books intended for the large market of rank amateurs in the United States. 

2. Paul Hassenstein, “The Normal Harmonium And Its Literature,” The Music Trade Review 41:3, July 1905, 87. 

3. Ibid., 87.

4. Mason & Hamlin began as a reed organ manufacturer, but in 1883 started making pianos as well. About 1920 the company ceased making reed organs, but continued their piano line. 

5. “Action design” refers to a specific set of performance capabilities contained within the mechanism of an instrument. Action design was independent of case style. The same action could be enclosed in a variety of cases.

6. Robert F. Gellerman, The American Reed Organ (Vestal, New York: Vestal Press, 1973), 18.

7. Ibid., 97–99. Gellerman’s list of stop names gives some indication of the diversity and lack of standardization among the American reed organ manufacturers.

8. The point of division between bass and treble was called the “split point.”

9. The harmonium did not employ the swell shade of the American system for dynamic contrast because the pressure system made possible quick changes in air speed. Quick control of air speed permits the execution of sharper accents and faster dynamic changes than is typically possible on the American instrument. Simply put, the American instrument is easier to learn how to play, but lacks the degree of potential interpretive refinement offered by the harmonium.

10. The phenomenon is due to inertia. Lowest reeds speak quite slowly: they are the largest reeds, sometimes several inches in length.

11. Gellerman, American Reed Organ, 107.

12. I have consistently used “American Reed Organ” or simply “reed organ” to refer to the suction bellows action design, and “harmonium” to describe the European pressure instrument.

13. Standardized pitch range, split point, sets of stop pulls, shared nomenclature. Nevertheless, as the 19th century progressed, European harmonium manufacturers (like their American counterparts) succumbed to the lure of increased capability that culminated with the celebrated “Art Harmonium.” The Art Harmonium offered a whole new range of attractive colors and capabilities. Music written for the Art Harmonium could not be played on more basic harmonium models.

14. Casey Pratt, e-mail to the author, July 30, 2013. Casey Pratt is a United States reed organ restorer who specializes in the Mason & Hamlin. Exact numbers are not known to date.

15. Ibid. 

16. For instance, Liszt owned a piano-harmonium specially designed for him by Erard and Alexandre and a Chickering grand that was used in his piano master classes. He also collected then “antique” pianos that belonged to Mozart and Beethoven.

17. The Liszt Organ has a set of uniquely voiced, so-called “Liszt” reeds of great tonal beauty. 

18. The main biographical information to date regarding Arthur Bird was amassed by Dr. William Cushing Loring (1914–2002). Loring was a Harvard graduate and an urban sociologist. After retirement, he focused on American art and music, working with Scarecrow Press to develop a series of more than twenty books on various North American composers. 

19. Available at the International Music Score Library Project website: http://imslp.org.

20. Another likely reason piano sales surged ahead of the reed organ resulted from the installment purchase plans offered by piano companies. Once a luxury item of the upper classes, the piano then became affordable to the burgeoning middle class.

21. The flamboyant case styles of American reed organs clearly indicate a function beyond that of simply a musical instrument. In addition to ornate carvings, some reed organ cases featured a façade of non-functional organ “pipes,” mirrors, candle holders, and the like.

22. This information was communicated by Frans Vandergrijn, a Netherlands-based authority on reed organs and harmoniums in a posting on Yahoo’s Reed Organ Restoration newsgroup, August 9, 2013. 

23. Pratt, e-mail to the author, August 10, 2013. To put these prices in perspective, average United States yearly income in 1900 was $438.

24. http://imslp.org/wiki/10_Pieces_for_Harmonium,_Op.37_(Bird,_Arthur_H.)

25. Modern recordings include music for piano 4-hands, op. 23, Vladimir and Nadia Zaitsev, pianists; Introduction and Fugue, op. 16, Tony and Mary Ann Lenti, pianists; Serenade for Wind Instruments, op. 40, Suite for Double Wind Quintet, op. 29 (Naxos), and Carnival Scenes for Orchestra, op. 5 (Albany).

26. William C. Loring, Jr., “Arthur Bird, American,” The Musical Quarterly 29:1, January 1943, 87. 

27. Ibid., 88.

28. Ibid., 86.

29. Op. 37, 1897; op. 38, 1901; op. 39, 1903; op. 41, 1906; op. 42, 1905; op. 44, 1903; op. 45, 1905. All are available at the Library of Congress.

30. Not all of the op. 37 pieces scanned and available in IMSLP come from the original 1897 printing, several being from later editions. The only difference is that additional equivalent registration intended for European suction instruments was added. 

31. My supposition is that Breitkopf titled them for the “American Harmonium” in order to alert purchasers that the intended instrument would be one of American design. European suction instruments could have been more or less acceptable alternatives, but only the Mason & Hamlin Normal-Harmonium would have had the subtle specificity of timbres and tonal balances characteristic of the Mason & Hamlin sound.

32. On IMSLP: http://javanese.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/2/2d/IMSLP65232-PMLP1327…

33. See performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIC9EwIjmks

34. And Percy Grainger’s later work for the reed organ.

35. See performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi6yjMzjKe.

36. The American Reed Organ Society has been in existence since 1981.

 

References

Archival Sources

Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. Music of Arthur Bird. Includes all his published music for reed organ, plus some manuscript scores.

 

Books and Articles

Brown, Andrea Elizabeth. “A Descriptive Analysis of Arthur Bird’s Suite in D.” DMA diss., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2010.

Elson, Louis C. American Music. New York, NY: MacMillan Co., 1904.

Gellerman, Robert F. The American Reed Organ. Vestal, NY: The Vestal Press, 1973.

———. The American Reed Organ and the Harmonium. Vestal, NY: The Vestal Press, 1996.

Good, Edwin M. Giraffes, Black Dragons, and Other Pianos. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Hendron, Michael, ed. Manufacturers Music Album Reed Organ Society Anthology Series. Palmer, Massachusetts: The Reed Organ Society Publications Office, 2001.

Hiles, John. A Catechism for the Harmonium. London: Brewer and Company, 1877.

Loring, William C., Jr. “Arthur Bird, American.” Musical Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1943): 78–91.

———. Arthur Bird: His Life and Music. Newton Centre, MA: n.p., 1941.

———. The Music of Arthur Bird: An Explanation of American Composers of the Eighties and Nineties for Bicentenial Americana Programming. Atlanta: n.p., 1974.

Milne, H. F. The Reed Organ: Its Design and Construction. Chancery Lane, England: Office of Musical Opinion, 1930.

 

Recordings

Bird, Arthur. Suite in D. On Bird Songs: Romantic Chamber Music of Arthur Bird, North Texas Chamber Players. Eugene Corporon, conductor. CD (digital disc). Klavier, KCD-11071, 1995.

———. Suite in D. On Collage: A Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Peabody Institute, 1857–2007. Peabody Conservatory Wind Ensemble. Harlan Parker, conductor. CD (digital disc). Naxos, 8.570403, 2008.

———. Suite in D. University of Cincinnati Chamber Players. Rodney Winther, conductor. CD (digital disc). Mark Records, 7212, 2007.

———. Amerikanische Weisen, op. 23, Three Characteristic Marches, op. 11,  American Souvenirs Piano Music for Four Hands, Nadia and Vladimir Zaitsev, pianists, CD (digital disc), Gleur De Son-Qualiton/The Orchard, 57928, 2004.

Bird, Arthur; Dussek, Jan Ladislav; Liszt, Franz; Grieg, Edvard; and Onslow, George; Forgotten Piano Duets, Vol. 2, Tony and Mary Ann Lenti, pianists, CD (digital  disc), ACA Digital Recording, B004QEZC2, 2011.

Notes on pipe organs in Canada's youngest province of the Confederation, Newfoundland and Labrador

Lester Goulding and William (Bill) Vineer

Lester Goulding was born in Grand Falls, Newfoundland. He has been an independent businessman, a music specialist (wind band) in the provincial school system, and a sessional instrumental instructor at the Department of Music at Memorial University of Newfoundland. A Licentiate and Fellow of Trinity College of Music, London, England, Goulding apprenticed and worked at Casavant Frères, St. Hyacinthe, Quebec in 1954 and 1955. In 1956 he was appointed by the builder to be their sales and service representative in Newfoundland and Labrador. With few exceptions, he has serviced all of the organs in this province. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland with his wife Elsie. He has four children and nine grandchildren.

William (Bill) Vineer is an Ottawa Valley boy from Renfrew who got “hooked on the pipe organ” at age five when he attended Renfrew Presbyterian Church with his family. While he has had a lifelong love for the pipe organ, his focus since 1967 has been on the Vineer Organ Library & Archives, now celebrating its 46th anniversary; the library and archives are located in Vineer’s west-end Ottawa home. Its website: www.vineerorganlibrary.com. Moving to Ottawa in 1965, Vineer began a 30-year career with the Department of Retro Virology in the Department of Agriculture’s Animal Disease Research Institute, during which time he contributed to over 150 published scientific papers, and two patents. In addition to his research work, he taught for 26 years in the Department of Hospitality at Algonquin College.

Contact the authors at the Vineer Organ Library & Archives by telephone at 613/224-1553 or by e-mail at 

[email protected].

For those of us in Canada who have a passionate love for the pipe organ and its history, there is no need to look further than our own backyard: a gold mine of glorious history is sitting right here in the youngest province of the Confederation, Newfoundland and Labrador, which became Canada’s tenth province in 1949. Prior to joining Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador was a Crown colony and in fact the oldest colony of the British Empire in North America. Thus, as we uncover the history of pipe organs past and present, it is not surprising to find in this eastern province a loyalty to the old country, Britain. A profound respect and affection for British standards of quality can be readily observed and it was quite common for the principal churches in the colony to turn to Britain rather than to America for their organs.

 

Pre-Confederation (1853–1949)

The earliest pipe organ found in our research that could be factually dated was constructed in 1853 by the British builder Thomas J. Robson for St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Cathedral, in St. John’s. Taking this date as a starting point, we have a period of 96 years, ending when Newfoundland and Labrador joined the Canadian Confederation in 1949. During this period, a total of 52 pipe organs were installed in the British colony: 36 were of British make, eleven were from Canada, and two from the United States of America. We did not find any information regarding the origin and manufacturer of the other three instruments. The date of installation could not be determined for eight of the 52 organs.

 

1949–present

After Newfoundland and Labrador joined the Canadian Confederation in 1949 and up to the present day, a total of eighteen organs were installed in the province, all manufactured in Canada and all still currently in use. The instrument built by Létourneau Organs as well as sixteen of the instruments built by Casavant Frères remain in the province, their conditions ranging from good to excellent. Another of the organs built by Casavant Frères and originally installed in Newfoundland is now located in Ontario and is in excellent condition.

 

Pipe organs of Labrador

We believe that there were at least five pipe organs installed in Labrador, the mainland part of the province. Four of these were smaller instruments and were installed in communities along the coastal shore, the first having arrived in 1824. The only organ among these four still in existence today is located in the Moravian Church, Hopedale: a one-manual with four stops, built in Saxony, Germany. We continue to search for information on the other three pipe organs we believe were located along the coastal shore of Labrador. It is highly likely that these too came from Saxony, Germany.

The fifth pipe organ located in Labrador is a Casavant, a unit organ of one manual, nine stops, three ranks. It was relocated in 1981 to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Roman Catholic Basilica, Labrador City. The organ is in good condition, is played on a regular basis, and is actively maintained.

 

Inventory of Newfoundland
and Labrador pipe organs

The table below, a chronological listing of the instruments of the past and present installed in Newfoundland and Labrador, is current as of January 2013. Each instrument is identified by opus number, year of installation, city or town, location, builder, number of manuals, stops, and ranks, type of action, and present condition. Abbreviations were used to describe the action of the instruments: “M” Mechanical (Tracker), “P” Pneumatic, “MP” Mechanical-Pneumatic, “EP” Electro-Pneumatic, “DE” Direct Electric (all unit organs), and “ES” Electric Slider. In the Opus and Year columns, “N/A” indicates data was not available at the time of publication. 

We would greatly appreciate being made aware of any errors or omissions and would welcome readers’ corrections and comments. Any information that can be added to these files or data to help fill in the table would certainly be welcomed. All information on the organs of Newfoundland and Labrador has been submitted from the files of Lester Goulding.

 

Some historical facts of interest

The 1853 Thomas J. Robson organ, installed in St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Basilica, St. John’s, had three manuals and 46 stops: 16 on the Great, 11 on the Choir, 13 on the Swell, and six for the pedals, plus four couplers;¹ “[…] it was handsomely equipped with mixtures on all three manuals, and fell short of the full present-day gospel by failing to have a 4ft. choral bass on the pedals.”² We have found no trace of this pipe organ. 

Today, St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Basilica houses two Casavant organs, both installed in 1955. Opus 2269 is a four-manual, 51-stop instrument located in the gallery, and opus 2270 a two-manual, 15-stop instrument located in the chancel.

A very rare and historic instrument is to be found in the Masonic Temple, St. John’s. Built in 1883 (opus number unknown) by August Gern, who previously worked as a foreman in the late 19th century for the renowned French organbuilder Cavaillé-Coll, the instrument is fitted with two manuals, 10 stops, and mechanical/pneumatic action. It has glass-paneled doors, all part of the console, which are set into the beautiful case. This pipe organ was originally built for the home of John B. Ayre (1850–1915), a merchant, political figure, organist, and director of the music section of the now defunct Ayre and Sons department store.

The importance of this instrument is that it is the only Gern pipe organ in Canada and in fact the only one in North America. Our understanding is that only a very few August Gern pipe organs remain intact in England where the builder lived. Unfortunately this pipe organ is in poor condition and in need of a total restoration. We firmly believe that this pipe organ should be restored to the full working condition of its glory days and sit in its rightful place as part of the glorious history of Newfoundland and Labrador.

The Bevington & Sons organ of 1884, a one-manual, nine-stop instrument with mechanical action, was built for Alexander Street Methodist Church. It was moved in 1911 to Trinity United Church, Winterton. This instrument is in good condition today.

The British organ builders, Forster & Andrews (1843–1956), of Hull, England, built a total of eight instruments that were exported to Newfoundland. Seven of these were smaller instruments of similar design (one manual, six stops), the other one being a larger organ of three manuals, 38 stops. The last of the smaller instruments was built in 1928 for Botwood United Church, Botwood. In 1990, the organ was relocated to the Corpus Christi Roman Catholic Church, St. John’s. The organ is in poor condition and is in need of a total restoration. It should be pointed out that Forster & Andrews were exporting their instruments to Newfoundland while it was still a British colony and did not export any of their instruments to Canada.³

Casavant opus 2586, built in 1960 for All Saints’ Anglican Church, Foxtrap, is a two-manual, 20-stop, three-rank direct electric action instrument. It was moved in 1999 to St. Leonard’s Roman Catholic Church in Manotick, Ontario. This pipe organ is in excellent condition.⁴

The only two pipe organs that we know to have been imported from the United States are Estey opus 1701 (1919), located in Central United Church, Bay Roberts (two manuals, seven stops) and Möller opus 7751 (1948), located in St. Anthony United Church, St. Anthony (two manuals, 17 stops, three ranks). Both are still in good playing condition.

Of the eleven pipe organs built in Canada and exported before 1949, nine were by Casavant, one by Woodstock, and one by Lye. Of these instruments, eight are still playable and rate from good to excellent, two were destroyed, and one lost its console (destroyed), although the case remains in the church.

Of the three instruments installed by unknown builders, one has been destroyed and two are still in use, one rated poor and one good.

Casavant opus 1386, located in Gower Street United Church, St. John’s, was installed in 1930: three manuals, 29 stops. This instrument was rebuilt and enlarged in 2007 to 36 stops.

It is amazing that, even after 160 years (1853–2013), fourteen of the 36 instruments manufactured in England remain in playable condition, their status ranging from poor to good, and that the two that are silent remain intact in their original location. We would very much like to see all of these remaining instruments that came from Britain and are still in playable condition be classified as heritage instruments, and rebuilt to their original condition before this very important part of Canadian history is lost forever.

 

Gower Street United Church,
St. John’s, Newfoundland

In the photograph, we see the Peter Conacher organ built in 1896 for Gower Street United Church, St. John’s, Newfoundland. In 1930, the organ was moved to the Memorial United Church, Grand Falls, Newfoundland. This photo was taken in 1953, prior to the organ being dismantled. The casework shown here now houses Casavant opus 2182. The towers and rosettes are hand-carved. Beautiful!

 

Historical note

The United Church of Canada came into existence in 1925, bringing together the Congregational, Methodist, and some of the Presbyterian churches of Canada.

 

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their most sincere thanks and appreciation to the following: Carl Goulding, who spent countless hours correcting the chronological listing for this article; Kathy Roberts, who spent hours making changes and corrections in order for this article to be published; Paul Cheatley, who designed the database used in this article and provided helpful input to this article. 

 

Notes

1. E. J. Hopkins and E. F. Rimbault, The Organ: Its History and Construction (London: Robert Cocks & Co., 1877), pp. 453–454.

2. C. I. G. Stobie, “The Organ in St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, St. John’s, Newfoundland,” The Organ, 52, 1972, p. 58.

3. Laurence Elvin, Forster and Andrews: Organ Builders, 1843–1956 (Lincoln: Laurence Elvin, 1968), p. 77.

4. “Pipe Organ Database,” Organ Historical Society, 15 February 2013, database.organsociety.org.

 

 

The University of Michigan 52nd Conference on Organ Music presented works ranging from the 16th-century organ Mass Missa Kyrie fons bonitatis, to the world premiere of Three Pieces for Organ by Czech composer Jirí Teml, along with a new event—an improvisation competition

Marijim Thoene and Gale Kramer

Marijim Thoene received a D.M.A. in organ performance/church music from the University of Michigan in 1984. She is an active recitalist and director of music at St. John Lutheran Church in Dundee, Michigan. Her two CDs, Mystics and Spirits and Wind Song are available through Raven Recordings. She is a frequent presenter at medieval conferences on the topic of the image of the pipe organ in medieval manuscripts. 

Gale Kramer, DMA, is organist emeritus of Metropolitan United Methodist Church in Detroit, Michigan, and a former assistant professor of organ at Wayne State University. As a student and graduate of the University of Michigan he has attended no fewer than 44 of the annual conferences on organ music. He is a regular reviewer and occasional contributor to The Diapason. His article, “Food References in the Short Chorales of Clavierübung III,” appeared in the April 1984 issue of The Diapason.

 

 

The University of Michigan 52nd Conference on Organ Music took place September 30–October 3. The annual conference is organized by Marilyn Mason, who has brought world-class performers and scholars to Ann Arbor for some 51 years. The conference offered a feast of sounds, from the 16th-century organ Mass Missa Kyrie fons bonitatis, to the world premiere of Three Pieces for Organ by Czech composer Jirí Teml; performers ranged in age from “twenty-somethings” to seasoned veterans. This year’s conference inaugurated a new event—an improvisation competition. The five contestants dazzled the audience with their ingenuity, creativity, and ability to transform a simple melody into new music. As Michael Barone commented, “The organ is a magnificent creation, but it only comes alive when people play it.” 

 

Sunday, September 30

4 pm, Hill Auditorium

The opening event, Kipp Cortez’s master’s degree recital, signaled the excellence and vitality that were to mark the entire conference. His formidable technique was apparent in his program: Carillon by Leo Sowerby; Prelude, adagio et choral varié sur le thème du ‘Veni Creator’, op. 4, by Maurice Duruflé (the performance was enhanced by the singing of the Gregorian hymn by St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church compline ensemble, directed by Deborah Friauff); Les Corps Glorieux (Le mystère de la Sainte Trinité, VII) by Olivier Messiaen; Rhapsody in D-flat Major, op. 17, no. 1, by Herbert Howells; and Variations sur un vieux Noël by Marcel Dupré. The latter was a tour de force. The crowd stood and cheered his playing. 

 

8 pm, Hill Auditorium

Almut Roessler, the renowned interpreter of Messiaen’s organ works, was scheduled to perform; however, due to circumstances beyond her control, she had to cancel her U.S. tour only two weeks before the conference. David Wagner was chosen to play the concert in her place. He was a great choice: a native Michigander, born and raised in Detroit, a sought-after recitalist, a well-known radio personality, and professor of music and university organist at Madonna University in Livonia, Michigan. He is the program director and music host of the classical music station WRCJ-FM in Detroit. He opened and closed his recital with William Mathias’s Processional (1964) and Recessional—pieces that exploited the instrument’s broad and rich spectrum of colors. Dr. Dave “the artist” and Dr. Dave “the raconteur” delighted the crowd with four centuries of organ music and commentary, explaining the connection between these disparate works: Versets on Veni Creator Spiritus by Nicolas de Grigny; Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582, by J. S. Bach; and Sonata No. 1, op. 42, by Alexandre Guilmant. These composers are linked together by fortuitous events. Wagner pointed out that while no autograph copies from de Grigny exist, we have J. S. Bach’s hand-copied manuscript of de Grigny. He also related that in 1908 Guilmant directed the first publication of de Grigny’s organ works and that Guilmant played the basis of his Symphony No. 1 on the organ built by the Farrand & Votey Company in 1893 for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which was purchased by the University of Michigan in 1894 and has since been named the Frieze Memorial Organ. It was rebuilt and reconditioned by the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company of Boston and resides in Hill Auditorium. 

 

Tuesday, October 2

Michael Barone, host of Pipedreams, presented a fascinating pastiche of recordings culled from his vast library in his lecture, “Imagining the Future, Celebrating the Past.” He presented organ music by contemporary composers who are stretching the boundaries of old forms, combining other instruments with the organ, and implementing Danish and Norwegian folk songs, jazz, and blues in new ways. Barone played numerous examples of intriguing new music for the organ that finds inspiration in J. S. Bach and old hymn tunes.

The first composer on his list of “cutting edge” composers was Henry Martin, who teaches composition at Rutgers University; he received the 1991 National Composers Competition and the Barlow International Composition Competition in 1998 for his Preludes and Fugues for Piano. Barone commissioned him to compose organ preludes and fugues in G major and E minor for the 25th anniversary concert of Pipedreams that took place at the 2008 AGO convention in Minneapolis; Ken Cowan premiered the works. Since then Barone has commissioned preludes and fugues in D major and B minor, which Cowan premiered in 2009; Prelude and Fugue in E Major, premiered by Isabelle Demers in 2012; and Stephen Tharp has agreed to premiere the next set of preludes and fugues. 

Henry Martin’s “new music” interjects jazz, burly elements of dissonance, kaleidoscopic colors, and shifting textures into the constructs of the preludes and fugues of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. In his Prelude and Fugue in G Major the virtuosic demands are apparent in the perpetual motion of the prelude and the driving intensity of the fugue.  

To illustrate the pulsing life of organ music today, Barone played many recordings of live improvisations as well as new music. This list includes only a few of the recordings presented: Gunnar Idenstam, Folkjule: A Swedish Folk Song Christmas and Songs for Jukksjarvi: Swedish Folk Songs; Matt Curlee/Neos Ensemble of jazz-styled arrangements for organ, violin, vibraphone, and drums; Barbara Dennerlein playing jazz on the pipe organ; and Monte Mason, Psalm 139 for choir, organ and electronics.

Barone continued by pointing out that Paul Winter in his Winter Solstice concerts at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine uses the organ as the bedrock of his composition, and that Cameron Carpenter, playing in the Royal Albert Hall in London at end of the Olympics, stretched the boundaries of organ composition and made us feel as uncomfortable as Bach’s contemporaries were with him. Barone admonished us to find new audiences for the organ, to go beyond all the wonderful pieces we know, and explore the huge amount of repertoire that’s not played and can be adapted “if you push the right crescendo pedal.”

One of the most enlightening and entertaining events of the conference was Steven Ball’s lecture/recital, “Introduction to the Theater Organ,” given at the Michigan Theater, which proudly houses a 1927 Barton theater organ, the oldest unaltered organ in Ann Arbor. Steven Ball wears several hats—organist at the Michigan Theater, University of Michigan carillonneur, and manager of the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments, as well as director of music at the Catholic Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Detroit. 

Ball began his presentation with a quiz. We were given the specifications of four pipe organs and asked to identify the country of origin, location, builder, date, and whether it was a theater organ. The last question was difficult: how can you tell from the specifications if the organ is a theater organ? The answer is, you can’t! Dr. Ball’s lecture was fueled by the criteria applied to the selection of each of the 2,500 instruments in the Stearns Collection: i.e., each piece was chosen to show how instruments evolve, aid in the study of organology, and promote the understanding of world cultures and music.

Ball explained what happens when a musical instrument evolves, and pointed out there is a cultural relevance and progression accompanying this evolution. (1) There is a dialogue between builders and composers. When the Barker Lever was introduced in 1837 to the organ at St. Denis, an envelope was being pushed, facilitating the composition of new organ music. (2) Change is marked by acoustical evolution: sound gets louder and the compass expands. He noted that the theater organ was specifically voiced and designed to duplicate the sounds of an orchestra, and using analog technology first produced what we know as “surround sound.” (3) As instruments evolve, they become more vocal in nature—organ students are constantly told to let the music “breathe.”

Steven Ball offered a brief history of the theater organ, commenting that Robert Hope-Jones created more patents for the theater organ than anyone. He invented the Tibia Clausa, stoptabs instead of drawknobs, increased the wind pressures (ranging from 10 to 50 inches), and enclosed the pipes behind walls and thick swell shades for greater expression. The merger of his company with Wurlitzer in 1914 ended in disappointment and led to his suicide in 1915. In 1927 Wurlitzer cranked out an organ a day for a demanding market, and organists were paid for playing in the theater.

The Michigan Theater organ, opus 245, was built in 1927 by the Barton Company, which employed 150 people, taught students to play, and placed them in theaters throughout the Midwest. The instrument is only one of 40 that exists in its original home with its original operating system intact, which includes combination action and console lift. 

Steven Ball also proved to be the consummate entertainer. For 30 minutes we watched “One Week,” a silent film starring Buster Keaton, while he improvised on the Barton organ. What fun to watch and hear the misadventures of Buster Keaton in high style. 

 

Improvisation competition

For the first time in the conference’s long history, an improvisation competition was included. One could feel the excitement as the audience filed into the sanctuary of St. Francis of Assisi Church for the final round. The sacred space, with its live acoustic and three-manual, 1994 Létourneau Opus 38, provided a perfect venue for the competition. The five finalists were chosen from a preliminary round based on submitted recordings. Judges of the preliminary round included Joanne Vollendorf Clark, Gale Kramer, and Darlene Kuperus. The judges for the final round were Karel Paukert, William Jean Randall, and Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra. 

The five finalists were given 30 minutes without an instrument to plan their improvisation, which was to combine a prelude, a toccata, or a fantasia with a fugue on the tune Picardy, and also include a free improvisation on a given theme. Their complete performance time was to last no more that 15 minutes.  

It was intriguing to listen to each competitor’s treatment of the themes, to hear music composed before us with marvelous fluidity and agility. We heard borrowings from the medieval ages to the present. No one envied the judges.  

Bálint Karosi was awarded the Earl Moore first prize of $3,000; Timothy Tikker was awarded the Palmer Christian second prize of $2,000; Naki Sung Kripfgans the Robert G. Glasgow third prize of $1,000; and Steven Hoffman and Matthew Samelak the runner-up prizes of $500.

The behind-the-scenes organizer, Michele Johns, and her committee of Gale Kramer, Darlene Kuperus, and Marcia Van Oyen did a superb job in planning this remarkable event.

 

8 pm, Hill Auditorium

It was a privilege to hear Karel Paukert perform Czech organ music as well as pieces that embody the spirit of improvisation. His program gave ample evidence that the repertoire for organ is crossing new boundaries, using colors and timbres in new ways. His playing of Frammenti by Karel Husa (b. 1921), Toccata and Fugue in F Minor by Bedrich Antonín Wiedermann (1884–1951), and Adagio and Postludium from Glagolitic Mass by Leos Janácek (1854–1951) was infused with rare sensitivity and energy. He played cutting edge music by Jirí Teml (b. 1963) and Greg D’Alessio (b. 1963) with the same intensity. We were honored to hear Paukert play the world premiere of Jirí Teml’s Three Pieces for Organ.  

Paukert’s choice of “Albion II” from Albion by Greg D’Alessio was a shining example of what can emerge in organ repertoire when tapping into the resources made available in the digital age. Paukert played a score for organ and electronic tape with sounds, he explained, “derived from the electronically processed tonal palette of the McMyler Organ by Holtkamp at the Cleveland Museum of Art.” This piece for organ and electronic accompaniment is definitely New Age music; spellbinding magic resulted by combining digitally manipulated with acoustic sounds of the pipe organ. He concluded his concert with two well-known works, both of which are improvisatory in character and spirit: Jehan Alain’s Deuxième Fantaisie and Franz Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on the Name of B.A.C.H.

 

Wednesday, October 3 

9:30 am, Blanche Anderson Moore Hall

The 16th-century organ Mass, Missa Kyrie fons bonitatis, was performed by students of Professor James Kibbie: Andrew Earhart and Colin Knapp, with chants sung by Joseph Balistreri. The score will be published by Wayne Leupold in 2013 and is the culmination of ten years of research by Scott Hyslop.   

The performance was followed by Scott Hyslop’s lecture, “Pierre Attaingnant: The Royal Printer and the Organ Masses of 1531.” Hyslop’s interest in classical French music was the basis for his doctoral thesis. His continued work on the topic is about to see its fruition in his publication of the performance edition of Attaingnant’s Missa Kyrie fons bonitatis. Hyslop explained that it was a unique accomplishment for Attaingnant to be able to print three items (staff lines, notes, and text) simultaneously and that in 1537 Attaingnant became the official printer and book seller to King Francis I of France. Unlike the popular Missa Cunctipotens, the Missa Kyrie fons bonitatis contains the Credo, which agrees with Paris usage. The new edition will include an accessible essay on musica ficta written by Kimberly Marshall. 

 

2 pm, Hill Auditorium, 

lower lobby

Renate McLaughlin, a graduate student of Marilyn Mason, lectured on “Karg-Elert: a musician at the wrong place and the wrong time.” She documented events in the life of the composer that had a negative influence in keeping him from enjoying the recognition he deserved during his lifetime. She presented interesting biographical details that showed him to be out of touch with reality and a man lacking in common sense. Her question of why his dreams of fame and glory were never realized was answered in her lecture topic. 

 

3 pm, Hill Auditorium 

The students of James Kibbie played Symphonie No. 6 in G Minor, op. 42, no. 2, by Charles-Marie Widor. His students gave polished performances. The performers and the movements they played were: Colin Knapp (Allegro), Matthew Kim (Adagio), Matthew Dempsey (Intermezzo), Stephanie Yu (Cantabile), and Andrew Lang (Finale). 

8 pm, Hill Auditorium

Timothy Tikker, a doctoral candidate studying with Professor Marilyn Mason, programmed an interesting mix of well-known and lesser-known repertoire. Well-known pieces included Mendelssohn’s Sonata in B-flat Major, op. 65, no. 4; J. S. Bach’s Partite diverse sopra il Corale Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig, BWV 768; Max Reger’s Toccata and Fugue in d/D, op. 59, nos. 5 and 6; and Messiaen’s Dieu Parmi Nous from La Nativité du Seigneur. It was in the lesser-known pieces that Tikker communicated what seemed to be the essence and soul of the music. He captured the intensity and drama of Ross Lee Finney’s The Leaves on the Trees Spoke. Tikker set the stage of Vincent Persichetti’s Do Not Go Gentle for organ pedals alone, op. 132, by playing a recording of Dylan Thomas reading his poem. Likewise, he seemed to revel in the lyricism and quiet loveliness of Herbert Howells’ Quasi lento, tranquillo from Sonata for Organ. 

 

Conclusion

We thank Marilyn Mason and all who participated in the 52nd Conference on Organ Music. You offered us a sip of the elixir of life and we left refreshed. 

—Marijim Thoene

 

Marijim Thoene received a D.M.A. in organ performance/church music from the University of Michigan in 1984. She is an active recitalist and director of music at St. John Lutheran Church in Dundee, Michigan. Her two CDs, Mystics and Spirits and Wind Song are available through Raven Recordings. She is a frequent presenter at medieval conferences on the topic of the image of the pipe organ in medieval manuscripts. 

 

Monday events

 

Guest lecturer Susanne Diedrich of Wupperthal, Germany described rhetorical/musical devices used in Bach’s Orgelbüchlein, such as circulatio, suspiratio, katabasis, anabasis, and exclamatio, which were illustrated in performances by U of M students Timothy Tikker, Renate McLaughlin, Josh Boyd, and Kipp Cortez.  

Speaking on the history of organ improvisation, Devon Howard of Chattanooga, a graduate of the University of Arizona, outlined possible reasons for the decline of improvisation in this country, as well as for its resurgence. He urged students to learn improvisation as a way to understand composed works more thoroughly. Howard’s model of imitation, assimilation, and innovation presaged the method described by the next speaker.

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra proposed a model of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction, by which one might create an improvisation by imitating extant compositions. In illustration of her book Bach and the Art of Improvisation, she performed a recital of five works by Bach, Pachelbel, and others, following each with an improvisation derived from some aspect of its model. She also highlighted some of the pedagogical resources available for teaching improvisation, distinguishing three different approaches and three levels of proficiency.

Seven high school students from the Interlochen Arts Academy, prepared by their teacher Thomas Bara, performed a stunning program in the afternoon slot. Joseph Russell, Garrett Law, Hannah Loeffler, Michael Caraher, Emily Blandon, David Heinze, and Bryan Dunnewald played with poise, spirit, maturity, and musicality.

Professor James Kibbie and his colleague Professor David Jackson and the University of Michigan Trombone Ensemble (19 players) brought the evening to a high point. Kibbie and Jackson presented works for organ and trombone by Koetsier, Schiffmann, and Eben. The trombones (senza organo) made an impact in a canzona by Gabrieli and a transcription from Morten Lauridsen. Kibbie’s solo performance of “Moto ostinato” and “Finale” from Eben’s Sunday Music crowned the evening.

—Gale Kramer

 

Gale Kramer, DMA, is organist emeritus of Metropolitan United Methodist Church in Detroit, Michigan, and a former assistant professor of organ at Wayne State University. As a student and graduate of the University of Michigan he has attended no fewer than 44 of the annual conferences on organ music. He is a regular reviewer and occasional contributor to The Diapason. His article, “Food References in the Short Chorales of Clavierübung III,” appeared in the April 1984 issue of The Diapason.

 

Photo credit: Marijim Thoene

Matthew M. Bellocchio

Matthew M. Bellocchio, a Project Manager and designer at Andover Organ since 2003, is a Fellow and past President of the American Institute of Organbuilders.

Andover Organ Company marks seventy years

by Matthew M. Bellocchio

Anniversaries invite us to reflect upon our past and contemplate how far we have come. As 2018 marks Andover Organ Company’s seventieth anniversary, this article will highlight its long and rich history, from its humble beginnings to its recent achievements.

Andover was founded in 1948 as a result of an Organ Institute organized by Arthur Howes, head of the organ department at the Peabody Conservatory, and held each summer on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Howes had traveled extensively in Europe and observed the developing Organ Reform Movement there. Originating in Germany in the 1930s from Albert Schweitzer’s writings, the movement sparked an interest in early music and performance practices, as well as the building of new organs that could authentically render early music, especially that of Bach. Howes started the Organ Institute to help spread the Organ Reform Movement in America. The faculty included such notable organists as Carl Weinrich (Princeton University), Ernest White (St. Mary the Virgin, New York City), and E. Power Biggs.

Tom Byers, a former Henry Pilcher’s Sons Organ Company employee who lived in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts, attended the annual institute with his wife. He was inspired to start an organ company that would follow the institute’s philosophy. He chose the name “Andover” for its prestigious association with the Organ Institute and because of the advantages, in the pre-internet days of telephone directories, of appearing near the top of the alphabetical company listings. 

Byers chose the opening line of Psalm 98, “Cantate Domino Canticum Novum” (Sing to the Lord a New Song), as the company motto, which still appears on Andover’s letterhead. This underscored his philosophy of creating a new style of organ, one that looked and sounded differently from what most American organ companies were producing.

Despite its name, the company has never been located in Andover! It started out in the home of Tom Byers in Lawrence, just north of Andover, and later moved to a two-story wooden building in nearby Methuen. In 1979 the company purchased a three-story brick building in a former mill complex at 560 Broadway in Lawrence, where it has been ever since.

 

Leadership and people

Rather than having a single leader dictate the company’s course, Andover’s many talented employees have each contributed to the company’s development. The company has always been owned and run by its principal employees who, serving as its shareholders and board of directors, make decisions collegially.

Charles Fisk joined the company in 1955 as Tom Byers’s junior partner. Robert J. Reich, a Yale-trained electrical engineer, was hired in 1956, and Leo Constantineau, a woodworking teacher and professional draftsman, in 1957. In 1958, Byers left the company, and Fisk became the owner. Walter Hawkes, who had worked for Holtkamp, was hired as shop foreman. Later that year, Andover signed a new organ contract with Redeemer Lutheran Church in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The contract did not specify the type of action. But the result, premiered on Palm Sunday 1959, was the first new mechanical-action organ built by an American firm in the postwar era. That instrument, Opus 28, is still in use.

The following year, Opus 35, a 33-stop tracker designed by Leo Constantineau and voiced by Charles Fisk, was built for Mount Calvary Episcopal Church in Baltimore, where Arthur Howes was organist. Fisk left Andover in 1961 to start his own company,
C. B. Fisk, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Andover was reincorporated with Robert J. Reich and Leo Constantineau as the new owners. Reich, who became the Tonal Director, revised Andover’s pipe scales to provide more foundation tone. Constantineau’s case designs gave the company’s new instruments a distinctive visual flair. 

Andover has been blessed with several dedicated individuals who each worked over fifty years at the company. Reich, who joined Andover in 1956, served as President and Tonal Director 1961–1997; he then worked part-time until retiring in 2009. Donald Olson joined the company in 1962 and became Andover’s general manager and visual designer in 1968. His elegant case designs were the hallmark of Andover’s new instruments for nearly four decades. He succeeded Robert Reich as President in 1997, stepped down in 2012 and then worked part-time until fully retiring in 2015. Robert C. Newton, who started at Andover in 1963 and headed the Old Organ Department for many years, retired in 2016.

Andover’s current President, Benjamin Mague, joined Andover in 1975. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in music from Colby College and a Master of Music degree in organ from the University of Wisconsin. He served as Andover’s mechanical designer and later as shop foreman before becoming President in 2012. 

John Morlock, Andover’s Tonal Director since 1999, joined the company in 1976, working principally in the Old Organ Department. Don Glover, Andover’s in-house reed voicer, came to Andover in 2004 from the Reuter Organ Company.

Michael Eaton, Andover’s visual designer, joined the company in 1991. He also heads a maintenance team and serves as Treasurer and Clerk for Andover’s board of directors.

Andover’s present team of dedicated and talented people collectively possess over 350 years of organbuilding experience. Other current employees are Ryan Bartosiewicz, Matthew Bellocchio, Eric Dolch, Anne Doré, Andrew Hagberg, Lisa Lucius, Kevin Mathieu, Fay Morlock, Jonathan Ross, Craig Seaman, and David Zarges. Appropriately, more than half of Andover’s employees are church musicians or organists.

Andover has been the parent for many other New England tracker organ companies, having employed over its seventy years many talented individuals who later founded their own companies. These include Philip Beaudry, Timothy Fink, Charles Fisk, Timothy Hawkes, Richard Hedgebeth, Fritz Noack, Bradley Rule, J. C. Taylor, and David Wallace.  

 

Tonal style

Tonally, the early Andover organs were inspired by the Organ Reform Movement. At the time of Andover’s founding, few American companies were repairing old tracker organs; most just electrified or replaced them. Andover was the first to deliberately retain and renovate nineteenth-century trackers. But, adhering to the Organ Reform philosophy, Byers and his early successors often “improved” those organs tonally. It was not unusual for them to evict the string stops and replace them with mixtures and mutations. Andover’s new instruments came to be characterized by strong Principal choruses with bright mixtures, colorful neo-Baroque style flutes and mutations, and reeds that emphasized chorus over color. 

In the 1980s, as Andover began more frequently to work on significant nineteenth-century American organs, a gradual transition occurred. This was solidified in 1999 when John Morlock, who had started in Andover’s Old Organ Department, succeeded Robert Reich as Tonal Director.

Today, Andover’s tonal style may best be described as “American” and is grounded primarily in the best practices of the nineteenth-century New England builders, in particular the Boston firm of E. & G. G. Hook. Their organs, especially those from the firm’s “golden period” (1850s to 1870s), are admired for their remarkably successful blend of warmth and brilliance. Their pipe scales and voicing techniques worked extremely well in the dry acoustics of many American churches. 

When designing a new organ or reworking an existing instrument, we basically use the same scaling proportions between the various stops of the chorus that the Hooks used. We have found that doing so results in a principal chorus that is nicely balanced between fundamental weight and harmonic development.

Within this framework, adjustments are made to reflect or, in some cases, compensate for the acoustical properties found in each room. Each instrument needs to work and sound well in its “home” and be able to perform its tasks capably and effectively. Andover organs are designed to lead and support congregational hymn singing, as well as interpret a wide range of organ literature.

 

Maintenance

From the very beginning, organ maintenance was an important part of the company’s work. It created name recognition, established relationships with churches and organists, and provided a consistent revenue stream. Today, Andover maintains over 300 organs annually throughout the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Southeast—from northern Maine to South Carolina, from western New York to the islands off eastern Massachusetts. These instruments range in size from small one-manual trackers in country churches to the world-famous Great Organ (IV/116) in the Methuen Memorial Music Hall; and range in age from a few years to a historic 1762 Snetzler organ. 

We service all types of organ mechanisms—from traditional tracker action to modern solid-state relays and combination actions. Each spring and fall, we schedule extended maintenance tours to visit multiple instruments in a geographical area. This enables our customers to share the travel expenses. 

Many customers treat us like old friends. Occasionally, a church secretary or organist will call us and merely say, “This is so-and-so at First Parish Church,” not realizing that we have over three dozen tuning customers with that name!

 

Andover Organ firsts

As the leader in the mid-twentieth century tracker organ revival in America, Andover pioneered many innovations that are now standard in the industry. Opus 25, a two-manual built in 1958 for the Rice Institute (now University) in Houston, was an electro-pneumatic instrument utilizing slider chests with pneumatic pallets, one of the first examples of this pallet type. This was decades before the adoption of the “Blackinton-style” pneumatic pallet.

In 1961, Andover carried out the first historically sympathetic restoration of a nineteenth-century American organ: the 1-manual, 1865 E. & G. G. Hook Opus 358 at the Congregational Church in Orwell, Vermont (Andover Opus R-1.)  

Other significant Andover (AOC) restorations include: 

• First Presbyterian Church, Newburyport, Massachusetts (1866 E. & G. G. Hook/AOC 1974); 

• First Parish Church, Bridgewater, Massachusetts (1852 E. & G. G. Hook/AOC 1977); 

• South Parish Congregational Church, Augusta, Maine (1866 E. & G. G. Hook/AOC 1982); 

• Church on the Hill, Lenox, Massachusetts (1869 William A. Johnson/AOC 2001); 

• Old Whaling Church, Edgartown, Massachusetts (1850 Simmons & Fisher/AOC 2004); 

• Centre Street Methodist Church, Nantucket, Massachusetts (1831 Thomas Appleton/AOC 2008); 

• St. Peter’s Catholic Church, Haverstraw, New York (1898 Geo. Jardine & Son/AOC 2011); 

• St. Anna’s Chapel, Newburyport, Massachusetts (1863 William Stevens/AOC 2013).

Utilizing its expertise gained from restoring old tracker organs and building new ones, in 1963 Andover was the first company in the world to re-trackerize an old tracker organ that had been electrified. The instrument was the 1898 James Treat Opus 3 at St. George’s Primitive Methodist Church (now Bethesda Missionary Church) in Methuen, Massachusetts.

Other notable re-trackerizations: 

• First Presbyterian Church, Waynesboro, Virginia (1893 Woodberry & Harris/AOC 1986); 

• St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral, Providence, Rhode Island (1851 E. & G. G. Hook/AOC 1989); 

• Westminster Preservation Trust, Baltimore, Maryland (1882 Johnson & Son/AOC 1991); 

• Sage Chapel, Northfield, Massachusetts (1898 Hook & Hastings/AOC 1996); 

• Unitarian Society, Peterboro, New Hampshire (1867 E. & G. G. Hook/AOC 2003); 

• Christ Episcopal Church, Charlottesville, Virginia (1869 E. & G. G. Hook/AOC 2012).  

The slider and pallet windchests used in most nineteenth-century organs were generally trouble free for many years. However, when heating systems were introduced into churches in the early twentieth century, problems developed. The solid wood chest tops (tables), just below the sliders, were made from a thin, wide plank of air-dried lumber. With constant heating the wooden tables dried out and cracked, allowing air to leak from one pipe hole to the next, resulting in “runs.” 

Andover was the first American company to replace a cracked, solid-wood table with a marine-grade plywood one. The routed bleed channels between the table’s wind holes were then carefully replicated and the entire table graphited, like the original. This type of table replacement is now standard in the industry. The first organ to receive this treatment, in 1965, was the 1897 George W. Reed, at the Baptist Church in Winchendon, Massachusetts. Sadly, the organ burned with the building in 1985. 

One of Andover’s most significant recent projects was the 2016 restoration of the wind system and key action in the 1892 Woodberry & Harris Opus 100 at St. Mary–St. Catherine of Sienna Parish in Charlestown, Massachusetts. With three manuals, 36 stops, and 41 ranks, it is the largest and most significant nineteenth-century organ remaining in original unaltered condition in the greater Boston area. 

The instrument’s action is entirely mechanical and incredibly complex. The three-manual, reversed detached console sits in the center of the gallery, while the pipes and windchests are in cases at either side of a large stained-glass window. Four levels of trackers descend from the keys to squares beneath the floor, then under the console towards the rear window, then turn off at right angles towards the sides, then turn off again at right angles towards the rear, then to squares which send them up to the rollerboards below the chests. The organ’s four divisions have a total of 17 sets of wooden trackers, totaling nearly a mile in length! A Barker machine lightens the touch of the Great and the manuals coupled to it.

The two large reservoirs were stripped and releathered in place. All four layers of trackers were disassembled, labeled, and brought to the shop for replication. Because of the organ’s historic significance, all the new trackers were made of the same materials as the originals but using modern machinery. Andover customized a miniature CNC router to notch the cloth-wrapped tracker ends and built a spinning machine to whip the threaded wire ends with red linen thread, just like the originals. The Barker machine was carefully releathered. “Now she runs like a Bentley,” said one of the instrument’s many admirers.

 

Rebuilding for reliability

A conservative restoration is the logical decision for an exemplary work by an important builder or a small organ in a rural church with modest musical requirements. But sometimes it is necessary to strike a balance between preserving the original fabric and updating it to suit modern needs. An organ that has already endured several unsympathetic rebuilds, or an aging instrument with unreliable mechanisms and limited tonal resources, in an active church or institution with an ambitious music program might be better served by a sympathetic rebuilding. This was the case with two of Andover’s most significant rebuilds.

The 1876 E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings Opus 828 at St. Joseph Cathedral in Buffalo, New York, was built as a showpiece for the 1876 “Centennial Exposition” in Philadelphia and purchased afterwards by the cathedral. Major changes were made to the organ by Tellers-Kent Organ Company in 1925 and by Schlicker Organ Company in 1976. By 1996, the organ was virtually unplayable during the winter months and a decision of whether to replace it or rebuild it was imminent. In 1998, the cathedral decided that “the organ need not be replaced, but rather completely rehabilitated.” At the same time, the organ’s tonal palette needed expanding to better serve the musical needs of the cathedral and to enable it for use in concerts and recitals.

A team from Andover dismantled the organ in July 1999, loaded it into two moving vans, and transported it back to Lawrence, where eighteen employees labored for more than a year to clean, repair, and expand the instrument. In undertaking this immense job, Andover sought to retain and restore as much of the original as possible. The entire organ was cleaned, and the black walnut case stripped of coats of dark varnish and restored to its original finish. The façade pipes were stripped and repainted in their original designs with colors that harmonized with the cathedral’s interior.

All the original chests and pipework were rebuilt and repaired. The manuals were expanded to 61 notes and the pedals to 32. The two original reservoirs were releathered and two new ones constructed. The Choir is now unenclosed, as it originally was, the Swell box is back to its original size, and the Solo is restored to its original position.

Many of the missing original pipes were replaced with pipes salvaged from the Hook 1877 Cincinnati Music Hall organ, Opus 869. Other compatible Hook organs were visited to develop pipe scales appropriate for the additions to the cathedral organ, which were voiced in the Hook style. The organ is now far closer to its original sound than it has been since the 1923 electrification and rebuilding.

A new floating Celestial Division on a slider windchest was added. This division was based on contemporary E. & G. G. Hook solo divisions, as typified by the organs in the Cincinnati Music Hall and Mechanics Hall, Worcester. There is an 8′ Philomela copied from the 1863 Hook at Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, an original Hook 4′ Hohlpfeife, a 2′ Harmonic Piccolo, a Cor Anglais, and a few more modern stops stops such as a French Horn, Dolcan Gamba with Gamba Céleste, Spitzflöte and Spitzflöte Céleste. 

Thomas Murray played the rededicatory recital on June 11, 2001. The St. Joseph Cathedral organ will be featured in a recital by Nathan Laube during the American Guild of Organists Northeast Regional Convention, July 1–4, 2019.

In contrast to the Buffalo cathedral organ, the 1902 Hook & Hastings Opus 1833 at St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts, was a modest two-manual, 18-rank instrument. After nearly a century of use and constant winter heating, the windchests and actions developed serious problems. The original console was replaced in 1946. When the replacement console failed in 2004, a one-manual tracker was put in its place to serve as a temporary instrument until the chapel organ could be rebuilt. 

Our lengthy experience with Hook & Hastings organs taught us that their early electro-pneumatic actions were cumbersome, slow, and difficult to repair. Therefore, in our 2014–2015 rebuilding of the organ, we reused the pipes, windchests, and most of the original parts as the basis of an expanded instrument with a new electric action.

We built a new, solid white oak console in the style of the Hook & Hastings original, with a lyre music rack and elliptically curved stop terraces. To meet the demands of a twenty-first century music program, this reproduction console has state-of-the-art components, including a record/playback module. The façade pipes were stripped and repainted with a new decorative treatment that harmonizes with the Italian Renaissance-style case and chapel. As a crowning flourish, the cross surmounting the case was painted in faux lapis lazuli.

Most of the organ was crammed within the small case, with Swell above Great and the wooden Pedal 16′ Open Diapason pipes at each side. Behind the Swell, in an unfinished gallery, were the organ’s large reservoir and Pedal 16′ Bourdon. We moved the Pedal Open Diapason pipes to the rear gallery and added a Pedal 32′-16′-8′ Trombone and 8′-4′ Principal there. Judicious additions to the Swell expanded its resources. There was sufficient space inside the case behind the Great chest to add a seven-stop unenclosed Choir division.

The end result of these tonal changes and additions is an instrument of 40 stops, 34 ranks, and 1,994 pipes that is more versatile and appropriate for its expanded role. It still sounds very much like a Hook & Hastings organ, but one from an earlier and better period of the firm’s output.

 

Façade firsts

The company’s work with historic organs gradually led to pipe façade restorations as well. In 1967, Andover was the first American company to make restorative paint repairs to a painted and stenciled pipe façade, at the First Congregational Church in Georgetown, Massachusetts (1874 Joel Butler). Thirteen years later, in 1979, during its rebuilding of the 1884 Geo. S. Hutchings Opus 135 at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, Vermont, Andover carefully stripped a coating of green paint from all the façade pipes, documented the original designs and colors underneath, and repainted the pipes in their original colors and stenciling—another first.

Andover’s Opus 102 (1992) at Trinity United Church of Christ in York, Pennsylvania, was the first new American organ in the modern era to feature painted façade pipes with nineteenth-century style colored bandings. The upper façade flats of this organ contained another first: “frosted tin” pipes, which feature the natural, unplaned finish of the cast tin sheets. This gives them the light color of tin, but with a dull, non-reflective finish.

In recent years, Andover has worked with historic painted decoration conservator Marylou Davis to create new painted-pipe decorations in historically inspired styles. The most notable example of this collaboration is the 82-rank Andover Opus 114 (2007) at Christ Lutheran Church in Baltimore. This was the first twenty-first century American organ façade to combine polychromed and monochrome texture-stenciled pipes, frosted tin pipes, and numerous hand-carved pipe shades, grilles, finials, and skirtings in the casework. 

Opus 114 is also Andover’s first dual-action, double organ. The 13-rank, electric-action gallery organ can be played from its own console or from the front organ’s three-manual mechanical-action console. Likewise, the entire front organ can be played from the two-manual gallery console through couplers and general pistons. The organ’s four matching cases (two in chancel, two in gallery) perfectly suit the church’s Gothic architecture and fool many people into thinking that they were reused from a 19th-century organ. 

Andover has never been afraid to fit an organ around a prominent window. This reflects our design philosophy that an organ should look as if it has always been part of its environment. And in most churches, the window was there long before the organ. Fighting the window can sometimes be a losing battle. Opus 115 (2007) at Church of the Nativity in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Opus 118 (2014) at First Parish Church in Wayland, Massachusetts, illustrate Andover’s creative approach in dealing with windows.

In Raleigh, the modern clear glass window was front and center, at the top of the space where the organ would go. We designed the organ case to frame the window’s central orb and cross. The polished tin façade pipes match the brightness from the window. The organ also serves as a reredos for the altar, which stands in front of it. Looking from top to bottom, one sees the window, the organ, and the altar—light, music, action. The church was very pleased with the result, as were we.

In the 1820 Federal Period meetinghouse in Wayland, there was an elegant Palladian window in the center of the back wall of the rear gallery. Because of the semi-elliptical curve of the gallery’s rear wall, the only apparent organ placement with such a floor plan was in the center. Thus, all the previous organs had blocked the window. Andover’s design put the detached console in the center, by the railing, and divided the organ into two cases that frame, rather than cover, the Palladian window. The choir members sit in the space between the console and cases and benefit from the natural backlighting provided by the window. Again, everyone was pleased with the results.

Seventy years after its humble beginnings, Andover has much to celebrate: 118 new organs and 533 rebuilds/restorations. Andover’s wide-ranging work in building, rebuilding, restoring, and maintaining pipe organs is well-recognized, and best summarized by its mission statement: “Preserving the Past; Enhancing the Present; Inspiring the Future.”

www.andoverorgan.com

John Speller

The Organ Historical Society’s 60th Annual Convention took place in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, with the Marriott Hotel in central Springfield as the convention headquarters. I arrived on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited on Saturday, June 27, and found the hotel conveniently located a short walk from the railroad station. Pre-convention events offered on Sunday morning and afternoon included visits to the Norman Rockwell Museum and the Daniel Chester French Estate, and a walking tour of the Springfield Quadrangle, though I opted instead to attend the Sung Eucharist at Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal) in Springfield, again conveniently located a short walking distance from the hotel.

 

Sunday, June 28

The convention proper began with Choral Evensong at Christ Church Cathedral, with an augmented Cathedral Choir directed by David Pulliam, in which we were treated to the John Sanders Responses, Sumsion in G, and Stanford’s Te Deum in B-flat. Evensong was rounded off by a spirited performance of the Allegro from Mendelssohn’s Sonata No. 5 on the fine 1953 Austin Opus 2195, rebuilt as a III/54 instrument by Theodore Gilbert Associates in 1985. 

Another short walk took us to St. Michael’s Catholic Cathedral, where we heard the first recital of the convention, given by Christopher Houlihan on the rebuilt 1929 4-manual Casavant organ, comprising a gallery organ in the fine Gothic case of the previous 1862 E. & G. G. Hook organ, and a chancel division in cases designed when the present organ was installed. This is the largest organ in Western Massachusetts. The program included the Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Minor by Henry Martin (b. 1950) of Rutgers University, commissioned by OHS member Michael Barone and previously given its première performance by Christopher Houlihan in New York City. Houlihan also treated us to one of Brahms’s earliest works, the Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, WoO 9, and one of his latest works, the chorale prelude O Welt, ich muss dich lassen, op. 122, no. 11, effectively sandwiching the chorale prelude between the prelude and the fugue. Houlihan’s performance of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548, was masterful, and indeed I think this was the best performance of the “Wedge” Fugue I have ever heard. The other major work in the recital was Vierne’s Symphony No. 4 in G Minor, op. 32, in which Houlihan effectively demonstrated the large mood swings that characterize this work. After this, it was a short walk back to the hotel for drinks and to explore the books, music, and recordings in the exhibit hall.

 

Monday, July 29

We boarded the buses early Monday morning for a day looking at organs in and around Westfield, Massachusetts. The day began with a recital given by Patricia Snyder on the 1977 C. B. Fisk organ, Opus 71, in First Congregational Church. This splendid little organ was ideally suited to the program of de Grigny and Bach that Ms. Snyder played. Next was a recital by Caroline Robinson on the 1897 Casavant tracker organ, Opus 78, relocated in 2008 from Pittsfield by the Czelusniak firm.to St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Westfield. The organ is situated in a divided case in the gallery at the west end of the church, with the console on the north side, and is believed to be the second oldest Casavant organ in the United States. It has a warm, bold tone with rolling diapasons, but is brilliant enough to be effective in classical as well as romantic music. Ms. Robinson’s recital consisted of music by Brahms, Widor, Schumann, and Boëly.

Following these recitals, founding OHS member Barbara Owen gave a lecture on organ building in the Pioneer Valley. Three important organ builders had their workshops in Westfield—William A Johnson/Johnson & Son, Steer & Turner/J. W. Steer(e) & Son, and Emmons Howard. The Steere company was purchased by the Skinner Organ Company in 1921; the Westfield factory continued to run as a branch of the Skinner firm until 1929. The lecture was accompanied by slides illustrative of the history of all these companies.

After lunch we went to nearby Lenox, Massachusetts, for a recital on the famous Aeolian-Skinner, Opus 1002 of 1940, at the Serge Koussevitzky Music Shed of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. The “shed” is a fine semi-outdoor concert hall designed by Joseph Franz. James David Christie, who is the resident organist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, gave an interesting concert, assisted by two members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Robert Sheena, English horn and oboe, and Cynthia Meyers, flute. The program included music by Johann Sebastian and Johann Bernard Bach, Georg Böhm, Marguerite Roesgen-Champion, Charles Callahan, Jacques Berthier, and Jean Langlais. The J. S. Bach piece was the Sonata No. 1 in B flat, BWV 525, transposed to G major and transcribed for organ and flute, a very interesting change from the usual version.

We then moved to the Church on the Hill (United Church of Christ) in Lenox for a recital played by Peter Crisafulli on the I/9 William A. Johnson organ, Opus 281 of 1869. In 1988, Andover Organ Company releathered the bellows and in 1991 carried out a thorough historically informed restoration. Crisafulli’s eclectic program ranged from No. 5 of the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues, attributed to J. S. Bach but probably by Johann Tobias Krebs, to a modern piece, the Sonatina by Robert W. Jones. Altogether this was a pristine and delightful little organ. Next was a recital given by Adam Pajan on a later Johnson instrument, Johnson & Son Opus 805 of 1893, at the Unitarian-Universalist Meeting of North Berkshire in Housatonic, Great Barrington. The music included works of Arthur Foote, J. S. Bach, Brahms, and Mendelssohn.

The day culminated in the evening recital given by Bruce Stevens on the Hilborne L. Roosevelt organ, Opus 113 of 1882, at First Congregational Church, Great Barrington, an organ I have been longing to hear since I first heard of it around thirty years ago. I was not disappointed: it is a wonderful mellow, cohesive instrument. The chorus was perhaps a little lacking in brilliance for the Bach Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV 541, though Stevens’s performance was nevertheless very effective, and the instrument later proved more than capable of softer baroque effects in the Pachelbel Partita on ‘Christus, der ist mein Leben.’ The organ was at its best, however, in the performance of Max Reger. We heard both Reger’s Scherzo, op. 65, no. 10, and his Introduction and Passacaglia in D Minor, op. 96, in which the organ sounded absolutely magnificent. We then heard the suite In Festo Corporis Christi by Bruce Stevens’s former teacher Anton Heiller, and finally Wilhelm Middelschulte’s transcription of Bach’s Chaconne for Violin Solo from the Partita in D Minor, BWV 1004. A feature of the Great Barrington Roosevelt is the striking façade of pipes stenciled in blue and brown on a background of gold. Small chunks of wood and plaster were glued to the pipes under the paintwork to create a rich three-dimensional effect that is most unusual and possibly unique.

 

Tuesday, June 30

We began the day with a recital by Michael Plagerman on the 1907 Emmons Howard organ in South Deerfield Congregational Church. If anyone thought that Johnson and Steere were the important organ builders in Westfield and that Emmons Howard was an “also ran,” this instrument and the other Emmons Howard organ we heard would definitely give the lie to such a thought. Emmons Howard may not have had quite such a large output as the other Westfield builders, but his instruments were certainly of equal quality. The conventioneers began by singing the chorale Vater Unser, after which Plagerman played Bach and Pachelbel chorale preludes on this hymn. We then heard a voluntary by the eighteenth-century English composer Maurice Greene, Franck’s Cantabile, and the Allegro from Mendelssohn’s Organ Sonata No. 2. The organ produced a grand effect—rich and powerful—and Plagerman brought forth some very pretty effects in the Greene.

We next heard an organ—perhaps the only surviving organ—built in 1868 by William Jackson of Albany in Holy Name of Jesus Polish National Catholic Church in South Deerfield. Jackson was the son of an organ builder in Liverpool, England. Jackson’s father was chiefly memorable for having built the first organ in England with a 1-1/7 foot stop. William Jackson trained with Gray & Davison in London before coming to the United States, which is evident from the Gray & Davison-style console of the South Deerfield organ. The recitalist, Larry Schipull, began with Niels Gade’s Three Tone Pieces, op. 22, and then—appropriately for an ethnically Polish church—played a transcription of a Chopin Fugue in A Minor. The Chorale Prelude on ‘Wie schön leucht die Morgenstern’ by Johann Christoff Oley featured the labial oboe on the Swell, perhaps the earliest stop of its kind in North America. We also heard the Andante with Variations in D of Mendelssohn and the Finale in D by T. Tertius Noble. The organ sounds grand yet bright and has a particularly beautiful Melodia.

Gregory Crowell then played the early William A. Johnson organ, Opus 54 of 1856, in First Congregational Church, Montague. Works of the eighteenth-century English composers Jonathan Battishull and Henry Heron were followed by Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Major, BWV 870, from Das wohltemperierte Klavier II, together with an Adagio by nineteenth-century German composer E. F. E. Richter and a Maestoso by an anonymous German composer of the same period. This is quite a charming little instrument with a very substantial Pedal Sub Base [sic]. We also took in a recital by Don VerKuilen at the First Congregational Church of Sunderland, home of an early Odell organ, Opus 109 of 1871, a relatively rare example of a New York-built organ in the Pioneer Valley. The program consisted of nineteenth-century American music and Seth Bingham’s Fughetta on ‘St. Kevin.’

Following lunch at the same church, we boarded the buses for a recital at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Springfield. This for me was one of the highlights of the convention. The church was built in 1962 during the pastorate of Father Basil J. Rafferty, who spared no expense to make sure that it was an outstanding example of modern architecture, with excellent acoustics and built from the finest materials. Much of the building is lined with marble in various hues, including a striking emerald green marble reredos. The stained glass is also extremely beautiful. The organ is a three-manual electro-pneumatic Lawrence Phelps Casavant, Opus 2750, built in 1963. The church was threatened with closure in 2005, but following the appointment of Father Quynh D. Tran as pastor in 2006 has taken on a new lease on life as a predominantly ethnically Vietnamese congregation. One would hope that this fine Casavant organ might inspire some parishioners to learn the instrument. The recital was given by Joey Fala. Fala, a native of Hawaii, has completed two degrees at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Albany, New York, and is now undertaking graduate work in organ performance at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Fala promises to be one of the outstanding organists of the upcoming generation. His varied program included Marcel Dupré’s transcription of the Sinfonia from Bach’s Cantata 29, the Prélude from Franck’s Prélude, Fugue, and Variation, and Hyfrydol from Vaughan Williams’s Three Welsh Hymn Preludes. Fala’a program continued with Miroir by Dutch composer Ad Wammes and ended with the Te Deum, op. 11, by Jeanne Demessieux. The Casavant is a wonderful organ in excellent acoustical and architectural surroundings.

The evening recital featured Peter Sykes, assisted by his wife Victoria Wagner, playing the four-manual E.M. Skinner organ, Opus 322 of 1921, in the United Congregational Church of Holyoke. This is a very forthright Skinner organ—I found it a little brutal in the bass at times—in a vast and very beautiful church. Following an American folk tune, White’s Air, arranged by William Churchill Hammond, we heard Peter Sykes’s fine and now well-known transcription of Holst’s The Planets, op. 12. I have now heard Sykes’s transcription of The Planets on several organs in several states, but I thought this was the best performance I have heard. Sykes was able to produce some almost magical effects on the Skinner organ in the quieter passages.

 

Wednesday, July 1

The first recitalist on Wednesday was Monica Czausz, a young woman who also promises to be one of the outstanding organists of the upcoming generation. A student of Ken Cowan, she has already received several awards in organ-playing competitions. The organ was Johnson Opus 424 of 1874 in Wesley United Methodist Church, Warehouse Point, Windsor, Connecticut, a lovely little organ in a very well-kept church. Ms. Czausz played selections from Widor, Schumann, and Saint-Saëns, as well as a haunting Adagio by Charles-Valentin Alkan and Will o’ the Wisp by Gordon Balch Nevin.

Next we travelled to Somers Congregational Church (United Church of Christ), Somers, Massachusetts, for a recital by Christa Rakich, organ, with cellist Jeffrey Krieger of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. The recital included Ms. Rakich’s own composition, Hommage à Pachelbel: Eleven Variations on ‘St. Anne,’ three pieces for cello and organ by Edward Elgar, and the Ricercar à Trois from Bach’s Musical Offering, BWV 1079. The organ is a fine new tracker instrument by Richards, Fowkes & Co., Opus 21 of 2014. 

We then went to St. Theresa’s Catholic Church, South Hadley, Massachusetts, for the OHS Annual Meeting followed by a hymn sing led by Patrick Scott and featuring the church’s 1964 Casavant tracker organ, Opus 2791. At the meeting, we heard the exciting news that through the generosity of the Wyncote Foundation, founded with monies from the late Otto and Phoebe Haas Charitable Trusts, the Organ Historical Society offices, library, and archives are all to be housed in Stoneleigh, a 35-room mansion built in 1901 in Villanova, Pennsylvania. A presentation showing the plans for the new climate-controlled OHS headquarters was given by OHS member Fred Haas, son of Otto and Phoebe Haas, and also the chair of next year’s OHS convention in Philadelphia. I was particularly interested in the organ at St. Theresa’s used for the hymn sing, a Lawrence Phelps Casavant tracker originally built for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts. My late mother-in-law was for many years a member of St. Andrew’s, and so I knew the Casavant organ in its original location well. It was far from satisfactory, being architecturally out of keeping with the building, too loud, and excessively bright and screechy. The church put up with the instrument until 2005 when the then organist and choirmaster, OHS member Harry Kelton, persuaded them to buy a new Juget-Sinclair organ, which is as perfect an organ for the church as one might imagine. The Casavant organ was secured for St. Theresa’s in South Hadley through the Organ Clearing House and was installed in 2005 by Czelusniak et Dugal of Northampton, Massachusetts. Bill Czelusniak told me that no changes were made to the voicing apart from raising a few drooping languids and note-to-note regulation. The Casavant organ fits St. Theresa’s as though it had been built for it. The casework that was so out of place in Wellesley looks just right in the fine modern architecture of St. Theresa’s and the volume of the instrument is just right for the spacious acoustics of the church. Furthermore, the acoustics of the building boost the bass frequencies and absorb some of the upper frequencies, so the organ is perfectly balanced for the room. So now St. Andrew’s, Wellesley, and St. Theresa’s, South Hadley, both have ideal tracker instruments in their buildings. As I asserted above, it is as though the Casavant organ was built for the South Hadley church: the organ has at last found its true home.

The next venue was the South Congregational Church of Amherst, where Christopher Marks gave a recital on Casavant Opus 74 of 1896. This is believed to be the oldest unaltered Casavant organ in North America and was relocated to the Amherst church by Czelusniak et Dugal. The stoplist is interesting in being somewhat similar to many Cavaillé-Coll orgues de choeur, with a small Grand-orgue to 4 foot and a larger Récit to mixture and reed. The recital consisted of works by Pierné, Ropartz, and Widor. 

After this we made a short trip to the Jewish Community of Amherst for a recital by Vaughn Watson. The organ, a splendid little instrument, was built by Emmons Howard in 1900. The synagogue inherited the organ in 1976 when they purchased the building from the Second Congregational Church of Amherst, which had merged with First Congregational Church in 1970. Although the Jewish Community used the organ for a time, they had not used it recently and were excited to discover that it might still be played. Several members of the community were present and expressed interest and enthusiasm for the recital, so one hopes they may make more use of the instrument in future. The recital consisted of works by Bach, Schumann, and Mathias, after which the congregation sang “The God of Abraham Praise,” and Watson rounded off the program with Louis Lewandowski’s Prelude ‘Rosh Hashanah.’

For the evening concert we went to the First Church of Monson (United Church of Christ) for a concert on the organ, Johnson & Son Opus 781 of 1892, played by Rosalind Mohnsen. I suspect that the convention committee’s choice of Mohnsen to give a concert on the Johnson in Monson may have been a little tongue-in-cheek, but it proved to be an excellent pairing. The organ is a fairly comprehensive three-manual and includes—unusually for the period—a soft yet very effective 32-foot Pedal Quintaton. In addition to some well-known works such as Saint-Saëns Fantaisie, the recital included a number of interesting works that are not often played. These included Albert W. Ketelbey’s Sanctuary of the Heart, Karg-Elert’s concert arrangement of Handel’s The Harmonious Blacksmith, Alfred Hollins’s Concert Overture in C Minor, Toccata from Sonata No. 1, op. 40, by René L. Becker, and the Concert Sonata No. 5 in C Minor, op. 45, by Eugene Thayer. Of particular interest was Zsolt Gárdonyi’s playful Mozart Changes.

 

Thursday, July 2

We began the day with a visit to Heath Union Evangelical Church for a program given by Frances Conover Fitch on the very early William A. Johnson two-manual organ, Opus 16 of 1850. The instrument is interesting in that it appears to have been constructed as a G-compass organ but changed to C-compass during installation. Ms. Fitch demonstrated this very attractive little organ with a selection of works by Percy Buck, John Stanley, John Zundel, and Samuel Wesley. 

The next organ we visited at First Congregational Church in Shelburne was an eye-opener for me in a number of ways. The instrument was J. W. Steere & Son Opus 681 of 1915, an early example of a pitman electro-pneumatic action Steere. The first thing that impressed me was the quality of the work, both tonally and mechanically, every bit as good as the best work of Ernest M. Skinner during the same period. But what was also really impressive was that the organ is a hundred years old and still operating on its original leather, which as yet is showing no signs of giving out. This can be attributed to three factors—the use of very high quality vegetable-tanned (or perhaps even mercury-tanned) leather, the careful sealing of the leather against the atmosphere, and the absence of air pollution in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. The only changes ever made to the organ were the addition of an electric blower and the replacement of the original dry batteries for the action current with a rectifier. I was further impressed by how laid back the organist Carol Britt was about her recital. Unlike the other organists who spent the first few days of the convention frantically practicing for their recitals, Dr. Britt had practiced the previous week and came along on the bus with the rest of us and enjoyed listening to all the organs. She gave a faultless recital consisting of the Pastorale from Guilmant’s Organ Sonata No. 1, David Dahl’s Suite Italiana, and Lefébure-Wély’s Sortie in E-flat.

One of the little-known gems of the Pioneer Valley is the village of Florence, now part of Northampton, Massachusetts. The Victorian Annunciation Chapel was formerly a parish in its own right, but is now part of the consolidated St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish and is only used for one Mass each week. The organ, Steere & Turner Opus 305 of 1890, is the oldest organ in Northampton. It is a surprisingly powerful organ for its size. The recitalist was Grant Moss, organist of nearby Smith College in Northampton. The last time Dr. Moss gave a recital at an OHS Convention, our bus driver got hopelessly lost and we missed the recital, so I was delighted that I finally got to hear him this time. The program consisted of works by Healey Willan, Nadia Boulanger, Joseph Jongen, and Alexandre Guilmant.

We then travelled into the center of Northampton for a recital at the First Churches of Northampton, affiliated with both the United Church of Christ and the American Baptist Church. The church is a fine Victorian brownstone building with cast iron pillars and an outstanding Tiffany glass window. The celebrated preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) was once the pastor. The organ is E. M. Skinner & Son Opus 507 of 1936, which retains the case and 16 ranks from the previous Johnson & Son organ, Opus 718 of 1889. Lorenz Maycher was intending to give the recital but had to withdraw owing to indisposition, and Charles Callahan graciously agreed to come down from Orwell, Vermont, and step into the breach. He played the Bourée in D of Wallace A. Sabin, Adoration by Florence Price, Nevin’s Will o’ the Wisp, and two pieces of his own composition, Folk Tune (1994) and Hymn-Fantasia on ‘Melita’ (2013)—altogether a very interesting and varied program that showed off the lovely voicing of the Skinner organ to good advantage.

We then returned to the United Congregational Church of Holyoke, where we had heard The Planets on Tuesday evening, for a recital by Christoph Bull in the monumental Skinner Chapel, an amazing neo-Perpendicular building with a vaulted apse. As a chapel, it is much larger than most people’s churches! Unlike the main church, the chapel has air conditioning, so the congregation has the main worship service there during the summer. The organ was Ernest M. Skinner Organ Company Opus 179 built in 1910–12. It was rebuilt in 1972–74 by the Berkshire Organ Company, and reconstructed again, more in keeping with the original design, by Czelusniak et Dugal in 1990–92. Christoph Bull began his recital with one of his own compositions, a rather exciting piece named Vic 1, short for Victimae Paschali Laudes, the Gregorian chant upon which it is based. He followed this with Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582, an Invention in C Minor by William Joel, and a transcription of Ravel’s Boléro. Bull’s program continued with another entertaining piece composed by the recitalist, When Felix met J. S.—Mash-up of Mendelssohn and Bach. The organ retains much of its E. M. Skinner sound, but as this recital demonstrated it can handle many varied styles of repertoire well.

The convention proper ended with the evening recital on Thursday, although there was an additional optional day on Friday. The Thursday evening recital was given by Nathan Laube and was streamed live on the Internet. The webcast will be available on the OHS website under “Conventions” at www.organsociety.org. The recital featured the two organs of the Abbey Chapel, Holyoke College, South Hadley. Laube played the first half of the program on the large two-manual C. B. Fisk organ, Opus 84 of 1986, in the west gallery of the chapel. The program reflected Laube’s recent research in early European styles of music and included works by Buxtehude, Cabanilles, Poglietti, Rossi, and van Noordt. These came off extremely well on the organ, which I think in some ways is the best Charles Fisk organ I have ever heard. 

The second half of the concert was performed on the Abbey Chapel’s magnificent four-manual chancel organ, built by George S. Hutchings, Opus 436 of 1896, rebuilt by the Skinner Organ Co., Opus 367 of 1922, and again rebuilt by E. M. Skinner & Son, Opus 511 of 1938. Restoration work was subsequently carried out by William Baker in 2001 and Czelusniak et Dugal in 2013. The second half of Laube’s program included a transcription for organ of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G, op. 23, no. 5, Lynnwood Farnam’s transcription of Dupré’s Cortège et litanie, op. 19, no. 2, the third of Herbert Howells’s Three Psalm Preludes, op. 32, Joseph Jongen’s Sonata Eroïca, op. 94, and the Andante Sostenuto from Widor’s Symphony No. 9 (Symphonie Gothique). The program provided a very fitting close to a great convention.

 

Friday, July 3 

More than half of us were still around to board the buses for the optional extra day of the convention on Friday. We began the day with recitals on two early E. & G.G. Hook organs. The first of these was Opus 93 of 1849 in First Congregational Church, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. The recitalists were David and Permelia Sears, organ, and their daughter, Rebecca Sears, violin. Permelia Sears played a suite by Jacques Boyvin, which came off very well since the surprisingly complete specification of the organ includes a Tierce, Cremona, and other stops suited to eighteenth-century French organ music. Next Permelia and Rebecca Sears played a transcription for organ and violin of Arthur Foote’s Cantilena in G, op. 71. Permelia Sears’s final offering was the Introduction and Passacaglia from Rheinberger’s Eighth Sonata. Then, in honor of it being the day before July 4, David Sears played his own transcription of Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, specially written to exploit the G-compass of the Hook organ. The organ was originally built for the much larger First Congregational Church in Springfield, where it may have been used to accompany Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” when she visited the church in 1851. It makes a very grand sound in the rather smaller church in Hinsdale, New Hampshire.

The second early Hook organ we visited was also located in a rather smaller building than the one for which it was originally constructed. This was Hook Opus 48 of 1842 in the First Parish (Unitarian) in Northfield, Massachusetts, originally built for Third (later Unity) Church in Springfield. Lubbert Gnodde gave a short recital of works by Franck, Dupré, and Sweelinck. The instrument, though smaller than the Hinsdale one, again produced a rather grander sound than one might
have expected.

We had lunch on the attractive grounds of the Northfield Mount Hermon School in Gill, Massachusetts, with lovely views of the surrounding hills. After lunch it was only a few yards to the school’s Memorial Chapel, built in 1901. Here we heard Rhonda Sider Edgington give a recital on Andover Organ Company Opus 67 of 1970. The program was made up entirely of works by composers born in the last century—Adolphus Hailstork, James Woodman, Margaret Sandresky, Daniel Pinkham, and Libby Larsen. The organ is a fine instrument in fine acoustics and though now 45 years old has weathered well. There is something to be said for the view that a good organ will never really go out of fashion.

Next we proceeded to the First Church of Deerfield, affiliated with both the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association. Here there is a 2003 organ by Richards, Fowkes & Co., Opus 13, which was designed to be similar to the small village church organs in Thuringia that J.S. Bach would have been familiar with, by builders such as Trost and Hildebrand. The builders have done a remarkable job of fitting a II/22 organ into a case in the relatively shallow gallery that is a mere fourteen feet high. Margaret Irwin-Brandon gave a recital of works by J. G. Walther and J. S. Bach that was well suited to the instrument.

The final recital of the post-convention day was given by Daniel Romero on the organ of Our Lady of the Valley in Easthampton. The J. W. Steere & Son organ, Opus 504 of 1902, originally had a Weigle membrane tubular-pneumatic action that was never satisfactory, but this has now been replaced with an electro-pneumatic action by Czelusniak et Dugal, who also made additions, including a mixture, using Steere pipework. The organ has a rich, warm sound, not unlike a Skinner organ. The program unusually included a plainsong Credo sung by the congregation and accompanied on the organ. Also included were Duruflé’s Choral varié sur le thème de ‘Veni Creator,’ Philip G. Kreckel’s Silent Night, Harold Darke’s An Interlude and Charles Tournemire’s Improvisation sur le ‘Te Deum’ as reconstructed by Maurice Duruflé. And so back to the hotel for drinks and a dinner together before parting homewards by our several ways, God willing to meet again at the Philadelphia convention, June 26 to July 1, 2016.