A Conversation With Martin Neary

Mark Buxton

When Martin Neary succeeded Simon Preston as Westminster Abbey's Organist and Master of the Choristers in 1988, a distinguished career reached its logical (if dizzying) pinnacle. From his early years as a boy chorister at the Chapel Royal, Saint James' Palace, through an organ scholarship at Cambridge and several subsequent prestigious appointments (notably St. Margaret's, Westminster and Winchester Cathedral), Neary's achievements are the stuff of which church musicians dream. His numerous honors include a Fellowship from London's Royal Academy of Music; and from 1988-90, he was President of the Royal College of Organists.

But to paint a picture of Martin Neary as the prototypical English cathedral organist would truly miss the mark.  For he has cast his net far beyond the narrow confines of the organ loft, championing early and contemporary music both within and without the walls of the Church. In addition to a thorough musical apprenticeship and solid academic background, he trained on both sides of the Atlantic as a conductor. An active and well-travelled concert artist, he won second prize in the first St. Albans organ competition, and has garnered considerable acclaim for his many recordings as soloist and conductor.

The following conversation took place at Westminster Abbey.

Mark Buxton: As we sit here discussing your life and work, it strikes me there that is a pleasing symmetry to your career. As a boy, you sang in Westminster Abbey under Sir William McKie at the 1953 Coronation. Today, over forty years later, you yourself are in charge of the Abbey's music. What recollections do you have of those early years?

Martin Neary: Well, I began my musical life at the Chapel Royal, where I was a chorister for some seven years. (Incidentally, that was an unusually long tenure.)  When I arrived, Stanley Roper was in charge of the music, although he was later succeeded by Harry Gabb, who also held the position of Sub-Organist "down the road" at St. Paul's Cathedral.

As a Chapel Royal chorister, I was fortunate enough to sing at the Coronation. This was a truly memorable occasion, with a magnificent program of music directed, as you mentioned, by Sir William McKie--one of my many distinguished predecessors here. And in a way, yes, the wheel has indeed turned full circle, as I have just recorded a CD of music from the 1953 Coronation with the Abbey Choir.1

MB: After your secondary education at the City of London School, you went up to Cambridge on an organ scholarship at Gonville and Caius College . . .

MN: Yes, although I began by reading theology, not music. The Professor of Music at the time was Patrick Hadley, a name familiar to many Diapason readers as the composer of the anthem "My beloved spake" and the carol "I sing of a maiden."2 Hadley was Precentor of my college, Gonville and Caius, and encouraged me to change from theology to music. In retrospect, this was a good move, as I'm sure that I would have been too frustrated in the pulpit, not being involved in the musical side of things.

MB: The theological training must have been useful to you in your work as a church musician.

MN: Actually, it has been of immeasurable help to me over the years. As a theologian, I was required to learn Hebrew, which has given me a greater understanding of the Psalms. Wonderful as it is, Coverdale's translation of the Psalter does obscure the meaning of the original text on occasion. The opening of Psalm 121 is a prime example--"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills: From whence cometh my help." This is often taken to mean that the psalmist looks to the hills for his help, and finds it there; in fact, no help is to be found in the hills. The psalmist's help comes from the Lord, of course, as indicated in the following verse: "My help cometh even from the Lord, who hath made heaven and earth."

On another, more practical level, learning Hebrew was an extremely valuable exercise. Reading from right to left developed an independence and mental agility which served me well when it came to playing trio sonatas!

MB: Prior to Cambridge, you studied organ with Douglas Fox and Harry Gabb. During your university years, you were a pupil of Geraint Jones, one of England's foremost Bach exponents of the period, and a teacher of great repute.

MN: Geraint Jones was indeed a great pioneer in the field of early music--Bach in particular. He was also a marvellous teacher; in fact, it was he who really taught me how to play. He had a remarkable knack for knowing just what to do with a piece, even one that he himself didn't play. For example, I remember taking Ibert's Musette to one of my lessons. I'm sure that he didn't know the piece but his comments were so perceptive as to suggest intimate acquaintance with the music. My success at St. Albans would not have been possible without his expert guidance and instruction.

MB: That was in 1963?

MN: Yes--at the end of my Cambridge studies, in fact. In many ways, 1963 was of tremendous importance in terms of my subsequent career. During my last year at Cambridge, I started doing much more choral conducting, and was awarded a conducting scholarship at Tanglewood after a rather unusual interview at London's opulent Connaught Hotel . . .

MB: Unusual?

MN: The "interview" itself consisted of nothing more than a conversation over tea . . . with no less a personage than Aaron Copland.  Without any doubt, this was the most useful cup of tea I have ever had!

Tanglewood was, of course, a thrilling and stimulating experience, especially since 1963 was Erich Leinsdorf's first year with the Boston Symphony. And thanks to Peter Hurford's good offices and introductions, I was able to play a fair number of concerts in the United States.

MB: And you pursued these interests-- playing and conducting--when you returned from America?

MN: When I arrived back in London, I was appointed Assistant Organist of St. Margaret's, Westminster--here in the shadow of the Abbey--under Herbert Dawson, who had himself been an Abbey chorister under Bridge. When he left in 1965, I succeeded him as Director of Music. I also taught at Trinity College of Music in London, while continuing my own organ studies.

MB: With Geraint Jones?

MN: Yes, and also with André Marchal in Paris. Marchal was a great source of inspiration, with his legendary legato and supreme skill in "placing" notes. He was a marvellous teacher, too.

Additionally, I pursued my interest in conducting by going on one of Sir Adrian Boult's courses, something which proved to be extremely beneficial.  Boult's approach was very direct: he believed that the best training for a conductor was, quite simply, to conduct. By this, he meant that the body must convey the musical mind, with the musical thought clearly articulated through the conductor's movements. The same goes for choir training too. At first, one just holds things together, but later, one must shape the performances. A conductor must be much more than a musical traffic cop!

MB: This must have been an exciting time to have worked in London, what with the rapidly growing interest in performing early music with a critical eye to historical detail.

MN: The early music scene was indeed burgeoning at the time. In addition to well-established exponents such as Raymond Leppard, unusually lively musical minds such as John Eliot Gardiner and Roger Norrington were beginning to rise to prominence. As you can imagine, the atmosphere was conducive to new developments and experiments.  I started various things myself, such as performances of Baroque passions with early instruments--something very new at the time.

MB: Who influenced you in this work?

MN: Walter Emery and Arthur Mendel, mainly. I had always been interested in their scholarly writings, and they were a major source of guidance and inspiration.

MB: The crop of new tracker organs, generally designed for a more sympathetic rendition, shall we say, of earlier repertoire, must have been an important stimulus too . . .

MN: Very much so. Of course, as musicological research continued to break new ground, conventional wisdom as to what was the "ideal" organ varied greatly. Thus it was that some organs came to be regarded as old-fashioned within a few years of their installation.

MB: Could you give us an example of one such instrument?  

MN: The Flentrop at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall [QEH]. This was a good organ, designed for playing earlier repertoire, yet its equal temperament and its pitch (A440) made it almost out-of-date after only a few years. Naturally, this caused no end of trouble whenever the organ was used with period instruments at their original pitch. I shall never forget playing Handel's B-flat Organ Concerto [Op. 4, No. 2] at the QEH, and discovering to my horror that the organ pitch clashed with the Baroque ensemble.

MB:  What did you do?

MN: I had to transpose the entire piece down a semitone. (You can imagine how much extra work that entailed!)  Since that time, I have always thought of that concerto as being in A . . .

MB: 1971 saw your appointment to Winchester Cathedral as Organist and Master of the Music. This is undoubtedly one of England's most coveted positions, and one which owes much of its lustre to what you achieved during your tenure there. At the time, however, did you ever feel that you might be sacrificing something by moving away from London's thriving musical life?

MN: In some ways, yes, I did realise that I would have to forfeit certain things, in particular playing with the London orchestras. On the other hand, I moved to Winchester with a very open mind. I was only thirty-one at the time, and went there with an "anything is possible" attitude.

MB: What possibilities did you discover (or create) there?

MN: It was clear that there was ample scope for extending the musical horizons. For example, none of the Bach motets had ever been sung by the Southern Cathedral Choirs (Winchester, Salisbury and Chichester), so that was an ideal starting point. At Winchester, we did a good deal of earlier repertoire, including the first British performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion with period instruments. On such occasions as these, our top line would be augmented by a group of hand-picked singers from the Winchester area.

MB: But you don't do this at the Abbey.

MN: No, we use the choristers only.  In this way, the forces employed are more in keeping with those used by Bach. Our complement of men is smaller than Bach's, but the Abbey men are older and have stronger voices, thus compensating for what we lack in numbers.

MB: At Winchester, you were an ardent advocate of contemporary music too, with  performances and commissions of works by composers such as Jonathan Harvey--some of our readers will know his exquisite anthem "I love the Lord"-- and John Tavener. Of course, your affinity for the latter's output continues to this day, with the 1988 première (and 1994 recording, I might add) of Akathist of Thanksgiving.3

MN: I have conducted a fair number of Tavener premières, starting with the Little Requiem for Father Malachy Lynch in 1972. That work is very typical of the composer, inspired as it is by vast spaces. I think that this in turn both influences and inspires choirs which perform it.

As you say, Jonathan Harvey was another "Winchester" composer. (His son sang in the Winchester choir, incidentally.) My first contact with Harvey's work came when I played his Laus Deo for organ. There's an interesting story behind this: it takes only four minutes to perform and Harvey wrote it in a mere twelve hours. I spent more than thirty hours learning it!

Regarding "I love the Lord," he gave us this anthem in memory of his mother. It is a very simple, straightforward work, but worthy of Britten, I feel.

In my early years at Winchester, the new Bishop asked me to write a work for his enthronement using the text "TheDove Descending."4 I decided to ask a "real" composer instead, and approached Jonathan Harvey, who was teaching at Southampton University. (Southampton is situated in the Diocese of Winchester.)  He responded by writing a fascinating piece--"The Dove Descending"--although it posed some problems . . .

MB: Because of its technical challenges?

MN: Not only that, but also because there was considerable resistance to contemporary music. It was very unfamiliar terrain at the time, and the music was too difficult for many choirs. Today the situation is very different, because choirs have achieved a greater fluency in contemporary performance. The boys learn the music very quickly--a far cry from the early 1970s--and our men are able to read it at sight.

MB: That must be a prerequisite for professional men in cathedral choirs . . .

MN: Yes, especially here, given the sheer volume of music the Abbey Choir has to perform.

Incidentally, I should add that one of the gripes about "The Dove Descending" was the leap of a major tenth (E flat to top G) at the beginning of the piece.  Not to be dissuaded, I reminded the trebles of a Mozart piece in their repertoire which required negotiating an even larger interval--that of a twelfth!

MB: Before continuing our Winchester discussion, might I digress--since you've mentioned trebles--and ask you about the training your boys at the Abbey receive?

MN: We have regular daily rehearsals.  Nowadays, the training of choirboys proceeds with rather more vigor and liveliness than before, due in no small part to our greater understanding of how to work with a chorister's voice. Each boy receives individual training from myself and a voice coach, and we give them regular "check-ups." In my work at Winchester and Westminster, I have delighted in the challenge of working with boys aged 8-13. It is fascinating to see just how far one can take their voices, and I regard this aspect of my life as a great opportunity and blessing.

MB: As you look back on your time at Winchester, are there any special highlights?

MN: I think that 1979 was a banner year for us, signalling as it did the 900th anniversary of the Cathedral. One of my projects for 1979 was to arrange the first North American visit by an English cathedral (as opposed to collegiate) choir for twenty-five years. We were privileged to sing at several prestigious venues, such as the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Washington's Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall in New York.

Now thereby hangs a tale. Carnegie Hall had an electronic organ which gave out on us just before the concert was due to begin. This necessitated a radical revision of our program, and our tour manager was dispatched in haste to search out suitable repertoire at our hotel.  Luckily, we had a piano at our disposal, and it gave suitable service in several pieces--Mendelssohn's "I waited for the Lord," for example. However, piano accompaniment is considerably less suited for Purcell's "Jehova, quam multi"!  We all felt that the opening words of the anthem--"Lord, how are they increased that trouble me"--were very appropriate that evening!

Fortunately, we received good reviews for the New York concert, and the tour itself was a great success. As a learning experience, it proved invaluable for future visits.

MB: You appear to have enjoyed your good musical relationship with North America.

MN: Oh, very much so. I spent a sabbatical in the United States--at Princeton--in 1980, and was Artist in Residence at the University of California/Davis in 1984. I have done some guest conducting in North America and have always enjoyed playing recitals during my visits there.

MB: Towards the end of your Winchester period, the Choir took part in the first performance and recording of another contemporary work: the Requiem by a certain Andrew Lloyd Webber . . .

MN: Our participation in the Lloyd Webber brought us a great deal of press and media coverage. The exposure was very good for Winchester, of course, but I hope that it was also beneficial for cathedral music in general. Likewise, our tours and appearances at the Proms.  Events such as these bring cathedral music to a wider audience--and that cannot be a bad thing, after all!

MB: Earlier, we talked about your contribution to contemporary music at Winchester. How are you pursuing this interest at Westminster?

MN: I have set myself certain goals for my time here, one of which is to commission ten new masses with today's liturgies in mind. By that, I mean that the Sanctus and Benedictus must be concise.

MB: How is this project progressing?

MN: Well, Jeffrey Lewis has written a fine mass for us, and Francis Grier's contribution, Missa Trinitatis Sancte, is a winner in every way.5

MB: And a commission from John Tavener.

MN: Yes. In 1995, we celebrated the 750th anniversary of Henry III's substantial contribution to the Abbey's fabric. He enlarged the building in 1245 in memory of its founder, Edward the Confessor. To mark this, a major work  was commissioned from John Tavener. Entitled Innocence, it is a work for all humankind, using Jewish, Christian and Muslim texts.6

MB: 1995 was very much an annus mirabilis at Westminster Abbey, with the 300th anniversary of Purcell's death. The Abbey marked the tercentenary in grand style; but that is material for an article in itself . . .

MN: . . . We would have enough material for a series of articles, I'm sure!

MB: What a good idea. . . .

Mention of Purcell brings us back to your long-standing advocacy of early music. What is your approach to maintaining and nourishing the tradition of earlier repertoire here?

MN: I agree with the truism that tradition depends on maintenance. So, in order to perform this repertoire with greater stylistic fidelity and conviction, we now have a chamber organ by Kenneth Tickell. It will be of great use not only in Purcell, but also in English music of the 17th-18th centuries.

MB: A useful supplement to the renowned Harrison & Harrison . . .

MN: Indeed. The Abbey now houses two splendid examples of British organbuilding. The Harrison & Harrison instrument was built for the 1937 Coronation, and has undergone certain modifications since its installation. The most recent work was carried out under my predecessor, Simon Preston, and included the addition of an unenclosed Choir, some new mixtures and the Bombarde division. This has resulted in a superb accompanimental organ which is very rewarding to play.

For obvious reasons, the Harrison is less at home in music of a "chamber" nature, so our new organ fills what was a noticeable gap. It plays at various pitches - 415, 440 and 465 - and comprises Flutes at 8' and 4'; Principals at 4' and 2'; and a Sesquialtera beginning at Middle C.  As you can see, Cornet Voluntaries are possible.  There's also a device enabling the player to cut off the stop, permitting echo effects. Kenneth Tickell has voiced the instrument according to our express wishes, and it is a much-valued addition to the Abbey's musical resources.

MB: Tickell is an organist himself, of course.

MN: And a very fine one at that: an FRCO, no less!

MB:  I see that there's some controversy in British organbuilding circles at present, stemming from the fact that non-British companies have been awarded several recent contracts of note.  (I daresay that a similar situation on this side of the Atlantic would occasion vociferous comment from our North American builders.) Yet in some respects this is nothing new in British organ circles: after all, European firms have been building organs in the United Kingdom for several decades now.  Do you have any comments?

MN: Well, I welcome the work of what are sometimes referred to as "foreign" builders  Many of these organs are eminently superior when it comes to playing the repertoire, although they do not always meet every demand made of them. I do believe that the importation of instruments from abroad has, in some way, encouraged native builders to cast aside the insularity that was so prevalent in their ranks some thirty years ago.  This is heartening, I must say.

MB: Before we end our conversation, would you be good enough to share some thoughts on current North American organbuilding with Diapason readers?

MN: I always admire what the best North American builders have achieved, especially when faced with unhelpful acoustics. Fisk's instruments have always given me great pleasure, as have those by the Canadian firm of Karl Wilhelm. I haven't yet seen the Meyerson Symphony Center Fisk in Dallas, but am greatly intrigued by the excellent reports I hear.  I certainly look forward to playing it one day!          

The writer wishes to thank Martin and Penny Neary for their gracious hospitality and generous assistance in preparing this article.

Gordon and Barbara Betenbaugh

Gordon and Barbara Betenbaugh are organist/choirmasters at First Presbyterian Church in Lynchburg, VA. They have recently returned from a 13-week sabbatical in the UK. They also direct Cantate, the Children's Choir of Central Virginia, and Mrs. Betenbaugh is chapel organist and assistant choral director at Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg.

Tim Byram-Wigfield has been the music director at Jesus College in Cambridge since 1999. A former chorister at King's College, he was organ scholar at Christ Church Oxford before he moved to Winchester Cathedral to be sub-organist in 1985. For eight years he was Master of the Music at St. Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh before taking up his present appointment. He combines his work at Jesus College with a busy schedule as an organ recitalist, and has played in France, Australia, Belgium, the USA and Canada. He conducts the Northampton Bach Choir, is organist for the Millennium Youth Choir, and regularly gives workshops for amateur choirs. He is also active as a pianist, arranger and composer. He broadcasts frequently on BBC Radio 3, and has recorded on the EMI, Hyperion, Argo, Priory and Herald labels.

The chapel at Jesus College is the most ancient college building in Cambridge, begun in 1140. We had occasion to speak with Tim over tea prior to his afternoon rehearsal on Friday, May 23. We had previously attended a week's rehearsals and Evensongs at Jesus. The program is distinctive in maintaining two choirs. During university term there are five choral services each week. The Chapel Choir sings three and the Mixed Choir sings two. The alto, tenor and bass voices are common to both groups and are sung by the choral scholars, who each receive £100 per term plus a nominal payment for all the services they sing.

Tim Byram-Wigfield has recently been appointed director of music at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. The chapel runs a conventional cathedral-style set-up of boy choristers and twelve professional men, singing daily services. The building is one of the finest examples of English 15th-century architecture, with fan vaulting, fine stained-glass windows, and a marvelous Harrison and Harrison pipe organ.

BB: Your boy choir doesn't have a choir school like King's College or St. John's, do they?

TB-W: That's right.

BB: Do they pay tuition?

TB-W: No, the college provides it. In fact, the college also pays them a small stipend of £35 per term which is put into a savings account for them. It can accumulate until the time that their voice changes. We also provide some instrumental bursaries for them.

BB: How does that work?

TB-W: An instrumental bursary is a small donation that the college would make to the parents directed toward the cost of their instruments.

GB: Suzuki is not taught much over here, is it?

TB-W: It is in some places and certainly at very young ages. It used to be very popular for children who wanted to learn the violin in large classes. I daresay in London it still happens. I don't know of a class in Cambridge, but there might be one.

GB: Actually, from a choral standpoint it only helps the ear. It doesn't help the reading skills which is paramount.

TB-W: Yes, that's true. When I first came here four years ago there were only 13 full-time choristers, and only about half of them were reading on their instruments. Maybe it's just been through luck or because we've been tapping a different vein, the caliber of chorister we've been getting in terms of their musical ability and literacy has appreciated a bit. Going back to what you were saying, ours is a very different set-up from King's and St. John's. We operate on a part-time basis and can only be on that part-time basis, because the activity is essentially taking place after school at the end of the choristers' day.

BB: In the auditioned children's choir we have at home, the parents pay tuition. We've found that when parents pay tuition to the choir just like they do for soccer or other sports and activities, they feel more inclined to insure that their child attends rehearsal.

TB-W: Yes, that's like having lessons. That's less of a problem with us, because in a sense we're asking them to do us a favor by having the boys come and sing the services for us. In return, of course, we're providing them with a certain element of musical education and other aspects of education as well. Commitment being what it is these days, the amount of things the parents want their children to do affects the choir. We had a full house on Wednesday evening, and then we had less than 2/3 yesterday. This morning I got several e-mails that children would be absent for this, that, and the other reason. You get the idea.

GB: Yes, we have the same thing with church volunteer children's choirs at our church.

BB: Do you teach the boys in a separate theory class?

TB-W: No, it has to be done in the context of the music that we teach them. The only time I get the chance to teach them anything in that vein is when they're probationers and come to their probationers' class, which is on Tuesday afternoons. We only have an hour.

GB: Did you start the mixed choir of boys and girls in Edinburgh at St. Mary's Cathedral?

TB-W: No, my predecessor Dennis Townhill did. That works for them very successfully because they operate like a choir school. We had rehearsal in the morning and a service in the evening. Also, because it's in Scotland, where the tradition is not so firmly embedded in the society, it wasn't seen quite so much as a heresy to introduce boys and girls together, although for a while it was not without its difficulties. One of the strongest arguments there was that it was the only choir school in Scotland, and also because the choir school operated like a specialist music school like Wells Cathedral or Manchester. The argument was that this was a golden opportunity for a child to sing in the choir, so boys and girls should have the same opportunity. That's a pretty strong argument, really! It was for those reasons that they introduced the boys and girls. They kept an eye on the balance, which never really got beyond a third, boys to girls. Here it is a different situation, because this is a volunteer boys choir, just a club really. It could be swimming or it could be football.

BB: Do you have auditions?

TB-W: Oh yes, they are auditioned, and they have to pass that audition. They also have to pass an informal audition having done their probationary training before they become full choristers.

BB: Explain that, please. The earliest we take choristers in our auditioned children's choir is third grade, which is age 8. What age do you start the boys?

TB-W: I take them earlier at age 6, because I want them to get the bug early and get them used to using their voices and get them to understand something of the single line of music in front of them. They come and sing with the older boys once or twice a term.

BB: How often do you meet with these boys?

TB-W: Just once a week for a half an hour on Tuesday for singing with a bit of theory thrown in. It's really learning how to use the voice, and they learn some chorus songs and some easy hymns. They have a little test every term, so they have to learn something from memory, and they have to count rhythms. It's predominantly based on the singing rather than on instruments. That gives them the bug. They get their own cassock in the vestry and have something to aspire to. By the time they're 8 or 9 they are old enough to join the big guys.

GB: I understand that the college has done this for about 150 years.

TB-W: Yes, in 1849 when the stalls were put in and that lovely ancient organ case with the angels painted on it. [Author's note: In 1849 the "Sutton Organ" was built by J. C. Bishop and restored by Mander in 1967.] There was a rededication of the chapel, and we still have the manuscript for an anthem which was written by Thomas Walmisley for four boy choristers to sing. The names of the four boys are on the front of the manuscript. It's really very touching. They clearly were one of the porter's sons or one of the cook's sons or that kind of thing. Ever since 1849 there's been this tradition of getting volunteer boys to come sing in the chapel. That is, I daresay, one of the reasons why Jesus College is distinctive among other college chapels, because they've had the boy trebles, and a number of very distinguished church musicians have cut their teeth by being organ scholars here. There's James O'Donnell, Peter Hurford, Richard Lloyd, Malcolm Archer and a whole host of others who've gone on to work in schools as well as cathedrals. I think we've got four, maybe five, ex-Jesus organ scholars who are now assistants in cathedrals, which is very encouraging. It's a pretty worthy record. So, we don't have as long a tradition as King's or St. John's. One of the reasons that it wasn't as developed was because they never had a director of music to develop the program. The organ scholars were responsible for running it. In days gone by when academic pursuits weren't so pressurized, it was probably possible. In these days what with children's protection, the experience of teaching them, never mind the time it takes to go around to the schools and recruit them, the energy and time you need to devote to the program, you can't expect an 18-year old organ scholar to do that and do his degree also. That's why they created this post.

BB: How do you recruit?

TB-W: I go around to the schools where we already have choristers, and ones which I know are sympathetic. I do know some colleagues in other cathedrals where they have a similar situation where the headmasters won't allow them across the threshold because they think that it's peddling Christianity. This is becoming a real issue of political correctness in this country. You get parents who will refuse to allow their children to sing Christmas carols. I hate to say it, but this has emanated from the other side of the Atlantic. It's very sad in a way, because it undermines and makes us question everything about the oral tradition that we have in this country. In that context, it's actually in some places very difficult to sustain any kind of Christian choir at all. In Cambridge we're lucky because a lot of the people we're appealing to are educated enough to understand about the tradition; secondly there is a huge reservoir of parents who are employed by the university and therefore can understand what's being offered and thirdly, although they might send their child to a state school, they still want their child to be a chorister. Those three things give us an extra edge, but I think in other places it's rather different.

GB: We're going to the Southern Choirs Festival in Salisbury on the Saturday that you'll be there accompanying the Millennium Youth Choir. What kind of commitment do you have with them?

TB-W: Two courses, one at Easter and one in the summer.

GB: You don't accompany them each week then?

TB-W: No, because they come from all over the country. It's drawn from parish church choirs. The whole rationale behind the Millennium Youth Choir is that the RSCM designed this for young people between the ages of 16 and 23. It's for "A" level and university singers who wouldn't otherwise get the opportunity if they sing in their parish church choir to sing to that level of excellence.

GB: We have a chorister, a rising senior, who just e-mailed us that she'd been invited to sing at a new RSCM course at Washington National Cathedral this summer. She was delighted.

BB: She had been to two or three RSCM camps.

TB-W: Right. The RSCM has a number of summer courses as you've probably seen. The Millennium Youth Choir is relatively new as its name might indicate. It's only been going for three years. It was first conducted by Martin Neary. He did it for about 18 months to two years. Now Gordon Stewart conducts it.

GB: Where's he from?

TB-W: He hails from Dundee, but he's operating in the North. He was organist at Blackburn Cathedral and taught in Manchester for a long time. He's now the borough organist of Huddersfield Town Hall. There's a very fine Willis organ there. He does a lot of work with the BBC. He conducts both Daily Service and Songs of Praise as well as The Millennium Youth Choir.

BB: The Millennium Choir basically sings only twice a year?

TB-W: Yes, but there are one or two other opportunities that come along. For instance, they sang on the BBC Songs of Praise which is a television program on Sundays. Generally it's just twice a year, but I'm happy to go and play. It's nice to be able to do that.

GB: The 1971 Mander organ in the chapel is certainly eccentric!

TB-W: Oh, yes. It's really on its last legs now.

GB: Are you going to renovate it?

TB-W: Thirty years ago English organ builders were only just discovering or re-discovering about the principles of German Werkprinzip and tracker action. This was their brave first attempt to build something with tracker action and bold German choruses. That's what it is! It's very much a product of its time. It has the eccentric things like the reed en chamade (laughter, and a nasal YYENT). It's a very strident sound. Everything is starting to wear. It's always been very heavy to play. As I say, it's one of these curiosities that is, in many ways, a pioneering experiment. People recognize that now. There are those that say we should keep it because it was pioneering. That's fine if you don't have to play it every day.

GB: I understand.

TB-W: The college recognizes that something's got to be done. In fact, our strategy has been not to replace it with a new organ, but to replace it with a worthy Victorian instrument that needs a home. We found a 3-manual Hill up in a Baptist church in Portsmouth. It didn't start out there. It came from another church in South London. The Baptist church is closing, so we've purchased the organ, and it's being taken down and put in storage. The next stage now is to finalize how it will fit in the Mander space and whether we want to enhance the specifications at all. We'll then put forward proposals to the college. That's been our strategy rather than to build a new tracker action organ. Also we need some liturgical sounds to do the accompaniments. We need an oboe, a harmonic flute, a swell to choir, just those kinds of basic things.

GB: It will be a 3-manual?

TB-W: Yes, at least a 3-manual.

GB: With pistons and memory?

TB-W: It will have pistons, but it won't have a stepper. I'm not into those sequencers. It will have some memory. A lot of the accompaniment skills relied on in this country is being able to use the manual and the pedal pistons together. There's a coupler that I don't think you have very often in the states called the great to pedal pistons coupler. For many years organists would learn to accompany using great pedal pistons. When you press the great thumb piston, it operates the pedals as well. The idea is that you would use the great and the swell. People like Howells, Whitlock and Ireland learned their craft of organ management by using this skill. That's something which is fast disappearing, because everybody uses sequencers these days to change one of the stops.

GB: I have on my instrument Great 1 and 2 pistons which affect the pedal also. I wired it in mainly for the cadential 32's and accompanying. It's easier than a toe stud, of course.

TB-W: Yes, it is. Our organ will be quite a modest specification, probably about 49 stops. We deliberately decided to go down this route, because a lot of the new organs being built at the moment in Cambridge are of a particular type. Selwyn's having a Létourneau built now.

BB: We'll be there week after next. Létourneau does excellent work.

TB-W: Gerton College has a new Swiss organ by St-Martin. It is a very clever 4-manual with about five stops in each manual. It's a particular style of instrument which does lend itself very easily to turn of the century style music. There are very few romantic symphonic organs in Cambridge--King's is a modest example. St. John's is not really one, but it pretends to be. You should go and see the one in Our Lady and the English Martyrs.

GB: We went down there and saw it, but we haven't heard it yet. I understand it is used in Sarah MacDonald's CD of Howells' Evening Canticles with the Selwyn College Choir.

TB-W: Yes, it's a very fine romantic organ, and they restored it very well.

GB: I love the sound of the crescendo "build up" while accompanying at King's.

TB-W: It's fine up to about mezzo-forte I think. 

GB: I was surprised to see that bass flute inside the organ screen in the staircase to the console.

TB-W: Yes.

BB: Do you ever get to play other instruments in town?

TB-W: I played that Harrison on Monday. The King's Voices (mixed voices) sing the services on Mondays.

BB: Did you play last Sunday for Evensong or was it an organ scholar?

TB-W: Yes, I played.

BB: We were there and have been attending rehearsals of the Men and Boys choir and Evensongs for several weeks.

TB-W: What did we do? The Mathias--the Jesus service, and the Hadley My Beloved Spake. Well, it's quite a nice thing to do and no pressure for me. It's nice not to be in charge and to be at the steering end.

GB: It's quite a room.

TB-W: Yes! What kind of church do you work in?

GB: Presbyterian. It's about 1200 members. We have an adult choir of 40 people, a Youth Choir of about 40+, children's choirs of about 50 and three handbell choirs. We have an auditioned choir called Cantate, the Children's Choir of Central Virginia consisting of two choirs from 3rd-7th grade and 8th grade through high school. I direct the younger choristers, and a colleague does the high school singers. Barbara accompanies one choir and directs a third group called the Cantabile Singers, which is an all-girl choir in grades 8 through 12.

TB-W: Both boys and girls together?

BB: Yes. The original concept was just to be children. The girls could stay until age 15 or 16, and the boys were supposed to leave when their voices changed. They wouldn't go away, so we just changed the concept. The older group sings SATB, and the younger ones all treble.

TB-W: In some cathedrals where there are volunteer choristers, like Carlisle and St. Alban's, they occasionally arrange for the ex-choristers whose voices have recently changed to come and sing with the existing choristers, so that they don't feel that they've been thrown out on the scrap heap. Of course, we are desperate for altos, tenors and basses.

GB: Well, are you playing Monday at King's?

TB-W: Yes, I think so. It's extraordinary, isn't it, that there's so much activity in a radius of about three miles. Most churches in this country are gasping for decent resources. The real sadness of this training is that most choral scholars, especially at Trinity where they have girls, unless they want to make a career as a professional singer, they don't tend to carry on singing in church choirs. It's a real shame. Then, of course, we have a dearth of organists.

GB: I was going to ask you if you have problems like we do in the states.

TB-W: It's getting bad now. Early this month we had the open day for prospective organ scholars, those who would like to apply to Cambridge to be organ scholars. We had 24, which if you consider that we have 22 colleges in the scheme isn't very much.

GB: So the university will have to take everyone?

TB-W: That wasn't the actual competition. That happens in September, but it's indicative of how things are. Last year I asked the question of how many of them were expecting to go on to be a professional organist. I think only two were.

GB: Are the organ scholars at King's going to continue in the profession?

TB-W: I think Daniel Hyde is staying on another year as a postgraduate student, because there are hardly any openings at the moment.

BB: What about Ashley Grote?

TB-W: Ashley still has another year, so he's set there. The really high fliers like the idea of going to London perhaps and maybe being an organ scholar or one of the assistants at St. Paul's or Westminster ABBey. They don't like the idea of going somewhere in middle England and subsequently doing scout mastering or something.

GB: Since you have two choirs, do you have a lot of administration work?

TB-W: I spend a lot of my time dealing with administrative things to do with the choristers and the interaction with child protection monitoring procedures. A lot of administrative work is generated just by having the choristers. If we want the choristers to take part in a concert, either we or the person promoting the concert has to be responsible for getting licenses for those children to take part in that concert. Technically, that means filling in 12-page forms, getting passport photographs and doctor's certificates for the kids to take part.

BB: That's just for them to leave the country?

TB-W: Yes.

BB: Do you take your choir on tour every year?

TB-W: Yes, we do, but we don't undertake concerts for which people are charged, so that problem doesn't arise. There was a story I heard about Wells Cathedral. Wells took their choir to the States about three years ago. They had not only to work out a schedule which corresponded to legislation concerning rehearsal time, sufficient bathroom stops and this sort of thing. They then had to keep a diary about how the actual tour went, so they could compare the two. They had to have something written down in case somebody made any allegations, or wanted to pursue litigation or complained about being tired, became ill, etc. They would have a record. Things are going berserk. Of course, most places take the easy way out and don't want to deal with that. It's hard enough to get choristers in the first place and yet, there is still this much trouble.

BB: What about your mixed college choir? Do you tour with them every year?

TB-W: Yes, we do. We try to have each choir have a project of going away once a year. It's sometimes nice to take the mixed choir away to the Continent whereas the boys choir might go to a cathedral. They've done a lot of touring in the last eighteen months or so. We've taken them to Paris and Copenhagen. In the new year we'll be going to Edinburgh to sing services for Epiphany. One thing I'd like to ask you actually is what's your view of church music in this country coming from the States.

GB: Well, we always said that God lives at King's College! (laughter) The first time I heard a recording of the King's choir was in the early 1960s, and it was the most in tune singing I'd ever heard. I didn't know it was possible to sing like that. I got the bug as an undergraduate and through the years we learned to love the wonderful music making at St. John's and other colleges and cathedrals as well.

BB: We think church music here is wonderful with performances to uncompromising standards in many places.

TB-W: The world even in this country has moved on a great deal since 1960 to 2003.

BB: Oh, sure.

TB-W: Have you seen a copy of the magazine Cathedral Music?

GB: Yes, we take it. It is excellent.

TB-W: In there is an article by the organist at Guilford Cathedral trying to defend a very difficult situation. Guilford, as you probably know, is a post-war cathedral. Barry Rose was the first organist, and he recruited the kids. They started from nothing. He managed to get scholarships at the local schools. 40 years ago it was possible to do that. In a changing society and the way that parents run children's lives these days, it isn't possible to do that nowadays. One couldn't start a cathedral choir from nothing in the way that Barry was able to do in the 1960s. In Guilford, his successors have had to cope with and deal with that legacy. It's been very difficult. In that situation they've decided to scrap the Saturday services, so the boys will have one day of the weekend free. I can see that in some cathedrals that will happen more and more. I do think that things are different. In places like King's and Westminster Abbey where the resources are rich you will always have the tradition continued. When you get to places where they operate on a part-time basis you have trouble even getting an alto at all. When I first went to the cathedral organist conference, it was very obvious some people are having difficulty securing lay clerks. However, they wanted to pretend that they were doing as well as their colleagues were. I think now that organists are beginning to be much more vocal and frank about their experiences in recruiting boy choristers and adults. In trying to persuade parents of the commitment involved, I think we are seeing the start of fragmentation. Maybe in King's and Westminster Abbey it will continue for years and years, but I don't think it's going to continue everywhere. Even if you try and take those kinds of things into account. you then throw in the changing liturgical demands and the more informal stances that the clergy likes to take who perhaps question the need for having such regular formal services. Even initiatives like Common Worship dilute what the Book of Common Prayer offers in terms of musical opportunities. They would say otherwise. They point to all the resources that they produce. Actually it's a dilution of a music that used to be so rich. They are encouraging to ditch 400 years of music and use theirs instead. Their music simply isn't in the same division. Then you're caught in a problem because clearly there are questions of whether Evensong is just a time warp and are you just presenting music that was written 400 years ago. But what else is being offered?

GB: Dumbed down rubbish.

TB-W: It is dumbed down. Some people are just taking the position that you just have to go with the flow.

BB: Any difficulties or problems you may face over here are more than doubled in the States.

TB-W: I think you are further down the track than we are. The only thing we've got that saves us really is the tradition and the history of the buildings that we happen to be in.

GB: I was commenting to Barbara as we walked here today that I think that educated people here in the UK are more cognizant of the arts because of the long tradition. Our parish is an unusual congregation in that almost all are professionals and world travelers, well educated and at the top of their profession. We are very fortunate to have much support for all our endeavors and concerts. However, educated people in the states in general are not usually musically cultured or supportive of the arts. I think that the vast majority of professionals in the states still listen to pop music on the radio for entertainment, and a small percentage support the symphony and community concerts, etc.

TB-W: Certainly. One can't talk of a more superior tradition--you can't talk about the western tradition of classical music as being superior to ethnic musicology or even studies in popular music and jazz music which has over 100 years now. It isn't really possible to talk of Beethoven, Brahms and Bach in the same reverential tones we used to and get away with it. So, the times they are a-changing!

BB: It's not as scary for us in our position.

TB-W: Again, you're further down the track. I've been very lucky to have the opportunity both in Edinburgh and before when I was at Winchester to be able to deal in music which I love and was brought up on. I count my lucky stars that I'm still in a job which allows me to do it.  I'm not quite sure that in another ten years time it will still be there. It's only a trust fund that keeps things going and pays for my salary. That's a big part of my fortune, really. For as long as the college wants it to happen, that's fine. I can see a time, even here, where the dean might retire and the college might say, "Oh, do we really want a dean? Do we really want to have Evensong?"

GB: A turnover of ministers in any church could greatly change musical things. The stories are legion.

TB-W: Of course, the decline in churchgoing is becoming very alarmingly rapid in this country. It's slightly higher in Scotland. Perhaps we should leave for rehearsal now.

Author's note: As we left for that day's rehearsal of men and women and walked through the beautiful grounds of Jesus College, the mood of our philosophical discussion greatly changed. Tim is a high energy, easy-going person who smiles a lot and encourages his choristers in the joy of music. He is also an excellent, natural pianist who plays with much ease and joy. His choristers obviously enjoy making music with him. We look forward to visiting Jesus College again and attending Evensong after the Hill organ is installed. We also look forward to meeting up with Tim at Windsor Castle.

by Marcia Van Oyen

"English concert organist John Scott is recognized not only as one of his country's finest organists and musical leaders, but also as one of the most gifted of his generation of concert organists in the performance world today." So begins John Scott's biographical sketch in his management's brochure. Scott's stellar career includes serving as Director of Music at St. Paul's Cathedral and (formerly) Professor of Organ at the Royal Academy of Music, many tours and recordings with the St. Paul's choir and as organ soloist, and a dizzying array of other appearances and awards. In addition to an already demanding schedule, this year he served as a judge at the Dallas International Organ Competition, arranged an exchange with the choir of St. Thomas Church New York City in June, and is performing the complete works of Bach at St. Paul's in twenty-five recitals.

 

On his most recent recital tour to the United States, John Scott visited Glenview Community Church in Glenview, Illinois to play the inaugural recital for a concert series featuring the new Buzard pipe organ and to give a masterclass, "Accompanying the English Anthem." During the visit, he demonstrated a genuine love of his work and approached his tasks with the carefully-paced energy of a veteran performer. He is a most delightful person--confident but soft-spoken, business-like yet very polite, sincere and possessed of a slightly mischievous sense of humor. Following his electrifying recital performance, Scott was asked if constantly being praised for his work becomes commonplace. He responded simply with a smile, "I don't get tired of hearing compliments."

During one of our conversations, Scott began to reminisce about a childhood experience with organ music. That recollection became the stepping stone for a formal interview, an exchange during which he shared some of the details of his experience as a musician in a great English cathedral and how he got there.

 

MVO: During lunch on Saturday, you mentioned a recording that made a great impression on you when you were young--G.D. Cunningham playing the Bach D-minor Toccata and Fugue at Birmingham Town Hall. Was that one of your earliest experiences hearing organ music?

JS: Yes, I'm sure it was. It was a scratchy old 78 record that we had at home. When I was growing up the 78's were already out of fashion, but we had an old player at home that I was fascinated by--the wind-up sort of gramophone. I discovered this recording of G.D Cunningham and I was amazed that there could be such music. I had never heard anything like it. It was something entirely new to me and I couldn't stop listening to it. I think I wore the record out in the end.

 

MVO: How old were you at the time?

JS: I must have been about eight.

 

MVO: Were you already a chorister by then?

 JS: Yes, I became a chorister when I was seven. I had heard organ music, of course, but it was at about the same time that I discovered this recording.

 

MVO: At that time, you were singing in the choir at Wakefield?

JS: Yes. It was what we call a parish church cathedral--a church that had become a cathedral in the late nineteenth century. We had a very good choir of men and boys. All the boys were educated at the local grammar school where we had choral scholarships to help pay for our education. From an early age, I was exposed to a wide variety of good music.

 

MVO: When did you begin playing the organ?

JS: When I finished singing in the choir, I had already been learning the organ for a couple of years--first with Percy Saunders, who very much put me on the right lines and then with the new organist, Jonathan Bielby. He was a great influence on my playing. I studied with him from the age of fourteen to eighteen. He did more than anybody else to develop my technique and my stylistic awareness. He was a very fastidious and demanding teacher, and also a great inspiration. He had been organ scholar himself at St. John's College Cambridge under George Guest. It was he who encouraged me to go for that particular scholarship. I went to Cambridge at the age of eighteen and studied for two music degrees, leaving at the age of 21.

 

MVO: What were you studying in your lessons with Jonathan Bielby? Repertoire or accompaniment?

JS: A mixture of both. To begin with, the main emphasis was on accompanying. I was in the extraordinary situation of finishing in the choir one week, and the following Sunday I was drafted in to play for the services. I guess my organ playing had become suitably proficient. I went literally from being in the choir one week to accompanying it the next week. After a period of some months, during which I was being tried out, it became a regular process. I was eventually appointed assistant organist at the cathedral. I can remember that first Sunday because we sang an anthem by Basil Harwood called "O How Glorious Is the Kingdom," which has quite a difficult organ part. I dread to think now what it sounded like, but I must have been able to cope with it.

 

MVO: In the United States, organ study tends to be very repertoire-based, although the vast majority of organists are going to play in churches and need to accompany, not be solely concert artists. I have the impression that your training had an emphasis on accompanying.

JS: That's right. I was a pupil-assistant to Jonathan Bielby. His main job was to direct the choir; I would do most of the service playing. That meant it was in his interest for the success of the choir that the accompaniment be really well-rehearsed and moulded. We spent a lot of time in my lessons working on the cathedral music. That's not to say that we didn't do repertoire. I remember doing a lot of pieces during the four years that I studied with him. When I went to Cambridge, although I was expected to play for services and accompany the choir on a daily basis, I didn't have any specific instruction in that. My music degree was purely academic. I was working on harmony, counterpoint, history, orchestration--that sort of thing. For the first two years, my studies included no practical part whatsoever other than keyboard harmony. Only in my third year was the practical part significant. During that year I had to play a half-hour recital, but it only counted for ten percent of my final marks. During this time at Cambridge, I began studying with Gillian Weir. It was a profound and remarkable experience to study with someone of her eminence and inspirational quality. But it was very much left up to me whether I wanted to study with anybody and indeed, who that person should be. It wasn't a requirement for my university course at all. The same at Oxford. You could be an organ scholar for three years and never have an organ lesson. It's crazy.

 

MVO: That's incredible! Is that the way it is today?

JS: I'm not sure. I think things must have changed quite a bit since I was there. I think the whole syllabus is not quite so academically based. Practical musicianship has rather more emphasis now. It does seem strange, looking back.

 

MVO: Based on your experience as a cathedral musician, if you could design the curriculum, what would it include for those aspiring to do what you do?

JS: When I was at St. John's Cambridge, my main duties as Organ Scholar were accompanying and conducting when George Guest was away. As I say, there was no formal training as such, you were thrown into it in a way, and you either sank or you swam. With that in mind, it would be sensible for people who want to focus on church music to have courses in choral direction, service accompaniment, realization of orchestral scores on the organ, and of course guidance in repertoire.

You have to realize the distinction between the English university system and the conservatoire system. If you go to university, you would expect to take a music degree in which the greatest emphasis is on academic study, whereas in a conservatoire it's the other way around. You're basically being trained to be a practical musician, though a certain amount of theoretical study is necessary, of course. I chose consciously to go to university rather than conservatoire because I wanted the broader base that that experience could offer--the chance to meet with people from other disciplines and backgrounds. I found that to be more attractive.

Looking back again, in my first week at St. John's--I was overwhelmed by having this world-famous choir to accompany--I had the scary experience of playing for evensong on the first day of term with basically a new choir and Dr. Guest conducting. On the next day and the day after, he was away and I found myself standing in front of a choir, something I'd never done in my life. Nobody had told me what to do, I just simply had to get on with it. To some degree it's a very English mentality--a very dilettante approach. You make of it what you can and learn by your mistakes. If you're trying to conduct a choir and nobody can follow what you're doing, you have to refine your technique so they can. Of course, I had watched other people conduct. That's the great learning process--observing other people who are  experts. You take a lot of that with you. To this day, I've never had a conducting lesson in my life. It may seem very strange indeed, yet that's the way one functions. And I have the privilege of working with a fully professional choir and many times in the year with professional orchestras.

 

MVO: Would you say that your experience is fairly typical? Do you have other colleagues who have been similarly plunged into service?

JS: Yes, I think it is pretty typical. A lot of people do come through the cathedral tradition so they're immersed in it. They know the repertoire. Many of my colleagues who are cathedral organists were cathedral choristers. A lot of them have been to university and had very good organ tuition. The other practical skills are acquired rather than instilled. That has its own merits. In this day and age, we're much more concerned with building courses and curricula based on what people wish to do later. All of these things are being examined. In London at the Royal Academy of Music there's a church music course that's been running for ten years which does give people these basic skills which are required for the profession. It's by no means unique now, though it was unique at the time. There are many other establishments which are providing church music degrees which encompass not only the historical background but practical skills and knowledge as well.

 

MVO: Tell me about your transition from St. John's to St. Paul's.

JS: After four years in Cambridge, I went straight to St. Paul's. I moved to London. I had never lived in London and I was very excited by that prospect. London seemed to be the right place to go. I was invited to take the place of third organist at St. Paul's and assistant organist at Southwark Cathedral, just over the river. Southwark is the cathedral for the diocese of south London, only about a mile away from St. Paul's.  So I was number two at Southwark and number three at St. Paul's, basically playing three days of the week in each Cathedral, usually at Southwark on Sunday. That was a great experience. I did that for seven years--running back and forth over London Bridge. It was a great learning experience, I must say, being involved on the one hand with the professional choir at St. Paul's and the volunteer choir at Southwark cathedral. However two very different liturgical bases as well. St. Paul's at that stage represented all that was very "correct and proper," if that's the right expression--a very traditional form of Anglicanism, whereas Southwark was a more progressive and, dare one say, slightly livelier style of worship.

 

MVO: Were you working under Christopher Dearnley at St. Paul's when you began?

JS: I was working both with Christopher Dearnley and with Barry Rose who at that stage was in charge of the choir. Looking back, I did most of my accompanying for Barry because I tended to play on the days when Christopher was not there. I worked closely with Barry and learned a great deal. He's a phenomenal and inspirational choir trainer. That was a terrific experience at a time when the St. Paul's choir had made a great impact under Barry's leadership through recordings, developing a more public profile than they had previously had.

 

MVO: At that time Christopher Dearnley was mainly playing the organ?

JS: He was really. He was the Director of Music, having the overall say in the music program, but after the organ was rebuilt in 1973-1977, he very much wanted to concentrate on playing the organ, to develop its role in the life of the cathedral and beyond. He concentrated on playing the organ for the services and Barry did most of the choir work. I was gradually brought into that. After a while, I took the choir for one day a week.

 

MVO: So you moved more into Barry Rose's position eventually?

JS: For a year, Christopher took the choir again when Barry left. There's a very nice recording from that time on the Decca label, with Christopher conducting and me accompanying. After about a year, he wished to go back to playing the organ rather more. I think that's where he felt the most comfortable. I was keen to have the opportunity to take the choir on a more regular basis. Although I was sub-organist I found myself directing the choir more and more. I gradually stepped into that position.

 

MVO: Being in a high-profile position, you're probably under scrutiny a lot of the time. How do you handle that?

JS: To be honest, I don't worry about it too much now. I used to worry about it rather more. You're right, it's a bit of a goldfish bowl. There's never a day, even in the depths of winter, when there are fewer than a hundred people at evensong. You're always conscious that the daily choral office is something that is very visible. Certainly, in the summer months, many more people attend. In July we have visitors from all over the world when we do the orchestral masses. It is a very visible position in that sense. One struggles to maintain standards, but I'm very fortunate in the support and set-up that I have from my assistants, my colleagues and from the choir. We all strive to do the best. In recent years we've reached a pretty consistent standard which is there from day to day. Obviously, every choir has its off days, but they seem to be less frequent than they were when I first started doing the choir work. I'm more established in the position. I don't feel so much the weight of what went on before. I've been there long enough, made recordings and feel more comfortable about what I'm doing in the job.  Of course, I'm always concerned to see who's there from day to day and if they're people I recognize. There might be a day when you suddenly see George Guest or David Willcocks sitting in the congregation! If you worried about that too much, you wouldn't be able to get anything done. Just put your head down and get on with it.

 

MVO: Do you find the pressure to be a motivating force?

JS: Undoubtedly. The moment you began to relax, to rest on your laurels, is the moment to move on to something else. Every day has its challenge. There's no such thing as a routine week at St. Paul's. There's always something extra. Whether that's ceremonial services, memorial services or whatever, there's never a chance to settle back into a routine. A daily sung evensong is a challenge in itself because for the most part, you pick up the music with the boys first thing in the morning. You've got an hour in which to mould it in the morning, and half an hour with them in the afternoon before the men arrive. The men rehearse at 4:30 with the service at 5:00. As a full choir, we've really only got about twenty-five minutes to practice forty minutes of music. It's a lot to do. There isn't the oppportunity to work much more than a day at a time. On Monday, I try to look at some of the mass for Sunday, but generally we're living from day to day. There's a lot of pressure in that, just to get things done. We have to work quickly, efficiently, and professionally.

 

MVO: What is the rehearsal schedule?

JS: We rehearse every day except Thursday morning. The choristers are educated in the choir school, which is directly behind the cathedral. They're all boarders--they live there during the term. I see them from 7:50-8:50 every morning except Thursday, which is our day off.  Evensong is sung by the men on Thursday, and the boys sing evensong on Monday. Otherwise, it's full choir on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and three services on Sunday. That's nine choral services each week on a regular basis.

 

MVO: What do you enjoy the most about your work?

JS: Many things, really. I'm very fortunate being based where I am, having this wonderful building in which to work. It's always an amazing experience just to go into St. Paul's. Every morning I go in and think "wow." It's a building that completely overwhelms you. The sound of music in the building is very special as well. With nine seconds of reverberation, it's a unique acoustical environment in which to work. I'm very fortunate with the choir that I have--30 boys and 18 men--fully professional singers. It's a very dramatic and exciting group of singers with which to work. Of course, the organ  itself is tremendously thrilling. It's a fine instrument in every sense. The Willis part of the organ has great quality and refinement. The part built by Mander in 1973-77 added other dimensions that fit the building very well, further developing the potential of the instrument in a way unforeseen previously. It's a very exciting, versatile instrument. This year I'm playing all the organ works of Bach in twenty-five recitals on Sundays and I'm just amazed at how well it copes with that repertoire. It's been remarkably successful. Obviously, one has to register things in a very judicious manner, but many people have been amazed at how well it does work.

 

MVO: During your masterclass on  Saturday, I noticed that while you were playing you had a smile on your face. It seemed obvious that you simply love that music and love what you do. What is it all about for you? 

JS: It's very hard to define! I couldn't put my hand on my heart and say that I like this piece of music more than any other. I enjoy all the different styles of music that we sing. It's basically the English cathedral repertoire, of course, and a lot of eighteenth and nineteenth century music. But in the time that I've been responsible for the choir, I've moved the repertoire backwards quite a lot to encompass more polyphony and early music, music which I very much enjoy. The versatility of the group that I have is very great indeed. The men are not particularly challenged by anything you put in front of them as far as notes are concerned. They can basically read anything! There is little need for note-bashing. It's so much been a part of my musical life to be involved with this particular sort of music--Psalms, hymns, canticles, anthems--it's hard to imagine life without it, really. I've often considered whether at some stage in my life I'd like to be a free-lance organist. I'm not sure. That would have its compensations in many ways because I'm really not playing the organ so much at St. Paul's. But I can't imagine life without pieces like the Balfour Gardiner "Evening Hymn" or the Byrd Great Service. I enjoy them so much. Each time I come back to them I try and find something new and keep myself fresh in that way. I don't feel that I'm remotely tired of this music yet. I hope that in ten years time I can still say that. It's the sort of music that does really inspire me still.

 

MVO: What keeps that musical tradition alive? It's very easy for traditions to become frozen. 

JS: Yes, I know what you mean. Traditions can become fossilized. I think the tradition is continuously being enriched by music from other sources.    The fact is that we're discovering ne repertoire all the time. More and more music is being printed, most notably early music by some very good publishers in England who specialize entirely in Renaissance polyphony--pieces which have not been available before outside of collected editions. The market is being flooded by good quality material. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned, it's wonderful to encourage our best contemporary composers to write for the church. I'm glad to say that the Dean and Chapter support this endeavor. Part of our annual music budget is given over to commissions. For the millenium, we've pushed the boat out a bit. We had a big service on January 2nd which was televised nationally, attended by the Queen and the Government. We commissioned a setting of "Jubilate" from Sir Peter Maxwell Davies for choir, organ and brass. It was a good commission and will work well on its own with organ accompaniment, so we can do it liturgically. We commissioned some brass fanfares from another of our most eminent composers Sir Harrison Birtwistle. They were stunningly well conceived for the building with four different groups of brass playing around the building. It was really fantastic. Later this year, in July, we'll be doing a premiere of a work that we've commissioned from Luciano Berio, the great Italian composer. Our commissions in the past have been from English composers. I felt it was a time to bring in somebody else, so we commissioned Berio who seems keen to write for us. This is an important part of our life at St. Paul's--the church in its traditional role as patron of the arts must be seen to be lively and energetic. Over the years, we've commissioned pieces from John Tavener, Jonathan Harvey, Francis Grier, and William Mathias, among others. Most years we've had a commissioned piece. I've been very pleased and proud of that tradition.

 

MVO: You seem to view that as a responsibility.

JS: I do. It's all to do with keeping the tradition alive. On the one hand, I like to think that what we're doing is very much in the monastic spirit, as the monks of yesteryear. Our daily office of Evensong has evolved from that tradition. But it has to be renewed of course. We have to be always pushing the boundaries either forwards or, indeed, backwards. That's vital.

 

by Roy F. Kehl

Roy Kehl has resided in Evanston, Illinois, since 1969. He is a past member of the Bishop’s Advisory Commission on Church Music of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago. From 1981–1985 he served on the Standing Commission on Church Music of the Episcopal Church which compiled The Hymnal 1982. In that capacity he chaired a sub-committee on plainsong hymnody and consulted with Morgan Simmons in course of that work.

On March 24, 1996, Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago celebrated the music ministry of Morgan and Mary Simmons, who retired after 28 years as organist and choirmaster and associate organist, respectively. The festivities included several motets sung by the Fourth Church Morning Choir and alumni of that choir, vigorous hymn singing accompanied by Morgan, organ works played by Mary, Roy Kehl, Richard Enright, and Margaret Kemper, and tributes by choir members, Richard Proulx, and the Rev. Dr. John M. Buchanan, senior pastor of the church, followed by a gala reception in Anderson Hall.

Both Morgan and Mary Simmons are graduates of the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary, and have long been active in the AGO and the Hymn Society. During the Simmons' tenure, a number of innovations have taken place. Among them is the annual Festival of the Arts, which has featured such artists as Robert Shaw, Dave Brubeck, Paul Winter and Maya Angelou. Since the installation of the 125-rank Aeolian/Skinner organ in 1971, there has been an annual series of organ recitals performed by an international roster of musicians. The church has commissioned a number of anthems, several of which are included in the Fourth Church Anthem Series, published by Hope Publishing Company. Several recordings of the Morning Choir have also been released.  A recent major building campaign has included structural and acoustical renovations, as well as enhancement of the Aeolian/Skinner organ by Goulding & Wood.

This conversation took place on April 22 and 29 at the Simmons' home in Evanston, Illinois, shortly before they left on a trip to England.

Roy Kehl: Mary and Morgan, can you tell our readers something of your backgrounds, where you were born and raised, went to school, how you met, and how you came to Chicago?

Mary L. Simmons: Although I was born in Centralia, Illinois, I spent my growing up years in Carbondale where I was very fortunate to have a wonderful piano teacher  (Juilliard graduate) from the time I was five until I finished high school. At age twelve I began organ lessons with our church organist, but continued piano as my first instrument at the University of Illinois for my first two years when I switched to organ as a major. My teacher there was Paul Pettinga. In September of 1951 I enrolled in the master's program in sacred music at Union Theological Seminary in New York where I was a student of Hugh Porter and studied composition with Normand Lockwood. It was at Union where Morgan and I met and where we were married on May 17, 1953--two days before we received our degrees.

Our years at Union were very special times for us not only because of our developing relationship but also because of the lively stimulation that prevailed at the seminary and the city of New York. Clarence and Helen Dickinson were very much a part of the school's life as were Ethel Porter, Charlotte Garden, Harold Friedell, Madeline Marshall, Peter Wilhousky, Vernon deTar, and Robert Baker, to say nothing of the theological giants such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. The friendships which we made in those years with fellow students remain to this day.

Morgan F. Simmons: Andalusia, Alabama, is my home town. Although I was enthusiastic about music from an early age and had a reasonably good piano teacher from the time I was seven or eight, my music study was not very solid until my last three years of high school. During World War II my father was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where I had the good fortune of coming under the guidance of Union Seminary graduate Lee Sistare who put me on the right path to serious organ study. Simultaneously, I studied piano with a very fine teacher in Fayetteville.  During my senior year in high school we had moved back to Andalusia, and I made a twice monthly trip to Montgomery (85 miles away) to study organ with another Union graduate and a master piano teacher with an engaging southern name, Lily Byron Gill, who had been a student of Moszkowski and Ernest Hutcheson.

My undergraduate work was at DePauw University where I studied with Berniece Mozingo and Van Denman Thompson, the latter, one of the most gifted musicians that I have ever known. (He had completed a bachelor's degree at New England Conservatory in one year, done post graduate study at Harvard and was teaching at the college level by the age of 20.) I, too, entered Union Seminary in the fall of 1951, and, like Mary, I studied with Hugh Porter.  Following commencement and after two years in the army, I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for study at the Royal School of Church Music in Croydon, England, where we spent a year.  Returning to the states I began a doctoral program at Union while serving as minister of music at the Bound Brook Presbyterian Church in Bound Brook, New Jersey, where we had a comprehensive program with six choirs. In 1961 I completed the doctorate in sacred music at Union with emphasis on hymnology, and in January of 1963 I accepted a joint appointment as minister of music at the First Methodist Church of Evanston, Illinois, and as assistant professor of church music at Garrett Theological Seminary. I continued at First Methodist until the summer of 1968 and maintained my relationship at Garrett until 1977.

On September 15, 1968 we began our work at Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago--I as organist and choirmaster and Mary as associate organist (although she was not officially listed as such in the early days).

RK: What did you find when you arrived at Fourth Church in 1968? What was the program like at that time?

MFS:  We found a church with a long and impressive history of church music.  Eric DeLamarter had been the director of music from the time of the completion of the present church and its E. M. Skinner organ in 1914 until his retirement in 1935. His distinguished associates included Leo Sowerby, Palmer Christian, Walter Blodgett and Barrett Spach, who succeeded him, remaining at the church until his retirement in 1959 (with a one year's absence from the position). The organ was in a sad state with 240 dead notes and a lot of blanketing in the chamber to use in case of ciphers.  Plans were already under way for a new instrument at the time I was hired.

There were two choirs: the Morning Choir with 34 paid singers and the Evening Choir which had about 30 volunteers. The professional choir left a great deal to be desired since there were a number of singers who really should not have been there, and it took several years to build an ensemble that came close to my ideal of what a really good choral group should sound like. I discovered early on that it takes much more than finances to foster a truly effective musical program. The volunteer choir drew on the large singles' groups which were a hallmark of the church at the time, and there was a good pool of talent from which to draw.

The Morning Choir provided music for eleven o'clock worship and the Evening Choir sang for the 6:30 vesper service. The two choirs combined for a Christmas pageant and for the Spring Choral Festival which was held in May.  In addition the Morning Choir did a Fall Choral Service and a major work on Good Friday Evening. This schedule of special services had dated from the tenure of Barrett Spach, and I did not change it appreciably.

RK: What changes have taken place in the music program at Fourth Church during your tenure?

MFS: After our first Christmas we abandoned the rather old fashioned Christmas pageant and began the tradition of Nine Lessons and Carols, and we soon began an 11:00 p.m. Christmas Eve service which we named A Festival of Banners and Light, which necessitated the fabricating of banners to fill the very large space. Over the years we have been through three sets of banners and the service has grown in popularity so that there is now standing-room-only .

In 1988 a second morning worship service meeting at 8:30 a.m. was added to the existing 11:00 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. services. Vocal music for that service was provided by an octet from the Morning Choir, including one of the soloists. An assistant organist was subsequently added to the staff to direct the Evening Choir and play for the vesper service.

For most of the choral programs we used instrumental accompaniment more than had been done by our predecessors and performed a wider variety of music.  Some of the works performed included:

To St. Cecelia (Dello Joio), Missa Brevis (Kodály), Requiem (Fauré), St. John Passion (Bach), The Great Organ Mass, The Creation, and Stabat Mater (Haydn), Requiem (Brahms), Mass (Stravinsky), Mass in E Minor (Bruckner), Requiem, Grand Mass in C Minor, and Vesperae de Domenica (Mozart), Requiem (Duruflé), Israel in Egypt and Messiah (Handel) as well as lesser known works by contemporary composers.

After the organ was rebuilt and expanded in 1971 we began a series of organ recitals: four evening recitals by outstanding guest performers as well as noonday recitals on the Fridays of October, Lent and June by organists in the Chicago area--many of whom are of stellar caliber.

RK: Share with our readers the way in which you and Mary have shared the leadership of the music ministry.

MFS: Although Mary was not officially designated as my assistant or associate when we first went to the church, she functioned as such, and without her special talents the program could never have gotten off the ground. As I stated to the congregation on our final Sunday, March 3: "Mary has been my ears, my fingers, my best critic and my best friend." Her gifted ear and fine keyboard skills far surpass mine, and she graciously used those skills in a very unassuming manner to undergird the music making that took place at the church. She is a superb accompanist and acted in that capacity at choir rehearsals, morning worship and concerts. Because of her abilities we were able to perform music that I could never have programmed otherwise. We complemented each other's talents; she lent her ear for pitch and intonation to my ear for color, balance and interpretation. She offered steadiness to my exuberance. I did most of the planning and selection of the repertory as well as the registrations for the accompaniments, and she did the execution. In addition she is the organizer of the pair and managed the large and developing music library.

During our early years at the church she had the responsibility of our three children. Later she was employed for eighteen years as a full-time executive with one of the national boards of The United Methodist Church which required a lot of travel and energy. Fortunately, she had flex time and was able to be at the church by noon on most Thursdays for preparation for choir rehearsals. During my first nine years at the church, I still had responsibilities at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston and did occasional teaching in hymnology at Northwestern University's School of Music. That meant that there were many seven-day weeks.

RK: What were some of the challenges you faced at Fourth Church?

MFS: There were and have been few major challenges to the music program of the church. We enjoyed unparalleled support from the clergy and the congregation and were free to express ourselves almost without restraint. For many years there was no music committee as such, and the level of trust that was placed in our judgment was amazing. I did my best never to betray that trust.

One problem which the church in general has faced through the years is the matter of image. Many people have a distorted view of Fourth Church--that it is an elitist institution which caters to the very wealthy and that its financial resources are unlimited. At one time there were rumors that my salary was $100,000 a year, that the pastor had a chauffered limousine, a yacht and a bevy of servants. Actually, the church ministers to a wide variety of people from all economic strata, and its per capita giving has lagged behind the national average for many years. Its location on North Michigan Avenue in a space referred to as "the magnificent mile" and the very handsome Gothic architecture which was made possible by some of Chicago's past wealth reinforces the false image.  During a large part of my tenure, I handled the church's publications and publicity, and I constantly battled to correct the image and to get the message across that this is an all-inclusive community of faith which is open to all.

RK: What are some of the high points of your ministry at Fourth Church?

MFS: That is something of a difficult question to answer because there was a steadiness to the life of the church.  Fourth Church is atypical; we never went through the slump that so many churches experienced during the late sixties and seventies. In fact the membership of the church grew during every year that we were privileged to be a part of its ministry, and when we left we were at an all-time high membership--almost 4100. But there were some peaks along the way: the establishment of the Annual Festival of the Arts in the fall of the year which exposes the church and the participating artists to the important intersection between the arts and religion, the installation of the Aeolian/Skinner organ in 1971 and finally the enhancement of that instrument and the improvement of the acoustics which were completed in 1995. The close relationships which we have had with members of the choir were heightened by three European tours: Germany and Austria in 1987, England in 1990 and Italy in 1994. Singing in the Dom in Salzburg, conducting the choir in Bruckner's Virga Jesse at St. Florian Abbey where the great Austrian composer is buried, and conducting and playing for evensong at Bath Abbey are a few of the highlights of those overseas trips which we will always cherish.

RK: Tell us something about the history of the organs at Fourth Church and the recent renovations that you have referred to.

MFS: I've already mentioned the condition of the E. M. Skinner organ that existed when we went there in 1968.  This had been a landmark instrument when it was installed in 1914 and contained 59 ranks, among them the very first Kleiner Erzähler and Celeste which Skinner built. In the church archives is a letter from him describing the stop and its derivation. He said, "The result is a most beautiful combination, the most beautiful soft effect I ever heard." In 1946-47 the Aeolian/Skinner Company made several changes to the organ, including the addition of a mixture to the Great, a replacement of the mixture in the Swell, the addition of two mutations to the Choir and a Pedal unit (16, 8 and 4). Barrett Spach was very unhappy with the results and never forgave G. Donald Harrison for altering the essential character of the original instrument.

Soon after I went to the church we engaged Robert S. Baker, then Dean of the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary, as consultant for an extensive rebuild and enlargement of the organ. He, along with Donald Gillett, president of the Aeolian/Skinner Company, and I drew up the specifications for the instrument that was expanded to 125 ranks. All of the mechanical parts of the organ and the solid state console were new, but certain ranks from the original organ and the rebuild of the 40s were incorporated.  Because we were under the restrictions to make no physical changes to the building, it was necessary to confine the pipework to the original chambers: the very deep (25 feet square) chamber to the left of the chancel and the old echo chamber at the east end  peak of the nave. In the new scheme the Swell organ was buried at the back of the chamber and spoke directly into the large pedal prinzipal pipes. Also most of the organ was on low wind pressure. These factors along with the poor acoustics of the church made for a less than satisfactory installation. When people heard that there were 125 ranks, they would ask, "Is that all there is?" after hearing full organ.  Another common remark about the musical performances was, "It's too bad that the building doesn't sound the way it looks."

When the church projected a major renovation and restoration of the facilities, I began to address the matter of the organ which was a "diamond in the rough" and also the problem of three inches of horsehair felt on the ceiling of the nave. In 1989 we began conversations with Thomas Wood, president of Goulding & Wood of Indianapolis, to determine how some of the problems of egress and enhancement might be accomplished. We also worked with Kirkegaard and Associates related to the acoustics and secured the advice of Jack Bethards of the Schoenstein Company and the church's curator of the organ, Kurt Roderer. It was determined to relocate three divisions : the Swell, the Positiv and part of the Pedal. It was also decided to raise the wind pressures on the Swell, the Positiv and the Antiphonal divisions. A new 32' pedal reed was added as was a new prinzipal for the case of the Positiv which now speaks directly into the nave by way of the south balcony. A subbass of larger scale was added to the Pedal, bringing the total number of ranks to 126. A large part of the organ was revoiced and everything was regulated and finished to complement the new acoustic. The results are dramatic and have fulfilled my dream of leaving the church in a much better state than I had found it in 1968.

RK:  Could you tell us more about the acoustical and architectural renovations?

MFS:  As part of the restoration of the sanctuary of the church, which included extensive cleaning of the stone, refinishing of the pews and all other woodwork, repairing the stained glass and updating the antiquated lighting, it was happily decided to improve the acoustics which had been hampered from the beginning by the application of three inches of horsehair felt to cut down on the reverberation of the spoken word at a time when sound enhancement systems did not exist. The felt was removed and insulation was installed, covered by sheet rock and then hard wooden panels which were decorated to match the handsome polychrome beams.  Although there is not a long reverberation as a result of this work, there is far more warmth and clarity of sound so that the organ, the choir and the congregational singing are all wonderfully improved.

Another aspect of the renovation included the relocation of the Blair Chapel where there was a two-manual Austin organ which had been greatly enhanced in recent years by Brantley Duddy of Pennsylvania. The new chapel balcony will not accommodate the large  Austin chests and so the pipework, much of which is new and viable, has been put in storage in the hope that some of it can be incorporated in a mechanical action organ for the new space. 

The building is now almost totally handicapped-accessible with the addition of two elevators, a wonderful ramped loggia which is ideal for art exhibits, and expanded areas for day care, our very large tutoring program, the day and church schools and expanded administrative facilities. The former chapel space has been converted into a great hall which is widely used for after-church coffee hours, forums and large dinners.

RK: You have spoken earlier about the organ recital programs. Who are some of the artists that have been included?

MFS: Robert Baker gave the dedicatory program for the rebuilt Aeolian/Skinner in 1971, and Marilyn Keiser played the rededication recital in February of 1995. Among the other players have been William Albright, Arthur Carkeek, Robert Clark, Douglas Cleveland, David Craighead, Richard Enright, Michael Farris, Grigg Fountain, Robert Glasgow, Ronald Gould, Gerre Hancock, Charles Heaton, David Higgs, Wilma Jensen, Margaret Kemper, Charles Krigbaum, Joan Lippincott, Marilyn Mason, James Moeser, Thomas Murray, Bruce Neswick, John Obetz, Karel Paukert, Simon Preston, George Ritchie, Wolfgang Rübsam, David Schrader, Larry Smith, Frederick Swann, John Weaver, Todd Wilson and you. The list could go on for a very long time.

RK: You have commissioned a number of anthems. Who are some of the composers, and how did the Fourth Church Anthem Series come about?

MFS: Early on we commissioned Anthony Donato to write a piece for the centennial of the church which was in 1971. Subsequently, Gerald Near accepted a commission for one of our first arts festivals. Richard Proulx was asked by the church to compose a work to mark our twenty-fifth anniversary at the church in 1993. The Fourth Church Anthem Series is a joint venture with the church and the Hope Publishing Company, whose chairman of the board is Fourth Church member George Shorney. When I approached George with the idea, he very graciously accepted the challenge and suggested that the composers who were commissioned share a percentage of their royalties with the church and that those monies be used to help underwrite the Arts Festival. Composers in the series include Richard Proulx, Dan Locklair, Charles Huddleston Heaton, John Weaver, Walter Pelz, Kenneth Jennings and myself.  Last year alone over 3000 copies of the various anthems were sold--a very gratifying record for the promotion of good music in the church.

RK: Morgan, tell us something of your activities as a composer.

MFS: Much of the work that I have done has been for use at Fourth Church: a large number of vocal descants and responses as well as some free organ accompaniments. In addition I have composed works for several visiting organists including Cityscape for David Schrader, Metamorphosis for David Craighead, Conversation Piece--Pan and Cecilia Do Sums and Division for John and Maryanne Weaver, and Recitative and Variants on Fourth Church for Marilyn Keiser. I also composed a piece for oboe and organ for Ray Still of the Chicago Symphony as well as Prelude on a Melody by Sowerby which is inscribed to Mary.

RK: You alluded to your interest in hymnody and the teaching that you have done in that area. Tell us more about your association with the Hymn Society and the work that you have done for recent hymnal revisions.

MFS: Cyril V. Taylor, the composer of one of the most beautiful twentieth- century hymn tunes, Abbot's Leigh, was warden of the Royal School of Church Music when I studied there in the 50s. He taught a course in hymnody in such a fascinating manner that I was hooked and have maintained an abiding interest in the subject. My doctoral dissertation was "Latin Hymnody: Its Resurgence in English Usage," a study of the effect of the Oxford Movement on hymnody and the introduction of plainsong melodies to the English church during the 19th century.

Back at Union Seminary I came under the influence of Ruth Ellis Messenger who served, along with Carl Parrish, as my dissertation advisor. Through her urging I became active in the Hymn Society, serving as a member of its executive committee for a number of years and eventually as its vice president. Later I was secretary-treasurer of the Consultation on Ecumenical Hymnody for several years.

You will recall that in 1987, with your help, I compiled a small spiral bound volume of 87 hymns, Again I Say Rejoice, to introduce the congregation to some newer hymn texts and tunes that were not in the 1933 Presbyterian Hymnal. This collection proved to be a good bridge to the denominational hymnal that would appear in 1990.

I was a reader/consultant for The Hymnal 1982 as well as for The Presbyterian Hymnal of 1990, and I contributed a large number of essays on texts, tunes, authors and composers to the Companion To The Hymnal 1982.  That hymnal also includes two plainsong accompaniments which I was asked to compose, and 100 Hymns Of Hope includes my tune Fourth Church which is sung at Fourth Church every Sunday at the presentation of the offering.  The hymn writer Carl Daw, Jr. was commissioned to write the text for that response.

RK: You and Mary have long been active in the American Guild of Organists.  What have been your involvements with the Guild?

MFS: Mary and I joined the Guild when we were undergraduates at the University of Illinois and DePauw respectively. Mary is a past Dean of the North Shore Chapter and is currently an ex officio member of the board. We were both founding members of the Columbus Georgia Chapter when I was stationed at Fort Benning. I served as Dean of the DePauw University Chapter, Sub-Dean of the Columbus Chapter, Dean of the North Shore Chapter and am currently Director of the Committee on Denominational Relations on the national level.

RK: What is the work of that committee and how does its concerns reflect your thinking about the current state of church music?

MFS: The committee seeks to be a sounding board for the wide spectrum of concerns that face church musicians in various churches throughout the country. One of those concerns is the matter of the use of pre-recorded music for worship. You may have seen the statement on that issue in The American Organist. That statement was the result of a lot of work by our committee to address the critical matter of the sidelining of the human dimension in worship.

We are also concerned about the vapidity and banality of much that is being espoused by those who are advocates of the church growth movement.  This is a movement that considers the organ an antiquated means of enhancing worship and one that dismisses much which we as traditional church musicians hold dear, and declares them to be irrelevant to the so-called "seekers." Personally, and I think I speak for the members of the committee, I feel that there is an abdication on the part of many church leaders to do the hard work of providing substantive elements for worship whether it be in provocative preaching or mind-stretching hymn texts set to solid music. I like to think that is what has taken place over the years that we served at Fourth Church. The commitment to excellence at every level of the church staff is evident and the fact that we are at a record membership says that the church does not have to aim at the lowest level of mentality and taste to have a vital and vibrant community of faith.

RK: Your interests are not confined to the musical sphere. Let's talk about your gardening and needlepoint projects.

MFS: Gardening predates my musical interests. I began gardening at the age of four, but I wouldn't describe myself as a horticultural Mozart, even though I have taken a number of blue ribbons at African violet and rose shows. I have a small greenhouse which gives me a lot of pleasure and allows me to enjoy this abiding hobby year round. In it I have camellias and azaleas which keep me in touch with my Alabama roots. I also have orchids and other plants there. Since retiring I have already expanded the garden to include two new flower beds. We are looking forward to visiting the Chelsea Flower Show in London at the end of May.

Needlepoint has been a hobby from the end of my high school days and I have done quite a bit. As part of the renovation for the church I designed and stitched seven cushions for the chancel as well as a wedding kneeler, and now there are six more chancel cushions on the drawing board which will be begun upon our return from England.

RK: What are some of your retirement plans?

MFS: We hope to do more travel and visiting with our three children and six grandchildren. I plan to continue composing, to do some serious writing and get involved in some volunteer work-- perhaps with children. I have missed the contact I had with young people at the two churches we served prior to going to Fourth Church. As I said at our retirement celebration on March 24, there are still many roads left to travel. There is a lot of gas left in the tank, and I plan to continue to exceed the speed limit.

We look back on our active days as church musicians with a great sense of fulfillment and have remarked many times that we are among the most blessed in this our chosen field.

Thank you for the opportunity of sharing some of our thoughts with you and the readers of this venerable magazine which I have been reading for almost fifty years!               

Catching up with a well-traveled recitalist

Joyce Johnson Robinson

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of THE DIAPASON.

Advocate and proponent of new organ music as well as transcriptions of older works, Stephen Tharp is one of today's most active concert organists, having already made over twenty intercontinental tours throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia since 1987. He has held positions at New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral and St. Bartholomew's Church, but at present forgoes a church position in order to focus exclusively on performing, recording and teaching. As a champion of new music, he commissions and premieres numerous new organ works--many of which are dedicated to him--including compositions by Thierry Escaich, Jean Guillou, Anthony Newman, Martha Sullivan, and Morgan Simmons. Stephen Tharp also promotes the transcription, having adapted, and often recorded, works from a variety of styles and eras, from Bach and Handel to Shostakovich and Stravinsky. The most recent of his six recordings, made at St. Sulpice in Paris, was the first commercially released recording by an American organist on that instrument. Stephen Tharp is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists.

We recently spoke with Stephen as he was preparing for another trip abroad.

JR: How did your interest in the organ begin? What was your early training?

ST: I first "responded to" music at the age of three, playing Christmas carols by ear on the piano from the radio and records. It was finally church music, however, that sparked the interest in the organ. I recall hearing this colorful, powerful instrument and thinking about how I absolutely had to learn to play it. Of course, my first teacher started me on the piano, which I think made me a little unhappy at the time. That was at the age of six. By age eight, the same teacher started me on the organ, and the two of us worked together on both instruments for the next several years, mostly at my home in Chicago.

JR: Age eight is an early start! --I'm thinking of the pedals here.

ST: I spent two years in piano. At age six I couldn't reach the pedals. By age eight, it was still a bit of a challenge, but I could start. My organ playing improved along with the piano playing. The transition time from doing one to doing both was actually kind of short. And at eight years old I was just barely able to reach the pedals too!

JR: So what things were you playing? Were you playing any repertoire, perhaps really easy things where you just had a pedal note here and there?

ST: I think the first real pieces of music were the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues, and not all of them. I've never practiced right hand, then left hand, then pedal, then do right hand and pedal, then left hand and pedal--because then you leave one out. You have to develop all three together. So I never did part practicing. No matter how long it took or how slow I did it, it was always everything at one time. Another thing was that I never went through method books per se, doing scales and things like that. There should be a musically relevant reason to attack any given technical issue. So if you have a particular technical challenge you want to hit, find a piece that targets it so that musically there is relevance to it.

By age eleven, I switched to a teacher named James C. Thunder, the director of music at Christ Church in Des Plaines, Illinois, again studying both organ and piano with him. It was Thunder who introduced me to a great deal of the mainline organ composers and their music, recordings of their music, and so on. After working with him for a few months, he made me a sort of "music assistant" at Christ Church, and in this capacity I learned and played on the organ many major anthem and oratorio accompaniments--Handel's Messiah and the Brahms and Mozart Requiems were among the first.

I stayed with James Thunder and Christ Church through 1985 when, at age fifteen, I became a private organ student of Wolfgang Rübsam at Northwestern University, perhaps to this day the person who, for many reasons, has had the greatest influence on my artistic temperament. It was Rübsam who introduced me to the discipline of intricate fingerings (somewhat ironic now, as I rarely ever write in fingerings at all), stylistic awareness and articulation in Baroque music and, most powerfully, the kinds of phrasing, rhapsodic gestures and rhythmic idiosyncrasies possible in Romantic music. I returned to Rübsam to do my graduate studies at Northwestern University in 1993, after four years at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois for my B.A. in music. There I was very lucky to work with two wonderfully musical, insightful and imaginative teachers: Rudolf Zuiderveld in organ and Garrett Allman in piano, accompaniment and conducting. So many of my thoughts on lyricism, projecting musical structure and balance, etc., come from my time with them, and I must say that at a small liberal arts school I had access to perhaps a wider range of study than might have been the case elsewhere. This proved to be invaluable later, especially as I began traveling more and more to Europe. It was also at Illinois College that my interest in new organ works began. I had many opportunities to play a lot of music that was unpublished at the time. One particular performance at Illinois College of William Albright's 1732: In Memoriam Johannes Albrecht for Organ and Narrator, with Albright himself narrating, stands out. Jean Guillou's Hyperion and William Bolcom's Gospel Preludes Book IV are two further examples. There are many others.

JR: You were based in Chicago and then moved to New York and held positions at both St. Patrick's Cathedral and St. Bartholomew's Church, respectively, over the course of seven years. You then made the decision to "fly solo" as an artist without any church job. What prompted this?

ST: My move to New York City came in 1995, when I was appointed associate organist and director of cathedral concerts at the Cathedral of St. Patrick, where I stayed for two years in a prestigious but very busy position. I decided to leave there when my own career became busier and busier, at that point maybe two or three trips to Europe per season interspersed with U.S. concerts. I can honestly say, however, that much of what really boosted the success I was having already in Europe to another level was the position at St. Patrick's, and the people I met while I was there. Booking all the solo organ recitals was part of my duties as concerts director; there were occasions when organists would reciprocate by extending to me performing invitations overseas, and it was then that perhaps three tours a year began turning into five and six, a schedule that I maintain to this day. In late 1997, I became the associate organist at St. Bartholomew's Church, but only in a part-time capacity, which allowed me to continue my concert schedule. Of course, as the church continued to grow, so did the size of the position, and eventually I became full-time. Altogether, I was at St. Bartholomew's for just over four years. The music program there--everything from Praetorius and Carissimi's Jephthe, to Christmas concerts with The American Boychoir and Jessye Norman, to the U.S. premiere of James MacMillan's Cantos Sagrados and the N.Y. premiere of Howells' Hymnus Paradisi--is truly staggering for a church of its size. Therefore, when I made the decision to leave there in 2002, it was far from an easy one. But my performing schedule became simply too large to manage alongside a full-time position. It came time for me to focus all of my artistic (not to mention physical!) energies in one direction instead of several.

JR: These days it seems your career is based more in Europe than in the United States. Is this by choice? How did it come about?

ST: It is ironic that, as an American organist who plays about 60 concerts a year, the majority of them are elsewhere in the world. This was never really intended, but strangely enough, it has turned out that way. For one thing, I began playing publicly on a large scale much earlier in Europe than I did here. My first European concert was in London in 1989 at The Royal Albert Hall. Subsequent trips to England, then The Netherlands, then Germany, then France, really got things going, and they continued like a domino effect.

There is also what is known as an "association factor." I think that without having something like a major competition prize or a well-known teaching post, you don't necessarily get the same kind of attention for what you do. In an ideal world, this should not be such an important factor, but marketing is never that simple. Thanks to JAV Recordings and the Organ Historical Society, especially their websites, all six of my commercial recordings are very easy to find and obtain. And it goes without saying how wonderful it has been with Karen McFarlane Artists since 1998. Of course, we live in an era when massive amounts of information are bombarding you from all sides.

JR: How much are you on the road? What kind of performing schedule do you keep?

ST: It really depends. There are factors such as how many concerts are a part of any given tour, how many different tours are planned close together, how much travel is happening back and forth from the U.S., and what is going on in between--in other words, is there "down time."

Let me give you an example of how extreme it can become by describing my activities during the fall of 2002. Fall seems to be the heaviest time for traveling and playing. Following late August recording sessions at St. Luke's in Evanston, Illinois, I began in early September (four days after the recording) by playing an organ and orchestra concert in Krakow (Bielsko-Biala), Poland, consisting of the Piston Prelude and Allegro for Organ and Strings, and the Jongen Symphonie Concertante. This was followed by a few concerts in the Czech Republic and Germany with a more "mixed" general program, including Mendelssohn, Handel, and Karg-Elert. Next was a concert at St. Laurent's Church in Diekirch, Luxembourg (the oldest church in Luxembourg) on a beautiful new North German-style instrument by the builder Seifert of Kevelaer, Germany. That concert consisted of Bach, Bruhns, Buxtehude, and Murchhauser. Three days later were two concerts as part of the Merseburg Organ Festival, but with all American music, which they requested. This particular invitation arose at the last minute, while I was in Chicago recording at St. Luke's. Karel Paukert, who had been scheduled to play but had to withdraw at the last moment, graciously recommended me as his replacement for the concerts. I was lucky because these two dates, back-to-back, happened to be within a gap between Luxembourg and the other concerts that followed Merseburg elsewhere in Germany, although it was now necessary to "cram" in music that, in a few cases, I had not actually played in quite a while, and with only two days to prepare before the first of the concerts. Those consisted of Buck, Paine, Parker, Hurd, Newman and Sowerby. The rest of the tour (which spanned three and a half weeks altogether) meant a great deal of train travel and concerts roughly every two days as far north as Norden and as far south as Frankfurt.

During October, I went back to Europe with a second fall tour that began at the Passau Dom, which houses the largest organ in Europe. The highlights there were the premiere of my newest commission at that time, Thierry Escaich's Trois Poèmes, and a superlative work by Jean-Louis Florentz called The Cross of the South. Two days later at the Arcore (Italy) Organ Festival, I played my organ adaptation of Bach's Goldberg Variations. Thereafter came more of the Passau program in Innsbruck, several cities in southern Germany and then Strasbourg. To conclude this trip, I was in residence for a week at the Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen, Germany, at the invitation of organ professor Christoph Bossert, not only teaching his students in masterclasses on Vierne, but then performing as part of a theatrical concert of live improvisational dance with the dance department students, featuring live organ improvisation as the incidental music "in reaction to" the stage improvisation.

In November, I made my second trip to Australia, playing in Sydney and Adelaide, and concluded everything with a December Christmas concert at Spivey Hall in Atlanta, the last of several U.S. performances between the trips to and from Europe and Australia. In addition, I have been "guest teacher" at the Hochschule in Stuttgart when in Europe but not actually playing somewhere, and also at Yale University when in the States for a longer stretch.

This is not always the norm, but when it rains, it pours, and my upcoming calendar already indicates that this kind of agenda will happen more frequently. A lot of that has to do with the freedom with which I can now plan my concerts without a regular church job. Usually, larger tours are put on the calendar as far in advance as two years, and so a festival or organization will say, "Oh, this is your date and concert? Well, this is our theme, so you will play this and this and that." Put enough of those close together for when you are in Europe at one time, and your schedule fills very quickly! But, I love it.

JR: Do you find any differences between American and European audiences? You've said that they are larger in Europe.

ST: Right. In general that's true.

JR: Can you talk about European attitudes and their appreciation of your playing the organ, and how you plan your programs for a European audience versus here?

ST: It's very interesting. Of course, everything you do has to be accessible to your audience, but I don't believe that we're beyond being able to educate someone or at least spark their interest in hearing things that otherwise they wouldn't have considered. You know, when you push envelopes, other people who want to do something similar don't necessarily stretch themselves as far as you might, but they'll stretch themselves farther than they would have otherwise, just because they see a bigger realm of what's possible. I think more of that is ingrained earlier on in European audiences. Consequently, I have found that overseas you can get away with a lot more experimentation, and that allows you to be somewhat more adventurous with new music or transcribing.

Transcribing can mean so many things; I've seen people do transcriptions of Schoenberg on organ. I saw someone--Bernard Haas, from Stuttgart--do a transcription of one of the Five Orchestral Pieces of Schoenberg at St. Eustache the same week I was in Paris doing my St. Sulpice recording, which was October 2001. And he did it from memory, with double pedal, triple pedal playing, all of these things that were so intricate, yet he kept the dynamic level very contained and small, based on the chamber quality of the original piece. And people just ate it up, and in a sense it was the most adventurous thing on the program, and while there were many organists present, there also were a lot of people who came because it said "organ concert"--but it was a very intensive 20th-century program, with some Webern transcriptions, and some of Jean Guillou's pieces, and then the Schoenberg in the middle, and people were just perplexed by it. But there were more comments, questions, and curiosity about that work than anything else on the program, and it certainly was the most envelope-pushing piece.

To try to do something like that over here, it depends on how you present it and how you talk about it first to your audience. But it seems that certain kinds of transcriptions are much more popular here than 20th-century music and yet in some ways 20th-century music, especially in certain circles in Europe, has always been more popular than transcriptions. You hear a lot against transcriptions with these kinds of dogmatic black and white ideas about what a transcription should be: is it necessary, why are we doing this if you have all this music of Bach, is a transcription anything compared to that? I've found that I can introduce a transcription to a skeptical European the way you try to do the same thing with modern music for an American audience, and if you do it the right way, I think you can sell something new or at least get people curious.

JR: Tell us your thoughts on commissioning new organ works.

ST: I had a very special experience while I was still in high school. My earlier studies, both organ and piano, engaged fewer pieces for longer periods of time than would be the case later as my technique advanced. So, when I worked on a piece, I really lived with it for a long time before it went before anyone except my teacher.

At one point, I had spent about a year with James Thunder on Aaron Copland's Piano Variations when, one day, after a lesson, Thunder said to me, "You know, Copland is coming to Chicago to give a lecture at the Cultural Center downtown. I made some arrangements this morning on the telephone--do you think you'd be up to playing this for him next week?" Well, I was not about to be stupid and say NO (which Thunder knew), although the idea scared me to death (which Thunder also knew). Even at that age, I could grasp what it meant to play something important for the composer himself, much less Aaron Copland! After six more days of polishing my memorization, I attended the lecture at the Cultural Center and was introduced to Copland afterwards by my teacher. A half an hour later, I sat down in a private piano studio some blocks away at Roosevelt University and, nervous as a ninny, played the work for Copland. He was extremely kind, complimentary enough that I still enjoy talking about it, especially about the fact that I was, as he put it, "crazy" enough at my age to have memorized it, insightful on tempi, some phrasing, and so on. But, the one major awakening was how incredibly inspiring it is to sit down with the source of a creation and share thoughts on it, the ideas that sparked it, concepts and such related things. That was a turning point for me, as it also spawned a real hunger for more music that was new, different, fresh, and intense, sometimes vehemently intense.

At that age, I found pieces that were off-the-wall, learned them, and played them in recitals because I felt a need to do so. What I began to learn was that, when you present something "dicey" to an audience, even knowing that all or many of them may be hearing it for the first time, you get further with that audience by talking to them about what they will hear and why they would want to hear it, even again and again, than you do by just handing them written program notes. Once you do this, the audience feels that there are good reasons for being curious about something that will be not only unfamiliar, but also likely push a few envelopes too, and that this is a positive and enriching thing! If you play down to your listeners, especially with your choice of programming, like they're dumb, then they will respond that way a lot of the time. If you show them that you trust their minds and ears enough to KNOW that they can be interested in what you are offering them, people tend to be more open-minded for you. Despite a lot of thinking these days to the contrary, when it comes to "modern music," I still find this to be unmistakably true, if you as the presenter handle it the right way.

Put all of this together with the opportunities to meet and work with more and more living composers that really began at Illinois College, and the result is a list of varying and remarkable works that I feel privileged to play as often as I can. There is a very challenging three-movement pedal solo work called Sequentia Pedalia by Chicago composer Morgan Simmons, which he gave me in manuscript just prior to my appointment to St. Patrick's in New York; Anthony Newman, one of my best friends in the world, and one of my most devoted supporters, has written three very large but different works for me of brilliant intricacy (these get played perhaps the most frequently and are always very well received); there is Jean Guillou's massive and intense seven movement symphonic poem called Instants (his second largest solo organ work), improvisational but thematically interwoven, written for my concert at King's College, Cambridge; and a jazzy, witty piece based on Bulgarian folk rhythms for organ, percussion and women's chorus called Slingshot Shivaree, composed for a program at St. Bartholomew's called "Organ Plus" by my friend Martha Sullivan. She is an especially talented composer whose star is on the rise, with her works being performed all over the U.S.; there is the haunting and nostalgic 4-movement Sinfonietta by Philip Moore of York Minster, England; and the most recent to date, the Trois Poèmes by Thierry Escaich, works of pure genius, contained electricity with balance and proportion. There are more to come, the next being in 2004 from Bruce Neswick.

JR: About your championing of transcriptions: You've recorded a number of transcriptions, including a good half-dozen of your own.

ST: Right.

JR: What originally got you on the transcription bandwagon? And how do you prepare these? Do you write them down note for note, or do you just sketch them out for yourself? Would you consider having any of them published?

ST: There are several issues here. I have not actually written down anything per se; there's nothing that exists in any formatted way. Usually the bigger transcriptions are the most complicated ones that would take the most work--things that are orchestral versus piano, like a symphony, the Shostakovich 5, or the Petroushka dances, which are all marked from the full scores. You go through and find the things that are more important in the texture, and then find out by process of elimination what you have to take out, because obviously with two hands and two feet there's only so much you can play. So you must decide what to keep and what has to go--and how to eliminate things in an orchestral score so that you can play it on the organ without changing the piece or leaving out something important.

Through looking at a score that I've marked up, I work it up slowly and memorize it, and then essentially play the transcriptions from memory. So none of them are actually written out; they're just marked-up adapted full scores.

In the end, as crazy a process as that sounds, it ends up being easier come performance time, because there's too much to follow and certainly to have an orchestral score in front of you, to have someone try to page-turn that would be crazy. It's very distracting to try to read ten lines of a score while playing and doing registrations and keeping your focus in front of an audience. Anything that limits other senses is more focused--in other words, by playing from memory, the other senses become more acute, because the visual distraction of looking at a page and reading something takes away from the ear, takes away from things that are tactile. So playing from memory certainly hones in on what you feel under your fingers, what you listen to, in a different way. This is never more important than in a very complicated transcription. That's one reason I've never actually written anything down.

Another reason is that a lot of the repertoire is not really of interest to publishers; they don't think it's mainstream enough to sell. So, no, at this point, nothing is published. I think at some point, if either a publisher decides they would like something specific or if I could get a couple of players who were interested in a certain transcription, then I would take the time to write something down.

JR: Your repertoire is very diverse and you strive to present each piece with a sense of stylistic awareness. What then are your thoughts on organ transcriptions vs. organ repertoire, and on performance practices? As a performer, how do you strike a balance among these?

ST: I have some very specific and passionate thoughts on this. To start with, I think that the art of transcription is very important, and it is ironic that it gets both incredible support and simultaneously a great deal of criticism nowadays.

Realize that when we say transcriptions, we are not just talking about Danny Boy, Ave Maria and Flight of the Bumblebee. We are also talking about large-scale, often mainstream repertoire that demands as much care and subtlety from an organist as it would from a pianist, a singer or an orchestra. Art at a very high level transcends its chosen medium. It is not just a matter of whether or not the organ becomes an orchestra, a piano, or anything else.

A successful transcription should not sound like it is a transcription, but rather be idiomatically adapted to the new medium while preserving the soul and stylistic context of the original in a carefully struck balance, and this is why transcribing is such an art form and anything but trite. I would challenge those who flippantly dismiss transcriptions as circus tricks as not understanding these ideas on a very profound level, nor having experimented with transcriptions enough personally to see what is really possible, and how. Consider the Bach-Vivaldi Concerti, several Liszt works that began on piano or organ and then went the other way, in the composer's own hand nonetheless, or the most obvious example, Mussorgsky's piano work Pictures at an Exhibition (transcribed later by other composers for a medium of immense color possibility, and now part of the standard orchestral repertoire). So, ultimately, we do accept transcriptions--we always have. Moreover, awareness of style must be applied here too--transcription does not always mean swell boxes, string divisions and tubas. Take for instance Bach's Italian Concerto or his Goldberg Variations. I have had as much musical satisfaction from playing these on organs by Fritts, von Beckerath, Gabler, Fisk and so on, as I have had sitting at a great E.M. Skinner with the Liszt B-Minor Sonata or something as monumental as the Shostakovich Symphony No. 5.

For me, all of this leads to a larger issue, and that is how we often see performers "mixing menus," which just confuses everything. I once heard an organist pull out stops at 8', 4'and 2' on a neo-Baroque organ and make his way through Elgar's Nimrod on that one sound, and briskly at that, like it was just this pretty piece to play for the audience, and that was enough. It was evident that the player did not understand anything about the intimacy of this music, or that perhaps this was not the right organ for it. On the flip side, I recently heard a Bach prelude and fugue played with all the swell shades flapping around like window blinds in a storm, with as many pistons as there were notes and Romantic rubato everywhere. Although the result was extremely musical in its own way, the total change of esthetic was so foreign to the score tha

by James B. Hartman

Notes

                  1.              A General History of Music, From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (1789), vol. 2. (New York: Dover Publications, 1957), 380. Selections from Burney's essay on Purcell, pages 375-416, are reprinted in Michael Burden, Purcell Remembered, 139-141.

                  2.              See "Purcell manuscript acquired by British Library," describing the only known keyboard manuscript of 20 pieces in Purcell's own hand, and the recording of the entire manuscript of Purcell's keyboard works on three period instruments by harpsichordist Davitt Moroney, The Diapason, June 1995, 6.

                  3.              See also The Purcell Companion, edited by Michael Burden (Amadeus Press, 1995), reviewed by Enrique Alberto Arias in The Diapason, November 1995, 8-9. The book contains 11 essays in five sections: Introduction, Background, A Composer for Church and Chamber, Purcell and the Theatre, and Purcell in Performance.

                  4.              The are some inconsistencies in the end date of chapter 2 and the start date of chapter 3, and between the contents outline and the chapter headings in the text, as well as an inaccuracy in the start date of chapter 5.   

                  5.              The date and location of the first performance of Dido and Aeneas has been a matter of speculation. Recent research supporting the title-date connection is cited in King, 173; the problem is acknowledged but not resolved in Burden's introduction to the contemporary reference (Purcell Remembered, 79); Holman concludes "I suspect, however, that the last word has not been said on the matter" (Henry Purcell, 195).

                  6.              (Richard Goodson, the elder?), Orpheus Britannicus, ii (1702, 1711), cited in Holman, 21.

Henry Purcell, by Robert King. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994. 256 pages, 103 illustrations, 13 in color. $34.95.

Purcell Remembered, by Michael Burden. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1995. xxv + 188 pages, 17 b/w illustrations. $29.95 hardcover plus $5.50 s&h, $17.95 papercover plus $4.50 s&h. Available from the publisher, 133 S.W. Second Ave., Portland, OR 97204-3527.

Henry Purcell, by Peter Holman. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xvii + 250 pages, 42 musical examples. $17.95, paper.

Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814), one of England's earliest and most notable music historians, wrote: "Unluckily for Purcell! he built his fame with such perishable materials, that his worth and works are daily diminishing, while the reputation of our poets and philosophers is increasing by the constant study and use of their productions. And so much is our great musician's celebrity already consigned to tradition, that it will soon be as difficult to find his songs, or, at least to hear them, as those of his predecessors, Orpheus and Amphion. . . ." Burney attributed the disregard of the work of this superior genius, "equal to that of the greatest masters on the continent," to the changeability of taste in music and to "an inferior band to the Italian opera composers, as well as inferior singers, and an inferior audience, to write for."1 Fortunately for Western musical culture, these impediments to the appreciation of Purcell's music no longer exist.

The level of awareness of Purcell's music in recent years has been increased by the discovery of new manuscripts,2 recordings, progress towards the completion of the comprehensive edition of his works, the publication of books, exhibitions, and other special media events connected with the 1995 tercentenary year. The number and diversity of Purcell's creative output--anthems, domestic sacred music, services, catches, odes, secular vocal music, theater works, keyboard works, consort music--present a challenge to complete comprehension.

In recognition of the tercentenary year, eight books have been published between 1994 and 1996; seven of these will be discussed in these pages in two installments.3 The books in the first group, general in outlook, present the historical background of Purcell's time, provide a picture of his life from scattered sources, and establish a credible context for his compositional genres; those in the second group, more closely focussed and which include two edited collections of essays, deal with specific aspects of the development of Purcell's musical style and performance practices, then and now. All of these works contribute much to deepening our appreciation of this 17th-century master from these diverse viewpoints, ranging from the social and musical setting in which he worked to the opinions of critics and musicians across the centuries.

Robert King is one of Britain's leading baroque conductors. While at Cambridge University he founded The King's Consort, a period-instrument orchestra. He has made over 50 recordings; about one-half of these feature the music of Purcell, for which he researched and prepared his own performing editions. His current project is the recording of all of Purcell's odes, welcome songs, secular solo songs, and sacred music. His historically oriented book, Henry Purcell, provides a fitting introduction to this group of tercentenary publications.

The brief Prologue of the book touches upon several themes identified in other books: Purcell's acknowledged genius; the diversity of his compositions for the church, the opera house, the theater, small domestic instrumental forces, and his royal patrons. It also comments on the lack of information about Purcell himself, who left few letters and no personal diaries. Our present picture of Purcell, therefore, is a composite sketch compiled from scanty references in official records set against the wider historical background, which King treats in considerable detail throughout five chapters, each dealing with a politically defined chronological period.

Chapter 1, "A Restoration Childhood, 1659-1668," covers the period from the dissolution of Cromwell's Protectorate parliament to the "Triple Alliance," the diplomatic triumph of King Charles II. In this period Henry Purcell senior was appointed Master of the Choristers at Westminster Abbey, where he worked with his counterpart at the Chapel Royal on the choral and instrumental music for the royal coronation. Also, Thomas Purcell, young Henry's uncle, received an appointment as composer at the royal court. The catastrophic plague of 1665--the cause of the death of Henry's father in 1664 might have been due to an earlier isolated outbreak--and the great fire of London in 1666 undoubtedly left lasting impressions on the young Purcell. Whether "the wistfulness that is so prevalent in Purcell's music could therefore be seen as a manifestation of a little boy still crying for his lost father" (p. 42) is perhaps an excessive psycho-biographical speculation, however.

Chapter 2, "Learning the Trade, 1668-1677,"4 reconstructs the musical scene at the Chapel Royal from the time when young Henry became a chorister there at the age of eight or nine to the death of the eminent musician Matthew Locke, court composer and also a friend of Henry's father and uncle. As a chorister, the young Purcell's musical education included lessons from John Blow and Christopher Gibbons, son of Orlando. Although the Chapel boys were encouraged to compose, no composition by Purcell has survived. Along with other boys, he might have acted in London theatrical performances--a formative experience for his later influential years in that context. When his treble singing days were over, Purcell became assistant-apprentice to the supervisor of the royal instruments ("regals, organs, virginals, flutes and recorders and all other kind of wind instruments whatsoever"), a position that ensured contact with court musicians. Whether or not Purcell ever was a pupil of Matthew Locke, the latter's influence on the youth must have been great, partly through the composer's association with the Purcell family, but more directly through the court performances of Locke's music, whose style is reflected in the ode Purcell composed on the death of Locke.

Chapter 3, "Rising Star: Purcell at the Court of Charles II, 1677-1685," chronicles the period from the time when the teenage Purcell was appointed court composer, succeeding Locke, to the death of the royal patron. Commencing with this chapter, the author's discussions of Purcell's compositions include comments on their editions, scoring, musical textures, harmonic language, structural devices, expressive features, and general aesthetic characteristics, all of which provide condensed program notes for the works described. Purcell's compositions in this period included church anthems, the first small-scale songs to go into print, odes and welcome songs for royal occasions, verse anthems, and various instrumental pieces, including the Sonnata's of III Parts, published in 1683. His first commissioned work for the celebration of St. Cecilia's Day appeared in the same year. Only a year before, Purcell had received an appointment as one of the three organists of the Chapel Royal, and a year later he assumed the position of full supervisor and keeper of the royal instruments, following the death of his mentor. The infamous "battle of the organs," an acrimonious contest in 1684 between the builders Bernard Smith and Renatus Harris over the contract for a new organ for the Temple Church was resolved in Smith's favor, after much hostility and a mischievous act of sabotage; the players on Smith's instrument at the trials were Purcell and Blow.

Chapter 4, "Changing Fortunes: Purcell and King James, 1685-1688," covers the short period from the coronation of King James II, for which Purcell set up an organ in Westminster Abbey and contributed a grand, large-scale anthem, to the King's flight from England following political upheavals. During this uncertain time Purcell maintained his position as one of the three organists in the Chapel Royal, but the position of official court composer went to Blow; accordingly, Purcell turned his attention from writing anthems to developing the devotional song--his solo vocal writing at its best--and to his first royal ode. As Purcell wrote less music for the church and more secular vocal music, his compositions began to appear increasingly in printed editions. Even so, his financial affairs suffered on account of the King's decision to open a new Roman Catholic chapel at Whitehall, staffed by highly paid musicians imported from abroad. Purcell was among the royal employees who had to battle for payment for their services, but eventually he was paid "for repairing ye Organs and furnishing Harpsichords."

Chapter 5, "Maturity Cut Short: Purcell under William and Mary, 1688 [sic]-1695," opens at a critical point in English constitutional history, the declaration in 1689 of William and Mary as king and queen. Purcell had control of the organ loft for their coronation, and he produced the first of six birthday odes for the new queen in the same year. Although royal patronage in music was diminishing, Purcell maintained a busy schedule at court (still as supervisor of the royal instruments) and the Chapel Royal, in addition to his responsibilities at Westminster Abbey. The production in 1689 at a girl's boarding school of an opera, presumed to have been Dido and Aeneas,5 marked the beginning of his career as the leading composer for the London theater. The sources, production, and musical features of his various works for the genre are supplied in appropriate detail throughout this chapter. About a month after the annual celebrations of St. Cecilia's Day in November 1694, Queen Mary died in the smallpox epidemic that was sweeping London; Purcell composed a march and some vocal music for her funeral service in Westminster Abbey, and later, the music for two elegies. Purcell's own premature death at the age of 36, attributed to tuberculosis, was also marked by a ceremony in Westminster Abbey, when some of the music he had composed for Queen Mary's funeral was again played. A brief Epilogue to the book mentions various persons who paid tribute to England's greatest musical figure and to some significant 20th-century performances of his work.

This elegantly produced and thoroughly researched book successfully interweaves highlights of social and political events with the state of music in late 17th-century England. The numerous graphic illustrations of persons, places, and important events of the period that accompany the text, including a double-page, full-color painting of London in flames, bring a sense of immediacy that transcends the verbal accounts. For these reasons this book provides a stimulating introduction to the study of Purcell for the general reader. A useful supplement is a performer's catalogue of Purcell's works intended to aid performers and scholars as a general reference or for concert programming; pieces in the various genres contain information on titles, authors, occasions, composition dates, first performance dates, soloists, choruses, instruments, timing, and Zimmerman classification numbers. A selected discography and a selected reading list of 48 titles, chiefly historical (only six directly on Purcell), complete the volume.

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Michael Burden is Lecturer in Music at New College, Oxford, and directs the New Chamber Opera. He has written widely on 17th- and 18th-century music and 20th-century musical theater. His book, Purcell Remembered, is a unique assembly of selections from various official publications, notices, public documents, letters, diaries, reminiscences, prefaces and dedications to Purcell's published works, and other sources relating to the composer and his times, spanning three centuries. Much of the material derived from these scattered sources is tangential to Purcell's music as such, but taken as a whole it provides an engrossing and instructive account of life in Purcell's day, and therefore it is a useful supplement to Robert King's historical narrative.

An introductory chronology of Purcell's life and works mentions other musical, political, social, and cultural events, some of which may have impressed Purcell. The selections are presented within discrete sections focussing on Purcell's early life and the Chapel Royal, singers and singing, his Sonnata's of III Parts and a battle for an organ, two coronations and a revolution, publishing and pedagogy, the stage, Purcell's death, the Restoration musical scene, recollections and assessments of Purcell's works by commentators, and similar opinions by musicians through the years.

The selections cover Purcell's life span and beyond. For example, several excerpts from the diaries of Samuel Pepys, England's observant and music-loving writer who wrote during the period 1660-1669, include a reference to a meeting in 1660 with Henry Purcell's father or uncle and the composer Matthew Locke, followed by an account of the activities at the Chapel Royal and vivid descriptions of the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666. Pepys also remarked on Purcell's first composition, a song included in a collection published in 1667. As for Purcell's death in 1695, his will is reproduced, along with a description of his interment in Westminster Abbey, some letters by his wife Frances and the publisher Henry Playford relating to the posthumous printing of some sonatas, and several odes, including Dryden's praiseful lament for "The God-like Man, Alas! too soon retir'd." The nature of Purcell the man remains obscure, apart from passing references to his "mirth and good humour, which seem to have been habitual to him"; his contemporaries and successors confined their descriptions to his musical abilities as a composer. His adult singing abilities were extolled in 1685 as "wondrous skill" in an adoring ode by Aphra Behn, the first professional writer in England. As an accomplished organist, Purcell often adjudicated the appointments of other organists and advised on the building or maintenance of church organs. Relevant passages are reproduced from church vestry minutes and from the writings of the music critic Roger North (1653-1734) concerning the great battle for the organs between the rival builders Renatus Harris and Bernard Smith, in which Purcell and Blow successfully demonstrated the Smith organ, and Giovanni Battista Draghi played the Harris instrument.

References to Purcell's small-scale vocal works highlight two contrasting subgenres; the high-minded and the down-to-earth. One example of the former was the performance of Purcell's ode for the St. Cecilia's Day celebrations in 1692; his songs, on the other hand, some of the ribald variety with their bawdy allusions, provided communal entertainment in public taverns, alehouses, and coffeehouses. An explanation of the musical structure of catches and glees, and instructions for singing them, appeared in an advertisement to John Playford's 1673 edition and later editions, along with some examples. One entertaining rebus referred to the composer:

His surname begins with the grace of a cat,

And concludes with the house of a hermit, note that;

His skill at performance each auditor wins, But the poet deserves a good kick on the shins.

Glimpses into significant historical events of Purcell's time are provided in eyewitness descriptions of the coronation of King James II in Westminster Abbey in 1685, when Purcell was organist there, and of the joint coronation of King William and Queen Mary in 1689, when Purcell attended to his usual duties at the Abbey, including the provision of a second organ. The last days and funeral rites for Queen Mary, for which Purcell contributed some of the music, are chronicled in several documents relating to the event.

Public awareness of Purcell in his own time and after his death was due in large part to the publishers John and Henry Playford, father and son, who brought out the composer's works. Their artful prefaces and self-effacing dedications--short on content, strong on flattery for royalty and the anticipated subscribers among the public--sometimes featured encomiastic verses on the collections or offered biblical justification for the learning of music. On the other hand, Purcell's opening remarks to his Choice Lessons for the Harpsichord or Spinet, published in 1696, were pedagogical in nature, consisting of directions to the performer and "Rules for Graces," a table of ornaments and embellishments. Almost a century later, Charles Burney speculated that Purcell adopted this practice to meet the needs of ignorant and clumsy performers, and that it contributed to the obsolescence of his music.

Today's readers may vicariously visit the productions of some of Purcell's theatrical works over the centuries through the descriptions by witnesses to actual performances, beginning with an account of Dido and Aeneas (?) in 1689; George Bernard Shaw's quirky review of a 1889 production of the same work provides contrast, as do the critical commentaries on later revivals by Gustav Holst and Thomas Beecham. Appropriate selections from advertisements, prologues, reviews, and recollections relating to performances of Dioclesian, King Arthur, and The Fairy Queen are included here, along with several assessments of the state of opera in England through the years. A summing-up by Sir George Dyson in 1932 acknowledged the freshness and beauty of Purcell's music for his stage productions, but attributed their lack of consistent plots and unified design to the entertainment-driven desires of the public.

The assessments of Purcell by musicians, historians, journalists, and other writers over the years consisted mainly of flattering tributes; insightful critical evaluations did not appear until recent times. For example, an unsigned contribution to the Universal Journal in 1734 described Purcell as "a Shakespear in Musick," possessed of "a most happy enterprizing Genius, join'd with a boundless Invention, and noble Design [who] made Musick answer its Ends (i.e.) move the Passions"; William Boyce, writing in 1768, praised him as "a Genius superior to any of his Predecessors . . . . equally excellent in every thing he attempted." Nevertheless, in 1893 C. Hubert H. Parry, while admitting that Purcell was the greatest genius of his age, criticized his excesses in realistic expression and his faulty judgment in matters of choral style that involved occasional lapses into innocent bathos and childishness. Peter Warlock, writing in 1927 about Purcell's fantasias, found their advanced perfection of form and content sufficient to include them in England's most significant contributions to the world's great music. A wide-ranging and perceptive review of Purcell's place in English music, written by Donald Francis Tovey in 1941, opined that Purcell was born either 50 years too soon (to gain access to the resources of Bach and Handel) or 50 years too late (to be master of the Golden Age). Sir Jack Westrup, formerly chairman of the Purcell Society for almost 20 years, writing in 1959, deplored the repetition of the limited amount of Purcell's music performed in inappropriate "realizations" from erroneous copies. Quotations by contemporary British composers Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett, and Peter Maxwell Davies reveal their attraction to Purcell that initiated performances of his works--Davies deplores note-perfect but emotionally insensitive "authentic" performances--that contributed to the renewal of interest in the master in England and elsewhere.

Michael Burden's three-century harvest of written fragments about Purcell and his times provides in words the same sense of immediacy that Roger King's illustrated historical narrative does in pictures. Purcell Remembered includes a center section of 17 small monochrome illustrations, some of which duplicate the more opulent chromatic pictures in King's volume. A multidimensional understanding of the Purcell could therefore be achieved by reading both volumes in parallel.

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Peter Holman is now Senior Associate Lecturer at Colchester Institute of Music, following a teaching career at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and elsewhere. In addition to writing for scholarly journals, he maintains an active performing career as a harpsichordist, organist, and director of The Parley of Instruments and musical director of Opera Restor'd. His book, Henry Purcell, provides the context for understanding the various genres within which Purcell worked: his small-scale domestic works, both vocal and instrumental, and his large-scale public works in church music, the odes, and theater music.

An opening chapter on Purcell's musical world covers the salient events of his life span: the re-establishment of musical life in the Restoration period, the role of secular musicians and performing groups, Purcell's service as a choir boy at the Chapel Royal and his early musical instruction, his duties as a music copyist, his first post as custodian and repairman of musical instruments, his activities as court composer, his succession to the position of organist at Westminster Abbey, the decline of royal patronage of music, the political accommodations of musicians, and life in the theater. Again, we are reminded that little is known about Purcell the man from direct evidence, but attempts have been made to draw character implications from the handwriting of the person described in a later poetic reference as one whose "Pride was the sole aversion of his Eye, Himself as Humble as his Art was High."6

Nearly all Restoration songs dealt with some aspect of love (usually from the male viewpoint), and Purcell's contributions to the genre--dance songs, declamatory songs, and dialogues--have always been greatly admired. The humble catch, too, was mostly preoccupied with wine and women, although Purcell provided untrained amateurs and off-duty musicians with settings of various topics: politics, loyal toasts, newsworthy events, bell-ringing, and others. The Italian influence in England was felt in both performance practice and repertory, and several ground-bass songs by Italian composers were models for Purcell and his contemporaries. Holman gives some detailed consideration to Purcell's musical language in the songs, such as the affective associations of certain keys, the colors obtained through different keys in unequal temperament, and other melodic and harmonic devices relating words, music, and emotion. Other forms treated in the same chapter include symphony songs (inappropriately called "cantatas") performed in the royal apartments, verse anthems and theater songs, some of which became models for succeeding generations of song writers.

Genre distinctions prevail in the discussion of instrumental music, such as fantasias and pavans in the contrapuntal tradition, and overtures and chaconnes as orchestral forms. Holman draws comparisons with earlier forms by Purcell's predecessors and similar works by his contemporaries, and speculates on Purcell's intentions for them as composition exercises or performance pieces. At the same time, notwithstanding the admiration of English musicians for Italianate sonatas, the relationship between Purcell's sonatas and those by Italian masters remains unresolved, as does the rationale for their sequential order in collections. As for Purcell's keyboard music, recent discoveries of Purcell manuscripts have helped to resolve some questions of Purcell as author or arranger of harpsichord works. Several organ voluntaries are now known to have been falsely attributed to him, and many others undoubtedly never were written down, due their improvisational nature.

Insofar as the tradition of cathedral music was unfamiliar to the generation that had lived through the period of the proscription of singing in church services and the destruction or dismantling of organs, Purcell and his contemporaries had much to do to rescue earlier practices and develop new repertory. Holman's discussion of church music follows Purcell's development from his youthful preoccupation with contrapuntal forms to his later absorption of the melodic, harmonic, and structural features of the Italian style. As a writer of anthems, however, Purcell perhaps owed less to Italian music than to Matthew Locke, whose compositions provided the model for works that synthesized formal counterpoint with expressive, soloistic, vocal writing and daring harmonies, but without Locke's polychoral style. The distinguishing features of Purcell's symphony anthems are discussed in some detail, including the Italian harmonic influences and sense of drama. Some useful background information accompanies the account of Purcell's last church music written for Queen Mary's funeral and performed again at Purcell's own funeral.

Apart from Purcell's three famous odes, Welcome to All the Pleasures; Hail, Bright Cecilia; and Come, Ye Sons of Art, Away, the remainder have been neglected partly on account of the toadying texts of these celebratory or welcoming compositions; besides, little is known about their origins or the circumstances of their performance. Purcell's experimentation in this genre involved contrapuntal and ground-bass writing, along with new ways--including the sophisticated Italian influences--of combining voices and instruments. The superb writing style, controlled structure, and grand scale of the ode on St. Cecilia's Day, Purcell's most popular choral work, inspired Handel to produce a birthday ode; this marked the beginning of the English secular choral tradition, according to Holman.

The reopening of the London theaters around 1660 and the presence of instrumental groups to accompany the plays also offered creative opportunities to Purcell. His first music for the theater was performed in the early 1680s, but he dropped out of the scene for almost a decade for reasons unknown. Equally obscure are the inspiration, circumstances, dating, première, foreign musical influences, and political and allegorical meanings of Dido and Aeneas. The resumption of Purcell's career in the commercial theater in 1690 was marked by the production of more than 40 works in the remaining five years of his life, including the landmark Dioclesian, the first semi-opera, followed by King Arthur and The Fairy Queen of the same genre. Holman's discussion of these and other later stage works touches upon the integration of music and action, in addition to other more purely musical issues.

The discussion of each facet of Purcell's output contains assessments of both its glories and shortcomings, with respectful consideration of unresolved and controversial issues surrounding dating, style, and other historical circumstances. The reader's assimilation of this material, however, could have been aided by a system of subheadings to identify the subtle shifts in focus and subject imbedded in the seamless flow of information within each section. Moreover, the book lacks a concluding chapter that would provide a general assessment of Purcell's accomplishments within his own time and his influence on future generations. Nevertheless, the author's enthusiasm for Purcell's music and his comprehensive treatment of its distinct genres undoubtedly will contribute to the renewal of both scholarly and practical interest in the composer and his music far beyond the heightened exposure both received during the tercentenary year. A bibliography of 204 books, articles, and general reference works; a list of 108 edited music collections; and an index of Purcell's works by genre provide the necessary documentation.