EROI Festival 2006: Eastman School of Music

Hans Davidsson is general artistic and research director of the Göteborg Organ Art Center, GOArt, as well as artistic director of the Göteborg International Organ Academy. In 2001, he was appointed professor of organ at the Eastman School Music and project director of the Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative (EROI). In 2006, he was appointed visiting professor at the Bremen Hochschule für Künste, Fachbereich für Musik.

When the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester opened its doors in downtown Rochester, New York in 1921, its benefactor George Eastman made sure that the first class of organ students had facilities that were state of the art, and a superb faculty. In the early twentieth century, Eastman’s truly American vision of the pinnacle of the organ art even allowed that first class of students to choose whether to study “theatre organ” or “legitimate organ” playing. To meet twenty-first-century needs for organ education with the same energy, vision and commitment, Eastman has embarked on a program called the Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative, or EROI. EROI’s main goal has been to update and expand Eastman’s collection of instruments for the whole range of the organ repertoire, making it a global organ facility. EROI’s first major step was to install the largest Italian Baroque organ in North America in the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester in 2005. Its next project will be to restore the Skinner Organ Company’s Opus 325 at Eastman’s Kilbourn Hall to its original 1921 condition. The current phase, the Craighead-Saunders Organ, will be inaugurated in Christ Church (Episcopal) across from the Eastman School of Music on October 16 at EROI’s seventh annual organ festival.
The Craighead-Saunders Organ is a new two-manual, 33-stop instrument named after David Craighead and Russell Saunders, two renowned professors of organ at the Eastman School of Music. They will both be celebrated by faculty, students and alumni at the opening symposium of this year’s festival, including the presentation of a new biography of Russell Saunders by Martha H. Sobaje.
The Craighead-Saunders Organ is a scientific reconstruction of an organ from 1776 built by Adam Gottlob Casparini for the Holy Ghost Church in Vilnius, Lithuania, and represents a Baltic-North European building style from the height of Enlightenment-era Europe. The finished instrument is the result of a six-year interdisciplinary research project between GOArt (the Göteborg Organ Art Center) and the Eastman School of Music on the processes of eighteenth-century organ building. GOArt is an interdisciplinary research center at Gothenburg University in Sweden, devoted to the study of the organ and related keyboard instruments and their music. A basic idea shaping GOArt’s research environment is to study the organ not just as a musical instrument, but also as a visual object, cultural artifact, and technological construction, and to communicate its research results to students, scholars and builders. In this latest project, GOArt worked in collaboration with a reference group that included leading American organbuilders as well as key members of Eastman’s faculty. This reference group made decisions for the project by consensus through the entire design and building process.
The result is a new and fresh instrument that challenges us to listen to, look at, and interact with an aesthetic that hasn’t been experienced this way anywhere since the end of the eighteenth century. The instrument’s soundscape is made up of over 1800 carefully reconstructed pipes that have been voiced by Munetaka Yokota based on strict principles that follow the original instrument’s design and documentation. Its case, built following eighteenth-century methods, creates an object like a Baroque theater set, painted in egg tempera and gilded and hand-burnished by German experts and a small army of volunteers. The colorful instrument and its generously proportioned new timber-frame balcony will provide an opportunity to explore eighteenth-century vocal and ensemble music using a large organ as the main continuo instrument. The tonal resources will make it possible to explore traditional continuo registration practice in this repertoire for the first time in a century.
The Craighead-Saunders Organ’s potential to offer new perspectives on the music of J. S. Bach and his sons and pupils has inspired the two-day symposium at the heart of this year’s EROI Festival, entitled “J. S. Bach and the Organ.” This symposium, co-sponsored by the Westfield Center, brings together leading Bach scholars and performers from around the world. Highlights will include the 2008 Glenn E. Watkins Lecture delivered by Christoph Wolff, as well as a concert of Bach’s cantatas performed by members of the Christ Church Schola Cantorum and the Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Players.
On Saturday the festival continues with a final symposium, “Reconstruction as a Model for Research and Creation,” co-sponsored by the Organ Historical Society. A natural continuation of the EROI Festival in 2007 (“New Dimensions in Organ Documentation and Conservation”), lectures and panel discussions will address the complementary process of documenting the original Casparini organ and creating the reconstruction in Rochester.

Rochester participates in the AGO Organ Spectacular
The 2008 EROI festival will help celebrate the American Guild of Organists’ International Day of the Organ here in Rochester. A Sunday afternoon program co-sponsored by the Rochester AGO chapter, “Organ Spectacular—An International Organ Celebration,” will give alumni and registered participants the opportunity to experience the wide range of Rochester’s growing organ landscape. This year, two new organs in Rochester will have their inaugurations during the festival. Paul Fritts has just completed his Opus 26 for Sacred Heart Cathedral, and George Taylor and John Boody the new Tannenberg-style organ, Opus 57, in Pittsford First Presbyterian Church. Throughout the day, other participating venues and area churches will offer open houses, mini-concerts, and/or organ demonstrations by resident organists and Eastman students. This will take place in cooperation with the Rochester AGO chapter. For more information and a list of events and locations, contact Nicole Marane, event coordinator ([email protected]), or visit the EROI (www.rochester.edu/EROI) or Rochester AGO (www.agorochester.org) websites.
The inaugural festival for the Craighead-Saunders Organ at Christ Church will take place October 16–20 in conjunction with the University of Rochester’s Meliora Weekend and the Eastman School of Music’s Eastman Weekend. Registration materials are available online on the EROI website. For more information on the Craighead-Saunders Organ and recent photos, visit <www.esm.rochester.edu/EROI/c-s.php&gt;.

Spellings and capitalizations are all according to the original stop labels from the 1776 Casparini organ and the order is given according to the use of these capitalizations.

CLAVIATURA PRIMA
BOURDUN. á 16.
PRINCIPAL. á 8.
HOHLFLAUT. á 8.
QVINTATHON. á 8.
Octava Principal. á 4.
Flaut Travers. á 4.
Super Octava. á 2.
Flasch Flot. á 2.
Qvinta. á 5.
Tertia. á 1 3/5
Mixtura. á 5. Choris.
Trompet. á 8.

Claviatura Secunda
PRINCIPAL. á 4.
IULA. á 8.
Principal Amalel. á 8.
Unda Maris. á 8.
Flaut Major. á 8.
Flaut Minor. á 4.
Spiel Flet. á 4.
Octava. á 2.
Wald Flot. á 2.
Mixtura. á 4. Choris.
Vox Humana. á 8.
Dulcian. á 16.*

PEDAL
Principal Bass. á 16.
Violon Bass. á 16.
Full Bass. á 12.
Octava Bass. á 8.
Flaut & Quint Bass. á 8.
Super Octava Bass. á 4.
Posaun Bass. á 16.
Trompet Bass. á 8.

*This position was never occupied on the original windchest.
There is no information preserved about the type and pitch of the reed stop once planned for this position. The Craighead-Saunders Organ has a Dulcian 16?.

Accessories
Ventil ad Claviaturam Primam.
Ventil ad Claviaturam Secundum.
Ventil Pedall.
2 Tremulants
BEBNY. (Drum)
Vox Campanarum (Glockenspiel)
Gwiazdy. (Cymbelstern)
Kalilujactgo. (Calcant)
Shove Coupler (Claviatura Secunda to Claviatura Prima)
Pedal to Claviaturam Primam Coupler
Compass: Manuals: C–d3; Pedal: C–d1

Born in 1940, Jerker Sjöqvist is a former teacher, organist and choirmaster, cello and recorder player. He visited the UK for the first time in 1977, and started his own Evensong group, which appeared some 200 times in Sweden, Italy, Austria, Germany, and the UK. He brought about 300 Swedish choirmasters to Cambridge in the 1980s for choir training, and arranged tours in Sweden and Norway for St. John’s College Choir, Cambridge. He has written reviews on organ and choral music, and has arranged tours across Europe, including three organ tours with American organist Matthew Provost to Ostfriesland and Bach organs in Sachsen (Germany) and Alsace, a Dutch organ tour with Jacques van Oortmerssen, a 2007 tour to Paris, and last fall a USA tour in cooperation with the late Joel Kuznik. He was a member of the board and treasurer of the Swedish Union of Organists 1985–2005, and since 2004 has been treasurer of the Swedish Society of Organ Friends.

The Swedish Organ Society (Svenska Orgelsällskapet) came to the United States October 16–22 to attend concert highlights of the Eastman-Rochester Organ Initiative, which focused on the new Craighead-Saunders Organ built by GOArt of Sweden. They then traveled to New York and Philadelphia for an additional taste of American organbuilding.
In March 1771, Adam Gottlob Casparini (1715–1788) delivered a magnificent organ to the Polish Dominican Holy Ghost Church in Vilnius, Lithuania. The organ, the only surviving example of this productive Prussian organbuilder’s larger instruments, has miraculously been preserved intact in a world of war and political conflict. World War II and the political situation during the Soviet era undoubtedly played a part in the organ’s preservation from major renovations during the 20th century.
In 1992, Swedish organist Göran Grahn (well-known organ consultant and Secretary of the International Society of Organbuilders, ISO) made this major discovery during one of his many journeys in the Baltic countries. He came into contact with a local organ expert, Rimantas Gucas, who had been taking care of the organ, which by that point was a more or less unusable treasure. Money was in short supply, and there were many bureaucratic obstacles that slowed the progress of the restoration project. After being tipped off about the instrument, Göteborg Organ Art Center (GOArt), Sweden, became involved and made a deal with the Lithuanian Department of Culture in 1999 to document the organ. This technical documentation during the next three years was done by Niclas Fredriksson of the Swedish National Heritage Board, in cooperation with local scholars and organbuilders.
The project thereafter ran on two distinct tracks. One track was the restoration of the original organ by Lithuanian conservators, but to date they have only restored the organ case, with the rebuilding of the bellows, windchests, and action to be done under the supervision of Janis Kalnins. There is still insufficient money to restore the pipework, but many are hard at work to realize the goal of a completely restored organ.
The second track is based on the new documentation more recently done by a team of American organbuilders and the Eastman School of Music, whose Hans Davidsson, professor of organ, was a driving force behind this project. The school runs an ambitious program called the Eastman-Rochester Organ Initiative (EROI), which with GOArt has built a full-scale reconstruction of the Casparini organ, in Christ Church (Episcopal), Rochester. The reconstruction includes a second tremulant, and a Dulcian 16′ has been added to the second manual. The instrument was also equipped with a pedal coupler, and the upper range in both manuals and pedal has been extended with two keys. The glockenspiel and zimbelstern were made by Whitechapel Bell Foundry in England, and the original wood carvings were documented and reproduced by the American firm New Energy Works, also responsible for the reconstructed balcony.
On Thursday, October 16, 2008, EROI began with the inauguration of the Craighead-Saunders organ. The event featured music and speeches from many people, including the president of the University of Rochester, the Lithuanian ambassador, and the director of GOArt, Johan Norrback. Harald Vogel, who served as the official inspector, played Bach’s Prelude in C Major (BWV 545) with his usual authority and a sublime plenum.
The three organ professors of Eastman also reinforced the organ’s aural success in playing Stephen Kennedy’s new composition 3-3-33 (three players, three movements, 33 stops). William Porter showcased a wide variety of registrations and ended with Bach’s Allein Gott in der Höh (BWV 662). David Higgs played an impressive performance of Mendelssohn’s Sonata in F Minor, op. 65, no. 1. Hans Davidsson presented a fresh and brilliant rendition of Bach’s Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major (BWV 564), accompanied with dancing by the Rochester City Ballet in the choir.
The inaugural concert concluded with the sinfonia and chorus from Bach’s cantata Wir danken dir, Gott (BWV 29), which was performed with a beautiful blend of organ, voices and orchestra. The impression was, however, that the visiting Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Players have some things to learn from baroque performance practice in the old world, an impression also reinforced during Friday’s gala concert.
A group of 18 traveling enthusiasts from the Swedish Organ Society (Svenska Orgelsällskapet) were joined by an equally large group from the Friends of the Organ Art (an association with a special connection to GOArt), who together with other visiting Swedes created a noticeable Swedish presence. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the newly built reconstruction of what may be the largest well-preserved instrument in northern Europe. It was a wonder to behold and during the many recitals provided an unforgettably splendid aural experience.

The Craighead-Saunders Organ
Christ Church Episcopal, Rochester, NY
Modeled after the 1776 Adam Gottlob
Casparini Organ, Holy Ghost Church, Vilnius, Lithuania

Claviatura Prima
Principal á 8
Porduna á 16
Hohlflaut á 8
Flaut Travers á 4
Octava Principal á 4
Qvinta á 3
Super Octava á 2
Flasch Flöt á 2
Tertia á 13⁄5
Mixtura á 5 Choris
Trompet á 8

Claviatura Secunda
Principal á 4
Iula á 8
Principal Amalel á 8
Unda Maris á 8
Flaut Major á 8
Flaut Minor á 4
Octava á 2
Wald Flöt á 2
Mixtura á 4 Choris
Vox Humana á 8
Dulciana á 16

Pedall
Principal Bass á 16
Violon Bass á 6
Octava Bass á 8
Flaut & Quint Bass á 4
Posaun Bass á 16
Trompet Bass á 8
Accessories

Tremulant
Pedal to Manual Coupler
Gwiazdy (Cymbelstern)
Vox Campanorum (Glockenspiel)
Bebny (drum stop)
Calcant

The 2016 EROI (Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative) Festival will explore historical, conceptual, and practical aspects of the interaction between organ and voice from October 26 through 28 at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. Titled “Breath for Singing: The Organ and the Human Voice,” the festival also features the premiere performance of a new hymn commissioned for the conference, with text by Yale theologian and poet Thomas Troeger and music by internationally recognized composer Nico Muhly.