A conversation with Morgan and Mary Simmons

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

Chicago, Illinois, June 25-July 1

Ronald E. Dean

Ronald E. Dean is Organist and Choirmaster at the Church of the Holy Cross (Episcopal) in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Professor of Music, Emeritus, at the Hurley School of Music, Centenary College. A graduate of Williams College and the University of Michigan, his organ study was with Frederick Kinsley, Robert Barrow and Robert Noehren. His reviews appear from time to time in this journal.

The forty-seventh annual convention of the Organ Historical Society took place in Chicago, with some forty events scheduled throughout the seven-day period.  The headquarters was the Hotel Allegro, formerly the famous Bismarck where, according to local lore, many a secret political deal was conjured up in what one can imagine were the proverbial "smoke-filled" rooms (the Chicago City Hall is, after all, just around the corner). Since Chicago is known familiarly as "the windy city" (the term coming more from the renowned political rhetoric than from any breezes that might come from Lake Michigan), it was appropriate that the Organ Historical Society add to the "windiness" through the sounds produced by the thousands of wind-blown pipes during the week. The convention committee, ably chaired by Stephen Schnurr, organized a well-rounded series of events designed to display a wide variety of instruments, from small one-manual nineteenth-century trackers to a huge five-manual 8,000 pipe-Wurlitzer. There was something for every taste and inclination. As the week progressed, one of the famous Chicago heat waves rolled in with daytime temperatures in the mid-nineties, producing a bit of discomfort and tuning problems in churches without air conditioning. There was much fanning and sipping from water bottles. Those stalwart organ folks who went on to the AGO national in Philadelphia the next week experienced the same sort of weather. There certainly were, to paraphrase, "hot times in those two old towns" during late June and early July.

Tuesday

The first event of the convention was a major recital played by William Aylesworth, former OHS President, and convention co-chair for the previous OHS convention held in Chicago in 1984. This evening recital featured the famous 1875 Hook and Hastings three-manual, Op. 794, the oldest organ in Chicago. The building, now the Scottish Rite Cathedral, was originally Unity Church (Unitarian). The program opened with the spirited singing of the three verses of "The Star Spangled Banner" which was followed by Voluntary No. 1 in D, Boyce; Deux Noëls (Laissez pestres vos bestes and Joseph est bien marié), Le Bègue; Cantabile, Franck; Marche Funèbre, Loret; Praeludium und Fuge für orgel zu vier Händen, Albrechtsberger; and Symphonie II, Widor. James Wyly provided the additional two hands in the Albrechtsberger piece. Following this beautifully played recital, which included cogent and helpful verbal commentary, Aylesworth provided the enthusiastic audience with an encore, "Marcia" from Widor's Symphonie No. III (original edition). Since Aylesworth is the regular organist for the Scottish Rite Cathedral, his elegant playing was at home with the musical choices which displayed both the subtle and grand sounds of the organ. In spite of the lack of reverberation to match the grandeur of both the instrument and the building, this opening program was a fitting beginning for the convention.

Wednesday

The first full day began with a "Group A-Group B" split for the first event  to accommodate limited seating space in a couple of churches. This report will follow the "Group A" plan. After a somewhat delayed departure from downtown Chicago with the compounding problems of heavy traffic and the omnipre-sent work on the highways, OHS regular Mary Ann Crugher Balduf presented the following program on a delightful one-manual organ of circa 1885 attributed to Chicago builder Emil Witzmann in St. John United Church of Christ, Palatine: March, Marsh; En Forme de Canon, Salomé; "Élevation" (from Heures Mystiques, op. 49), Boëllmann; "Vision" (from Sechs Charakterstücke für Orgel, op. 64), Bibl; "Moderato," "Poco Allegro," "Moderato con moto" and "Allegro Giocoso" from Miniatures for Organ by Howells; "Prière pour les morts" from Twenty-four Pieces for Organ by Langlais; "All my hope on God is founded" from Three English Hymn Tunes, Clark; followed by singing of the hymn by Howells. The program closed with a Scherzo by Shelley. This instrument was one of the smallest to be heard and was masterfully handled by Ms. Balduf to show what can be done on a lovely little organ with seemingly limited resources. The building is a charming New England style church that has had some recent remodeling. The organ shares a rear balcony location with Hammond speakers. The high placement allows the organ to offer a fair amount of presence within a rather dead acoustical environment. The instrument was restored by parishioners Stan and Scott Regula.

A trip to historic Woodstock (no, not THAT one; this one is in Illinois) and its 19th-century Romanesque-styled Opera House which houses a "steamboat gothic" theatre brought us to an informative lecture by William Osborne on one of Chicago's premier figures in the organ world, Clarence Eddy (1851-1937). Osborne's recently published comprehensive study on Eddy is available through the OHS catalogue. Though a native of Massachusetts, the often-traveling organist and pedagogue spent a great amount of time in Chicago, and these years were the center of Osborne's well-delivered and enlightening remarks which were followed up by a recital of some of Eddy's works the next day (see below). Prior to the lecture, John H. Scharres, managing director of the Woodstock Opera House, related the colorful history of the building and the many uses to which it had been put over the years.

St. Mary Catholic Church, just a short walk from the Opera House, was the site for both a box lunch and a recital by Robert E. Woodworth, Jr. on the church's 1910 two-manual Hutchings which has had some restoration by the Berghaus Organ Company. Michael Friesen presented an OHS Historic Organ plaque to the church. In spite of having wall-to-wall carpeting as well as pew cushions, the vast interior space with its high barrel-vault ceiling offered a good acoustical environment for the following program, which consisted of works by Chicago composers: "Fanfare" from Sonatina for Worship No. 7 by Jones; "Meditation--Elegie" from Suite for Grand Organ, Borowski; Allegretto (Andante quasi Allegretto) and Rondo (Allegretto non troppo), Buck; "Intermezzo" from Sonata II for Organ, Moline; Rest in Peace, Goode; and Impromptu, Bliss; followed by the vigorous singing of the hymn "Wonderful words of life." One wonders how many times that old Gospel hymn had been sung in a Roman Catholic church! The organ, with its keen strings and heavy, broad sound (especially in the reed stops), filled the room well.

Our travel delays were further complicated by a bus breakdown before we arrived at St. Mary Roman Catholic Church in Buffalo Grove where Susan Friesen played the following program: "Offertoire" from Heures mystiques, Vol. 2, op. 30, Boëllmann; two settings of Meine Seele erhebt den Herren, Pachelbel; Pastorale in F-Dur, Bach; Pastorale in A, Clarke; Pastoral Interlude (op. 32, no. 4), Parker; and Variations to the Sicilian Hymn, Carr (arr. Owen), which had been preceded by the singing of the hymn "Saviour, like a shepherd lead us" to the tune Sicilian Mariners. The organ, a small one-manual built by the Wisconsin Pipe Organ Factory in 1904, featured a reversed console. (See the Organ Handbook, 1993, p. 7, for a description of a similar instrument built by the same firm in 1905, reversed console and all, which was played by Rachelen Lien during the Kentuckiana Convention.) Ms. Friesen chose a program that was well-organized and energetically played to show the variety of sonic combinations available on this instrument of limited resources. The church building had been extended at its liturgical east end with the result that the worship space was considerably increased, yet the organ, with its favorable rear gallery location, filled the entire area effectively.

Zion United Church of Christ in the beautiful little town of Carpentersville was the site for a short program played by Mary Gifford on a small two-manual tracker Hinners of 1911 which has had restoration work done by Gruber Pipe Organs, Inc. The instrument is well maintained and loved by the congregation. Ms. Gifford obviously enjoyed playing the following program: Rustic Wedding, West; Prelude, Cradle Song, and Aria, Lloyd Webber; Andante, Wild; and Variations on "St. Elizabeth," Ferko. Prior to the Ferko piece, there was a very emotion-filled moment for many of the conventioneers at the singing of the hymn "What heavenly music" from the 1849 publication, Hymns for God's Peculiar People. Ms. Gifford noted that this was the late Alan Laufman's favorite hymn to which she has provided a descant in his memory. Alan was a prime moving force in, as well as past President of, the OHS and served the Society in many other capacities. He was also the founder of the Organ Clearing House, an organization that has saved many an old and worthy instrument. Since Alan had been a friend to many at the convention, some people found it difficult to sing through increasingly misty eyes.

After another lengthy bus trip, we arrived at the locale of what was undoubtedly one of the monumental highlights of the entire convention, a stunning memorized recital by Ken Cowan given at the Victorian Palace at Plum Tree Farm in Barrington Hills, the residence of Jasper and Marian Sanfilippo. The entire setting defies description--it must be experienced. A catered buffet dinner took place in what one wag called "the rec room," a large museum containing a variety of mechanical contrivances including automatic musical machines, a complete carousel, steam and other-powered engines and a Rolls-Royce Roadster. There was time to wander among the exhibits before taking a short walk to the main house and the continuation of displays of hundreds of mechanical musical instruments, all restored and in playing condition, and in an opulent and perfectly maintained facility, a part of which is actually the residence for the Sanfilippo family.

Cowan's recital took place in the astoundingly decorated multi-storied Music Room which houses, in addition to many more self-playing instruments, the pièce de resistance, an eight-thousand-pipe five-manual Wurlitzer which, in its present state, is the result of the late David Junchen's plan for the ultimate theatre organ. The instrument was originally a much smaller 1927 Wurlitzer built for the Riviera Theatre in Omaha. After considerable expansion, it now contains five enclosed divisions on several levels plus a set of tower chimes flanking the stage. People who did not mind climbing into the chamber were invited to do so at the end of the recital to see the inner workings. Those readers who have heard Ken Cowan realize that he is among the most outstanding young organists on the scene today. His unassuming manner and his sure and relaxed technique hide a fiery yet totally musical approach to organ playing. His program: The Stars and Stripes Forever ("my own arrangement with [obvious] borrowing from other peoples' arrangements," said Cowan). He also noted that a program such as this one requires "rapid shutters" . . . he then turned again to the audience and in an aside added " . . . this may be the only group who knows what I mean!" He was probably correct. The program continued with Rondo Capriccio (a study in accents), Lemare; "Nocturne" and "Scherzo" from A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mendelssohn; Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue, Willan; Prelude to Hansel and Gretel, Humperdinck (arr. Lemare); the rousing singing of the wonderful English hymn Angel Voices, followed by "My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice" from Samson and Delilah, and Danse Macabre, Saint-Saëns (the latter arr. Cowan); and Overture to Oberon, von Weber (arr. Cowan). After several curtain calls, the artist returned with an encore, Moszkowski's Etude in F Major, a brilliant tour de force. As an added touch during the playing of Danse Macabre, one could see occasional appropriate and dramatic lightning flashes in the night sky. Surely, there was no Wurlitzer stop for that special effect!

Thursday

The day began at a somewhat more relaxed pace with Michael Friesen presenting an account of the Louis Mitchell organ built in Montreal in 1869-1870 for Holy Family Catholic Church, Chicago. At seventy-five ranks, it was reputedly the largest church organ in the country. It was rebuilt by Roosevelt in 1892 with a detached keydesk. After several additional rebuildings, all that remains is the huge case occupying a commanding place in the upper gallery. Even though the plethora of golden angels have descended from their once-ornamental location on the organ case (they are still intact and are in the process of being re-gilded), what remains is still imposing.

The landmark Pullman United Methodist Church and its wonderful 1882 Steere and Turner organ was the site of the first recital of the day. Naomi Rowley presented the following program: Epilogue on St. Theodulph, Willan; Two Christmas Partitas: Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming and Good Christian Friends, Rejoice, Drischner; How Brightly Shines the Morning Star, Gade; Prelude and Fugue in B-flat, Simon; Two Pieces (op. 90): Lamento, and Paraphrase on a Chorus from Judas Maccabeus, Guilmant; and the hymn "Of all the spirit's gifts to me" sung to the tune Meyer. The instrument is a fine example of some of the best in nineteenth-century American organ building. Restored by Kurt Roderer in 1968, its tone is broad and solid yet clear and well-balanced in both its small and large ensembles. Dr. Rowley obviously understood the instrument and chose her program well to demonstrate its features. She is a consummate musician and responded modestly to the well-deserved standing ovation.

Our next stop was in the Hyde Park area and the Disciples Divinity House and the Chapel of the Holy Grail on the campus of the University of Chicago. The beautiful chapel has a small two-manual nine-rank Aeolian organ (Op. 1775; 1930) in the rear gallery. Michael Shawgo informally demonstrated the mildly-voiced instrument with the following selections that had been in the Aeolian player roll catalogue: "Meditation" from Thaïs, Massenet; The Palms, Fauré; The Question and The Answer, Wolstenholme; Meditation, Sturges; Andantino, Chauvet; Hymn of the Nuns, Lefébure-Wely; and "War March of the Priests" from Athalie (op. 74), Mendelssohn. Because of the intimate dimensions of the lovely chapel, listeners were encouraged to visit the demonstration in shifts. The organ, totally enclosed behind a wooden screen, has the character of many a residence organ built by the same firm. Since this campus was also the venue for a box lunch, conventioneers were free to mill about the facility and perhaps take advantage of the following recital by Rhonda Sider Edgington played on the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Carillon of the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel: Prelude No. 5 in d, Van den Gehn; Londonderry Air, arr. Myhre; Wondrous Love, arr. Warner; Changes, White; Three Short Pieces ("Air," "Lullaby," "Chantey"), Miller; "On the Burro" and "Jumping Bean" from Spanish Suite by Della Penna; Waltz, Barnes; and Chorale Partita IV on St. Anne, Knox. Some of the more adventuresome listeners took up the invitation to climb the tower to visit the playing cabin.

Following these events, Derek Nickels played a recital on the unaltered 1928 Skinner, Opus 685, in the University Church, Disciples of Christ. His program: Imperial March, Elgar; Chant sans Paroles, Lemare; "Divertimento" from Four Extemporizations, Whitlock; Prelude on Land of Rest, Sowerby; the singing of the hymn, "O God, our help in ages past" followed by Toccata and Fugue on St. Anne from Music for Elizabeth Chapel, Ferko. Nickels treated the fine Skinner with style and aplomb during his expert playing of the program in what was some more oppressive heat. He maintained his composure and musicality during what must have been an unsettling and unwanted percussive hammering just outside the church whose windows were open in an attempt to invite some circulation of air. Mr. Skinner occasionally did include some percussion stops in his instruments, but certainly nothing like this.

William Osborne then played a program featuring works either dedicated to or by Clarence Eddy in the vast church of St. Mary of Perpetual Help Roman Catholic Church in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago. The large Austin, Opus 1602 of 1928, sang out its solid tones in the opulent, well-maintained and multi-domed structure. As a part of the recent restoration work, its seven-rank String Organ sounded for the first time in twenty-five years. Osborne is a seasoned musician with a great sense of style and an admirable feeling for the musical phrase. His program: Concert Overture in c (1899), Hollins (dedicated to Clarence Eddy); Suite for Organ (1905) "To Clarence Eddy," Rogers; and Eddy's own Festival Prelude and Fugue on Old Hundred (1879), which was followed by the singing of the same tune to the text: "Before Jehovah's Awful Throne." Osborne's deft handling of the incredible pedal cadenza at the end of the Eddy Fugue was nothing short of spectacular. Another well-deserved standing ovation followed.

Holy Family Roman Catholic Church was the site of a short program played by Jason Alden on a delightful one-manual Steinmeyer organ, Opus 197, of 1879 on loan to the church by Keith Hooper. Its reversed console allows the organist to view the now-empty Louis Mitchell case that had been the topic of Michael Friesen's lecture earlier in the day. Like many other churches, Holy Family is in the process of extensive restoration, and is a monument to the faith and persistence of both the clergy and parishioners. The program: Onder een linde groen, Sweelinck; "Andante" from Twelve Fughettas (op. 123a), Rheinberger; "Lebhaft" from Six Fugues on B-A-C-H, Schumann; Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, Buxtehude, followed by the singing of the hymn "Come unto me, ye weary" to the tune Abendlied. Alden, a fine young and very musical player whose interest in the organs of Costa Rica has recently been published in The Tracker (Volume 44, Number 2, 2000), chose his pieces wisely to demonstrate the lovely, bright and incisive sounds of this beautifully designed unenclosed nine-stop tracker. Amazingly, its sounds effectively filled the vast interior of the church.

The evening feature was a recital wonderfully played by Will Headlee on a rare Wurlitzer church organ (Opus 2065, 1930) of four manuals and 32 ranks installed in the breathtaking Reform Jewish Temple Sholom on Lakeshore Drive in the area of Chicago known as the "Gold Coast." After warm remarks by Rabbi Aaron M. Petuchowski, Headlee offered the following program: the hymn "Open your ears, O faithful people," sung to the tune Torah Song; Fantasy: Torah Song, Phillips; Fantaisie in E-flat, Saint-Saëns; Prelude and Fugue in G (BWV 541), Bach; Grand Choeur Triomphal, Guilmant; "Landscape in Mist" from Seven Pastels from the Lake of Constance, Karg-Elert; "Naïades" and "Clair de lune" from Pièces de Fantaisie, Vierne; Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue, Willan; Sweet Sixteenths--A Concert Rag for Organ, Albright; and Toccata on Leonie, Bingham; which was followed by the singing of the hymn by the large audience. The unusual Wurlitzer is situated in two high and widely separated chambers with a balcony for choir and organist. Unfortunately, the placement of the console and the reflecting panel for the choir together make it very difficult for the organist to sense balance with the division on the south side of the gallery since the console is on the north side of the choir loft. Headlee provided us with appropriate and entertaining comments during the recital where he demonstrated the many colors of this unusual and quite fine instrument. Its full, somewhat bright yet smooth and well-balanced sound was a revelation to most, yet he used the Albright piece to bring out the theatre organ colors for which Wurlitzer is better known. An extended ovation followed the program. In recognition of the rarity and quality of the instrument, Michael Friesen presented an OHS Historical Organ citation to the Cantor, Aviva Katzman. Upon leaving, one noticed that the listing of the staff included the name of a Rabbi named Moses--no wonder that this is an important Temple!

Friday

This was northwestern Indiana day that began with a program played by Thomas Brown on a tonally bright and strong 1963 Phelps-designed Casavant (Opus 1740) situated in a rear gallery of the acoustically live contemporary St. Mary of the Lake Roman Catholic Church in Gary. His program was preceded by a surprise snippet of the great Bach Toccata in D Minor that then received a segue into a "Happy Birthday" salute to OHS President, Michael Barone, joyfully sung by all. The recital proper began with the following Bach works: Prelude in G (BWV 541a), Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (BWV 639), featuring appropriate and subtle ornamentation, Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein (BWV 641) and In dulci jubilo (BWV 608), all from Das Orgelbüchlein, and Fuge in E-flat (BWV 552b) from Clavierübung III; "Berceuse" from 24 Pièces en style libre (op. 31), Vierne; "Placare Christe servulis" from Le Tombeau de Titelouze (op. 38), Dupré, followed by the singing of the hymn "Christ Leads" sung to the artist's own magnificent tune, Spes. Brown can always be relied on for vigorous, exciting and accurate playing as well as sensitive phrasing, and this program showed his considerable abilities in abundance. After a short punch and cookies reception given by the ladies of the church, we were off to Valparaiso for the next two events as well as another box lunch.

David Schrader played a dazzling program on a fine 1883 Johnson and Son organ (Opus 615) which had been relocated through the Organ Clearing House and restored in 1994 by the Rutz Organ Company and installed in the Chapel of Mary, Queen of the Apostles in St. Paul Roman Catholic Church, Valparaiso, where convention chairman Stephen Schnurr is organist. The program: the hymn "Ancient of days" sung by all to the tune Albany; Postlude from Glagolitic Mass, Janácek; Postlude pour l'office de complies, Alain; and Grand Sonata, Buck. Schrader's choices of registration showed the transplanted Johnson off to fine advantage in spite of the dead acoustics. Of particular note were the magical Alain Postlude and the Buck Grand Sonata, a composition made for an organ such as this.

OHS Archivist, Stephen Pinel, presented an illustrated lecture titled, "New and Notable at the OHS American Organ Archives," both a retrospective view and opportunities for the future of what has become one of the most noteworthy collections of organ research materials in the world. The collection began modestly and moved to various locations prior to settling in its present rather elegant space in the Talbott Library of the Westminster Choir College of Rider University. Profound thanks for many years' hard work and dedication are due to Stephen Pinel and his many helpers for bringing our archives to its present state of world-wide and noteworthy respect. If interested, contact the OHS headquarters (www.organsociety.org) for further information on the Archives, its plans and needs.

A visit to the magnificent Chapel of the Resurrection on the Valparaiso University campus brought us to another one of the feature programs of the convention, a recital by John Gouwens on the 102-rank Schlicker/Dobson. The ambiance is visually stunning as well as sonically commanding. After some welcoming remarks by Valparaiso's acting president and university organist, Gouwens played the following program: Praeludium in e, Bruhns; Au jô deu de pubelle--Grans Déi, ribon ribeine, Balbastre; Cathédrales, Vierne; and the hymn "How lovely shines the morning star" sung with gusto by the entire audience, followed by Gouwens' magnificent improvisation on the same tune. The space and views through the incredible stained glass windows add an uplifting effect to what is reputedly the collegiate chapel with the largest seating capacity in the world. Even as left by Schlicker in 1959 with many stops prepared for, the organ was a magnum opus, and it is now even more so with the additions and changes completed by Dobson in 1996. We were told that this afternoon's performance was the first time that the organ had been featured in a national meeting. Kudos to John Gouwens for tour de force playing on yet another hot midwestern afternoon.

We then traveled to St. Paul Episcopal Church in La Porte for a short recital by Gregory Crowell on the church's much altered 1871 Steer and Turner tracker, Opus 45 (with some further rebuilding and additions by Ronald Wahl). The organ has a rather commanding presence in the small and acoustically unsympathetic room, but it did exhibit some refinement in its full sounds and warmth and subtlety in the softer ranks when some annoying ambient sounds did not interfere. Crowell can always be counted on for a sensitive sense of phrasing and contour, both of which he displayed in the following program: Ouverture in C (K. 299), Mozart; Prelude and Fugue in F (BWV 901), Bach; Five Variations on Fairest Lord Jesus Christ, Woodman (followed by the singing of this well-loved hymn); Prelude and Fugue in D, Dvorák; Solo pour la flûte, Lemmens; and Toccata, Foote. The organ had received an OHS Historical Organ plaque in 1981.

The final recital of the day was played by convention chairman, Stephen Schnurr, on a transplanted Roosevelt three-manual (Opus 506) in First Congregational Church, Michigan City. The organ has been restored by Roland Rutz, who was in the audience and recognized for his fine work. The recipient of an OHS plaque in 1999, the instrument sits in a recess at the front of the church, and what could have been a resulting "tone trap" at the top of the front display pipes and behind a choir arch seemed not to inhibit egress of the sound. The recital (enhanced by the accompaniment of birds tweeting outside) was made up of works by Chicago composers: Triumphal March (op. 26), Buck; Offertoire in g (op. 194), Havens; Prelude and Fugue in a, Eddy; "In a Village," "Serenade," and "The War Dance Festival," all from Impressions of the Philippine Islands by Moline. The first two pieces in this set featured the fine Oboe and Doppel Flute stops, while the ferocious final piece was accompanied by frantic fanning. The program continued with Meditation (op. 29), Cole; The Joy of the Redeemed, Dickinson; the hymn "O what their joy and their glory must be," sung by all as an appropriate follower for the Dickinson piece; and "Allegro con fuoco" from Sonata I, Borowski. Schnurr was obviously at home on this powerful Roosevelt, his playing being equally vigorous and brilliant while at the same time displaying an inner warmth and musicality. He is a fine young player who is receiving increasing recital exposure throughout the country. Congratulations are due to Stephen Schnurr for a fine performance, even while tending to the myriad of details as convention chairman. A note at the bottom of the page listing his recital program ended with " . . . he intends to spend the remainder of the summer walking the dunes and shores of southern Lake Michigan as soon as the convention is completed!" He has certainly earned that bit of luxury.

Our Indiana visit ended with dinner in a dining room at the Blue Chip Casino in Michigan City. Some wondered if any OHSers visited the casino proper to try to recoup some convention expenses.

Saturday

The first event was a stunning recital by David Dahl on the magnificent two-manual tracker-pneumatic Roosevelt, Opus 494 of 1891, in historic St. James Roman Catholic Church, Chicago. Festive bell ringing from the lofty tower welcomed us to the church. Fortunately, neither the bell tower nor the Roosevelt was severely damaged in a disastrous fire the church suffered in 1972 except for some adverse effects to the organ of extreme heat and moisture. The organ is essentially unrestored (except for some work done in 1949) and was recently put into playing condition by Walter Bradford. Even though there are some stops that are still inoperative, it was enlightening to hear this 1891 Roosevelt of two manuals and compare it with the slightly larger three-manual Roosevelt of the same year heard just the evening before in Michigan City, Indiana. The St. James instrument benefits from installation in a high rear gallery in a lofty nave helping to give a comforting bloom to the sound in the now rather stark interior. After some heartfelt and warm welcoming comments by the pastor who has only recently received appointment to the parish, Dahl presented an outstanding performance of the following program: Trumpet Fanfare, Purcell (arr. Biggs); Allegro moderato maestoso, Mendelssohn; Dahl's own An English Suite Honoring the 18th-century English Organ Art containing "Voluntary for the Diapasons (With solemnity)," "Sarabande Air (With lyricism)," "Voluntary for the Cornet or the Trumpet (With playful spirit)," "Pastorale for the Flutes (With serenity)," and "Jigg (With jaunty humor);" Elegy, Thalben-Ball; the hymn "O praise ye the Lord" sung to the tune Happy Land; Aria, Howells; and Hymn Prelude on Song 22 of Orlando Gibbons, Stanford. Among the many features of this Roosevelt, long a favorite instrument in the area, are a big, assertive yet colorful Great Open Diapason, and a grand and incisive Great Trumpet. Dahl was at one with the organ throughout his program, and his accompaniment of the hymn was truly outstanding, leading both the Roosevelt and the congregation in subtle text breaths. This was some of the best hymn playing of the convention and a true hallmark of a fine musician.

The next event took place in the massive Basilica of Our Lady of Sorrows for  a recital played by Dana Robinson on what may be the largest surviving Lyon and Healy organ, their four-manual Opus 90 of 1902. The instrument received an OHS Historic Organ plaque in honor of its historical importance and the one hundredth anniversary of its installation. The vast interior with its 80-foot high barrel vault and nave of 230 feet is an example of opulent and breathtaking Renaissance revival architecture. The organ is divided on both sides of the wide half-dome chancel and fills the room with a warm and dignified sound. Robinson's program began with the singing of "Hail! Holy Queen," after which there was a short transition leading into the playing of the entire Symphonie III (op. 13, no. 3) by Widor. This was an appropriate choice since this huge work was well suited to the large and colorful sounds of the Lyon and Healy (on which, incidentally, Clarence Eddy had played the dedication recital), the massive ambiance of the building and Robinson's brilliant playing. The entire "package" worked wonderfully well. The artist obviously understood the organ, the room and the music. This was one of the most spectacular venues of the entire convention.

For a total change of pace, the group went to Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Chicago, where James Russell Brown played very ably on a small tubular-pneumatic Lancashire-Marshall (their Opus 52 of 1891) which had been relocated by the Organ Clearing House and rebuilt for its present location by the Bradford Organ Company of Evanston in 1987. Placed on an angle at the rear of the church, some of its "innards" could be seen by those entering the building. With the help of a stop assistant, Brown organized the following program to display the potential of what could be accomplished on a modest yet flexible organ: the hymn "A song of creation" sung by all to the tune Whitehead, followed by a setting of the same tune by Locklair; Ciacona in e, Buxtehude; Sur "La, Mi, Re," anonymous English, 16th century; Scherzo, Gigout; "The peace may be exchanged" from Rubrics, Locklair; Angels (Chaconne), Ferko; and Fugue in F (BWV 540), Bach. Once more, the organist must have suffered greatly from the extreme heat but his performance was musical and assured, and communicated his joy in playing (perhaps aided by the twittering of more birds).

Frederick Beal then performed the following program on a rare Burlington Organ Company tracker built in Burlington, Iowa, in 1903, and placed in a recess at the left front of the Living Sanctuary of Faith Church in suburban Oak Park. His program: Voluntary in c, Greene; Meine Seele erhebt den Herren from Schübler Chorales and Fugue in g (The Little), both by Bach; "Fidelis" from Four Extemporizations for Organ, Whitlock; "I am black but comely, O ye Daughters of Jerusalem" and "How Fair and how Pleasant art Thou" from Fifteen Pieces for Organ, Dupré; Voluntary on St. Columba, and Prelude on Hyfrydol, both by Willan, preceding the hymn "Love divine, all loves excelling" sung to the tune Hyfrydol. Thanks to work done by the Berghaus Organ Company and the loving ministrations of Fred Beal, the organ, in spite of its somewhat closeted enclosure and the fact that it still needs restoration, acquitted itself quite well. Beal noted that there had been a problem with the organ bench squeaking and that tightening repairs did not seem to do the trick, whereupon someone suggested that perhaps an application of a bit of sacred olive oil from the communion table might work. Permission was granted, and the offending noises were quite mitigated. This is the only instance we could recall of an anointed organ bench at an OHS convention.

Jonathan B. Hall then presented the final recital of the afternoon in St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church in Forest Park on the landmark three-manual Aeolian-Skinner (Op. 1235, 1954) with floating positiv supplied by Berghaus in 1976. As a result of the continuing heat and humidity, several conventioneers drifted in and out of "the arms of Morpheus" during the playing of the following program: Concerto in a minor (after Vivaldi), Bach; Offertoire, Truette; the haunting Lotus by Strayhorn (arr. Wyton); the hymn "O love, how deep, how broad, how high" sung to the tune Deus tuorum militum, followed by Sowerby's Prelude on the same melody. The organ with its "pipes in the open" arrangement in the rear gallery, together with the added Rückpositiv on the gallery, gives a visually stunning effect in this highly decorated, vaulted and reverberant church. Hall obviously understood the potential of both organ and the wonderful room. This event was an exciting climax to an active series of performances before we went to Oak Park for the Annual Meeting, a barbecue dinner and the evening recital.

OHS President Michael Barone efficiently chaired the meeting which, in addition to the usual business items and reports from the treasurer and executive director, contained announcements concerning the modest expansion of oversight of the OHS publications, both books and periodicals, including our official quarterly, The Tracker. At this time also, this year's Biggs Fellows, Michael Banks from South Bend, Indiana, and Charles Creech from West Monroe, Louisiana, were introduced. The E. Power Biggs Fellowship was founded to allow deserving interested people to attend a national OHS convention who might otherwise not have been able to do so. Over the years, this function of the Society has resulted in many of the recipients having gone on to careers in music as performers, church musicians, scholars, or organ builders. In fact, Patrick J. Murphy, the first recipient of a Biggs Fellowship in 1978, and now a highly respected professional organ builder in Pennsylvania, was at this convention. The Distinguished Service Award went to Julie Stephens, who over the years has done exceptionally fine work and performed many tasks for the OHS. She also happened to be in charge of the committee responsible for seeing to arranging for all of the varied dinners and box lunches provided during this week.

After a sumptuous barbecue dinner served at Oak Park's First Baptist Church, many conventioneers took advantage of a short stroll to the First Methodist Church where its 1925 four-manual E.M. Skinner (Opus 528) "open console" was generously hosted by the church's organist, Michael Shawgo, who had done the demonstration of the small Aeolian organ in the Chapel of Disciples Divinity House earlier in the week. The Skinner, though distinguished and serviceable, is awaiting restoration.

The Arts Center of Oak Park (formerly First Church of Christ, Scientist) and its three-manual Kimball of 1916 with a later Austin console was the site of an evening recital by Christa Rakich. Her program, interspersed with verbal comments that were both informative and entertaining, follows: Prelude and Fugue in d (op. 16, no. 3), Clara Schumann; the Suffragette hymn, "March of the Women," Smyth (sung lustily by all); Répons pour le Temps de Pâques--Victimae Pascali Laudes, and "Rorate Coeli," "Hosanna Filio David," "Domini Jesu," and "Veni Creator Spiritus," all by Demessieux; Nocturne, Tailleferre; and Trois Préludes et Fugues (op. 7), Dupré, performed in the following order: G minor, F minor, B Major. Peter Sykes assisted as page-turner and occasional cipher stopper, and now and then emerged "from the woodwork" (actually an anteroom) to tend to other mechanical ghosts. The selections, except for the Dupré works, were pieces by women composers. The program suited the organ well in spite of a mixture that tended to separate itself from the ensemble and a particularly huge and annoying sixteen-foot pedal stop that set up extensive vibrations in the room, and which frequently obscured the upper pitches. It is quite possible that the artist was not aware of these particular problems as the console is situated off to one side of the platform and is in a somewhat sunken valley where balances might have been difficult to perceive. Ms. Rakich's energetic performance elicited an appreciative standing ovation.

Sunday

The organizers of the convention wisely left the earlier part of this day open for those who wished either to attend churches in the area or to indulge in a late morning. The events started with Lee Orr's lecture, "Dudley Buck in Chicago." Since Orr is deeply involved in the music of this noteworthy nineteenth and early twentieth century American organist and composer, it was fitting that he present this topic to our convention, particularly since Buck had spent some time working in Chicago before returning to New England and New York after the calamitous Chicago fire of 1871. Buck was apparently well known as a virtuoso with an especially "facile and quiet" pedal technique. One looks forward to Orr's publishing the results of his research, both with regard to Buck's music as well as his biography. The profession needs continuing scholarly studies of performers and composers like Dudley Buck and Clarence Eddy (see the comments on William Osborne's presentations noted earlier in this report) to help fill in our gaps of knowledge about these important and once highly popular figures.

The group then moved to the Epworth United Methodist Church where John W.W. Sherer (organist and director of Music for Chicago's landmark Fourth Presbyterian Church) presented the following program, "Chicago Composers: Past and Present," on a fine 1930 Möller, Opus 5881: Fanfare, Proulx; "Flourish" from Suite for Organ, DeLamarter; A Song of Gratitude, Cole; "Communion" from Ferko's Missa O Ecclesia; Bred dina vida vingar, Webster; Prelude on a Melody by Sowerby, Simmons; the magnificent Pageant by Sowerby, and the hymn "This is the Spirit's entry now" sung by all to Sowerby's tune Perry. The organ, with its hefty reeds, vigorous full ensemble and lovely soft work, had been a gift of the Barnes family which included the famous William H. Barnes, who had been organist at this church and was known throughout the organ world for his many writings and the several editions of his book, The Contemporary American Organ. As usual, Sherer communicated both the demanding and subtle qualities of the program through utilizing both his remarkable virtuoso technique and his sensitive musical sense to serve the requirements of the music. He is a terrific musician.

The rest of the day's program took place in Evanston and environs, beginning with Philip Gehring's warmly received recital on a two-manual tracker built in 1974 by Lawrence Phelps and Associates for St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church, Skokie. His program: Passacaglia, Buxtehude; O Mensch, bewein dein' Sünde gross (BWV 622), Bach, which featured elegant ornamentation on the Sesquialtera; this was followed by Pepping's setting of the same chorale melody and featured a solo line on the Principal; Benedictus--Cromome en Taille, Couperin; the Passacaglia of Near followed by the audience singing the hymn "Now thank we all our God" sung to the usual melody by Crüger. Sectional works such as variations, chaconnes and passacaglias are particularly good choices for events such as these as they allow opportunities to display both solo colors and various ensemble combinations. The rear gallery organ with its detached console and beautifully designed case filled the modestly sized room with strong, bright and colorful sound.

The next stop was the small St. Andrew Episcopal Church in Evanston where Ruth Tweeten presented the following short recital on the church's dandy little Lyon and Healy organ, Opus 174, of 1905: Voluntary in D, Croft; Chorale Prelude on Rhosymedre, Vaughan Williams; Jesus is tenderly calling, Open My Eyes that I May See, and This is My Father's World, all by Diemer; Voluntary in d (Diapasons), Walond; Siciliano (Swell Flutes), Alcock; Voluntary in D (Full Organ), Avison; and the hymn "Jesus is tenderly calling thee home" sung to a tune by George Stebbins. This diminutive "stock model" two-manual tracker of seven stops, restored by Bradford Organ Company with volunteer assistance from members of the Chicago-Midwest Chapter of the OHS, acquitted itself well under Ruth Tweeten's expert hands. Her fine, sensitive playing and creative registration showed what can be accomplished on an organ with only seven ranks. There were many such organs that served small churches well, and this one continues to do so under the watchful and enthusiastic care of this caring congregation. Prior to the program, Susan Friesen presented an OHS Historic Organ citation to the parish's articulate and appreciative rector.

Brian Harlow, recently named assistant organist at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, New York, and who had served prior to that appointment as interim director of music, organist and choirmaster at his Alma Mater, the Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, played an outstanding recital on the well balanced Skinner (Opus 616) of 1927 in the First Congregatonal Church, Evanston. His program: Variations de Concert (op. 1, 1908), Bonnet; "Muzette" from Six pièces (op. 70, 1891), Bossi; Berceuse, op. 16, Fauré (trans. Commette); the hymn "The church's one foundation" sung to the tune Aurelia; and "Finale" from Sonata I by Harwood. Harlow is obviously one of the rising young stars on the organ scene and played magnificently on this beautiful and dignified Skinner that benefits also from being in a particularly good room. Once again, here is an artist who also knows how to play and lead a hymn--his subtle phrasings helped give life to the singing. As a virtuoso, his "horsepower" was well demonstrated in the infamous pedal cadenza near the end of the Bonnet Variations; it was done with both vigor and ease.

After a "dinner on your own" time to sample the various culinary delights in Evanston, we went to St. Luke's Episcopal Church for the feature event of the evening, a thrilling performance by Thomas Murray on the magnificently restored Skinner, Opus 327 of 1922. Details of the phases of its restoration by the A. Thompson-Allen Company of New Haven have been published elsewhere recently, but suffice it to say that here is what one might perceive as a "freshly-minted" (albeit eighty-year-old) E.M. Skinner. Everything seems just right, and the tuning, in spite of the continuing heat and thanks to the fact that Nick Thompson-Allen had been on site for several days, was tight and secure. The instrument, always a landmark in Skinner's output, is truly a monument. After some introductory welcoming remarks by Richard Webster, organist and choirmaster of St. Luke's, Murray played the following program: Fugue in g (K. 401), Mozart; Six Trios (op. 47, 1900), Reger; Two Preludes on Welsh Folk Tunes (1956), Romanza: The White Rock and Toccata: St. David's Day, Vaughan Williams; Sonata I (1904), Borowski; the hymn "Blessed be the God of Israel" sung to the tune Thornberry; followed by Vocalise, Rachmaninoff (trans. Potts); and Sonata Eroïca (op. 94, 1930), Jongen. The event was a perfect match of organ, program and artist. Murray justly received a tumultuous standing ovation.

Monday

The final day of the convention began with a short recital by former OHS President Kristin Gronning Farmer on a three-manual tubular-pneumatic Lyon and Healy, Opus 29 of 1898 in Lake View Presbyterian Church, Chicago. The organ has had some restorative repairs by the Bradford Organ Company and sounds quite good in this modernized and sympathetic room. The program began with the singing of the hymn "Not here for high and holy things" to the tune Morning Song, followed by Chaconne in e, Buxtehude; Herzlich tut mich verlangen, Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern and Mach hoch die Tür, die tor macht weit from Zehn Choralvorspiele (op. 77) by Georg Schumann; "Une femme pieuse essuie la face de Jésus" from Le chemin de la croix, Dupré; and concluded with Concerto in D, FXII/15 ("The Guitar Concerto"), Vivaldi. In spite of a few mechanical problems and with the assistance of her husband, John Farmer, Ms. Farmer played in her usual forthright and musical way and featured the considerably fine colors of this straight, modest-sized instrument.

Next, the large two-manual Johnson & Son tracker, Opus 690 of 1888, in Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church was played with verve and understanding by Christine Marshall Kraemer, the church's organist and choir director. The instrument was restored by the Bradford Organ Company in 1987 and received an OHS Historic Organ plaque to commemorate its centennial in 1988. This is one of only two Johnson organs remaining in Chicago of the many that firm installed in this city (see the articles, "Chicago, A Johnson Town" written for The Tracker, Vol. 10, No. 2 and No. 3, 1966 by the late F.R. Webber). Ms. Kraemer's program follows: Voluntary in D, Boyce; "Andante religioso" from Mendelsssohn's Sonata IV (op. 65, no. 4); Noël sur les flûtes, d'Aquin; O wie selig seid ihr doch, ihr Frommen and O Gott, du frommer Gott from Elf Choralvorspiele, Brahms; "Adagio" from Fantaisie in C, Franck; and the chorale prelude Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme by Walther prior to the singing of the hymn, "Sleepers, wake! A voice astounds us" to the Wachet auf tune. Under Ms. Kraemer's expert control, the Johnson sounded quite typical and acquitted itself well in the somewhat dead room. We often need to be reminded that many fine nineteenth-century American organs were designed, voiced and installed in less than what we might consider favorable acoustical surroundings, yet they often sounded both grand and colorful--a tribute to the art of those builders of the past. This instrument served as just such a reminder.

The last event of the morning was a short but delightful recital played by Elizabeth Naegele on a fine and firm-sounding tubular-pneumatic Austin, Opus 172 of 1906 in St. Paul Community Church (originally St. Paul Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church), Chicago. The instrument, situated in a front corner of the room and angled toward the center of the congregation, has had a few tonal rearrangements and revisions, but has the overall fine Austin ensemble except for a two-foot fifteenth which is a bit strong when used with a super coupler. Ms. Naegele, with the help of one of her young and enthusiastic organ students as page turner and stop assistant, gave a rousing and energetic performance of the following program: Overture to Die Meistersinger, Wagner (arr. Karg-Elert, adapt. Morris), followed by the singing of the hymn "Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing" to the tune Azmon; Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele and Herzlich tut mich erfreuen from Elf Choralvorspiele, op. 122, Brahms; "Nicaea," "Ash Grove," "Ajalon" or "Redhead," and "Saint Kevin" from Four Hymn Voluntaries, Leavitt; and Fiat Lux, Dubois. Ms. Naegele's joy in playing brought a palpable uplifting effect to the program.

After yet another box luncheon, this time in the undercroft of the monumental St. Mary of the Angels Roman Catholic Church, Chicago, the group assembled in the upper church where James Hammann played a superlative recital on the highly unified Kimball of 1920 situated grandly in the rear gallery of this magnificent church. Designed to approximate one-sixth the scale of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome it is, as a result, the largest Catholic church in the state of Illinois. Closed for a time, considered unsafe and destined for demolition, the gigantic multi-domed building has been beautifully restored and is a monument to the faith and persistence of the parish and the priests of the Prelature of Opus Dei. Hammann always rises to the occasion in vast enclosures such as this, and brilliantly played the following program: Fantasie in Freiem Stile No. 4 in e (op. 133), Merkel (dedicated to Clarence Eddy); "Adagio molto espressivo" from Sonata No. 2 in g (op. 77), Buck (also dedicated to Clarence Eddy); and Choral varíe sur le theme du Veni Creator (op. 4), Duruflé (programmed in commemoration of the centennial of the composer's birth). The glory of this final piece was the fact that those in attendance were invited to sing the unaccompanied chant (provided in our Hymn Supplement) alternately with the Duruflé variations. Doing so provided a totally different dimension to the work than is felt when it is simply performed in straight concert format. The result was elevating in its effect, thanks to the fact that Gregorian chant is a natural expression in a space such as this with the room helping to act as support for the pitch. Thanks are due to James Hammann for coming up with the idea. It worked spectacularly well. Prior to the recital, Michael Friesen presented an OHS Historic Organ plaque to the appreciative pastor of St. Mary's.

Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Chicago was the locale for the next event, a recital by Timothy Edward Smith on a rare Van Dinter organ of 1909 situated in the rear gallery of this highly decorated and well-maintained air-conditioned church. This latter feature came as a very welcome relief to the conventioneers as well as, I am sure, to the performer who presented a beautifully played recital on an organ with a surprisingly conservatively designed stoplist for its time. The large 37-rank two-manuals boasts not only a Twelfth and Fifteenth on the Great, but also a three-rank Mixture as well as an 8' Trumpet and 4' Clarion, a complete Pedal division (up through a 4' Octave and including a 51⁄3' Quint), and a large Swell division containing a variety of eight and four-foot colors as well as a Dolce Cornet. The original tracker action has been electrified and a new console supplied. The OHS had visited another and somewhat smaller yet equally bold and colorful Van Dinter organ played by Rosalind Mohnsen during the Kentuckiana convention. (See the Organ Handbook 1993, pp. 78-81.) Timothy Smith received a justly deserved standing ovation for his fine musical and vigorous playing of the following program: Solemn Melody, Davies; Ciacona in c, Buxtehude; Canzona on Liebster Jesu, Purvis; Funeral March of the Marionette, Gounod (trans. Smith); "Fantasia et Fuga" from Sonata Cromatica, Yon; followed by the hymn "Praise to God, immortal praise" sung to the tune Dix. Smith has performed frequently at OHS conventions and always with wonderful results. Hear him if you can, either in a "live" recital or on CD.

The final recital of the afternoon was presented by Sally Cherrington Beggs on a relocated large two-manual Hutchings, Opus 269, of 1892 located in St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, Chicago. Originally installed in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, it was rescued through the Organ Clearing House, relocated and reconstructed with some additions for St. Joseph's by the Bradford Organ Company. Ms. Beggs gave a lively and enjoyable performance of the following program: the hymn "Come now, and praise the humble saint" sung to the tune Land of Rest; Fantasie über Ein Feste Burg (op. 13), Paine; "Rondo Ostinato," "Sarabande" and "Rhythmic Trumpet," all from Baroques, Bingham; Sweet Sixteenths--A Concert Rag for Organ, Albright; and On an Ancient Alleluia, Bitgood. The organ, though considerably altered, still has the Hutchings "heft" and color.

For the final event of the convention, the group assembled in the vast First Baptist Congregational Church in the Union Park section of Chicago to hear Peter Sykes, a perennial favorite, in a major recital on the church's large four-manual, totally enclosed seventy-seven rank Kimball, Opus 6949 of 1927. The organ, with a case from the church's previous 1871 three-manual Hook and Hastings, is receiving some ongoing restoration work by the Bradford Organ Company. Its central location in a front gallery and surrounded by a variety of additional instruments, both acoustic and electronic, is ideal for projection into the entire large church, and Sykes took advantage of this feature in the following program: Sonata III, Hindemith; Rhapsody (op. 17, no. 1, 1915), "Moderato tranquillo," Howells; Sonata No. 2 in d (1914), Prokofiev (trans. Sykes); the hymn "Come all you thirsty" sung to a tune composed by Peter Sykes; Scherzo-Fantasia (1960), McKinley; Clair de lune (op. 53, no. 5), Vierne; and Suite, Duruflé. While coping with what appeared to be a problem with balky swell shades, Sykes' virtuoso playing and demanding program obviously delighted the audience which rose to its collective feet in appreciation. As part of the event, Michael Friesen awarded an OHS Historic Organ plaque to the organist and pastor of the church. During the intermission, OHS Vice President Scot Huntington eloquently ex-pressed appreciation to the convention committee and to its chairman, Stephen Schnurr, for the years of work that went into the planning and ultimate realization of a very successful convention. Huntington noted that, since Schnurr is a native of Kentucky, he might enjoy (and certainly deserved) a gift of premier Kentucky sipping whiskey as tangible evidence of the Society's gratitude for a job exceptionally well done. One hopes that Schnurr will enjoy this as much as he will roaming the dunes of northern Indiana (see the note at the end of the report of his recital in Michigan City on June 28).

Each OHS convention has its own personality, and all are enjoyable, both from the standpoint of hearing a variety of noteworthy instruments well-played and renewing acquaintances with those who share one's interest in the OHS and its aims. The 2003 convention will be in south central Pennsylvania June 19-25, with headquarters in Harrisburg. Buffalo, New York, will be the site for the 2004 convention slated to run from June 14-24. Plan to attend a future OHS convention--you will not be disappointed. Both fun and enlightenment will be in store!

 

(Because of travel delays, the reviewer was unable to hear the opening event of the convention. The comments are distilled from those furnished by OHS members who were in attendance.)

Steven Egler

Steven Egler is Professor of Music Emeritus at Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, where he taught organ for 41 years. He is also director of music and organist emeritus at First Presbyterian Church, Mt. Pleasant, where he served for 35 years (1976–2011).  He is currently dean of the Saginaw Valley Chapter of the American Guild of Organists.

This interview with Morgan and Mary Simmons of Evanston, Illinois, longtime musicians (1968–1996) at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, reveals their strong relationship as evidenced in their 65-year marriage (1953–present). We met on July 29, 2017, at their home in Evanston, where they have lived for 50 years.

They discussed their rare collaboration in several positions throughout the years, and they shared wonderful anecdotes about their time as students at the Union Theological Seminary School of Sacred Music, various church positions, and music making in general. The Simmonses shared the importance of their respective families and the influence that their families had on them and their careers as individuals and as musicians.Morgan and Mary also revealed insights into working with two high-profile pastors—the third and fourth respectively—of Fourth Presbyterian Church:  Dr. Elam Davies (1968–1984) and Dr. John Buchanan (1985–2012). 

Thanks to Ken Wuepper of Saginaw, Michigan, for audio technology support, and to Morgan and Mary Simmons for their careful editing assistance.

 

Steven Egler: Morgan, let’s begin with you telling us about your childhood and formative years.

Morgan Simmons: I was born in Andalusia, Alabama, April 6, 1929. Although I only had one sibling, my extended family was huge with 50 first cousins. Both of my parents came from large families, and my paternal grandmother was the oldest of 16, 14 of whom I knew.

Since both my grandmothers lived across the street from each other, and I lived only a block away, I got a lot of attention growing up.

 

Were you the oldest?

Morgan: No, my sister was three years older, and for both of us family was exceedingly important.

 

Recall for us your earliest musical experiences.

Morgan: I sang in the children’s choir of the First Methodist Church of Andalusia, and I started piano lessons when I was in the fourth grade with a very old-fashioned lady, Josie Lyons, who taught piano in the ladies’ parlor of the Methodist Church. She was a real taskmaster. If we were late to lessons we did not have a lesson, but we were still charged. She was also the organist and choir director of the church and wore very interesting attire for Sunday worship—a white satin surplice with a purple full-length skirt and matching scull cap for winter months; a white lace surplice with black skirt and matching cap for the summer.

I also took up clarinet but never perfected it; then at age 15, I began organ study. This opened an exciting new chapter in my life.

 

Mary, please tell us about your early years.

Mary Simmons: I was born February 22, 1930, in Centralia, Illinois. When I was six, we moved to Carbondale, Illinois, and I had a wonderful childhood with my sister who was five years older than I and my brother who was three years older. 

Unlike Morgan, I did not come from a large family. My mother was one of six children, and my father was an only child. This was the family that I mostly knew.

When we moved to Carbondale, I became a piano student of Helen Mathis, later Vogler, who was head of the piano department at Southern Illinois University. I studied with her until I graduated from high school, and it was good that she took such great interest in me.

When I was in the eighth grade, my mother thought that I was getting bored with the piano and suggested that I would like to study organ.

I studied organ at the Presbyterian Church in Carbondale with Eloise Thalman, who was a very good organist and took me under her wing. I loved it from the first day that I started, and during the summer, I got up early and rode my bicycle to the church to practice because I loved it so much. 

After having had a few lessons that same summer, Mrs. Thalman came to my home and said she would be taking her husband to the Mayo Clinic and asked me to play for church. What a shock that was! From that point on, I was hooked.

Morgan: Mary didn’t say that she has perfect pitch, which was discovered before she was six years old. Her native abilities are far greater than mine: I’m not a gifted, natural musician and have always had to work for everything I’ve done, so that has figured in our musical experiences through the years. 

It has occurred to me that one of the big factors that has enhanced my life is related to World War II. My father was in the military, and when I was a junior in high school we moved from Andalusia to Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville, North Carolina, which was the beginning of a totally new experience for me.

Shortly after arriving at the army base, I had the good fortune of studying organ with a chaplain’s assistant, Lee Sistare, who was a graduate of Union Theological Seminary’s School of Sacred Music where he had been a student of Clarence Dickinson. He introduced me to Dr. D.’s Technique and Art of Organ Playing and plied me with stories of church music in the “Big Apple.”  

During my stay at Fort Bragg, I sang in the Chapel Choir. The chapel was only two doors from our quarters and had a small, two-manual Hilgreen-Lane organ where I was able to practice. 

Following my two years in Fayetteville, I returned to Andalusia for my senior year in high school and had lessons with another Union graduate, Henry Whipple, who lived in Montgomery. I took the bus every other Saturday to Montgomery for lessons with Mr. Whipple, who had been a student of Palmer Christian and Clarence Dickinson. On those same Saturdays, I had piano lessons with the  distinguished pianist Lily Byron Gill. She had studied with Moszkowski in Paris and was a teacher of the old school, who taught Czerny and Hanon, so I was exceedingly fortunate. 

 

How did you learn about DePauw University?

Morgan: A young chaplain, who was from Indiana and knew about my interest in organ and church music, recommended that I consider DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. I had never heard of the school, yet I was determined to go to Union once I had completed my bachelor’s degree. I was granted a Methodist scholarship and thus attended DePauw for my undergraduate study. 

I appeared in Greencastle green as a gourd, having taken the train from Alabama. Alas, I arrived without my wallet! It had worked its way out my hip pocket and went to Chicago on the Monon railroad. Believe it or not, it was returned to me a couple of days later with all the money still in it, so it was another of those serendipitous experiences that has graced my whole life.

My first-year organ teacher was Bernice Mozingo, a graduate of DePauw, and who had studied with Parvin Titus and Palmer Christian. The organ professor at DePauw, Dr. Van Denman Thompson, was very particular about taking first-year students, but at the beginning of my second year, I began my study with him. He was unlike any musician I had ever known.  

A larger-than-life individual, he graduated from New England Conservatory in one year, took postgraduate work at Harvard, and was teaching college in Arkansas at age 19. He came to DePauw when he was 20 and taught for 47 years. 

His wife, Eula Mae, blind from age three, was a very accomplished musician in her own right. Together they had seven children, the youngest of whom they named Lynnwood in honor of the person known by many as America’s greatest organist, Lynnwood Farnam. 

He was also teaching and performing Messiaen and other contemporary composers long before many other organists of the day. 

The organ used for teaching was in Gobin Memorial Methodist Church, a four-manual vintage Kimball instrument with fabulous strings, and before I arrived, the Aeolian-Skinner Company had added an unenclosed positive. In 1943, a two-manual “Baroque” organ was installed in the balcony, so we had the best of both worlds.

In terms of teaching, he was unique. During an opening conversation at the console, he would sit facing the stop jams and comment on my playing; then he would leave me alone while walking up and down the aisles of the church, return and say, “I think you’d be better to put your third finger on the B-flat.”  

He had an incredible ear. A fellow student said he called up to him during one lesson, “The vacuum cleaner is sounding a flat F sharp. You’ll have to play a little louder.” Besides being a wonderful teacher, he was a fabulous performer and improviser. 

Marcel Dupré came to the campus to play in 1948, and l listened in the back of the church while Dr. Thompson demonstrated the organ for Dupré by improvising a lengthy theme and variations. Upon its conclusion, Dupré stood up and shouted, “Prima, prima!” 

I had wonderful experiences at DePauw and made life-long friends with such people as Charles Heaton and Maureen and Art Carkeek. It was here that I was introduced to the A.G.O. There was a student chapter, and I got my feet wet during my senior year when I served as dean.

 

Mary, please tell us about your college experience and study.

Mary: When I graduated from high school, I was determined to continue organ study but also piano. I went to the University of Illinois because that was a tradition in my family. My grandfather, my father, my mother, my mother’s brothers and sister, and their spouses, as well as my sister and brother and their spouses, were all graduates, so it was a given that I would join the “club.”

I started out as a double major in piano and organ, but after two years I decided to drop the piano to a minor and really concentrate on organ. My teacher was Paul Pettinga, a fine pedagogue and a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory.

When I graduated, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do; however, my brother, who was a ministerial student at Union Theological Seminary in New York, told me about the School of Sacred Music there.

I interviewed with Hugh Porter, was accepted, and attended from 1951–1953. That was the beginning of a wonderful relationship with Hugh Porter and his wife Ethel, which was enhanced by experiences and the varied opportunities that the city had to offer.

 

Was two years the typical amount of time that it took to complete the Master of Sacred Music degree, and did it include fieldwork as well?

Mary: Yes.

 

What was Union Seminary like when you arrived in 1951?

Morgan: Mary and I both arrived at Union the same year—the fall of 1951—and were, of course, overawed by the city. It was the “golden age,” both for the seminary and for the city of New York in terms of church music. Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich were both at their prime as professors at Union.

Hugh Porter was director of the School of Sacred Music, having succeeded Clarence and Helen Dickinson, who were still around and still teaching. They came on Wednesday, which was known as D-Day. 

Mrs. Dickinson was quite a character and was the first woman to have received a PhD from Heidelberg University. She was said to be able to talk the horns off of a Billy goat and that she had talked her way into a required course that had been previously closed to female students. She wrote her doctoral dissertation, in German, on Italian art of the Renaissance. 

The Dickinsons taught a course about the history of sacred music, and Dr. D. taught
a course on oratorio solo accompaniment.

Both Mary and I studied with Hugh Porter whose style of teaching was quite a contrast to what I was accustomed. He was very much on-the-bench and over your shoulder while humming and tapping rhythms and penciling, and it took some time to get used to his more hands-on approach.

 

Would you liken him to anyone more recent, such as Russell Saunders’s style of teaching?

Morgan: Perhaps. He had studied with Lynnwood Farnam, a perfectionist of the first order. I have no first-hand knowledge of Russell’s style, but I had the good fortune to study one summer with Arthur Poister following my doctoral degree. With him the music was paramount—the technique secondary!

I also studied with Marilyn Mason who emphasized technique: careful fingering and pedaling. With Dr. Thompson you learned by osmosis!

In New York, one could experience an oratorio every Sunday. At that time, Dickinson was at the Brick Church, Frederick H. Candlyn was at St. Thomas, Harold Friedell was at St. Bartholomew’s, Norman Coke-Jephcott was at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Robert Baker was at First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, and Vernon DeTar was at Ascension. DeTar was very smart: he presented his oratorios on Monday evenings, thus avoiding competition.

Those were exceedingly memorable occasions; I remember DeTar conducting Honegger’s King David with the Witch of Endor being portrayed by Madeleine Marshall, who was the diction teacher at Union and a wonderful person. We became close friends, and she subsequently came to Evanston to do a program for our A.G.O. chapter. It was a heady time to be in New York. No question!

 

Mary, what can you say about your time at Union?

Mary: My experience was a little different from Morgan’s. He more was interested in the theological studies than I was, although I loved being there and making friends. We had chapel five mornings a week and, like many of us who had jobs related to the seminary, I was in charge of the choir robes. I was constantly cleaning the robes, removing candle wax, and replacing collars. 

I especially remember having a course from Harold Friedell on writing descants. I loved doing that and composed some pretty good ones as a result. I also studied composition with Norman Lockwood for a very short time.  

During my second year, I served a small church in the Bronx with an integrated congregation. In spite of the fact there were so few children in the area, they wanted me to start a children’s choir, so we scheduled the rehearsals for after school. It was an extra trip for me, because I had to take two separate subway lines and a bus to get to the church. 

I did, however, manage to get a small choir to perform some decent anthems. It was a learning experience for me, and I especially enjoyed the children. 

When Morgan and I were married, one of the fathers brought some of the children to our wedding. It was such a thrill to have them there.

 

Morgan, please tell us about your fieldwork experience at Union.

Morgan: For two years, I was fortunate to serve a Lutheran church in New Rochelle, which had had a Union person before me. We were able to perform Messiah with outside soloists (“and I accompanied,” whispered Mary). 

For the first time I had the joy and privilege of working with children’s choirs. Years later after going to Fourth Church, I realized how much I missed this phase of music ministry.

It was a tradition that the Porters invited the entire student body to their cottage in Connecticut for a retreat at the end of each academic year. That’s when Mary and I became serious with one another. The following October, we became engaged and made plans to be married in James Chapel at the seminary. Because our parents and many friends would be attending our commencement, we set Sunday, May 17, 1953, as our wedding date. Dr. Lewis J. Sherrill, author of a powerful book, The Struggle of the Soul, and my spiritual advisor, performed the ceremony. Like the Porters, he and Mrs. Sherrill became like family to us.

Hugh played for our wedding, and our reception was held on the 15th floor of Riverside Church. We left the city for our honeymoon in pouring rain, drove up the Hudson to a rustic cottage, and returned Tuesday for commencement to receive our Master’s degrees. You can imagine the flurry of activity surrounding all of these events!

Following graduation in the summer of 1953, Mary and I were named as musicians for the first Montreat Conference in North Carolina. We accepted this invitation with the provision that, if I were drafted, I would not be able to fulfill my obligation to the conference. Sure enough, I was drafted and had to return to Alabama to report for duty, leaving Mary alone to complete the term. Upon my return to Alabama, my father was diagnosed with a serious illness for which I got a month’s deferment. 

I was in the infantry and trained at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, in the crack platoon of the division. The only way that I got through the ordeal was to rely on my sense of humor and say to myself, “If only so-and-so could see me now, crawling with a rifle on my belly under live ammunition!” We were known as the top unit with an A number-one record for performance. 

 

What do you mean by “crack”?

Morgan: “Crack” refers to the discipline that was used in an attempt to “break” (or “crack”) you, but I got through it. 

As fate would have it, Frederick Kent, who had been in the class ahead of me at DePauw, worked in the Third Army Chaplain’s Office at Fort Jackson. He asked me where I would like to be stationed after basic training, and I said Fort Benning. This was the closest base to my home in Alabama and where my sister and brother-in-law were stationed. Being another serendipitous experience and following those eight weeks of hell, I ended up with a plum job at Fort Benning. I was able to practice, took a speed-reading course, and enrolled in a French course, knowing that I was going to need it for my doctorate.

 

Mary, where were you at this time?

Mary: I was with Morgan’s parents in Andalusia. Upon Morgan’s return home after basic training, his father brought out a bottle of champagne for celebration.

Describe your time in Columbus, Georgia, and your activities there?

Mary: After this, we moved to Columbus, adjacent to Fort Benning, where I got a job on the post and did some organ subbing in the area.

Morgan: During that time, we got involved in the church music life of Columbus and were instrumental in founding the Columbus Chapter of
A.G.O., for which I served as its first sub-dean.

 Since I was stationed there for 18 months, we also determined that, if Mary got pregnant by a certain time, we’d be able to take advantage of the Army hospital. It worked and our son, David, was born on May 5, 1955. We call it a historic birthday: 5555!

I was released from the Army that June and then attended summer school in New York to begin work on my doctorate at Union. 

 

Please tell our readers about your year (1955–1956) in England where you attended the Royal School of Church Music.

Morgan: Prior to separation from the Army, I applied for a Fulbright Scholarship, and the following September, Mary and I and our four-month-old son sailed for England where I began study at the Royal School of Church Music at Croydon. At that time and for many years, the Royal School was housed in Addington Palace, which once served as the summer palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Mary, David, and I had gracious accommodations on the second floor of the magnificent edifice. 

Cyril V. Taylor, a very fine biblical and musical scholar, was the warden of the School. He had been with the BBC Radio Ministry, and at the RSCM, he taught courses on psalmody and hymnody. This is where I became interested in the subject of my doctoral dissertation: Latin Hymnody: Its Resurgence in English Usage. Subsequently, I researched the translation of Latin hymns into English and did a fair amount of research at the British Museum in London.

I had a few organ lessons with Sir William Harris who, at that time, was organist to the Queen at Windsor. I took the Langlais Suite Brève to one lesson, and after hearing one page, he shut the book and said, “I will not listen to such music.”

Then I had the audacity to think I could study with Herbert Howells at the Royal College of Music. During our initial session and in no uncertain terms, he informed me that I wasn’t ready for him!

He sent me to William Lovelock, professor at Trinity College in London. Like Van Denman Thomspon, he was also a mind-blowing musician. He could write out a melody, harmonize it by writing the alto line, then the tenor, and then the bass, just one voice at a time. So I had almost a year’s study of basic harmony with Lovelock, which complemented my undergraduate and graduate school experiences. 

Gerald Knight, director of the Royal School, was a gracious host to Allen Sever (another Fulbright Scholar) and me and took us on trips to Ely, York, and other cathedral cities. 

I also had the amazing opportunity of hearing Lessons and Carols at Salisbury and King’s College, Cambridge.

We were introduced to Prince Philip during a reception for all Fulbright scholars at the English-Speaking Union. Another time, Sir William McKie, organist at Westminster Abbey, entertained Mary and me for tea. These encounters were among the highlights of our time in England. 

 

After being in England for a year, you returned to Union where you pursued your Doctor of Sacred Music degree.

Morgan: Yes, but unfortunately, we had to shorten our time in England because of my father’s illness, so we returned four weeks earlier than had been scheduled. 

My father died in July 1956, and we returned to Union that September where I began my doctoral study. 

I also assumed the position of minister of music at the Bound Brook Presbyterian Church in Bound Brook, New Jersey, succeeding our friend, Charles Heaton, who had just completed his doctorate at Union. It turned out to be a wonderful experience since the church had a long history of fine church music going back to the days of Ifor Jones, esteemed conductor of the Bach Choir Festival in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

 

Of mention on the current website of Bound Brook Presbyterian Church is: “Many of our former directors of music have become of note in their field. Ifor Jones who was here in the 1930s became the third director of the Bach Bethlehem Choir and has edited many Bach cantatas and anthems. Morgan Simmons was here in the 1950s and went to and retired from Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. Other noted names are Charles Heaton and Clifford Case, former U. S. Senator.”

Morgan: Thanks for doing your homework! I had not known of Senator Case’s relation to the church, which is the third oldest church in the state of New Jersey, founded in 1688, and has missed only one service in its history. That was when a battle was being fought during the Revolutionary War on the church grounds. 

We had a blizzard one year while we were there, but we held church with 17 in the choir and 50 in the congregation. I was never so proud of a choir!

Ifor Jones and E. Power Biggs had been contemporaries at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and both came to the United States in 1930. Although Jones was an organist, Biggs excelled in organ and Jones in choral work.

The Bound Brook Church offered abundant opportunities to put into practice what I had already learned and was continuing to learn. 

We had a large children’s choir program of six choirs and enjoyed annual subscriptions to children’s concerts in New York City for six Saturdays each year. They heard orchestral music, took boat trips, and learned about city life—a testament to the generous support of the congregation.

There was a good choir library, also. During our first year, we did the Bach Magnificat, about which the chairman of the music committee was initially very uncertain, but she was delighted that we could actually “pull off” something like that! 

 

Was Mary with you in that position?

Morgan: Oh, yes. Mary was always there accompanying.

 

So Mary, were you playing all of those oratorio accompaniments before they became published scores for organ?

Mary: Yes. I always loved accompanying, even in high school.

Morgan: Our second and third children were born while we were in New Jersey—one between children’s choir rehearsals on a Saturday morning, and the other between church services on a Sunday morning. 

 

How convenient!

Mary: We had a good apartment that came with the job, good train service into New York, and made lifelong friends.

Morgan: At Union, I was studying during the summer with Marilyn Mason (as mentioned above) who was also working on a doctorate. Plus, I studied with John Huston, organist at First Presbyterian Church.

Also mentioned earlier, my doctoral dissertation centered on Latin hymnody. It included the study of plainsong hymns being introduced to the Church of England during the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century.

The dissertation was accepted by Oxford University Press in New York but was rejected by the London office, so it was never published. Mary did all the typing of the 300-page document, and I penned in more than a 100 musical examples in four copies, no less.

 

Did you include footnotes?

Morgan: Oh yes!  

Mary: And I was pregnant at the time!

Morgan: In addition to the dissertation requirement, I had to write annotated program notes for six organ concerts and six choral programs.

 

Now, tell us about your move to Evanston and your job at First United Methodist Church.

Morgan: After six years at the church in New Jersey, I received a joint appointment here in Evanston at First Methodist Church, which became First United Methodist Church, and Garrett Seminary, which became Garrett- Evangelical Theological Seminary. That appointment began in January 1963, and I succeeded Austin Lovelace in both of those positions. Once again, we had the opportunity to do excellent repertory at First Methodist. 

Before Alice Millar Chapel was built in 1962, the church was closely associated with Northwestern. It was the site of many of the university choral concerts as well other musical events.

Shortly after we arrived, the church was the venue for an all Randall Thompson concert with Randall Thompson himself in attendance. On many occasions, we collaborated with the choral forces at Northwestern.  

Mary was technically not on the staff, but she did all of the organ accompanying for the church. We made many close friends, both at the church and at Northwestern.

 

Mary, how did you deal with the orchestral reductions to piano that were then the only available keyboard scores for these large choral works. Did you think that this was a difficult task at all?

Mary:  We did consult the orchestral scores, and I could pull out things that were important. Most of the time, however, I used the accompaniments in the vocal score in order to figure out what should be highlighted.

Morgan: One of Mary’s specialties was the Brahms Requiem, which we performed both in Evanston and later at Fourth Church. In addition to the organ, we added timpani and harp. 

With other scores, such as the Mozart Requiem, we used orchestra, although the first time we did the Mozart at Fourth Church, we used just the organ.

 

Speaking just a bit ahead of ourselves, what was the condition of the organ when you first went to Fourth Church? 

Morgan: It was the original 1914 E. M. Skinner organ that had undergone some additions and changes in the late 1940s, but there had been no mechanical changes. There were no general pistons, yet it had three master pistons that controlled divisional pistons number four, five, and six but not the couplers. We also used one of those master pistons as the general cancel since there was none, and it was important for silence. Needed sound could be provided by the crescendo pedal! 

That first year, Mary played the Mozart Requiem without general pistons, and it was quite something. Also, the organ had 230 dead notes when we went there!

 

Why did you move from First United Methodist, Evanston, to Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago?

Morgan: Essentially, I was not reappointed to my position at the church in Evanston, not on musical grounds but rather ministerial difficulties. There was much turmoil going on in the church at the time, and I was going to be without a job. 

One Sunday in June 1968, a distinguished gentleman appeared after the postlude and introduced himself as chairman of the music committee of Fourth Presbyterian Church. I knew that Fourth Church was looking for an organist, but I also knew that it was the sort of place where one did not apply. He said that they were looking for a new organ and wanted to know what my opinion was. He gave to me the names of three companies that they were considering, complimented me on the service, and left.

That afternoon I received a call from Elam Davies, pastor of Fourth Church, who said that Mr. McLeod and his wife had attended First Methodist Church that morning and liked what they heard. He then invited me to have lunch with him the next day and told me that they were looking for a new organist. We met for an interview, after which he offered me the job. He said that he had plenipotentiary power and was able to do this if I was interested. I told him that the offer was very enticing, but that I had an appointment with a pastor from another church and was not yet in a position to make a commitment.

The next evening I met with Louis Evans, Jr., pastor of the Presbyterian Church in La Jolla, California, who did not have plenipotentiary power and who was not in a position to offer me the job.

The next morning, Elam called me and inquired where this church was. I told him, and he soon got back to me after having looked up the statistics and said, “It looks like a good church, but there’s only one Fourth Church!” I told him that I thought he had majored in persuasion in seminary, and the rest is history. I never had a contract, never had a secretary.

 

What about the administration of the music program at Fourth Presbyterian?

Morgan: I did all of that myself as well as all of the church publications for a time. I did all of my own typing, along with Mary’s assistance in proofreading.

Right at the beginning of my tenure, the organ was front-and-center: they were definitely going to replace the instrument.

Mary: I’d like to intersperse here that it was Elam who suggested that I should be on the payroll. Thus, I became a regular member of the paid staff as associate organist.

Morgan: Unlike any other pastoral relationship that I had prior to this, there was a bond with Elam right from the beginning. We worked together from 1968 to 1984.

At one point, there were a couple of disgruntled choir members who tried to get me fired. Elam said that, even if there were no choir remaining in the loft, I would still be organist and choirmaster. That’s how strong his support was for me. Even after his retirement to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, we remained close friends.

One of my biggest responsibilities was developing the choir. Dr. Davies gave me the authority to hire and fire as necessary, but it took me four to five years to create the choral sound that I carried in my head.

The choir was all paid, and as a result, one always exchanges one set of problems for another. Having never worked with a paid singer before, let alone an all-paid choir, I was presented with a whole bevy of challenges and potential for tension in the ranks as well as dealing with prima donnas.

 

Please talk about the installation of the Aeolian-Skinner in 1971.

Morgan: Elam Davies did not have a good experience with the organ in his previous church in Pennsylvania. As a result, he was determined that the organ was going to be an Aeolian-Skinner, and we engaged Robert Baker as the consultant. We also worked closely with then president of the Aeolian-Skinner Company, Donald Gillette.

The organ was finally installed in the fall of 1971 and was essentially crammed into a very tight and remote space. It replaced the E. M. Skinner instrument of fifty-nine ranks with one of 125 ranks, which made for even tighter quarters.

The big problem was that Aeolian-Skinner was essentially bankrupt at the time, and they cut all kinds of corners on the mechanics of the console, including the combination action, which was very unsatisfactory and which eventually had to be completely replaced. Robert Baker played the dedicatory recital, and we had an organ recital series during the rest of our tenure.

 

Considering that you were there as the organ was being planned, what input did you have regarding the stoplist?

Morgan: I insisted that we had to have a Harmonic Flute on the Great, yet I had to fight for it since in those days 8′ stops were not in vogue! I also insisted that we retain the French Horn. We also saved as much of the original E. M. Skinner pipework as possible.

The very first Kleine Erzähler was included in the 1914 organ, and there is a letter in the archives from E. M. Skinner in which he says the following:

 

I have invented a new stop through my study over this case. I wanted to [include] a Flute Celeste of which I’m very fond; [however] it takes a considerable room and I set about finding a way to take less room. I wanted to make the stop softer than usual, so I had some pipes made to a small scale from the model of my Erzähler. The result is a most beautiful combination—I think the most beautiful soft effect I have ever heard. The sheer beauty of this stop gives me a very great asset and adds another to my list of original stops. I call it Kleine Erzähler which means ‘Little Storytellers.’ The stop is so talkative I have always said it named itself. 

 

It has been retained in the new instrument by Quimby Pipe Organs, along with the Harmonic Flute (1971 Aeolian-Skinner, Opus 1516) and the French Horn (1914 Ernest M. Skinner Company, Opus 210).

 

Considering that Rev. John Buchanan was such a prominent figure in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., describe your day-to-day working relationship with him?

Morgan: John and I had a very good relationship, but it acquired a new dimension because it was my first time  to work with a senior pastor who was younger than I.

Initially, I intuited that John felt I was still “wedded” to my relationship with Elam. It took some time to convince him that this was definitely not the case and that he had my total respect, admiration, and affection. He was very supportive of the music ministry, bringing to the equation his own accomplishment as a trumpeter and love for brass music that eventually led to the establishment of a fine ensemble that continues to enhance worship.

Elam was very much a hands-on pastor; for instance, he’d tell the young assistant pastors when they needed to polish their shoes. I missed that with John because there were times when I thought staff needed to be called to account. 

Elam also had a mind like a steel trap, came to staff meeting with no notes, took no notes, and yet quoted verbatim what was said and who had said it. He kept a calendar in his head, and you knew that he was on top of everything that went on in the church. If he trusted you, you had his total support, yet his was a different style of administration as well as a different style of preaching which was very dramatic and frequently went off topic. By contrast John’s sermons were perfectly crafted, informed by insatiable reading, and on point—qualities that led to his international prominence.

 

Upon your retirement from Fourth Church in 1996, the following quote from the Chicago Tribune speaks volumes.

Quote of John Buchanan, Chicago Tribune, March 27, 1996, “Organist Retires On a High Note.”

 

Pastor John Buchanan, while praising his [Morgan’s] ‘impeccable musicianship,’ also noted one job drawback for Simmons. Over 27 years, Simmons had sat quietly, between musical offerings, through ‘2,688 sermons and 1,700 weddings,’ a patience required in few other art forms.

 

Among your many activities, you’ve enjoyed success as a composer. What can you say about your composing?

Morgan: Most of my compositions can be described as “occasional” pieces. For instance, the impetus for Cityscape was the 1992 annual Festival of the Arts at Fourth Church, “Faces of the City.” It is based on a three-note descending scale (C-B-A) which comprises the opening notes of the popular song, “Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town.” Coincidentally, these same pitches are the beginning of Old Hundredth  (sung every Sunday at church) and are incorporated in the concluding movement of the work, “The Magnificent Mile,” an allusion to the location of Fourth Church. 

Reflections for Oboe and Organ was written for Ray Still, renowned former oboist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and premiered by the two of us in a recital at Fourth Church in 1976. 

Because I am not gifted with a keen ear like Mary, composing is an arduous task, most of which is done at the keyboard. I may get a musical idea, but I don’t commit it to paper without checking it out at the piano. The sounds of the Fourth Church organ and the acoustics of the building also influenced the coloration of many of my compositions.  

Prelude on a Melody of Sowerby features the Kleine Erzhäler and Celeste, which Sowerby would have heard and played. The piece builds to full organ after a blast from the Festival Trumpet, which dates from the 1971 Aeolian-Skinner.

On the occasion of the Fourth Church Morning Choir tour to Britain in 1990, I composed settings of the Canticles and responses for Evensong, which the choir sang at Bath Abbey, a service at which my mentor Cyril Taylor and his wife were in attendance. The highlight of that tour was the singing of his magnificent hymn tune Abbots Leigh in his presence and in that awesome building.  

 

Your hobbies include gardening and needlepoint. Please tell us how you became interested in these wonderful, non-musical activities. (The photos included here of your garden and needlepoint are testaments to your skills and artistry.)

Morgan: I began doing needlepoint at the age of 18 under the guidance of one of my aunts. The gardening goes back to age four when I was given a dedicated space in our yard for my own plantings. Addiction to the plant world has only grown through the years.

The needlepoint includes over 30 pieces for Fourth Church—mainly the chancel cushions, a cross with attendant panels and replicas of stained glass—plus the large 4′ x 4′ tapestry of The Burning Bush which hangs in the new building at Fourth Church and which was created in honor of the musicians who have served the church.

 

Why needlepoint?

Morgan: It is therapy: I don’t sit still well. I guess that it has had something to do with my itchy fingers!

 

In a statement that you sent to me before the interview, you said the following:

 

I was always sensitive to the fact that I had BIG shoes to fill. In Isaac Newton’s words, ‘If I have seen further than others, it was only by standing upon the shoulders of giants.’ I wouldn’t dare to presume that I’ve seen further than others, but I am acutely aware that I have a BIG debt to those who have gone before me.”

 

Because you are a giant in our field, what do you have to say to those of us who are standing on your shoulders?

Morgan: I’ve spoken about the fact that I don’t have outstanding, native musical ability. Whatever success I’ve had has been a combination of managerial and musical abilities. Additionally, I believe that I have a good balance of IQ (Intelligence Quotient) and EQ (Emotional Quotient). 

My IQ is not “off the charts,” but I think that my emotional quotient and my personality play a large part in my ability to relate to people. This is particularly important in working with choirs.

The voice is difficult to teach because you cannot see it, so you have to use your imagination to convey ideas. I would make comparisons between fabrics and sound—beige chiffon or “tweedy” and other such comparisons—to which people could relate. I often quoted the maxim expounded by William Self:  “No one is a soloist; everyone is a soloist,” superb advice for creating a unified quality of sound. This is difficult for me to talk about, and, if anything, it might be perceived to be conceited.

 

I don’t think that you are being conceited. Rather you are being honest and, as you feel comfortable, revealing of your skill in working with choirs.

Morgan: Through the years, I’ve gone through much self-searching and self-evaluation, and I’ve tried to conquer (not necessarily “the demons”) but various issues. I’ve experienced Dalcrose Eurythmics, yoga, acupuncture, and Alexander Technique. 

My sister used to say that the definition of an A-type personality is one who smacks one’s face against the automatic door because you get there before it opens for you. Needless to say, she and I were both A-types and could recognize the trait in each other.

 

Are you saying that this is something you’ve had to conquer over the years?

Morgan: Yes, it’s been both a bane and a blessing—a compulsion to measure up to the goals and responsibilities that I’ve set for myself. There is a big dose of “driveness” in my makeup that comes from my inner drive and my family background.

 

Do you have something else to share about experiencing the world at an early age?

Morgan: As a child, I had the good fortune of being exposed to the outside world. My mother was an incredibly independent woman and well ahead of her time. In 1940, she organized an 8,500-mile driving trip from Alabama to Portland, Oregon, and back. There were seven of us—my mother, sister, and I, an aunt, and a friend of my mother, and her two daughters—piled into a 1938 Buick! 

We stayed with friends and relatives along the way as well as in motor tourist camps (as they were called then), and this was long before the interstate highway system! We saw the Grand Canyon, the World’s Fair Exposition in San Francisco, with Johnny Weissmuller and Esther Williams. Additionally, we visited the Mormon Tabernacle, Carlsbad Caverns, and Yellowstone Park. This was just the start of the world opening up to me.

In the summer of 1949, I joined my family in Germany where my father was stationed. That was the first year of the Salzburg Festival, which we attended, and we also visited Bayreuth where I had the opportunity to play Wagner’s piano.

During our time at Fourth Church, we took the choir on three European tours: Salzburg and Vienna, England, and Italy.  

 

How did the Fourth Presbyterian Church Anthem Series (Hope Publishing Co.) come to be?

Morgan: This was a result of our friendship with George Shorney, who was at that time president of Hope Publishing Co. He became a member of Fourth Church—and I don’t want this to sound immodest—because of the music.

There are 16 anthems in that series: 11 were composed during our years and five were added after our retirement.

 

Who initiated the Morgan and Mary Simmons A.G.O. Scholarship for Young Organists?

Morgan: John Buchanan’s older daughter Diane married Rick Andrew, whose parents, Edith and Edward Andrew, initiated the scholarship with the A.G.O. upon our retirement from Fourth Church in 1996. It is presented annually for students attending a P.O.E. (Pipe Organ Encounter).

I’d like to add that I think the P.O.E. program is one of the best things that has ever happened to the Guild.

 

You also developed an arts series and organ recital series during your tenure at Fourth Church.

Morgan: Before Elam Davies retired, I proposed an arts festival, which he strongly supported by designating funds for its inception. Robert Shaw, Maya Angelou, Dave Brubeck, Gwendolyn Brooks, and other luminaries were featured on this series, which continued until our retirement.

 

Might you comment about the future of our profession?

Morgan: The drop in A.G.O. membership is alarming, yet better and better organists and instruments are appearing on the scene. 

 

What do you think is the reason for the decline in A.G.O. membership?

Morgan: I think that it’s a reflection of society: people are generally not “joiners” anymore.

 

Might it have something to do with the organ’s role in current-day worship?

Morgan: Case in point: some years back I attended a study program at St. Olaf College, and while there I attended a Lutheran church in Northfield. Sitting silent in that church was a fine, tracker instrument while the service was led by piano and guitar. This was disturbing. I’m sorry to say that this is not an uncommon occurrence!

 

Another common thread among those whom I have interviewed is that they have all said the same thing: they became interested in the organ due to their early exposure to the organ in church. Unfortunately, young people are not being attracted to the organ and its music like in the “old days.” This has adversely affected the number of those who are entering the profession.

Morgan: As an early teen, I thought that I was going to enter the ministry, but I eventually realized that my speaking voice was not of the right caliber to occupy the pulpit.

 

Do you have any words of wisdom to pass along to our readers as well as to the next generation of organists and church musicians?

Morgan: I wish that I had some words of wisdom, but I can honestly say that some of these young players are just fabulous. I believe that the future of the profession is in good hands if they can persevere with grace and commitment in the challenging times in which we live.  

 

Thank you, Morgan and Mary. You are the great musicians of the Magnificent Mile!

An interview with Elise Cambon, organist of New Orleans’ St. Louis Cathedral for 62 years

Marijim Thoene

Marijim Thoene received the DMA in Church Music/Organ Performance from the University of Michigan. She is currently organist at Church of the Immaculate Conception, “The Jesuit,” on Baronne Street, in New Orleans, and is an active recitalist.<span style=&quot;mso-spacerun:yes&quot;> </span>Her CD, “Mystics and Spirits,” recorded at St.
Joseph Abbey in St. Benedict, Louisiana, has recently been released by Raven
Recordings.

Elise Cambon, affectionately called "The First Lady of Sacred
Music," is a living legend in New Orleans. This spirited woman, who calls
herself a tiger, was born in New Orleans in 1917. Her accomplishments in church
music read like an entry in Who's Who in America normal'>; a summary of her life's work will be published in the 2004 edition.
She graduated from Newcomb College, part of Tulane University, in 1939. Her
first organ lessons began in 1939 with Ferdinand Dunkley, a graduate of the
Royal School of Church Music, a professor at Loyola and organist/choirmaster at
St. Charles Ave. Presbyterian Church. A pivotal moment occurred in her life
when she was playing as a substitute organist for a Boy Scout Mass at the St.
Louis Cathedral in 1941. As she played Widor's Toccata
style='font-style:normal'> as a postlude, Archbishop Rummel decided to offer
her the position of cathedral organist. As she is fond of saying "Timing
is everything." (See photos
#1 and #2 taken shortly after she became cathedral organist, dated 1944, 1946.)

While cathedral organist she taught music at the Ursuline Academy 1942-1951,
at the Ursuline College 1949-1951, and at the Louise McGhee School for Girls
1953-1961. (See photo #3 taken with choir from McGhee School, dated 1958.) She
was the founder and first Dean of the New Orleans Chapter of the AGO in 1942.

She received a Master of Music degree in organ performance in 1947 from the
University of Michigan where she studied wtih Palmer Christian. She continued
organ studies with Arthur Poister at Oberlin College and Syracuse University.
Throughout her tenure as organist at the cathedral she conducted choral
concerts and played organ recitals to a packed house. Photo #4 dated March 23,
1952, taken after one of her cathedral concerts shows from left to right Norman
Bell, Most Reverend Joseph Francis Rummel, Elise Cambon and Reverend Father
Robert Stahl, S.M.

In 1951-1953 she attended the Hochschule für Musik in Frankfurt as a
Fulbright fellow and studied organ with Helmut Walcha, harpsichord with Maria
Jaeger and conducting with Kurt Thomas. After her Fulbright she spent summers
studying Gregorian chant at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes and at Pius X
School of Liturgical Music in Purchase, New York. In 1959 she was invited to
teach at Loyola University and received a grant to found the School of
Liturgical Music. (See photo #5 showing, from left to right, the Rev. C. J.
McNaspy, S.J. dean of the College of Music, Frederick W. Salmen, president of
the foundation, and Elise Cambon receiving grant to found the School of
Liturgical Music at Loyola University.)

Not only did she obtain grants for two Holtkamp organs, but also funds to
install air conditioning in the practice rooms. She founded the New Orleans
Bach Oratorio Society in 1959. She earned her Ph.D. in musicology from Tulane
University in 1975 and was awarded first prize in musicological research from
Mu Phi Epsilon International Music Society for her dissertation "The
Italian and Latin Lauda of the 15th-century." She retired from teaching at
Loyola in 1982. Photo #6 shows Elise Cambon at the organ console in St. Louis
Cathedral taken the year she retired from Loyola University.

She received grants and raised funds for the St. Louis Cathedral Choir to go
on "Pilgrimages," to sing five concerts in Europe, England and
Ireland from 1987-1998. In 1987 she took the Cathedral Choir on a concert tour
to Italy and France and performed in Rome, Assisi, Florence and Paris. In 1991
the Cathedral Choir sang concerts in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. And
in 1994 she directed the Cathedral Choir as it performed in Spain and
Portugal. Her last two
"Pilgrimages" with the choir were in England in 1996 and in Ireland
in 1998. In England the choir sang at
St. Martin-in-the Fields, Clifton Cathedral, Westminster Cathedral, Ely
Cathedral, Canterbury Cathedral and St. George's in Bloomsbury (London). In
1989 she became coordinator of five choirs plus a brass ensemble from the
Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra for "One Shell Square" for Christmas
concerts, which she continues to do.

These are the facts of her life, a life dedicated to learning, teaching and
performing music. It was a great privilege to interview Elise Cambon and hear
her tell of the forces that shaped her remarkable life. She describes in her
own words her life, her ambition, her passion for learning, teaching,
conducting and playing Bach, her life devoted to church music. Photo #7 shows,
from left to right, Marijim Thoene and Elise Cambon at Dr. Cambon's home on
July 3, 2003.

M.T. Tell me about growing up in New Orleans.

E.C. I was born February 27, 1917,
at home at 2004 Napoleon Avenue. My father's name was Maurice Cornelius Cambon
and my mother was Marie Camilia Murray Cambon, called "Camille." My
two sisters, Marie and Camille, were twins and were born on the feast day of
St. Cecilia on November 22, patron saint of music. They were fun to be around.

M.T. Do you remember about your first piano lessons? Did you have to
practice a lot? Did you want to practice?

E.C. Did I want to practice?! That
was when I got to Europe. I don't remember taking piano lessons until I was in
Europe and came back to the States.

M.T. Did your father get to see you conduct and play?

E.C. Oh, no. Things went bad. We
went to Europe when I was eight years old in 1925 and stayed until about 1930.
While we were in Europe, my father
rented a piano, and we started lessons with Albert Leveque, an
understudy of Cortot of the Paris Conservatory. In the meantime we also had a
French governess and she taught us French. She took care that we practiced the
piano and studied lessons in French. We studied mostly grammar and science,
natural science. We spoke only French. We were not allowed to speak a word of
English.

M.T. Did you have to compete with your sisters for practice time on the
piano?

E.C. No, I was on that piano bench
before any of them. I respected Monsieur Leveque and he liked me too, because I
could memorize anything that he wanted us to learn. My sisters liked the
keyboard, but not as much as I did. I was always on the piano. Everyday we were
assigned certain hours to practice the piano and to study French. The lady who
taught us French knew enough about the piano that she could supervise. My
teacher would play something and I would learn it from memory right away.

M.T. When you got back from Paris did you speak English?

E.C. Yes, but we were encouraged to
converse in French. We brought back a French governess. She stayed with us
until I was 13. Then I was sent to the Sacred Heart Academy, and I studied
Latin.

M.T. Was it really strict at the Academy? You had to work very hard?

E.C. Oh, yes. You see we lost all of
our money by that time. We lost it in 1929 in the Great Depression. In 1930 my
uncles committed suicide. They both owned the Cambon Real Estate Corporation,
and were grief stricken that so many people had lost money and there was no way
to repay it.

M.T. What did you study at Newcomb?

E.C. At Newcomb I majored in French
for the simple reason that it was easy for me. I didn't have to work on it. And
I had three positions: I had an NRA job with the government, I taught children
piano lessons every Saturday and I baby sat for them in the evening when
needed. I was able to pay my school tuition by means of this extra employment.

M.T. Where did you teach?

E.C. I taught the children of
professors in their homes. Sometimes they would bring me home, or I would take
the streetcar if it wasn't too late. It wasn't dangerous in those days like it
is today.

M.T. When did you start playing the organ?

E.C. My sister Marie sang at the
Church of the Immaculate Conception, "the Jesuit," on Baronne St.,
and Claire Coci was then the director. When I heard Claire play I was very
impressed. The next time I saw her
was when she was at Oberlin in Ohio. At that time I had already finished my
master's degree at Michigan where I studied with Palmer Christian. I stayed at
Michigan two and a half years. I studied with Arthur Poister at Oberlin one
summer, and I thought he was very good. Then he moved to Syracuse University
and I studied again with him.

M.T. Did you take lessons from Claire Coci at the Jesuit?

E.C. No, I never took lessons there.

M.T. When did you start taking organ lessons?

E.C. I started with an Englishman
here by the name of Ferdinand Dunkley who was organist at St. Charles Ave.
Presbyterian Church. He had a degree from the Royal School of Church Music and
was very, very smart. I studied a lot with him, and I got to the point that I
could play the Trois Chorals by Franck. So, he was my first organ teacher.

M.T. How old were you when you started organ?

E.C. About 22. I had lessons with
him for a long time. And I liked him very much, he was a genuinely fine man.
Then I went to the Loyola College of Music to study theory and other things at
night--Gregorian chant. Fr. Callans taught me that. He had studied at Solesmes.

M.T. What attracted you to the organ?

E.C. Claire Coci. I thought she was
a stunning performer. She was very dramatic. She made that organ sing. I'm not
saying that I wanted to play that way, but I love Bach very much. You can make
Bach's music sing. But so many people think Bach should be played in a very
strict manner; playing it so strictly causes it to lose all of its spirit. When
I went to Ann Arbor I started doing Bach. I love Bach and earlier composers--de
Grigny, Couperin, etc.

M.T. What do you think is the most valuable information Palmer Christian
taught you? What do you treasure most from his lessons?

E.C. Well, Palmer Christian
impressed me by his dignity. He was a gentleman to the core. He played at the
English Church in Paris before he came back to the United States. He truly was
a highly refined man. He meant business. He wasn't mean, just very dignified.

M.T. And you had a lesson
every week from him?

E.C. Oh, yes.

M.T. Did he have studio classes where the students would play for each
other?

E.C. Yes, once a week. I remember
playing the Bach D Major Prelude and Fugue.

M.T. What did he tell you to do to handle stage fright?

E.C. Stage fright? I was never
afraid.

M.T. You were never nervous?

E.C. I always thought I could be
better. But I never felt nervous. I never played when I thought I didn't know a
piece. I'd better know it, or I wouldn't play it.

M.T. When did you begin directing choirs?

E.C. At the cathedral, I had a boy
choir. They were cute as buttons. I would rehearse them one half hour before
the Mass out in the garden in front of the cathedral.

M.T. How old were you when you started directing the choir at the
cathedral?

E.C. It was before I got through
Newcomb. I think I was 24, maybe it was 1941. I was playing for a Boy Scout
Mass and Archbishop Rummel was there. It was the first time the archbishop had
heard me play. I played the Widor Toccata and the archbishop said
to the priest, "Who is playing that organ today? I want to meet the
performer." The man who had been organist was ill, and when he was unable
to return I was offered the job. I was there 62 years this past year.

M.T. What were the biggest challenges you faced as organist/choir
director?

E.C. Following the edicts of Vatican
II. The people were encouraged to sing the Ordinary of the Mass. The goal was
to have the people understand what was going on at the altar.

M.T. What was it like to study at Pope Pius X School of Liturgical Music
in NY?

E.C. It was wonderful. I got to know
my teacher, Dom Gajard, a visiting Benedictine monk from Solesmes.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> When the Gregorian Chant Choir of Spain
sang at the cathedral in January, 2003 to celebrate the Louisiana Purchase, I
discovered that the conductor of the choir had studied with Dom Gajard and had
met me in the 1950s.

When I had finished studying in Germany on a Fulbright grant in 1953, the
Archbishop wrote me, "You've been studying enough in Protestant
churches. I want you to go to
Solesmes." And he paid my way. I stayed there for six weeks. I was really
impressed, people were serious, they really tried to learn. I went to Pius X
each summer for four years. Every time I had a vacation I went there. I studied
with Mother Morgan and there was another nun who taught how to conduct chant.
We sang chant in the Mass everyday.

M.T. What led you to teach at Loyola University?

E.C. I had been in Europe on a
Fullbright and I met Fr. McNasby. He said, wouldn't you like to teach music and
Gregorian chant at Loyola University? Fr. McNasby invited me to teach
liturgical music. He invited me to teach summer school.

M.T. Why did you decide to work on a Ph.D. in musicology?

E.C. I decided if I was going to
teach music history I had to have a fine understanding of the development of
music, from its origin in Gregorian chant to the present. So I took classes all
during the winter time. I took classes in Renaissance, etc., but chant I studied
at Solesmes. In chant stress was determined by the accent of the text. It was
like dancing, and I liked that.

M.T. Why did you decide to write a dissertation on the Italian and Latin
lauda of the 15th century?

E.C. Well, I loved Latin and I
studied Italian for a couple of summers in college. I had had four years of
Latin in high school and college. I didn't like the music particularly. I did
it because I had done so much work with the lauda when I studied
early music. I had a lot of material on it.

M.T. How did you survive working under five archbishops?

E.C. I got along with them like two
peas in a pod. Archbishop Rummel treated me just like a daughter. The next was
Cody. He stayed only two years and so I have a short remembrance of him and I
think the one who followed him was Archbishop Hannan. He was a very genteel
man. He got along with people, and most people liked him very much. He couldn't
carry a tune in a bucket. And so there was no relationship that way. But he was
always nice to me and he respected my way. I loved also Archbishop Schulte, he
was a great guy. When he was archbishop the cathedral ceased being operated by
an order of missionary priests to a single rector. Fr. Hedrich was the first
rector of the cathedral and became a monsignor later. When Archbishop Schulte
introduced me to the new rector, Fr. Hedrich, the Archbishop told Fr. Hedrich,
"Now you're the liturgist, don't forget that, but Dr. Cambon is the
musician. When it comes to music she is the musician." And he meant it. He
respected my knowledge of first-class religious music. And I like very much
this new bishop, Moran, the one that was just made a bishop.

M.T. What would be your advice to any young person thinking about going
into church music?

E.C. I would say to them go to the
church and perform for a church that really believes in God. Do it for God
because you love the music. God deserves the best. However people are very
important and you shouldn't be a cantankerous individual and if you can't get
along, get out. And then I would say if you respect the people you work for,
never talk about them, never call them down to other people. As long as I have
been at the cathedral I have never had a priest under an archbishop that I
couldn't find something very rewarding about them. But you do run into
characters, and that you can't help, because everybody is different and maybe
they don't agree with the music you like. Try to be in a place where you can do
the music you like without any arguments.

M.T. Do you have any regrets?

E.C. None.

M.T. How did you build up the choir at St. Louis Cathedral?

E.C. I started out as the organist
in 1940 and then I had a boy choir. The man who trained the boy choir became
ill; his name was Roland Boisvert. After he left the cathedral he became organist
at St. Joseph's Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in St. Benedict, Louisiana, a
short distance from New Orleans. They saw how loyal I was at St. Louis
Cathedral. I was always there for the evening services. I was playing weddings,
and working my tail off, trying to keep up. I had to train the boys to sing the
Mass on Holy Days. And I would say to them. "All right kids I want to see
you Sunday morning at 7 o'clock and we will go over the Mass so that you will
be good." And they came very religiously and on Friday morning we had Mass
and do you know some of those kids became priests of the order of Mary
Immaculate. They were the order that was at the cathedral. They are missionary
priests.

M.T. Did you rehearse them everyday?

E.C. I would rehearse them at lunch
time. They would come in from playing ball to rehearse the music. They would
prepare the music for the Mass they were planning to sing on the first Friday
of the month and on some Holy Days. After the rehearsal I would throw up as
many pennies as I had on me to give them a reward for coming, and do you know
one of them is now a priest, Rev. Msgr. Ignatius M. Roppolo at St. Rita's in
New Orleans. The oblates of Mary Immaculate had a school and the boys in the
choir came from that school.

M.T. When did you begin directing the adult choir?

E.C. It grew out of the school
choirs I was directing and the girl choir that Fr. Lorengan directed. When Fr.
Lorengan retired I was given both choirs to direct. I had just begun teaching
at Ursuline Academy and some of the kids from there wanted to come over and
sing. And eventually we got some men. They came from Loyola University. Some of
the girls brought some boys they knew from Jesuit High School.

M.T. So the adult choir at the cathedral came from other choirs you had
trained. Did you pay them?

E.C. No, no indeed.

M.T. When the choir grew, did you pay the singers?

E.C. Not for a long time because
they loved the music. In those days people were more religious, more people
went to church. I had a lot of people from Ursuline who were interested, and
they are still singing in my choir at the cathedral.

M.T. When did you start paying singers?

E.C. When we started giving a lot of
concerts.

M.T. What year was that?

E.C. I think that was in 1982. One
of them was Marilyn Bernard. I paid her because she was so good. She was an
excellent soprano. She came for the love of music.

M.T. And your sister Marie helped you raise funds for choir trips?

E.C. Yes. She knew the people. She
came down to the cathedral when I played the 12 o'clock Mass on Sunday. When I
finally got the choir moving they sang the High Mass, and I played all the
Masses, all the Benedictions that they had on weekdays.

M.T. When did you start playing so many Masses?

E.C. I started in 1940.

M.T. How many Masses did you play on Sunday?

E.C. The 9, 10, 11 and 12.

M.T. What about weekday Masses?

E.C. The children sang once a week.
I went down there to direct them. They really didn't need me. I used to go down
there at night and play the evening Mass too on Sunday night at 6 pm.

M.T. As choir director did you do any 20th-century repertoire?

E.C. No. They didn't like it. My
choir now does not like esoteric music that they do not understand. They like
Benjamin Britten, Randall Thompson. Their preference is for Gregorian chant and
music of later periods that shows organization and beauty. They will not sing
modern music. They are used to doing 16th-century polyphonic music.

M.T. What about the Brahms Requiem normal'>?

E.C. We have sung it and enjoyed
doing it.

M.T. Do you have a favorite 20th-century composer?

E.C. I love Randall Thompson, his
"Alleluia," and Benjamin Britten.

M.T. When you were playing organ recitals what repertoire did you play?

E.C. Bach, the Passacaglia
and Fugue, Prelude and Fugue in D Major, the Prelude and Fugue in A minor,
the C Major.

M.T. Did you play pre-Bach repertoire? Nicolaus Bruhns? Buxtehude,
Sweelinck?

E.C. Oh yes.

M.T. Did you play any 20th-century repertoire?

E.C. Yes, I played Marcel
Dupré's Preludes and Fugues, and Jehan Alain. I played
Messiaen's Celestial Banquet.

M.T. Did you study with Dupré?

E.C. No, I just heard him play.

M.T. What about Franck? Did you play his music?

E.C. Oh, I like Franck. I did the Trois
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Chorals, the Pastorale
style='font-style:normal'>, and Pièce Héroïque
style='font-style:normal'>.

M.T. And what about Hindemith?

E.C. I played his sonatas.

M.T. What about Tournemire?

E.C. A great man. I played some of
his music. I didn't play a lot of Tournemire because I didn't think the people
would enjoy hearing it. I think you must play music that people understand, not
just what you like to play.

M.T. What did you play at the cathedral? Did you play Brahms?

E.C. Yes, I love his chorales.
Beautiful. I played Couperin, de Grigny, Clérambault, Sweelinck, and we
sang Sweelinck too.

M.T. Did you play Mendelssohn?

E.C. Yes, but I think he is boring.
His music doesn't do anything. It's too old fashioned. I like music that says
something to people, and that has a wonderful sound. I was lucky to have the
cathedral organ.

M.T. Tell me about the restoration of the organ. I know you are
responsible for its restoration.

E.C. I paid for the whole thing.
It's being restored and added to by Holtkamp Organ Company of Cleveland, Ohio.

M.T. When did you find time to practice the organ?

E.C. At night, often I practiced
until midnight. And I took a cab home. It wasn't dangerous then.

M.T. You were alone?

E.C. Yes, usually, I couldn't expect
someone to stay down there with me.

M.T. Were you able to play organ preludes every Sunday?

E.C. Yes.

M.T. Did you play the organ during Advent and Lent?

E.C. No. In those days it was
forbidden. I was always under the supervision of Fr. Stahl. He was the director
of the seminary choir and could play the organ and wrote compositions for the
Notre Dame Seminary. I got my instructions from him. I followed the rules of
the Catholic Church, and there was to be no organ music during Advent and Lent.

M.T. And when you did play a prelude, was it always soft and meditative?

E.C. Not at all.

M.T. Really?

E.C. No. That's a lot of
foolishness. I would play big works, like the Passacaglia. And at the end of
the service, pieces like Toccata and Fugue in d minor.

M.T. When you played the Toccata and Fugue in d minor
style='font-style:normal'> for the prelude, nobody complained that you were
interrupting their prayers?

E.C. No, they came just to hear it.

M.T. Do you have any organ students who are pursuing church music as a
career?

E.C. Many. I have one boy who is
blind and is in Florida. One just gave a recital at St. Dominic's Church,
Marcus St Julien. I taught Fr. Carl Davidson, a former seminarian at Notre Dame
Seminary, Fr. Tom O'Connell and Dreux Montegut who is the music director, director
of the Cathedral Choir and Cathedral Boy Choir at St. Louis Cathedral.

M.T. Do you have any advice to an organist who is starting out?

E.C. Learn the music the way I was taught by Walcha: to play various voices
and the pedal and sing the other voice, to learn it from memory and know
everything that is going on in the piece. Make it the most important thing in
your life, to study and perform music like the composer meant it to be played.
And the first one in my book is Bach, and then of course polyphonic music of
the 16th-century, music of Palestrina, Victoria, Lassus, Orlando Gibbons, Byrd,
and Sweelinck, and composers today such as Vaughan Williams, Randall Thompson,
Benjamin Britten. The music must have form, direction and emotional strength. You
are saying something when you are writing a piece of music.

M.T. Do you have any advice for a choir director? How to deal with
people?

E.C. You have to love people with
your whole heart and soul. And that's why you are strict. You want them to be
the very best they can be. And you treat them as though they are part of you,
and not just an operation to show off.

M.T. What about someone who talks during rehearsal?

E.C. Well, I can't put up with that,
but you remember people are human. They need to have a break and talk. Give
them time to do that, and when it's time to rehearse, it's time to rehearse.
You can't talk and rehearse at the same time. You should make the rehearsal so
exciting and intelligently planned that they feel they are really accomplishing
something and there isn't time to talk.

M.T. What is the best way to conduct a choir rehearsal? Do you have them
sight read through the score?

E.C. I always say if people are
absolutely unable to read they should divide among voices, the women together
if there are two voices, the men together if there are two voices, if there are
six voices in groups of threes, so that nobody has to wait while one person has
to learn his part. People don't mind waiting a little while someone else learns
his part. But if they can't read at all take them by themselves. And if they
can't get in tune with each other it's much better to practice without a
keyboard. The keyboard is just there to teach them the scale and intervals.
Teach them to sing the intervals. Pick a simple piece and have them sing each
interval. If they cannot do this, and they are monotones, well, fare-thee well.
It's not a joke to sing. Do you think people teach this?

M.T. No.

E.C. You cannot learn to sight sing
if you can't sing intervals. You may not have to sing intervals in another
choir, but you're going to do it in this one. I love my choir. I hug them. You
tell the choir, "Either you learn to do it, or try to adapt yours

by Malcolm Wechsler

The author thanks Scott Carpenter and Harry Martinas for editorial help with this report.

The 46th annual convention of the Organ Historical Society
(OHS) took place June 21-28, 2001, in North Carolina, centering around
Winston-Salem. Convention registration brings with it the fabulous Organ
Handbook, with recital programs, organ specifications and photographs, and bios
and photos of performers. It's the Bible for the week, eagerly devoured, and
kept in one's library forever. As with last year, the editor this year was
Jonathan Ambrosino.

Thursday, June 21

The opening concert was held at First Presbyterian Church in
Greensboro, the perfect convention opening on several levels. The building is
stunningly beautiful, designed by Hobart Upjohn, modeled on the cathedral at
Albi in France, and somehow built in 1929 and 1930, in the height of the Great
Depression. It was able to accommodate the entire convention, not the case with
quite a few buildings later in the week, when we were often divided into
smaller groups. The organ, finished by Létourneau just last year, fills
the 1400-seat building with great clarity and power. It is a grand creation,
with large instruments in both gallery and chancel, beautifully encased. The
acoustic of the building is organ-friendly, but nothing more. Having chancel
pipes on both sides and a large gallery division placed very high up gives the
instrument a great presence. There is a very effective en chamade reed atop the
gallery division. The whole enterprise is undergirded by digital 32's, not
obnoxious all of the time, but often enough.

Bruce Stevens plays with grace and elegance. The program
opened with the Kerll Passacaglia in D Minor, which introduced us to the clarity of the instrument's choruses and
other combination possibilities, through a great variety of variations,
building to a quite sturdy ending. Next, Beethoven, Adagio in F Major (Organ Sonata 8) played on a pleasantly limpid flute registration. Somewhere, at every recital of an OHS convention, a hymn gets sung, mostly meant to show the effectiveness of the organ as an accompanimental instrument, but the custom has taken on a life of its own. There is even a special hymnal printed, especially attractive this year. The recitalist gets to choose the hymn, and to accompany it with as much or as little freedom as wanted. The hymn, "I will give thanks with my whole
heart," to the tune Herr Jesu Christ, was sung in glorious harmony,
supported magnificently by Stevens. Next, Rheinberger, Introduction and
Passacaglia (from Sonata No. 8). This sonata is glorious, and both player and
organ did it complete justice. The huge power of the Pedal, some of it achieved
by illicit means (I would personally prefer a good Resultant), gave the ending
particular force. Then, Franck, Choral No. 2 in B-Minor
style='font-style:normal'>; next, Stevens and flutist Marcella Leonard
performed The Hedding Suite by
Everett Titcomb. Liszt's Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H
style='font-style:normal'> received a totally splendid performance, virtuosic
in the extreme, registered without fear, including the en chamade in the
balcony. The Liszt was a glorious ending to a great recital, and a promising beginning for the week to come.

Friday, June 22

The first full day plunged us right into the OHS convention
bus-church-bus-church routine at its richest and fullest, complete with an 8:30
a.m. departure (and I might add, an 11:30 p.m. homecoming). We had a wide
variety of experiences this day, in the vicinity of Danville and Chatham,
Virginia, a two-hour bus ride from the hotel.

The first stop was Mount Vernon United Methodist Church,
Danville, housing a gentle and lovely 1860 Boston-built Simmons and Willcox
organ, rebuilt with significant additions by George Bozeman in 1988. As this
organ was saved and relocated through the good work of the late Alan Laufman
and the Organ Clearing House, it was somehow entirely appropriate that this
recital was played by the new director of the Clearing House, John Bishop. The
program: Bach, Prelude and Fugue in C Minor (BWV 549), began quietly, very slowly, and passionately; the fugue, on the other hand, was quite quick, almost Newmanlike, on a reedy registration, building naughtily with the gradual opening of the box; Pachelbel, Aria Sebaldina (from Hexachordum Apollinis); Derek Bourgeois (b. 1941, student of Howells), Serenade, written for the procession at his own wedding, a fine, accessible work, in a fresh but not shocking harmonic idiom. The hymn, "Christ is made the sure
foundation," was sung to Westminster Abbey
style='font-style:normal'>--we got to sing in parts in our usual impressive
way, complete with descant. Langlais, Noël with Variations, Choral (from 24 Pieces for Organ or Harmonium); Lefébure-Wély, Sortie--this was so well done, it made up for the over-exposure from which this piece now suffers. He who occupies the director's chair of the Organ Clearing House is able to shape and encourage one of the greatest programs to ever come out of the OHS. Its achievements under Alan Laufman were noteworthy. We offer John Bishop thanks for showing us his musical side, and wish him the very best in guiding OCH in the years ahead.

At Sacred Heart R.C. Church, Danville, James Darling,
well-known for his many years at Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, gave an
excellent recital on a Simmons organ from 1877, rebuilt with some tonal changes
by Andover in 1980-81. The program began with the Concerto in C Major, op. 6, no. 10, by Corelli, adapted for organ by Thomas Billington; then Grave (with variations) from Voluntary in D Major (op. 6, no. 5) of Samuel Wesley. The hymn, giving us a good chance at some excellent harmonizing, used the tune Hereford by Samuel Sebastian Wesley  for the text "O thou who camest from above" by
Charles Wesley. The program next promised more Wesley, but the artist had a
change of mind and moved smartly into the 20th century with a quite flashy and
wonderful chorale-based work, Christ ist erstanden
style='font-style:normal'> by Ludwig Lenel, long associated with Muhlenberg
College in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

After a good lunch at the Knights of Columbus Hall (bar
closed!), we moved on to First Christian Church, still in Danville, which
became the scene of an unfortunate confluence of realities. OHS really tries,
with the help of always willing volunteers, to get organs into shape for our
pleasure and edification. This recalcitrant machine (built at a time when
Möller could actually build good instruments), through poor design,
including really ill-thought-out tuning and maintenance access, and long-term
neglect, in recent years due to the poverty of the congregation, defied all
attempts to bring it "online." Just to get inside the thing, lots of
heavy case pipes have to be removed, this landing one on the huge reservoir,
and leading to other contortions to actually get at the pipes that badly need
ministrations. With the complexities of running smoothly a convention of this
kind, and it does indeed run amazingly smoothly, this poor old organ and its
condition did not get sufficient attention. Baxter Jennings, longtime organist
at Sacred Heart Church, where we had just been, was the unfortunate player
assigned to play this instrument. Susanne Martin, choir director at Sacred
Heart, came along to sing the "Pie Jesu" from the Fauré Requiem, but was overwhelmed mostly by a too-loud registration, which in turn, might have been necessary if none of the softer stops had sufficient notes actually playing. I think too, that Mr. Jennings was totally terrified by the experience of not ever knowing what notes might play at any given time, and by knowing that under these almost impossible
circumstances he was playing for a church full of organists from all over the
country.

The next event took place at Chatham Presbyterian Church in
Chatham and involved a 1912 Möller. This 17-stop organ showed that in the
early 20th century some very good things could come out of Hagerstown. What a
solid and lovely instrument, and what a player is Randy Bourne. For the first
two pieces, the organ was hand pumped, with all the well-known benefits of
this: a Praeludium (WV33) of
Scheidemann, followed by the Prelude & Fugue in F Major
style='font-style:normal'>, from the "Eight Little," with supple and
sensitive playing. Bourne spoke during much of this concert, and the compelling
nature of both the playing and the chat kept the audience at full attention all
the way. One of the first things he mentioned was his use, in the Bach, of an
old edition of 1909, a product of its time, suggesting soloing out sections
using a solo Flute accompanied by strings. Would this have been taken seriously
by many organists as little as ten years ago? Some would say we are returning
to the corrupt old ways of the pre-Orgelbewegung days. Others, I with them,
might say that we have matured musically, and can now ask what is musical
rather than what do the "rules" say. Next, four gently busy Variations on "St. Catherine" written in 1999 by Robin Rokey. Bourne then played a ravishing transcription of Mélodie in E-flat Major (op. 42, no. 3) of Tchaikovsky, with the Flute solo accompanied on that rarity, "an audible Aeoline!" This was followed by another successful transcription, of a Mussorgsky piece, Fair at Sorochintzy, with images of the Cossacks
riding into a village, destroying it, and riding off--exciting stuff! The
program ended with the hymn "Love Divine, all loves excelling," sung
to Beecher. And here was a
recitalist who understands the wonder of hymn singing, and he gave us a chance
at some harmony, and accompanied rather than dominated.

J. R. Daniels, who is organist and choirmaster at Saints
Simon and Jude Church in Pittsburgh, has been around OHS conventions since
1994, in which year he was an E. Power Biggs Fellow. He gave a concert this
year at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Chatham, on a much-moved 1865 S.S. Hamill
organ of about 12 stops. Taylor and Boody did a restoration in 1992, adding a
pedalboard and a Pedal Bourdon. Here is another recitalist who understands
hymns--he supported us gently in a sweet old traditional Roman Catholic hymn,
letting us happily harmonize to our hearts' content. He then made an apt little
speech about how much louder this gentle instrument would have sounded when it
was built, to people who had so little noise and music in their lives. His
recital made me wonder whether we have matured sufficiently to accept most of
the music on this program! Daniels is, at present, researching the music of
Théodore Salomé (1834-1896). The program began with The
Canterbury March, by Harry Crane Perin
(1868-1933), not a work of much substance. This was followed by the essential
Lefébure-Wély, Choeur de Voix humaines (The Nuns'
Chorus), consisting of Flute solo with
flourishes, accompanied on strings. Next, a kind of ornamented aria on "My
hope is built," by John Behnke, born 1953. It was then Salomé time.
Daniels warned us that the next piece, Offertoire in D-flat
style='font-style:normal'>, had been referred to by John Henderson, in his A
Directory of Composers for Organ, as the worst piece of organ music ever
written. The recital ended with a more interesting work of Salomé, Grand Choeur in A, altogether a better piece than the previous offering.

After a good dinner at the Stratford Inn Conference Center
in Danville, we headed to The Church of the Epiphany. George Bozeman,
organbuilder and a regular recitalist at these conventions, played the first
half on a 1928 Skinner of 16 ranks, I thought not a very successful example of
the breed. Bozeman, as always, gave us something unusual and interesting--the Sonata Cromatica (Seconda) of Pietro Yon. I was sure that what we were handed next was not going to work, but I underestimated us. We had in our hymnals a choral score of the Yon Gesù Bambino, and led by an excellent soloist who also conducted, Robert Sutter, we did a wonderful job. What a great idea, and what an interesting recital.

After a brief stretch, the program  moved to the balcony, with its 1978 Andover organ of 38
stops, for a contrast of epic proportions. There are 12 ranks of mixtures,
given unpromising names like Cymbal, or simply "Sharp." These are a
bit uppity, but judicious registrational pruning can work wonders, and there is
much that is beautiful in this instrument. The upstairs organist was Kathleen
Scheide, and she began with  Aria: Quis mutuos amores, by F.-X. Murschhauser; the hymn "Everlasting Arms of Love" to the tune Galliard; O Lamm Gottes (BWV 656) of Bach; the Reger Prelude and Fugue in B Minor,  and then we heard from Ms. Scheide as composer in a very pleasant piece called Aria
La Romanesca. The program finished with
Scheide's own transcription of a Mozart piano duet, K. 358.

Saturday, June 23

This day began with John Farmer's fascinating history of the
much travelled Skinner (opus 248 of 1916), now comfortably and happily living
in the great Vanderbilt mansion, Biltmore, in Asheville, North Carolina, thanks
to Farmer's alertness and skilled ministrations. The following rather long
Internet address will give the story in some detail:

<http://www.biltmore.com/just_for_media/news_releases/whats_new_concert_…;
and this address will show the handsome console:

<http://www.biltmore.com/visit/biltmore_house/pipe_organ.html&gt;.
There are a few infelicities, like a "genuine forced-air organ," and
other minor oddities, but if you don't know Biltmore, or even if you do, this
is all interesting reading. My thanks to Harry Martenas for locating these
sites.

Next we boarded six buses for the longest journey of the
convention, a bit less than three hours, during which we were shown a rather
good video about the Biltmore mansion. The Asheville part of North Carolina is
wonderfully hilly, giving the bus drivers some anxious moments maneuvering the
sometimes narrow streets, including the one which brought us to Mount Zion
Missionary Baptist Church.

Presiding over Felgemaker Opus 713, 1901, two-manuals and 26
stops, was Will Headlee, always a wonderful presence at these conventions. He
spent some years of his life in Asheville, so this was something of a
homecoming. Out of respect for the organ's lineage, he began  the first movement of the Mendelssohn
A Major Sonata on original Felgemaker
sounds--distinguished and beautiful sounds they are, too. For the Andante, he
used the original strings. Next, two choral preludes by Ludwig Lenel: "Now
praise we Christ, the Holy One" and "How brightly shines the morning
star;" then, Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan
style='font-style:normal'>, Kellner; Voluntary No. 1 in D Major, Boyce. This organ really does sing. I think everyone realized that we were in the presence of royalty, an organ with
distinguished beginnings well and lovingly restored tonally and mechanically,
with some additions, by John Farmer and Company. Also, somehow, in its
simplicity, the organ is really fine visually as well. Then, "Sarabande" and "Rhythmic Trumpet" (from Baroques), Bingham; "Balm in Gilead" and "Swing Low," Utterback; Fantasy on "Roll, Jordan, Roll," Ralph Simpson (b. 1933), a really great fun piece (published by Morning Star); and the 1875 hymn, "I am thine, O Lord."

The next program took place at St. Matthias' Episcopal
Church, Asheville, and featured Carol Britt playing a one-manual organ built by
Reuben Midmer. Britt, organist and choir director at St. Augustine's Episcopal
Church in Metairie, made fine use of the single-manual instrument. The organ,
built in 1898, is original to this building. Ponder this from the program note:
"Original to the church, the Midmer organ is in a remarkable state of
preservation. Apart from maintenance and some patching to the bellows leather,
the instrument is essentially as installed 103 years ago." Was that a good
investment or what? The program: Triptych
(Prelude, Scherzo, and Fugue), Robert Powell; Grand Triumphal March, Nicholls (1877), a real two-step played with wonderful panache. To play the Partita on O Gott, du frommer Gott of Bach on an instrument with limited variety takes a bit of work. With impeccable phrasing and some careful registration planning, this was a fine and arresting performance. It made perfect sense for us to next sing "O Gott, du frommer Gott," and we did indeed, happily with some directions for harmony and unison verses.

The next move was well up the social ladder, as we visited
the Vanderbilts in their stately home, Biltmore, in Asheville. After a lovely
dinner in "The Stable" on the estate, we then proceeded to the main
house to hear the organ, played partly by the Skinner player mechanism, and
partly by Kristin Gronning Farmer. Kristin, who chaired this convention, and
whose good and thoughtful work in that capacity we benefited from daily, has
also played for OHS conventions in the past, including Boston last year. In
addition to which, she is an organ builder, working with her husband, John
Farmer, and specializing in "gilding, pipe stencilling, polychrome
painting and faux finishes," which skills she makes available not only to
the "family firm," but also to other builders. After a demonstration
of some of the resources of the instrument, she let us sample some of what is
available on the Skinner semi-automatic rolls. It was all good fun.

Sunday, June 24

After yesterday's long ride to Asheville, we spent today
staying quite close to Winston-Salem, beginning the day at the hotel with the
annual meeting of the OHS. Bill Van Pelt presided, and those in charge of other
projects and committees of the society reported on activities since the last
meeting (in Boston in 2000). There were two E. Power Biggs Fellows this year:
Ryan Celestin of Metairie, Louisiana, and Bruce Ludwick, Jr. of Keyser, West
Virginia. An election of officers was held by mail prior to this meeting, with
some ballots submitted on the day. Elected as President: Michael Barone, whose
radio program, Pipedreams, produced and disseminated by Minnesota Public Radio,
is known throughout the U.S.

On to the buses at 11, going to the workshop of J. Allen
Farmer, Organbuilders--a great barn surrounded by beautiful countryside. On
display, a two-manual and pedal mechanical-action residence organ, two stops on
each manual division and a pedal 16'. Outdoors, on a perfect day, we were
treated to a fine buffet lunch.

Next stop, Maple Springs United Methodist Church to hear
James Hammann, who is on the faculty of the University of New Orleans, is
organist of St. Francis Xavier Church, and in his spare time runs an organ
maintenance business! The organ is a 1926 Casavant, originally located in
Detroit, but moved to Winston in 1982. Voluptuous describes it well, a 3-manual
instrument with all the good (big) stuff and a sound that is broad and warm.
The program: James Houston Spencer (1895-1967), Symphonesque
style='font-style:normal'>, op. 12 of 1933, a rich work, somewhat inventive
harmonically in a way occasionally somewhat reminiscent of Sowerby, followed by
our second convention performance of "Rhythmic Trumpet" from Seth
Bingham's suite, Baroques, of
1944. This had the benefit of a wonderfully bold Trumpet, and was given a
really swaggering performance. Last, in this concert of music by composers who
lived at just about the same time, Air with Variations (
style='font-style:normal'>written for William Strickland) by Leo Sowerby
(1895-1968).

Here, we did our famous split, dividing into two groups
because of some limited seating in one of the churches. My group went first to
Ardmore United Methodist Church, which houses an organ by Fritz Noack from
1978. Although I recognized a bit of aggressiveness in the sound occasionally,
its was more than compensated for by a luminous clarity and some really lovely
stops and ensembles. This was a most interesting recital, played by William H.
Bates, professor of organ at University of South Carolina in Columbia. He chose
"When in our music" to Engelberg as his hymn, which he played very broadly and did interesting things with the accompaniment. Abruptly changing modes, he played Retrové (Estampie III) from the Robertsbridge Fragment of the early 14th century; then Fantasie sus orgue ou espinette, arr. Guillaume Costeley, mid to late 16th century; the choral prelude Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich of Buxtehude, with the cantus on a beautiful Tierce with tremulant; John Stanley, Voluntary in C: Adagio and Andante; then, Brahms, Herzlich tut mich verlangen, played sensitively on Principal sounds; and Partita on "When in our music God is glorified" by Professor Bates himself. This recital was carefully designed to match the instrument, and all was played with great musicality, technical skill, charm and as needed, wit!

The buses took us then to St. Timothy's Episcopal Church for
a recital by Rachelen Lien, from New Orleans, where she is organist and choir
director at St. Matthew United Church of Christ and Parker Memorial United
Methodist Church. Lien chaired the OHS's national convention in New Orleans in
1989. Her assignment this day was to perform on the smallest instrument heard
in the convention, a charming Erben from 1851, temporarily living in the chapel
at St. Timothy's, while its home church in South Carolina is undergoing
structural work. The organ has one manual, no pedal, 5 stops, 5 ranks, 190
pipes! An 8' Open Diapason goes down to Tenor F, a Dulciana does the same, and
both are anchored by 17 pipes of a Stopped Diapason Bass. There is a 4'
Principal and a Flute to Tenor F. There is a very tight Swell box. For some of
the pieces, the hand pump was used. The program: Adagio in e minor
style='font-style:normal'>, J.S. Bach; Allegro
style='font-style:normal'> from a Thomas Arne Concerto; Soeur Monique of François Couperin, using the Swell box for the contrasts called for in the piece; Pastorale by Charles Wesley, using first the Dulciana, and then the 4' Flute for contrast, sounds of enormous beauty and integrity; Partita on "Ah, vous dirai-je, maman," Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (1732-1795). Next, mezzo-soprano Mary Martin, violist Tony Pruett, and cellist Worth Williams collaborated with Rachelen in the Brahms Lullaby for the Christ Child, opus 91. A really special treat, followed by another, the Saint-Saëns The Swan with cellist Williams. Following this, the hymn "Built on the Rock." A fascinating program, beautifully played, ended with a good chance to sing.

The convention then moved into the main church for two more
events, and they were something of a family affair, in the broadest sense of
family. It honored people of this community and people who worked to make this
wonderful convention possible. Starting with the organ builder: this amazingly
versatile one-manual instrument is Opus 22 of 1994, by John Farmer. Through the
judicious use of common basses, space and money was saved, and divided stops
made possible accompanied solo effects. The organist who next played a recital
and then accompanied Evensong was Scott Carpenter. He is assistant organist at
this church--Kristin Farmer is director of music. The composer whose music we
heard both in the pre-service recital and in Evensong itself is Margaret
Sandresky, another treasure of this area, of whom more later. The recital: Préambule (24 Pieces), Vierne; next, an anonymous 18th-century English Cornet Voluntary, and courtesy of divided stops, we heard a beautiful accompanied Cornet, three ranks just from middle c up; next a full Trumpet divided at middle c made possible a Trumpet Voluntary of Thomas Dupuis (1733-1796); then, Nun freut euch (BWV 734) of Bach; next we heard the really lovely Celeste in Prayer in E-Flat of Guilmant. The final works on the program were two
parts of an Organ Mass by
Margaret Sandusky based on the little 15th-century waltz tune L'Homme
armé. This was a wonderful recital,
which fact the audience acknowledged fully. Scott Carpenter is a player of
great assurance, musicality, and clarity.

Next was a really glorious Evensong, sung by the splendid
unauditioned choir of St. Paul's, Winston-Salem, conducted by Barbara Beattie.
Evensong began with the Richard Strauss Solemn Entry
style='font-style:normal'>, with the Giannini Brass Quintet. Preces
and Responses were by Martin Neary, then
followed the hymn, "O blest creator, source of light," to the Haydn
tune Bromley. The Psalm was No.
19, impeccably sung to a fine S.S. Wesley chant. The canticles (Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in D) were by Sir Herbert Brewer (1865-1928). For the anthem, another lovely piece by Margaret Sandresky, The Turtle Dove. The closing hymn was "The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended," to the magnificent tune St. Clement.

After a good dinner at the Adams Mark Hotel, it was off to
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, and a joint concert by Margaret and John Mueller.
The organ is Skinner Opus 712 of 1929. Aeolian-Skinner did some revoicing work
in 1965, and in 1996-97 the Thompson-Allen firm of New Haven, Connecticut, did
a complete restoration. The St. Paul's organ has four manuals, 42 stops, 51
ranks--not huge, but quite telling in the space. The event began with Margaret
Mueller at the console as we lustily sang "For All the Saints," to Sine Nomine, complete with harmony for stanzas 5 and 6. After that, came an organ demonstration (Margaret). We were handed a two-sided, tightly-spaced sheet describing the demonstration. There were seven sections for the demonstration of the reeds, six for the Diapasons (no Prinzipals here), seven for Flutes, and three for the Strings; ah, and one
short section for the Harp and Celesta! Each of the sections dealt with
divisions separately, and ensembles and stops alone in those divisions. We then
heard March on a Theme of Handel
by Guilmant; Fantasie in C,
Franck; and finally the charming A Wreath of Carols
style='font-style:normal'> by Margaret Vardell Sandresky (b. 1921), making use
in lovely and clever ways of the Sussex Carol, Greensleeves, Lo how a
rose, and In dulci jubilo
style='font-style:normal'>. John Mueller then took over for a very fine Sonata da Chiesa for Flute and Organ assisted by flutist Julie Frye, written (1998) by North Carolina composer Dan Locklair (b. 1949). Dr. Mueller ended the program with the Allegro from the Widor Sixth. The audience essentially erupted at the end of this definitely "feel good" program, a tribute to two North Carolina composers, two well-loved North Carolina organists, and a most beautiful instrument.

Monday, June 25

The day began with a fascinating lecture by Jonathan
Ambrosino, who was just finishing a two-year term as President of the OHS.
"The Residence Organ, 'The Final Touch of Beauty for the Well-Planned
Home,'" took us back to those days of "yesteryear," the early
part of the 20th century when even radio did not exist commercially. If you
wanted music, you made it yourself. Just about everyone had a piano in the
parlor, and someone in the family who could play it. Those with wealth and
space had pipe organs.

After the lecture, a short bus ride took us to Centenary
United Methodist Church, Winston-Salem, for a concert involving Margaret
Vardell Sandresky and Dan Locklair. Centenary U.M.C. is not a small church,
surely seating at least a thousand souls. The church was begun in 1929, and
Austin installed an organ in 1931. With its usual uncanny thoroughness, the
Organ Handbook for the convention provides both the original specification and
that of today, after a number of revisions. The main redo was in 1963, not a
promising year! Right away, one notices that the Great lost its 16' Double Open
Diapason in favor of a Quintaten! Five 8' stops were whittled down to three.
The Second Open (albeit an upward extension of the 16') is gone, as is the
Doppelflute. The Great reed unit, Trumpet and Clarion, is gone. To be sure, in
the 1931 instrument the Great only went up to a 2' Principal, and that was an
extension of the 4'; now there is a IV Mixture, surely an improvement. The
Swell did not fare too badly, although it did lose its 8' Open Diapason, always
a shame, I think. It gained a 16' Contra Fagotto. I think I weep a bit for the
Choir organ, which must have had breadth and presence with an English Diapason,
Concert Flute, Flute Celeste, Dulciana and Unda Maris. These morphed into just
a Nason Flute, Dulciana and Unda Maris. It lost its Clarinet and Orchestral
Oboe in favor of a Larigot and Krummhorn. The Solo and Echo divisions are
changed somewhat in character, and possibly improved by the 1963 rebuild. In
1987, Austin made two additions of great significance: a not-too-frightening en
chamade reed in the back, and a solid 32' Bombarde in the Pedal.

The first part of the program was played by Margaret Vardell
Sandresky, who began with a work by her father, the first organist in the new
1931 building, Charles G. Vardell, Jr. (1893-1952). Appropriately, Mrs.
Sandresky registered using only stops from the 1931 organ. Skyland is a
wonderfully atmospheric work, with great soaring lines, and bits of nice glassy
effects, using also the French Horn and the Harp. Next, three works by Mrs.
Sandresky herself, beginning with a year 2000 commission from the Home Moravian
Church, a suite entitled The Good Shepherd, consisting of four chorale preludes based on Moravian Chorales; then a Wedding March written in 1982 while Mrs. Sandresky was organist of this church--somewhat British sounding, with great flourishes; and ending the first half of the program, En Chamade, written for OHS 2001. There are several movements, some with chimes, and some cleverly using the big reed in the back.

After a short break, the program resumed with Dan Locklair
playing his own music, beginning with a Fanfare for Organ
style='font-style:normal'>, written in 2000 on commission from Fourth
Presbyterian Church of Chicago. This was followed by three sections from the
Windows of Comfort (Organbook 2),
commissioned in 1996 by First Presbyterian Church, Topeka, Kansas, and inspired
by that church's Tiffany windows. Then, Ayre for the Dance and Jubilo
(A Prelude for Organ), a 1998 commission
from the AGO for the 2001 regional competitions for young organists. Finally,
we had a chance to sing, and a good chance indeed with the Parry tune to
"O praise ye the Lord!"

We next did a rather free-form triple split. We all drove to
the great estate that Tobacco built, Reynolda House in Winston-Salem, spacious
and elegant. The room from which to hear the organ is not huge, hence the split
with assigned times for each group for hearing the recital, for eating lunch in
the various restaurants on the estate, and for simply walking around the
beautiful grounds. It did not work out exactly as planned, because it took
rather a time to check out the various restaurants and to get into fairly long
lines and to wait for service.

After this visit, the buses took us back to the hotel for a
rest period. Then, we rode to Greensboro for dinner at First Presbyterian
Church, and then to Christ United Methodist Church, the scene of which could
have been a convention planner's nightmare, but turned out more than o.k. We
were to have heard Lenora McCroskey. Ms. McCroskey suffered an injury to her
arm some days before she was to play, and realized it would not be possible to
meet the commitment. Her excellent former pupil Stewart Wayne Foster was,
fortunately, available to play. He is artist in residence and associate
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  organist of First (Scots) Presbyterian
Church and is founder/musical director of the Orchestra of St. Clare,
Charleston's first full-scale Baroque orchestra. Mr. Foster has been
coordinating the pipe organ component of the Piccolo Spoleto Festival since
1999.

We began with a hymn, "O Gladsome Light," to the
tune Cantique de Simeon, a Louis
Bourgeois tune harmonized by Claude Goudimel. The notes on the instrument
indicate that this was one of the organs completed in the last year of Charles
Fisk's life, 1982, and mentioned that it is  considered a sister organ to the one at Downtown United
Presbyterian Church in Rochester, New York. Mr. Foster is a superb player, possessing a very easy sort of grace, his movements sure and musically based. With very little notice, he was able to put together a most interesting program. He also spoke very clearly and well, with comments carefully chosen and useful. Nicholas Bruhns, Praeludium in e minor; Bach, Toccata in d minor, BWV 913 (written with harpsichord in mind); Clérambault, Suite on the Second Tone; a setting of "Amazing Grace" by Robert Hebble, who was one of Mr. Foster's teachers; Toccata on "Old Hundredth" by Jack Jones (another of Mr. Foster's teachers). The recital ended with the Final from the Vierne Third Symphony, brilliantly played. By this point, I had wondered if Mr. Foster, given the late notice about playing, had actually had a chance to go out in the room and listen to the instrument with his registrations. Some judicious pruning could have made the big moments more bearable, something that was very much wanted in the Vierne, which was so splendidly done, but was also painfully loud.

Tuesday, June 26

The day began with a lecture by Peter Cameron entitled,
"George Jardine and Son, New York Organbuilders--An Era of Spectacular
Organs." Cameron has had a long career in organ maintenance, repair, and
restoration, and from 1977 to 1994 served as maintenance coordinator for the
Andover Organ Company. His lecture was a wonderful appreciation of a once great
company, from one who has had extensive hands-on personal experience with their
output. A great story, well told.

After the lecture, we did our three-way split to accommodate
one very small but beautiful venue in Historic Bethabara within Winston-Salem,
the "Saal" of the 1771 "Gemeinhaus," the meeting room in
which services were held in the Congregation House. While one part of the group
was hearing the recital, the other two parts were visiting the historical exhibits and enjoying the beautiful grounds. The little three-stop, single-manual organ in the "Saal" is by Charles McManis, built in 1971 after a 1772 organ by North Carolina builder Joseph Bultischek, an instrument that perished in a fire in 1942. Sadly and strangely, no one knows what the specification of that organ was, so Charles McManis, fortified with some knowledge of other very small organs used by the Moravians, settled on an 8' Gedact, 4' Principal, and 2' Octave.

Michael Rowland is director of music at Ardmore United
Methodist Church, and staff accompanist at Salem College. He played an
18th-century program beginning with Four Preludes of the English Moravian,
Christian Latrobe (1758-1836), followed by three Bach chorale preludes: Erbarm dich mein (BWV 721), Gelobet seist du (BWV 697), and Allein Gott (BWV 717). We then sang Allein Gott, two stanzas with harmony provided--sheer joy in that lovely place. Mr. Rowland was then joined by Lauren Kossler, a fine violinist, and together they played a suite for violin and keyboard by John Stanley. Thanks to them both for a perfect program for a most attractive and historic place.

Andrew Unsworth played an 18-stop Hook and Hastings
instrument of 1924, with no stop over 4', in a quite dead acoustic at Calvary
Moravian Church in Winston-Salem. Both Unsworth and the organ conquered all,
aided, no doubt, at times by the 73-note chests and attendant super coupler.
Currently organist and choirmaster at St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church in
Durham, he holds a Ph.D. in performance practice from Duke. The program began
with two pieces by Henry Dunham (1853-1929), who taught organ at New England
Conservatory for 52 years: from the First Sonata in G Minor
style='font-style:normal'>, op. 10 (from 1882), an Allegro moderato, followed
by Impromptu from a set of 12
pieces of 1912, op. 24; next, "Vision," Rheinberger, a lovely piece
requiring some dexterity at registration changes, which were very deftly
handled. The last of the organ pieces was the War March of the
Priests, Mendelssohn, played with great
flair and a fat and powerful registration--very satisfying indeed. Unsworth
proved himself to also be a very fine hymn player, giving really good support,
and doing clever bits of descanting, with a rather nice reharmonization of the
last verse of the hymn Redeemer of Israel, to a tune by Freeman Lewis.

Lunch was served at Centenary United Methodist Church,
Winston-Salem, following which we bused to Old Salem where we again broke into
three groups in order to accommodate the limited capacity of the "Saal" in the Single Brothers' House. While one group was at the recital, others were touring Old Salem. In the "Saal," Lois Regestein played her excellent recital three times in order to fit everyone in. The organ, by David Tannenberg, 1798, is gentle and sweet, and comprises five stops. The console is slightly detached and reversed. The instrument was rebuilt by Charles McManis in the mid-60s. The program: Organ Obbligatos to an Anthem, by Johann Ludwig Freydt (1748-1807); Fuga, by Johann Gottfried Gebhard (1755-?); Prelude No. 2 in C Minor, Prelude No. 6 in E-flat, by Christian Latrobe; Nun rühen alle Walder, by Ernst Immanuel Erbe (1854-1927), then another "Chorale Verse" based on the same tune, by Carl Anton Van Vleck; Voluntary IV in G, op. 7, by John Stanley; and then the hymn Morning Star, written in 1836 by Francis Florentine
Hagen (1815-1870). James Boehringer, former director of the Moravian Music
Foundation, and Kevin Brown, present administrator of the foundation, were both
acknowledged as having provided help in organizing the program.

We next walked to Home Moravian Church, where Paula Locklair
presented a most interesting slide-talk about the work of David Tannenberg and
his relationship with the Moravians in North Carolina. Mrs. Locklair has worked
with the various collections at Old Salem since 1975, and has been director of
collections since 1987, and is married to composer Dan Locklair. After her
talk, she introduced John Boody of the firm of Taylor & Boody, who gave a
slide-talk presentation about the company's project for restoring the 1799
Tannenberg organ for the Home Moravian Church. This is the oldest American-made
two-manual instrument extant. (For information on the project:
<www.taylorandboody.com&gt;.)

We then moved upstairs to the church, where the Piedmont
Chamber Singers, directed by James Allbritten, and accompanied by David
Pulliam, led us in a Singstunde, which is just what it sounds like--a wonderful
hour of singing, much of it done by us, with some choral works sung by the
Chamber Singers. We sang hymns that would be known to a Moravian congregation,
but not necessarily to us, and thus learned some new and quite interesting
hymns.

OHS planners always try to find occasional experiences other
than organs and organ music, and tonight was the night. We bused quite a long
way out of town to the Pollirosa Restaurant, obviously a very popular spot.
There was a long line and the place was really packed, but they were ready for
our group, and we had some wonderful barbecue and lots of other good things,
all accompanied by bluegrass music, live, on stage. There were also hayrides
available, but I did not notice any of our group indulging. We had six buses,
and they left for the hotel at intervals, so you could leave when you had had
your fill of food--and possibly of bluegrass. A lot of our gang really got into
it, singing and dancing up a storm, and me without my camera!

Wednesday, June 27

This penultimate full day of the convention featured an
array of various instruments. Here is the pipe count for the day: 362, 363,
951, 4926, 1038, and finally 6663. The day began with an almost two-hour bus
ride to New Hope Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, to hear Steve Barrell play
the 1987 one-manual organ by John Brombaugh. The program: Pieter Cornet (c.
1560-c. 1630), Four Versets on "Regina Caeli," featuring various combinations of sound, some of the fuller
bits somewhat on the harsh side, some individual voices quite beautiful.
Divided stops make possible solo and accompaniment, used to good effect. Then,
Johann Pachelbel (from Hexachordum Apollinis
style='font-style:normal'>, 1699), Aria Prima with Six Variations, the second variation on a beautiful Flute with tremulant. For something entirely different, we sang the hymn "Were you there," with a harmony of Barrell's own devising, based on the music of Fats Waller.

A very short bus ride brought us to Hillsborough and St.
Matthew's Episcopal Church for a recital by Grant Hellmers, an Australian by
birth, who has been at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond for 20 years,
and was assistant for the four years before that. Before his time in Richmond,
he held church positions in Australia and in Vienna. The two-manual Hook &
Hastings stock model organ dates from 1883. The program: Humoresque (L'organo
primitivo), Toccatina for Flutes, Pietro
Yon; the beautiful Schübler Wer nur den lieben Gott lasst walten, Bach, after which we sang the two stanzas given for the chorale, one in harmony, and the second in unison with a very nice reharmonization. The power of even half of an OHS convention was just too overwhelming (we were split in two groups at this point)--every stop was indeed on! Following the hymn, three charming pieces by Leopold Mozart, from Der Morgen und der Abend (Morning and Evening); then, "Lied" (from 24 Pieces in Free Style), Vierne, with the lovely Open Diapason for the melody; Percy Whitlock, Divertimento (No. 2 from Four
Extemporisations); and finally, Allegro
(Number 6 of Six Short Preludes and Postludes, Set 2, op. 105) of C. V. Stanford. Well conceived and beautifully played was this program, and the little stock organ really is
lovely.

Both New Hope Presbyterian and St. Matthew's Episcopal
provided lunch for their half of the convention party, after which we gathered
at the Chapel of Peace College in Raleigh, where Rosalind Mohnsen played her
16th OHS convention recital. The organ is a transplant, a gift to the college
given by Christ Church, Raleigh. I don't know how many intact organs by
Pomplitz & Company are extant. Here at Peace College, this 17-stop Pomplitz
found an excellent home, and it and the college were presented with an OHS
Plaque in recognition of this. It was accepted by the president of the college,
who said a bit about how much she enjoys this instrument. With only 17 stops,
this two-manual organ nonetheless has both a 16' Double Open and a Bourdon, and
is quite robust in other ways as well. The program began with March from Ten
Progressive Pedal Studies of George
Whitefield Chadwick; then, Gavotte Pastorale by Frederick N. Shackley (1868-1937); Prelude
in E-flat Minor (op. 66-1911), Vincent
d'Indy (1851-1931); Prelude and Fugue in B Major
style='font-style:normal'> (op. 99), Camille Saint-Saëns; Pastorale in D Major, op. 13, William Wolstenholme (1865-1931); and finally an Allegro Moderato in D by Henry Smart (1813-1879). The recital came to a rousing close with the hymn "The Day of Resurrection" in glorious harmony to Henry Smart's well-known tune Lancashire
style='font-style:normal'>.

A bus ride brought us to the beautiful campus of Duke
University, with a chapel boasting three remarkable organs, upon each of which
we heard what could only be described as a perfect recital, tailored to match
the qualities of the instrument. We began at the west end of the chapel with
the famous four-manual Flentrop of 1976, with Mark Brombaugh offering a recital
of Buxtehude, Scheidemann, de Grigny, and a partita by James Woodman,
commissioned by Brombaugh in honor of his father. Woodman's Partita on
"Spanish Hymn" was written in
1999 and comprises seven sections: Prelude, Chorale, Bicinium, Trio, Aria,
Fughetta, and Canon. The program ended with the hymn "Spanish Hymn,"
complete with three harmony verses and even a bit of a descant! The Flentrop
organ had a robust sound in the louder works and permeates the building wonderfully. The chapel's walls have been treated with several coats of sealant with excellent results. Equally impressive were the clarity and color of the quieter sounds.

The next event generated something akin to hostility. I
suppose the behavior of a few of our colleagues might be compared to the
reactions of some who demonstrated their opprobrium at the first performance of
Rite of Spring. Well, in truth, no
tomatoes were thrown on this occasion, but it saddens me to report that a
number of people left the building, saying things like "I don't have to
listen to this." Some even said things like: "I listened to the damn
Flentrop, but this is too much!" Meantone is not nearly as sinister as it
sounds! I heard Margaret Irwin-Brandon at OHS Boston the previous summer, where
she had the assignment of playing the Charles Fisk dual-temperament instrument
at Wellesley College. The anti-anything-different folks were in evidence there,
too. As at Wellesley, she chose a program absolutely perfect for the instrument
at hand: Frescobaldi, Toccata Sesta, Bk. II, per l'organo sopra i pedali, e senza; Canzona Quarta; Toccata Quinta, Bk. II, sopra i pedali per l'organo, e senza. Then we sang "Savior of the nations, come" (Nun komm der Heiden Heiland), five harmony stanzas in our hymnlet, which means we all sang in meantone without any permanent injury, with the exception of stanza 3, which got switched amazingly into a triple meter, which we all managed quite well. Then Canzona II of Froberger, followed by Ballo della Battaglia of Bernardo Storace. Now, if anyone was in doubt about the personality of meantone tuning, the Frescobaldi works left no doubt. There are intervals that jar our "well"-conditioned brains and ears, and I found myself, as at Wellesley, looking straight up at the organ and listening with as much attention as I could muster--this contemplation coupled with a totally relaxed attitude. This is edgy, this is somewhat unsettling, but I can get used to it, and find these sounds more of a condiment than a threat. The very gentle beauty of this Brombaugh organ at Duke beguiled me into complete acceptance, and pleasure at having the opportunity to hear something from the history of our instrument. The Froberger was wonderfully gentle and sweet, and then the Storace was, well, a battle, with the little Regal on the Brustwerk doing yeoman service!

The journal of the Organ Historical Society is called The
Tracker, and back in the very early days, this was the perfect name.
Conventions included visits to, if not totally exclusively, almost exclusively
mechanical-action instruments. The broadening happened gradually, and now
convention goers visit historic E. M. Skinner organs, on which are often
conferred OHS plaques in honor of their preservation and maintenance. We have
often even visited new organs of note, no matter what mechanism makes the pipe
speak, e.g., the new Létourneau instrument at the first recital of this
convention! Welcome, I think, to the real world, with a broader view of real
excellence. I have not, and I know others who are driving the work of OHS have
not, abandoned a belief in the great virtues and advantages of tracker action.
This does not prevent me from thrilling at the sound of the Wanamaker Organ,
for example. The full circle we have made was brought into full view by all the
buzz and almost palpable anticipation of the next event, a recital on the
Aeolian organ in the east end of the chapel, an organ so reviled in times past
that there was a powerful movement to junk it. It makes the heart glad to know
that the OHS had a role in the campaign to save it, so there was some reveling
in all of this as we settled down to hear Ken Cowan give a convincing
demonstration of this instrument: Allegro vivace from the Widor 5th; Ave
Maria of Marco Enrico Bossi (1861-1925) demonstrating the ravishing strings of the instrument; Roulade, Seth Bingham; Overture to The Flying Dutchman, Wagner; the hymn "In our day of thanksgiving one Psalm let us offer," to the glorious tune St. Catherine's Court, with harmony. (Let it be here stated that Ken Cowan does know how to accompany a hymn. I wrote in my book: "What an accompaniment!!") Words won't do in describing Cowan's simply stunning performance of a perfect piece for right where we were, the Liszt Ad nos, ad salutarem undam.

Thursday, June 28

The last day of the convention began with Rachelen Lien from
New Orleans, a regular performer at OHS conventions, giving a preview of a
January 2002 mini-convention entitled "A South Louisiana Organ
Odyssey." This event, to be held January 3-5, was to include tours of
plantations, monasteries, and convents, as well as the famous French Quarter.

A 45-minute bus ride brought us to the First Presbyterian
Church of Lexington, for a recital by Edward Zimmermann, a native of North
Carolina, now teaching at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. The organ, Opus
499 of Geo. S. Hutchings (1900), was relocated to this church through the Organ
Clearing House and members of the staff of Andover Organs, which company
rebuilt and enlarged the instrument in 1994. The program consisted entirely of
works by Otto Dienel (1839-1905), beginning with a chorale prelude on Lobe
den Herren, for which Zimmermann used only
original Hutchings stops; we then sang just one stanza of the chorale. This
two-manual instrument of 23 stops and 28 ranks is very fine. There followed
three more chorale preludes: Komm, O komm, du Geist des Lebens; Mach
dich, mein Geist, bereit; and Wer
nur den lieben Gott lasst walten. The
program ended with a three-movement Grand Sonata No. 3 in F Major, op. 18, on the chorale Wie gross ist des Allmaecht'gen Guete. At some of the convention recitals, we are joined by varying numbers of members of the
congregation, which suggests the good news that there is interest in the organ.
From this church, there were many congregants, and I am sure they had their
interest and pride in the instrument strengthened.

After lunch in Winston-Salem, we moved on to another
surprisingly effective organ, speaking out of a very small rectangular hole
high on the east wall, looking for all the world like a large
style="mso-spacerun: yes">   speaker enclosure. No date is
given for this Kilgen unit organ of 11 stops and 13 ranks. The church was built
in the early 1930s by a Presbyterian congregation, and the organ would seem to
be of the same period. In 1964, the congregation of St. James A.M.E. Church
bought the building. The organ was last played publicly 30 years ago. The last
time it was played at all was 20 years ago. At some point, before the organ
ceased to be used, some tonal changes were made under the direction of John
Mueller, which now, at this time of our organic thinking in the 21st century,
will either bring cheers or jeers. The Great 8' Open was replaced by a Mixtuur
III. The 8' Clarabella became a Gedeckt. The Dulciana became a 4' Octaaf. On the
Swell, the Vox Humana became a 2' Vlakfluit. When members of the convention
committee went to inspect this instrument, it was not playing at all--there was
no longer electricity to the blower. John Farmer and a crew, along with a
licensed electrician, got it all cooking again. There were a few members of the
congregation around for the recital, and I hope they might be persuaded to make
some use of the instrument, now that it can be played again. Those there seemed
impressed. Here we were treated to a concert by bass-baritone John Williams and
organist Max Smith. The program: Handel, Thanks be to Thee
style='font-style:normal'>; Mendelssohn (Elijah
style='font-style:normal'>), Lord God of Abraham (preceded by the recitative);
Margaret Vardell Sandresky, O God, my heart is fixed on thee
style='font-style:normal'> (Psalm 108); for organ alone: Adagio from Widor Symphony No. 6; "I Stood on the River of Jordan," arr. Harry Burleigh; "Let Us Break Bread Together"; provided with full harmony, we happily sang "Fairest Lord Jesus" to the tune Crusaders' Hymn.

A 45-minute bus ride brought us to the third and last
"stately home" of the convention, the Chinqua-Penn Plantation,
devised and built by Mr. & Mrs. Thomas Jefferson Penn. A Skinner organ,
Opus 565, was installed in 1926. The pipes are in the basement, speaking out
into the great living room through large grates. For this visit, we were
divided in two groups to avoid crowding in the room where the organ resides.
While one group was walking the extensive and interesting grounds, the other
was listening to a recital, well played and chosen for the organ and venue, by
Mary Gifford, who is director of music at St. Leonard Catholic Church in
Berwyn, Illinois. Her program was perhaps a reproduction of at least the spirit
if not the specifics of what might have been heard by the residents of this home. There were four charming Edward MacDowell piano works arranged by Ms. Gifford: Hunting Song, An Old Love Story, To a Humming Bird, and the inevitable To a Wild Rose; next A Southland Song by William Lester, an English organist who settled in Chicago in the early part of the 20th century, and was for some years a reviewer for The Diapason; then we attempted to sing "When Mother Played the Organ," by George B. McConnell (text by Dick Sanford) and did not do
too badly at all. The perfect closer was the Mendelssohn War March of
the Priests arranged by Theodore Dubois.

After dinner at the plantation (one could get used to that),
we hopped on the bus for a one-hour relaxing trip to Greensboro, and West
Market Street United Methodist Church, where Peter Sykes played the final
recital of the convention. Organist at First Church in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, Sykes teaches organ, harpsichord, and chamber music at the Longy
School, and serves on the faculty of the extension division of New England
Conservatory. The organ at West Market Street is by Dobson in collaboration
with Manuel Rosales. Quoting from the Organ Handbook: "In the final
equation, Dobson designed and constructed the organ; Rosales provided basic
scaling with input from Dobson; and both companies shared equally in the
voicing and tuning process." Key action is mechanical, stop action,
electric. Some Pedal ranks are on electric action. There are three manuals and
39 stops, the third manual being a small Solo Organ, with an Harmonic Flute, a
5-rank Tenor G Cornet, an 8' Trumpet and an 8' Clarinet. The program:
Mendelssohn, Sonata No. 3 in A Major; a five-movement "suite" by
James Woodman, All Creatures of Our God and King: Sister Moon, Brother Sun, Mother Earth, All of Tender Heart, and Alleluia; the tune Lasst uns erfreuen appears here and there. Then, Tocccata in F (Bux 137); Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 537, Bach; three "Tonstücke," op. 22 of Niels Gade; and to close, Duruflé Prélude, Adagio, et Choral varié on Veni Creator. The last hymn to be sung at this convention followed, a rather angular but ultimately attractive and singable tune by Derek Williams (b. 1945) to the text, "Give us the wings of faith." The Dobson/Rosales instrument, though not large, provided plenty of variety and color for such a varied program. There were, for me where I was sitting, a very few overpoweringly loud and harsh moments, and I thought it had to do with the Great Reeds, 16, 8 & 4, but others will have felt differently, I am sure. The instrument is surely a great success, and Mr. Sykes' performance was superb. The buses soon departed for the hotel, and one last look at the exhibits and the convivial bar  and it was all over for another year.

This was another wonderful OHS convention! Readers please
note: the 2002 OHS national convention will take place June 25-July 1 in
Chicago, Illinois. For information: 804/353-9228;

<www.organsociety.org&gt;.

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.