From the Dickinson Collection: Memorizing Controversy

Lorenz Maycher is organist-choirmaster at First-Trinity Presbyterian Church in Laurel, Mississippi. His interviews with William Teague, Thomas Richner, Nora Williams, and Albert Russell have also appeared in The Diapason.

Introduction
The reputation of organist, composer, and educator Clarence Dickinson (1873–1969) has suffered undeserved neglect among American church musicians since the 1950s. By the time he retired as organist-choirmaster of the Brick Church in New York City, changes in taste and style had radically altered what was considered acceptable in church music and organ design. Following Dr. Dickinson’s retirement in 1960, the magnificent Skinner organ he played for over forty years was discarded, and his music gradually fell out of favor. Today his music lies largely forgotten. A recent search of a leading used music catalog produced 25 full pages of anthem titles by Clarence Dickinson that had been discarded by church music libraries throughout the country.
As we all know, styles are constantly changing, with one period of music, style of composition, or set of performance practices replaced by the next. Dr. Dickinson himself put the case well in his 1962 speech to the American Choral Directors’ Association:

    I suppose it is always a little rash to make any predictions about the future, because we seem always to be like the little boy who asked his mother whether the preacher was right when he said that we are dust, and will return to dust. When she said, “Yes,” little Johnny asked, “Is that pile of dust under my bed coming or going?”
    When I was a student in Berlin, Strauss was writing the latest of his tone poems. Heinrich Reimann, my organ teacher, played the first Berlin performance of the Brahms Chorale Preludes. When I got to Paris, Debussy was just beginning to be known. I prepared the chorus for a performance of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony and Choral Fantasy for Mahler in New York, at a time when Mahler’s music was considered very advanced. There have been many significant changes since that time.
    Our relationship to the repertory of the past will change. Thirty or forty years ago, who would have predicted the fashion for the baroque which seems now to be sweeping this country? I think it is likely that within a generation, only relatively little of this music will be used in churches. By that time, someone will have come up with some new period which captivates the attention of scholars and choirmasters, and then, who knows; we might even develop a mania for Barnby and Buck! I understand that the editor-in-chief of an important German reference work has said that the period which needs most research is the nineteenth—that’s right—the nineteenth century. When musicologists start work there, and doctoral dissertations are written about Stainer and his continental counterparts, how the picture of church music will have changed!

Recent trends suggest that the romantic style of music making has returned in full force: new church and concert organs are being built in the romantic tradition, with string divisions, abundant color reeds, and double expression, and the inclusion of romantic transcriptions has become acceptable even on degree recital programs in the major universities. Perhaps now is the time to reconsider Clarence Dickinson, surely one of the most influential figures in American church music in the first half of the twentieth century. This pioneering musician, composer, arranger, author, educator, historian, and concert organist set the standard for generations of church musicians and organists. He served as organist-choirmaster at Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City for over fifty years and was founding director of the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary and a founding member of the American Guild of Organists. As a composer, Dickinson was a master of form, counterpoint, and heartfelt melody. Working with his equally famous wife and partner, Helen A. Dickinson, he produced an important body of musical research, including hundreds of lectures on church music and music history, and published countless original anthems and historic editions. As his extant recordings reveal, he was also one of the great concert organists, with a dazzling technique and profound sense of color, drama, and musicianship.
Reminiscences, which is compiled from autobiographical sketches and speeches by Dr. Dickinson, is the first installment in a projected series of articles featuring items from Clarence Dickinson’s personal library, housed at William Carey University in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. We are very grateful to Patricia Furr and Dr. Gene Winters, of William Carey University, for so generously providing access to this collection and granting permission to publish these important historical documents, preserving the legacy of Clarence and Helen A. Dickinson.
—Lorenz Maycher
Laurel, Mississippi

This matter of age is a queer thing: for a goodly number of years, if you start early, people keep saying “Is it not wonderful that such a young lad can handle a great organ?” Then, through the middle years, when you are working your hardest, they just take it for granted that you do your job. After you hear yourself for the first time referred to as an octogenarian (an awful shock), people say, “Isn’t it wonderful that the old boy can handle that great organ at his age?” I thought you might be interested to know how I got started on this road.
Lafayette, Indiana, was a wonderful place for a boy to grow up in the latter part of the nineteenth century: one went up Ninth Street hill and almost immediately found himself in the country. The woods were full of nut trees: hickory, black walnut, and butternut, and it was such fun to gather bags of nuts for the winter. There were small caves in the hills through which you could crawl adventurously. In winter, if your school was at the top of one of the city’s hills, you could coast down home on your sled or skates, for there was much snow and ice. Of course, you had to be careful to stop before you reached the railroad track that wound around the city at the foot of the hills. My older brother, Richard, coasted down icy Ninth St. hill on his sled at such speed one day that he could not possibly stop. He arrived at the crossing at the very same moment as a freight train, and slid safely under the moving train, as he was lucky enough to strike the very center of a car. He never told anyone of this adventure until long afterwards, or I feel sure he would have made the first page of the Courier.
Many exciting things happened in those days: one was the flood where the water reached the level of the city streets. The old wooden covered bridge was in danger of being swept away. Mr. Goldsmith, the bridge builder, a perfect giant in the eyes of a small boy, was directing its rescue. The men attached a great cable to the bridge and fastened it around a large brick house which stood at the end of the street, so that if the bridge should be carried off its stone piers it would swing around alongside the shore and be salvaged. They knocked out a great number of the boards at the sides of the bridge and allowed the water to race through over its floor so that it did not offer much resistance to the raging current. It was not swept away, but it certainly was an exciting sight for a small lad!
We lived in the large Presbyterian brick manse on Columbia Street, which was, in my young judgment, most admirably situated, as all processions passed by the house every summer; the circus parade and the marches at election time, in which men carried swinging gasoline torches, their great wicks giving off light and smoke.
When I was about seven years old I made my first and only business venture. My allowance was 5 cents a week for carrying in kindling wood, and one of my classmates informed me how I could double my income by going down to the Courier office in the late afternoon and buying two copies of the paper for a nickel and then selling them for 5 cents apiece. I did this one day all on my own, and was much surprised when my family was not enthusiastic over the venture. It was probably just as well, as the nervous strain of wondering whether I would really recover my initial investment proved rather great for such a young man.
I began piano study with my two older sisters, Martha (Mattie) and Sarah, in those early days. My father, The Rev. William Cowper Dickinson, D.D., was the pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, and my earliest memory of that church is of the great golden organ pipes standing so imposingly in front of me at my sister’s wedding. I suppose my future was settled right then. When I was ten years old, my father accepted a call from the College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati. It was like going home to him, because he had spent his boyhood in Walnut Hills, Cincinnati. My grandfather, Baxter Dickinson, had moved to Lane Seminary to be associate director of the seminary with Lyman Beecher, so that my father had as playmates Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher (later Stowe), who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Baxter Dickinson had been a professor at Auburn Theological Seminary, where he wrote a very famous paper called the “Auburn Declaration,” which separated the church into the old school and new school, the conservative and the advanced. He lived to see the two churches unite on that same basis—the old church had caught up with the new. When I came to the Brick Church and sat down at the piano in the room that served as social room and chapel, I looked up at a picture over my head, and there was my grandfather standing on the steps of the old Church of the Covenant, which later became a part of the Brick Church, at the assembly which brought the two churches together.
In the summer of 1883, our church in College Hill was just putting in a new organ, and since the manse was next to the church, I was kept busy watching the erection of the organ. I spent all my time watching this, and learned much about the organ. I “helped” in various ways, occasionally pumping the wind into it for tuning, and part of the time holding the keys down for the tuning. When the men were away, I would pump the organ full of wind and race around to the front and play till the wind gave. I had a terrible time trying to decide whether to play for a couple of minutes on the softest stop or whether to have a great burst of glory with full organ for a few seconds. When the day came for the dedication of the new organ, a famous organist came up from Cincinnati and found this lad performing this act. He very kindly went around to the rear of the organ and pumped for me, so for the first time I could finish my piece. It was a very kind and wonderful thing for a great artist to do, and I doubt whether, in all my life, I have ever had a more exciting experience.
Soon after, I was allowed to play some of the Christian Endeavor services on the small organ in the chapel, and came to know the hymn book very well, as my father was rather strict, allowing no secular music to be played on Sunday. I was studying piano, and enjoyed the Mozart and Clementi sonatinas, but I gloried especially in a little book of operatic transcriptions my older sister had left behind when she married, enjoying immensely the showy arpeggios and splashy effects, in Martha, for instance. When I was twelve, I made my debut as a pianist and conductor in the Town Hall wearing little old folks’ concert dress. There I sat with my ruffled shirt, blue velvet coat, and white curly wig, conducting a chorus of children and the “orchestra,” which consisted of a piano and one violin.
When I was fourteen, in June 1887, my father retired, and we all went to California to live in Pasadena for ten months, where I grew 10 inches in 10 months, a good advertisement for the California climate. It happened that we took our dinners at the same boarding house as the quartet of the First Presbyterian Church, a church which has remained famous for its music ever since. By this time I had learned to play the piano well, and when the quartet, which included the beautiful soprano soloist, Mae Staats, was asked to sing after dinner, I was the only one who could play for them. This was a wonderful opportunity for me to learn all the well-known solos, duets, and quartets. (Years later, when Mrs. Dickinson and I were holding music conferences in the three universities—University of Los Angeles, University of California, LA, and Occidental College—notices of the conferences were in all the papers. I received a letter from Mae Staats in Northern California asking, “Were you the little boy who used to play for me so many years ago?”)
But it happened that my best friend was going to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and he persuaded me to join him there in the preparatory school, which had just reopened after being closed from the Civil War to that year. Here I had the good fortune of being appointed University Organist at age fifteen, gaining my first experience in playing major services and accompanying anthems. This was an exciting winter because my friend and I occupied the room General Harrison had occupied when he was there, and this was the fall in which he was elected President of the United States.
The president of the college, President Warfield, started athletics that year, and we all had to play. I played on the scrub football team against the real team, on which the faculty played. One chilly afternoon, with players swarming the field, President Warfield, who was six feet, four inches tall, broke through the line, knocking men right and left, till I was the only one between him and the goal! I can still hear the spares yelling, “Hold him, Dickie! Hold him!”—but he knocked me sprawling. My friend unfortunately gave the mathematics professor a black eye during one game, and he was flunked owing to that black eye. I barely passed with the lowest successful mark possible.
When the year was over I joined my family in Evanston, Illinois, and entered Northwestern University in the fall of 1890 as the youngest member of a class of 125. When I showed my bad mark to the professor of mathematics at Northwestern, I was told I should have to take that course again. This was disheartening, as it was the one course in which I had no interest. Nevertheless, I attended the first meeting of the class. The professor finished with an amusing story, which he thought very, very funny. Naturally we all laughed uproariously, and while he was almost choking with laughter at his own joke, I shoved my application under his hand, and he signed it without putting on his glasses. You have all seen the play “How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying.” This shows you how to enter college with one bad mark!
I had started a classical course, in line with what most of my ancestors and relatives had done, with the idea of becoming a professor of Greek and Latin. But I was still interested in music, so right away I got an appointment as organist of a small church in Evanston—the South Presbyterian—and began the study of organ in earnest with Professor Cutler, organist of the First Methodist Church, of which I became the organist quite a number of years later for a short time, following Peter Lutkin. With the experience I had, it did not take me long to eat up the instruction book which Prof. Cutler gave me, and when I asked, “What next?” he replied, “You should have some Bach.” I said, “What shall I get?” He said, “Oh, get Volume I of Bach’s works in the Peters edition.” Bach’s Volume I contains the six organ sonatas which he wrote to complete the education of his son, Friedemann Bach. It was like being thrown into deep water and being told to swim. But I was always thankful, because when later I came to study the big preludes and fugues, they all seemed comparatively simple and easy.
At the Methodist church in Evanston, I not only practiced and years later became organist and choirmaster, but made my debut as a concert organist after only three months of study—a great occasion, naturally, for a young lad, but why it called for the purchase of my first stiff Derby hat, I do not know, as I could not wear it at the console. My number came in the middle of the program, so I sat in the front pew, and, when the time came for me to play, I left my new Derby, the pride of my heart, on the seat to keep my place. The audience was kind, and I returned to my seat during generous applause, feeling quite elated, but lost all consciousness of the pleasant sound when, to my horror, I saw what seemed to me the largest woman I had ever seen sitting in my place. “But where is my hat?” I cried. “I ain’t seen no ’at,” was the reply. I finally persuaded her to rise, and there it was, my precious Derby, crushed flat as a pancake, never to rise again! A lesson for life: you may have as many as three successes in a row, but then comes the inevitable “bump” to bring you down to earth again.
Organ study was quite expensive, because I not only had to pay $1.50 for a lesson, but I had to pay $.10 an hour to a pumper. My pumper was what we called a “Bib,” that is, a student at Garrett Biblical Institute of Northwestern University. He was a solemn young man, and would pump with his right hand and read a book held in his left. If I pulled out too many stops, he would quit pumping and come to the front of the organ, gazing at me very reproachfully over his glasses, so I would have to withdraw the larger stops.
The organ pumper was a very important being in those days. Dr. Isaac Woodbury, of Boston, the writer of some of our well-known hymns, used to speak of his pumper as a very skillful inflator of the bellows. If he did not pump steadily, he could spoil your playing by letting the wind run down, then pump fast and furiously to fill the bellows again, thus shaking the tone. When I was growing up in College Hill, we were fortunate to have the village blacksmith as our pumper. He was used to blowing up the bellows with one hand and then striking the red-hot horseshoe on the anvil, which made it very easy for him to pump steadily.
I remember substituting in a Baptist church one summer when vacationing from my own church. The morning service was quite exciting because they had baptisms. The leader of the choir would take hold of my coat tails, and as the victim stepped into the water, he would pull my coat tail very gently, gradually harder and harder, until he gave a sharp pull and I would come out with full organ to hide the splash.
This was summer, and the evening service was very quiet. After the sermon, I gave the signal to the blower for the concluding hymn, but there was no response, even after a second vigorous bump on the board which a certain stop struck. So I had to get off the bench, go back and wake up the young lad. He came to, saying, “I was just sneaking a little snooze.”
The best blower I have ever known was in Dublin. I naturally was anxious to see the organ that Handel played when he gave the first performance of the Messiah, so I went to that church. It was locked, but I found a reluctant sexton who opened the door. When I asked to see the organ, he said, “We never show the organ.” I told him I had come all the way from America just to see the organ that Handel had played. So he finally unlocked the organ console and said, “Of course, no one is allowed to play this organ except the organist of this church.” I sat down and put my hands on the keys, while he objected. I said, “I only want to see how hard the action is in this old tracker organ.” Then I pulled out a few stops, saying, “I just want to see how far one has to pull them. Sometimes they are very long in these old organs.” Suddenly the organ gave forth sound. He looked as though he had seen a ghost and dashed around to the rear of the organ. There was Mrs. Dickinson, pumping away. So he finally relented and said, “What’s the use of fighting these Americans.” He took over the pump handle so that I could play some of the Messiah and one of the concertos of Handel which I hoped might have been the one Handel played between the parts of the oratorio. When we came away, I gave him an extravagant tip and we parted good friends.
In my first position, at South Presbyterian Church of Evanston, where I was organist from 1890 to 1892, I received what was to me a fine salary; $100 for the first year. The second year they raised it to $10.00 a month.
In 1892, I saw an advertisement in a newspaper, “Organist Wanted,” for a big church in Chicago, Church of the Messiah, where they had just installed a beautiful Roosevelt organ, the most up-to-date in the city, with an electric blower, making it possible to play as long as one wanted. I applied for the job and got it. There I met a lady, Mrs. Proctor Smith, who immediately took an interest in me. She insisted that I must devote myself to music, and worked on me for hours, trying to convince me that I had enough natural ability to devote my life to it. She also later secured a $3,000 loan for my study abroad, and practically forced me to try my hand at writing music. So the Greek professorship went out the window. Mrs. Smith knew a great deal about art, poetry, and music, and put an interest in it all in me. She possessed a beautiful soprano voice, and studied in London, and later in Boston with the great singer and conductor, George Henschel, conductor of the London Philharmonic, and later, for one year, to get it started, the Boston Symphony. With such teaching, and her own natural feeling for the text, as well as the music, she was a wonderful interpreter, and so was the great inspiration of my young life. I dedicated my first set of songs, set to poems by my cousin, Emily Dickinson, to Mrs. Proctor Smith. These were written when the discovery and publication of Emily Dickinson’s poems was still creating much excitement and discussion.
It was at Church of the Messiah, where I was organist from 1892 to 1897, that I gave what was the first entire organ recital from memory, an innovation that called for much comment for and against. Clarence Eddy, internationally known as the leading organist of America, had brought up a pupil, Harrison M. Wild, to be a rival in Chicago. Although I substituted occasionally for Mr. Eddy, I was attracted more by Wild’s playing, and so studied with him. He gave a series of Sunday afternoon concerts to large audiences, and occasionally asked me to play a group of pieces.
When a young German organist, Wilhelm Middelschulte, arrived in Chicago, friendless and moneyless, he came to Wild for help. Wild secured for him a good position as organist of a leading Catholic church, and invited him to play a group of numbers on his recital series. Middelschulte played these from memory! Wild then said to me, “This will become the custom, I am sure. Get busy and play your first recital from memory.” I did.
Clarence Eddy attended the first half of the recital. He left at intermission, and the Tribune critic came in. The Tribune critic gave me a very enthusiastic review, insisting I played much more freely and better, not being hampered by notes. The next Sunday paper published a letter from Clarence Eddy, saying that my playing from memory had been a mistake—that there were so many things to attend to on an organ that I was nervous, and I would have played much better if I had had a score before me. All very true, and his presence did not help! But, by the time he left, and the critic entered, my nervousness had disappeared. Other leading organists wrote to the Tribune, and the discussion was carried on in the New York Sunday papers, all this to explain why I was the youngest organist asked to be one of the founding members of the AGO. It was at this time that John Hyatt (High Hat) Brewer, a very fine and quite pompous organist, came out from New York to organize the Chicago Chapter of the Guild.
Church of the Messiah closed for two months every summer. By great good luck I became the substitute organist for the summer months at the services of First Church of Christ, Scientist, substituting for Frederick Root, who, with his father, wrote many of the songs of the Civil War. The church held its meetings in the Chicago Auditorium, with its great five-manual Roosevelt organ, giving the young college boy a chance to amuse himself with what you would call “romantic registration.” This organ had the first crescendo pedal, which was an enormous barrel with projecting metal tabs which struck other tabs as it revolved and drew the stops in succession. This was really comparable to a music box on a tremendous scale.
It is interesting to see how inventions develop: when I was a student in Berlin, young Josef Hofmann, the brilliant pianist, was much interested in inventions, and asked me over to see his latest. Foolishly, I did not go. You all know one: he made a device for orchestral players to turn their music, controlled by the foot. The Boston Symphony adopted it for one season, but Hofmann made a great deal of money by later turning it into the windshield wiper for automobiles.
After five years at the Church of the Messiah, in June 1897, I moved over to St. James Episcopal Church—now Cathedral—for one year as organist. Then my friends insisted that I must go abroad to study. One of the older vocal teachers had been kind to me in Chicago, and having learned of my proposed trip, took me to supper at Theodore Thomas’s home after the Saturday night orchestra concert. Mr. Thomas, the conductor, very kindly gave me some important introductions to great musicians. He was in a good mood and reminisced with a number of amusing stories. The one I remember particularly was the one about the trombonist and the tympanist. The trombonist had borrowed $10.00 from the tympanist and had been very slow in returning it. The tympanist importuned him very strongly, and the trombonist said, “I’ll pay you Saturday night.” Just before the tympanist was to play a very long roll, the trombonist turned around and began tossing pennies across the drums which, of course, bounced high in the air and made a continuous shower, to the amusement of the audience as well as the orchestra. It must have been a great sight.

To be continued

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, and a recitalist on organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Memorization
I ended last month’s column with a list of some ideas about memorization, sight-reading, and looking or not looking at the keyboards. This month and next I will focus on the pros and cons of memorization as a learning tool. That is, I want to consider ways in which working on memorization—or not working on memorization—can help the teaching and learning process, and what can be learned from thinking about the phenomenon of memorization, whether a student memorizes music for performance or not. I will also consider the role of sight-reading, or reading in general, in performance, and how reading relates to knowing a piece thoroughly and well. I want to start with a brief account of my own history with memorization. This, of course, affects my thinking about memorization in general, as does the whole range of experiences of my students—and other students whom I have observed—over the years.

Personal experience
I have, to put the punch line first, done very little public performance from memory over the years. I have actually never played a piece in concert or in a recording session from memory. When I was applying to graduate school at Westminster—it was 1983—I had to play my audition partly from memory. This was a requirement for the organ performance program, though not for organists applying to the church music program. I was unaccustomed to memorizing, and I worked very hard at it. In the end, at the audition, I had a brief memory slip or two, from which I recovered fairly well. During my years in that graduate program, I also had to play a jury or two from memory. The experience was similar: that is, I worked very hard on the memorization, had a few brief memory slips, and more or less got through it.
Meanwhile, the rules of the organ performance program at Westminster, at the time I was a student, stated that I would have to play my master’s recital entirely from memory. Entering that program as someone who had done little or no work on memorization prior to my audition, I had no idea how I would manage to cope with that requirement. Either I would work very hard at it and hope that it went well—better, I would have hoped, than the audition or the juries, since noticeable memory slips in concert would have felt quite bad—or I would hope for some sort of miracle. That miracle came when the department decided to change the requirement. We were now allowed to choose either to give one recital from memory, or two playing from the scores. I chose the latter, which, among other things, permitted me to take on the challenge of learning The Art of the Fugue and playing it as one of those recitals. I could not even have considered trying, at that point in my life, to memorize something that long and complex.
Since the last of those juries that I played as a graduate student, I have not played a piece from memory with anyone listening. Clearly this means that I do not believe that memorization is a necessity for good performance: if I did believe that, then either I would have memorized repertoire for all these years or I would have been taking, and would still be taking, an ongoing blow to my self-esteem.
Furthermore, it would be hypocritical of me to believe that we teachers ought to expect—let alone force—our students to memorize. Indeed, after many years of teaching and playing, I cannot see any good reason to expect students or any players to perform repertoire from memory. This is, of course, a fairly extreme statement about a more or less “hot button” topic, and I hold onto it lightly: that is, while I feel quite convinced about this view, I am also open to being persuaded otherwise at some point. I have not been persuaded yet, though, in spite of both generally paying attention to writing and teaching on the subject and having conducted a review of the literature in preparation for writing this column.

The case against memorization
It makes sense to me that, in spite of the very strong tradition of memorization in piano playing and the weaker but persistent tradition of memorization in organ playing, the burden of proof must fall on the side of maintaining that performing from memory is necessary. This is in part because it is usually extremely time consuming. If I am going to ask my students (or myself) to spend a lot of time on anything—time which could be spent, among many other things, on learning and performing more pieces—then there must be a very good reason for it.
However, I have seen the imposition of a need to memorize do actual harm. Literally all of the auditions, juries, and student recitals that I have ever heard that were performed from memory have included memory slips—sometimes small, sometimes large—or passages that were clearly executed in a tight, hesitant way because of fears about memory. This is perhaps a small sample size, but it has been so consistent that it strongly reinforces my belief that if students are required to play from memory, the benefits of doing so must be unambiguous and compelling. I have also seen students do what I would have had to do with The Art of the Fugue if I had been required to play my degree recital from memory: that is, avoid certain pieces that they would really like to play because those pieces seem daunting to memorize. Many students go around in a constant state of tension and anxiety because of concern about memorization. And, worst of all, some people decide that they cannot aspire to be performers at the highest level because they do not—rightly or wrongly—believe that they could confidently perform from memory.

Is there a case for memorization?
Of course, playing music and being a performer is difficult and can be nerve-racking. But is the extra difficulty and tension caused by memorization justified? How good are the reasons for asking students to play from memory?
Some of these reasons are, it seems to me, either essentially stylistic or just practical and arguably rather superficial: that it looks more professional, that it saves the inconvenience of having to use a page turner, that if you use music you will feel like or look like a “student”, that memorization will save you if the music blows off the music desk, that it will enable you to give a recital at a moment’s notice when you are away from your library of printed music, that it will permit you to play at a social occasion at which you were not planning to play. (These specific reasons actually constitute the majority of what I have seen mentioned about the subject in my recent review of Internet-based discussions.) Some people mention that if a piece is fully memorized, it becomes easier to look steadily at the hands and feet and to look to find pistons, stop levers, etc. This is interesting and has more musical/technical substance to it than some, and I will discuss it more later.
However, the main claim for memorization is that only by memorizing a piece can you learn it really thoroughly. This claim takes several forms. The most direct is that it is only through the techniques of memorization that a piece can really be learned—that is, that experience shows that only after doing the kinds of things that lead to a piece’s being memorized will you really know the piece inside and out. Another claim, turning things the other way around, is that if a player engages in the act of learning a piece really thoroughly then he or she will indeed, almost automatically, have memorized it: therefore playing from the score is seen as a sign that the player can’t have learned the music very well. Both of these ideas have been incorporated into the ways that some people talk about learning and playing music. I have seen phrases like “learn the piece inside and out, backward and forward” used as a synonym for “memorize the piece.” I have encountered as a sort of aphorism: “get the music into your head and your head out of the music.” Indeed, in some circles, and in particular at certain times in music history, “learn a piece” has been used as a synonym for “memorize a piece.”
Furthermore, of course, we normally use the language in which we talk about performances or performers to imply, without necessarily having made a considered judgment about it, that playing from memory is playing of a higher order. “She was the first to play the works of so-and-so from memory,” “he had memorized such-and-such repertoire by the time he was 14.” Feats like this are impressive because they are difficult, and there is no reason not to acknowledge the work of people who accomplish them. (By the way, however, they also get more notice than they might otherwise, simply because they can be described objectively. If we try to say that “she was the first to play the works of so-and-so in an absolutely riveting manner” there is no way to establish objectively that this is actually true.) We are still just slipping around the question of whether playing from memory is in any way better—or, for our purposes here, whether asking students to play from memory really helps them to become better players.
Some observers report seeing performers—both students and others—playing pieces with their eyes intently, almost frantically, following the music, clearly needing that music to teach them the notes as they play. In fact, most of us know that this is common, that it always creates bad and insecure performances, and that it is a sign of poor preparation. However, in itself this doesn’t prove or even really suggest that performing from memory is the solution to this problem, although it points to the fact that some people misuse the circumstance of playing from music.

The bottom line of learning
So this all comes back to the same thing: that anyone who wants to play a piece should take on the responsibility of learning that piece extremely thoroughly, and that anyone who wishes to become an accomplished player must get into the habit of studying all pieces thoroughly and well. Much of what I have written about over the last several years—in particular the methods of analyzing and learning counterpoint and the technique of paying attention to elements, small or large, that recur in any piece—has been geared towards helping people to know their pieces very well musically by the time that they have learned the notes. Much of the rest of what I have written—about pedal learning, slow practicing, paying attention to hand choices and more—has been geared towards making sure that the physical side of playing will be secure enough that a player can take advantage of what he or she has learned by getting to know the piece really well, that is, not be distracted from it by physical problems or insecurity.
It seems to me that anyone with good practice habits and good physical technique who has put in the time to study a piece thoroughly will end up being able to play that piece from the score as well as anyone could play it from memory. Therefore my own approach—the bargain I would make with my students, so to speak, is this: that there should be no compromise on studying the music in depth, including taking things apart contrapuntally and motivically, noticing harmonic patterns, recurring rhythms, changes in texture, in what order voices enter, playing hands separately when that seems like a good idea for technical or musical reasons, and so on; but that this intense study should be for its own sake and for the sake of the performance, not for the sake of leading to full memorization.
Those who advocate memorization are right that the greatest source of wrong notes, insecurity, and hesitant, unconvincing playing is not knowing what is coming up next. Too strong a reliance on reading—only half-learning a piece and expecting to fill in the rest by quasi-sight reading in performance—is a trap into which many of us fall, experienced players as well as students. It does not often result in good performances. I would suggest avoiding that trap in the most direct way—by insisting to one’s self and to one’s students that pieces be studied thoroughly and carefully. It is, looking at it one way, overkill and perhaps a distraction to relate that process of thorough study to the act of playing from memory. The opposite of reading a piece that is ill prepared is, I would say, reading a piece that is extremely well prepared.
For some people, the act of studying a piece well will indeed lead naturally and apparently automatically to the musical text of the piece actually being memorized and the printed music’s becoming unnecessary. There is, most obviously, nothing wrong with this. However, there is also nothing wrong with the more common scenario in which even very thorough study of the music does not lead to real, note-perfect memorization. I would encourage teachers and students to be comfortable with that.
Next month I will continue this discussion, talking about some of what I consider to be beneficial ideas that have arisen from the tradition of memorization, such as studying music away from the keyboard, and also discussing the role of sight reading, some of the pitfalls that reading presents, and ways to avoid them.

§

On a completely different matter: I have recently had a fascinating conversation with several friends on the following question: who was the musician that you have heard live in performance who was born the earliest? This led to quite an interesting and far-ranging discussion about time and history, and the reach of living memory. I would like to open that discussion up to a wider group. I encourage anyone reading this to think about your own answer to that question, and to e-mail it to me at Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, and a recitalist on organ, harpsichord, and clavichord. He can be reached by e-mail at . My own answer is as follows: that the earliest-born performer whom I heard in performance at all was Leopold Stokowski, born 1882, and that the earliest-born player that I heard was Arthur Rubinstein, by a margin of ten days over Eubie Blake, both born in 1887. I will include all of the answers that I get in a later column.

Lorenz Maycher is organist-choirmaster at First-Trinity Presbyterian Church in Laurel, Mississippi. His interviews with William Teague, Thomas Richner, Nora Williams, Albert Russell, and Robert Town have appeared in The Diapason.

The first installment in this series, “From the Dickinson Collection: Reminiscences by Clarence Dickinson, Part 1: 1873–1898,” was published in the July 2008 issue of The Diapason; next appeared “From the Dickinson Collection: Memorizing Controversy,” September 2008; and most recently, “From the Dickinson Collection: Reminiscences by Clarence Dickinson, Part 2: 1898–1909,” February 2009.

Introduction
As a founding member of the American Guild of Organists, Clarence Dickinson (1873–1969) was a frequent speaker at AGO functions throughout his lengthy career. In this speech given to the St. Louis Chapter in 1959, Dr. Dickinson reflects on playing the 1904 St. Louis Exposition organ, offers colorful memories of the chapter’s founding members and of Andrew Carnegie, reflects on his personal career as a church musician, and offers helpful advice to organists of all ages. Additional material has been incorporated into the text from a speech Dickinson gave at Westminster Choir College on October 1, 1968. All material in this series is taken from the Dickinson Collection, Dr. Dickinson’s own personal library, which is housed at William Carey University in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. We are very grateful to Patricia Furr and Dr. Gene Winters of William Carey for granting access to this special collection, and for permission to use these items in this series intended to preserve the life and legacy of Clarence and Helen A. Dickinson.
—Lorenz Maycher
Laurel, Mississippi

I am delighted to be here with you tonight, and to share in the celebration of the Golden Anniversary of the founding of your chapter. Thank you, Howard Kelsey, for all these undeserved kind words. It hardly seems necessary to say anything, but just to stand here and let you imagine I am all things I should like to be. I am not much of a speechmaker. Whenever I find myself in the position of making a speech, I am reminded of Thackeray’s saying: “My wit is cab wit,” which means I always think of the bright things I might have said when I am in the cab going home afterwards!
My first acquaintance with Howard Kelsey came with his arrival at our school at Union Seminary. Many of the students were arriving in ancient, rather dilapidated Fords, which they had purchased for anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars and then sold upon arrival. One of our students, now Dr. Allwardt, met him coming down the hall and said, “I suppose you came in your Rolls-Royce.” Howard answered very simply, “Yes.” He had driven the family car and sold it for enough money to carry him through the entire two years’ course.
I have been rather intimately acquainted with St. Louis—the town, not the saint—and your organization for a long time. I first came here to play at your Exposition in 1904. That was the year Mrs. Dickinson and I were married, and we had been in Europe (Spain and elsewhere) for a long trip, the last stop being England, where, a few days before we sailed, Lady Patterson gave a luncheon for us to meet Lady Penell. We were telling her of the trip ahead of us, how we would travel miles across the ocean, then take the finest train of that time, the Twentieth Century, up the Hudson. Lady Penell interrupted and said, “Oh, that is wonderful! Then you can tell me about my Hudson Bay stock.”
Arriving in St. Louis, I had the pleasure of giving a number of recitals on the magnificent organ at the Exposition, which was designed by Dr. George Ashdown Audsley, the author of the greatest early book on organs and organ building. I remember the old gentleman’s coming to the house for dinner, bringing the two great volumes and putting them down very wearily, saying, “I have brought you twenty-seven pounds.”
The Exposition organ marked a great advance in organ building, with many new mechanical devices. I have always remembered playing Liszt’s “Evocation à la Chapelle Sistine” most effectively on it, as I was able to put more atmosphere into the playing of it than ever before or since. You may remember the main theme is that of Allegri’s “Miserere,” which has been sung every Good Friday in the Sistine Chapel since it was written, in diminishing light, until it is finished in complete darkness. The score and parts were held for use in this manner and were jealously kept secret until the twelve-year-old Mozart wrote it down from memory, and we have all had the wonderful privilege of singing it ever since. Liszt used the Mozart “Ave Verum” for his second theme. On your organ, it was possible to depict the darkness Liszt desired by using in the pedal stops 64′, 32′, 16′ and enough soft 8′ pitch to define the tone, with 32′, 16′, and soft 8′ on the manuals, gradually climbing upward till one could end the final triad at the top of the keyboard on a 4′ flute in an organ in the ceiling of the high auditorium. This is the organ which was later installed at Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia. In the foundation work, Dr. Audsley harkened back to the period of middle 19th-century tone that he advocated, although using a bit more color and control.
I would like to speak a bit about the changes in organ building during my lifetime. The first organ I played in my father’s church was made within the same period as the Exposition organ, as was the first organ of my own in the South Presbyterian Church in Evanston, and later the organ in St. James in Chicago. Organs of this period had clarity of diapason tone, and, in the larger instruments, had brilliance achieved through the reeds and mixtures. With the advent of electric action came the possibility of octave couplers, and the declaration by the Austin Organ Co. that nothing above a four-foot stop was necessary, which unfortunately gave us quite a long period of impossibly dull organs. Even in the large four-manual concert organs no number of super-octave couplers could infuse any life into them. With Mr. Skinner there came additional beauty of tone, which had its drawbacks, too, since many small organs sacrificed the real organ tone in order to secure some of his beautiful color stops—not so far as I remember, though, in his large organs: the Brick Church organ, built in 1918, contained six mixtures, and other overtones, on which a baroque program could sound as successful as much as one built today.
There have been several periods of what you might call “feverish organ building.” One increase in good organs throughout the country we owe to Mr. Andrew Carnegie. The building of better organs led to an increased number of good organists capable of handling the larger instruments, and then to higher standards of church music. This debt has never been adequately acknowledged. Mr. Carnegie gave 8,400 organs distributed all over the United States, and greatly helped the cause of good church music. I speak as one very grateful, since the hundred-rank organ in the Brick Church came to us in this manner. His insistence that the church contribute half the cost was wise, as it interested the members in an undertaking in which they had a part. Mr. Carnegie also had a very fine organ in his home, and maintained an organist so that he awoke to the music of an organ every morning.
I was quite well acquainted with at least three of the founders of your chapter: Ernest Richard Kroeger, the real founder, Charles Galloway, and James T. Quarles. The year before I went to Paris to study with Guilmant, Mr. Galloway had worked with him. Whenever I especially pleased Guilmant with my playing of some large number, he would say, “Mr. Galloway played that very beautifully!”
Mr. Kroeger and I were very good friends. One winter he came to Chicago and attended a rehearsal of my Musical Art Society. My accompanist, as it happened, was away that day, so I ventured to ask Mr. Kroeger if he would mind helping us out, which he very graciously did in wonderful manner. We were rehearsing Grell’s sixteen-part Mass, a mean piece to read at sight as there was no reduced score—just the sixteen-part score. The chorus had only their single parts. The first chorus gives out the first eight-bar theme, then the second enters singing the same bit. As this was their first look at it, trouble soon developed. After straightening it out, we started over again. When the third chorus entered the same thing happened. When I started for the fourth time, Dr. Carver Williams, who was the 2nd bass in the last chorus, threw his part down on the floor and cried out, “I’ll be darned if I will count 64 bars again!”
As you know, Mr. Quarles was organist at Cornell University for a number of years before he moved to St. Louis. Andrew Carnegie had given a splendid new four-manual organ to the university’s large auditorium. Quarles got the idea of having four organists play the dedication recital. So, on this occasion, Quarles opened the recital, Dr. Tertius Noble followed, and William Churchill Hammond, the Holyoke organist, came third. Hammond finished his section with a very soft, quiet number, during which Mr. Carnegie went sound to sleep. I came next, opening with full organ, at which Mr. Carnegie woke with a leap in the air. So I, for once, had the honor of awakening Mr. Carnegie from his slumbers.
I would like to make a few remarks as suggestions of how we, as musicians, may go forward to the new day. In the first place, build up good fellowship among all organists of the city, young and old, long-time residents and newcomers. Too often there are two or more separate sets of members, the older and the younger, with separate, perhaps even conflicting points of view. See if you can build a warm, personal relationship with each other. Let the joy of association help promote a more definite feeling of “togetherness” in what each of you, as individuals, and all of you, as a group, are trying to accomplish. As you cultivate generosity and appreciation of others’ efforts and talents, feelings of rivalry, or competition, of professional jealousy, of any semblance of strife among yourselves, will be minimized. Give emphasis to a spirit of cooperativeness, of encouraging one another, of striving, not separately, but together, toward achieving accomplishment of worthy goals. In the work of the Guild, remember we all either “hang together or we hang separately.” This may necessitate a bit of “giving in” on the part of everyone concerned, but the results will be well worth the effort and the sacrifice. Your Guild, planning and working together, brings harmony and unity, and will have a positive influence in your city. I am not suggesting here that there is any noticeable lack of this fine spirit among your members; rather, this is the very first bit of advice that I would offer any chapter, for I believe it to be a truly basic principle for our progress, and I believe that improvements can always be made in any of our chapters in this regard. It is very important that newcomers to our “fold” be made to feel welcome and wanted.
To my mind, one of the chief good works of the Guild is its bringing us all together, and not only within the confines of our own city, but city mingling with city. It is stimulating and enlightening, and furnishes us much of that in our country which has been one of the chief benefits of our European sojourns. In this connection I have a pleasant thought of such a visit, which I think would, as the Germans say, be “sympathetic” to this occasion. It is of a visit of a couple of hours duration with Georg Schumann, the Berlin composer whose organ “Passacaglia” and “At Evening” we play in this country, and whose motets are sung by all our Musical Art societies. He had been only a vague acquaintance, a composer, but when I came into personal touch, he was—I cannot convey to you how delightful. There was first, with much enthusiasm, the Bach manuscript to show me, which he had just found at the Singakademie, tucked away for centuries and lost to sight. Just as I was leaving and had reached the door, he exclaimed, “Ach, Himmel! I almost forgot! Come back, won’t you!” So I returned to my chair, while he disappeared for a few minutes, then reappeared and passed through his study again, beyond the living room in which I was sitting. Then he called me in. On the wall hung Stuck’s famous “Mask of Beethoven,” which the artist had presented to the composer. It had been put away for the summer, but Schumann had gone to all the trouble of unpacking and re-hanging it, and, as we stood before it, in all its wonderful impressiveness, after a long silence, he said, “Now, whenever you see this in reproduction”—and one does so often, on the covers of all the Hugo Wolf things, for instance—“Whenever you see this in reproduction, you will think of me and of how this hangs just here in my study.”
And so the Guild brings us all in touch; to the newcomer in a city or chapter it means everything, in the unique opportunity it offers for getting acquainted; to the steady residents, it should mean the inciting to do ever better work, and in intercourse with other organists and composers, inspiration. I say organists and composers, for the organists are giving to the world the greatest body of church music; and this, I believe, will be, in future, more and more stimulated by the Guild.
Admittedly, the purposes of the Guild are manifold, and the accomplishing of all of them is no easy task, but let us not forget that one of our principal aims is the raising of church music standards. And, in this, I would offer a word of warning if you are to build wisely and effectively for the future: remember that progress, if it be real and lasting progress, is a slow process. It must be gradual, step by tedious step. It evolves. Rome was not built in a day, you know, but it was practically destroyed in a few hours under the leadership of a stupid, lackadaisical, “fiddling” ruler. In attempting to raise standards, therefore, work positively and confidently, but move patiently, calmly, understandingly, and cautiously.
The future of the world we live in depends on the rising generation. The future of music, as it affects our common life, depends on the ideals being shaped in the minds of our young people. Therefore, try to keep the music sung in Sunday school up to a high standard, as well as that used in the main church service. But, be patient. Do this gradually. After we sang Palestrina’s “Reproaches,” with its use of plainsong, in the Brick Church a good many years ago, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees came up to me and said, “That was a queer thing you gave us this morning.” Notwithstanding this implied criticism, we repeated it some time later, and then again. After the third repetition, without realizing that he had heard it before, the same man came up and commented almost enthusiastically, “That was a beautiful anthem this morning. I hope you will repeat it soon.” I never heard a more vivid reversal of opinion. So, do not get discouraged. But, make sure if it is old and modal, or very modern, that it is really inspired.
And while I am on the subject of high standards in church music, let me remind us that this may be accomplished through a varied musical program and that it is not necessary to limit ourselves merely to “Bach, or Pre-Bach,” as is suggested by one teacher I know. A question I should like to ask is “Why do some of us limit organ specifications to the point that we can play only linear music?” I admire Rembrandt’s drawings greatly, but that is no reason for me to deny myself, and others, the enjoyment of the color in his paintings, as well.
I feel like giving a suggestion to the young players here, as I did recently to the New York chapter when the treasurer had just announced a change of address for seventeen young organists, which meant they were moving from one church to another: When you go out to consider a new position, you look at the organ very carefully to make sure it is an instrument you will enjoy playing, and you examine the choir library to see what material there is to work with—probably also the piano in the choir room—but you do not examine the minister, the most important factor in your future happiness. Scrutinize your minister, because he can make or break your career in that church by loving and demanding rather cheap music, or backing you up on the use of beautiful music and helping you to raise the standards of the music used in that church.
It might interest you to know the one reason I have led a happy life as an organist and choirmaster is the fact that I have invariably been associated with kindly and sympathetic ministers. When I went to my very first church, the small one in Evanston, a big new organ was being installed. I was appointed permanent organist, but for the dedication of the new instrument, a well-known organist from Chicago was invited to play the opening recital. When the program was being arranged, the minister said to the visiting organist, “But do let the lad play the first number on his new organ.”
The minister of the next church I served in Chicago was a very brilliant young man who afterwards became dean of the Harvard Divinity School. He helped me by insisting I should play an organ number after his sermon that carried out the spirit of his text, sometimes quietly meditative, sometimes big and stirring. After a couple of other short associations in Chicago, I became organist and choirmaster of St. James Episcopal Church, and found a rector who was fond of the best, and very sympathetic to all I strove to do in presenting the use of fine music.
When I came to New York and the Brick Presbyterian Church, I had Henry Van Dyke, the poet, writer, and Ambassador to Holland during the First World War. The church was always crowded to hear him preach, yet he was a great enough man to say occasionally, “It hardly seems necessary to preach a sermon—the music has said it all.”
Then came William Pierson Merrill, who had been organist of Union Seminary when a student there, bass of the quartet in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where they always had distinguished soloists, and director of his own choir in Chicago. He also wrote very good anthems and hymn settings, and his text of the hymn “Soldiers of Christ Arise” had gone into practically all the English and American hymnals. You can imagine how interested he was in building a unified service by the fact that he took the trouble to cable from London the text for the first few Sundays in the fall.
In addition to our serious work together, we always had good times because of his keen sense of humor. He liked to tell of the Saturday before his first service as minister of the Brick Church. I was rehearsing the choir in the old building on Fifth Avenue in the first chorus of the “Elijah,” and was having great difficulty in getting the choir to enunciate the final letter P in the word “Help.” It was just at this moment that Dr. Merrill decided to visit the rehearsal and speak a word to the choir. He used to say, “Dickinson stopped them and cried out in a loud voice, ‘You’ll have to do that again—it sounds like hell.’” Dr. Merrill continued, and said, “I decided this was no place for me, and returned to my study.”
His two sons inherited his sense of humor. During the two years that the new Brick Church was being built on Park Avenue, we worshiped in a lovely little Gothic church on 85th and Park Avenue, where there was not room enough for the console in the chancel, and the organist sat in a little curtained room to the side. Ernest Merrill, as deacon, was passing communion, and brought me the bread in this little room. I then looked at my watch and found that I must leave at once to catch the one o’clock train to play a recital in another city, so put another organist on the bench for the finish of the service. When Ernest came in with the wine, his face took on a look of horror, and he asked the other organist in a sepulchral whisper, “What did you do with the body?”
Dr. Merrill and his family once had an audience with the Pope, along with a number of other people. Before the Pope entered, the majordomo went around and pulled down the sleeves, pulled up the collars, and saw that the women had something on their heads. Fourteen-year-old Billy turned to his father and asked, “Wouldn’t it be much simpler to just blindfold the Pope?”
It has been one of my goals to encourage all ministers to acquire knowledge of, as well as an appreciation of, music. I do not see how one can hope for a service of worship if the minister writes the sermon, someone else selects a miscellaneous lot of hymns treating three or four different themes, and the leader of music puts on some anthems he likes, or the soloist chooses a solo he likes. A good old Scotch Presbyterian minister once said, “I preach my sermon, and that’s all I want; I don’t care what they do with the music.” Such a minister deserves the fate of one who preached on the text, “Launch out into the deep,” after which the choir rose and sang, “Throw out the lifeline.”
We must keep ever in mind the power of music to lift the individual person out of his self-centered existence. When he joins in singing a hymn or listens to an anthem, he ceases to be wholly individual; the congregation becomes one, and he a part of it. Personal differences of creed, questionings, doubt, disbelief are forgotten as hearts and voices unite in gratitude, joy and aspiration. It is the privilege and the responsibility of the organist and choirmaster, working with the minister, to offer music so worthy, so noble, so universal in its appeal, that it will not only lift the congregation into closer fellowship with God, but will subtly re-establish in some measure the consciousness of the fellowship of all Christian souls.
Not long ago, one of my pupils gave me some advice, which I should like to pass along to you: “Keep practicing. Although there are no immediate dates pending, keep practicing.”

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Memorization II
Last month I staked out a position about memorization that went something like this: that asking students to perform from memory is not in any way a necessary part of asking those students to perform well, or to become fully competent or indeed great players; that in many or most cases, a focus on memorization is damaging to the student’s work because it is disproportionately time-consuming and it leads to increased anxiety—anxiety that is often justified, since the attempt to play from memory does indeed often lead to reduced security and thus less command of the music; and that any meaningful advantages that are sometimes ascribed to memorization—which can be summed up as “knowing the music really well, inside and out”—can actually be achieved better by studying the music extremely thoroughly in a way that is governed by the idea of studying the music thoroughly, not by the goal of then being able to play it from memory. A substantial amount of what I have written in this column in the last few years has been geared towards helping students and their teachers develop ways of studying music very thoroughly, in a focused and efficient way. Further aspects of this study will of course occupy future columns as well.
In this month’s column I will write about a few more aspects of the memorization issue, including a (very) little bit about the history of memorization, the relationship between memorization and sight-reading, and some of what I think that we and our students can learn from thinking about the concept of memorization, even without taking the step of deciding to perform pieces from memory. I will also focus more on the other two aspects of playing—or learning to play—that I have mentioned as being related to memorization, that is, sight-reading and looking or not looking at the hands and feet.
It is commonly said that Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt were the first keyboard players to play in public from memory. As far as I know, this is indeed true, although it is often the case that before the first famous person did any particular thing, there were less famous—or more-or-less unknown—people doing that same thing. In any case, when Schumann and, soon after her, Liszt began to play public piano recitals from memory, it was greeted as something new. It was also not greeted universally favorably. Both of these great performers were criticized for showing off, for putting their own displays of virtuosity ahead of the musical integrity of what the composers had written. (Apparently Clara Schumann came in for more of this criticism than Liszt, perhaps because she was the first, but, unfortunately, also because she was a woman.) It was probably largely the extraordinary popular success that Liszt enjoyed as a virtuoso performer—success that put him easily in the “rock star” category—that led to the spread of the practice of playing piano music from memory.
It is interesting to speculate for a moment about the relationship of memorization to the notion of authenticity to the composer. Of course, the most basic way to apply that type of “authenticity” to the memorization question would be to suggest that music should be memorized if the composer expected or wanted it to be memorized, and not memorized if the composer did not. It seems extremely unlikely that very many performers approach it this way. I have never myself noticed a pianist playing Liszt or other late nineteenth- or twentieth-century composers from memory, but not Beethoven, Brahms, or Schubert. Memorization seems as a normal matter to be associated with the identity of the performer rather than the identity of the composer. However, it is quite common for players who do regularly memorize their repertoire to report, as a matter of their experience, that older music is harder or in some way less natural to memorize than later music. On the whole, composers are probably more interested in having performers play their music promptly than in having them memorize it. It would make sense for composers to want good performers to be available routinely to learn new music rather than to spend their time on memorization. This, rather than any particular difficulty in memorizing the type of music, may explain why in the twentieth century there was an informal tradition against memorizing modern or avant-garde music.

Memorized works vs.
improvisations
After the growth of Lisztian memorized performance in the world of concert piano playing, the historical situation in the organ world was mixed. It is well known that Marcel Dupré played from memory and expected his students to do so; Maurice Duruflé did not. Surviving photographs of Alexandre Guilmant playing all show him with scores on the music desk. Pictures of Joseph Bonnet playing are always devoid of music, as are those of Günther Ramin. Of course Helmut Walcha, Jean Langlais, André Marchal, and other blind organists played from memory. Judging from photographs, Charles Tournemire played from music.
That is, Walcha, Langlais, and many others played from memory, or Tournemire played from music, when they were not improvising. The place of memorization in the history of organ playing must be seen, in part, in relation to the importance of improvisation in the work of organists over the centuries. If much of what is being done at the organ is improvisation, then the relative importance of playing music that other people have already written is reduced. Perhaps the sense of whether or not it is worth the time to memorize that music is affected by this.
At the same time, in a different way, I believe that the phenomenon of improvisation has shaped our perception of the meaning or importance of memorization in the opposite direction. Improvisation is a directly creative art, more directly creative than playing music that others have written, though not necessarily more important to the listening public or to the world of music as a whole. Improvisation is done without music on the music desk. I think that there is a chance that when some people react to performance from memory—without music on the music desk—as being on a higher artistic level than performance from printed music, they are being influenced in that judgment by the image of improvisation. At least, I think that this may be true—probably subconsciously—for some people, and it may shape the nature of the discussion about the supposed advantages or merits of playing from memory.

Related musical skills
There are also other ways in which playing from memory shares outward forms with other musical skills that themselves are often admired. For example, playing from memory is clearly easier for those who have perfect pitch, and when an audience sees a performance from memory, some of that audience probably react to that performer as being more professional, more of a musician even, because the memorized performance seems to imply perfect pitch. Or, to put it another way, it looks a lot like “playing by ear”, a skill that is often admired. (In fact, playing by ear is another one of those skills that are sometimes used almost to define great musicianship: “When he was only five years old he could hear something once and sit right down and play it,” etc.) Of course, playing by ear is an impressive skill, and it has uses in music-making. Perfect pitch can also be impressive, though its relationship to making music is complicated and not always positive. It is important, however, not to confuse these various issues. The impressiveness of the feat of playing by ear does not address anything about whether playing from memory leads to better performances.

Sight reading
Sight reading is, in a way, the opposite of playing from memory. It by definition requires the printed music, and the better a player is at it, the less he or she has to have studied the music before playing it. Good sight reading is a useful practical skill, especially for the most practical situations: the moment in church when the minister changes the hymn (to an unfamiliar one!) at the last minute, or the sudden request to participate in a vocal or chamber music recital. Ideally we can all choose our own repertoire in plenty of time to learn it the right way. In real life that does not always happen, and good sight-reading skills can come to the rescue. Good sight reading can also play an important part in the process of learning a piece carefully and well. Of course, learning any piece starts with reading something, whether that is a series of separate contrapuntal voices, or separate hands and feet, or a whole texture in small increments. The more accurate and comfortable that reading is, the more smoothly and, probably, the more quickly the process will go. That process can work perfectly well as long as the player can read music at all, but the earlier the reading is the faster the process will normally be.
However, really great sight reading—the kind that permits a player to sit down and perform a piece without having looked at it previously—can be a trap that leads to artistically unconvincing performances. This is because it allows players to short-circuit the process of really studying the music, discovering what is going on in the music, what the patterns are, what the overall shape is, what the rhetoric of each section or passage is about. Of course, this trap in its full form only lies in wait for a few of us, the most elite sight readers. (It is not a problem for me, for example.) However, it is a reminder of the major caution that I or any of us who do not practice or advocate memorization must give to ourselves. Since we allow ourselves to rely on the printed music in performance, we have a solemn responsibility not to use that music as a crutch propping up an inadequately prepared performance. This is what leads to the claim that un-memorized performance exists at a lower artistic level than memorized performance. I have been arguing that any suggested advantages to memorization in the realm of artistic quality of performance can actually be attributed to thorough study of the music, not to memorization itself. Obviously, in order for a non-memorized performance to express the fruits of thorough study, that study must have taken place. Over-reliance on reading ability is a threat to this, and we who do not memorize must be conscientious and honest with ourselves about this, and teach our students—and then expect them—to do the same.

Pros and cons
Although I have outlined reasons for not expecting our students to memorize or, certainly, requiring them to, I do not believe that memorization and performance from memory should be expunged from the life of the student and teacher. To start with, if a student wants to memorize pieces, I have no particular interest in discouraging that, let alone trying to forbid it. Some students, of course, come to their first organ teacher having already learned to memorize repertoire from the experience of studying piano. Some students do indeed find that they memorize fairly easily and naturally. However, just as we who perform from scores have a responsibility to be honest about the pitfalls of that approach, any student who wants to play from memory must realize the pitfalls of that approach. The first of these that can affect even very willing and successful memorizers is the time that it consumes. Is that worth it? The same time could be spent learning more music. Would, for example, learning all three Franck Chorals rather than memorizing one of them add to a student’s musical understanding of the Choral that the student might otherwise have memorized? Would the time spent memorizing the Bach “Dorian” Toccata be better spent learning a couple of Buxtehude Praeludia so as to understand better the background to Bach’s work? This particular question is less relevant the faster and easier a memorizer a student is, but it is of some relevance to anyone who expresses a preference for memorization.
Here’s another pitfall: Is a student memorizing only because he or she feels the need to look steadily at the keyboard? If so, then the time spent memorizing is clearly being misdirected. That student should, as a matter of overall security and reliability, learn to play with much less looking: the occasional glance rather than the eyes glued. After this has been accomplished—or indeed while it is being worked on—the commitment to memorization can be re-evaluated. Perhaps there will be other, better reasons for that student to continue to work on memorization, perhaps not. (Incidentally, learning to play with very little looking at the keyboard will greatly improve a student’s relationship to sight reading and to the early stages, at least, of working on a piece.)
Also, a student who chooses to memorize must be honest about whether that memorization work is really—really—correlated with thorough study of the music. It is certainly true that the process of memorization involves going over the music a lot in a way that can be short-circuited by those of us who play from score. However, to the extent that that repetition is training the muscle memory to react correctly and carry out the gesture that is supposed to come next, it isn’t necessarily about musical understanding at all. Also, if memorization is mostly physical—if the student would not be able to write the piece out from memory, or even to know and be able to describe away from the keyboard most of what comes next as the piece unfolds—then it is notoriously unreliable. In particular, it is subject to falling apart in the face of any distraction and then being very hard indeed to put back together.
Even a student who is not committed to memorization might be intrigued by trying it out as a special project or challenge on an occasional piece. I have no problem with this, as long as it is kept separate from an expectation that memorization will become the norm. It might make sense to start with a short piece—an Orgelbüchlein chorale, perhaps, or one of the short Vierne pieces. And this would be a particularly intense and interesting challenge if it were approached—at first—away from the keyboard. If, for example, a student memorizes each separate voice of a short chorale prelude away from the instrument—so that he or she could write it down—then brings each voice over to the console separately at first, and then puts those voices together from memory, that constitutes an intense and challenging mental workout. It is also a version of the kind of separate-voice study that I would recommend in any case.
Looked at this way, memorization has something in common with, for example, learning to read from seventeenth-century tablature, or making one’s own organ transcription of a song or a string quartet. It is a mental and musical exercise that might well be interesting and challenging, and that might yield some insights or unexpected results.
This topic of memorization is one about which I would particularly welcome feedback—ideas, anecdotes, reactions to anything that I have said. I will include some of that feedback in a future column. 

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

This and that
This month’s column is a grab bag or miscellany of sorts. I will add to what I have already written about each of my last two subjects—memorization and interpretation—based partly on feedback and discussions that I have had about those subjects over the last few months and partly on my own further thoughts. By coincidence, a couple of things have arisen in my own performing life and in my teaching recently that shed some specific light on the issues that I discussed in July, August, and September, and I will recount those anecdotes. I will also provide a brief introduction to what will be the subject of next month’s column: figured bass realization and continuo playing.

Memorization vs. thorough learning
The first anecdote that I want to mention comes from my own recent performing life. It bolsters my existing views about memorization, or, more particularly, about the relationship between memorization and really thorough learning. (That is, it is a bit self-serving of me to recount it!) I recently needed to choose one of the larger Bach pieces to be part of a recital program. There were three in particular that I was interested in playing: the Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548; the Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542; and the Toccata and Fugue in F Major, BWV 540.
The first two are pieces that I memorized for auditions or juries at Westminster in the early 1980s. The Toccata and Fugue is a piece that I first learned at about that same time but that I have never tried to memorize. I did, however, study the F-major more intensely and in more detail than I had ever studied anything up to that point. I did all sorts of motivic and other analysis, including an analysis of proportion in both the Toccata and the Fugue, which suggested to me that the two pieces are more closely related than they are sometimes thought to be. I also practiced it to within an inch of its life, using every strategy that I knew at the time, but relying mainly on good old-fashioned repetition. I feared at the time that it was “too hard” for me, but it was an absolute favorite of mine and I was determined to learn it.
I performed all three pieces from time to time in the 1990s, and had not looked at any of them within the last ten years. When I began exploring them in order to choose one to play, I discovered very quickly that the F-major was much more solid—retained much more of what I had once put into it—than either of the other two. In fact, right off the bat I could play through it at about 80% tempo and have it come out quite accurate and steady. The process of working it up to a performance tempo and getting it to feel solid and ready to play was as smooth and easy as I can remember that process ever being with any piece. Furthermore, I noticed that when I tried to play chunks of each of these three pieces from memory—at page turns, for example, in order not always to stop at the same place—I could do more of that with the F-major than with pieces that I had explicitly memorized all those years ago. This probably in part reflects my having done a less than stellar job of memorizing them, but it is also, I believe, a reminder of the power of really studying and working on a piece.

Reading or sight-reading
One of the ideas that I have encountered persistently in discussions about memorization after I finished writing my recent columns on the subject (before as well, but more after, for some reason) is that if you haven’t memorized, you are sight-reading. I discussed sight-reading in July and in August. However, at the moment I feel even more impressed that we must make clear to our students that the alternative to memorized performance is not or should not be anything that earns the description of sight-reading. “Reading,” yes; “sight reading,” no. The role of reading in a well-prepared performance is hard to describe. I would try some of the following:
1) Reading confirms what you already know or remember at a (slightly) subconscious level about what is coming up next, and therefore enables you to bring that knowledge to the conscious level in an untroubled manner.
2) Reading gives you something to latch on to if you feel that the performance is slipping away. In fact, the security—or perhaps the rescue—that players are sometimes tempted to achieve by looking at their hands when a passage seems about to unravel can usually be achieved better by zeroing in on the music and explicitly reading what the next notes are supposed to be. This sometimes takes a leap of faith—it can feel like tightrope-walking—but it works.
3) The experience of playing a piece from the score resembles the experience of listening to a long, complicated song (or oratorio or opera) that you know well. You would not be able to write out all of the words or the whole libretto, but as it unfolds you know with certainty at each moment what is coming up next.
4) There are many things in everyday life that we experience this way: for example, the road signs along a familiar route. I could never list from memory the content of all of the signs along, say, the Connecticut Turnpike or the Garden State Parkway. But as I drive along, I know what is coming up next, and I know right away if I see that one of them has been changed.

Semi-memorization
I describe this particular state of knowing something—a piece of music or a pattern of exit signs or anything—as semi-memorization. It results naturally from really thorough study of a piece of music. Reading with attention and focus a piece of music that you have semi-memorized is neither sight-reading nor playing from memory. It is its own thing, as different from each of them as they are from each other. It is the most common and natural mode of performance for most of us most of the time.

Page turns
I have become increasingly impressed by the extent to which full-fledged memorization is mentioned as a necessity specifically to avoid dealing with page turns. Page turns can be annoying indeed, but, as I mentioned in July, wholesale adoption of memorization seems to me to be a disproportionate response to this annoyance. It is especially disproportionate as something to ask of our students as a major part of what they work on.
(At this moment in history, it seems possible that the practical side of page turning will change dramatically, perhaps quite soon. There are already electronic music reading systems that work very well on orchestral-type music stands, and that can work also on piano or harpsichord music desks. They eliminate the need to turn pages by hand. I have started using such a system in my harpsichord playing. It is useful in concert, and also sort of a conversation piece, given that it is still fairly rare. However, the most important difference that it makes is in practicing. After all, no one ever employs a regular page-turner for practice sessions. I have often in the past had the experience of playing through a piece without page-turning breaks for the first time when I played it in concert. These new music-reading/page-turning systems make that unnecessary. It is trickier to devise a system like this for organ, mainly because the organist cannot spare the feet for operating page-turning pedals. However, it seems certain that any practical obstacles to this will be figured out and that systems like this will some day be commonplace.)
However, page turns do create a real musical problem, and one approach to solving that problem involves a modest selective use of memorization. If a player—student or otherwise—always stops at a specific point, turns the page, and picks up the piece immediately after that specific point, then that moment in the music will often be permanently technically insecure or musically hesitant or unconvincing, or both. I have seen students struggle with short passages that seem puzzlingly difficult, for which no fingering, no way of practicing, no way of thinking about it seems to help. Then we have realized that the page-turning break has been actually training the student to become anxious and distracted at that spot. He or she has literally never played or heard that moment in the music without a break. (This is easy to miss in lessons where the teacher is routinely doing the page turns.)
The solution to this is straightforward. The student must vary the placement of the page turn break while practicing. This can be done by selective copying—taping a copy of the final line of the earlier page to the top of the later page and a copy of the first line of the later page to the earlier page, and then pausing to turn that page at all sorts of different places. It can also be done by memorizing the last few measures of the earlier page and the first few measures of the later page and again pausing to turn at various different spots, randomly distributed. This little bit of memorization should be anxiety-free, since is it never intended to be brought out in performance.

Teaching interpretation
Here is another recent story, this one relevant to teaching interpretation. It is also, I am afraid, intended to confirm or bolster what I have recently written, so it too is a bit self-serving. A young student of mine—middle-school age, a somewhat experienced and very talented pianist with so far just a little bit of harpsichord and organ experience—was working on a piece that was manuals only, two voices, with a left-hand bass line in steady eighth notes and a more florid right-hand part in sixteenths and thirty-seconds. After she had worked on the notes a certain amount, when it was almost time to put the hands together, I did the following. I played the first several measures of the left-hand part for her three different ways: legato, staccato, and in-between, that is, mildly but distinctly detached. I asked her to think about which she liked better: nothing about which I preferred, or about historical authenticity, or about anything else (supposedly) authoritative. I did say to her that in the end there was no reason that these approaches couldn’t be combined and the results varied. She took this home to think about.
Over the next week or two of practicing and the next couple of lessons, she not only, in a sense, chose one of my options (the middle one) but more importantly worked out—on her own—a completely varied and nuanced articulation with some notes held longer than others and certain phrases or passages played overall more or less legato than others. This exercise pointed her in the direction of listening carefully to what her playing was doing and to thinking about what she wanted out of the piece and each of its constituent passages. It also led—without my saying anything else—to her beginning to make similar choices about other pieces that she was playing and to her listening more closely to what she was doing in those pieces.
I believe that none of this would have happened if I had said to her something like “why don’t you try this phrasing and these articulations,” and had written various markings into her music. Of course this happens a lot—otherwise this approach would not be the essence of what I recommend, as discussed last month. I mention this case because the student was young enough—and sufficiently inexperienced at the particular instrument—that any teacher might easily have misgivings about leaving so much to the student’s choice, because it happened to arise while I was thinking and writing about these things, and because it worked out especially well.

Figured bass realization
Next month’s column will be about figured bass realization and continuo-playing at the keyboard. This skill is not necessarily directly relevant to the day-to-day work of most organists or to what our students come to us to learn. It is normally thought of as part of the constellation of skills that might be taught to those studying harpsichord, though of course in the days when continuo was a universal practice, much continuo playing took place at the organ. Certainly any organist who feels comfortable realizing continuo parts himself or herself (rather than relying on printed realizations found in modern editions) will have both greater flexibility and greater musical possibilities open to him or her in playing any non-solo Baroque music. This includes many anthems and other music that church choirs might sing. It is even relevant to the playing of many hymns. Understanding continuo playing is also a window to understanding a lot of what is going on in (at least) Renaissance and Baroque music in general. It is also a step towards undertaking the art of improvisation, since it is itself a form of improvisation, though one conducted within defined limits.
Figured bass realization is often taught as part of the teaching of harmony, counterpoint, or theory in general. In that context it is considered a good idea to think of continuo realizations as being in effect pieces of music that should follow the rules or customs of composition especially as to voice leading. This is an approach that is nearly the exact opposite of what works best in actual performance. The reasons for this lie in the nature of what a keyboard continuo part contributes to a performance. An understanding of this is the key to learning to play continuo comfortably, not least because it actually has the effect of making the process easier than it can seem to be in theory class. I will discuss this in detail next month. That discussion will also include a very practical protocol for working on continuo playing and of course for introducing it to students of various levels and backgrounds. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JR: Thank you so much, Ken!