Doing things a little differently: An interview with Greg Zelek

Joyce Johnson Robinson

Joyce Johnson Robinson is a past editor of The Diapason.

Photo caption: Paul Jacobs stands between George Rau and Susan Woodard, his high school organ and piano teachers, respectively. The ceremony was for the honorary doctorate given to Jacobs by Washington & Jefferson College in 2017.

 

Paul Jacobs’s name first appeared in the November 1998 issue of The Diapason, which noted that he won first prize in the Young Professional Division of the Albert Schweitzer Organ Competition in its inaugural year. His marathon performance in Chicago of the organ works of Olivier Messiaen was described in detail by Frank Ferko (“An Extraordinary Musical Odyssey: Paul Jacobs’ Messiaen Marathon,” The Diapason, April 2002, Vol. 93, No. 4, pages 14–15). Over a decade ago, The Diapason presented an interview with Jacobs, which focused on his development as a musician and his views of music within American culture (“Challenging the Culture: A Conversation with Paul Jacobs,” The Diapason, February 2006, Vol. 97, No. 2, pages. 22–25).

Jacobs has become a vocal champion of the organ and of art music, as evidenced by interviews and articles in such publications as The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He is the only organ soloist to have won a Grammy Award, and is recognized as a musician of unique stature through his performances in each of the fifty United States and around the world, as well as his performances with major orchestras, including Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and San Francisco Symphony, to name just a few. Jacobs also serves as chair of the organ department at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. Last season Jacobs toured in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

We were able to discuss his work and thoughts during a visit of his with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in May of 2018, and present an edited version of his comments here.

The Grammy

Joyce Johnson Robinson: Your awards include a Grammy award—the first and only organ soloist to receive a Grammy award.¹

Paul Jacobs: The Grammy was entirely unexpected. I was shocked by the nomination and utterly convinced that it would never materialize.

You didn’t even go to the ceremony.

It would have been difficult to attend, because I was performing with an orchestra the same weekend and didn’t want to cancel; besides, I wouldn’t receive it [the award] anyway. Well, I was wrong about that! This honor was something good not only for me, but for the entire organ profession, for organ playing to be recognized by such a mainstream institution.

Do you think it’s led to additional opportunities, or brought more attention?

On some level, perhaps. But I don’t believe that any one accolade or accomplishment is a silver bullet, which is what I tell my students. Young musicians, understandably, want to be successful and recognized immediately for their work, but there isn’t just one ingredient that’s going to make this happen—one has to commit for the long haul and be patient. Intense dedication to the art form—pursuing it for the right reasons—is crucial, because this isn’t always an easy or lucrative path. But if you genuinely love music, it will sustain you through difficult, even discouraging, times. If you tenaciously persist in the journey, your vocation to music will eventually bear fruit.

People have approached me over the years—many who have stable work and a healthy paycheck—and expressed some degree of envy that I can make a living doing what I actually love to do. It’s a reminder that shouldn’t be taken lightly: making beautiful music for others is a rare joy and a privilege. Be grateful for the music that has been bequeathed to us, that is under our care to pass to future generations. We’re the custodians of timeless works of art and must be fully dedicated to studying and sharing them with the world in any way that we can, large and small.

Collaborations

How did this all get going with orchestras?²

Oh, I’ve always had a strong desire to collaborate with other musicians. The organ can be—but need not be—a lonely instrument. There’s an abundance of fine repertoire for organ and various combinations of instruments. As a student, I played a good deal of chamber music, so much so that, as an undergraduate, I was inspired to double-major in both organ and harpsichord, primarily for the opportunity to play continuo. This cultivated relationships with many musicians who weren’t organists, which has always been important to me. As time progressed, I was increasingly invited by important orchestras to perform with them, something that has brought tremendous satisfaction.

You’ve worked with such important conductors as Pierre Boulez, Charles Dutoit, Yannick Nezet-Seguin, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Franz Welser-Most. Many conductors haven’t worked very closely with organ soloists. Is this correct?

That’s right. Let me consider how to best phrase this—my desire is for organists to be taken as seriously as other musicians. But we must earn respect; it doesn’t come automatically. And we have to deliver at the highest artistic level—consistently, every time—while always remaining flexible to the fluid circumstances of live performance. We also have to be easy to work with, personally speaking.

Several conductors have indicated to me that they’ve had less than flattering experiences with organists in the past. Sometimes organists do not help themselves or the art form, which is marginalized enough already. I think it’s crucial that organists become more self-aware of the quality of their playing and how they relate (or not) to other people, particularly those not in their own field.

What do you think about the growth of your work with orchestras, and these new concertos and pieces that are being written for organ and orchestra? Do you see this starting to spread, with other organists doing this? Right now it seems to be just you.

I know, it’s true; but this is also something that I’ve worked very hard to achieve. None of this has occurred without extraordinary effort, not to mention occasional frustrations. To begin with, it takes a bold willingness to want to understand the world of orchestras—entirely different from the organ community—its structure and needs, and what its audiences expect. And usually these audiences do not comprise the same people who attend organ recitals.

Additionally, organists must be capable of overcoming any idiosyncrasies of a given instrument, quickly overriding any problems, which are bound to arise given the non-standardized nature of our instrument and everything that this entails. Frankly, the conductor and hundred or so musicians on stage don’t give a hoot about the very legitimate problems organists face; an organist must simply be able to deliver with the same ease and confidence as they do, no questions asked.

Some of the new works that you’ve premiered, such as Wayne Oquin’s Resilience, were written for you or with you in mind.³

Some of them were, yes. I’m always looking for composers who are eager to write effectively for the organ and encourage my students to do the same. To survive, an art form must evolve and each generation must contribute to it; therefore, it’s important to encourage living composers—composers of our time—to consider the instrument and its unique expressive potential. Maybe not every piece of new music is going to stand the test of time, but a few will. And sometimes contemporary music connects with certain listeners in a way that the old warhorses do not.

And what about future recordings?

Recently released on the Hyperion label is a recording made with the Utah Symphony of Saint-Saëns’ ever-popular “Organ” Symphony. Also to be released later next season on the Harmonia Mundi label is Samuel Barber’s Toccata Festiva, performed in Switzerland with the Lucerne Symphony. And I’m excited by another recording project with Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony, one which will include Hindemith’s rarely heard Organ Concerto, Horatio Parker’s Organ Concerto, and Wayne Oquin’s Resilience.

International Touring

Having performed on five continents, including his recent European tour, Jacobs traveled to China to perform and to serve as president of the jury for the country’s first-ever international organ festival and competition, held at the Oriental Arts Centre in Shanghai.

What are your impressions of the organ world in China?

There is an exciting and increasing curiosity about the organ among Chinese musicians and audiences alike. Something that I experienced in Shanghai was that the audiences comprise primarily young people—to identify gray hairs is actually tricky! Children and their parents and young adults routinely fill the concert halls in China.

Can you explain that?

Not entirely, but it’s inspiring to witness the emergence of an organ culture in the world’s most populous country. Just as we’ve seen in other Asian countries in recent decades, now we observe something similar in China. Where it will lead, however, we do not know. But there is definitely some very genuine interest in the organ; the Shanghai Conservatory just instituted its first classical organ major degree. Of course, a problem is that there are few churches to employ trained organists. Nonetheless, it was encouraging to witness what is happening on the other side of the world, and to experience firsthand Chinese culture, which has retained some traditions and values that we’ve lost or forgotten in the West—civility, a profound respect for one’s elders and teachers, common courtesy and decorum.

Surprisingly, I actually returned to New York after a sixteen-hour flight feeling somewhat relaxed, and this sense of calm remained with me for a few days. Shanghai’s population is a staggering twenty-three million people, and New York, by contrast, is a mere eight million. Yet, in many ways, Shanghai felt calmer than New York, or many other large American cities, for that matter. Despite the tremendous activity of Shanghai, one isn’t bombarded by honking horns or aggressive pedestrians or motorists. Rather, a Confucian attitude seems to pervade daily life. The Chinese just find their place in society and work into it. Overall, it strikes me as a quieter, more serene culture, despite such a large population.

You’ve done a good deal of international touring, including in Europe. In your experience, how do the American and European organ cultures relate to one another?

Of course, I love Europe. How could one not? Its culture has given the world Dante, Rembrandt, and Wagner. And there’s an undeniable indebtedness that American organists, in particular, acknowledge toward Europe—the spectacular historic instruments and the impressive traditions and performers that have emerged over generations. However, I think we have reached a point in time when American organists need not feel subservient toward the Europeans; rather, we should view ourselves as friendly colleagues and peers. Yes, we can learn from them, but they can also learn from us.

Some American buildings in which organs are situated might be more modest in scale than the imposing, reverberant cathedrals of Europe. This could be just one reason that reflexively prompts some organists to esteem what occurs on the other side of the Atlantic more favorably. It’s true, some American churches or halls might possess a different acoustic or aesthetic character, but this doesn’t mean that the organs within them are any less valuable or effective, if they’re used properly. A Cavaillé-Coll and a Skinner can be equally magnificent, but the organist must be willing and able to play them quite differently. Today in the world, some of the finest organists—and organbuilders—are Americans. And America continues, rightly, to recognize extraordinary European talent; now, we’d appreciate a similar open-mindedness.

Teaching

Paul Jacobs remains the chair of the organ department at the Juilliard School, a position he assumed at age 26, one of the youngest faculty appointments in the school’s history. Former students of his now occupy notable positions. In academia, Isabelle Demers, noted concert organist, serves as organ professor at Baylor University; Christopher Houlihan, also an active concert organist, holds the Distinguished Chair of Chapel Music at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut; David Crean serves as professor of organ at Wright State University and is also a radio host.

Students of Jacobs also hold positions at prominent churches: in New York City, Michael Hey is associate organist at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Benjamin Sheen is associate organist at Saint Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, Ryan Jackson is director of music at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, and Raymond Nagem serves as associate organist of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine; in Orange County, California, David Ball is associate organist at Christ Cathedral (formerly Crystal Cathedral). Other Jacobs students include Greg Zelek, the recently appointed principal organist of the Madison Symphony and curator of the Overture Concert Series in Madison, Wisconsin, noted performing and recording artist Cameron Carpenter, and Chelsea Chen, a successful concert organist and composer.⁴ In addition to Juilliard, for the past six years Jacobs has also directed the Organ Institute of the Oregon Bach Festival.

In your teaching, have you noticed any changes in students over the years, either in the way they’re prepared, or outlooks?

Yes. The students with whom I work tend to be less naive, perhaps, than when I was their age. Part of this, perhaps, comes from their experience of living in New York City. And I wonder, too, if technology has had something to do with this—social media and interconnectedness, everything out in the open, no secrets kept. Many young organists are savvy, perceptive, and hard-working. But I’ve also found it necessary to stimulate discussion about the problems young organists face, some of which they themselves could help resolve. For example, it’s my belief is that there’s an unfortunate separation between the organ world and the broader world of classical music, which is something that I’ve attempted to rectify through my own work, and strongly support my students to do the same. Many of them are already making a positive impact. Another imposing hurdle organists face beyond “organ versus classical music” is the larger cultural problem (at least as I see it) of the enveloping secularization of our society, which I believe will continue to increase the already formidable challenges to the arts, and certainly to classical musicians—not only to organists whose primary employer happens to be religious institutions. This, of course, is an all-encompassing topic, one that can elicit impassioned points of view; nevertheless, it needs to be discussed openly and honestly, especially by dedicated young musicians.

Beyond the decline of traditional church music, what do you think are some of the challenges facing young organists?

I am concerned by the inward-looking attitude that some organists have adopted. There is a sense of parochialism that often suffuses the profession, and it’s time to break out of that mold. In some quarters of teaching, the primary concern is that the students learn the “correct” way to play and interpret music from a panel of “experts.” How stifling! Many young organists spend their entire careers seeking their approval, at the same time showing disregard and even disdain for other dedicated musicians who might choose to do things a bit differently. The world of organists seems, at times, to be made up of fiefdoms, each guarding its own camp. There’s often a lack of unity, which contributes to a certain amount of unnecessary infighting. All this makes it difficult to reel in new lovers for organ music.

The insularity of our profession is a problem. This needs to be said. Too many organists are stuck exclusively in the organ world. To my mind organists need to step out of the organ loft. We should regularly visit museums, attend the opera, the symphony, and chamber music concerts, befriending other musicians who are not organists. Read literature, explore architecture, painting, and philosophy. I feel the need for the organ world academy to open its churchly doors onto a broader landscape that includes all of these things.

I recall hearing my high school organ teacher, George Rau, who studied at Fontainebleau one summer with Nadia Boulanger, say that, in the past, it was almost expected for serious organists to go and study with a European master, and that would “validate” them. But this is not the case anymore. Of course, I would never discourage a student from spending time in Europe—this would be very valuable. It’s simply no longer obligatory, however, in the formation of a fine musician.

We now have our own master teachers.

Yes, and master builders. America has its own impressive, rich tradition, so there’s no reason to possess an inferiority complex, subconsciously or otherwise. We now boast of some of the most versatile organists and organbuilders in the world, pursuing different styles, doing different things, but many with the highest degree of artistic integrity.

Further thoughts

What’s next on your agenda?

I anticipate another exciting season of music-making, of course, always continuing to expand my repertoire. In addition to the recording projects previously mentioned, I anticipate offering a special series of French recitals in New York, then joining several American orchestras as well as ones in Germany and Poland. I’m also looking forward to playing the organ at Maison de la Radio in Paris and dedicating the Hazel Wright organ at the new Christ Cathedral in California, among other adventures.

Do you get any break during the summer?

Yes. There are pockets during the summer that are a bit lighter, thankfully, particularly in August—but much of this period is spent preparing repertoire for the upcoming season. At least these days are not so rigorously structured; the hours can be taken more leisurely. But I long for uninterrupted time to read, reflect, and think about life. (Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov has been on my reading list for some time!) It’s tempting, when the gerbil wheel is spinning faster and faster, to neglect one’s spiritual growth. But I believe that a true creative artist must take special care of his or her soul, which is different from a person’s physical and mental health.

How do you recharge? Do you go home to Pennsylvania?

Yes, I definitely spend some time there, and it will be refreshing to be with family, both immediate and extended, as well as old friends. I remain deeply fond of the outdoors, taking long walks in the woods, which purifies the spirit and provides time for thought, reflection, and inspiration. I don’t think it’s our job to “change the world”—whatever that means, anyway; it’s impossible, in fact. But I do believe it’s our duty to live in such a way that sets an edifying example to those whom we encounter each day, bestowing in our personal interactions an increased love for music and sensitivity to beauty in life. This we must do.

Thomas Murray, John Weaver, Lionel Party, as well as going back to my high school teachers, George Rau and Susan Woodard—they’ve each set a sterling example, not only regarding excellence in musicianship, but also in how to treat people with sincerity and empathy, never losing sight of the larger picture. Our ultimate goal shouldn’t be mere professional success. I remain exceedingly grateful to have been influenced by these generous and caring individuals, and hopefully I succeed at passing along similar wisdom to my own students.

I remember saying to John Weaver at some point, “You know, John, I’ll never be able to repay you for all that you’ve done for me.” And he said, “Well, you can’t, so don’t try. But do it for somebody else.” That’s the way to look at it. We’ll never be able to adequately repay our mentors, but they don’t care. They just hope we will pass it on.

Notes

1. In 2011 Paul Jacobs received a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra) for his recording of Messiaen’s Livre du Saint-Sacrement (Naxos), the first time that a solo recording of classical organ music has been recognized by the Recording Academy. Other awards include the Arthur W. Foote Award of the Harvard Musical Association in 2003, and an honorary Doctor of Music degree from Washington and Jefferson College, Washington, Pennsylvania, in 2017.

2. Jacobs has also collaborated with dramatic soprano Christine Brewer; touring together, they also recorded Divine Redeemer (Naxos 8.573524).

3. Jacobs’s work with new music includes premieres of works by Christopher Rouse, Samuel Adler, Mason Bates, Michael Daugherty, Wayne Oquin, Stephen Paulus, Christopher Theofanidis, and John Harbison, among others.

In October 2017, Jacobs, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Nézet-Séguin presented the East Coast premiere of Wayne Oquin’s Resilience for organ and orchestra. Commissioned by the Pacific Symphony as part of their American Music Festival, Resilience received its world premiere on February 4, 2016, at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa, California. The work is a 13-minute call and response between organ and orchestra and is dedicated to Paul Jacobs and conductor Carl St. Clair.

4. On November 22, 2014, Jacobs and his current and former students from Juilliard presented the complete organ works of J. S. Bach in an 18-hour marathon concert at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan, presented by the country’s largest classical radio station, WQXR. Many of the time slots in the six-hour event sold out.

Samuel Russell

Samuel Russell is the library and archival collections manager at Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales, Florida. He oversees the Anton Brees Carillon Library and the Chao Research Center, which houses the archives of the Bok Tower Gardens Foundation and its predecessor, The American Foundation. The Chao Research Center is also home to many artifacts related to the founder: Edward W. Bok.

This interview took place February 19, 2022, at the Blue Palmetto Café on the campus of Bok Tower Gardens, Lake Wales, Florida. Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra was studying with Geert D’hollander and playing four concerts at Bok Tower during the week of February 14–19, 2022. I conducted this interview before Pamela had a meeting with Geert. The conversation ended a little early as we heard the bells chiming in the background, which reminded us that it was time for her meeting.

I have Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra with me today. She is a carillonist in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I play mid-day recitals at the University of Michigan.

And you are also on faculty there?

Not right now. I was the visiting carillonist at the University of Michigan during the 2019–2020 academic year, when Tiffany Ng was on a fellowship leave.

How long have you been playing the carillon?

Eight years. I first started playing the piano when I was a child. Then I added the organ when I was about twelve. As an undergraduate, I majored first in piano and then organ and choral music education, and then went on to pursue a Master of Fine Arts and doctoral degrees in organ with secondary music theory, conducting, and sacred music fields.

Were you aware of the carillon during your childhood?

No, I didn’t live near a carillon in my childhood. It was only when we moved to Ann Arbor and I took the organ professor position at Eastern Michigan University that I started hearing the bells. I was so enchanted by their time keeping capabilities, but also by their role as messengers—that they could speak to the moment of any given day.

The history of letting people know if there was a special event going on, or pirates were coming, or whatever the news was.

Exactly. I had a sabbatical in Ostfriesland, Germany, to study and play historic instruments there. The oldest organ in that area was from 1457 in Rysum, and the church had a bell that was tuned to a low E, the same low E as the pitch on the organ. In his Fundamentum Organisandi (1452), Conrad Paumann composed E drones with figuration above the repeated Es. The pastor of the Rysum church at that time loved the bell. Every time I’d go to practice, she’d say to me, “Shall we play? Can we do the bell and organ piece?” For that E drone in the Paumann piece, she would keep pulling the bell to ring repeatedly in rhythm, and I’d play the Paumann figuration above it. We had so much fun playing that fifteenth-century “duet.” She called it the “Echt Rysumer Hit,” or the true hit from Rysum. A fifteenth-century piece was their town hit!

But then we had to stop because Rysum is in a rural area and the farmers were plowing their fields. They could hear the bells miles away, kilometers away, and for centuries they used the bells to signal when someone died. They would ring the bell the number of times that corresponded with the age of the newly deceased person. The farmers would stop their tractors and start counting: eighty-two, eighty-three . . ., “Oh, it must not be Berta.” Eighty-four, eighty-five . . ., “I wonder if it’s Henk.” Eighty-six . . . . While the pastor and I were playing, they’d hear the bell over and over, and they got stirred up wondering, “Who in our community died?” So that is why we had to stop.

That is fascinating. It definitely means something to that culture and how the bells were translating a message, or sharing the message of something. Did you find it an easy transition from the piano and organ to picking up playing the carillon?

Well, knowing the keyboard layout and playing with my feet translated from the organ, but as for the dimensions, it was a whole new haptic awareness, because it’s like playing on a keyboard built for a giant instead of using a five-finger technique.

I also play the harpsichord and clavichord. The clavichord taught me a lot about arm weight and getting the most beautiful tone. And even though the clavichord is the quietest keyboard instrument, I found the technique of playing it the most helpful in teaching myself how to play the carillon. When I first learned to play the clavichord, I would just sit at the keyboard for hours and think, how do I get the best sound?

Okay, that note bloomed a little, but could it bloom more? And that note sounded choked. Why?

It’s important to ask these questions. I’m an improviser, which helps to let my ears guide first. I find that I can bring out the soul of the instrument better if I initially improvise on it rather than reading music because then my eyes can take over.

That is a very interesting word choice: can you go more into it? Finding the soul of the instrument.

I discovered this when playing historic organs and then harpsichords and clavichords. Each instrument is different, just as each carillon is different. There are some schools of thought where people impose a technique, usually the same technique, on every instrument they play. Even if they’re Steinway artists, Steinways differ from one piano to the next. I find that the finest, the most sensitive and expressive musicians seek to pull out the sound that the instrument most wants to make. So you pay attention to where the most resonance can be found. Is it in the bass or tenor? Is it in the treble? And what does that tell me about what repertoire I choose? Or about what kind of weight I’m distributing here or there? And what parts must be softer so that the melody comes out? What effects communicate well?

When you’re playing and listening to the instrument in real time, how do you become one with the instrument as you’re playing it so that there is that intimate connection?

It is again improvisation. If I am struggling with a passage or hearing something that doesn’t sound optimal to me, then I’ll take that passage and I’ll create an improvisation that is similar to it to figure out. When I take my eyes out of the equation, it opens up the ears. The instrument will speak. It will, it will . . .

Tell you what it wants to play?

It really does, by the quality of the sound. How much color comes, how much bloom? Does it sound forced? Does it sound weak?

What are your favorite types of things to play on the carillon?

I love Geert D’hollander’s music and how he plays the carillon so sensitively. I’m also strongly committed to presenting works from underrepresented composers and cultures and to broaden our repertoire and audience to be diverse and inclusive.

Let’s talk about both of those aspects. First, are you referring to Geert’s original compositions?

His original compositions. He is such a fabulous composer, and each piece is different. His works never sound like cookie-cutter replicas of each other. There is always something fresh in them and yet something historically grounded where you can tell how much music he’s listened to and how much he has studied. Every time I see he has published something else I want to get it and play it because it is just magnificent. And having the opportunity to coach with him here at Bok Tower is just such a dream. It is thanks to the Emerging Artists grant I received from the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America (GCNA) to come here.

The Emerging Artists grant is new and for people who have passed the carillonneur exam in the past three years. It is a wonderful opportunity. It is not like you’re done studying when you pass the GCNA certification exam. I consider that a new beginning, and I think it is really brilliant of the GCNA to offer the award to encourage people to go deeper and to get to the next level of expressive playing or understanding repertoire.

And because I am a composer and Geert is a composer we are talking about compositional techniques, too. I’m sharing my compositions with him, and he is giving me some great feedback on it, saying, “This is lovely, but this—maybe it’s in G minor too long,” or that kind of thing. And then I’ll say to him, “That is exactly what I was thinking. Let’s talk about that.” Then he shows me some of his new compositions that haven’t been published yet, and we talk about them.

I wrote two books on Bach and the Art of Improvisation. Geert improvises, too. So today we are going to have a session about carillon improvisation in the style of Bach, because he recently was commissioned to take some of Bach’s cello or gamba suites, unaccompanied, and arrange them for carillon, but with a twist. He is giving a kind of modern commentary on them, but you can still hear Bach in them. I create improvisation blueprints from Bach preludes and use the same unaccompanied gamba suites for the organ and the harpsichord, and I have written about this in my books. So today we are going to take my books and then the music of Matthias Vanden Gheyn, the well-known Baroque carillon composer whose three-hundredth anniversary we celebrated last year, and we are going to talk about how this might come full circle so that we can develop an improvisational method for the carillon. A carillon student, Carson Landry, will join us.

This opportunity is hugely stimulating. What a beautiful setting to be here in the Bok Tower Gardens and have access to the carillon all day long—into the evening. That is very rare. Most towers have very limited playing time, but here, the playing time is not restricted, and Geert is accessible, kind, and generous with his time, and we are having a blast.

I’d like to delve into your history as a composer and learn more about your style.

Because I’ve studied and performed a lot of early music, I’ve composed in a Baroque or even earlier Renaissance style as well for some of my organ works. But then I started getting commissions for organ. One of the commissions was from a brilliant young organist, Wyatt Smith, who wanted six pieces for a liturgical cycle entitled Liturgy LIVE! He wanted each piece to have a world influence. I started digging into ethnomusicology and finding music from all over the world and figuring out what aspects I could combine. Wyatt also wanted German chorales from the seasons to be featured with that world music. It was an interesting pairing.

Can you tell me more about what that means?

My daughter is from Ethiopia, so I took some Ethiopian rhythms and combined them with a chorale, for instance. I paired a Yoruban lament from Nigeria with the Advent chorale Nun komm, der heiden Heiland. I featured a French Romantic toccata with the Pentecost chorale Komm, heiliger Geist. Each piece had a different character and musical features from around the globe.

What else inspires you in your writing?

When I came to the carillon, I became acutely aware that this is a public instrument. In Ann Arbor we have students from around the world. So, I’d come out of the tower and hear all sorts of world languages and see people from around the world and then I would think, I’ve just played all this music by dead European men. Right? That is not the demographic here. Even though there are some people from European descent, that doesn’t represent everyone—it excludes a lot of people.

How does this public instrument connect with people from around the world? And imagine how much wonderful music the carillon has been missing when so many cultures haven’t been represented! Then I started thinking that my compositional direction must be to lift up the voices that have been missing from classical keyboard music. I interviewed people from the African American, Muslim, and Arab communities, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and then several people from the Latin community. I asked them about their experience with prejudice. They were incredibly generous in telling their stories. They said they were really glad that somebody finally asked. They wanted to talk and then they gave me permission to write pieces about their stories. It was cathartic for them in that they felt silenced when they were experiencing discrimination, but through this music, they had a voice. And now there was a way to claim agency in a situation where they’d had no agency.

You’re taking feelings from what people tell you and then putting that into the feeling of the music.

The feelings are there definitely, and that’s extremely important to me to get into the right affect for the piece, and the character and style of music. But I’m actually telling a story as well. So the piece I’ll play at Bok Tower today, Earth Blood Reprise, is about a woman, Jackie Doneghy, who grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, and studied with top piano professors when she was in middle school and high school. When she auditioned for a conservatory (not Oberlin), she was heckled because the head of the department didn’t want to allow an African American person into the conservatory. As a result, she dropped the piano and never came back. Her story is implanted into Earth Blood Reprise. I include quotes from Lift Every Voice and Sing, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and spirituals.

How do you take the story and then put it into music notation?

I’ve also been getting into storytelling with journalists. I collaborate with international journalists from the Knight-Wallace fellowship program at the University of Michigan. I compose music on stories that they have not been able to report on. The stories are under-reported and some of the journalists have been censored. These journalists and filmmakers and I founded Collaborative Investigative Composing (CIC) to tell these stories via music and document them in music scores and film.

The process is a little different for each CIC, depending on how much the storyteller wants to get involved in the music notation. I’ve worked with Jet Schouten, a Dutch journalist who took twenty years of piano lessons. Jet wanted to play the notes on the carillon that she wanted in a CIC composition, while I notated the music. Venezuelan journalist Marielba Núñez played themes and effects on the carillon while she verbally told me the stories of Venezuelans who are fleeing the authoritarian government and humanitarian crisis. I took Marielba’s themes and developed them more to fit with her stories. At that point, I play what I notated and ask the storytellers whether the music tells their story effectively or whether something is missing.

Marielba is also a poet, and she has a keen ear for form, structure, and balance. She’s not a musician, but she could describe in literary terms the changes she suggested.

When Jackie gave up the piano due to the audition trauma she endured, she became a singer instead. She asked for some spirituals to be included along with Lift Every Voice and Sing, and then I added the Moonlight Sonata, because that is one of the pieces she played on the piano. Including the Beethoven was a way for Jackie to reclaim it in her own voice, not in the disparaging voice. So there are layers there. A general audience may not know the story there unless there are program notes or if a performer has a chance to talk with them. This means, of course, it is also really important that the music can stand alone, which it absolutely does.

People will ask me questions about it afterwards, and they’ll say, “That is such an intriguing piece. Tell me about it.” And then we have a chance to talk about it after the concert.

As an example, on Saturday (February 19, 2022) at Bok Tower, I performed Earth Blood Reprise along with some pieces from The Music of March: A Civil Rights Carillon Collection edited by Tiffany Ng, some spirituals, including Go Down, Moses and Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child, which I arranged in Global Rings, and Joey Brink’s arrangement of Lift Every Voice and Sing. After the concert, an African American man approached me and he said, “Thank you for including music for us. I like the sound of the bells, but I never thought I’d hear something that directly speaks to our experience. It makes such a difference.” He then told me that as he walked around the gardens listening, he met several other African Americans, and each one of them would smile and nod, or wink, or show a thumbs up that indicated that they, too, felt included by the carillon that day. He asked about Earth Blood Reprise and wanted to hear more of the story. At the same time, he said that the piece spoke to him before knowing the story. Hearing the story served to deepen his experience.

How it is different composing for the carillon in comparison to the piano, the organ, or even the harpsichord. What is unique about the carillon specifically?

Fewer notes can be played at once on the carillon compared to other keyboard instruments. I think of composing for the carillon often as a Schenkerian reduction that happens before the bigger or more expanded piece is actually written. Writing for the carillon must be sparse. I think about the strong minor third partials and not having dense chords especially in the tenor-bass range because then the resonances cancel each other out as they vibrate for so long. If there are two voices close together in thirds, for instance, they really need to be in the treble. But those are technical details.

I mentioned my work with journalist Marielba Núñez to tell stories via music about the humanitarian crisis due to an authoritarian government in Venezuela. Journalist Eileen Truax and filmmaker Diego Sedano reported on the untenable conditions people fled from in Mexico and the issues they face due to unjust U.S. immigration policies. I’m starting to write an oratorio based on those stories. A former TV news anchor and filmmaker from Belarus joined in a CIC piece that demonstrates how an authoritarian head of state forces the media to tell lies to the people. One journalist, Tracie Mauriello, reported on school shootings in the U.S.: gun violence. Another journalist, Ana Avila, reports on misogyny and gender violence in Mexico. Dutch journalist Jet Schouten and I collaborated in a pandemic response, Healing Bells, which was premiered simultaneously by carillonists in fourteen countries. Healing Bells contains an arrangement of Plyve Kacha, a Ukrainian lament.

I return to your question about how we collaborate. When I meet with a journalist in person, I can take them to a carillon, just as happened with Marielba and Jet Schouten. Then I actually ask them to play the feeling of their story on the carillon while they’re telling the story to me a second time around. First, we just sit like this across a table and talk. And then, the second time, even if they haven’t had music lessons before and I might say, play just the black keys and then everything you play will sound good. I get them started with pentatonic modes, so that they can stay focused on the affect of the story. Inevitably they come up with a really interesting theme. And then I build on their theme and use that as a unifying theme throughout their piece.

You say it is people who don’t know music. But everyone kind of intuits that these are the low keys and these are the high keys. For the carillon it’s playing with your fists. You strike the keys, and you might depict your frustration by playing on low keys or reflect your high points on the high keys, and then you might play in the middle of the keyboard. It is an interesting way to get them to express their internal story in an alternative way.

It is so important to the journalists to be able to tell these stories first of all, and with censorship for some of them, these are stories they haven’t been able to tell. And secondly, they feel really strongly that it is important—as an archivist, you’ll appreciate this—to preserve these stories. Otherwise, those stories are erased. They have been erased now in the present, but if they’re also erased in the future then these atrocities from authoritarian governments resulting in humanitarian crises will never come to light.

You said you work with the Knight-Wallace Fellows, and they’re at the University of Michigan?

Yes.

Is that relationship between the two entities—the carillon and the Knight-Wallace Fellows—something formally recognized by the university?

Lynette Clemetson, the director of the Wallace House, approaches me from year to year to ask whether I would present for the fellows. University of Michigan Carillon Professor Tiffany Ng has fully supported this, which has greatly helped to facilitate our CIC initiatives. From carillon presentations, the fellows themselves find out about our CIC way of telling stories. Then they are free to just approach me and say, “I’d love to do something. Can you collaborate?” It starts out rather informally and grows from there.

We at CIC are applying for grants. We really need some funding to create some short and full-length documentaries about our work so that these stories get preserved in music scores and film to reach wider audiences. We’d like to tour to a number of sites to integrate with communities who connect personally with the stories and places where no one knows about these stories and then to culminate with CIC performances. I usually compose a CIC first for carillon. Now, I’m developing CIC works for organ, chamber ensembles, orchestra, choir, soloists, etc. Our CIC team feels passionate about what we’re doing because it meets a need. It is cross-disciplinary, collaborative, and is dealing with a lot of social-justice issues. We’re going to find a way to continue.

To continue telling the stories that people need to share.

Yes, exactly.

Thank you for your time and for sharing what you’ve learned and your methodologies with me. I appreciate it.

Thanks so much for your invitation, Sam, it is really kind.

Bok Tower Gardens library website: boktowergardens.org/library/

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra’s website: pamelaruiterfeenstra.com

Gavin Black

A word

Over the last year or so I have attended more cultural and artistic events than I have in several years. I have had periods of doing more of this sort of thing than I had on average before the pandemic: catching up on theater, dance, music, art galleries, one figure skating exhibition, poetry readings, lectures, movies, etc. This has been extraordinarily satisfying, life-affirming, and a good antidote to a certain claustrophobia that had rather naturally set in before. I have noticed that as it seemed to become safe to go out and experience public life in these ways, I pursued doing so almost frantically. I get maybe 100 emails per day informing me about some sort of concert or play, and for quite a while I reacted to each such email by thinking “Yes, I have to do this!!” Recently I have noticed that this exaggerated fervor has simmered down to something more normal.

Upon attending theater, concerts, and such, I noticed that I was beginning to think about performance—not so much the phenomenon as the word itself. It felt like I was saying to myself things such as: “How nice to be attending a performance again;” “I haven’t been to a performance in a long time;” “I had never gone this long without experiencing a performance.” The word began to sound weird to me, the way a word does once in a while if you hear it enough. Yet, it also sounded interesting. I began to seek out instances of the words “performance,” “performer,” and “perform.” And though it was not the point initially, I became interested in the connections between that word and our relationship to it as musicians. In particular, I wonder what holding that word up to the light a bit might say about the perennial problem that we all face: that performance is hard, nerve wracking, and productive of anxiety. Certainly most of what is so difficult about performing music is intrinsic to the activity, not something that is created by the word itself. However, the word may shape expectations of feeling to some extent.

By chance these musings about the word “performance” tie in with something that I had planned to write about anyways, and that will form the subject of the next column.

Performance

So what about that word “performance?” Below is a potpourri of some of the ideas, observations, and questions that have been going through my head.

Performance is used in the arts (or the “performing arts”) to refer to a situation in which someone provides a public exhibition of their art. What are the performing arts? Is it interesting to suggest that they are arts that involve movement through time? That is, movement through time when they are being taken in by a patron, customer, or audience member. Everything exists in time, so a painting or sculpture exists in time. When someone looks at it and focuses on or appreciates it, that takes time. But the art is not using time.

There are some moving sculptures. If that is not “performance,” why not? Presumably because the sculpture has no consciousness or volition, and the person who made the sculpture is not the one doing the moving. So if something is a “performance,” someone has to be doing the performance in real time, though not necessarily at the same time that the audience is experiencing it. Acting in a movie or television show is just as much “performance” as acting in the theater.

We certainly would say that an orchestra gives “a performance.” But would we say that of an individual orchestra member? “I love (or hated) his performance of the oboe solo in such-and-such a symphony.” “She gave a great (or terrible) performance of the opening horn solo in Schubert’s Ninth.” Probably not. We would say, “I liked (hated) the way she or he played that passage.”

What about conductors? We might say, “That conductor gave a great performance of that symphony last night.”

What about in church? Would we say that someone gave a performance of a certain piece as prelude or offertory? Maybe, though I think that in reality we would be more likely to use a phraseology involving “playing” rather than “performing.” “That prelude that you played today was a favorite of mine.” How about with hymns? I would be astonished if anyone said, “I loved her performance of Hymn #284,” rather than “I loved how she played. . . .” If I am right about that, what does that tell us? When you accompany a hymn in church you are, first of all (like a member of an orchestra), not creating the whole of the musical, artistic entity. You are also doing something that is only partially directed at the listeners/audience, or in this case the congregation, whom we have stipulated as part of the “performance” situation—that is, only partly directed at them as listeners. You are helping them to sing, and in turn their singing is probably not what we would call a “performance;” the singing is essentially for the benefit of the people engaged in doing it.

So performance is presumably directed outward. Usually? Always?

Occasionally at one of these performances I have been so avidly attending, I find myself chatting afterwards with an actor or dancer. This is usually in a small group in the lobby or out on the street in front of the venue. Occasionally, I will say, “I am also a performer,” or something to that effect. What I find fascinating is that I always feel that in saying this I am being a bit presumptuous or even a bit of a fraud. Yet, I am a performer. So what’s up? I think that part of it is that we tend to put “performers” on pedestals; we do not think of them as being “regular” people, and I happen to know first-hand that I am a “regular” person! So at some visceral level I feel as though I am misrepresenting myself or perhaps impolitely trying to cut down the real performer to whom I am talking. There is also more neutrally just the feeling that using the concept of “performer” to equate two very different things is somewhat inaccurate and reductionistic.

The difference between the two things may come down to an actor plays a part pretending to be someone else, whereas performance of music does not. Is that really true? Is it a hard and fast difference? This is the thread that I will pick up next month.

The word performance is also used with respect to athletics. “That was a great pitching performance.” “He underperformed his career average.” In athletics the word almost always means what you achieve in relation to defined standards. If I say that a golfer’s performance in the final round of a tournament was amazing, I do not mean anything other than that they shot a great score and perhaps executed some shots along the way that were really difficult. That may not be a comprehensive way of putting it, but it is all about the concrete, measurable carrying out of defined tasks. I might very well appreciate the elegance of a golfer’s swing or something about their demeanor—maybe a particular look of concentration, but in this context that is not part of their “performance” on the golf course. 

This is one of the reasons that we think that we can compare how “great” different athletes are. It is not just that statistical descriptions exist of what each athlete did in their sport. (Sometimes that information is lacking, which makes the evaluation impossible as a practical matter, but does not change the concept.) It is that “performance” is defined as being those objective results. 

Picture this: you have been sitting around the living room visiting with some friends. All of a sudden one person stands up, starts to express displeasure with everyone else in the room, increasingly loudly and insistently, and walks out shouting, “I’m finished with the lot of you!” Let us say that this was unprovoked. Someone in the room might then look at the others and say, “Well, that was quite a performance!” If the person who left the room had instead just visited peacefully and eventually said a pleasant “Good night,” no one would have characterized that as a “performance.”  

When someone acts as the officiant at a wedding, their words, gestures, and signature make the marriage official. We might say that they have “performed” a wedding ceremony. However, we would probably not refer to that phenomenon as “a performance.” When shaking the hand of a member of the clergy or judge or ship’s captain, we might say, “I loved the way you spoke at the wedding” or “I loved the way you conducted the wedding.” Maybe, “I loved the way you performed the ceremony just now.” But certainly not “I loved your performance earlier this afternoon.” What does this tell us, and what does this mean? 

Performance vs. performance art

What about “performance art?” It resists definition, as the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the subject illustrates. That interesting article opens with statements such as, “Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants,” and “Its goal is to generate a reaction,” which do not really distinguish it from other art. That leads back to the question: why use the word “performance” as the defining title of an art form or art movement that is not any more about “performance” than any theater piece or piano recital? It seems an abstraction of the concept of performance, perhaps an assertion that the act of performance as such has a life and a meaning independent of the forms through which it has traditionally been channeled. Can that concept of performance as an independent entity then be turned back on our awareness of what performance is in any form?

There is a whole other set of uses to which the word “performance” is put. One that is found disproportionately in ads and commercials is a use like “performance motor oil,” “get the best performance from your stove,” or “high performance grass seed.” This is another abstraction or maybe just a more fundamental use of the word. It means something like, “How you do something (anything).” It is interesting that in this context the word “performance” implies “really good performance.” I suspect that this is fairly new, as is a similar way of using the word “quality.” This usage is related to the “performance” of a stock or mutual fund. Two characteristics of this sort of usage are that it has an unambiguous good-to-bad axis—no one would disagree about what’s good and what’s bad—and that it refers to inanimate entities. The things doing the performing have no consciousness or awareness.  

The second of these is clearly a departure from the way “performance” is used in the arts. The first is more intriguing. I wonder whether this is connected with our heightened feelings of expectation and nervousness when what we are doing at a given moment is a “performance” rather than just playing through a piece or reciting a poem out loud because we like the sound of it. There are many reasons to find performance difficult, reasons that are grounded in the content of what we are doing. But I wonder about the linguistic: “performance” is supposed to be good, can always be better, can be measured, and can be used to create rankings.

As an anecdote about my own recent experience, I have done very little performing since the pandemic began—just two short harpsichord recitals, a year or so ago. I feel confident that I will progressively get back to performing, but it still all feels rather abstract. On the other hand, I have been doing a lot of playing at home and in my studio, playing through things, sort of practicing, but usually not in a goal-directed way. My own ears are telling me that, for my own taste and in relation to what I want to try to make happen when I play, I am playing categorically more effectively than I ever have before. I suspect that what I am hearing in my playing is related to the sense of being free from the demands of performance. And if true, this is in large part due to the substantive anxieties and pressures of performance. But I suspect that the language plays a part. If we are contemplating a “performance,” we are at risk for thinking that we have to behave like “performance motor oil”; if we are just playing, we can just play.

An upcoming workshop

I will be offering a one-day workshop on J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue on Saturday, April 1. The event, presented by Princeton Early Keyboard Center, will run from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. in the chapel at Princeton Theological Seminary, 64 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey. The workshop is free, and no advance registration is required. However, if you let me know in advance that you are coming, I will be able to keep you informed of any changes of plan, and I will also invite you to tell me about any specifics of what you would like to get out of the day. It has always been important for me to keep the exact content of workshops flexible so that we can end the experience having addressed the needs of each person who has attended. This event is open to anyone: keyboard players, other musicians, other artists, any person with any interest in The Art of the Fugue, from any background. I hope to be able to offer a valuable experience to people who already know the work very well as well as to those who know nothing about it but are interested. 

I will have at least one harpsichord at the event, and we will also be able to use the Paul Fritts organ in the chapel. I will not be giving a performance of The Art of the Fugue, but I will be playing substantial amounts of the piece. There should be opportunities for workshop attendees who wish to play a bit on various instruments.

There is information about the workshop on the PEKC website (pekc.org) and on my own website (gavinblack-baroque.com), and both of these will be kept up to date with any changes. There will likely still be some sort of Covid protocols in effect for visitors to the seminary at that time. This information will be found at both websites.

Please feel free to come, and also to let anyone know who you think might be interested. I hope to see you there!

Lorraine S. Brugh

Lorraine Brugh is currently resident director of Valparaiso University’s Study Centre in Cambridge, England. She is professor of music and the Frederick J. Kruse Organ Fellow at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana.

The interview took place January 31, 2018, in Girton, Cambridge, and preceded a luncheon Mr. Rutter attended, given by Lady Rachel Willcocks, the widow of Sir David Willcocks, at her home in Cambridge. Mr. Rutter also had a publishing deadline that day and had already been at work several hours when he arrived at 10:30 a.m. Mr. Rutter began the interview by explaining the luncheon he would later attend.

John Rutter: This is one of the things that Rachel Willcocks does, bless her heart, since Sir David’s death three years ago. She’s really been born again, as she was his principal caretaker. Did you ever meet him?

Lorraine Brugh: No, I never did.

JR: Oh, what a shame! Many Americans did, as you know, as he loved his trips to America working at summer schools, colleges, universities, and churches. He made quite an impression over the years. It was inspiring that he was active in music until his ninetieth year.

He died peacefully in his sleep and was greatly celebrated by his college, by his many former students, protégés, and admirers. After that she started a new life. She would now be 91 or 92. She is an active member of her garden club, her book club, and is out there. Every so often she hosts luncheons for various of her old friends.

She brings together people who perhaps don’t all know each other, but they all know her. My wife Joanne and I were invited but she can’t do it. She’s ringing a quarter peal. She’s a bell ringer, a change ringer. They’re counting on her; it’s been booked for a while, but I will be meeting Rachel. We do that every few months.

LB: There will be others who join you?

JR: There will. But who they’ll be I’ll find out when I get there. It’s usually about four or five others. It’s nice that she’s still having an active social life. Her daughter, Sarah, who lives in London, comes up to assist her. That’s what’s on the agenda for lunch. She is a dear lady, and, of course, I owe a huge debt to David Willcocks.

LB: That’s actually my first question. I know he gave you the opportunity to edit 100 Carols for Choirs together.

JR: That came later, of course. Our first collaboration was on Carols for Choirs 2, the orange book, that volume 2 of the series that throughout the English-speaking world became pretty standard.

That all came about because I had decided I wanted to study music at Cambridge while I was still in high school. I applied, not to King’s College, where David was a renowned choir director and a member of the university music faculty. I thought at King’s I might just get swallowed up, because it is a college with such a strong musical reputation.

What I did, which I never regretted, is I applied at Clare College, which is their next-door neighbor right along the banks of the Cam. Of course, that didn’t prevent me from going to choral Evensong at King’s College, which I did, and at St. John’s.

Back in those days, the two choirs that counted were King’s and St. John’s, the two that have boy sopranos. That all changed later when the first men’s colleges became mixed, but that’s ahead in the story.

I really met and got to know David Willcocks in my second year as an undergraduate when he took what they used to rather quaintly call “Harmony and Counterpoint” class, all rather academic and old-fashioned in its way. I was one of a class of seven or eight that he took every week. At the end of one of these classes, he took me aside and said, “Mr. Rutter, I understand that you’ve been composing. I hear that you have written some Christmas carols.” I thought “Oh my goodness, me, I’m in trouble.”

He was known really as Mr. Christmas. He transformed our musical celebration of Christmas with the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols as he ran it at King’s College, with his own wonderful descants of some of the standard Christmas hymns, and his radiant arrangements of some of the traditional carols. He was very strongly associated with the celebration of Christmas in peoples’ minds.

I think he might have been a bit annoyed that here was this young upstart who was also presuming to write and arrange Christmas carols himself. That was the exact opposite. What he actually wanted to do was to see what I was up to, and to give me encouragement, which was incredibly generous of him. What he said was, “Look, would you bring a selection of your compositions to my rooms at King’s College at 9 o’clock on Monday morning, and I’d like to look through them?”

So, very nervously, with a sheaf of music under my arm, I went to his elegant rooms at the top of the Gibbs building in King’s College, and without a word he looked through the pile, and at the end of it, said, “Would you be interested in these being published?” Now that’s an offer you don’t refuse when you are a young student.

LB: So, there was more than The Shepherd’s Pipe Carol in there?

JR: Yes, there was. There was my very first Christmas carol, The Nativity Carol, and various arrangements of traditional carols of one sort and another. The next thing I knew he took the manuscripts down to Oxford University Press where he was for many years the editorial advisor for their choral music. Their sacred choral music was really chosen by David Willcocks. It was quite an honor that he was taking my work down to discuss it with the senior editor there.

That was the pattern of his Mondays. He spent the morning doing correspondence and administration at King’s, then he would take the train down to London to spend the afternoon at the editorial offices of Oxford University Press. Then in the evening he would take his weekly rehearsal of the Bach Choir, which was his London choir, a large amateur chorus over 200 voices that was and is of great renown.

Amazingly, I received an offer of publication in the mail the next Wednesday, which was pretty fast work really. Later they refused to believe it at Oxford University Press (OUP) because they say they never move that quickly. We have the dates to prove it, so they actually did.

More than that they said, “Would you be interested in an annual retainer?” which gave them first refusal of anything I might write. The sum was £25 per year, which, even then, would not fry many eggs. It was a gesture. From that day to this, OUP has been my main publisher. So it is thanks to David Willcocks that I made the massive leap from being an aspiring composer to a published composer. That mattered a lot more then than it does now.

Now with website, internet, and sound bites, composers have lots more ways of reaching their audience than they had then. Music notation software allows one to put music on paper so it looks like a printed copy. That also wasn’t possible then. We still worked like medieval monks with pen and ink. Of course, the whole revolution didn’t come until really twenty-five years after that. So I was very fortunate to have a publisher working on my behalf. That’s the story of how my work as a composer began, and how it started to spread worldwide through OUP.

David Willcocks, really having put my leg on the first rung of the ladder, then continued to encourage and support me through the rest of his life. This is mirrored in similar generosity to quite a lot of others who passed through his hands, or came to his notice in one way or another: performers, conductors, other composers, organists, singers. There were many who would say that one of the great influences, mentors, and supporters they had was David Willcocks. He was a great man.

LB: Did he consciously see it as his role to nurture and generate new generations of students and other young musicians?

JR: Yes, I’m sure that he did. He saw his role as a leader, an exemplar. King’s College Cambridge was a role model for choirs around the world. They set standards, higher than had been general in the years before that, which everyone was expected to match if they could, or aspire to.

It wasn’t so much for himself as it was what he wanted to do for his college, for its choir, and for musicians the world over. That’s really what I mean by generosity: his gifts were always put to the service of others. You can’t really say anything better of someone than that.

LB: Your work does a lot of the same thing. (Next I showed him the December 2017 issue of The Diapason. The issue contained the article on Francis Jackson’s centenary.) Do you know the journal?

JR: Yes, I do, although I think when I last saw it wasn’t in such lovely full color. It was a little more austere-looking.

There’s Francis Jackson! He continues to play at a small local church. His dean at York Minster, Viv Faull (the Very Reverend Vivienne Faull, current dean of York Minster), was at one time chaplain of Clare College, and so I remember her from those years. Jackson was very loyal to York Minster. Interestingly, he and David Willcocks were often mistaken for each other because they looked rather alike. Sometimes they were congratulated for the other’s work.

LB: I imagine they were pretty gracious about that.

JR: I think they were.

(I mention my interview with Stephen Cleobury for The Diapason, June 2018, pages 20–23.)

JR: Stephen’s reign at King’s has been even longer than David Willcocks’s. David was the organist/director of music at King’s for seventeen years, I believe. He took office late in 1957 when Boris Ord, his predecessor, became ill and needed help. He had something like a motor-neuron disease. It was a degenerative condition, and first his foot began to slip off the pedal notes. David, who had been organ scholar at King’s, was summoned to assist. When it was clear Ord wasn’t going to recover, Willcocks was given the title director of music and Ord had an emeritus role. David continued until 1974 when he went to the Royal College of Music. Philip Ledger followed for a period of seven years and did a fine job. Stephen Cleobury took over in 1982 and will retire in 2019.

We have had two long reigns with a shorter one in the middle. Now his retirement has been announced, and the advertisement has been placed for the job, which will generate hot competition. A lot of interest will attach to it, and many will apply, I imagine.1

LB: What kind of direction do you believe King’s will go, or would you like to see the direction be?

JR: What has changed is that King’s is no longer in the field by themselves. When David Willcocks took over in 1957 there were only two choirs that the world had heard of in the city of Cambridge. King’s was one of them, St. John’s was the other. They were twin peaks; I would never hold up one over the other. King’s has possibly enjoyed the greater renown because it is traditionally broadcast from the BBC at Christmas time that has gone around the world.

St. John’s does not sing during the immediate period around Christmas, so King’s has slightly had the edge. What a new director now has to accept is that King’s is not alone. There are other peaks in the Cambridge choral world. This is a city of choirs.

Once the men’s colleges began to admit women, and, in the case of Girton, the women’s college began to admit men, the choirs became mixed, made up of very gifted and eager undergraduates who wanted to sing at a high level, and have had the example of King’s and St. John’s to inspire them.

Of course, those mixed choirs are more in line with what is happening in the real world, as men and boys choirs are often becoming difficult to recruit. Adult mixed choirs are becoming pretty standard. My own choir, Clare College, Trinity College Choir, Gonville and Caius, Christ College, Jesus College (they actually have two choirs, as they have both a boys and a girls choir), St. Catherine’s, a lot of choirs are vying for excellence.

What has to continue to happen at Kings, as has already begun successfully, is to accommodate to the thought that they don’t have the field to themselves, and they must remain distinctive. For the foreseeable future I think they will retain a boy’s and men’s choir. They do have a mixed choir that sings on Mondays. They need to maintain their tradition.

They have spread themselves quite widely in the scope of their activities, and that will have to continue. They now have their own record label and webcasts that bring their work day by day to a wide audience.

They give a lot more concerts, recitals, and do a lot more tours than they used to. Whoever runs it will have to have a clear sense of the identity of the choir and its tradition, while being able to successfully swim in a much more crowded pool. In some ways it’s a harder job than it was back in the days of David Willcocks at King’s and George Guest at St. John’s, because it was kind of lonesome up there, and now it isn’t.

When they look back and write the history of what’s happening in choral music in Britain, it will be seen that there was something of a golden age at Oxford and Cambridge, and other universities, where many have seen the value of the fine choir tradition and want to copy it. So Royal Holloway College, London University, and King’s College, London, all now have fine choirs.

One thing about a choir is that it’s useful for drawing attention to the college, because the students tapping away at their laptops doing their degree work isn’t very newsworthy. On the other hand, a choir that gives a recital and wows the audience spreads the awareness of the college, helps with recruitment. There’s no question of that. That’s something that’s been understood for a long time in the United States, where, for example, the St. Olaf Choir has always had a big annual tour. This is something we’re rapidly getting used to here in the UK.

Cambridge has always been an international university, and now it has to compete on a global stage with others. There are Asian students who are so committed and dedicated and they have a choice. They could go to a university in this country or they could go to an American university or Australian one, or wherever they feel there is a center of excellence in their chosen field. Choirs will continue to have an important role in waving the flag for their colleges and universities. That will continue to be an important part of what King’s College does.

LB: Some colleges struggle to get enough resources in the budget to be able to tour.

JR: In the end you may find that you attract more funding than you spend. It’s necessary to spend money in order to recoup the costs. The great thing about a choir is that it is transportable. You can’t send the Clare College cricket team on a United States tour. What would they do when they get there? Whom would they play?

That’s something the new director of King’s College will have to be aware of. You always have to fight your corner in a college that isn’t just about music. There are people who are highly expert in many fields of academic endeavor and question music’s place in the academy.

We have to persuade others over and over again that music is important, and why liturgical music that forms part of the music in the chapel is important. This is not so hard to explain to atheists, but it is to people from a different religious tradition. What’s the point of all this elaborate worship in a university setting?

I heard a senior tutor say, “We’re a degree factory.” The response to that is to ask why we should be the same as every other university. If the college or university has a unique tradition, if the choir is built into the fabric and statutes of the institution that go back centuries, then we should be cherishing and nurturing that.

That’s a point, oddly, that is better understood in the United States than here. I’ve talked to people who are attracting tourists to this country and some British planners have said, “We’re not a museum. We’re a vibrant country that’s doing all sorts of new things, pushing back new frontiers in science and technology.” An American in the meeting said, “What people want is your history.” In a sense it is part of what we should be nurturing.

The atom was split here in Cambridge, new bits of the universe have been discovered. Yet, when we have something rather special and lovely that goes back for centuries, we shouldn’t apologize for what went on, we should celebrate it.

LB: For American choral music, the British choral music tradition is still of great interest and curiosity. Are there other mentors than David Willcocks who influenced you?

JR: I have to go back further than my university days. I was fortunate to attend a boys school where music was a very important part of the curriculum. It was in north London, Highgate School, which had a Christian foundation, dating from 1565. It has a plain red brick chapel up Highgate Hill. At the highest point in London, there it is.

That is where I spent my early years under the really inspirational guidance of Edward Chapman. He had been an organ scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in the 1920s, and was a student of Charles Wood. If you’ve ever sung “Ding Dong Merrily on High,” the chances are you’ve probably sung his harmonization. He was a choral and liturgical musician. He was director of music here at Gonville and Caius College. He was a conservative craftsman of great skill who was rather strict and stern with his students, of whom Edward Chapman was one.

I am the grandson of Charles Wood through music because a lot of his ideas and teachings were passed down to me through Chapman. Oddly, of course, Wood wrote and arranged Christmas carols and compiled collections of them, and I’ve done the same. I can’t explain that connection really. The great thing was that I was encouraged to think that composition was normal, which for a teenage boy is quite unusual. In our school it was OK to write music. We were encouraged to write music for our school orchestra or other instrumental ensembles or the chapel choir occasionally.

One of my slightly older classmates was John Tavener, later Sir John Tavener. He was clearly destined for fame and fortune. We still miss him. He died in 2013, just short of his seventieth birthday, which was very sad.

LB: Did he die rather suddenly? Didn’t he compose until the end?

JR: He had an unusual condition called Marfan syndrome, a congenital malfunction of the body’s connective tissues. Marfan’s people generally grow rather tall and can be double-jointed, which can help if you are a keyboard player, I suppose. Indeed John was a fine pianist and organist. It tends to go with a general malformation of the heart and requires heart surgery, which now has an established technique and outcome. At the time when John and his brother, who also had the disease, had the operation the surgery was pioneering. It did give them thirty years of life they wouldn’t have had. Nevertheless, his health was always precarious.

I remember him mostly as a high school friend. We would show each other our newly written compositions, and I was recruited, among his other colleagues and friends, to take part in whatever was his latest compositional epic. I generally worked on a smaller scale than he did and was rather in awe of him.

There were other musicians there among my contemporaries. I remember in a very different field young David Cullen, who became Andrew Lloyd Webber’s orchestrator and assistant, who worked in the shadows, but whose skill and musicianship were relied on by this renowned musical theater composer. He was at Highgate at the same time, as well as Howard Shelley, the pianist, who has had a fine international career.

There was a whole bunch of us who knew that music was important in our lives. I was not the most obvious among them, really, because I had no outstanding performing talent. I’m afraid your readers wouldn’t enjoy my organ playing.

LB: So I shouldn’t ask about it?

No, well, it ceased at age 18. I felt I owed it to myself to study an instrument to a reasonable standard, and I studied the organ up through the standard exams.

As I worked through the eight levels we have here in the UK, the music gets harder and the scales get faster and more intricate. I managed to put myself through grade 8 on the organ and afterwards, when I got my certificate I thought, “Right, I’m giving up,” because I knew my musical gift, if I had one, was for composing and conducting, not for playing. I can rehearse and accompany music, but I never want to play in public.

Yet, well, oddly, a page of orchestral score paper always felt like home territory to me. I always felt very comfortable with what amounts to the cookery of orchestral writing. The recipe is put together from different ingredients. You have to know what goes with what. If you put too much spice in it masks the flavor of something else.

When writing for orchestra, if one puts too much brass in, it will cover up what is going on in the woodwinds and strings, etc. That was something I learned from the great masters as, in the end, every musician does. I was encouraged to write for all sorts of resources back in high school.

We had an annual musical competition with an instrumental ensemble class. The more instruments you included, the more points you got. So if we had within our house, which was a sub-group of the school, a tuba player who could only play about four notes, you would put him in. So that gave me a taste of instrumental writing, where one had to adapt to the resources you have. None of that music survives, fortunately.

LB: What an environment to live in!

JR: Yes, it really was. Our headmaster always thought I should be an academic. He knew enough of the musical profession to know it was full of pitfalls, disappointments, setbacks, heartbreak, and he was not sure that I would have whatever it took to succeed. Nor was I sure, but I boldly applied to Cambridge, slightly under false pretenses, because I said I wanted to study modern languages, French and German. As soon as I came up for the interviews, I confessed to the senior tutor of Clare, “Well, look, I really want to do music.” And he said, “All right.”

So I was allowed to follow my true vocation. Nobody stopped me, and no one has stopped me ever since. I’m still doing today what I was doing as that little child in my parent’s apartment when I first discovered the out-of-tune upright piano.

There’s a story I’ve told many times, but it’s true. At the age of five or six, as an only child, I spent a lot of time by myself, and I would doodle away in a world of my own, singing along in my little treble voice, and just making up music. In a way, that’s what I’m still doing, all these years later, except, with a bit of luck I get paid for it. And I can write it down, which I couldn’t do then. I only learned to read and write music once I got to school.

LB: Do you think that being able to compose a tune is a gift?

JR: I would always describe myself as 50% composer and 50% songwriter. Really they’re not the same skill. I’ve always been drawn to melody among those twentieth-century composers where I found it. That often meant songwriters. I owe a huge debt to the classic American songwriters, which I would call the golden age of American musical theater, roughly stretching from Jerome Kern to Stephen Sondheim. The thing I learned from them, which I also learned from the song writing of Schubert, Schumann, and others, is that a tune is a great carrier for the sense of a text. It’s like a vector for conveying the text, like shooting an arrow into the heart of the listener.

I would never renounce melody. Of course in twentieth-century concert music and opera, one doesn’t normally go out humming the tunes. The composers of that sort of music are developing music in other ways, discovering new sound worlds, new structures, new interrelationships between music and other worlds of the arts. A lot of contemporary music is inspired by dance, visual arts, poetry, etc. One doesn’t go to it expecting the same thing as attending West Side Story. Although my training is 100% classical, I’ve been influenced by music theater and perhaps, to a smaller extent, pop music.

I have this problem that probably goes with age, but pop music stopped for me somewhere after the Beatles, which is a long time ago. “Here, There, and Everywhere” is a lovely song.

I’m not sure that any one pop musician today has any standing like they did. The world of pop music and media was not so fragmented as today. There were not so many radio and television stations, not as many record labels. If you did attain prominence, it is probably greater than anything you could attain now.

The Beatles were so multi-talented. They were very good: great melodists, inventive poets. Their music retains great freshness. I think that’s where melody fits in to what I do. I’ve allowed myself to be influenced by the fields outside of classical music, but it’s contained within the framework of my classical training, I think.

LB: The Beatles created a new sound world as well. When we studied classical music in the 1970s we came home to our dorm and listened to the Beatles. We didn’t see it as a problem or incongruity to put those musics next to each other.

JR: I don’t think it need be a problem. I must say I’m not too enamored with rock music in church. I think it’s too one-dimensional. I think there is a subtlety about the great tradition of church music, and a depth that is more nourishing. I think so much rock music is loud, and all in 4/4, and thus there isn’t the same potential for responding sensitively to what is probably the greatest body of texts we have. Anybody who is going to set words to music is sooner or later going to come upon religious texts. They have the great quality of vision and poetry. We have the great fortune in this country, and I’m fortunate to be a member of the last generation to experience the King James Bible and the Prayer Book of 1662 on a daily basis. These words are majestic English, written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, when they knew how to turn a good phrase.

It was ousted about the time I went to university, first the New English Bible, then other translations. We absolutely need the new translations, and I use them, but when I’m looking for words to set, I find there is more resonance in the historic English of the King James Bible or the old Prayer Book. Somehow it seems to invite music in a way I don’t find in contemporary religious writing. This is not to say that we shouldn’t persevere with it. I remember the dean of St. Paul’s (London) once said to me, “Yes, the contemporary translations of the Bible are not all that fantastic. The only way they’ll get better, though, is if we keep persevering with them.”

LB: There are good reasons for changing and updating English language.

JR: Oh, yes. With inclusiveness, and those things, which they weren’t worrying about in the 1600s. At the same time, it’s good to have a sense of historical imagination, so that when we hear William Byrd setting the words, “Prevent us, O Lord,” we know that he didn’t mean “stop us, O Lord,” but “go before us, O Lord.” If we just eradicate that from our religious language, we lose a sense of how flexible and ever-changing language can be.

Or again, “when man goeth forth to his labor,” it refers to the German “Mensch.” “Mann” in German means a human being, where man in English means a male. In English the same word, unfortunately, serves for both. We need to be aware that a little mental switch goes on and we say, “ah, this is Mensch, this refers to the whole human race.” It would be a shame if we lost that completely, though I do see where it is important the people understand the words as they are meant today. However, young people also need to read old poetry and experience old literature. Otherwise they won’t be enriched by this changing landscape of the English language, which has been such a wonderfully flexible instrument through the changes of many centuries, and continues to evolve.

LB: I recently heard a Mass by Jonathan Dove sung at the Bath Abbey. Do you know it?

JR: Yes, I do, and I know Jonathan Dove quite well, a fine composer. Their director of music Huw Williams has not been there very long. He had been at St. Paul’s Cathedral, as one of the three organists there. He then moved to be the director of music at the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace in London, and then moved within the last year to Bath Abbey, where they have a glorious acoustic—a stone fan-vaulted roof very much modeled on King’s College. The sound floats around in a particularly beautiful way, I think.

LB: I saw you had done a Singing Day the previous weekend at Bath Abbey. Can you say a bit about what those Singing Days are all about?

JR: That Singing Day was one of about twelve to twenty I do every year. Its purpose is to bring people together to enjoy singing for a day without the pressure of a concert or worship service at the end. I really got the idea from the reading sessions that I was asked to be a part of in the United States, often put on by publishers or universities, denominational summer retreats, where people are handed a pile of music at the door and they sing through it. Generally, the purpose is to acquaint those people with the publishers’ music that they might want to use in their own situation. I couldn’t help realizing that they were getting pleasure out of just being together, singing, and not having to worry about polishing the music to perfection.

So I wondered if that idea could be brought into Britain, where it’s not necessarily all about promoting music as such, but just giving people a chance to sing together. It’s aimed at anybody who wants to come. I accept these engagements if I am free, and if the hosts agree to my simple condition that all are welcome. I have ample opportunity to work with professionals. It’s nice to embrace the whole domain of people who sing for fun. A lot of the people who come do belong to civic or church choirs. It might be a small choir, though, without a sufficient balance of parts. So to be part of a choir of 450, which was the maximum we could fit into Bath Abbey, was rather inspiring because it’s different. I do get people who say they are too shy to audition for a choir. I like it if people bring along youngsters to be introduced, painlessly I hope, to all sorts of choral music. Of course there are those who sight read but are a bit rusty, and it improves their skills just like a muscle that needs exercise. So there are a number of functions.

I try to throw in tips for vocal technique. Particularly the men who come to these events may not have sung recently, or even at all since being a child. They come back to it not knowing how to use their voice properly. A few simple things will often put them back on the track, to be able to control their breath, and make a reasonable sound. So there is some teaching purpose, but really the idea is to spend time singing through a bunch of music. I choose about a 50/50 mix of classical or contemporary composers, perhaps not known to them, and my own works. If I didn’t include some of my own work, people would think it’s a bit strange. So, more than anything else, what I find striking about these events is how people feel they must tell me what pleasure it’s given them at the end of the day. It’s almost a physical thing, really, to just say, “I feel so good.” Of course you might get something similar with a good yoga class or Pilates, but singing can have the same beneficial effect on us—body and soul.

LB: And now, as we know more scientifically about brain theory, we can show that it’s true.

JR: Of course, exactly. Sometimes people have to discover, or rediscover that for themselves. These Singing Days form an enjoyable part of my life, and I hope that they spread a love of singing, or reinforce it among those that have dropped out of choral singing, or put new heart into those who struggle with their little church choir week by week, and need something to power them up a bit.

I have to say that my days of traveling abroad to various universities and churches have come to an end, voluntarily. I decided I had to prioritize my time. I like to be in other places, but I resent the time I spend traveling to and from them. I know it’s quick and easy in comparison to the days before jet travel, but it’s still quite tiring. I value increasingly the time I spend at home recording and composing.

LB: I’d like to hear a bit about what you are thinking about for the future. I saw the recent piece Visions you wrote as a violin concerto with boys choir for the Yehudi Menuhin competition. It seemed like a new area for you.

JR: Yes, I never thought I’d end up writing so much choral music, because I simply compose music. I think we delude ourselves if we imagine we are in control of our lives. I don’t think I ever did, or do, have a grand master plan for my life in music. If I ever had it, it hasn’t turned out the way I thought it would. So many of the paths we take are the result of chance meetings or events we hadn’t predicted. If I hadn’t met David Willcocks, and if he hadn’t been interested in my work, I might never have shown my music to a publisher, and perhaps I might have thought I should teach at a university. If people out there in the world of choral music hadn’t gotten hold of some of my early music and requested more of it, there wouldn’t be as much as there is. More than three-quarters of my total output is choral. I don’t fight that too hard, because, when all is said and done, I love choirs. I grew up singing in them. I feel some sense of coming home to my roots when I write choral music. I love poetry; I love words. Music allied to words is rather special to me.

Sometimes, though, it is nice to go beyond words. That is one of the reasons I thought it would be an interesting challenge to write a work that centers on virtuosic violin writing. It is a twenty-minute work for the winner of the Yehudi Menuhin competition in 2016 and was requested to have a part written for the boys choir of the Temple Church (London), where the concert would be held.

Visions is either the only violin concerto with a part for sopranos or it is the only work for soprano voices that has a violin part quite this elaborate. It’s a hybrid piece, but one which sprang out of the circumstances. I receive many invitations to write things, but the reason I said yes to this one was that it was different and drew inspiration from the history of the Temple Church itself, which, as Dan Brown’s readers will know, has links with the Crusades.

The Knights Templars came back with their plunder from the Holy Land, and given that they thought they had been rather naughty, they should spend it on something worthy. So they founded hospitals, churches, and schools. The round part of the Temple Church was built with money they probably supplied, and it’s modeled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. So it was the London base for one of the Crusades. It’s a little hard to speak of this now in a time when the Crusades have become quite politically incorrect. Nonetheless, there is something inspiring about seeing the tombs of the knights, especially when it’s dark in the round part of the church. The rest of the church was bombed flat in World War II, but the round part was sturdy and withstood; the nave did not.

LB: I’ve visited the Round Church in Cambridge, built in a similar way and time, and find the acoustics are splendid.

JR: The Round Church is very similar. In Cambridge it is sadly no longer used as a church. It is sort of a visitor’s center. Of course Cambridge is ludicrously over-churched, and always was. I don’t think that all of those church buildings that crowd around here were ever full, even when everybody went to church. It was like a style accessory; we’ve got to have one. There’s been quite a lot of imagination applied to find a role for them all in the twenty-first century.

LB: The first time I walked into Michaelhouse, a coffee house in a church with choir stalls, an altar, and stained glass windows, I was quite startled. For an American, it felt strange to me.

JR: Michaelhouse Centre is owned by Great St. Mary’s, our university church, which has a thriving congregation. They’ve always had Michaelhouse there, and they scratched their heads a bit to decide what to do with it. I don’t think it’s been used for worship for many years now. It’s not really needed for that purpose, as the university church is just a one-minute walk away. It’s a little bit of a shock, I’m sure.

LB: Do you have the amateur musician in mind when you compose?

JR: If you write for an opera company or orchestra, you’re writing for professionals. If you write for choirs, you are generally writing for amateurs or students. That’s who make up the majority of the world’s choirs. There are a small number of professional European and British choirs, sometimes associated with broadcasting, and certainly university and cathedral choirs that attain a professional level.

The term “professional singer” means something different in the UK than in the United States. Those singers called professional here earn their living solely by singing in professional choirs or vocal ensembles like Tenebrae, Ora, The Sixteen, to name a few. The same pool of singers will populate those groups. There are something like 200 professional small group singers in London. They accept invitations to be in a tour or recording for a group. There is a lot of fruitful interchange.

Many of those singers are from the Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge) chapel choirs, and they want to earn their living as singers but they don’t necessarily want to be soloists. They are really on a level that is unrealistic for other choirs to match. The best of our collegiate choirs are on a similar level. They can perform music of similar challenge and complexity, not available to your average parish choir or local choral society. As a choral composer you have to know for whom you are writing. I’ve just been writing the liner notes for Trinity College Choir’s CD of Owain Park’s music, which is terrific—it creates a sound world opening up before your ears, but don’t expect it to be replicated by your local church choir anytime soon.

I don’t write primarily for the apex of the choral spectrum. Rather, I’ve been writing mostly for choirs somewhere in the middle. One has to be mindful of the liturgical context. The surprise to me is that some pieces I’ve written like All Things Bright and Beautiful and For the Beauty of the Earth, the little ditties, which were crafted with the needs and tradition of the American choirs who commissioned them, have begun to filter back over here. I remember thinking, I will never hear For the Beauty of the Earth sung by an English cathedral choir. Just yesterday I looked at the YouTube video of it being sung by Winchester Cathedral choristers, and indeed the Queen Mother wanted it sung at her 100th birthday celebration service, which it was. I could have never predicted that. What’s happened is that the Church of England has moved its own goalposts a bit, and there has been a loosening up and embracing of a more relaxed, informal kind of church music.

I’ve been generally aiming at a choir in a specific location. It’s always a surprise when a piece gets performed somewhere quite different. I wrote my Requiem within the Anglican Catholic tradition, and it gets done a lot in Japan, where there really isn’t a strong Christian tradition. One never knows where music will reach, and that’s one of the amazing things about it. I always try to write for the performers who will be involved in the first performance. I feel a strong obligation to whoever is doing the piece first. I don’t usually think long past that.

LB: Isn’t it interesting that when you write for a particular context, it often finds a new home in a quite unrelated place?

JR: I almost never write for a general purpose, and I don’t accept commissions anymore, as I want to use my time for my own projects at my own pace. Things like Visions could have never happened if I had been overwhelmed with commissions. This was what I thought was a brilliant idea that was presented to me, and I was glad I had the time to do it.

I still seem to be as busy as ever. The nice thing about being a composer is that no one forces you to retire. You carry on until there is no longer any demand for your services, and of course, composers sometimes carry on even when there is no demand. I hope that day won’t come. It’s nice to be wanted.

LB: What do you still want to do and write?

JR: Oh, everything I haven’t ever done. I don’t want to repeat myself. That’s why I’m a bit shy of doing more choral pieces, particularly if they are attached to a particular celebration, a centenary or a conductor’s anniversary. I’ve done all that. I look for the things I’ve never done before, and I must be realistic. John Williams isn’t going to phone me and say, “I really don’t want to write the next Star Wars score, will you do it for me?” That’s not going to happen.

LB: Would you like that kind of invitation?

JR: Oh, yes, I’d love it. Nor is the Metropolitan Opera going to say, “How about a big new opera for 2020?” It’s happened to my young composer friend, Nico Muhly. His new opera, Marnie, has been premiered in London. It has also been performed by the Met who actually commissioned it. That happens to someone of his generation, but not to somebody of my generation whose track record is in another field altogether.

Then again, if Cameron Mackintosh, the great theatrical man who backed many a musical, were to say “How about a big Broadway musical?” I wouldn’t say no if I had the right idea and the right collaborator to do the book and lyrics. Those are things I’ve never done before, so if they came my way, I would love them.

But, I should be very grateful for the opportunities that have come my way, the people I’ve met, the kind musicians I’ve worked with, the fine texts I’ve been privileged to set to music. It’s been a rich and varied career so far. I’ll be honest with you: I don’t usually plan much beyond a week, because you never know what may happen that may change all your plans. It’s always a challenge to keep up with the commitments that I have undertaken, which sometimes take longer than I’d planned, or those additional ones that come along that I can’t anticipate.

I was amused last year when Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, died. He was very much the architect of the European Union, and my Requiem was to be used in part at his funeral service in the cathedral in Münster. There was an orchestra already booked when they discovered that his vast bulk and the coffin were so huge, and the pallbearers so many, they weren’t going to be able to squeeze past the orchestra, which was off to one side of the chancel steps. They needed to cut the orchestra right down—twelve players had to go.

They asked if I could rescore the Requiem movement for the reduced forces that would be at their disposal. I think I got the email on Friday, and they needed the parts on Tuesday. So I dropped what I was doing. It was a flagship event, televised all around Europe, and I couldn’t let them down. I hadn’t anticipated that, nor had they.

LB: Did you conduct it?

JR: No, I watched it on television. They did get the coffin past, but only just.

LB: You were holding your breath?

JR: We all were. They were big strong pallbearers.

LB: Do you have guidance or encouragement to American church musicians?

JR: Well, you know, hang in there. I think it’s always the first thing to notice that church music has the complication of not just writing for a concert hall where you’re pretty much in charge. You’re part of a team, which is not primarily about music, but is about worship. One must be sensitive about that. I have been told that one of the most common problems by far is professional-personal relationships between clergy and musicians. It always needs patience and tact and understanding on both sides. When it is achieved, then something rather beautiful can happen.

The problems can be in both directions. Sometimes it’s the musician who wants to introduce change, and it’s the clergy or the congregation who resist. Sometimes it’s the reverse, and it’s the clergy or congregation who want music that’s more pop oriented, and it’s the musician who digs in his/her heels and says, “I don’t want to do that.” How do you meet in the middle? I don’t know.

It can make things difficult. One must be a first-class musician and a first-class diplomat, and to be aware of the winds of change that blow, being able to distinguish between temporary fads that everyone will soon forget, and the changes now that are here for good. It’s impossible really to be a successful prophet 100% of the time, but a sense of discrimination, in an altogether good sense, is probably useful. For example, if there is pressure to scratch singing the psalms in the way you are used to, and the new idea is to do them with three chords to a guitar, one must say, “Hold on one minute. This seems to be catching on and isn’t going to last.”

On the other hand, when there has been a general move to make church music more this or more that, then you must consider whether to go with it or risk being written off as someone who is irrelevant. You should always have as your guiding light the music that is in your heart of hearts. Always be true to that.

Notes

1. On May 23, 2018, the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, announced the appointment of Daniel Hyde as director of music at King’s, to take office on October 1, 2019. Hyde currently serves as organist and director of music at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Fifth Avenue, New York, New York.

Murray Somerville

Murray Forbes Somerville, graduate of New College, Oxford, holds degrees also from Union Theological Seminary in New York and the New England Conservatory; he served for thirteen years as university organist at Harvard. Retired to South Carolina, he is currently Committee Chair for the L’Organo organ recital series, part of the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston.

To try and categorize Anna Lapwood’s career is a challenge. She is a hugely successful concert organist, performing across Europe, Africa, and the United States; she is a conductor, director of music at Pembroke College, Cambridge (appointed at the age of 21, the youngest ever in Oxbridge); she is a recording artist, arranger, singer, radio and television presenter, TikTok personality with millions of hits, and last year was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire by King Charles III, with Princess Anne making the presentation.

Her recital repertoire includes not only the standard classical organ works of Bach, Duruflé, Price, and the like, but often also her own arrangements of movie scores, a genre she has loved since childhood. Go to her YouTube channel and particularly youtube.com/watch?v=VT5B-vEPeXI for an organ concert performance like none other. Or watch her numerous posts on TikTok.

It took us nine months to find a short time in her schedule for our Zoom interview. And even though she had just finished a European concert tour, traveling back home that day, she was as full of energy as it seems she always is, and (as you would expect from an Oxford graduate) articulate and ready to answer slightly edgy questions about the choral and organ world, as well as sharing her experiences in so many different musical fields and her goals in reaching wider and wider to share her love of the instrument, her love of music, and her joy in communicating with people.

Well, hallo, Anna!

Hello! Good to see you!

Good to see you too, Anna. Thank you for taking time out of what I know is your extremely busy schedule to talk with me. By the way—when did you start in Germany this morning?

I set off at nine and got back home. . . about ten minutes ago.

Wow! Well, for the first question I have been burning to ask you for a year now: how did you manage to get 5,000 people in June 2023 to come to the Royal Albert Hall for a late-night organ concert?

I still don’t really understand what happened there. That felt like such a significant moment, as the concert was such a remarkable experience. I hadn’t expected that number of people, but they were mostly there from social media. It was this massive moment, in my mind, of realizing that what I’ve been doing on social media can translate into bums on seats at a concert hall as well. I think that’s the thing that brings me the most joy, to see people coming to their first ever organ concert. And I hope they’re coming back for more.

Yes, indeed. That leads me to what I was going to ask you about TikTok: how that works for you, how it helps, what use can be made of it? And are you worried about any government bans of TikTok?

Yes, I mean I’m obviously keeping an eye on that side of things; I think it’s slightly less of a conversation here [in the UK] than it is in the U.S. It wouldn’t be ideal, although I obviously do a lot on Facebook and Instagram as well, so there’s a mix of different platforms in there. But I think the thing that I’ve realized is wonderful about sharing on social media, with the organ specifically, is that our biggest problem as organists is that we’re hidden from the audience. If you think about the fact that with any artist on any instrument or a singer or whatever, the whole thing is trying to create a connection with the audience, right? That’s performing, and we are automatically at a disadvantage straightaway. What I think social media is amazing for, is you can bring them immediately right next to you and give them the experience of sitting on the organ bench with you whether it’s in rehearsal or in performance, which then means if they do come to a concert and they can’t see you, they have all those memories from the videos. They know what you’re thinking, they can imagine what it looks like so much more easily, and it helps break down those barriers.

Another thing that has struck me is how comfortable you are at addressing a camera, addressing people. Even when people come up to you during practice sessions you greet them warmly, whereas most of us get annoyed. Do you have any words of wisdom for your colleagues on that subject?

Well, to be fair, we all know that there are different circumstances, right? If you have twenty minutes to register, and that’s nowhere near enough time, and you’re really, really stressed, and someone comes up to you, you’re probably not going to react in quite the same way as if you’re registering for eight hours and have a bit more relaxed schedule. In that case people coming up and asking questions can be a really welcome break from the intense brain work. But the thing I just always keep in my head is that you never know what tiny interaction could sow a seed in someone’s head that makes them want to try the organ themselves, makes them want to go to an organ concert, or it just makes them think differently about the instrument or about classical music in general.

I see all of our roles as organists as evangelists for the instrument, and that spreads through every minute of every day. I love it personally. If I’m doing an overnight at the Albert Hall, it makes such a difference when someone comes up and asks me to play something. It’s like I’ve had a shot of caffeine, and I can keep going for another two hours when I might have been flagging before.

Which leads me to my next question: how did you get started on the midnight to 6:00 a.m. shift at the Albert Hall, and, for the benefit of our readers, tell us a little bit about the place and the instrument.

So, I started working at the Royal Albert Hall a couple of years ago. I had a message from the former artistic director, Lucy Noble, and she just said, “I’d love to have a chat with you about something at the Royal Albert Hall.” And I have never replied to a message faster, literally embarrassingly fast. Within a minute of it arriving, I wrote “Yes, yes,” because I have always loved that organ and I’d had the chance to play it a couple other times in the past. She asked if I would become one of their associate artists; the whole point of that role being to try and bring a different audience to various aspects of the Hall; so, there are a couple of us in different fields.

She said to me, “What would you want to do as associate artist?” And I said that I want to put the organ right at the middle of everything that the Hall’s doing, and I want it to be something that people talk about and think about including in concerts. Whether they are classical concerts or pop concerts or rock concerts, I want them to think of the organ as an amazing novelty thing, to take the concert to a new level. We all kind of looked at each other and went, “Oh, that’s fun, but it’s never going to happen.” And then it just started happening kind of naturally, because the other thing that I said would be really important is getting access to the organ.

They gave me, maybe once a month, a slot between midnight and six in the morning. And sometimes that’s registering for an upcoming concert, sometimes it’s filming videos for the Hall or for my channels. And often I’ve found now that one of those sessions can lead to a concert because people stumble across you there. If they’re in the middle of a residency, then they all want to play the organ, and that’s great. It’s happened a couple of times now, and it’s completely changed my life. It’s an incredible organ, such a rich organ, I mean the orchestral color, the bass drum, the bells—it’s so much fun to play. But I think almost more than that, it is so perfect for that space, it brings together so many different events, not just different genres—they have tennis matches and boxing matches in there. That organ can hold the room, whatever the event is; it can compete with a massively amplified rock band, and it feels like sitting at the helm of a ship.

How would you compare that to some of your experiences in the United States? What are some of your favorite instruments in the States?

You have so many great instruments in the U.S. I know that we have amazing ones here as well, but I do think that organs in the U.S. seem to have more gizmos and fun kinds of bells and whistles, right? And also, things that make our life a little bit easier as organists. They have very logical setting systems and things. I think my favorites from the most recent tour were definitely Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, which was just this massive bucket-list moment. Although next time I go I really want to have more time, because I landed and then I had fourteen hours in one day to register, and then the next day was the concert day and dealing with flight hours. I was so tired and so overwhelmed, and I feel like I sort of scratched the surface of what that organ can do, but I would love just to be there for a week and get to know it properly and spend more time with the amazing people there as well. So that’s one of them. And the other one, possibly my favorite other than the Albert Hall, is Disney Hall in Los Angeles. Oh, such an incredible instrument, and the hall has such a lively acoustic. It’s so warm and so clear. And again, the team there are just such wonderful people, and they care about opening up the instrument to as many people as possible.

Going off on a completely different tangent—having myself lived in Zimbabwe as a teenager (or Rhodesia as it then was)—are you still doing your visits to Zambia?

I am. I’m actually about to take the Choir there. We’re off next week.

Oh, wonderful; congratulations! Tell us more about that.

I started going out there when I was a university student, and there was a charity called the Muse Trust, which started taking these trips where they would take two Oxford students and two Cambridge students who would go to help teach music in Zambia for a month. I went out on this first trip and absolutely fell in love with everything about the place. And the music—there was so much music everywhere, just everywhere you turned, people were singing, people were dancing. And I just thought this is a pretty wonderful thing.

And then when I started working at Pembroke [College, Cambridge] nine years ago, in my first year I got chatting with our dean, who is also our chaplain. He’d spent some time in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and we soon decided to run a choir tour there with them. That kickstarted things again, and I’ve been going back every year since, trying to go for three weeks or a month and doing a whole range of things: teaching music and working with some incredible musicians there.

I basically go and I say, how can I help? What can I do? What would be most useful. And what I find, so much of it is literally can we just sit and make music together, which is the most incredible feeling, right? We all know what it’s like to just spontaneously sit down and be like, let’s just play, let’s just mess around and see what happens. What I try to do, at the request of the musicians that I work with there, is share those videos so that people can see that there is this incredible talent everywhere. And I’m trying to help nurture careers when I can. For example, one of the Zambian singers is now in the UK, and I’m trying to help him as much as I can. One of the other things that I do is talk to them about how you market yourself as a musician, how you use social media to create an income stream from music, because at the moment being a musician in Zambia isn’t really a possibility as a career path.

It’s an incredible thing. I feel so lucky to work there. It’s like this reset every year, which also just reminds me not to take this for granted at all because there are so many musicians there who would desperately love to do what I do for a living and who just can’t because they were born in a different place.

Well, give Victoria Falls my love, please, when you go there again. So let’s talk about Pembroke and what you’re doing there. Before you went there, to be honest it wasn’t always thought of as a musical powerhouse, but you’ve changed that in no uncertain terms.

Yes, it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster.

And you started a girls’ choir; tell us about that.

When I first came up, there was a chapel choir, and I started working there when I was twenty-one, very much learning on the job. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing or what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to make music and loved making music. And it was amazing how they actually let me learn on the job; they took a massive risk appointing someone so young and so inexperienced. I think they saw that I wanted to grow the music department into something that the college could be really proud of and something they were known for. It was toward the end of my first year, I remember the daughter of one of my colleagues coming into my office one day and saying, “I think you need to set up another girls’ choir, because there aren’t enough girls’ choirs in Cambridge. There’s not enough opportunities for girls to sing.” And her dad said, “I promise I didn’t ask her to say that.” But it lit the spark in my brain. It was like, well, that sounds like a fun idea. And because I was twenty-one and because I was so full of energy and was just throwing absolutely everything I had at this job, I thought, “I’ll start up a girls’ choir.” I think there’s something liberating about being early on in a job when you don’t see red tape, you just see opportunities. And so now I think I would have probably done the setting up process slightly more carefully and cautiously; but the college was incredible at helping me turn everything around pretty swiftly. We had a girls’ choir the next year, and now they are like 
my children.

Honestly, when I perform on the organ I have their names written throughout my scores based on what character I’m trying to conjure up in my playing. During the Duruflé [Prelude and Fugue on the Name of Alain] I have names of the girl choristers all the way through. I think it’s just one of the greatest privileges to help shape people’s early musical lives and hopefully give them confidence and make them realize that they’re capable of so much.

I do remember that right before the 100th anniversary of the Nine Lessons and Carols Service, in 2018, when British opera star Leslie Garrett made a statement that there should be girls in King’s College Choir, you wrote at that time that this made you angry. Do you still feel that way?

It’s a really interesting question. I think my thoughts have changed a bit; I think what I would defend is the importance of gendered spaces. So, in the same way that I think having a girls’ choir is such an amazing thing—and I love them so much, and there is something so unique about it being a group of girls—I think having boys’ choirs can be a really positive thing, in exactly the same way. I think the suggestion that we can just solve all problems by mixing everything—I don’t think that’s necessarily right.

I would say when people complain about the idea of introducing girls into something like King’s, I think one of the things they often say is, “Oh, the sound is different.” And I’m like, come on, so often in those early experiments you’re comparing boy choristers who had sung every day and been trained every day with untrained girls. Of course, the sound is different, but actually so many people can’t tell the difference when it’s two well-trained different sex choristers.

I’ve always felt that it’s much more about developmental issues and social cohesion and all that sort of stuff.

Yes. What I would say is that I think gendered spaces are super important for those who want it. I think mixed spaces are also really important for those who want it, but I think what we do need to make sure is that there is parity of opportunity. And by that I mean there is the opportunity for girls to sing to that standard and with that level of publicity, so that it’s not just boys who sing for the really high profile services. That is really important because we all say you can’t be what you can’t see, right? Increasingly you sort of think, why is that and how can we make a difference there?

Of course, the U.S. has a slightly different problem, in that actually it’s often very hard to persuade boys to sing.

Well, this is the other side of it, and it’s one of the reasons I remember finding it frustrating those years ago, having worked with boy choristers in various different places and seeing what a great thing it is for them to be choristers, looking at how if you’d move away from the chorister roles to more general singing, the number of boys versus girls singing in any normal school choir is so skewed the other way. You’re going to have maybe thirty girls and then two boys, so we need to make sure we’re still encouraging boys to sing and finding ways to encourage them. Making sure that the opportunities are there for them as well is essential. But I think it’s about finding the right ways to do that that allows parity of opportunity.

This leads me actually to my next question: how did you feel when you were the first woman organ scholar in 500 years working with the all-male choir at Magdalen College, Oxford? You’ve said you had a stiff learning curve; tell us a little bit more about that.

You stole the words right out of my mouth! Yes, it was a very steep learning curve. When I started as organ scholar I had never accompanied a choir on the organ. And then I was doing it. I had accompanied choirs all the time on piano, but not on the organ. I didn’t know any of the standard choral repertoire because I hadn’t been brought up in that world. I knew orchestral repertoire extremely well because I had spent years as an orchestral harpist, but I didn’t know all the kind of normal choral repertoire you might expect someone to know. I had also been at an all-girls school for my entire school life. So, to say it was a culture shock doesn’t even scratch the surface. It was like suddenly being thrown into a country where you don’t speak the language. I remember vividly being asked to go and get the Psalters from the Song School and having no idea what a Psalter was but being too embarrassed to ask. I was standing there in the Song School looking around, going, “What am I looking for?” because nothing said Psalter, but I was spelling it without the “P”—so this is what I mean by I really didn’t know what I was doing. But in a way I’m so grateful for my time there because I learned so much, so fast, because if I didn’t I wouldn’t have survived.

It was very much like I remember thinking, “I can’t do this, I can’t do this!” Then sitting myself down and being like, “You’ve got to make the most of this opportunity, so you’re going to work as hard as you can to try and catch up on all the stuff you’ve missed.” I practiced the organ for eight hours a day, and once I’d done that for a term and had sort of learned the standard repertoire and started to get a bit more comfortable with things and immersed myself in that world, I loved it.

One of your first media successes that I saw was that amusing video you did back in 2016 about May Morning¹ and behind the scenes, waking up the choral scholars, warming up the choristers, and all of that. I was just wondering whether you think that the rather media-savvy tradition of your college—thinking about Oscar Wilde, Dudley Moore, people like that—was that an influence on you?

I just think I wanted to share a little bit of the craziness that goes on behind the scenes. I mean, it’s a bizarre thing, right? This choir gets up at whatever time it is in the morning, goes and rehearses, climbs the tower, sings to however many thousands of people, then goes and eats breakfast, and then does another service. It’s so crazy. I just thought—actually people might find this interesting. I guess that’s exactly the same ethos I’ve applied ever since. I just think there are so many bits of being a musician generally that are so weird and so crazy, and people find it interesting. Seeing kind of under the hood as it were.

It’s still up there on YouTube, I just checked on it the other day. Now let’s move into one or two quick things. What does it mean to be a member of the Order of the British Empire. Can you tell us about the ceremony and all of that?

I can’t remember when I got the letter now. I was doing carol services, so it was around the end of November when it is Cambridge Christmas. I got this letter, which said on the front, “On His Majesty’s Service,” and I remember I was at Pembroke. I kind of looked at this thing and ran back to my office and ripped it open. It said, “You’ve been made a member of the Order of the British Empire,” and I kind of jumped up and down and screamed quite a lot. It’s a huge honor, and actually the best thing about that day was that my parents happened to be there that evening. They turned up for the service, I grabbed them, I had like two minutes I think before the service, grabbed them, ran to my office and said, “Sit down, you’ve got to hear this!” They have sacrificed so much, and they’ve worked so hard to enable me to do what I do.

And you just happened to have your phone going?

Oh, no, that was very much intentional. I said, “I’m filming you, by the way.” I don’t know what they thought I was going to tell them, but they were very, “What is going on?” But I wanted to capture the moment because I know how much that meant to them. That level of recognition I think was a huge moment for them, almost even more than it was for me. It was a massive moment for me. I cried so much when I read the letter.

And then you told Princess Anne that she should take up the organ?

Yes. I was not very cool at the presentation ceremony, I have to say. They give you all these instructions, and they are very, very kind about it, and you think I’ll be fine and then. . . . Well, I certainly found the moment I stood there I just didn’t know what to say. I freaked out. I sort of whispered at her (because they were playing really quiet music, and I didn’t want to interrupt the music). She said, “You can speak louder than that.” And then she started asking about the fact that there aren’t many female organists. And I said, “Well maybe you should have a go, maybe you should try the organ here,” because we were at Windsor Castle. And she said, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” I was quite persistent in encouraging her to play.

I think perhaps you’re known for that.

And you’re supposed to sort of reverse away. I think I messed that up entirely and nearly fell over. And she laughed out loud. So, all in all it wasn’t my smoothest moment.

You’ve invented a hashtag—#playlikeagirl—how’s that going?

Well, you know what, that was never started as kind of, “Oh, I want to invent a hashtag,” it was just like a response to lived experiences I guess. It came about, as I’m guessing you know, there was this competition where my feedback was “you need to play more like a man.” And that was equated to, I needed more power and authority, which as a nineteen-year-old I remember thinking, “I’m not sure that’s the right way to phrase that.” I had no problem being told to play with power and authority, but I do have a problem with that being equated with only being masculine; and I also had a problem that there was an assumption that the male playing was better. There were other comments from the same person to other people, other female conductors, that were along the same line.

I remember sort of stewing with it for a while, and then maybe about a year later Marin Alsop spoke out about how if she does a certain gesture, it’s seen as “girly,” and if a man does it it’s “sensitive.” Just looking at the discrepancies, I shared this experience and put the hashtag, “Play Like a Girl,” and then it’s sort of just gently grown from there. For me it’s about just saying to people, “You should be happy to play as yourself,” because I think the most important thing in music is that you’re sharing something of yourself through music. My experience is that since I started trying to be myself as a performer instead of being who people want me to be, it’s been a totally different experience. Performing is something that I love, though I used to hate it. I think it’s just saying to people, you can be yourself when you play and own that.

Terrific. I have one other thing. I was just wondering if you’d like to offer any reflections on being an Oxford-trained musician working in a Cambridge College (when it does usually tend to be the other way round).

Well, Oxford–Cambridge, everyone makes a big thing about this, but I don’t really believe that it exists. Ultimately, I think we’re all really trying to do the same thing in very similar places. I mean, I grew up in Oxford so there’s a certain loyalty there, but I have now spent more time in Cambridge than I did in secondary education, which is terrifying, and I love Cambridge with my whole heart. I guess I don’t tend to think about that too much.

Congratulations once again on all you’re doing; you make us all proud. We can’t wait to see what you come up with next. I do know that one of the things that’s next for you is matrimony; we’re thrilled for you and wish you both all the very best.

Thank you so much. No idea when we’ll find time for that, but we’ll find 
a way.

Note

1. Every year, on the morning of May 1, at 6:00 a.m. (weather permitting, the moment when the rising sun first strikes the spires of the great Bell Tower at Magdalen College, Oxford), the College Chapel Choir sings from the top of the tower the “Hymnus Eucharisticus” written for the occasion in the seventeenth century by its then director Benjamin Rogers, followed by madrigals. This becomes the cue for the thousands gathered on the streets below to break out the champagne, start Morris dancing, and generally indulge in all the other traditional rituals associated with the arrival of spring.

Thanks to Meg Davies, associate manager, musicprods.co.uk; the Reverend Amanda Robertson, technical assistance; and Barbara Wilson, transcriber.

Joyce Johnson Robinson

Joyce Johnson Robinson is a past editor of The Diapason.

Katelyn Emerson is a member of The Diapason’s inaugural 20 Under 30 (2015) class, an honor bestowed prior to receiving her undergraduate degrees from Oberlin. She had already earned top prizes in numerous competitions in the United States, France, and Russia. She teaches in her private studio and performs nationally and internationally. Katelyn Emerson is represented in North America by Karen McFarlane Artists, Inc.

Katelyn, what were some of the first instruments you played? What led you to prefer the organ?

Growing up, I was drawn to voice, piano, flute, and organ. Singing was integral to my childhood as my whole family sang in a church choir and my older brother, Andrew, and I both sang in the Sandpipers Seacoast Children’s Chorus, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 

When Andrew turned ten, he began piano lessons. Naturally, as a six-year-old enamored with everything he was doing, I began to sightread through his piano music, and my parents sought a piano teacher to spare them from the cacophony coming from the keyboard—and so that I wouldn’t learn bad habits. 

Four years later, all I wanted for my birthday was flute lessons as I had watched my mother play and loved the sound of the instrument. Flute and voice ultimately allowed me to join both local and all-state youth symphonies and choruses. 

Dianne Dean, director of the Sandpipers Chorus, first introduced me to the possibility of playing the organ. I had plunked out a hymn or two at my parents’ church but thought this imposing instrument out of reach for a small girl. However, Dianne had been instrumental in founding the Young Organists’ Collaborative, an organization that introduces young people to the pipe organ and funds their early studies. She encouraged me to audition for a scholarship, and upon receiving it, I studied piano, flute, and organ through high school.

The “lightning bolt” moment was during the Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, opus 78, of Camille Saint-Saëns. I was principal flutist of the Portland (Maine) Youth Symphony Orchestra, playing at the heart of the ensemble while my then organ teacher, Ray Cornils, played the Kotzschmar organ in Merrill Auditorium. There had been no time to rehearse with the organ prior to the concert, so those brilliant C-major chords of the final movement came as a complete shock. I realized the organ could be all the musical instruments I loved—and that it could even keep pace with a full symphony orchestra! This could be my instrument.

Tell us about your experience with the Young Organists’ Collaborative.

The Young Organists’ Collaborative (YOC) was founded in 2001 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when a new Létourneau organ was installed in Saint John’s Episcopal Church. When Bishop Douglas E. Theuner came to bless the instrument, he donated $1,000 seed money with the charge to find a way to bring young people to play the pipe organ. Chosen students received a year’s worth of lessons and a small stipend for shoes or scores. Today, students come from around the seacoast—Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, etc.—and are paired with an approved local teacher who can help find practice spaces. They are required to play at the end-of-year recital and are invited to take part in a masterclass with a professional organist partway through the year. The YOC can fund up to three years of study and offers additional scholarship competitions.

I received one of these scholarships in 2005 and began studies with Abbey Hallberg Siegfried, who worked at Saint John’s. When she went on maternity leave a year later, Abbey connected me with Ray Cornils, municipal organist of Portland, Maine, whose teaching included practice techniques, patience, and good humor that form the foundation of my playing and teaching. 

When and where did you give your first recital? What did you play?

It’s difficult to recall my first recital! I do remember my first organ masterclass vividly, when I had only been studying for about six months. This class, sponsored by the YOC, was with Ray Cornils, whom I was meeting for the first time. I played the “Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Major” from the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues attributed to Bach. After I played through the work in its entirety, Ray quietly asked if I realized which pedal note I had missed in the prelude. While I can’t remember now which note it was, I do remember him guiding me through the process of identifying the reason for the mistake. That detective work set the standard for how I problem-solve in my own practice and how I work with my students to do the same.

You earned your degrees at Oberlin and subsequently studied in France and Germany. How did each of these experiences form you?

During my first semester at Oberlin, my assigned teacher, James David Christie, went on sabbatical. While usually a cause for chagrin, this was an extraordinary stroke of luck: he swapped positions with Olivier Latry. 

I have always learned repertoire quickly, but Professor Latry’s demands put me into high gear. At least one new piece each week was expected, which meant that I had expended the music I had prepared over the summer halfway through the semester. After panic-learning Duruflé’s Prélude et fugue sur le nom d’Alain in five days, I finally mastered “the back burner”; with two dozen or so pieces in progress at once, each at a different stage of learning, a new one would hit the “lesson-ready” point just at the right moment. Professor Latry also expanded my arsenal of practice techniques, and I would credit nearly all of my inherited practice methods to him and Ray Cornils.

Professor Christie’s preferred pedagogical approach was almost perfectly opposite: rather than covering new music every week, he preferred a lengthier study of style, working through a half-dozen pieces over the course of a semester to develop deeper understanding that could be applied to other music of that genre. I have grown to appreciate this more than I did as a teenager and to balance learning notes quickly with understanding and translating the music. 

My love affair with all things French had begun only two years before university, and fortunately additional academic scholarship was available if I pursued the double degree program at Oberlin (a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Music after five years), so French language and literature was the natural choice. I remember asking Professor Latry about studies at the Conservatoire de Paris within our first few lessons together, likely to his amusement!

My first solo trip abroad was in 2011, between my freshman and sophomore years, for the last iteration of the Summer Institute for French Organ Studies, led by Jesse Eschbach and Gene Bedient. Aided by a scholarship, I traveled to Poitiers and then Épernay, wondering if I could handle being alone abroad. Wandering the cobblestones of Poitiers, reveling in that 1787 Clicquot, and then the 1869 Cavaillé-Coll of Église Notre-Dame in Épernay, and getting to know the other students from Indiana, Utah, and Canada, I discovered that I thrived on travel. 

During my sophomore year at Oberlin, Marie-Louise Langlais came to teach. In contrast to Professor Christie’s detail-oriented teaching, Madame Langlais emphasized beautiful broad lines, Wagnerian long phrases, and propelling the music forwards no matter what.

At Oberlin, one of my most impactful teachers was not an organ professor. David Breitman remains head of the historical performance department and teaches fortepiano. After I carelessly ran through a Mozart sonata in one of my first fortepiano lessons, I remember him asking, “Now, this is an opera. Tell me about the first character. What else was Mozart working on while composing this?” Ray Cornils had planted the first seeds of exploring musical character in my mind (“If you met this piece walking down the street, what would it look like? How would she feel? Where would he be going?”), but I hadn’t applied this inquisitive curiosity more broadly. Professor Breitman’s similarly Socratic method of teaching was a continuation of Ray’s. Neither teacher ever dictated interpretation. Instead, they posed questions that led a student to make informed decisions and arrive at possible conclusions themselves through a contextualization and personification of music that has become a cornerstone of my playing and pedagogy. 

The formative experiences and broad education I received from Oberlin continued to feed my curiosity. I took classes in psychology, astronomy, anthropology, rhetoric, French literature, and more. 

Upon graduating, I won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Toulouse. I documented a fraction of that year in France on my blog (katelynemerson.wordpress.com), but spent most of it on road trips to see untouched instruments in the countryside, locked into Saint-Sernin at night, scrambling for practice time, being clapped at because nobody had mentioned a noon Mass, stopping by the marché for bread and a bottle of wine for a picnic, and showing up at the Conservatoire to discover there was another strike and it was closed. Life had a different pace. Concerts were a train ride away, I performed on instruments sometimes wonderful and sometimes frightful, and I met brilliant colleagues and lifelong friends. 

My teachers in Toulouse, Michel Bouvard and Jan Willem Jansen, once again revealed how contrasting teaching styles can enrich study. With Michel Bouvard, I delved into the French Romantic, allowing the instruments to inform how the repertoire can really be played. His relaxed technique and unpretentious approach to this music gave it space to sing. Jan Willem Jansen had extraordinary attention to detail. After hearing me play the “Allein Gott” trio from the Clavierübung, he rightfully informed me that the fourth and fifth sixteenth notes of measure 27 had rushed. I doubt my ears will ever be so attuned to proportion, but I still strive for it nonetheless!

As my year in France concluded and I prepared to pursue further graduate studies, I was offered the associate organist and choirmaster position at the Church of the Advent in Boston, which I simply couldn’t turn down. I had worked with music director Mark Dwyer for several months while at Oberlin and was in awe of the program, liturgy, and choirs. Mark remains a dear friend, colleague, and teacher, and his attention to detail emphasized the importance of every part of music—from note to silence. 

The itch to live abroad is difficult to scratch, so I’m particularly grateful to make a living based on travel! Having heard that Ludger Lohmann would retire in 2020, I applied for a German Academic Exchange Scholarship (DAAD) to pursue the Master Orgel at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart. It broke my heart to leave Boston but I looked forward to two years in Germany.

Navigating life in France had been fairly easy given my comfort with the language. I had enough German to be dangerous—enough so that people assumed I understood. Thankfully, I avoided extreme disaster, realized the meaning of halb zwei in time not to miss my lessons, and discovered the delicacies of southern German cuisine. Lessons with Ludger perfectly balanced churning through new repertoire, exploring historical context, and receiving a list of sources (often primary) to consult. When the pandemic disrupted studies, we met at his beautiful home on the border of Switzerland to indulge in cake and then play and discuss Reger on the three-manual tracker in his living room.

I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have mentors, human and instrumental, that have each shared perspectives and ideas for ways to approach both music and life. This is but a small sample of those who have shaped my understanding, and I hope those not mentioned will still feel my appreciation and forgive the oversight, due solely to lack of space.

How has your knowledge of foreign languages and your living abroad given you insights into the music of those countries’ composers?

Music is inevitably tied to the social, historical, and cultural context in which it was conceived, even while its nature as organized sound allows it to have meaning outside a single context. My understanding of different languages and sensitivity to ways of comportment have helped me to get to know people all over the world, and I continually strive to connect with and understand them better. As an interpreter, I try to delve into the composer’s influences as well as my own, linking both to the present listeners as we undertake the aural tour of emotive depth and structure that is music performance. To do this, I strive to learn as much as I can of the time, place, and people that surrounded the music’s conception to make interpretative decisions that both link and are drawn from the past and present. The more I learn and study, the richer and more complex these relationships become, which results in further exploration and endless excitement!

Tell us about your recordings—those already made, and those planned for the future.

I have released two recordings on the Pro Organo label, working with Fred Hohman. The first of these, part of the prize package from the American Guild of Organists’ 2016 National Young Artists Competition in Organ Performance, was recorded on the glorious 1935–1936 Aeolian-Skinner at the Church of the Advent in Boston where I was working. These winners’ CDs are typically variety programs, so I sought to showcase how this liturgical instrument can play a variety of repertoire brilliantly, with music by Bruhns, J. S. Bach, Mendelssohn, François Couperin, Alain, Vierne, Tournemire, Thierry Escaich, and Howells. The album title, Evocations, comes from Escaich’s Évocation III (this was its first CD recording). Two years later, Andover Organ Company approached me about a new recording on their magnum opus, Opus 114, at Christ Lutheran Church in Baltimore in honor of their company’s seventieth anniversary. For this CD, Inspirations, I played Rachel Laurin’s Finale, opus 78 (this was the first recording), Horatio Parker, Rheinberger, Buxtehude, Bairstow, de Grigny, Langlais, and Duruflé.

Over the last two years, recording has become more essential than ever. I now have my own video and audio recording equipment and, while none of it equals commercial-level recording equipment, I can use it to pre-record recitals for venues that want to “premiere” the recital on YouTube or Vimeo, particularly if they don’t have their own equipment, and I can also make recordings for my channels. I have a huge “dream list” of instruments on which I would like to record CDs and frequently tweak ideas for programs on them. One idea would juxtapose commissions of living composers with previously composed repertoire related by inspirational source or another contextual consideration—an idea that will hopefully come into being in the next few years!

Who are some of your favorite composers?

My favorite composers are those who wrote the music I’m currently playing! Similarly, the best organ in the world is the one on which I will perform next or am currently playing, and the best piece in the world is the one that’s on the music desk right now. While this might seem to be a cop-out, it’s a simple truth: we play music better when we like it—so we must like what we are working on in order to play it well.

When push comes to shove, I am happiest playing a variety of music. My music bag currently contains music by Parry, Bach, Taylor-Coleridge, Dupré, Demessieux, Reger, Sowerby, Alcock, Laurin, Duruflé, Price, Widor, Whitlock, Franck, and Scheidemann, as well as a few others.

Tell us about your teaching.

After beginning at Oberlin, I was asked to help guide incoming students as an academic ambassador, explaining the sometimes-overwhelming collegiate administration and helping them to choose courses that would feed their curiosity. I tutored French, music theory, and organ at Oberlin, and taught music theory at the local community music school.

Since graduating, I have continued teaching, both privately and in masterclass and lecture settings, holding general question-and-answer sessions that follow tangents of interest as well as structuring courses that focus on specific topics. I enjoy connecting sometimes disparate ideas and exploring possibilities, discussing why decisions can be made this way or that, and, above all, searching for the many nuanced ideas that make an individual “tick.” 

My teaching studio is loosely divided into three groups: those working on interpretation, those seeking to improve practice strategies, and those learning about injury prevention or working to recover from injury. Of course, most are tackling all three! 

Interpretation, at its core, requires working with ideas, examining options, and then seeking physical means to translate them convincingly into sound. Since we organists cannot modulate volume with touch as pianists can, nor can we swell or diminish sound via the breath of wind or the bows of string players, much of our playing is about manipulating smoke and mirrors to turn our intention into aural reality. Since we can now so easily record ourselves, I hold even greater admiration for how players listen in the moment to what is going on, and particularly for how each of my students has a different way of perceiving the sounds swirling around them. Couple this with learning about the context of the composer, their influences, the instruments they may have known, and the time and place in which the piece was composed, and we have rich, unique “readings” of the repertoire that can link to the interests of any student, all while we explore techniques to help bring that perspective to reality. 

Time is short for everybody, and practice must be as efficient as possible. Having studied with excellent teachers of practice methods and having experienced fairly limited practice time during study and travel, I continue to explore ways to break down repertoire for efficient practice. I often make a game of turning difficult sections into manageable chunks, isolating them from the context that can distract from them. Sometimes, I encourage a student to leave it in that “practice mode” for days or even weeks, which allows the subconscious mind to digest novel movement. The best part of this technique is the excitement with which a student brings me new ideas for this “game,” ideas that I can then share with others when similar sections come up!

Surveys indicate that somewhere between 60% and 90% of professional musicians in the United States have experienced some kind of performance-related musculoskeletal disorder, most often due to overuse. The enthusiasm with which the work of pedagogues such as Roberta Gary and Barbara Lister-Sink has been received, the many stories shared by colleagues and students, and both the unnatural perch on the organ bench and the similarity in how organists use their hands and upper body to that of pianists all make me suspect that this prevalence is much the same in organists.

At age fourteen, I developed bilateral tendonitis in my wrists and forearms. Giving music up was not an option, so I undertook technical retraining with Arlene Kies, late professor of piano at the University of New Hampshire. Arlene helped me to completely rebuild my technique, as I had had almost no technical training in my six years of study. Through her work and that of my mother, a certified hand therapist and occupational ergonomist, I regained my ability to make music and developed a deep respect for my body. By paying attention to its abilities and limitations, I overcame many flare-ups throughout the next decade (including several during competitions). 

This firsthand experience with how playing and practice techniques can couple with contributing factors for tragic consequences inspired me to deepen my understanding of these complex issues so I can work with musicians, particularly organists, to prevent injury and, when injury happens, collaborate with the individual and their medical specialists to work towards recovery. We discuss healthier practice techniques that utilize mental involvement to balance out physical repetition that can lead to overuse, review postural considerations, and discuss ways to give whatever part of the body that is most at risk a little relief, whether avoiding using force when opening jars or cans or making small changes to computer and office workstations. If a student is experiencing pain or discomfort or is recovering from an injury, I always strongly recommend that they work with a medical professional for treatment in addition to exploring adjustments at their instrument.

Being a teacher and being a student go hand in hand. We teach ourselves while in the practice room, but the added variable of joining another person on their journey of learning means that we are continually exposed to different vantage points and ideas. 

How have things been for you during the time of covid?

In spring of 2020, I was based in Germany, but, when rumors that international borders might close began to proliferate, I was on tour in the United States. Fortunately, I made it back to Baden-Württemberg just a few days before flights were grounded. Despite the restrictions, I was able to complete my final semester of my master’s study, performing a program of Froberger, Messiaen, and Reger to an audience of fourteen (including the jury) in the Stuttgart Musikhochschule’s concert hall. That summer was spent waiting and then moving quickly as restrictions changed, but my husband, David Brown, who then worked for Glatter-Götz Orgelbau while I completed my studies, and I managed to return to the United States in September 2020 so he could resume work at Buzard Pipe Organ Builders.

Many people I have spoken with have described challenging months, yet they have almost always also shared silver linings like cherishing time with family and friends or pursuing new projects. My 2020 and 2021 were the same: over seventy concerts were postponed (incredibly, very few canceled entirely), which broke my heart, but my time was filled with writing articles, teaching in person and over Zoom (which I had been doing while traveling, even before 2020!), and learning new repertoire. I also took a course in occupational ergonomics to support my teaching of injury prevention. The world felt like it was on hold for so long, but hope was always on the horizon with wonderful events scheduled for the future—many of which are taking place now! 

What are some of your hopes and plans for the future?

We live in such an exciting time. No previous generation has had so much information at their fingertips, just a click away. The work of thousands of previous performers and researchers—and the life experiences of millions of human beings—is there for our perusal and for us to build on. 

It is incredibly easy to pour through stacks of music and literature, both physically and online, and I’m constantly noting repertoire that I want to learn and share with people. Including some of this less-familiar music in programs requires that I show why this music matters and why audiences should care about it. Without knowing the context or inspiration of a particular piece, how could a listener attending a concert after a busy workday be expected to respond to it? They often have nothing to hold onto, particularly with a longer or more esoteric work, so why should they come back to hear more? Highly aware of this, I seek to share my passion for each piece, proposing some ways through which to relate to it. Connecting a particular piece of music with the heart of the listener has become one of my highest performance priorities.

I would also like to help to evolve the definitions of success for us musicians and organists. I have spoken with so many who did not experience their “big break” before age thirty and who desperately strive to feel successful. We are so often told what success should look like that we can no longer hear our internal voice showing us how our unique skills could create something quite different. This leads to discouragement, depression, and sometimes a heartbreaking lack of self-compassion. I tackle this with my students and work with musicians in all stages of life to help curate their unique careers and pursue whatever they hope to achieve. My own path has been rather unusual, with several gap years that opened Europe and Asia for performance and study, and with my primary income from performing and teaching. The latter is integral to who I am as a person and a musician, as is writing articles that continue conversations about a diverse range of ideas.

While I don’t yet have the answer to this challenge, I try to work with my students and colleagues to explore ways to find our place in a world large and varied enough for all of us. We all may play the pipe organ, but our unique backgrounds—culture, language, family, and everything else—cause us to approach life and this instrument so vastly differently that each of us have the potential to fill a gap that the field didn’t even know was there.

It just takes listening.

Thank you, Katelyn!

Katelyn Emerson’s website: katelynemerson.com