A Conversation with Charles Ore

Steven Egler

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Tell us more about your family.

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

What was Alec Wyton like as a teacher?

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

Times have changed, haven’t they?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

So this was before the Murtagh years?

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

What do you like about being a concert organist? 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Are you still teaching? 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

What is it about his music that attracts you?

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Do you plan the same music for both services?

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

What books do you like to read?

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

 

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

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

 

What are your favorite organs?

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

Norberto Guinaldo

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

Childhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Early music lessons

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

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

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

 

First church position

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

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

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

 

Political climate

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

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

 

The big city

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

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

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

 

The search for organ music

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

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

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

 

Organ lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A place to practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The search for Bach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Organ lessons

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

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

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

 

To be continued.

Douglas Reed

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

You’ve mentioned motion or movement training in school.

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

Did you study the organ during that time?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

Then you went from Central to New York City?

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

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

 

Ernest White had a series of studio organs, right? 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

  

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

Did Leonhardt perform at that time?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

How has the revival of mechanical action influenced your thinking?

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

What did you learn?

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

 

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

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

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

 

Can you speak more about singing?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

  

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

Dare we talk about the metronome?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

You have mentioned Louise Cuyler a number of times.

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

 

And what about Eugene Bossart?

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

 

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

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

 

Had you made any recordings earlier in your career?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Were the Stasi after you in East Germany?

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

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

 

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

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

 

Did you play any of the Silbermann organs?

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

 

What about Hildebrandt organs?  You mentioned Naumburg. 

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

 

Did you go to Dresden on that trip?

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

 

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

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

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

 

What about Barbara?

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

 

And your wife, Evelyn?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

That was in Hill Auditorium?

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

 

You’ve often mentioned Catharine Crozier. 

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

 

Are there other fine performers you admire?

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Recordings by Robert Clark

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

Bach at Naumburg. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 041.

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

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

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

Bach Clavierübung III. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 042. 

 

 

Douglas Reed

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

You’ve mentioned motion or movement training in school.

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

Did you study the organ during that time?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

Then you went from Central to New York City?

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

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

 

Ernest White had a series of studio organs, right? 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

  

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

Did Leonhardt perform at that time?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

How has the revival of mechanical action influenced your thinking?

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

What did you learn?

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

 

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

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

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

 

Can you speak more about singing?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

  

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Dare we talk about the metronome?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

You have mentioned Louise Cuyler a number of times.

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

 

And what about Eugene Bossart?

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

 

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

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

 

Had you made any recordings earlier in your career?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Were the Stasi after you in East Germany?

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

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

 

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

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

 

Did you play any of the Silbermann organs?

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

 

What about Hildebrandt organs?  You mentioned Naumburg. 

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

 

Did you go to Dresden on that trip?

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

 

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

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

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

 

What about Barbara?

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

 

And your wife, Evelyn?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

That was in Hill Auditorium?

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

 

You’ve often mentioned Catharine Crozier. 

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

 

Are there other fine performers you admire?

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Recordings by Robert Clark

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

Bach at Naumburg. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 041.

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

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

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

Bach Clavierübung III. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 042. 

 

 

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.

Gavin Black

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

Motivation, Practicing, Fun, Guidance, & Projection II

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

 

Remembering Peter Williams

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

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

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

Now to get on with some questions . . .

 

Fingering

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

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

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

 

Authenticity

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

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

 

Relaxation

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

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

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

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

 

Other practice techniques

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

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

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

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