The Class of 2016: 20 leaders under the age of 30

The Diapason Staff

The Diapason’s third annual “20 Under 30” selections came from a field that included over 110 nominations. The nominees were evaluated based upon information provided in the nominations; we selected only from those who had been nominated. We looked for evidence of such things as career advancement, technical skills, and creativity and innovation; we considered a nominee’s awards and competition prizes, publications and compositions, and significant positions in the mix. Our selections were not limited merely to organists but reflect the breadth of our editorial scope, which includes the organ, harpsichord and clavichord, carillon, and church music. Here we present the winners’ backgrounds and accomplishments, and then have them tell us something interesting about themselves and about their achievements, goals, and aspirations.

One candidate was nominated and selected, after which it was determined the nomination contained an erroneous birth date. The candidate has an exemplary list of accomplishments to his credit; however, because he is now above the age of 30, we had to remove him from our list of 20. We are grateful for his graciousness in this process. This experience proves that all persons who submit nominations to our 20 Under 30 program must ensure that they provide accurate and confirmed birth dates for all nominees! The staff of The Diapason determined this year’s class would thus have 19 people, not 20.

In order to assure that future classes of our 20 Under 30 program continue the level of excellence of our previous three classes, the staff of The Diapason has decided that this will now be a biennial event. Nominations will again open for 20 Under 30 in December 2018 for our Class of 2019. Please carefully consider those you may know that deserve this honor and begin to take notes for your nomination. We can only honor those who are nominated.

The Associated Pipe Organ Builders of America (APOBA) is graciously providing a one-year subscription to our 20 Under 30 Class of 2017.

 

Bryan Anderson is a native of Georgia. Currently working toward a master’s degree at Rice University under Ken Cowan, Anderson’s undergraduate work was at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he earned degrees in organ (studying with Alan Morrison) and harpsichord (with Leon Schelhase). A rising concert artist, he has performed at such venues as the Kennedy Center, Verizon Hall in Philadelphia, Woolsey Hall at Yale, Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, Princeton University Chapel, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. He has been featured in performance at conventions of the American Guild of Organists and the Organ Historical Society. His recent positions have been as organist at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, as well as serving as an assistant organist of the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ in Macy’s department store for several years. During 2015–16, Anderson held the post of organ scholar at Wells Cathedral in Somerset, England. He serves as an organist at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Houston, Texas. In addition to work as an organist, Anderson has enjoyed extensive collaboration as a chamber musician, performing many times as a continuo artist and ensemble pianist. His website is www.bryan-anderson.com.

An interesting fact: I make hobbies of longboarding and studying ancient Akkadian.

Proudest achievement: I am most proud of becoming a competent improviser (by my own standards). It was not something I was exposed to early in training, and it is relatively recently that I feel confident in that skill set, especially liturgically.

 Career aspirations and goals: One of my goals is to build church music in a place that doesn’t already enjoy a great program. If I could help make something “from the ground up,” I would consider it really useful and enjoyable work. I also aspire to be in a position (academic, ecclesiastical, or unofficial) where I could regularly present curated concerts. A concert with some kind of focus can be more rewarding than a “touring” recital program, and I would like to have more outlets in that direction.

 

Juilliard-trained organist David La’O Ball (BM 2014, MM 2016) serves as organist and assistant director of music at Christ Cathedral in Orange, California (formerly Crystal Cathedral). David is a well-lauded young performer—The New York Times declared his appearance in Juilliard’s FOCUS! Festival “a rousing performance,” and his performances have been broadcast on American Public Media’s Pipedreams and New York City’s WQXR.

As part of a wide-ranging musical vision for 21st-century collaboration—a vision cultivated during his time studying at Juilliard with Paul Jacobs—Ball is committed to making the “King of Instruments” play well with others. He has spearheaded a number of chamber recitals, performed as an orchestral musician, and commissioned multiple new works for the organ. His website is www.davidballorgan.com.

The only thing matching Ball’s passion for performance is his commitment to liturgical music. From his earliest days as organ scholar under John Romeri at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, Ball played and accompanied the basilica’s choirs in performances across the country and in Rome, Italy. While at Juilliard, he worked as the assistant director at St. Malachy’s—The Actors’ Chapel. Currently, as Christ Cathedral organist, Ball’s music underpins an array of services and events, accompanying the cathedral’s choirs and supporting the diocese’s diverse congregation.

An interesting fact: I only just got my driver’s license after moving to California. Starting to drive as a Southern California driver probably wasn’t the easiest introduction to the skill. Also, I’ve always been deathly afraid of roller coasters—but since my new job is essentially down the street from Disneyland, I’ve been working towards conquering that fear. Actually, the driving has helped, I think. There are plenty of similarities between riding roller coasters and driving in Southern California traffic—high speeds, sharp turns, sudden stops, especially the way I drive! 

Proudest achievement: Probably my degrees—I earned both my Master of Music and Bachelor of Music degrees at the Juilliard School in New York City. It was an incredible amount of work, and there were plenty of times when it certainly didn’t seem like I’d ever make it through, but I did! Ear training with Mary Anthony Cox and all!

Career aspirations and goals: Being a church musician is my passion. I love playing recitals and concerts, but I grew up as a church musician, and in the midst of a big liturgy, or a small, intimate one, is where I truly feel most fulfilled. I’m living the dream right now as a cathedral organist, and could only hope to continue doing what I’m doing, and perhaps to have a cathedral program of my own to run someday.

 

Viktoria Franken started organbuilding in 2008 at H. P. Mebold in Siegen, Germany, where she was trained in the historic craft of organbuilding and as tonal assistant. She also attended the Oscar Walcker School for Organbuilding in Ludwigsburg, Germany, where she earned a certificate of completion as well as a certificate of apprenticeship in organbuilding from the chamber of crafts in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2012 she began work at Killinger Pfeifen, Freiberg, Germany, where she mastered special skills in assembling and prevoicing reed pipes.

Since 2015 she has worked for John-Paul Buzard Pipe Organ Builders in Champaign, Illinois, as a tonal assistant. She is responsible for soldering, pipe repairs, racking, and pipe-related woodworking. She is being trained in all aspects of voicing and placement of pipes in the organ.

An interesting fact: I love being out in my yard gardening, growing vegetables, as well as cooking. 

Proudest achievement: Growing up in a small village and working in a five-person shop, I never imagined being anywhere else other than in Germany. Now I live in the United States and work at places I just knew from television previously. I’m proud having this awesome opportunity and loving what I do for work.

Career aspirations and goals: I want to become a voicer! Creating sounds that will touch people deep in their souls and make them feel them just like I was touched by sounds as a little kid.

 

Christopher Grills is leading a multifaceted career as clavichordist, harpsichordist, church musician, opera director, and tuning and temperament scholar. Grills’s special affinity for the clavichord has brought him to attention on the international music scene. In 2013 he performed on the clavichord at Musica Antiqua a Magnano in Italy, and in May 2017 he will perform at the Nordic Historical Keyboard Festival in Finland. 

Originally from Joplin, Missouri, Grills is the first student in North America to pursue graduate studies focused on the clavichord. He earned his Master of Music in historical performance at Boston University under the tutelage of Peter Sykes and received a full-tuition scholarship to pursue his Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the same institution. He has been featured in interviews in The Joplin Globe and in Tangents, the bulletin of the Boston Clavichord Society.

Grills is a collaborative keyboardist and performs harpsichord continuo with the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra and the Boston University Baroque Orchestra. He is currently co-directing the Boston premiere of the Hasse opera Alcide al Bivio with the Harvard Early Music Society. He is organist at First Congregational Church in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

An interesting fact: At age 12, I wrote a historical monologue on Thomas Jefferson and performed it in period costume, which won an award in a competition called National History Day. I was later invited to reprise it at the annual Fourth of July celebration at the U.S. National Archives.

Proudest achievement: My proudest achievement is overcoming the limitations of my autism, learning how to interact with and love others, and getting to where I am in life now. I feel like I’ve become an inspiration for other young people with disabilities—nothing can stop us from achieving our dreams! 

Career aspirations and goals: I plan to continue to professionally promote, on both a local and global scale, an interest in and awareness of historical performance practices in all musicians at all levels of musical instruction, as well as the broader inclusion of the clavichord in the 21st-century musical scene. Upon completing my doctorate, I hope to secure a music director position that can provide the financial stability to pursue my dreams and a venue to create and inspire music among congregants and the general public alike. I aim to eventually direct my own Baroque orchestra and perform and record lesser-known solo keyboard, chamber, orchestral, and opera works.

 

Nathaniel Gumbs is a native of the Bronx, New York, and is currently a candidate for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree, studying with David Higgs at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. He received the Master of Music degree in organ performance from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, and the Bachelor of Music degree in organ performance from Shenandoah Conservatory, Winchester, Virginia. His former teachers include Martin Jean and Steven Cooksey. As a young artist, Gumbs has performed recitals throughout the United States and has played many historic instruments in Paris and Rome through Shenandoah Conservatory and in Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig through the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. His playing has been described by music critics as “mature, lyrical, accurate, and energetic.” Nathaniel was recently mentioned in the New York Times for playing with “deft and feeling” on his duo recording with bass-baritone Dashon Burton. In April 2016, he was featured on the American Public Media broadcast Pipedreams Live!. Gumbs has also earned Service Playing and Colleague certifications from the American Guild of Organists. He is currently the director of music and arts and church organist at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.

An interesting fact: I love fine dining experiences, traveling, and playing gospel music on the piano!

Proudest achievement: My proudest achievement is being accepted to two of the finest institutions for organ and sacred music (Yale and Eastman) and studying with two awesome pedagogues (Martin Jean and David Higgs). Another proud achievement is serving as director of music for Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, one of the largest African American churches in North Carolina.

Career aspirations and goals: I plan to have a thriving career as a concert organist, teach at a major conservatory, and be a significant figure in church music. 

 

A native of Talladega, Alabama, Christopher Henley serves as organist of Anniston First United Methodist Church, where he provides service music for the traditional worship services, manages the Soli Deo Gloria Concert Series, and accompanies various vocal and instrumental ensembles. Prior to his service at Anniston First United Methodist Church, he served as organist of the First United Methodist Churches in Talladega and Pell City, Alabama. He is the founder and artistic director of The Noble Camerata, an auditioned vocal ensemble that sings choral services in the Anniston, Alabama, area and seasonal concerts. Henley also serves on the faculty of the Community Music School of the University of Alabama, where he is an instructor of piano. Henley is currently a senior in pursuit of the Bachelor of Music degree in organ performance at University of Alabama, where he studies with Faythe Freese. He is an active member of the American Guild of Organists and University of Alabama Music Teachers National Association. For the AGO, he was appointed as a member of the executive board for the AGO Young Organists initiative for the Southeast Region.

An interesting fact: Growing up, I worked with my father in our family business, Talladega Auto Parts. I stocked shelves, managed office work, and worked with customers. Even now, I work with my dad during my off-seasons! 

Proudest achievement: Being named a member of the 2017 class of “20 Under 30” alongside several friends and colleagues is a tremendous honor. 

Career aspirations and goals: I desire to work full-time in a church music program, either as organist or organist and choirmaster. While I enjoy performing recitals, I feel a deep calling to a life of service in the church.

 

Jeremy Paul Jelinek is an undergraduate in the organ studio of David Higgs at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Thanks to an exchange program, in 2016–2017 he studies interprétation d’orgue (performance) with Olivier Latry and Michel Bouvard and organ improvisation with Laszlo Fassang at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris (CNSMDP). While in France, he maintains an active concert schedule. 

Sacred music is his purest joy; he is interested particularly in early music. Jelinek has developed a rigorous study and a passion in French Classical organ music, having given classes on this subject. He is student at l’École du Chœur grégorien de Paris, where he studies interpretation, semiology, and history of chant, singing offices and Masses. As a church musician, he has held various positions at Calvary Church, St. Andrew’s Church, and St. Anthony’s Chapel (Pittsburgh), and Christ Church (Rochester). He is the recipient of several organ competition prizes and awards. Jelinek “interpret[s] . . . with aplomb . . .
demonstrating impressive technical facility” (The American Organist, September 2016) and “play[s] with elegance and assurance” (The Diapason, November 2016). He is also a composer, notably of choral works, and has written for several ensembles.  

An interesting fact: I am most inspired in all aspects of my life as musician by the ancient chant melodies and the vast body of choral and instrumental music that chant has influenced. 

Proudest achievement: Studying at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris (CNSMDP).

Career aspirations and goals: As a performer, it is my sincerest hope, amidst this complicated world, to transcend hearts and minds towards something greater. As a church musician and leader, I want to share all that I have with others, and in doing so, preserve tradition and nurture music of the highest quality.

 

American organist Weston Jennings is quickly establishing himself as a talented and engaging international performer. Having first encountered the pipe organ at the Interlochen Summer Arts Camp (Michigan) at the age of 16, he later graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy. At the Eastman School of Music, Jennings earned his Bachelor of Music degree and the Performer’s Certificate. In May 2017, he will graduate from the Yale School of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music with his Master of Music degree. 

Prior to his graduate studies, he completed two years in England as the organ scholar of Canterbury Cathedral and Chelmsford Cathedral. During this time, he was also appointed the first organ scholar to the Royal Festival Hall, London. 

His organ teachers include Thomas Murray, Michel Bouvard, Hans Davidsson, David Higgs, and Thomas Bara. Following his recital debut at the Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.) in 2009, he has performed across the United States and Europe, including Westminster Abbey (London), St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue (New York), the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (Los Angeles), the Chapel of the Queen’s College (Oxford), Royaumont Abbey (France), and the Berliner Dom (Germany).

His website is www.westonjennings.com.

An interesting fact: I own a small collection of typewriters from just after the Second World War. Occasionally, I put them to good use, and type letters to friends and family.

Proudest achievement: Earning the Performer’s Certificate from the Eastman School of Music.

Career aspirations and goals: Following graduation from Yale, I aspire to further develop my concert career, as well as continue my work as a sacred musician. Teaching has always been a particular joy for me, and I would like this to play a larger role in my future career.

 

Jerin J. Kelly has been working for Goulding & Wood of Indianapolis, Indiana, since the summer of 2012. Prior to that, he was a student at Herron School of Art & Design, where he earned the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in furniture design. Since starting at G&W he has been active in the construction of two new organs, Opus 50 in Lexington, Kentucky, and Opus 51 in Mobile, Alabama. He has also worked on numerous renovations and major repairs. His responsibilities in the shop include building off-note chests, expression boxes, general structure, and pipe racking. In addition to building pipe organs, he also leads a service crew, tuning and maintaining about 200 pipe organs in the eastern United States.

An interesting fact: I play guitar and harmonica in an Americana group called Bigfoot Yancey. Our first full-length album, Hills, was released on April 28. 

Proudest achievement: My proudest achievement is at the end of any organ installation—seeing these beautiful architectural-scale instruments in their environment, and knowing that I’m part of a crew that can pull off such a project. As an art school graduate, finding myself in the company of such talented craftsmen is quite an achievement.

Career aspirations and goals: My goals are to get better at what I do, to become a more efficient builder and more knowledgeable technician. I’ve been in this profession for five years. There’s still a lot to learn.

 

Edward Landin is a graduate of the St. Thomas Choir School, Interlochen Arts Academy, and
Westminster Choir College. His principal organ teachers have been Thomas Bara and Ken Cowan. Further studies and coachings have been with Roberta Gary, David Higgs, Susan Landale, Marie-Louise Langlais, Kimberly Marshall, Paula Pugh Romanaux, Kathleen Scheide, and Carole Terry.

Currently the assistant director of music at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, his duties include directing numerous children’s and handbell choirs and serving as principal accompanist for the 65-member Sanctuary Choir. In addition to recitals at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and St. Thomas Church in New York City and Old West Church, Boston, Landin has also performed in France, Germany, and Wales.

A major interest in contemporary organ music, particularly by American composers, led Landin to commission E, Fantasia, and Parodies by Kathleen Scheide; Praeludium and Psalm 139 by Pamela Decker; Prelude on the Carillon d’Alet by Craig Phillips; and Exordium by Carson Cooman. A collection of Landin’s own compositions, Flourishes and Reflections—Organ Music for Service or Recital was recently released by Lorenz. More information may be found on his website: www.edwardlandin.com.

An interesting fact: I am a major animal lover (currently have two dogs and two cats) and a longtime figure skating fan. Michelle Kwan’s autograph is one of my prized possessions!

Proudest achievement: The recent publication of some of my compositions by Lorenz was a wonderful achievement for me. I hope it’s only the beginning of my work as a composer.

Career aspirations and goals: Each piece I have commissioned by Carson Cooman, Pamela Decker, Craig Phillips, and Kathleen Scheide has been a wonderful experience. Keeping the organ alive includes adding new and fresh repertoire to all the wonderful music that is already out there.

 

Christopher Lynch is Fellow in Church Music at Trinity Cathedral, Portland, Oregon. He sang in the boy choir at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, before attending the American Boychoir School in Princeton, New Jersey. Lynch studied organ performance at Indiana University (IU), where his teachers included Janette Fishell, Bruce Neswick, Jeffrey Smith, and Christopher Young. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from IU.

Before coming to Trinity, Lynch served on the music staff of Episcopal churches throughout the country, including St. Mark’s Cathedral (Shreveport, Louisiana), Trinity Church (Bloomington, Indiana), and St. Paul’s, K Street (Washington, D.C.). In these appointments, he has been mentored by such noted church musicians as Bruce Neswick, Robert McCormick, and Marilyn Keiser. 

A member of the American Guild of Organists and the Association of Anglican Musicians, Lynch is a frequent staff member for the Royal School of Church Music’s summer courses, including RSCM Pacific Northwest, where he has served as course organist.

An interesting fact: When not on the organ bench, I love hiking and exploring the limitless beauty the Pacific Northwest has to offer!

Proudest achievement: I find myself most proud as a teacher. In the several music programs that I’ve been a part of where boys’ and girls’ choirs are one of our main areas of focus, I find there is nothing more satisfying than witnessing the development of a chorister and getting to introduce them to music that is hugely important to me and will hopefully be equally important to them in their lives.

Career aspirations and goals: I aspire to be an organist/choirmaster for a large, vibrant church music program like the many I’ve been privileged to be a part of as a chorister and organist.

 

Patrick Parker is minister of music and organist at Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Lake Charles, Louisiana, artistic director of Houston Baroque, and artistic director of Renaissance Southwest. He can be heard on recordings through Raven: Houston Baroque’s My Soul Sees and Hears featuring music by Buxtehude and Handel; Rheinberger: Songs and Sonatas with Katie Clark, mezzo-soprano; and the complete works of van Eijken (winter 2018). As a concert organist, Parker’s repertoire includes the complete solo organ works of Bach, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and others. Major performance venues include St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Grace Episcopal Church (New York City); Cathedral of St. Philip (Atlanta); St. Cecilia Cathedral (Omaha); Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart and Christ Church Cathedral (Houston); Trinity Cathedral (Cleveland); Grace Church Cathedral (Charleston); Cathedral Church of St. John (Albuquerque); La Madeleine (Paris); Wells Cathedral (England); Nieuwe Kerke (Amsterdam); Auferstehungs-kirche and Michaeliskirche (Leipzig); and Michaeliskirche (Hamburg). In 2015, Parker resided in Leipzig and performed on historic organs throughout Europe. He holds degrees from Cleveland Institute of Music and University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the Doctor of Musical Arts in organ performance from University of Houston. His website is: www.patrickaaronparker.com.

An interesting fact: I grew up in a very small town in North Carolina, and as a child I loved country music and wanted to be the next Vince Gill. I did not really know what classical music was until I was 16 or so, and never heard or saw an organ until I was a freshman in college! Now I’ve gone to the other side of the spectrum and love listening to Bruckner and Wagner (especially Parsifal).

Proudest achievement: I am always proud when I get to expose people to organ and church music and share my passion with them. The greatest source of pride for me comes from first-time performances of masterworks. There is something very special, vulnerable, and memorable in asking an audience to sit with me and share time together while we go through the process of a major cyclical work. I played Bach’s Clavierübung III during Reformation in 2010; playing Messiaen’s Les Corps Glorieux in Memphis recently was another very special experience. I’m looking forward to doing Messiaen’s Harawi with my friend, soprano Julia Fox, this summer and Livre du Saint Sacrement next season.

Career aspirations and goals: I get to wake up every day and do what I love for a living. My biggest goal is to remember that and stay grateful for the absolutely wonderful life I have. I believe that if I can stay in gratitude and focus on connecting with others through music, the rest of my career will fall into place organically.

 

Nicholas Quardokus is a first-year student in organ in the Master of Music degree program at the Yale School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music, New Haven, Connecticut, where he studies with Martin Jean. Quardokus concurrently serves as organ scholar at Trinity Church on the Green, New Haven, as well as at Marquand Chapel at Yale Divinity School. A recent graduate of Indiana University, he completed his Bachelor of Music degree with highest distinction at the Jacobs School of Music with a major in organ performance and minor in early music, studying with Janette Fishell. Solo performances have included recitals throughout the Midwest and East Coast, including the American Guild of Organists Region V Convention in 2013 and a “Rising Star” recital at the AGO National Convention in Boston in 2014. In 2014, he was awarded first prize and hymn prize in the Young Professional Division of the Albert Schweitzer Organ Competition. In addition, he was one of the featured organists at the 2015 Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. His performances have been heard broadcast across the nation on public radio’s Harmonia Early Music and Pipedreams.

An interesting fact: In my spare time I enjoy baking, especially chocolate chip cookies and focaccia bread.

Proudest achievement: My proudest achievement has been working for the parishes I’ve served thus far, in Indianapolis and New Haven. Whether it be something special, like being the organist for a tour of English cathedrals, or something more routine such as playing Sunday services or helping train choristers, my hope has been to make a small, subtle difference by living out my vocation each day. That’s what I find extremely rewarding.

Career goals and aspirations: My goal for my career is first of all, to be a church musician. I feel very strongly that church music is as important an effort and vocation as anything we can do as organists. I hope someday to be a part of a parish that trains both children and adults to be good musicians and good people. My goal is to create music that does not merely enhance worship, but rather music that is an integral part of worship.

 

Latvian Brazilian Cristiano Rizzotto is a doctoral candidate at the American Organ Institute at the University of Oklahoma, under John Schwandt, and is the organist and choirmaster at Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Golden Valley, Minnesota. He holds a bachelor’s degree in piano performance from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Magna cum Laude, 2010), where he studied under Miriam Grosman (piano) and Alexandre Rachid (organ). He was awarded second place at the XVIII ArtLivre National Piano Competition in São Paulo.

Before moving to the United States, Rizzotto served as titular organist at the Benedictine Abbey in Rio de Janeiro, where the monks have kept the tradition of the chants and liturgy alive since 1590. The abbey organ, built in 1773 and later expanded in the 20th century, is one of the oldest organs in South America.

Rizzotto moved to the United States to study with Andrew Scanlon at East Carolina University, and earned a master’s degree in sacred music in 2013. He became a published composer when his Toccata was released by Wayne Leupold Editions in 2014. He is an active recitalist, having performed in 20 American states, Europe, and South America. Cristiano and Clara Rizzotto married in Alaska in 2015 and are expecting their first child to be born this summer. His website is www.cristianorizzotto.com.

An interesting fact: I am fascinated by the aurora borealis, and that is one of the reasons behind my constant, lifelong pursuit of the North. Other reasons are that I love cold, and winter is my favorite season of the year. I even started learning Bokmål as a result of this passion for all things Northern. A funny fact: When I did my master’s audition at ECU, I had just heard of the existence of organ shoes. I auditioned wearing regular shoes, and the jury called me up front afterwards to take a closer look at my footwear. I remember the surprise of one of the jury members: “How can you play Langlais wearing that?”

Proudest achievement: I am proud to be happily married to my dear Clara, who is an accomplished medical physicist, an incredible Renaissance woman, and a supportive and truly wonderful person. She is an incalculable blessing in my life.

Career aspirations and goals: My aspiration is to contribute to the enrichment of the organ and choral music landscape in liturgical and performing contexts. One way to do this is to continue to present Latvian repertoire for organ and choir to audiences throughout the world. The history of Latvia, the Singing Nation, is deeply connected to music that ennobles the people and strengthens their faith. Another way of doing this is to continue to promote talented musicians through the International Concert Series I established in the Twin Cities and by connecting musicians throughout the world for concerts in the United States and abroad. Finally, I want to keep working with choirs, adults and children, teaching them chant and the Church’s inestimable treasure of sacred music, which reflects the beauty of the Eternal.

 

Sarah Simko, a master’s degree student at the University of Michigan, studies organ with Kola Owolabi. She received her bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied organ with Nathan Laube, Edoardo Bellotti, William Porter, and Hans Davidsson. During her time at Eastman, she also studied harpsichord with Bellotti and Porter. A native of Rochester, Michigan, she was a scholarship winner of the Detroit Chapter of the American Guild of Organists in 2008, 2010, and 2011. She has since been invited back as a member of the jury. Sarah was recently named the winner of the Schoenstein Competition in the Art of Organ Accompaniment, hosted at the University of Michigan this past March. She was also the recipient of the 2010 Marilyn Mason Young Musician’s Scholarship from the Ann Arbor Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. She has performed in masterclasses with Marilyn Mason, David Wagner, Ken Cowan, Bruce Neswick, and Olivier Latry. Simko is currently the organ scholar at Christ Church Cranbrook. Previously, she held positions at Bethany Presbyterian Church, Greece, New York, and University Presbyterian Church, Rochester, Michigan.

An interesting fact: I got my first bottle of crazy nail polish in the second grade: neon blue! Since then, I have developed quite the collection, and a penchant for fancy toe nails. I’d paint my fingers, but the crazy designs are too distracting when practicing!    

Proudest achievement: I have been very fortunate to travel quite frequently for musical reasons. Growing up, my high school church choir at University Presbyterian Church went on a spring tour every year. After graduation, I was invited back as an accompanist and assistant director. With the Agape Singers, I have been to New York, Pennsylvania, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Ireland, and Scotland. Whenever we travel, we visit major attractions, but perform in smaller, more intimate venues. It is a truly humbling experience to share the gift of music with people from all walks of life at these concerts. The shared joy is a constant reminder of why music is such an important art. As an undergraduate student, I was able to travel to Northern Germany for the Arp Schnitger organ competition, first as a registrant and later as a competitor. It is impossible to not fall in love with those instruments or the repertoire! The colors of those instruments have a way of sticking with you and driving your creativity to find those sounds long after you return home. Now as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, my colleagues and I are preparing for an amazing trip to France this summer! Cavaillé-Colls, here we come!

Career aspirations and goals: I would like to be an organ professor at a university someday. I have had and continue to have the most amazing mentors and teachers. They have always supported me in all my endeavors without quelling my musical ideas. They are a constant reminder of what it means to work hard and to work for others. I want to be a mentor for future students and inspire them to pursue their dreams.

 

The meticulous technique, innate yet highly mature musicality, and constant musical engagement exhibited by Joshua Stafford compelled the jury of the 2016 Longwood Gardens International Organ Competition to name him, out of 12 stellar competitors, the Pierre S. du Pont First Prize Winner of this illustrious event, earning him a cash award of $40,000. Already in demand as a recitalist and improviser, Stafford has performed at many notable venues. His recital at the 2015 conference of the Association of Anglican Musicians was hailed as “technically flawless yet exceptionally nuanced and spontaneous.” Recordings of his performances have been aired on American Public Media’s Pipedreams and WRTI’s Wanamaker Organ Hour.

A native of Jamestown, New York, Stafford received the Bachelor of Music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in 2010 as a student of Alan Morrison. In 2012 he received his Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music as a student of Thomas Murray and Jeffrey Brillhart.

Stafford is director of music at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Morristown, New Jersey, where he conducts an RSCM-based program with choirs of boys, girls, and adults. The chorister program is paired with an after-school outreach program for the city’s underserved children, offering excellent music education at no cost.

An interesting fact: When I was in high school, I played for a weekly AM radio show on a Hammond spinet, broadcast live from a Friendly’s Restaurant! 

Proudest achievement: I’d have to say winning the Longwood Gardens competition, especially while maintaining a full-time church job!

Career aspirations and goals: My goal is really to continue doing what I do now, maintaining a balance of church work and a recital career. I feel very fortunate to be in a parish that has been incredibly supportive of both the program here and of my performing. It’s so rewarding to see the progress of choristers and to be able to have daily rehearsals singing much of the great Anglican choral repertoire!

 

Michael Sutcliffe grew up in Tolland, Connecticut, only minutes away from the organ shop where he would eventually begin his career. He has had a lifelong passion for music and began studying guitar at age eight. Relentless tinkering also defined his early years. He graduated from the University of Connecticut in 2010 with a degree in sociology and came to work at Foley-Baker, Inc., starting in the leather shop. Upon returning to UConn part-time for a Master of Business Administration degree, he was promoted to general manager at Foley-Baker. Since then, he has overseen all of Foley-Baker’s major reconditioning projects, ensuring they are completed on time and under budget.

An interesting fact: I enjoy riding motorcycles, even in the chilly Connecticut weather.

Proudest achievement: Being a part of the team that reconditioned the Kotzschmar Memorial Organ in Portland, Maine. Standing on stage with the rest of the Foley-Baker crew during the dedication was surreal.

Career aspirations and goals: I’d like to open more regional Foley-Baker branches and eventually turn the company into a nationwide chain of full-service locations.

 

Brian Tang is an associate carillonist at the University of California, Berkeley. He studied carillon as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley with Jeff Davis, and later with Geert D’hollander. Since his induction into the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America in 2010, he has given recitals across North America and Europe, including at the International Carillon Festivals in Springfield (2013) and Barcelona (2016). In the 2014 Queen Fabiola International Carillon Competition at Mechelen, Belgium, he was awarded second prize and the SABAM (Belgian Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers) prize for the best interpretation of a contemporary Belgian work. Brian Tang regularly produces carillon arrangements and transcriptions, one of which received first prize at a contest for the 2016 GCNA Congress at Yale University. In addition to the carillon, he plays the piano and is an erstwhile cellist.

An interesting fact: I have been an appreciative host to a family of chinchillas for the past few years.

Proudest achievement: Live music is such an ephemeral art, and carillonneurs are physically removed and usually anonymous to their audience, so it’s particularly rewarding when somebody can recall a performance from the distant past and tells me that I impacted their day.

Career goals and aspirations: My goal as a performer is to share under-appreciated music and assist with the development of the carillon as a concert instrument. One day, I hope to contribute original compositions to the carillon repertoire.

 

Janet Yieh, 24, a native of Alexandria, Virginia, is pursuing her Master of Music degree with Thomas Murray at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music and School of Music, New Haven, Connecticut. She also serves as organ scholar at Trinity Episcopal Church on the Green, New Haven, under the direction of Walden Moore, and as director of music at Berkeley Divinity School. Yieh is a graduate of the Juilliard School (Bachelor of Music degree in organ, 2015) and former assistant organist of Trinity Church, Wall Street in New York City.

Winner of the 2015 Franciscan Monastery and Washington, D.C., Chapter of the American Guild of Organists Young Organist Competition, as well as the 2015 Northern Virginia and Potomac and 2013 Philadelphia AGO Quimby competitions, Yieh performs around the United States and Asia, with highlights including Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, Washington National Cathedral, St. John’s Cathedral, Taipei, and Momoyama St. Andrew’s University Chapel, Japan. As a collaborator, she has accompanied the Washington Chorus at the Kennedy Center and NOVUS NY Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and she has premiered new music for the organ. Her playing has been broadcast on Pipedreams, New York’s WQXR and WWFM stations, and is featured on two CD recordings. A pianist from age 4 and violinist from 7, Janet began organ lessons at 11 with a scholarship from the Potomac Organ Institute. She is a member of the Association of Anglican Musicians and has earned the Colleague certificate of the AGO. Former teachers include Paul Jacobs, John Walker, Wayne Earnest, and Victoria Shields. Her website is www.janetyieh.com.

An interesting fact: I’m allergic to cats, avocados, and cats named Avocado!

Proudest achievement: Twice a week at Trinity Church, I teach our youngest third and fourth grade choristers, and I’m the proudest when I see how truly excited those brilliant, funny kids get about music and those lightbulb moments.

 Career aspirations and goals: I have a long wishlist of repertoire I’d like to learn, from Clavierübung III to Duruflé and transcriptions, and I hope to always continue learning, performing, and sharing the music that I love with audiences! My music teachers and church community encouraged me to pursue the organ, and I aspire to give back in those same ways by bringing the excellence of our conservatory training to service playing, choir training, and hopefully one day directing music in my own parish or cathedral!

THE DIAPASON Staff

The Diapason’s inaugural “20 under 30” selections came from a field that included over 100 nominations, a response that surprised and delighted us. The nominees were evaluated based upon information provided in the nominations; we selected only from those who had been nominated. We looked for evidence of such things as career advancement, technical skills, and creativity and innovation; we considered a nominee’s awards and competition prizes, publications and compositions, and significant positions in the mix. Our selections were not limited merely to organists but reflect the breadth of our editorial scope, which includes the organ, harpsichord, carillon, and church music. Here we present the winners’ backgrounds and accomplishments, and then have them tell us something interesting about themselves, and about their achievements, goals, and aspirations.

Since we had to decline multiple nominees for each one we chose, selecting only 20 from a field of very worthy nominees was quite a challenge. We do urge you to participate in the “20 under 30” awards next year—a person must be nominated in order to be selected. 

 

Nunc Dimittis

Jonathan E. Biggers, associate professor of music and Edwin Link Endowed Professor in Organ and Harpsichord at Binghamton University, died unexpectedly on September 27 at his home in Vestal, New York. Born on February 10, 1960, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Robert E. and Margaret V. Biggers, Jonathan earned bachelor and master degrees in music from the University of Alabama, and a doctorate in organ performance from the Eastman School of Music. He was awarded a Fulbright grant to study at the Conservatory of Music in Geneva, Switzerland. He won a unanimous first prize at the 1985 Geneva International Pipe Organ Competition, and also won the 1990 Calgary International Organ Festival Concerto Competition. Biggers presented hundreds of concerts in church and university settings throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, appeared as the featured soloist with orchestras in both the U. S. and Canada, and was featured many times on NPR “Pipedreams,” the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, and on radio and Television Suisse Romande broadcasts in Geneva, Switzerland. Jonathan E. Biggers is survived by his brother and sister in law, Fred and Caroline Biggers of Staunton, Virginia, and their children Claire and Sam to whom he was simply Uncle Jonathan.

 

George Bernard Bryant, Jr., died October 9 at the age of 77 of complications from Parkinson’s disease. Born June 17, 1939, in Nyack, New York, Bryant began playing the organ at St. Ann’s Catholic Church, Nyack, while in high school, before attending the Juilliard School in New York City, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in organ. He returned to Nyack to serve as organist for St. Ann’s Church from 1966 until retirement in 2014. He was a founding member of the Rockland County Music Teachers Guild and served on the music commission of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. In 1978, he became organist of Temple Beth Torah, continuing until 2014. In 1992, Bryant formed the Rockland County Catholic Choir, an organization that has toured Europe and Canada on several occasions. The George Bryant scholarship was created in 1997 to promote organ students and their studies. 

 

Emily Ann Cooper-Gibson died at her home in Marshall, Texas, on May 19, 2016, after an extensive illness. Born in 1935, she won the American Guild of Organists National Competition at the 1956 national convention in New York City. She studied with Robert Ellis at Henderson College, Arkadelphia, Arkansas (BM, 1957), David Craighead at the Eastman School of Music (Performer’s Certificate and MM, 1961; DMA, 1969), and André Marchal in Paris, France (Fulbright Fellow, 1958–59). Cooper-Gibson taught at Martin Luther College, New Ulm, Minnesota, and Hardin-Simmons University, Abeline, Texas, and served at churches in Abeline, Texas; Rochester, New York; Washington, D. C.; Potomac and Bethesda, Maryland; and McLean, Virginia. From 1957 through 1998 she played recitals throughout the United States and Europe. Active in the AGO, she served as dean of several chapters. Emily Ann Cooper-Gibson is survived by Gerald Gibson, her husband of over 50 years.

 

James A. Wood of Concord, New Hampshire, died October 16 at the age of 90. He was born on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, February 8, 1926. After graduating from Nantucket High School he studied at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, majoring in organ with E. Power Biggs and George Faxon, and choral conducting with Sarah Caldwell. During World War II he served as an Army medic in Europe. After the war he continued his studies at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, and Trinity College in London, England.

He served as director of music at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Nashua, New Hampshire, for 23 years, and at Saint Paul’s Church in Concord, New Hampshire, from 1970 until his retirement. In 1956 he joined the faculty of Saint Paul’s School in Concord and became head of the music department and director of chapel music in 1970. In 1955, he was a founder of the Actorsingers of Nashua, a community group of vocalists and actors producing musicals and operettas. He was a dean of the New Hampshire Chapter of the American Guild of Organists and was named honorary member in 2008. He was also a president of the New Hampshire Music Teachers Association.

James A. Wood was pre-deceased by his wife, Constance A. Wood, a daughter, Licia A. O’Conor, and a grandson, Alexander. A memorial service was held at the Old Chapel at St. Paul’s School on October 22. Donations in his memory may be made to St. Paul’s School Music Department, 325 Pleasant Street, Concord New Hampshire 03301, or St. Paul’s Church Food Pantry, 21 Centre Street, Concord, New Hampshire 03301.

John Bishop

A Pokémon world

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

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

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

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

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

 

Starry eyes

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

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

 

The man from Samos

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

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

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

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

1+1=2

1+2=3

2+3=5

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

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

 

Blow, ye winds . . . 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Pay attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A time and a place

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

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

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

 

Notes

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

Performing Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony

A conversation with conductor Andrew Grams and organist Jonathan Rudy

Joyce Johnson Robinson

Joyce Johnson Robinson is consulting editor of The Diapason.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)—

 pianist, organist, poet, dramatist, writer, music editor, and composer—is popularly known for his orchestral works Danse Macabre and Carnival of the Animals. He studied organ and composition at the Paris Conservatoire and served as organist of the church of Saint-Merry (1853–57) and subsequently at the church of La Madeleine in Paris. His music for organ comprised a small portion of his works: some collections of preludes and fugues, improvisations, rhapsodies on Breton themes, and a few single works.

Saint-Saëns’ compositional output includes five symphonies, two of which—youthful works—he withheld from publication, so the fifth symphony, in C minor, written in 1886, was designated No. 3. This symphony was dedicated to the memory of his friend Franz Liszt, who died ten weeks after the work’s London premiere, without having heard the work.

Symphony No. 3 has the nickname “Organ,” which instrument, with the piano, is part of the orchestral ensemble. The organ does not feature as a soloist, but it is strongly present in the finale. Symphony No. 3 is structured in two large sections, although it could be presented in a more typical four-movement design.

The Elgin Symphony Orchestra (ESO) of Elgin, Illinois, presented this symphony in February, the concluding work on a program that also included Liadov’s The Enchanted Lake, Respighi’s Fountains of Rome, and Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The program was conducted by music director Andrew Grams and featured organist Jonathan Rudy (of The Diapason’s 20 under 30 Class of 2016). Prior to the orchestral rehearsals and performances, we explored some of the performance issues of this symphony with conductor and organist. [NB: The Illinois Council of Orchestras named the Elgin Symphony Orchestra Illinois’ Professional Orchestra of the Year in 2016; the council had also named Andrew Grams the 2015 Conductor of the Year in the professional orchestra category.]

 

About the organ

As the performance venue, the Hemmens Cultural Center in Elgin, lacks a pipe organ, a Rodgers Infinity 361 digital instrument was supplied by Triune Music of Elmhurst, Illinois. Triune Music first partnered with the ESO around 20 years ago, when then music director Robert Hanson wished to rent a digital organ; he sought an instrument with clarity, and both Swell and Choir division 16′ and 4′ couplers, so that organists would have a specification available as would be found on any major concert hall pipe organ. According to Steven Smith of Triune Music, who installed the organ in the Hemmens auditorium, the challenge at a site like the Hemmens auditorium is to provide enough sound for the organ to be a solo instrument without making the orchestra unable to hear themselves, since speakers are positioned only a few feet above or behind the orchestra, rather than higher up, as they would be with pipe organ chambers. Triune made use of a special speaker system that throws the higher frequencies of the organ sound upwards so it would not interfere with the ability of the musicians to hear each other on stage; they also employed four large sub-woofers that were “floor-loaded,” that is, aimed into the hardwood floor of the stage, increasing the decibel level of the low frequencies to a point where the audience could feel them.  (Interesting fact: Steven Smith had also been the organist for a previous ESO performance of Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 in 2008.)

Most digital organs today permit the selection of a “genre” of voices  (French-style sounds, or German). The Infinity 361 organ has a “Voice Palette” feature that permits more than one sampled rank to be available on any of its speaking stops. For instance, one could draw the 8′ Principal, but by turning a knob, change to another related voice, such as Open Diapason, Octave, or Montre, and save the chosen voice to a piston. As such, the organist can choose a broad English Diapason, an American Classic Mixture, and a French Chorus Reed simultaneously, depending on the colors desired.

§

 

Joyce Johnson Robinson: Maestro Grams, why did you want to program the Saint-Saëns Third Symphony?

Andrew Grams: Because I like doing it! It’s a great, great symphony. I played it the first time, as a violinist, at school.

 

JJR: How many times have you presented it?

AG: At least four. Once was even down in Adelaide, Australia.

 

JJR: Were these all with pipe organs?

AG: Not all. Adelaide was, North Carolina Symphony was not. I don’t remember all of them.

 

JJR: In the score, are there certain passages that you’re already thinking you need to check?

AG: For me, it’s just let’s go through it and see what it’s like and see what the issues are, and make adjustments as needed. And adjustments can be done very quickly.

Jonathan D. Rudy: That’s right! Very quickly. And I know for me, one of the biggest questions is just hearing it together for the first time, to know if there is such a thing as too much on this organ—

AG: There is. There’s going to be. I think you’ve got a lot of juice available to you.

JDR: I’m looking forward to see where we strike that, and then adjusting registrations from there. Right now I’ve just got every possibility and then some registered, so we’ll make some quick adjustments.

 

JJR: Jonathan, how are you preparing for this since you have limited time to familiarize yourself with the organ?

JDR: Of course, regular and patient practice is the ticket for truly mastering a piece. But in an ensemble setting like this, it is extremely important to take time and understand how one fits and functions with the group as a whole. This involves careful (full) score study, listening, analysis, and thought. For example, knowing that the organ’s first entry in the piece functions as the harmonic foundation for the string’s unison melody influences my registration choices here. In such cases, I’d choose to utilize the full 8′ chorus for a lush and harmonically foundational sound. Regarding the instrument, I’ve had some practice over the last few years adapting to instruments a few days in advance of performances. What I typically do is study the stoplist, and as far as I’m able, consider registration choices in advance. I also try to prepare the works on similar organs (especially where mechanical action is involved) in my local area.

 

JJR: How long did it take you to acclimate yourself to this instrument, especially since it has features that aren’t on pipe organs?

JDR: That was the fun part about it. In practice it’s a pretty standard layout—the pedal and the manual layout is AGO standard, so that wasn’t really an issue. The touch was very friendly, I thought, for being an electronic instrument, and it had a nice resistance to the key—that wasn’t an issue. But, knowing that for every stop, there’s often one, two, or three alternate stops that you can choose—that was rather interesting. It did allow for some more flexibility in the tone I was looking for and the color—for example, Saint-Saëns is a French composer, and probably composed with Cavaillé-Coll in mind. He certainly wrote his organ music that way. So being able to choose, say, a Montre, over a Principal, over other styles, was helpful in this case. But it did take a little longer to come up with that general crescendo, which I have purposed for this. Lots of options!

 

JJR: This symphony is such a wonderful piece, with its thematic interweaving, especially in its latter half. Maestro, are you performing it as two or as four movements?

AG: I think of it as two, but I think you can make an argument to do it as one big movement, and not have such a big gap between part one and part two. I think in practice it’s probably a good idea to relax and shake it out before we launch into the Scherzo proper, but I agree with you. I can’t remember the first time I ever heard the piece; but I know that I always loved it. And as I went through the university years and started to learn more about composition, about how things are built, my appreciation for the piece grew and grew, because not only is it exciting and grand but it’s so well put together. There’s that passage just before the long transitional passage into the Finale, where he’s got this nice fugato and then he just adds all the previous touches on top of each other. Every time I get to that passage I think, “This is the best stuff in the world!”

JDR: He takes that transformation from some of his peers at the time—definitely Franz Liszt, definitely Brahms, they were both known for their motivic transformation like that. But I love how he works that style into his well-constructed traditionalist compositions. There’s so much emotion, but everything is restrained; everything is brought into the form. I think that’s really exciting—as you said, the construction builds up the piece.

AG: Pristine. It’s like one of those really intricate stained glass windows that portrays something not terribly complicated but it’s made up of these tiny little pieces of glass that have been put together in such an amazingly well-fit, well-constructed way that you know exactly what you’re looking at.

JDR: It’s really cool how the organ and orchestra play off each other. They’re very much equal partners in the music; it’s not meant to put the organ on display; the organ is meant to be—

AG: It’s a complement. First and foremost, it’s Saint-Saens’s Third Symphony. “Which one is that one?” “It’s the one with the organ.”

 

JR: Maestro Grams, how do you approach a piece for the orchestra? Is it in terms of tempos or lines?

AG: For me, I think it’s balancing all of the variables that you get—but this applies to any sort of orchestral performance. (to Jonathan) Your variable is you don’t know necessarily what instrument you’re going to play. My variable is whatever orchestra I’m working with—even if it’s my orchestra—I’m not playing it, so I’m not really in control of what’s happening, so I need to figure out, as we work on things, how do I make everything sound the best that I can? And it might not necessarily be exactly what I have in my head, but it’s really truly how do I get everybody to sound their very, very best, for whatever that group is going to be, at that time.

 

JJR: The organ appears in two movements, first as a quiet accompanist, later as a stronger support and even with some solo passages. How difficult is it to gain the proper balance? 

JDR: As an organist and an ensemble player, I will need to bring out the best of my accompanimental skills. In many ways, playing with an orchestra is akin to accompanying choral and anthem music, and requires sensitive listening and careful registration choices to balance with the colors of the orchestra. This symphony really isn’t an organ “solo,” but a true ensemble piece. The organist must carefully make choices that bring the color of the instrument to the table, but doesn’t overpower the orchestra at times.

 

JJR: Of the movements or sections in which the organ appears, is any one more challenging than another?

JDR: They have their challenges in different aspects, particularly in terms of registration. It’s hard to say one movement is more challenging, because the slow movement presents a different set of difficulties and choices (registration, balance) than the finale (slightly more technical, more registration choices, etc.). 

I know I’m going to be changing everything today. I’ve already about changed every single piston in some small minute form because I’m still experimenting and getting to know this organ, and getting to know what registrations I’m really starting to like in which sections. So I think that’s one of the challenges, especially in the soft section. You just want to find the most delicate and beautiful of sounds to begin that movement, the second half of that movement. So I’m experimenting with that.

One of the musical challenges for me, I think, is in the last movement, and that’s the metric displacements a little bit. If you listen to the piece, which I’ve done for a long time, you may hear the meter happening at a different spot than what’s written. So I’m still working a little bit to make sure I’m counting clearly through those measures—and I’m going to be watching like a hawk, by the way, for those spots where the organ comes in on the off beats. It’s written as a downbeat. That’s going to be a fun part as well—definitely challenging.

 

JJR: How about when the organ and the piano are together? Is that any potential problem, because there’s a lot going on there?

AG: I don’t think so. The important piano textures are usually all in the passages without the organ. There is so much loud activity everywhere that it’s “everybody have at it.”

JDR: Right. You’re thinking after the first solid chords and then the piano comes in. And then the organ has some quieter solid chords in the background, and I think those can come slightly out of the texture a little bit.

AG: A little bit—but not much. It’s commentary.

JDR: Exactly. You want less volume and more color at that point. And I’d like to give a shout out to Triune Music—Steve and Mark [Mackeben] and everyone else that brought this organ into place. When they installed it they actually spent some time before they brought it and worked on the registrations and came with some suggestions, which I thought were very helpful. They know this instrument very well. 

 

JJR: Gentlemen, thank you. I’m very much looking forward to the performance.

AG: Well, I hope that we knock your socks off.

JDR: This instrument sure has that capability, and I know the orchestra does.

 

Thanks to Diane Handler of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra and Steven Smith of Triune Music for their assistance.

 

Andrew Grams is music director of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra. The 2015 Conductor of the Year from the Illinois Council of Orchestras, Grams has led orchestras throughout the United States, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Detroit Symphony, and National Symphony Orchestra. In Canada he has led orchestras in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver; on other continents, he has led orchestras in France, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Born in Severn, Maryland, Grams began violin study at age eight; he received a bachelor of music in violin performance from the Juilliard School in 1999, and a conducting degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in 2003. His website is andrewgrams.com.

 

Jonathan Rudy is a candidate for the doctor of music degree in organ and sacred music from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where he earned his master of music degree, studying organ with Janette Fishell and choral conducting with William Gray and Richard Tangyuk, and where he has served as associate instructor of music theory and aural skills. His undergraduate work was at Valparaiso University, studying organ and sacred music with Lorraine Brugh and Karel Paukert. He is a member of The Diapason’s “20 under 30” Class of 2016 and is under the management of Karen McFarlane Artists.

 

Joyce Johnson Robinson is consulting editor of The Diapason.

John Bishop

When I was a kid . . .

 

KLH and WCRB

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

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

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

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

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

 

Vinyl

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

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

 

Organs I knew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Biggsy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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