A Conversation with Composer Craig Phillips

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of THE DIAPASON.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JR: Thank you!

Notes 1. Frank Rippl, “OHS 52nd National Convention, July 11–17, 2007, Central Indiana,” The Diapason, February 2008, vol. 99, no. 2, pp. 24–29.

Since the beginning of this century, the recital calendar of The Diapason has included numerous listings for Ken Cowan. A native of Thorold, Ontario, Canada, Cowan was first taught organ by his father, David Cowan; he subsequently studied with James Bigham, with John Weaver at the Curtis Institute of Music, and with Thomas Murray at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He has held organist positions at St. Bartholomew’s, St. James Episcopal Church, and the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in New York City, and St. Clement’s Church in Philadelphia; during his college years he was on the roster of associate organists for the Wanamaker Grand Court organ in Philadelphia. He presently serves as Assistant Professor of Organ at Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton, New Jersey; Rider University has honored him with the 2008 Distinguished Teaching Award.
A featured artist at the 2004 AGO convention in Los Angeles and during the 2008 AGO convention in Minneapolis (as one of several players during a concert recorded for Pipedreams), Ken Cowan has also performed at many AGO regional conventions, as well as at conventions of the Organ Historical Society and the Royal Canadian College of Organists. His discography comprises numerous recordings (for the JAV label) on Skinner instruments, including The Art of the Symphonic Organist, recorded on the 1921 Skinner organ at the Parish Church of St. Luke, Evanston, Illinois. (Note: John Speller’s review of this recording in The Diapason praised Cowan’s choice of repertoire, demonstration of the organ’s colors, and skill with buildup and decrescendo, calling the disc “one of the finest I have heard in some time.” See The Diapason, August 2004, p. 14.) With Justin Bischof, he recorded Aaron David Miller’s Double Concerto for organ with the Zurich Symphony Orchestra, on the Kleuker organ in the Tonhalle in Zurich (Ethereal Recordings). Cowan’s repertoire is broad, but favors nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers, from Bossi to Liszt, Wagner to Widor, Dupré to Roger-Ducasse, and much in between. He is associated with transcriptions, yet these do not dominate either his recital programs or his recordings. As a performer he seems relaxed, taking any difficulties in stride. Ken Cowan is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists.

JR: Let’s talk about your DNA! Your father is an organist, and other grandparents were too, correct?
KC: Yes, two grandmothers and great-grandmother Cowan. Thurza Cowan was an organist, and I think she must have been pretty good too, because the repertoire that is still sitting around my house in Canada shows she played some really difficult things.

JR: Were those the days when you had to have a pumper?
KC: A little bit after that, I think it was. She played a Woodstock organ. I saw a picture of the old console, and it looks like a theatre organ console. But it would have been electrified, I think.

JR: And your grandmothers?
KC: My father’s mother and my mother’s mother both played, each as a local parish organist.

JR: Did your grandmother teach your father?
KC: No, actually; that’s not our family’s habit. My father studied with a local organist named George Hannahson, actually a very good player; the brothers Hannahson did a lot of the church music in the area. Except for the things that my dad showed me to get me started at the organ, I think everybody in my family who learned an instrument always studied with somebody outside the family.

JR: Were your first lessons with your father?
KC: He got me started with the instrument. He didn’t teach me piano, so we always had it in mind that I would eventually find an organ teacher outside of our house.

JR: Did you insist on organ lessons, or did he suggest you should take them?
KC: No, it was me. He insisted that I study the maximum amount of piano possible before I ever touched the organ. Ever since I was three years old, I would hang around the organ bench, and I knew what all the stops were. I knew the difference between a Lieblich flute and a Rohr flute when I was little—before I could play anything. And I was the token key-holder in the family—if the reeds needed to be tuned, I would be carted down to the church. The arrangement was that if I was well-behaved in church, he would play whatever my favorite organ tunes were before we would go home. I still remember that.

JR: So what were your favorite organ pieces when you were a wee lad?
KC: They were a little different from what they are now! (laughter) Probably mostly little songs that I knew how to sing at the time. Or wedding pieces and old campy hymns, I used to like those too—and I knew all the words. Somewhere I have a tape of myself singing along, I think—locked away! Anyway, I was fortunate that there was a really nice Casavant organ from the ’20s in the church where my father played, a three-manual organ, so it was great just to get to know registration on a nice instrument first. And we always had a lousy piano—which is still there, actually! So to have this really nice organ—I couldn’t resist but to learn how to play it—or try.

JR: How old were you when you started playing the organ?
KC: I knew how to play a hymn on the organ, but I really started to learn pieces around eighth grade, so twelve or thirteen. I knew how to play the piano pretty well by then. In fact, I got a lot more interested in piano after I realized how much I really liked playing the organ. I learned about some organ pieces that had been arranged for piano—I remember one was the Liszt B-A-C-H—I guess if you don’t realize that it’s a hard piece
. . . . So I improved a lot as a pianist after I decided I wanted to try to become as good an organist as I possibly could, and realized at that time, too, that piano was the key, at least for a lot of it. A couple years after that, studying some Bach and other things, I heard music of Dupré for the first time. So I went along for a while just learning all the pieces that made me think “oh, that’s a really neat piece!” It wasn’t the most logical progression, but it worked out all right.

JR: What was your first recital like?
KC: First recitals on the organ—I was 13 or 14. At that time it was mostly playing the Widor Toccata, the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor—I used to work on lots of Bach pieces when I was in high school, so I always programmed that. I could practice the same pieces quite a lot, unlike now where there are piles and piles of things to get through in a short amount of time. But at least when I began performing I was confident that “I’ve been playing this Bach piece for a few months, it’ll probably be all right.”

JR: What was your first church position?
KC: I was sort of the perpetual assistant organist! I worked that way alongside my dad for the last year or so of high school, so I guess outside of any kind of familial supervision was when I went to college. I was assistant at St. Clement’s Church—and that was being thrown into the deep end of the pool, because Peter Conte was the organist at that time and of course ran a pretty tight ship, and still does there. I stayed at St. Clement’s the whole time I was in college in Philadelphia, and worked for a couple years at St. Mary the Virgin, and then at St. James Madison Avenue, and then at St. Bartholomew’s.

JR: You had said that when you were first studying, you weren’t sure about a career. At what point did you know that this was going to be your life’s work?
KC: I think that when I went away to college I knew pretty well that music was going to be what I would do primarily. And I never had any doubt that certainly I’d always be involved in music in my life. But I guess I was brought up in a casual enough way that no one ever said “You must be a musician.” And there are plenty of other interesting things out there to do! So it was by the time I went away to Curtis for college. I was fortunate that they were willing to take me in, and it was a great experience. I’ve been fortunate, in every place and with everyone with whom I’ve studied—I really made some lucky choices.

JR: At this point, could you identify who your big influences are?
KC: I think now it’s sort of a conglomeration. But there’s no one that I’ve ever studied with who hasn’t been an influence, and recordings are very valuable too. I remember when I was in high school—even though it wasn’t a complete immersion in music like college, I remember clearly what I learned from James Bigham, who was my teacher at that time—a major influence and a masterful player and teacher. At Curtis, of course, I was studying with John Weaver, and he had a different approach to teaching and was demanding about what was to be expected week to week.
My experience at Curtis was great. I still remember bringing in—I think it was my second year there—the Liszt Ad nos, and I was trying to be conservative, in the sense of not using countless general pistons. At that time the organ at Curtis Hall had just twelve general pistons, so I learned it using only one level, and I thought, “well, that’s a bit of restraint here”—a mere twelve generals, with lots of divisionals. I finished playing through it, and we talked about the music, and John Weaver said, “Now, I just should tell you, that when you’re approaching the registration of a piece like this, you can’t always count on having a dozen general pistons. I just bet that through use of more divisional pistons, I could work out all the registrations for this piece with no compromise whatsoever, on six general pistons.” And the amazing thing is—that he could! He was really impressive in that way, because, having decades of touring experience, he’s mindful that there weren’t always multiple memory levels. So he was very encouraging about people not being a slave to a computer combination action. For example, if you hit a piston for a chorale prelude registration that had a flute here and a cornet there, you’d be asked—“Can’t you remember these stops? Why do you have to hit a piston?”
Then of course, Thomas Murray is sort of a wonder in his own way. I enjoy just watching him at an organ—how he approaches the instrument, how to choose registrations—musically and registrationally always doing the most with the least, and loving every minute of it. I think a lot of people associate him with “oh, and he hits 500 Swell pistons.” Actually he doesn’t; he uses the fewest number to get the greatest effect. I didn’t realize that until really watching.
Martin Jean began teaching at Yale the same year I began studying there, and he was a really interesting person to study with as well. I had lessons with him for a semester at Yale while Tom Murray was on sabbatical; in addition to a coaching here or there at other times, students in the Yale department were free to coach with faculty outside of their own studio. Martin was full of curiosity about compositions and their possible interpretations, so I would always leave lessons with him pondering many possibilities. And I remember along the way I had a few lessons with McNeil Robinson, and he, in terms of how to learn a piece of music in a really thorough way, is just masterful. But you don’t have to study with someone for five years to get something immensely valuable, that you’ll never forget.

JR: Were you fairly confident with your registration ability before you studied with John Weaver and Tom Murray?
KC: I guess I was. Since I was a little kid I was fascinated with how stops were built, what the different ones did, the difference between the various colors, and so on. And there were enough nice instruments around that I pretty much understood how that worked—also, my dad was good at registration himself; that helped. If you’re around someone just an hour a week, that’s different than being around somebody all the time—as an aside, you can at any point say, “hey, how come you would do this, as opposed to something else?” And then Jim Bigham, with whom I studied in high school, just has an amazing imagination for registration and a huge instrument at Holy Trinity Lutheran; that was another great stroke of good fortune for me.

JR: When you studied with John Weaver and Tom Murray, did you work more on interpretation, or did they spend a lot of time with registration?
KC: A little of everything. Tom Murray in particular is very attentive to registration; even if he doesn’t change something radically, he is very sensitive to the finest details. Even if you can row your own boat to start with, I’d say to study with Weaver is to learn his system of managing a big instrument. He’s quite amazing in that he can register an entire recital in a couple of hours, and it will sound as though he’s played the organ for a long time, just because he’s so clear about exactly what he’s going to do at every point in a piece. Tom Murray is known as this “orchestralist,” who gives each color in an instrument its best opportunity to shine, so just to watch him do what he does is really an education!

JR: At Curtis, you were required to play pieces from memory. How many pieces have you memorized?
KC: Oh, probably hundreds. I think from year to year there are pieces—especially pieces that I learned when I was in high school—that I find I can usually play without really thinking about it much at all. From year to year I’ll carry around a few recital programs’ worth of repertoire, at any given time, and I try to keep on expanding that. During school semester, for example, there’s just not time to practice the number of hours a day that I’d love to, so I’ll always practice technical things on the piano, even if I don’t touch an organ. I find that to maintain a few hours of music is manageable, but it takes a lot more time to be constantly learning dozens of pieces.

JR: Do you have some favorite pieces? Desert island pieces?
KC: I’ve always loved Bach, and I think as is the case with so many people I ended up playing the organ because of the music of Bach. As things have gone, I’ve gotten into a lot of repertoire that is far from Bach—I’ve always loved symphonic organs, orchestral transcriptions and that sort of thing. But I think I could do just fine with some of the great works by Bach.
Now as far as what’s fun to play in a concert, on, say, a particular type of organ—for Skinner organs, they’re great at something English Romantic; the Willan Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue is a fun piece to play because it relies quite a lot on the interpreter, as does Liszt, Reubke, Reger—if you hear three people play the same piece by Liszt, or Reger, or Reubke, it will sound completely different, as I think it should.
Many people who play those pieces think that it couldn’t possibly be done any other way than their own, because they require a very strong interpretive perspective, but in reality there are of course many possible interpretations. I love playing transcriptions, because on an American symphonic organ, you really push the instrument to the edge of what it’s able to do, and that’s always kind of fun. And historically it’s been controversial because for much of the twentieth century the attitude of most organists was “why would you do such a thing? Go learn some more legitimate organ pieces!”

JR: It’s nice stuff!
KC: Yes, there are so many great pieces that weren’t originally composed for the organ. I think once you do learn most of the standard organ repertoire, it’s fun to look beyond it a little bit and see how an instrument can work at interpreting something else. I have to confess, too, that I started listening to records of transcriptions when I was in high school. I have old recordings by George Thalben-Ball, for example, and I still remember getting two recordings of transcriptions by Tom Murray and Thomas Trotter, I think both made in the ’80s, and so I thought, “Wow! That instrument sounds great—and very expressive. Wouldn’t it be fun to learn how to do that?”
Anybody who gets into this kind of orchestral stuff might be pigeon-holed with “Oh, all he plays is Wagner,” or, “All he plays are transcriptions,” which of course I don’t think is true of anybody who does. One of the keys to having success with transcriptions, though, is to know when it’s a good idea not to play something, because one of the pitfalls about the organ is you cannot bring exactly the same program to every instrument, or else you’ll win some and lose some. I find as with some of the big Romantic works, a transcription can sound great on an ideal instrument and it can sound like a dismal failure on the wrong instrument. I hope to usually be a good judge of when’s the time, and when’s not the time, to play a particular part of the repertoire.

JR: How about the future of this instrument with young people?
KC: I’m always glad when I know someone is bringing kids to a recital. And in a way, it’s a good reason to think about programming very carefully. Every once in a while I’ll play a program that might get a little too—mature for the newcomer.
If I were only playing for myself, I could go on for days listening to very intense-sounding organ music. But I’m not just playing for me; though I guess some people would say you should always be playing as though no one else is there—but someone else IS there. (laughter) So I am usually quite cognizant of the fact that there may be some young person there who’s never heard an organ recital before.

JR: Do you ever program a specific piece with children in mind?
KC: If I know they’re going to be there, yes. Things that are very effective with kids are pieces that are programmatic and tell a story, or pieces that really are “visual” in how the instrument is used. Kids immediately get a kick out of the fact that there are all these different colors and that wow, the organist plays with his feet, and beyond that things like Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre are great for kids, because they understand—they can tell what’s going on in the story as it’s going along. Of course, that’s a transcription, but there’s George Akerley’s A Sweet for Mother Goose nursery rhyme suite—that would be just the thing. I’ve heard some people do things like Carnival of the Animals and so on—that’s another work that’s not originally an organ piece, but can certainly get children’s interest in the instrument. And they all love the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor!

JR: How do you plan a program? Fast–slow, or loud–soft, or keys?
KC: Having interesting key relationships can be nice, particularly if you segue from one piece to the next. More importantly, just not flogging people with the same kind of piece over and over again is a good rule of thumb. For example, I wouldn’t play half a program of, say, a prelude and fugue by Bach, followed by a preludium by Buxtehude followed by Prelude and Fugue on the Name of BACH, and so on—but contrasting forms, contrasting styles. I’ve never been much into the philosophy that “we should always go in chronological order.” It’s more a question of how can you give a good psychological flow to it? I guess that’s the right way to describe it. And it’s different on recordings, too. I think how you listen to a recording is a little different. In a concert, you can go from fast and furious to very intimate, to scherzo, back to this, back to that. On a record, if you do exactly the same thing, you end up with people constantly adjusting the volume control.
Programming is a constant challenge. And then the trap is, when you find a combination of things that you think works really well, to then be able to get out of it. I remember reading an article years ago about Glenn Gould’s thoughts on why he stopped playing concerts; he said he was feeling that sometimes he settled in on the same small number of pieces, the philosophy being, “well, the Beethoven worked in Toronto, it’ll probably work in New York, too, so I’ll play it again!” And again, and again—and so on it goes. Trying something new, even if it means going out on a limb, is a good idea, I think.

JR: You’ve long been an Organ Historical Society convention favorite. How did that get started?
KC: Good fortune, I guess! When I was working at St. Clement’s in Philadelphia, I think it was 1996 the OHS had their convention in Philadelphia; at that time we were doing an Evensong at St. Clement’s as part of the convention, and they wanted Peter to play something, and he was already going to play a recital at the Wanamaker Store, so he said, “I’ll play the prelude, and why don’t you have my assistant play a short program after the Evensong?” I think there was some trepidation at first; “who is this guy?” I guess they liked it. And one thing led to another there; I’ve been back several times since.

JR: Yes, including in 2007 with your wife! Tell me about her, and how you cooked up this scheme.
KC: We met in graduate school; she went to Yale too. While we were students there, I had always liked an old recording I had of Jascha Heifetz and Richard Elsasser playing the Vitali Chaconne, as arranged by Leopold Auer. So on one of JAV’s Skinner series recordings, Joe Vitacco asked me to go out to Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian in Detroit, and I checked out the organ and it’s a great instrument—huge sound, and very mellow sound. I thought this would be a good accompanying organ, and that it would be neat to try and do a violin piece. So I asked Lisa to come along then, and that was the beginning of playing together. In the last seven or eight years, we’ve been asked to play duo programs together, so we’ve always been on the lookout for good repertoire that has been written for violin and organ, and things that transcribe well. We’ll often do an early piece, maybe something that’s contemporary written for those instruments; from the Romantic period, Rheinberger wrote some violin and organ works. I’ll often transcribe a concerto accompaniment for the end, and do a violin concerto as a violin and organ piece. And then we’ll usually do a solo piece each, too.

JR: The review of the OHS convention in the February 2008 issue of The Diapason mentions Lisa playing behind a screen.1
KC: We did the Karg-Elert Fugue, Canzona and Epilogue, for organ and violin, and a quartet of women’s voices is included at the end. I think Karg-Elert may have started this tradition himself, but there’s been a long practice of putting the violinist and the singers either offstage or in the Swell box. And at this particular church it worked, because you could open the door behind the Swell box and there was a hallway in behind. So everyone crammed in behind the chamber and you could have this diminuendo to nothing at the end. It was very unexpected color coming out of the organ chambers suddenly! It was a lot of fun, and everyone was a very good sport about the whole thing. The instrument was a Kimball organ, and certainly played repertoire well, but maybe accompanied even better. So it was nice to show that side of things.

JR: At the AGO convention in Minneapolis you played some new works. Do you play new pieces from memory?
KC: Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. One of the things I’ve been working on this week is memorizing them. I find if I have a deadline, it doesn’t take long to get things like that learned. I probably spent a week or so learning each of the preludes and fugues. But then the question is—what do you want to do with it? There’s no question that I play a piece better after a year than after a week. So the rest of the time is spent just trying to refine things and get a clear interpretation, especially with brand-new pieces. The composer Henry Martin is a pianist and is probably known for composing 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano, and he teaches jazz and music theory at Rutgers, Newark. The reason for the commission was that Michael Barone really liked his piano pieces, and so commissioned him to write a couple for organ. Not knowing what his musical taste is—of course, when you learn a piece like that, I found I was initially sort of cautious in an interpretive sense—if it’s not written in the score, well, is it OK to do something? Well, he has a great imagination, and is a good sport about everything. That was actually nice to discover. Interpretive freedom is good! So I really liked them—they’re difficult, but I think will make nice pieces.

JR: Teaching versus performing—do you enjoy the balance that you have right now?
KC: Absolutely! I think it would probably be hard for me to only teach, because you end up living musically only through your students, instead of being able to do something yourself—so you need an outlet. On the other hand, it’s great to work with other people—it’s so satisfying and exciting when students work very hard and get a lot better, and you can help them along their way. This year, it was only the second time in recent memory that I didn’t play Easter Sunday some place. So before cooking dinner for family, I went to Trinity Church where two of my students play, and I had a better time listening to them accompany the Easter service than I would have if I’d done it myself! I’ve always been interested in teaching, so I have no regrets there at all.

JR: Tell us about your position at Westminster. Do you teach service playing, or does your teaching concentrate just on recital literature?
KC: Mostly my colleagues Alan Morrison, Matthew Lewis, and I end up concentrating on creating some kind of structured program of study for each student. I do at times make students learn hymns and accompaniments as part of their lessons. I find that you can teach somebody about as much about creative possibilities at the organ through hymns and accompaniments, at least from a registration point of view, as from anything else, because so often with a lot of the primary parts of the repertoire—Bach, Franck, Vierne, and so forth—you frequently follow convention or instructions for registration; in service playing you have a blank slate, and can really get acquainted with the organ in a more individualistic way.
The school’s strong emphasis on choral training provides a great background for developing graduates who can become very effective church musicians. There are classes in improvisation, courses in organ literature, there’s a class on accompanying at the organ, which is primarily a service playing course. Then the sacred music department offers courses on the history of church music, theology, choral pedagogy and management of programs, worship planning, and congregational song. A broad range of guest lecturers in the organ and sacred music departments address other specific topics. It could be a masterclass on organ playing or literature on some occasions, or frequently guest perspectives on the general field of church music in America.

JR: Do you see any consistent patterns of problems among your students?
KC: Nothing that applies to everybody. In fact, that’s one of the fun challenges of teaching—it’s all problem solving, but everybody’s a different case. For example, some students don’t learn pedal technique in a structured way, and I’m surprised that students coming in at the graduate level sometimes don’t understand very much about registration—that can be a big project. But that’s certainly not unique to everybody; some of them are great at that. Nuanced registration is a hard thing to teach in a short time. And if you encounter people who are trained to do only one thing in a particular situation, it can be a real challenge to make them more curious and sensitive to the precise character of each stop or chorus on different instruments, and how they combine with others. Then comes the issue of how to control the instrument in the context of a complex piece if they’ve never been trained to manage a console with a combination action.

JR: Do you have responsibilities at Westminster besides teaching?
KC: I also am the coordinator of the organ and sacred music program. That involves plenty of meetings, planning, and discussions with other faculty about how to proceed with programs and curriculum. In the past year we have revised the entire curriculum in organ and in sacred music. This year began the implementation of those revisions, which is a big undertaking, but a necessary step to try to keep the program from getting behind the times. Of course, I’m not doing that on my own, but I certainly have to stay involved with how things develop. And then another task for sacred music at Westminster will be to find a faculty member to succeed Robin Leaver, who just retired. Hopefully we’ll soon be looking for the next teacher of sacred music there, but in the current economic climate, universities can be tentative about filling vacancies. Always something, you know! It’s the sort of place where I can stay there until ten o’clock every night and have plenty more to greet me the next morning.

JR: Are you ever able to go hear other organists or other concerts?
KC: Here and there. There’s not as much time as I’d like there to be, because I’m often away weekends, when a lot of great concerts happen. Going to conventions and so forth, I can hear a lot of things in a short amount of time, just to keep track of who’s doing what. And then the nice thing living between New York and Philadelphia is oftentimes there will be good concerts on week nights. Plus, Princeton has some really good music series right in town. So whenever possible, I attend performances.

JR: Do you have any big projects planned?
KC: For Westminster, keeping the department growing stronger is a priority. As far as playing goes, it’s asking myself, what do I want to play now that I haven’t played before? And I’ve got lined up some recordings that I’ve been promising to make and that I haven’t gotten around to yet, so I’ll just keep chipping away at them. A new CD on the big Schoenstein organ at First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, was just released this February on the Raven label. That disc has German Romantic repertoire (Reger, Reubke, Karg-Elert) and a transcription of the Liszt Mephisto Waltz #1. But otherwise it’s a question of just balancing responsibilities out—and finding some time for fun, too.

JR: Thank you so much, Ken!

Michael Barone is host and producer of American Public Media’s Pipedreams program, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2007. Pipedreams can be heard on radio stations across the country, also on XM Satellite Radio Channel 133 and in Hong Kong on Radio Four. Barone is a native of northeastern Pennsylvania, a music history graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory, and a nearly 39-year employee of Minnesota Public Radio.

John Weaver, one of the America’s finest concert organists, celebrates his 70th birthday on April 27, 2007. The following interview is offered in honor of this milestone.
Dr. Weaver was director of music at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City from 1970–2005, and served as head of the organ department at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia 1971–2003, and also chair of the organ department at the Juilliard School 1987–2004.
His formal musical studies began at the age of six, and at age 15 he began organ study with Richard Ross and George Markey. His undergraduate study was at the Curtis Institute as a student of Alexander McCurdy, and he earned a Master of Sacred Music degree at Union Theological Seminary. In 1989 John Weaver was honored by the Peabody Conservatory with its Distinguished Alumni Award. He has received honorary Doctor of Music degrees from Westminster College, New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, and the Curtis Institute of Music. In 2005 he was named “International Performer of the Year” by the New York City chapter of the American Guild of Organists.
In addition to his work at the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, he has taught at Westminster Choir College, Union Theological Seminary, and the Manhattan School of Music. He has written numerous articles for organ and church music magazines and has served as president of the Presbyterian Association of Musicians.
Dr. Weaver has been active as a concert organist since coming under management in 1959. He has played throughout the USA, Canada, Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. He has performed on national television and radio network programs in the U.S. and Germany, and has made recordings for Aeolian-Skinner, the Wicks Organ Company, Klais Orgelbau of Germany, a CD on Gothic Records for the Schantz Organ Company, and a recording on the Pro Organo label on the new Reuter organ at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle. His most recent recording, “The Organ and Choral Music of John Weaver,” is available on the JAV label and features his own organ and choral compositions. His published compositions for organ, chorus/organ and flute/organ are widely performed.
He currently lives in Vermont and continues to concertize and lead workshops and masterclasses around the world. The Weavers love to climb the New England mountains, and have a tradition of an annual ascent of Mt. Washington. Marianne is an avid gardener, and John’s hobby is a deep fascination with trains, both model and prototype.
This interview took place July 11, 2005, at the Weaver home in the rolling countryside near West Glover, Vermont.

MICHAEL BARONE: How did John Weaver stumble into the world of the organ?
JOHN WEAVER: We moved away from the little town where I spent the first four and a half years of my life. I have very few recollections of that place, except one of them that’s very strong—the organ at the church where my father was the pastor had a wonderful sound on low E. Something about the 16' stop on that organ resonated in the room in a glorious way, and I fell in love with that. As soon as I learned how to play a few notes on the piano, my favorite thing was to hold down the sustaining pedal and play an arpeggio—slowly at first—and just listen to it ring like an organ. Something in me has always been attracted to that sound.
MB: With whom did you study and how would you characterize those years?
JW: My first organ lessons were with a wonderful organist in Baltimore, Richard Ross. He died at age 39 shortly after having given me a lesson on a Saturday afternoon—just failed to show up the next day at church. Ross was becoming one of the best-known and finest organists in the country. When I first went to him, at the age of 15, instead of auditioning me at the organ, he told me to go up onto the stage of the Peabody concert hall and play for him on the piano. Well, there was a big Steinway up there, but the thing that really interested me was the 4-manual E. M. Skinner. I could hear air escaping from it, and I coveted playing that instrument so badly that I can feel it still today.
Nevertheless, Ross told me that he wanted to hear me play something on the piano. So, I stumbled through my Mozart sonata that was not really very good at that point, and afterward he said to me, “I don’t want you to study organ yet. You need to study at least another year of piano and really work at it very hard.” And then he also said something that I’ve always remembered: “If in the meantime you study organ with anybody else, I will never teach you.”
Well, I took his advice, and I went back to my piano teacher and really did work for a year—then came back the next year and played for Ross again. This time I played the Beethoven “Pathétique,” and I played it pretty well. Ross said, “OK, now you can start studying organ, but you must continue to study piano as well.”
Fortunately I had a very good piano teacher, and I studied with Ross for about a year and a half, until his death. The Peabody Conservatory brought in George Markey as an interim to fill out the rest of that academic year. While I was studying with Markey, at this point as a senior in high school, he said “Where are you going to go to school next year?” I just assumed I would go to Peabody because we lived in Baltimore, and Markey said, “Well, have you considered auditioning for the Curtis Institute of Music?” And I remember asking him, “Where is that?” I was soon to find out a lot about Curtis and also about the great teacher there, Alexander McCurdy. I did audition and was accepted, and had four glorious years in Philadelphia.

MB: McCurdy is something of a legend, and the stories about him are numerous. I expect you have more than a few.
JW: I’ve described him on numerous occasions as an Old Testament figure. He was someone you both loved and feared at the same time—certainly, not one to suffer fools. If you went into a lesson unprepared, you were sure to get a dressing down that would do a drill sergeant credit. But when words of praise came, they were so precious and so rewarding that they could light you up for a whole week. He was a very liberal teacher in that he did not insist on playing any piece of music in any certain way. Within that department at that time we had about six students—there was one student who was very much a disciple of E. Power Biggs, and there were others of us who were much more in the Virgil Fox camp. That was sort of the nature of the department, but McCurdy was as enthusiastic about the fellow who was a Neo-Baroquist as he was about the rest of us. That person, by the way, is Temple Painter, who is one of the leading harpsichordists in the city of Philadelphia and still plays organ as well.

MB: What were McCurdy’s techniques to get the best out of students? What did he create in you that might not have been there before? And then how did you take what you learned from McCurdy and shape that with your own personality?
JW: McCurdy had several ways of getting the best from us. I’ll never forget my first lesson: he assigned a chorale prelude from the Orgelbüchlein, which I had not played, and he said, “Mr. Weaver, I’d like you to play this next week from memory in organ class.” Well, right away it was jump-starting; and seven, eight hours a day of practicing became the norm. At my second lesson, he assigned the Vierne Cantabile, from the second symphony, and said, “I’d like you to play that next week in organ class in front of your peers.” Well, that was really a struggle. And he did that for about three weeks at the beginning of the four years. After that, he never assigned a piece again. But he got me into the habit of learning—I knew he expected that kind of production from week to week.
That’s a Curtis tradition that was started by Lynnwood Farnam, continued by Fernando Germani and by McCurdy, and I believe is still the case—each student comes every week with a new piece memorized to play in class. This could be a little one-page chorale prelude for manuals alone, or it could be a major prelude and fugue, a big romantic work, or a modern work—you could repeat something from previous classes, but you always had to have a new piece also. It got us into the habit of assuming when you started to learn a piece that you were eventually going to play it from memory. There are some pieces that I have never been able to play from memory. I’ve memorized a fair amount of Messiaen, but with more atonal pieces, I find that I am just not comfortable playing without the score.

MB: The challenge for the organist, of course, is that each instrument is different from the next and requires its own learning process. The traveling recitalist comes to a church, gets used to the instrument, gets used to the instrument’s response in the room, and then tries to make music with the repertoire that you’ve brought to town. Perhaps it’s no wonder that fewer organists want to memorize these days, but there’s still something about a performer totally connected to and deeply involved in the music that is missing when a score is being read.
JW: There is always the problem of the page-turner—or, if one turns one’s own pages, that has its risks as well. Page-turners can sometimes pull music down off the rack inadvertently, or pull a page right out of the book, or turn two pages—there are lots of risks. Page-turners also have a tendency sometimes to hum or to tap their foot. I’ve even known some who think it’s safe to step on the pedalboard to reach a page that’s far out of the way—that really does produce a catastrophe.
I guess it doesn’t make a lot of difference if the console is completely hidden. I wouldn’t know if someone was playing from memory or not, but pianists, violinists, singers are expected to walk on stage and play from memory. It’s harder for organists, yes. I like to have 12 to 15 hours at an instrument before I’m ready to play a recital on it. If I had 20 hours it would be better still. If I had 25, I would find a few more things to make that instrument come across in the very best possible way and the music to be the best that I could do. That kind of time is rarely available, but 12 to 15 hours is a norm.

MB: I always get the sense watching you that you really enjoy playing. Now is this actually true or are you just a very good actor?
JW: If it looks like I’m having fun, I’m glad for that because in a way, I am. I also am constantly aware of the pitfalls—how many things might happen that you don’t want to happen and sometimes do. But I do enjoy playing. I love playing recitals, though it scares me, and five minutes before the recital I ask myself “Why did I ever agree to do this?” But once I start playing, why, that departs and I really do settle down and enjoy what I love about the music that I play—hoping that people will catch something of what I’m feeling about that music and my devotion to it.

MB: How did you, a former student at the Curtis Institute, come to be the head of the organ department at Curtis?
JW: One fine day Alexander McCurdy called me up and said, “Mr. Weaver, I’m going to retire from the Curtis Institute, and Rudolph Serkin would like to meet with you and see if you might be an appropriate successor.” (Rudolph Serkin at that point being the director of the Curtis Institute.) Needless to say, I went down to Philadelphia and met with Serkin, and he suggested that I play a recital in Curtis Hall—it was never called an audition recital, but I think they wanted me to clear that hurdle before giving me a green light. Curtis Hall is one of the hardest places to play. It is totally dry acoustically, with a 118-rank Aeolian-Skinner in a room that seats about 200 people—probably more pipes per person than any place else in the world. But it’s an instrument that can, if one works with it, do remarkable things. So I did play the recital and did get the job, and was there very happily for many years. I started in 1971 and retired in 2003—32 years.

MB: How would you characterize yourself as a teacher?
JW: I’ve tried to follow the McCurdy mold. When I was at Curtis we continued the tradition of the organ class—memorization and new pieces each week. I also tried to not impose my own interpretation of any given piece upon the students that I was fortunate enough to teach, both at Curtis and at Juilliard. I do believe that everyone should somehow sound like themselves, that there is some part of themselves and their own musical personality that will affect the way that they perform any piece.
I’ve had students who were extremely flamboyant and almost overdone. I’ve tried to curb that a little bit sometimes, but I certainly don’t want to squelch the enthusiasm and the very strong personal interpretations that a student like that can bring. Sometimes I find a student’s playing to be too conservative, just dull note pushing, and then we talk a lot about the music and about its nature—its liveliness or passiveness or serenity or agitation—trying to have the student project something in the music other than just the notes on the page.

MB: Who were some of your outstanding recent students?
JW: Well, without naming any priority, certainly Paul Jacobs, who succeeded me at Juilliard; Alan Morrison, who succeeded me at the Curtis Institute; Diane Meredith Belcher, who’s on the faculty at Westminster Choir College; Ken Cowan, who is on the faculty of Westminster Choir College and is now the head of the organ department there—and a whole host of others. Those are four that are under management, nationally known, and do a great deal of playing—I’m very proud of them indeed.

MB: How did you come to be at Madison Avenue Presbyterian? What are the different demands, delights, and challenges of being a church musician as opposed to being a fancy-free artist in the world of recitals?
JW: For eleven years, I was at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in New York. While there, my wife and I started the Bach cantata series that continues to this day, and we really made that church known for performances of the music of Bach. In 1970, I knew that the position at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church was vacant. It never occurred to me to apply for it. But one day, a gentleman came into the church office unannounced, no appointment, and asked to see me. When we met he said, “We,” meaning the search committee at Madison Avenue, “were hoping that you would apply.”
Well, having the door opened by him at that point, I decided to follow through with it, and I did so with a great deal of doubt because I had grown up in a Presbyterian church, where the din of the congregational chatter before the service completely drowned out anything that could possibly be done on the organ. And I had the impression that Presbyterians generally did not place a very high value on the quality of the worship, the sermon being the centerpiece of the whole Sunday morning experience. But I met with the committee at Madison Avenue and particularly with their pastor David H.C. Reed, in whom I found a Presbyterian with wonderfully high regard for worship and high expectations for the quality of worship. My fears were allayed. I did go to Madison Avenue in the fall of 1970, and immediately we began changing the nature of the worship service there. The congregation began to sing a great deal more—four hymns every Sunday, plus they began to sing the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei.
That progressed until the congregation tended to draw people who liked to sing, and so the congregational singing was strong and is to this day. David Reed was followed by Dr. Fred Anderson, who was a musician—his first degree was as a music major—and a great lover of music and of worship. Now one could go to Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church and the worship experience would be very ecumenical. You would not be certain if you were in a Lutheran or a Roman Catholic or an Episcopal church. It’s very much Presbyterian, but at the same time very ecumenical and very rich liturgically.
MB: Have you considered yourself an organist who composes or have you always thought of yourself as a composer who had to make his way as an organist and a teacher?
JW: Very definitely the former: I’m an organist first and foremost, but I’m an organist who loves to compose. Many composers who try to write for the organ don’t understand the instrument and therefore write pieces that get a premiere performance and are never heard again. In fact, the organ literature that does become mainstream is almost always written by people who play the instrument. One great exception is Paul Hindemith, but he of course was able to write for any instrument, and he always did his research and knew what he was doing—he wrote three wonderful organ sonatas and a concerto.
Years ago, when I was in my early teens, I started going to Vermont in the summer to a music camp for theory. No lessons were taught on piano or clarinet or violin or anything like that. There was no applied music—it was all theory. We had counterpoint classes, form and analysis, and harmony and such, and the result of it was that the students of the camp composed because we had been given the tools of the musical language.
So I’ve gone to Vermont every summer of my life to compose, and now that I live here I hope to do a lot more composing. I’ve also composed primarily things that I myself could use. Although everything I’ve composed for the last 15 years has been on commission, I’ve always written something that I could use in my own work, either in recitals or in church services. I’ve written a lot of choral music and a lot of organ solo pieces and also several pieces for organ and flute because my wife is a very good flutist and we like to be able to play those pieces together.

MB: Do you have any favorites among the pieces that you’ve written? JW: My favorites tend to be the ones that have been performed a great deal. The Passacaglia on a Theme of Dunstable—it may not in fact be by Dunstable, but it was thought to be by him, namely the tune Deo gratias—was composed for the 25th anniversary of the state trumpets at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and I played the premiere performance there. It’s a set of variations in passacaglia form, and one variation is designated for that magnificent state trumpet at the west end of that huge cathedral. Nevertheless, the piece works on instruments that don’t have that particular kind of stop available. The piece has been recorded by a number of people and has been played all over the world—that gives me a lot of satisfaction. It’s also one of my favorite pieces.

MB: How many compositions have you’ve written up to this point?
JW: I’ve probably composed about 20 choral pieces, that is, anthem-length pieces. I’ve also composed all four gospel settings of the Passion story, and probably a dozen solo organ pieces.

MB: And other than the commission that you just received on Friday, the future is an open book at this point?
JW: Yes, actually that’s the only commission I have in hand right now, but I am trusting that others will come in. And if they don’t I’ll write anyhow.

MB: Someone wanting to commission you would do what? Do you have a website?
JW: .

MB: Do you enjoy the process of recording? You’ve made some notable recordings. It ends up sounding as though you’re having a good time, even if you might not be.
JW: No, I hate recording. [laughter] There’s something a little bit antiseptic about it. First of all, one does not get that sense of response from a live audience. You simply do the playing, and then there are people sitting around with scores and dials and they’re wanting to do this over again and that over again—or a siren will go off or there’ll be a clap of thunder; things like that can make it very frustrating. When they listen to a recording, people have no idea about how long it takes to make that, because street noises or other interruptions can destroy what otherwise would have been a perfect take. It’s very hard.

MB: You’ve been performing in Portland on the Kotzschmar organ—well, you must have been a boy in knee pants when you started.
JW: It was in 1956—at the end of my first year as a student at the Curtis Institute of Music—when I first played the instrument that had been given to the city of Portland by Cyrus H. K. Curtis, whose daughter was the founder of the Curtis Institute. So there was a wonderful connection there. And I’ve been back every year since. [Editor’s note: Dr. Weaver played his 50th recital on the Kotzschmar in August 2005.]

MB: The organ is a challenge as a musical instrument—it is this device with so many opportunities for color and dynamics, and yet is an incredibly complex machine, which even at its best seems to be intractable. Is this something that organists don’t think about, they just do? Or is making music on the organ as difficult as it might appear to a layman, seeing all of those controls to be manipulated and the separation between the console and the pipework and all of that?
JW: Michael, I believe every instrument has its challenges. For pianists, the way in which the key is struck is so critical, and a pianist’s hands must cover a large key compass, whereas organs have a shorter keyboard, 61 notes as opposed to 88; and organ music tends to stay in the middle register, so, in a way, that’s much easier. Violinists have tiny strings and a fingerboard, and it amazes me that they can play a C major scale. Violin virtuosos are just astonishing. The challenges of the organ are mastering the pedals, mastering console technique that enables you to draw upon the resources of the instrument—and then also to a very great extent, the imagination that you can bring to bear with so many different colors available. Each person will choose sounds to produce the right color, if I might use that word, for the passage that they’re playing in a way that pianists and violinists couldn’t possibly do.

MB: In the 21st century young organists face not only sustaining the presence of their instrument but actually rebuilding an audience for organ music. I see this as a real challenge.
JW: Yes, it is. Every now and then though, one sees very hopeful signs—one of those being the recent installation within the last five to ten years of a great many organs in the concert halls of this country—something that’s fairly standard in Europe; for instance, the renovation of the wonderful Ernest Skinner organ in Severance Hall in Cleveland, a new organ in Orchestra Hall in Chicago, the restoration of the organ in Boston Symphony Hall, the new Disney Hall instrument in Los Angeles. One could go on and on and name any number of places where new instruments have been installed or old instruments have been restored—to me this suggests that the organ will take, again, its place as a concert instrument and not just a liturgical instrument.
On the other hand, it must be said that concert halls are often not the most perfect, acoustically, for organs. Great organ music was written to sound its best in places with fairly substantial reverberation, such as a large stone church. So concert hall organs are wonderful, and I’m glad they’re being built, and they enable us to do organ concerti and sometimes organ solo recitals. But the church, particularly one that has a long reverberation period, is still where the organ seems most at home.

MB: How would you compare the scene for organs and organists in your day? Was this a peak of energy with that marvelous—some would say divisive, some would say energy producing—polarity between the historicists and E. Power Biggs on one side, and the theatricalists and Virgil Fox on the other? We don’t have quite that type of energy today. I daresay the man in the street, if asked to name a concert organist today, might be hard pressed, whereas back in the ’60s and early ’70s, the names of Biggs and Fox were very much in the public ear.
JW: Biggs and Fox, both of them very talented, extraordinary musicians, had a great advantage of working right at the time that the LP recording was becoming common in the American home. RCA Victor and Columbia were the big producers of LP recordings at the beginning of that time in the early ’50s. And there was Biggs and there was Fox, and these two polarities were represented in the recording industry—that did a great deal for the visibility of the organ and the popularity of organ music.

MB: It could be argued that now is both the best of times and the worst of times—there are far more organ recordings available, representing a much larger panoply of artistry and instruments both new built and historic, marvelously represented—and yet there is so much that the focus is lost to some degree.
JW: Yes, I think that’s right. When it was Biggs and Fox, you could expect to find their names in the crossword puzzle. No organist today has that kind of visibility. Another name that was right up there at the top was Marcel Dupré because of his extraordinary playing and also the fact that he had been the teacher of so many organists in the U.S. through the Fulbright program. There isn’t anyone who has really achieved that kind of star status in the organ world, which is not to say that there aren’t a great many wonderfully talented and brilliant performers. Maybe there are just too many.

MB: Yes, it could be argued that the performance quality of the 21st century is higher than it’s ever been. Do you think that it’s possible with so much talent around for someone to distinguish themselves or do they have to almost jump beyond mere artistry and do something odd in order to be discovered? JW: Perhaps it would be best to think in terms of naming names. The name of Cameron Carpenter who studied with me at Juilliard comes to mind. Cameron is extraordinarily flamboyant, both in dress and personality and in playing. His playing annoys the purists terribly, but certain people are simply mesmerized by his performances. And he is a genius—there’s no question about that. Another name that gets a great deal of visibility these days is the young German organist, Felix Hell, whom I also had the honor to teach. Felix, at first, was famous because he was so very young when he was playing recitals all over the world, literally, as he still does. But now he is taking his place among the more mature artists of the younger generation and plays very well indeed—and has made numerous recordings. So these two are a little bit like Biggs and Fox—Felix tends to be a fairly conservative player, not extremely so but more middle of the road, whereas Cameron is way out there in show biz land.

MB: Presuming it’s something different from that marvelous, resonate low “E” that had you mesmerized as a child, when you play and hear the organ, what sort of thoughts go through your mind? What is it about the instrument that still captures your heart and soul?
JW: Who could not be seduced by the instrument itself? Just the mechanics of it and this great collection of pipes, some of them enormous, much larger than most people realize, and most of them very much smaller. I think when a layman sees the inside of a pipe organ for the first time, they’re always astonished—even if it’s a small instrument, it looks amazingly big and complex. And the large ones, of course, are simply mind-boggling. So there’s something about the instrument: its bigness, its history. When I’m playing an organ, if I’m playing Bach I’m thinking about instruments I’ve played that Bach may have played—there’s this great history and great repertoire, and frankly the sound of the instrument has always seduced me.

MB: How would you characterize your playing style?
JW: Probably other people should do that. I would say that I am in the middle someplace. I probably am a little bit on the extrovert side of dead center, but I also am not one to completely disregard the knowledge that musicologists have brought to us of performance practice, of historic instruments—but sometimes I will just say “this piece that I’m playing on this particular instrument cannot be played in a good, authentic, 18th-century style.” Something must be done to make the music and the organ come together in a way that is satisfying and gratifying. And sometimes that means just throwing the rulebook out the window.

MB: Did you set out with goals? You probably didn’t begin your study imagining you would go to Curtis, and then after having studied at Curtis, you probably hadn’t thought that you might end up teaching there, or at Juilliard for that matter. You’re like a natural surfer who has swum out into the sea and found a fantastic wave and you’ve been able to ride that wave through your career with skill, with accomplishment, certainly with a sense of pride. How do you look back at your career from this point?
JW: I would have to say that as with many careers, a great deal of it has to do with being at the right place at the right time, but also having ability to do the job that is required. I’ve often thought that if I had been five years younger, the Curtis Institute would not have thought me an appropriate age to head that organ department. If I had been five years older, it’s likely that they would have chosen someone else from among Alexander McCurdy’s students.

MB: You have moved on from three prestigious positions and you’ve now settled in what used to be your summer home in rural Vermont, up in the marvelous rolling countryside in the northeast corner of the state. Somehow, I can’t think of you as retiring. What projects have you set for yourself for the future?
JW: The mail recently brought a new commission for a new organ piece—that’ll be one of the things. I do want to continue to compose. I’m playing a number of recitals this year including two that I’m extraordinarily excited about, because I will be reunited with the instruments that I had my first lessons on. One of them, the Peabody concert hall Skinner, was put in storage for about 40 years, and then set up at a big Roman Catholic Church in Princeton, New Jersey. A week later I will be playing a recital on the wonderful Skinner organ at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, where my teacher Richard Ross was the organist, and before him, Virgil Fox—a beautiful, perfectly untouched Ernest Skinner that really is quite a marvelous instrument. And I’m playing some other recitals and some dedications around the country.

MB: So, you keep your organ shoes polished and ready to go?
JW: Indeed so.
[Editor’s note: Dr. Weaver has announced that the 2007–2008 concert season will be his last for regular concert activity.]

MB: Tell me about some of your memories from being “on the road.”
JW: The wonderful occasions that I love to think back upon are two recitals that I played—one in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, for a national convention of the American Guild of Organists, in which everything went the way I wanted it to. I loved the instrument, the audience was wonderful, the acoustic was great. And the other one was the Mormon Tabernacle—a recital I played when the Tabernacle was having a three-day symposium to celebrate the restoration of the organ there. Everything was fun, and the instrument was to die for, and of course the acoustics are world famous.

MB: Tell me about your railroad fascination. Where did you grow up? Mauch Chunk?
JW: Yes, Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, is a little town north of Allentown and Bethlehem, about 20 miles up into the Pocono Mountains—it’s in a ravine cut by the Lehigh River, and there was a railroad on both sides of the river that ran through the town. The town is now called Jim Thore, but its historic name of Mauch Chunk has great importance. Anyhow, it was a railroad town, and being in this mountain ravine, day or night you could hear the sound of a steam locomotive. The bells and the whistles and the smell of coal smoke were a constant feature of that place. I can remember standing by the railroad track and holding my father’s hand and counting the number of cars on a freight train as it rolled through. It became a part of my life—a very strong hobby, and we are seated right now in the midst of a model railroad that I’m creating that is 26 by 36 feet and has 390 feet of track in it. This is my last model railroad—if I live to 150 I might actually finish it.

MB: And you had one in your office at Madison Avenue Presbyterian.
JW: Yes, unfortunately when I retired from Madison Avenue that meant the end of that railroad, but all of those trains and the structures and the little people and the automobiles and all that are now a part of the railroad here.

MB: I’m sure the compositions that you created for Madison Avenue Presbyterian remain in the files there for the choirs to sing. It’s too bad that your railroad installation in the office wasn’t kept by your replacement.
JW: In the search for my replacement, a fondness for railroads had nothing whatsoever to do with their choice. So.

MB: What of your siblings and in what directions did they go?
JW: My older brother took piano lessons from the same teacher that I had, and he could see that I was making faster progress, so he switched to violin and became in his high school years a reasonably good violinist—he played second chair, first violin in what was at that time a very good high school orchestra. My younger brother is a wonderful tenor, does a lot of solo work in the western Massachusetts area, teaches mathematics at Mount Holyoke College, has an abiding passion for music and even does some composing—he has been published.

MB: And your parents’ musical backgrounds?
JW: Both of my parents played the piano, my father better than my mother. My father had also studied organ for a year or two, and could get through a hymn—knew how to use the pedals a little bit for hymn playing. My mother was an artist, did a master’s at Carnegie Tech and then studied for a year at the Sorbonne—the walls of our houses are covered with paintings that she did over the years.

MB: With your family’s church affiliation and your being a church organist, it’s maybe not surprising that some of the most lovely works that you’ve created have been fantasies on or settings of hymn tunes. You certainly do respond to the church’s song in your compositions.
JW: Well, I love playing hymns. I especially love hymns when a congregation is stirred to sing really well—that’s a wonderful experience. Very often the reason for writing pieces based on hymns has to do with the nature of a commission that I have received. In fact, almost always when I have composed a piece based upon a hymn tune, it’s been requested by the person who commissioned the composition.

MB: Did your parents live to see the honor accorded their son who went on to great things?
JW: My father was very gratified to live to see my appointment to Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. It was one year later that I was appointed to Curtis. By that time, my mother had died, and my father was not at all well. My father did not particularly encourage my desire to be a professional organist. He, as a minister of a medium-size church, saw that as being at best a part-time job, which would mean having to do something else on the side, and that’s always a difficult life. I think he was very happy to see that I had the security of a full-time church position that was also in a church of great prominence within the denomination.

Michael Barone adds: When I first heard John Weaver play, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco for the AGO convention in 1984, I was charmed by his physical presence (Mr. Clean in a dinner jacket!), awed by his control of the instrument (and himself), and beguiled by his musicianship. Subsequent convergences have confirmed my first impressions. John is a modest man of major accomplishments, a patrician artist and persuasive virtuoso who has fostered and encouraged the talents and individuality of an inspiring array of youngsters. He is a musician whose own playing leaves a lasting memory, and whose compositions touch the soul. He’s a guy I’ve been both honored and delighted to know. Happy birthday, John!

John Weaver will be the featured guest/topic of a Pipedreams broadcast (#0717) during the week of April 23, 2007, which will remain available 24/7 in an online audio “programs” archive at www.pipedreams.org.

Michael Barone's John Weaver interview

See the interview here.

Other items of interest:

John Weaver honored by Juilliard

John Weaver honored by Union Theological Seminary

Honoring John Weaver's 80th birthday

John Weaver dies at age 83

John Weaver honored by long time representative

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of The Diapason.

Christopher Houlihan may very well be the youngest organist ever interviewed by The Diapason. A Connecticut native, Houlihan—sometimes known as “Houli”—made his debut album at 19 (a recording of the Vierne Second Symphony, made before he went to France in his junior year; see the review by David Wagner in The Diapaso, January 2009, pp. 19–20). His second recording (Joys, Mournings, and Battles, Towerhill Recordings) was recently released—a significant achievement for any artist, but all the more amazing given his youth. Houlihan, who placed first in the High School Division of the Albert Schweitzer Organ Competition (see David Spicer, “Albert Schweitzer Organ Competition 2003,” The Diapason, November 2003, p. 17), is a graduate of Trinity College, where he studied with John Rose; during his senior year he made his orchestral debut with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, performing Barber’s Toccata Festiva. Rose had insisted that Houlihan pursue some study with a different teacher, so during his junior year Houlihan studied with Jean-Baptiste Robin at the conservatory in Versailles, where he earned the French equivalent of an artist’s diploma. He also served as assistant musician at the American Cathedral in Paris, under Edward Tipton, working as choral accompanist and directing two children’s choirs. One Sunday when Tipton was away and Houlihan was to serve as both organist and choir director, the cathedral received a few hours’ advance notice that the President and First Lady of the United States, Mr. and Mrs. George W. Bush, would attend.
Houlihan’s first teacher, John Rose, described meeting the youngster prior to playing a recital—the young man and other family members came an hour early to get a bird’s-eye-view seat, in order to see the console and player up close. This initial meeting led to lessons with Rose at Trinity College, and subsequently to Houlihan’s matriculating there. Rose notes that one of Houlihan’s qualities is the ability to generate excitement about the organ and its music, to be able to communicate the music and his passion for it to an audience, and credits some of this to Houlihan’s technical mastery of rhythm and accent in way that makes the music “electrifying.” Rose feels that Houlihan’s “thirst for knowledge and learning” lead him to be “well informed about various performance practices,” yet realizing “the importance of bringing his own ideas and a fresh outlook to his interpretations. He also understands (and enjoys) the need to adapt his ideas uniquely, as needed, from one organ to the next.”
Christopher Houlihan’s fans are of all ages and include an 85-year-old retired math teacher at Trinity, along with students at the college; they have formed a group known as the “Houli Fans,” and this has expanded into marketing: t-shirts, caps, and mugs are available. Most of these students had never experienced an organ recital before supporting their friend. When he performed with the symphony during his senior year, they chartered buses to take throngs of students to the orchestra hall, where they rained down loud cheers from the balcony. Christopher Houlihan currently studies with Paul Jacobs at the Juilliard School, and is represented by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists (www.concertartists.com). Houlihan can be found on Facebook and YouTube, and his website is www.christopherhoulihan.com.

Joyce Robinson: Do you come from a musical family?
Christopher Houlihan: My family isn’t musical, but my parents have always been incredibly supportive of my passion. I think my mother signed me up for piano lessons just so I would have something to do after school. At the beginning I liked it, I thought it was all right, but I kept practicing and eventually joined a church choir in my hometown of Somers, Connecticut when I was about 8, and discovered the organ. The organ in the church was an electronic organ, and the organist there always had the tremolos on, but she showed me everything she knew and encouraged me to explore. She let me practice on the instrument. I was immediately excited by it and drawn into it, and I started reading as much as I could about the organ and tried to talk to other organists, but at the same time, I had no idea how to take organ lessons. It was obvious you could take piano lessons or lessons on any other instrument, but the organ was kind of a mystery to both my parents and me. My mother loves telling the story of walking into my bedroom and seeing me at my digital keyboard, moving my feet around. She discovered I had put rows of masking tape on her hardwood floor, in the outline of the pedalboard, so that I could learn how to play the pedals. She was a bit horrified that I had put tape all over her floor, but at the same time, she thought it was pretty clever.
Then, in 1999, my mother read in the newspaper that there was an organ concert going on in Springfield, Massachusetts. We’d never been to an organ concert before, never really heard any classical organ music, but we went, and I got hooked. I still have the program from that recital, and, looking back on it, I can’t imagine having had a better introduction to concert organ music: I heard Franck’s Pièce Héroïque and Vierne’s Third Symphony for the first time that day. After the concert, we spoke with the organist, and I said, “I want to take organ lessons, what do I do?” And the man said, “Why don’t you come down to Hartford and play for me?” This was John Rose. We went to Trinity, and I played for him; I was twelve years old, and he took me on as a student. From there, it just took off—I kept studying with him throughout high school, and when it came time to look at colleges, Trinity turned out to be a very good fit for me. John never pushed for me to go to Trinity; he would have been supportive of any decision I made, but for a lot of reasons I chose Trinity, and I’m really glad I did.

JR: Is that where your interest in Vierne came from? John Rose is well known for his work on Vierne, and your first recording was mostly Vierne.
CH: Yes, it was. John has been a wonderful mentor, and he’s never forced any particular style of playing on me, and I’ve studied all sorts of repertoire with him. But I do suppose I’ve had more exposure to Vierne than many other people, certainly because of his love of Vierne. I remember working on the “Berceuse” from the 24 Pieces in Free Style; that was probably my first Vierne piece.

JR: How old were you then?
CH: I’m not sure! I was in middle school, probably 13. Then when I got to Trinity, he said “You should really learn the Vierne Second Symphony, I think it would be a good piece for you.” And I learned it, and I absolutely loved it. Vierne is very chromatic, it’s very different from most Widor . . . Some people say things like, “You should never play a complete French symphony, it’s too long, it’s trash, audiences don’t like it,” but I find it incredibly gratifying as a performer and as a listener to hear a complete symphony. You rarely go to an orchestral concert and hear the Finale from a Beethoven symphony—you hear the whole work. I think a Vierne symphony works much better as a complete piece . . . the individual movements speak much more profoundly when you hear them in the context of the whole symphony.

JR: You must have worked on quite a bit of French repertoire with John Rose before you went to France.
CH: I did.

JR: And when you got to France, did you find the approach to French music to be different?
CH: That’s a complicated question to answer, but yes, the approach was very different. I went to France because I had a strong affinity for French romantic music, but I also wanted to learn more about French classical music, as well as study modern French music. Certainly one of the most beneficial aspects of studying organ music in France is hearing and playing on French organs. But having grown up on American organs, playing primarily in drier American acoustics, and approaching music from an American perspective in general, I really had to learn a new style of playing, one that was more effective for those instruments and rooms. My teacher, Jean-Baptiste Robin, often talked to me about “taste,” which is, of course, completely subjective, but I became more aware of the fact that taste is also cultural, and people from two different backgrounds (musical and otherwise) will have very different opinions about what they consider to be “in good or bad taste.” For example, sometimes I would phrase something a certain way, or accent something a certain way, and Jean-Baptiste would remark that it sounded “American.” Well, I am American, after all!
What is true, though, is that French music sounds most “at home” on French organs. One of the most incredible experiences I had was going to Poitiers Cathedral, where Jean-Baptiste Robin is titulaire, and hearing the 1791 Clicquot organ there. When I heard French classical music on that instrument I was almost in tears, it was so beautiful. That music came alive and worked in a way I had never heard it before. The same can be said of romantic music, but to a less extreme degree, when hearing it on French romantic organs. But what I’ve come to believe through those experiences is that what is far more important than choosing the historically correct stops, or playing in a historically correct way, is the type of musical effect that comes across to a listener. If hearing Widor played at St. Sulpice brings you to your knees, then that music should have the same effect wherever you’re playing it, and, typically, in my opinion, to get that kind of effect on American organs, you have to play the music in a very different way than you might in France.

JR: So are you saying that one must register more with one’s ears than just looking at labels on the knobs?
CH: Yes, absolutely. And at the same time, you don’t have to travel all the way to France to register that way. I think you have to go with your gut—you have to look for what’s the most musical solution when you’re registering anything. It’s not what the book says is the correct registration, but what has an effect—what makes the music come alive.

JR: Was there any particular aspect of registration that you had to make adjustments for when you returned to the U.S.?
CH: There are all sorts of things one can do. One basic idea that is important to know about is the upward voicing that a lot of the French organs have, where things really sing in the treble in a way they don’t on most of our organs. There’s not an easy solution to this, but it’s something to keep in mind and listen for. The other thing is that our Swell boxes are, generally, much more expressive even on smaller organs, and you can use them in a different way for the kinds of musical effects that naturally occur without moving the box on a French organ. The reason Franck used the Hautbois with his 8′ foundations was to make the Swell more expressive . . . if the oboe isn’t needed, I leave it off. Many American organs have the only chorus reeds in the Swell, and they might be quite loud; therefore, you don’t always have to play with the full Swell on where Vierne or Widor says “full Swell.” If you’ve only got a full Swell and one more reed on the Great, you don’t get a crescendo effect; you go from loud to louder. You’ve got to allow more liberty for these things, because in the end you’re being truer to the composer’s intentions . . .

JR: Tell us a little more about your time in France. Life in Europe is usually different than it is here, so what was it like for you—your schedule, your study, your practicing? Did you spend time learning the language?
CH: I was there through the Trinity College Paris program. They have about 20 to 30 students there each semester, and through that program I took French language classes, a class on French culture, a course on art history and architecture—they offer all sorts of courses, ranging from history of the European Union, to independent studies on anything you want to learn about. I did part of my coursework through them, and Trinity gave me credit for my organ lessons at the conservatory in Versailles, and my private harmony lessons with Jean-Baptiste.
I was also lucky enough to have an incredible job at the American Cathedral in Paris, working with Ned Tipton. I was the assistant musician, which meant that I accompanied the choir on Sunday mornings, and I directed two children’s choirs—the children’s group, and a teenager group—and along with all this I had an apartment in the cathedral tower, which was really incredible! You could climb to the top of the tower, and you had one of the most spectacular views of Paris. You could see all of the major monuments, really stunning. The cathedral is on the Avenue Georges V, which is right off the Champs Elysees . . . the whole experience was very surreal and I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity. And the people at the cathedral are so wonderful. There are a lot of Americans, of course, and people from England, from Australia, and French people too!

JR: During your time in France, you performed for George and Laura Bush at the American Cathedral in Paris. Can you recall that day?
CH: I’ll certainly never forget it. It actually began on a Saturday afternoon when I got a knock at the door of my apartment. Now, my apartment was 83 steps up a cement spiral staircase, so I didn’t get very many knocks on the door . . . I was fairly surprised to discover the dean of the cathedral and two French police officers with enormous rifles standing in front of me. They explained who would be coming for a visit the following morning. To complicate things, Ned was away, the adult choir hadn’t had a rehearsal the previous Thursday, and we had the children’s choir scheduled to sing that morning too. Unfortunately, we had to keep the news completely secret for security reasons, so I couldn’t let the choirs know what would be happening. Sunday morning was a little hectic . . . security came and set up metal detectors, dogs sniffed through the whole building, and of course, they didn’t care that I had a choir to rehearse! We wound up with about 15 minutes to run through the anthems, but we pulled it off pretty well.

JR: What were your studies like with Jean-Baptiste Robin?
CH: Robin was an excellent teacher and I learned a great deal from him. At his recommendation, we spent the year working almost exclusively on French music, and nothing could have made me happier. Each week I would prepare a different piece, by de Grigny, Marchand, Couperin, or one of the other French Baroque composers. We worked a great deal on Franck, of course, on Alain’s Trois Danses, as well as one of Robin’s own pieces, Trois Éléments d’un Songe.

JR: What made you choose Juilliard for graduate study? For that matter, why even bother with graduate study, because you had already made a recording, you were signed to professional management before you even got a bachelor’s degree, if my calculations were correct?
CH: True. I chose Juilliard because I really wanted to work with Paul Jacobs and I have had a wonderful time studying with him. I’ve been lucky at this point to have studied both at Trinity and at Juilliard, and have had vastly different experiences at both schools. At Trinity, the focus was on studying music in a broader context—a liberal arts school; I took classes in all sorts of things: science, math, philosophy—it was wonderful, and I made friends with all sorts of people studying all different subjects, and I can’t say enough positive things about how that can affect one’s perspective on making music. But I really felt I was ready to study music in a much more intense environment, and Juilliard was a great choice for that. I love being in New York City, being at Juilliard, and working with Paul. It’s been very rewarding.

JR: Has it been an opportunity to learn a lot of new repertoire, or just refine what you already know?
CH: One of the unique things about the Juilliard program is that we’re required to perform a new piece each Thursday morning in our organ studio class, which is open to the public. And that was definitely a big draw to go there, to learn a lot of repertoire. It can sometimes be difficult to learn a piece very deeply when you’re going through so much music so quickly, but you can always bring things back to Paul and work on them more, and of course work on them more on your own, which is where the real music happens, spending time getting to know the music very intimately. To touch on the last question again, even though I’ve been lucky to have these opportunities to record a CD and study in France and work under management, which I’m incredibly grateful for and excited by, I believe one never really stops learning. Juilliard has been a wonderful place for me to grow more as a musician, and I hope to continue to do that for the rest of my life.

JR: You have a website, and a presence on Facebook—do you find that these media help build your audiences?
CH: I’m not sure, but I do think they’re incredibly important tools. How many people are on Facebook now? I have no idea, but there’s no reason not to take advantage of it and to be communicating in the world where most people are interacting today. I don’t know if my online presence necessarily helps build my audience, but it certainly doesn’t hurt it. It certainly helps attract younger people.

JR: Do you notice that your audience has a younger demographic than that of other organists?
CH: I don’t think so, not yet at least, but attracting younger people to classical music is something I feel very strongly about. And one of the greatest things I experienced at Trinity was bringing my friends who weren’t musicians to my organ concerts, and getting them excited about it. They responded very positively.

JR: Would that be the Houli Fans?
CH: The Houli Fans grew out of that, from friends of mine who weren’t musicians, but who came to my organ concerts and got excited by the music and discovered something far more fantastic than they ever expected to. I would have never guessed some of my college friends would greet me by humming the opening bars of Vierne’s Second Symphony—or talk to me about how fascinating a Bach fugue was. Houli Fans has caught on in a very organic way, and audiences everywhere I go are interested to hear more about it. At Trinity, students came to the concerts and saw that I loved performing, thought the music was exciting, and they responded by getting more people to come! This is such a good sign for organ music, to see people, of any age, who don’t know anything about organ music responding to it. I think in a way the organ may stand in a better place now than it ever has, I suppose you could say—it has been so dismissed and ignored for so many years, that now it stands to be rediscovered. We’ve all been in situations where people ask about being an organist. They really don’t know what that is, they don’t know what that means, what we actually do. When they hear exciting classical organ music, they’re so wowed by it—it’s true. I’ve played recitals this year and people come up to me and say, “This was my first organ concert and it was way better than I ever expected!” I tell them, “Now go tell somebody else. And come back again and bring them!” Once people discover what’s going on, they’re excited by it. And that’s a really good sign.

JR: Do you see any special role for technology such as iPods or YouTube to advance organ music, or are those just tools like a CD would be?
CH: I think what’s important is reaching as many people as you possibly can. And people are on Facebook, on YouTube—a lot of people are using these things, and if we ignore them (and I’m not suggesting we necessarily are), you’re ignoring a big part of your audience. So I think it can absolutely help. YouTube is a fantastic resource for hearing and seeing performances—it’s an incredible archive of music and musicians and organs and all kinds of music, not just organ music, and quite a tool for marketing and advertising. Everything links to something else, and people can see you and discover other organ music and other performances.

JR: Well, back to the Houli Fans. What are they up to these days?
CH: We have shirts and hats and coffee mugs, and people are really responding well to it. Everywhere I’ve been this year I hear “Oh, I’m going to join the Houli Fans” and “I’m your newest Houli Fan” and things like that. And I find that both musicians and non-musicians want a very fun way to connect with the performer and somehow be involved in the performance. It’s fun!
And there’s nothing wrong with having a little bit of fun, or with classical music being fun. It’s been fun for centuries!

JR: You also have an interest in musical theater. Do you have much time for that any more?
CH: No, not right now, in graduate school, and with a busy performance schedule. But I did a lot of it in high school—I was music director of several shows. That was a lot of fun, and actually a really great learning experience. And I did a lot of it in college, too—music directing, performing on stage, singing, dancing, and all of that. I really enjoy it. At the moment I don’t have plans to do it professionally, but it’s a small passion of mine. I particularly love the music of Stephen Sondheim, and, coincidentally, I’m going to be inaugurating the organ at the Sondheim Center for the Performing Arts in Fairfield, Iowa.
I think there’s a lot that musicians can learn from theater, both from straight drama and musical theater, about how to approach a musical score, similar to the way an actor takes a script and analyzes everything that’s going on to create a character, and perform that character night after night. I try to approach music the same way—take the score and truly consider how to create a musical experience—in a way . . . a whole play. Not necessarily a story, but create the kind of experience I’d like to have as a listener. I think there’s a lot we can learn from theater and the other arts.

JR: Of what you’ve worked on so far, is there any particular repertoire you found a difficult nut to crack—you mentioned finding the character and learning how to bring that out; is there any music that’s been, say, a little more opaque for you?
CH: One of the most incredible things about the organ literature, and one of the most daunting, is the centuries that it spans. All this repertoire and all these different styles—personally, I think it’s impossible to be fluent in and to perform all these styles in a convincing way. Maybe it’s possible; I’d like to be wrong. When I’m learning a piece in a different style that I haven’t studied before, I try to approach it with respect for the scholarship that’s been done on it and its performance practice, but also perform it in a way that feels honest to me, so that I can perform it and convince the audience of the music. I don’t think there is much value in performing something just because you think you should—that you should play so-and-so’s music. Well, what if you don’t like so-and-so’s music? A lot of people may like so-and-so’s music, and a lot of scholars may say it’s important . . . But I don’t have to perform everything under the sun.

JR: In one of Gavin Black’s regular columns in The Diapason, one of his points was that if you don’t really like something, why waste your time learning it? Life’s too short—unless you’re in a competition and it’s required.
CH: At the same time, I’ve learned some pieces—I’m not sure I can name a specific one—where I’m not sure about it at the beginning, or I think I’m not going to like the piece. But then after I learn it I think, “Wow, now that I’ve studied it, and learned more about what the composer was trying to do, and found ways to make it come alive for my own performance, it really is a good piece.” And sometimes I decide to learn a piece, starting off by thinking it’s a great piece, and then after becoming more familiar with it, decide “This isn’t right for me.” It works both ways.

JR: You’ve already recorded two CDs—are you preparing any other recordings? What are your other plans for the future?
CH: I hope to be able to keep recording, and I hope to be able to continue performing. I really enjoy traveling and meeting new people, but most importantly, I love performing and bringing music to an audience. I believe it’s more like making music with an audience. Sometimes I even tell that to the audience too—I thank them for making music with me, since I can’t do it by myself, and since I get so much joy from performing. Eventually, I’d love to be teaching and sharing my love of organ music with others in any way I can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When did you start composing?

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

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

Have you always had a strong interest in new music?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are the Hildegard works liturgical music or concert music?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would you describe your music as mystical?

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of THE DIAPASON.

James Kibbie is perhaps best known through his position as professor of organ at the University of Michigan, where he has served on the organ faculty since 1981. Also quite active as a performer and clinician, Kibbie is at present involved in a project to record all of J. S. Bach’s organ works, with the recordings to be made available, free of charge, through Internet distribution rather than CDs (see www.blockmrecords.org). A portent of this is Kibbie’s own website (www-personal.umich.edu/~jkibbie/), where the professor has presented a yearly “Christmas card” of a downloadable performance, recorded on the Létourneau instrument at his home. We talked with James Kibbie during a visit he made in May 2007 to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois to present a recital and masterclass.

Joyce Robinson: Let’s begin by asking how you got “the bug.”
James Kibbie: I’m from Iowa! A lot of organists are from Iowa, and the way I got interested in the organ was the way that every single organist does, by hearing it played in church. It is a really valuable thing for churches to allow young musicians access to the organ. That was the case in the congregation where I grew up, and I think that experience is what creates organists.

JR: Did you come from a musical home? Were your parents musicians? Did they encourage your musical studies?
JK: My mother was a pianist, and I begged her to teach me to play. She was a school teacher, and she knew kids pretty well. She was smart enough not to try to force me to practice. Instead, the rule was that either I practiced regularly, or I had to give up completely and never touch the piano. That was enough motivation (sometimes just barely). My father was also a teacher, and he believed fervently that young people should pursue their own dreams and goals, wherever that led them. He always encouraged me, though I think it was a surprise to him to have a musician for a son.

JR: I notice you are wearing a POE shirt!
JK: This is from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a couple of years ago. I am so hot on this idea of pipe organ encounters! They have been enormously successful. I’ve taught at a number of them with somewhat different formats, and it turns out that any format for the POE works, because if you just bring young people together with the organ, the instrument sells itself.

JR: AGO statistics don’t show college enrollments going up. By now POEs should have had an effect, but they don’t seem to be increasing enrollment in organ programs.
JK: We’re doing well with enrollment at the University of Michigan. Not just in numbers, but in terms of quality—phenomenally gifted students, particularly undergrads. We routinely see now on résumés from students who are applying that they have as high school students attended at least one, many times more than one, POE. We definitely see the results—not just in numbers, but in the level of preparation for students.

JR: That’s reassuring. Now where did you get your bachelor’s degree?
JK: What at that time was called North Texas State University. It’s now the University of North Texas. I got bachelor’s and master’s there, with Donald Willing.

JR: And then you went on to Michigan, and you studied with Marilyn Mason—who’s now your colleague!
JK: Yes. I was really lucky—I had those two master teachers, who are very different as musicians and as people, but they were both so kind to me. And it turned out later that they were both exactly the right teacher for me at that particular time in my development.

JR: You went on to win some competitions—the Grand Prix de Chartres and the Prague competition. You had recorded and played music of Czech composers—Ropek, for example—was that an outgrowth of the competition?
JK: This was in 1979, at the height of the Cold War, so it was a very different place than the Czech Republic is now. After the winner’s recital at Dvořak Hall in Prague, Jiří Ropek came up and introduced himself and invited me to have dinner with him and his family. He was professor of composition at the Prague Conservatory and also organist at St. James Church, which is a historic church in the Old Town section of Prague. That started a long, warm friendship. In fact, one of the pieces I’m playing tonight is his variations on Victimae Paschali—he gave me a copy of the score to those variations at that first dinner, and said that he hoped maybe I would learn them and perform them, and I have performed them many times over the years. He passed away in 2005.
During the first years that I knew him, we corresponded—though not too often, because he said if he received too many letters from the West, it was a red flag to the Communist authorities, and he got in trouble, because he was a known opponent of the Communist regime, so it was certainly easier for him after the fall of Communism. He had earned a doctorate at the Carolinian University in Prague, but the Communist government had prevented it being awarded. Finally, in 1990, when Communism ended, the university could officially award him the doctorate that he earned over 40 years earlier. It’s remarkable!

JR: You’ve been at the University of Michigan now for over a quarter of a century!
JK: That’s right, 26 years. I love it! I get up most mornings looking forward to most of the things I’m going to do that day. I realize that’s a gift that not everyone has.

JR: Over the course of over a quarter of a century you must have noticed some changes, both in the program and in the students.
JK: There have been big changes in the field of church music, and all of us are either working as church musicians, or teaching students who will work as church musicians, so it’s central to everything that we do. I don’t think anyone of us could have foreseen all of the ways that church music has changed over the past 25 years. That means we can’t foresee how it’s going to change in the next 25 years.
I’ve been thinking about this—how do I prepare my students when I can’t foresee exactly all of the ways they’re going to need to change and adapt professionally? The answer must be to return to core values—to teach the commitment to excellence. If I can communicate to students that there’s one standard of music-making for everything that we do—our best effort—that is the thing that will serve them well no matter how the field changes.
If I’m coaching how you play an ornament in Bach, or how you achieve a legato line in Franck, I’m not just dealing with that repertoire, I’m modeling for the student this attention to detail and integration of all of the elements of performance that they’re going to have to rely on to create music in ways that I might not be able to imagine right now.

JR: Do you talk with your students about the job situation in church music?
JK: Yes, and without apology, we position our students to compete for the jobs at the top end. There the situation is quite favorable—salary, working conditions, the artistic content of the jobs—can be very satisfying. Where our profession is really struggling is in the part-time positions, particularly in some communities where there is not a tradition of paying well for church musicians. Those aren’t the kind of jobs necessarily that our graduates from the University of Michigan apply for, but they’re the jobs that the majority of our professional colleagues nationally are holding.

JR: Have any of your prior students been in touch with you and communicated that a church job they were in was starting to go in the “happy- clappy” direction?
JK: Oh my, yes, sure! (laughter) But if nothing else, we can take Johann Sebastian Bach as our model—if things don’t go well in a church job, you look for another one, but you don’t quit the present job until you find the new job first, which is what he did!

JR: Can you discuss the imbalance of today’s high level of talent, yet fewer college teaching positions and fewer upper-rank positions for church musicians?
JK: I recall something that I heard about the American jurist Daniel Webster. When he was a young man, he apparently wanted to become a lawyer. He went to his father and said, “I’m interested in the law as a profession, but it’s very crowded. I’m not sure about the job prospects.” His father said, “Remember—there’s always room at the top.” I’ve told that story to my students countless times. The answer for them is that they have to position themselves in terms of their abilities and their résumé and their preparation to compete at the top.

JR: How has your teaching changed over the last 25 years? Do you use different method books now?
JK: The longer I’ve taught, the more comfortable I’ve become communicating my own point of view. That’s what students come to their teacher for, and ultimately it’s all the teacher has to offer. I’ve used several method books successfully, but I keep coming back to The Organist’s Manual (love the pun) by Roger Davis. It has a superb selection of repertoire and just the right amount of technical exercises and explanations. If students balk at the price, I explain how expensive it would be to buy all of the repertoire separately.
When I was a freshman organ major, I assumed I’d study the “canon” of great organ music. Most organ students still expect that today, but there has to be room in our canon for great, noble music by living composers, including women, and music from many cultures and traditions—African-American composers, for example.

JR: At the University of Michigan there is a scholarship fund established in your name. How’s that going?
JK: It’s going very well! It’s endowed permanently, so we award it in perpetuity every year. It’s one of a number of named scholarships that we have and it is so necessary. You know that the costs of education are far beyond many families’ ability to pay, and church musicians don’t have the potential for large income after graduation the way some other fields do, so we have to have scholarship funding for our students. It’s essential.

JR: That’s quite a tribute. It was your students who set that up.
JK: They did, and it was done at the conclusion of the complete Bach works series that I played in 2000. It was announced at the final concert of that Bach series. They “passed the hat” at that concert, and then one of my alums, Dr. Edward Maki-Schramm, led the fund-raising, and it’s done very well since.

JR: As musicology evolves there’s always something new in performance practice. Do you keep integrating this with your teaching?
JK: I do, and particularly for older music—Bach and Buxtehude—there are so many questions that all of us have that must be answered just to play the piece. That’s what I concentrate on—the practical performance-based decision-making that performers must face. I have gradually come to understand that some of those questions—for example, in Bach’s time—had a precise answer. Whether or not I can discover it after more than 250 years is another question. Some of those questions never had a single answer. There was a range of possibilities open to the performer, and the individual performer was expected to make personal choices from that range of what was possible or appropriate.
That’s what resulted in a unique personal performance, which is so vital to all music, especially Baroque music. Performing Bach or Buxtehude is more of a partnership between the composer and the performer than is true of music of some later generations. I have increasingly moved in teaching to encouraging students to identify what that range of possibilities, historically, is, and to make their own choices within that range to create a performance that might be very different from my conception of a work—or someone else’s—but still faithful to the intent of the composer.

JR: Do you have an overall philosophy of performance practice?
JK: What I value most in music performance is the sense of certainty—a compelling performance, a convincing performance: “This is the way it goes!” Dr. Karl Schrock, one of my doctoral students years ago, said to me, “I think the most authentic performance is a convincing performance.” I have decided that what creates that sense of being so convincing is not just making effective decisions about all of the issues of performance—registration, tempo, ornamentation, articulation, nuance—but that intuitive ability of some performers to integrate all of their choices into a single vision of the music.
That’s what I concentrate on in teaching. When I judge competitions, I think that’s what I respond to—not necessarily looking for somebody who plays the piece the way I do, but who creates that sense of certainty.

JR: Some performers maintain that Bach, for instance, should be played in a certain way.
JK: Anybody who knows the nature of the historic record has to acknowledge that there is so much we don’t know. The answer to so many of these questions is—we don’t know. If anyone pretends to know how Bach played the organ, they’re deluding themselves. We have to be intellectually honest enough to be able to say the words “I don’t know.”

JR: Bach was such a musician and so knowledgeable about the organ; if he had the instruments and technology we have today, would he have used them?
JK: He might have written very different music. All of these people—Bach, Buxtehude, Franck, Dan Locklair—are using the materials that they have at hand to create great music: the kind of organs, the way people play the organ, the abilities of the musicians they’re working with. And because they’re geniuses, they use that raw material to create great musical works. So then if, after the work is created, I depart from that, I introduce anachronisms—the word means “out of time,” something that doesn’t belong to the time of the composition—I weaken it.
Even though it’s true that Bach might have used different sorts of organ effects that weren’t available to him then, the fact is that not having had them, he wrote music that doesn’t need them. Actually, by introducing them, we’re weakening the musical content of what he provided us. Our generation’s contribution to the understanding of performance practice has been that the music sounds best if you hear it approximately in the context of how the composer conceived it. Within that, as I said, there’s so much that we don’t know.
Our generation hasn’t grappled with what may be the central question: if I can create a 100% authentic performance, if I could play the organ exactly as it existed, the instrument that Bach knew, in exactly the acoustics, and play every detail of the performance exactly as Bach did it, my audience would be listening to it with 21st-century ears, not 18th-century ears. As a result, it’s a radically different piece of music.
We have not begun to address that limit on authenticity, and I think it’s probably the next generation that’s going to have to grapple with that. Our generation seems not to have been willing to think about that.

JR: One of the current trends in organ building is in the direction of larger scales and higher wind pressures—we’ve moved away from the Orgelbewegung and now we’re in another direction. Is this a fad?
JK: The best organ builders may draw inspiration from various historic periods, but they invariably build instruments that are of their own time and their own place, and that reflect the personality of that builder. The artistic direction of the particular builder doesn’t come essentially from historic models; you can learn from E. M. Skinner or Arp Schnitger or whomever, but the finest builders must gradually develop their artistic personality. I am not as interested in historic modeling as I am in the quality mechanically and tonally of the instruments, judged by contemporary standards.

JR: You have a Létourneau instrument.
JK: In my house—I’m so proud of it. We have another Létourneau at the University of Michigan. My colleague Michele Johns recently led a project to relocate that organ to a newly created small concert hall that’s a joint project of the School of Music, Theatre & Dance and the School of Public Health. It will be the focus of an ongoing series of chamber music concerts and will also be used for teaching and practice. The room is great—cabaret seating, a catering kitchen, and even a rose garden.

JR: Let’s talk about the instruments at the University of Michigan.
JK: Our students typically have some of their lessons on the big four-manual E. M. Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ in Hill Auditorium, some lessons on our Fisk in the style of Gottfried Silbermann, and some lessons on one of the two studio organs. We also have the Létourneau organ in its beautiful new hall, and we have a number of tracker and electric-action practice organs. All are pipe organs, of course. That’s what students expect, and only a pipe organ allows for performance of the repertoire to the standards we require. We also have access to some fine organs in local churches—Ann Arbor is a great “organ town.”

JR: Did you choose a Létourneau for yourself because of the one at the university?
JK: Yes, and because I had worked as consultant on a number of projects where Létourneau had been the builder chosen, and I developed a particular fondness and respect for his instruments. When I got this house organ in 2000, I wanted to make a little recording—sort of like a baby picture, you know, the proud parent!—so I recorded a partita Hugo Distler had written for his own house organ and put it on my website as a free download at Christmas time. That began what’s now an annual tradition.

JR: Your Christmas card!
JK: Yes! And I tracked the month-by-month downloads for those various recordings, and where the requests for downloads were coming from. It’s phenomenal, the number of people that month after month download these little house organ recordings—from Romania, China, western Europe, South Africa—all over the world! That’s what alerted me to the importance of this field of Internet downloads, and it’s one of the things that made me decide to release the Bach recordings as free Internet downloads rather than as commercial CDs.

JR: Do you have a grant for the Bach recordings?
JK: It’s very expensive, about $60,000 over three years to make the recordings, plus the expenses connected with the website. I puzzled a long time over how it could be possible. Then Dr. Barbara Sloat came to see me. I hadn’t met her before, but she explained she wanted to do something to honor her husband Barry, who was nearing the end of his life. He had attended all 18 recitals in the complete Bach series I had given at the University of Michigan in 2000. She wanted particularly to recognize Barry’s interest in the organ and in Bach, and she offered a very generous donation toward my Bach recording project. The University of Michigan has provided the remainder of the funding.
It’s a three-year project to record the complete organ works of Bach on historic 18th-century organs in Germany. As the recordings are made and mastered, they’re put on this website (www.blockmrecordings.com), sponsored by the University of Michigan, so that they can just be downloaded free by anybody, anywhere in the world.

JR: Your project is recording Bach on historic instruments. What were the criteria you used for choosing instruments to record on?
JK: There’s no single “Bach organ,” because he wrote for such different instruments over the course of his life, from the North German organs he knew in his youth to the late Baroque organs of his Leipzig years. I haven’t tried to make my recordings an anthology of historic organs. I’ve chosen a limited number of instruments, so I can deal with each instrument in detail. The 2007 recordings are on three Silbermann organs, the one-manual and two-manual instruments in Rötha, and the magnificent three-manual organ in the Dresden Kathedrale. About seven hours of repertoire on these organs is now posted on the website.

JR: Robert Clark recorded on the organ at Naumburg. Is that one of the instruments?
JK: No, instead I’m using two Trost organs next year that have a similar late-Baroque character, in Waltershausen and Grossengottern. But I love that recording of Robert Clark! I think the performer, the repertoire and the organ all match perfectly. He must have thought a long time in putting it together—selecting not only the organ, but the pieces that would go with the organ and go with him and what he wanted to do. I think it’s one of the great Bach recordings.

JR: What will you tackle next after your Bach project on the Internet?
JK: Bach is enough to think about right now, but I’ve already decided that my reward in 2009, when I finish all of the Bach recordings, is going to be particularly to go back to the organ works of Franck. It’s been several years since I’ve performed Grande pièce symphonique, for example. I’ve performed all of the Franck works, but I’m looking forward to going back to them as a sort of reward for finishing the Bach project.

JR: Do you have any favorite instruments that you like to play, besides your own?
JK: Instruments that belong to the time and place where they were built, not instruments that try to do everything, but instruments that do one thing, or one slice of the pie, particularly well. If you have a beautiful instrument, it lends its beauty and its integrity to anything that you play on it. Silbermann never thought of his organs playing anything other than contemporary music—music of 18th-century Germany—and yet churches with Silbermann organs have very multi-faceted musical programs, and the organ is central to that music program now in the 21st century as much as it was in the 18th, in ways that Silbermann couldn’t imagine. Because the instrument is so beautiful and so well built, it becomes flexible over time.

JR: Do you have an overall hopeful view of the organ world, especially in our culture? Ours is a culture of mediocrity, feeding off the bottom. How do we who feed off more lofty things deal with this?
JK: I’m enormously optimistic. The level of organ performance right now in this country is the highest that it’s been, I think anywhere, historically. The students, particularly the undergraduate students that we’re getting at the University of Michigan, are some of the finest talents that we’ve ever had. The quality of organ building is as high as it’s ever been in this country; there are new pipe organs being built all the time, including some really significant instruments in high-visibility venues. I am not worried!