Franz Liszt and Johann Gottlob Töpfer: A Fruitful Relationship in Weimar

Pianist and harmoniumist Artis Wodehouse has a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from Yale, and a DMA from Stanford. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant led to her producing CDs and publishing transcriptions of recorded performances and piano rolls made by George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton, and Zez Confrey. In 2000, Wodehouse began performing on antique reed organs and harmoniums that she had painstakingly restored and brought to concert condition. She founded the chamber group MELODEON in 2010 to present little-known but valuable music from 19th- and early 20th-century America, using her antique instrument collection as the basis for repertoire choice. 

During its prime in the nineteenth-century, the reed organ was the preferred instrument in American homes and also deemed a fit substitute for the more expensive pipe organ. Large reed organs became common in civic gathering halls and smaller churches. Despite the popularity of reed organs in America,¹ music for them consisted primarily of simplified arrangements of European art music, easy-to-play popular and sentimental ditties, polkas, marches, and waltzes, or hymns and other service music associated with worship or civic gatherings.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century it became apparent that design variation from company to company and from organ to organ, even within a given company’s fleet of models, was preventing composers from writing idiomatic original music for the American reed organ. The limited market for music crafted for one or another of the competing designs was too small to sustain widespread printing and marketing of scores.²

Without its own literature, such as had been created during the nineteenth century for its European counterpart, the harmonium, the American reed organ had an uncertain future. It would continue to be regarded at best as “a sort of weak substitute for the church organ.”³ Then, in the mid-1890s, at essentially the beginning of the end of the reed organ era, Mason & Hamlin⁴ began to address the problem by introducing an action design⁵ whose capabilities would “insure the greatest advantages to the composers, at the same time enable the manufacturer to place his instruments on the market at as low a price as possible.” The new action design was called the “Normal-Harmonium.” This was the action design for which the American composer Arthur Bird (1856–1923) wrote his compelling body of reed organ music. Figure 1 shows the Mason & Hamlin American reed organ, with Normal-Harmonium action design. Two knee levers are above the foot pedals. The right lever controls the internal swell shades; the left lever activates the Grand Jeu.

Mason & Hamlin’s Normal-Harmonium action design and Arthur Bird’s creation of a substantial, idiomatic music for the American reed organ came too late. Piano sales that had roared ahead after the Civil War rapidly displaced the reed organ. In the 1880s, reed organ sales slipped below that of pianos. By World War I, the glory days of the reed organ were over.⁶

Two competing
19th-century instruments: 

The American reed organ
and the European harmonium 

In the 1840s, United States inventors and businessmen founded companies that offered distinctive fleets of reed organ models. Reed organs were built in a bewildering variety of brands, sizes, and stoplist configurations. They ranged from diminutive four-octave home models that traveled to the West in covered wagons, to large, expensive instruments with powerful tone, full pedalboards, and many stops. 

The American reed organ used one or more sets of brass “free reeds” in order to generate tone. The performer’s foot pumping activated suction bellows that generated a stream of moving air, much like a vacuum cleaner. When the performer depressed a key, this moving air passed through a small chamber in which the reed was affixed at one end, but free to vibrate on the other end (hence the designation, “free reed”). The reeds varied in length, and the longer the reed, the lower the tone. Air rushing through the chamber caused the reed to vibrate, and tone to be produced. When a reed organ had more than one set of reeds, a set could be brought into play or silenced by allowing or blocking the moving air via stop pulls. As with the pipe organ, a set of shutters or swell shades located within the action facilitated dynamic contrasts. The performer opened or shut them on a gradient via a knee paddle. 

The largest and most prominent reed organ companies were Mason & Hamlin in Boston and Estey in Brattleboro, Vermont, but scores of others proved successful. As the nineteenth century progressed, American reed organs became increasingly complex. Inventors developed voicing techniques that produced a broad range of distinctive and contrasting timbres, named using terms derived from pipe organ nomenclature.⁷ Instruments built with multiple sets of differently voiced reeds featured multiple stops and a divided keyboard⁸ so that the player could choose contrasting timbres in the treble and bass of a single keyboard. Large reed organs were sometimes built with multiple keyboards, like pipe organs. The more reeds in an instrument, the more expensive it would be. 

Another keyboard instrument employing differently voiced sets of free reeds in airtight chambers arose in Europe during the nineteenth century. A Frenchman, Alexandre Debain, patented this instrument in 1842, naming it a “harmonium.” (See Figure 2.) 

Like the American reed organ, the European harmonium came to offer a broad range of distinctive and contrasting timbres controlled by stop pulls, and a divided keyboard that enabled the choice of different timbres in the treble and bass. (See Figure 3.)

Despite some similarity in design to the American reed organ, the European harmonium did not employ the American-style bellows system (suction) that pulled moving air in and through the reed chamber. Instead, in the European system, air was pushed through and out via pressure, producing sound like a trumpet or an oboe. The different airflow systems require different technical skills of the performer and produce distinctly different tonal characteristics. (See Figure 4.)

Foot pumping on the harmonium manages two important functions because of the way harmonium bellows were designed to work: the performer maintains constant airflow while simultaneously adjusting the relative airflow speed responsible for dynamic contrasts.⁹ Manipulating airflow velocity to effect dynamic changes was called “expression,” and this function had its own specially assigned stop pull. An additional European innovation for facilitating dynamic contrast was the invention of the so-called “double expression.” It was installed in the more costly European harmoniums. Double expression, a capability arising no doubt from a desire to mimic the piano’s ability to balance melody and accompaniment, allowed the performer to control not only the overall loudness but also the relative volume of the treble and bass on a gradient. Double expression is controlled by two knee levers installed under the keyboard and above the two foot-pump pedals. The skill required to play smoothly and expressively on the harmonium demands much practice.  

Late-speaking reeds, i.e., those with a time lag between the act of depressing a key and the sounding of its corresponding tone, hampered performers on both the American reed organ and the European harmonium.¹⁰ Although quick airflow delivery to the reeds was a design priority for both reed organ and harmonium builders, the Americans felt that beyond a certain point, slight lags were an acceptable characteristic of the instrument for which the performer was expected to make appropriate adjustments. The Europeans, however, took a different approach. To mitigate the problem of late speech (and to provide an additional tonal effect) they positioned small felt-covered hammers next to each of the reeds of the set most frequently used in performance. These little hammers were controlled by a stop pull, referred to as “percussion.” When the percussion stop is pulled and a key is depressed, the little hammers simultaneously strike the sounding reed, causing it to speak more quickly and incisively, like a crisp piano attack. The harmonium’s percussion makes performance of rapid passagework more predictable when compared to the American reed organ.

The most far-reaching advantage the harmonium held over the American reed organ was the standardization of stops generally agreed upon by the European companies. Standardization had two benefits: it made it possible to print in music scores commonly understood registration that could be used across instruments built by different companies. Secondly, performers could move from one harmonium to another with a minimum of adjustment.¹¹

It should be noted that the terms “harmonium” and “reed organ” were and continue to be used interchangeably. Lack of a clear and consistent terminology must be laid at the door of the overlapping and competing terms originally used. In their heyday, American reed organs were most frequently referred to as simply “organs,” but other names were used as well. These included Organ-Harmonium and Cabinet Organ, two different terms used by the same company, Mason & Hamlin. There were also fanciful names such as Phonorium, used by Estey.¹²

Harmonium and American reed organ repertoire

The capabilities of the European harmonium and the move towards standardization¹³ attracted several important nineteenth-century European composers. Elgar, Strauss, Schoenberg, Webern, Mahler, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Rossini made good use of the harmonium in some of their orchestral and/or choral works. Berlioz, Franck, Saint-Saëns, Guilmant, Widor, and many others wrote high quality solo and chamber music for it. Finally, the German composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877–1933) made it his mission to develop a body of repertoire that would exploit the unique sonic and expressive capabilities of the Art Harmonium. During the early twentieth century Karg-Elert wrote what has proved to be the single most significant body of solo and chamber music for the instrument. The popularity of the European harmonium peaked about 1900, slightly later than the American reed organ’s peak of popularity.

Relatively few harmoniums made it across the Atlantic during the nineteenth century. On the other hand, American reed organs were exported and sold in fair numbers throughout Europe, particularly those built by Mason & Hamlin.¹⁴ Also, several European manufacturers such as Lindholm, Mannborg, and Shiedmayer adopted the American suction bellows system for their instruments.¹⁵ Nevertheless, despite significant cross-Atlantic distribution of the American reed organ and the availability of native European instruments with some shared characteristics, the American reed organ never established an artistic foothold through a representative body of high-quality music comparable to that written for the harmonium. This cannot be fully explained by the technical differences between the two as outlined above. Although the American instrument may have lacked the harmonium’s more refined control of dynamics and its useful percussion stop, the best American instruments, such as the Mason & Hamlin Liszt Organ, have a distinctive tonal beauty and a multiplicity of sounds equal to those of their European counterparts. 

The promotional prominence and enlarged, relatively standardized capabilities of Mason & Hamlin’s flagship Liszt Organ may therefore have been the impetus behind Boston-based American publisher Arthur Schmidt to print a few works for it during the 1890s. Schmidt’s publications for the Liszt Organ included both original compositions as well as arrangements of famous European works for organ solo, duets with piano, and chamber pieces. But apart from Eugene Gigout’s excellent Romanza for the Liszt Organ, unfortunately none of the rest rose to a similarly high quality.

Arthur Bird, American expatriate composer (1856–1923) 

Around 1896, Mason & Hamlin likely encouraged and may have actually commissioned the American composer Arthur Bird to write idiomatic art music for the standardized action they introduced during the 1890s, called the Normal-Harmonium. 

No documentation has yet surfaced indicating payment to Bird for his work by the firm. Nevertheless, key musical and personal circumstances link Arthur Bird to the most significant people associated with the Mason & Hamlin Company. Central to the connection between Arthur Bird and Mason & Hamlin was Franz Liszt. A canny seer, Liszt bet correctly on the ability of eager young American pianists and composers to hold high the torch of pianism and to carry forward the music of the future. Liszt welcomed them, offering his inspired pedagogy and worldly professional connections free of charge. Liszt’s generosity forged a well-documented bond among his pupils. Liszt’s first American student was the pianist William Mason (1829–1908). Mason studied with Liszt beginning in 1849, and brought back to the United States Liszt’s pedagogic principles through an extensive career of teaching, performing, and publishing. William Mason also happened to be the brother of Henry Mason, who in 1854 co-founded the Mason & Hamlin Company. Henry and William Mason were in turn sons of Lowell Mason, an important American hymn composer and musical educator during the first half of the nineteenth century. 

Liszt owned and wrote music for numerous keyboard instruments provided for him by both European and American companies.¹⁶ Among such instruments in his sizable collection was a Mason & Hamlin cabinet organ that he acquired in the 1870s. Later, Mason & Hamlin’s flagship high-end model came to be named the “Liszt Organ,” a likely outcome of the close connection between Liszt, his pupil William Mason, and the Mason & Hamlin Company.¹⁷ The Mason & Hamlin Liszt Organ was introduced about 1880. Complex, colorful, powerful, and versatile, the Liszt Organ was designed to compete with the best European harmoniums. While the Liszt Organ shared many tonal and functional features with the Normal-Harmonium design, it had a different tessitura (five octaves, C to C, versus the Normal-Harmonium’s F to F) and a different split point (E–F versus B–C for the Normal-Harmonium).

Arthur Bird was also one of Liszt’s American pupils, coming to him during Liszt’s later years.¹⁸ Bird’s musical and personal background strikingly resembled that of William Mason. Born in Belmont, Massachusetts in 1856, Bird’s early musical training came from his father and uncle, who were born-and-bred American church musicians. Arthur’s father, Horace Bird, and his uncle, Joseph Bird, were active in the New England of the 1840s and 1850s as voice teachers, composers of hymns and songs, and editors of singing books written to develop score-reading literacy. Upon the advice of William Mason’s father, Lowell Mason, young Arthur Bird was sent in 1875 to study in Germany at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Returning to North America two years later, he took a church music position in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he began to compose. He returned to Berlin in 1881 to study composition and orchestration. It was during this time that Bird came into the Liszt orbit.  

By his early 30s (in the mid-1880s), Bird had become well established as an organist and pianist. His compositions were published and performed widely in Europe. Bird spent most of his life abroad, mainly in Berlin, where he married a wealthy German widow and apparently lived lavishly. In 1897 Bird returned for some time to the United States in what proved to be a failed attempt to have his comic operetta, Daphne, performed in America. Reading between the lines of William Loring’s biographical work on Arthur Bird, is it possible that Bird wished to forge a closer connection to his native country? Certainly a major production of an opera by a United States-born composer within the United States would be an excellent vehicle for that scenario. During the late 1890s, when the quest for “genuine” American composers was in full swing, Bird may have sensed an opportunity. In any event, in that same year (1897), the first of Bird’s pieces for the Mason & Hamlin “American Harmonium” (op. 37) were published by Breitkopf and Härtel, an important German firm still operating that publishes high-art European music.¹⁹

Characteristics of Arthur Bird’s “American Harmonium”

The historic trajectory mating Arthur Bird with the Normal-Harmonium came just at the point when the piano had overtaken reed organ sales. Mason & Hamlin realized that in order to survive in the long term, the reed organ needed some good original music. The publication of Arthur Bird’s music for the “American Harmonium” came at a historic crossroad for the American reed organ, largely due to the rise of the American piano. From the 1850s, pianos, and particularly American pianos, started to benefit from standardization and mechanical manufacturing methods of the industrial revolution. Prior to this time, pianos were mainly handcrafted items. Likewise around 1850, the design of the piano, particularly the American piano, moved rapidly toward increased durability and a greater dynamic and pitch range. Piano types coalesced into three categories: square, grand, and finally, upright. Each of these types served a clear purpose. As a result, consumers began to turn to the piano as a viable keyboard alternative to the reed organ, particularly in the home market, where the reed organ had ruled uncontested.²⁰ Sales of pianos grew steadily through the nineteenth century.

In contrast to the piano industry, American reed organ manufacturers from the 1850s to the 1900s offered consumers instruments of a wide variety of sizes, competing capabilities, nomenclature, and above all, case styles.²¹ After the Civil War, American manufacturers also developed complex instruments of considerable beauty, sophistication, and expense. These large instruments with enhanced performance capabilities were aimed at a smaller “niche” market, for placement in the homes of the wealthy, civic or religious meeting halls, and small churches. But after a sustained growth period lasting about 40 years, sales of the American reed organ began to decline in the 1880s.

The Normal-Harmonium action design of the 1890s for which Bird wrote was conceived to meet these market challenges. Mason & Hamlin worked with and adopted the Normal-Harmonium design in collaboration with two entities associated with the company: their German representative Paul Koeppen and the Bender firm in Leiden, Holland.²² Mason & Hamlin’s goal was to provide a standardized instrument that could compete with the piano and its plentiful repertoire. Their instrument had to be sophisticated enough to attract composers to write good music for it and be of a reasonable cost. 

Mason & Hamlin met both of its goals. First, the cost of an instrument with Normal-Harmonium specifications was indeed lower by half or more than that of the top of the Mason & Hamlin line, the Liszt Organ. The price of the Liszt came in at $700, but instruments with Normal-Harmonium capabilities could be had between $260 and $300.²³ Second, the Normal-Harmonium action provided attractive and useful performance capabilities. These included a pitch range of five octaves from F to F and multiple sets of reeds offering an elaborate stoplist. American reed organs with the Normal-Harmonium action design began to be manufactured in the 1890s and continued to be built until the company ceased reed organ production in the early 1920s.

As mentioned previously, inconsistent nomenclature and lack of a simple explanation for actual performance capability plagued the field. Although Mason & Hamlin offered a standardized action design in the Normal-Harmonium, Bird’s music itself was identified on the score as being intended for the “American Harmonium” and/or the “Normal-Harmonium.” Nomenclature had still not jelled. Therefore it must be stressed that the terms “American Harmonium” and Mason & Hamlin “Normal-Harmonium” do not refer to any one specific instrument, but rather to an action design embodying certain specific capabilities. 

Figure 5 shows the overhead view of interior of the Mason & Hamlin American organ with Normal-Harmonium specs. To the upper right is the paddle that is activated to rotate by the Vox Humana stop. The upper left box houses the very large Sub Bass reeds. The specific capabilities of the Normal-Harmonium are as follows. 

Stoplist:

Diapason Dolce 8′—the Diapason, mechanically softened. 

Sub Bass 16′—consists of 13 notes, the chromatic octave upward from low C. This stop uses the largest, longest reeds, producing a deep, rich, and powerful sound.

Eolian Harp 2′—two detuned sets of reeds producing a shimmering, ethereal vibrato.

Diapason 8′—pure, organ-like tone. 

Viola 4′—resembles the sound of the orchestral instrument for which it is named.

Viola Dolce 4′—the Viola, mechanically softened.

Vox Humana—adds a vibrato or tremolo. Can be used in combination with any of the other drawn stops in the treble. Activated by the turning of a windmill-like paddle located inside the action.

Seraphone 8′—differs from the Diapason in timbre. Focused and slightly nasal.

Flute 4′—resembles the sound of the orchestral instrument for which it is named.

Melodia 8′—continuation in the treble of the Diapason reeds.

Vox Celeste 8′—another stop combining two sets of detuned reeds that creates a vibrato effect. 

Octave Coupler—when pulled, mechanically connects a note to that of one an octave higher.

Melodia Dolce 8′—mechanically softened Melodia. 

The split point on the keyboard is between B and middle C. Stops from Seraphone 8′ up activate the treble, the stops from Viola Dolce, down, the bass.

Mechanical devices:

Grand Jeu—activated by a knee paddle located under the keys above the left foot pump pedal. The Grand Jeu causes all the reeds to sound at once, producing the instrument’s fullest and loudest sound.

Swell—activated by a knee paddle located under the keys above the right foot pump pedal. This device controls the internal shutters responsible for dynamic contrasts. (See Figure 6.)

Arthur Bird as composer

During his lifetime, Arthur Bird was recognized as an active, widely published, and well-received composer of some stature, particularly in Europe. Incidentally, his successful European career was launched in no small part because of the positive public and private endorsements Bird received from the influential Franz Liszt. 

Bird’s oeuvre is extensive, including opera and theatre works, orchestral music, songs, piano materials, chamber works (particularly those for wind instruments, for which he is best-remembered today), organ, and many other forms. Bird wrote a sizeable number of short solo piano pieces in well-established standard dance forms and topical styles—march, waltz, minuet, gavotte, lullaby, and mazurka. His extensive experience composing in this genre prepared Bird well to write for the American reed organ. Bird’s music is available in score at the Library of Congress through the generous donation of his widow and has been amply documented through the International Music Score Library Project.²⁴

Relatively little of Bird’s music has been recorded.²⁵ What is available tends to confirm the critical reception his work received during his lifetime. Reviewing a performance of [Bird’s] Serenade for Wind Instruments, op. 40, the Berliner Borsen Courier said: “It is distinguished for the freshness and spontaneity of its invention, as well as the clever craftsmanship and the clear and compact disposition of its different parts . . .” Another critic comments: “Characteristically his music is pleasing and melodious in composition. It is coherent and well developed in form. It lies easily within the range of the instruments, and displays no little knowledge of their resources.” Of him, [Arthur] Farwell wrote: “Arthur Bird is known as the possessor of a fertile and truly musical imagination and a thorough technique . . .
Bird is a musician of German training and French sympathies and calls himself a conditional modernist.” Mentioning that Bird composed in almost all forms, [Louis] Elson says of him: “He is an excellent contrapuntist, yet uses his skill in this direction as a means rather than as an end, seldom making a display of his knowledge. It is a pleasure to find an American composer who is not anxious to out-Wagner and who goes along the peaceful tenor of recognized and classical ways.”26 Bird was even described as “the most promising American composer of the middle and late Eighties” by no less than the important conductor,
Arthur Nikisch.²⁷ 

The amount and dating of Bird’s production seem to confirm Loring’s supposition²⁸ that after 1900, Bird’s work dwindled, though his reed organ works of 1905 (op. 45) maintain his previously held high standard. On the other hand, his simplified arrangements, American Melodies Specially Adapted and Arranged for Normal-Harmonium of 1907, appear to have been written simply for profit and lack the artistic value of his earlier work for the American Harmonium.

Arthur Bird’s music for the American Harmonium

Those who either possessed or might  have considered purchasing an instrument with the Normal-Harmonium action design would likely be individuals of some performance ability and/or a level of musical sophistication high enough to appreciate the artistic features of the instrument. They would also likely appreciate piano music of the better salon variety, up to and including Schumann’s, Chopin’s, or Grieg’s short works for solo piano. Finally, they would most likely be of the social class that would appreciate hearing this music, most likely in the home setting. 

Bird’s conservatism—informed by fine craftsmanship, deft handling of instrumental color, and fluency in miniature forms—may not have been enough to place him into the compositional pantheon of his trailblazing European contemporaries (Mahler, Debussy, etc.), but his abilities ideally suited him for writing salon-oriented character pieces of the type popularized by Mason & Hamlin’s Normal-Harmonium. An already accomplished American composer, Bird’s impeccable, media-worthy credentials and network of connections to Mason & Hamlin were a further plus. Bird was a perfect fit.

Bird published six opus numbers for the Normal-Harmonium.²⁹ All contain interesting and beautiful music, but the best of these was his first, the ten pieces of op. 37.³⁰ In the first printing, the op. 37 pieces were identified directly on the score’s front pages as being intended for the “American Harmonium”³¹ or for the Mason & Hamlin “Normal-Harmonium.” A page is devoted to an explanation of the stops required and their manner of notation in the score. Bird used circled letters derived from the stop name. For instance, Diapason is D; Viola, V; Voix Celeste, VC; and so forth. Later print runs of op. 37 contain the same explanatory page, but also indicate standard stop numbers, i.e., 1 for Diapason, 3 for Viola, 5 for Eolian Harp, etc., that would correspond to numbers appearing on European suction instruments of equivalent capability.³²

While no piece in the op. 37 set lasts more than three minutes, each exhibits a mastery of craft: beautifully spun-out melodies, masterful counterpoint, subtly personalized inflections of nineteenth-century harmonic practice, and traditional formal structures handled with deft assurance. Bird’s forms are not unusual (ABA, sonata, rondo). But because the Normal-Harmonium’s unique instrumental colors are an integral component of Bird’s structural designs, the listener experiences an additional dimension of thematic transformation. In his music for Normal-Harmonium, Bird’s assimilation of instrumental color as a component of structural rhetoric relates his music to that of the nascent French impressionists at the turn-of-the-century. The following briefly describes salient features of each of the pieces in Bird’s op. 37:

1. Meditation—a sarabande. In this mini-Wagnerian contrapuntal ramble, Bird employs kaleidoscopic stop changes that underscore the evolving melodic twists and turns.

2. Preludium—brooding and dramatic four-part writing in an ABA structure. Registration is simple, but Bird uses the octave coupler at the recapitulation, reinforcing and underscoring the harmonic excursions introduced as the piece moves toward an impassioned final cadence.

3. Adagio—elegiac four-part mini-sonata. Development section comprises a series of recitative-like meandering arpeggios over sustained chords. Recapitulation re-registers the opening material over low pedal points. With more recitative-like arpeggios at the coda, the piece concludes with a simple fadeout on the ethereal Eolian Harp stop.

4. Reverie—features a long-breathed, haunting, and tentative treble melody on the flute stop set against slithering countermelodies registered on the atmospheric Eolian Harp stop. In ABA form, the melody’s return is entirely recast in a fuller texture with the foundation 8′ and 4′ stops. In partnership with a walking bass line, the melody’s tentative first appearance is thereby transformed into an affirmative point of arrival. The coda brings the listener back to the ethereal Eeolian Harp, rounding the piece off as it began.³³

5. Postlude—hearkens back to Bird’s American past, a spirited march that suggests a full wind band.³⁴ Bird’s registration indicates that the piece must be played in its entirety using only one setting, the circled G indicating “Grand Jeu.” Because Grand Jeu causes all the stops to sound at once, finger strength and vigorous foot pumping are required throughout. 

6. Improvisato—a fierce, somewhat virtuosic piece. Registration involving the basic 8′ and 4′ stops is augmented at the recapitulation by use of the Grand Jeu. Rapid, conjunct passagework in the wild coda comes off surprisingly well, despite the lack of a percussion stop. Bird was a hands-on composer and knew what the Mason & Hamlin organ could do.³⁵ 

7. Offertoire—This piece would be suitable for use in a church setting. It is an atmospheric sweet/sour composition with change of mode. 

8. Scherzo—This is the most technically demanding of the set, an extended rondo. Rapid sixteenth notes scattered throughout the piece when the octave-coupler is drawn or the Grand Jeu is activated require finger strength and precise articulation. Not only the performer’s skill is tested: Bird takes the instrument itself to the edge of its mechanical ability to sound quick notes on the fly. Registration is extraordinarily full and rich, suggesting an orchestra. 

9. Auf dem Lande—a melancholy, minor “folksong” melody is transformed to a grand, affirmative conclusion in major mode.

10. Pastoral—perhaps the most inventive and idiomatic of the entire set. Bird’s motivic ideas have a symbiotic relationship with the instrumental colors he brings to bear. Set above continuously sustained low pedal points, a flowing conjunct melody in the treble twines about an ostinato pattern in the mid range. In order to keep the pedal points depressed while so much action is occurring that requires two hands, lead weights must be used to hold down the pedal-point notes.

The American reed organ, Arthur Bird, and the future

The composition of high-quality, original repertoire for the European harmonium during the nineteenth century has proved to have far-reaching consequences. Once thought lost to history, beginning in the 1980s the harmonium has been going through a steady revival, centering in the Netherlands. It seems likely the harmonium will continue to reestablish the place it once held in the classical repertoire. While there continues to be a small but passionate interest in the American reed organ,³⁶ a revival similar in scope and momentum has not yet begun.

As the rise and fall of the American reed organ demonstrates, the key to an instrument’s survival is not its mechanical capabilities, but rather the repertoire written for it. Not just any music will do. What is needed is music that will continue to offer listeners an aesthetic experience independent from the era in which it was created.

In the case of the European harmonium, the point where form and function met occurred when distribution was growing and the instrument’s capability achieved sufficient standardization. This favorable environment attracted a fair number of composers to write significant music for it. Unfortunately for the American reed organ, standardization arrived at the very point when distribution was falling. 

Nevertheless, we are grateful that one composer, Arthur Bird, stepped in during a brief moment of opportunity in the history of the American reed organ. With his ideal combination of skills, commitment, and inspiration, he provided us with music that stands poised to move into the future. ν

Special thanks to Carson Cooman and Whitney Slaten

Notes

1. American publishers also churned out a deluge of reed organ method books intended for the large market of rank amateurs in the United States. 

2. Paul Hassenstein, “The Normal Harmonium And Its Literature,” The Music Trade Review 41:3, July 1905, 87. 

3. Ibid., 87.

4. Mason & Hamlin began as a reed organ manufacturer, but in 1883 started making pianos as well. About 1920 the company ceased making reed organs, but continued their piano line. 

5. “Action design” refers to a specific set of performance capabilities contained within the mechanism of an instrument. Action design was independent of case style. The same action could be enclosed in a variety of cases.

6. Robert F. Gellerman, The American Reed Organ (Vestal, New York: Vestal Press, 1973), 18.

7. Ibid., 97–99. Gellerman’s list of stop names gives some indication of the diversity and lack of standardization among the American reed organ manufacturers.

8. The point of division between bass and treble was called the “split point.”

9. The harmonium did not employ the swell shade of the American system for dynamic contrast because the pressure system made possible quick changes in air speed. Quick control of air speed permits the execution of sharper accents and faster dynamic changes than is typically possible on the American instrument. Simply put, the American instrument is easier to learn how to play, but lacks the degree of potential interpretive refinement offered by the harmonium.

10. The phenomenon is due to inertia. Lowest reeds speak quite slowly: they are the largest reeds, sometimes several inches in length.

11. Gellerman, American Reed Organ, 107.

12. I have consistently used “American Reed Organ” or simply “reed organ” to refer to the suction bellows action design, and “harmonium” to describe the European pressure instrument.

13. Standardized pitch range, split point, sets of stop pulls, shared nomenclature. Nevertheless, as the 19th century progressed, European harmonium manufacturers (like their American counterparts) succumbed to the lure of increased capability that culminated with the celebrated “Art Harmonium.” The Art Harmonium offered a whole new range of attractive colors and capabilities. Music written for the Art Harmonium could not be played on more basic harmonium models.

14. Casey Pratt, e-mail to the author, July 30, 2013. Casey Pratt is a United States reed organ restorer who specializes in the Mason & Hamlin. Exact numbers are not known to date.

15. Ibid. 

16. For instance, Liszt owned a piano-harmonium specially designed for him by Erard and Alexandre and a Chickering grand that was used in his piano master classes. He also collected then “antique” pianos that belonged to Mozart and Beethoven.

17. The Liszt Organ has a set of uniquely voiced, so-called “Liszt” reeds of great tonal beauty. 

18. The main biographical information to date regarding Arthur Bird was amassed by Dr. William Cushing Loring (1914–2002). Loring was a Harvard graduate and an urban sociologist. After retirement, he focused on American art and music, working with Scarecrow Press to develop a series of more than twenty books on various North American composers. 

19. Available at the International Music Score Library Project website: http://imslp.org.

20. Another likely reason piano sales surged ahead of the reed organ resulted from the installment purchase plans offered by piano companies. Once a luxury item of the upper classes, the piano then became affordable to the burgeoning middle class.

21. The flamboyant case styles of American reed organs clearly indicate a function beyond that of simply a musical instrument. In addition to ornate carvings, some reed organ cases featured a façade of non-functional organ “pipes,” mirrors, candle holders, and the like.

22. This information was communicated by Frans Vandergrijn, a Netherlands-based authority on reed organs and harmoniums in a posting on Yahoo’s Reed Organ Restoration newsgroup, August 9, 2013. 

23. Pratt, e-mail to the author, August 10, 2013. To put these prices in perspective, average United States yearly income in 1900 was $438.

24. http://imslp.org/wiki/10_Pieces_for_Harmonium,_Op.37_(Bird,_Arthur_H.)

25. Modern recordings include music for piano 4-hands, op. 23, Vladimir and Nadia Zaitsev, pianists; Introduction and Fugue, op. 16, Tony and Mary Ann Lenti, pianists; Serenade for Wind Instruments, op. 40, Suite for Double Wind Quintet, op. 29 (Naxos), and Carnival Scenes for Orchestra, op. 5 (Albany).

26. William C. Loring, Jr., “Arthur Bird, American,” The Musical Quarterly 29:1, January 1943, 87. 

27. Ibid., 88.

28. Ibid., 86.

29. Op. 37, 1897; op. 38, 1901; op. 39, 1903; op. 41, 1906; op. 42, 1905; op. 44, 1903; op. 45, 1905. All are available at the Library of Congress.

30. Not all of the op. 37 pieces scanned and available in IMSLP come from the original 1897 printing, several being from later editions. The only difference is that additional equivalent registration intended for European suction instruments was added. 

31. My supposition is that Breitkopf titled them for the “American Harmonium” in order to alert purchasers that the intended instrument would be one of American design. European suction instruments could have been more or less acceptable alternatives, but only the Mason & Hamlin Normal-Harmonium would have had the subtle specificity of timbres and tonal balances characteristic of the Mason & Hamlin sound.

32. On IMSLP: http://javanese.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/2/2d/IMSLP65232-PMLP1327…

33. See performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIC9EwIjmks

34. And Percy Grainger’s later work for the reed organ.

35. See performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi6yjMzjKe.

36. The American Reed Organ Society has been in existence since 1981.

References

Archival Sources

Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. Music of Arthur Bird. Includes all his published music for reed organ, plus some manuscript scores.

Books and Articles

Brown, Andrea Elizabeth. “A Descriptive Analysis of Arthur Bird’s Suite in D.” DMA diss., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2010.

Elson, Louis C. American Music. New York, NY: MacMillan Co., 1904.

Gellerman, Robert F. The American Reed Organ. Vestal, NY: The Vestal Press, 1973.

———. The American Reed Organ and the Harmonium. Vestal, NY: The Vestal Press, 1996.

Good, Edwin M. Giraffes, Black Dragons, and Other Pianos. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Hendron, Michael, ed. Manufacturers Music Album Reed Organ Society Anthology Series. Palmer, Massachusetts: The Reed Organ Society Publications Office, 2001.

Hiles, John. A Catechism for the Harmonium. London: Brewer and Company, 1877.

Loring, William C., Jr. “Arthur Bird, American.” Musical Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1943): 78–91.

———. Arthur Bird: His Life and Music. Newton Centre, MA: n.p., 1941.

———. The Music of Arthur Bird: An Explanation of American Composers of the Eighties and Nineties for Bicentenial Americana Programming. Atlanta: n.p., 1974.

Milne, H. F. The Reed Organ: Its Design and Construction. Chancery Lane, England: Office of Musical Opinion, 1930.

Recordings

Bird, Arthur. Suite in D. On Bird Songs: Romantic Chamber Music of Arthur Bird, North Texas Chamber Players. Eugene Corporon, conductor. CD (digital disc). Klavier, KCD-11071, 1995.

———. Suite in D. On Collage: A Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Peabody Institute, 1857–2007. Peabody Conservatory Wind Ensemble. Harlan Parker, conductor. CD (digital disc). Naxos, 8.570403, 2008.

———. Suite in D. University of Cincinnati Chamber Players. Rodney Winther, conductor. CD (digital disc). Mark Records, 7212, 2007.

———. Amerikanische Weisen, op. 23, Three Characteristic Marches, op. 11,  American Souvenirs Piano Music for Four Hands, Nadia and Vladimir Zaitsev, pianists, CD (digital disc), Gleur De Son-Qualiton/The Orchard, 57928, 2004.

Bird, Arthur; Dussek, Jan Ladislav; Liszt, Franz; Grieg, Edvard; and Onslow, George; Forgotten Piano Duets, Vol. 2, Tony and Mary Ann Lenti, pianists, CD (digital  disc), ACA Digital Recording, B004QEZC2, 2011.

Jonathan B. Hall, FAGO, ChM, is the author of Calvin Hampton: A Musician Without Borders and of many articles on the organ and sacred music. He is past dean of the Brooklyn AGO chapter, director of music at Central Presbyterian Church, Montclair, New Jersey, and teaches music theory at the Steinhardt School of New York University.

The debate over the authenticity of BWV 565, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, has continued for thirty years. This article summarizes and critiques key points of that debate, taking the position that J. S. Bach is not the composer. A candidate composer is presented, Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel of Nuremberg (1697–1775). A stylistic comparison of his Divertimento Armonico to BWV565 reveals a very high level of congruity, arguing for his authorship.

The problem

For about thirty years, the question of the authorship of BWV 565—the famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, long attributed to J. S. Bach—has been raised civilly but persistently. Broached in 1981 by Peter Williams,¹ the question has spawned a variety of imaginative answers: that the piece is definitely by Bach, from his earliest youth;² that it is possibly a transcribed violin work;³ that it is certainly a transcribed violin work;⁴ that it may have been intended for five-string ‘cello;⁵ or even better, for lute;⁶ or that it may have been written for harpsichord;⁷ that it may have been written by Kellner;⁸ that we may, one day, figure out who wrote it;⁹ and so forth. Everyone agrees that the piece is wonderful. While all of these are interesting, none is convincing, save the last, which admits no argument.

The young-Bach or pre-Weimar theory is based, in essence, upon the multipartite nature of the piece, its extensive use of passagework, and its perceived emotionalism; yet the open-ended, improvisatory structure is not clearly akin to the five-part präludia of Buxtehude or his ilk. It is also too distinctive, too fluently assured, to be the early effort of a student, even a brilliant one. One also notes the clear Italian influence in harmony and style, the absence of internal sectional cadences, and the simplicity of the counterpoint: all atypical of North German practice. (Surely, given the work’s famous final cadence, a young Bach would have noticed opportunities for internal cadences as well.)

Also, we have a specimen of Bach’s youthful writing, his Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo, BWV 992; the keyboard idiom and harmonic language are both dissimilar to those of 565, the fugal writing in particular. We possess as well a number of chromatic, high-strung, ‘Arnstadt’ chorale settings, such as BWV 715; very possibly the infamous variationes so displeasing to the Arnstadt consistory in 1706.¹⁰ One cannot realistically imagine their composition after a very early stage, certainly not as teaching pieces. In any case, they are a far cry from the fluid idiom and transparent harmonies of 565, even if they display a predilection for fully diminished harmonies. Their harmonic language and keyboard idiom are too opaque, and for all their off-putting audacity lack anything like the genuine dramatic import of 565.

It would seem, in any case, that Bach’s formation as an organist is more the work of north German composers such as Böhm and Buxtehude, not to mention the transplanted Bohemian Johann Kuhnau, his predecessor in Leipzig. Bach’s early fascination with (and perhaps moonlight copying of) works like the Fiori Musicali would not have exposed him to the seconda prattica represented in 565. The Toccata and Fugue is assigned to Bach’s teenage years, ultimately, because it is least out of place there. 

Christoph Wolff states firmly that 565 is indeed an early work of Bach; he relates it to Forkel’s description of the undisciplined enthusiasm of Bach’s earliest work.¹¹ However, for this writer, Forkel’s description does not suit the Toccata and Fugue, though it applies well to the chorales just mentioned. One notes again the economy of the toccata and the fluency of the fugue, which strikes one as the work not of immature genius but of mature ingenuity—neither undisciplined nor early. Like Gandalf, it arrives (complete with magical fireworks!) neither early nor late, but precisely when it means to.

As to the work’s purported violinistic roots, due note is taken of the bariolage technique that is emulated in much of the work, including the fugue subject; but no candidate composer comes forth, nor any evidence for the conjectured A-minor original. Williams’s seminal article rests, at least in part, on a reversal of the burden of proof: the work cannot be proven to be for the organ.¹² The balance of his argument relies on the work’s evocation of string idiom, and thus the comparative ease with which the work may be paraphrased on violin—albeit transposed and thinned out!

Johann Paul von Westhoff is mentioned, even though his music bears no trenchant similarity to the work in question. He is chiefly useful as an example of ending a violin piece with an open fifth, a common enough occurrence and one which, here, helps beg the question of the inconvenient final minor chord. (Also avoided in this violin ‘reconstruction’ is the poor 4–1 resolution in the bass line in the final cadence in the organ work—it simply disappears, replaced by a leading tone that resolves quite properly.) Meanwhile, a touchier question—why a pedal solo in the middle of a violin piece?—is not raised, because it cannot be answered. What else could that passage be? What other raison d’être can it have, how can it even avoid risibility, if it is not there to display pedaliter pyrotechnics?

In several recent studies, Williams is willing to leave the question open. In the earlier, he mentions in particular the cello theory; in the later, he hews to agnosticism.¹³ Here and elsewhere, he remains undecided whether the work is a transcription, or by someone else.¹⁴

In another article, Bruce Fox-Lefriche states with finality that 565 was written for violin solo.¹⁵ No choice is offered: the essay asserts that there is “no doubt” that the piece cannot have been written either by Bach or for the organ, because it is “unidiomatic” and “far too clumsy.”¹⁶ (In fact, it is neither; it is thoroughly idiomatic to the organ, and quite fluid throughout.) It would seem evident that any attempt to ‘reconstruct’ a violin ‘original’ is a prima facie impossibility, because there is nothing to reconstruct it from. Yet the magazine offers two excerpts from his violin arrangement, the editor (not the author) claiming outrageously that it was “reconstructed” from “an 18th-century manuscript that is also the basis of the organ work”¹⁷ (emphasis mine). This “basis” is, of course, Ringk’s manuscript of the organ work.

To his credit, Fox-Lefriche recognizes the problems with the early-Bach theory, for some of the same stylistic reasons I shall mention below. He rightly notes the unisons and solos, the odd abruptness of the arpeggio in bar 3, the long stretches of unvaried harmony, and the apparent disregard of basic rules—all signally foreign to Bach’s style.¹⁸ I believe he is certainly correct when he says that “Bach had nothing whatsoever to do with the piece, either for violin or for organ,”¹⁹ at least insofar as authorship is concerned.

Similar problems accrue to the ‘cello and lute theories. Both take note of idioms familiar to their instruments of choice, and wish to claim the work as their own. However, neither of these theories is presented dogmatically. (Mark Argent, in particular, advances the ‘cello hypothesis with welcome caution.) Certainly, this writer has no trouble whatsoever with transcriptions or arrangements of the work: nay, the more the merrier: come fiddle, come xylophone. But they must be acknowledged as transcriptions or arrangements, and never as paths to an imagined Urtext.

The harpsichord theory cannot explain the sustained chords over a prolonged tonic pedal in bar 3 of the toccata; or the sustained and untrillable dominant pedal tone in the left hand during the fugue (bars 105 and following); or the adagissimo section towards the end. All of these depend on the unique sustaining power of the organ; I cannot imagine any application of style brisé that could do them justice. (And again: why a pedal solo? The piece is equally unsuited to a pedal harpsichord.)

I find that the piece is conceived in and saturated in organ idiom, so that no degree of arrangement or copyist intervention can be conjured to account for the received text. This idiom does not demonstrate anything more than stylish feints at string technique. Its antinomian pretensions, such as the long unisons, “trivial” part writing, ambient plagality and final chords, must be dealt with; they cannot be solved by subtracting the pipe organ from the equation. In fact, the organ is not the source of discomfort, but rather Bach himself.

As far as a different organ composer is concerned, 565 is closer to Kellner’s style than to Bach’s, but it is also not Kellner’s style. This conjecture, advanced by David Humphreys, cites two examples of Kellner’s organ writing.²⁰ They are striking, displaying both facility and drama. Still, they do not altogether convince, because the style, though facile and dramatic, is not convincingly similar to that of 565. Still, it is easy to see the attraction of this hypothesis, especially if a closer match is not forthcoming. Meanwhile, a computer-based, quantitative study by van Kranenburg (2007) is fittingly inconclusive; he will not award the piece to either Kellner or Bach.²¹

The exhaustive study on the authenticity of 565, by Rolf Dietrich Claus, concludes that the piece is not by Bach. This conclusion comes after considering the transmission of sources, the style and form of the work, and in short every aspect of the problem imaginable. It is a fascinating book, even though Claus does not propose a likely composer. He does, however, conclude that the chances of finding one are “not bad.”²²

The question thus remains open. On the one hand, serious doubt has been growing regarding Bach’s authorship, and there are strong reasons both to share it and to decide in the negative. The structural and stylistic reasons are many: the extensive use of octaves is unheard of in the free works, as are the harmonies of the final cadence; the counterpoint in the fugue is light and the voice-leading inconsistent. The subdominant answer, though logical and necessary, is atypical, and Bach nowhere (else) uses a theme of this nature. The work is also not found in autograph, but only in the hand of Johannes Ringk, via Kellner (would he really not claim authorship?); and so on. But on the other hand, if the question has gained traction, a proposed answer has not.

Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel

Recently, in studying some of the re-attributed keyboard works in the Bach catalogue, I encountered BWV 897, a Prelude and Fugue in A Minor. The prelude is now attributed to Cornelius
Heinrich Dretzel (1697–1775), an organist highly respected in his native Nuremberg and a student of Bach.²³ I was forcefully struck by clear parallels to 565, in particular the Toccata, and investigated the piece more closely. 

Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel came from a long line of musicians in his native city of Nuremberg. The most famous member of the family was his forebear Valentin (1578–1658). He almost certainly studied with J. S. Bach around the end of the latter’s time in Weimar, probably in 1716–1717. He is mentioned twice in the Bach-Dokumente as a student of Bach. In one of these passages, C. D. F. Schubart writes:

In Nuremberg . . . in the churches I heard students of the German Arion, the immortal Sebastian Bach, which made me feel in the first place how rare a good organist is. The names of Drezel, Bachhelbel, Löffeloth, Agrell, assuredly deserve more thanks and fame than the annals of music history have accorded them.²⁴

Dretzel’s career was discussed at length by Georg A. Will in 1802, who ended with this impassioned tribute:

[He is] recognized as one of the greatest virtuosos of his time in performance and composition, so that his name and fame are very great even outside his fatherland. His compositions, especially in church music, will forever be accounted as treasures.²⁵

The article in MGG (which calls him Georg) also quotes Schubart’s commentary on him:

. . . Drexel, a student of the great Sebastian Bach and indeed one of his best. He played the organ with great force, and especially understood registration, and composed with spirit for his instrument . . . he chose fugue themes for their songfulness, and handled them gracefully throughout . . . he understood counterpoint thoroughly . . . ²⁶

Dretzel served in the most famous churches of his native city, his career culminating in the prime position, that of St. Sebald. In two churches, St. Egidius and St. Sebald, he followed Wilhelm Hieronymous Pachelbel, scion of another family of Nuremberg musicians and prime representatives of the so-called Nuremberg School of organists. Nuremberg itself needs no introduction as a city devoted, not only to music, but to the arts of rhetoric and singing as well. Known for centuries as a cultural and commercial crossroads, its culture remains cosmopolitan, with an Italian influence, and its churches are both Lutheran and Catholic. Dretzel worked for churches of both confessions during his long career.

C. H. Dretzel died on May 7, 1775, and it is needless to add that his name and fame have not endured, even within his fatherland. Biographical entries shorten in every successive encyclopedia. In 1883, Fétis called him an ‘organiste habile,’ but had little else to say, even approximating his birth year.²⁷ Dretzel is forgotten today, probably because he published so little music. For years, he was remembered chiefly as the editor of a large collection of hymns, Des evangelischen Zions musicalische Harmonie.²⁸ Another composition, a brief alla breve, was published in Christoph Gottlieb von Murr’s magazine Der Zufriedene in March, 1763.²⁹ (Murr was also a collector of Bach manuscripts.) A divertimento for keyboard was sometimes mentioned but believed lost.

Then, in 1969, the harpsichordist and scholar Isolde Ahlgrimm published an article dealing with a unique score in the National Széchényi Library in Budapest.³⁰ The work turned out to be Dretzel’s lost keyboard work, titled both Divertimento Armonico and Harmonische Ergözung³¹ [sic]. Its catalog number is Z 41.618; the score once belonged to Franz Joseph Haydn, and came to the library through the Esterházy family. The bilingual title page, and use of the word Concerto/Concert, led Ahlgrimm to suspect publication after Bach’s Italian Concerto in 1735. (The title page may, if anything, refer to the Musikalische Ergötzung, published in 1695 by the most famous Nuremberger organist, Johann Pachelbel.) The work is only certainly datable to between 1719 and 1743, when Dretzel (as he states on the title page) was organist of St. Egidius.³²

The second of the Divertimento’s three movements, titled adagiosissimo in the original and molto adagio in Schmieder, was the same piece as BWV 897.1. Ahlgrimm’s conclusion is that Dretzel did not appropriate the prelude from Bach, but composed it himself; and she ascribes “glory” to Dretzel for having written a work worthy of being attributed to Bach. The reader is advised to make a mental note of this last point: Dretzel has fooled us before.

On examining this readily available Dretzel piece, BWV 897.1, I was struck by features I associate with BWV 565, and with no other piece ascribed to Bach, or to anyone else. The feeling grew swiftly that this unlikely composer is the likeliest, by far, to have composed the famous work in question. Certainly, he offers us a far closer stylistic match than those previously suggested. Ahlgrimm is right in deducting this prelude from the Bach corpus. I suggest that, once deducted, it takes 565 with it.

The feeling continued to grow upon examining the balance of the Divertimento; first, the excerpts in the Ahlgrimm article, and then a digital scan of the entire composition, provided by the staff of the National Széchényi Library. If there is any influence at all from Bach’s Italian Concerto, it is limited to the linguistic affectations of the title page—which are matched by a bilingual preface to the Cortesissimo Lettore/Geneigter Leser.³³ (Bach uses the phrase Gemüths-Ergötzung in his subtitle as well.) This preface refers to the score as “this first attempt” in publication (questa prima prova/dieser erste Versuch). Turning to the score, which is elegantly engraved, one notices first that the right-hand part is written in soprano clef throughout—like Ringk’s manuscript of 565 and, according to Russell Stinson, interesting although not a definitive indicator of date of composition.³⁴ The suggested time frame would include the year of Dretzel’s study in Weimar, and is also consistent with his identification of the Divertimento as his “prima prova.” Perhaps it also argues for an earlier, rather than later, date for the composition of 565; Wolff notes other “archaic” features in Ringk’s manuscript.³⁵

The Divertimento Armonico consists of three movements: allegro, adagiosissimo [sic], and fuga. All three display significant stylistic congruence and closely parallel passages—one might say intertextuality—with 565. The most compelling resemblances come in the second and third movements, which form an adagio-fuga pair quite like 565 itself. Meanwhile, the difference in medium—organ versus harpsichord—is not particularly important in this context, as certain elements of keyboard idiom and many of style easily cross over.

Points of similarity 

I believe that noting points of similarity between the two pieces—making concrete comparisons—is an appropriate method of demonstration. After all, it is the basis of Humphrey’s article, cited above; and it is a straightforward way to synthesize a view both of the unfamiliar Divertimento, and the perhaps too-familiar 565.

I cannot offer a theory of provenance; I do not know how the manuscript came to Kellner, an indefatigable collector and traveler. Possibly von Murr, also a collector, was involved. Possibly the work was an early thunderbolt. Perhaps it postdates the Divertimento (on stylistic grounds, I believe this is likelier). We know we have no autograph of 565, but only a copied text that has engendered perplexity. The evidence for my thesis is drawn from the two works in question; with the additional notandum that all other known circumstances of time and place are, at least, not opposed to my thesis. In other words, I am aware of no specific evidence to the contrary of my idea, no adverse circumstances to account for; frankly, this is an advantage over the other arguments heretofore adduced. I believe that the composer of the Divertimento Armonico is also the composer of 565.

1. The opening of the Divertimento is quite unlike anything Bach ever wrote, in that the first phrase is repeated verbatim. Bach always varies his antecedent and consequent phrases, either harmonically or melodically. Never—even once, as far as I can see—does he simply say the same thing twice. It is still odder to find the second of three repetitions varied by diminution. [Example 1] It is needless to adduce examples of Bach’s own practice. I might mention the opening of the Italian Concerto, the aforementioned Capriccio, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, among many others for examples of balanced, but not simply reiterated, phrase structure.

2. Throughout this first movement Dretzel shows a strong predilection for simple harmonizations in thirds and sixths; he will also do this in the fugue. Also, he often makes use of solo passages, including one that is virtually identical to an episode in the fugue of 565. [Examples 2, 3, and 4] Commentators have long used words like “trivial” to describe the similar harmonizations found in 565/ii.

3. The second movement, remarkably, is marked adagiosissimo. This peculiar word is best known to organists from the conclusion of BWV 622, “O Mensch, bewein,” in Orgelbüchlein. The term is also found at the third movement of Bach’s early Capriccio. MGG takes note of this occurrence by following it with an exclamation point in parentheses.³⁶ This strange tempo designation occurs in early Bach, somewhat less-early Bach,
C. H. Dretzel, and (to my knowledge) nowhere else.

4. Triple gestures: three mordents in 565, three large, full chords in adagiosissimo. In both cases, the commanding opening triplicate is followed by repetitious passagework and arpeggiation; and tension is introduced with a dominant harmony over a tonic bass. Basic to the style of both is a penchant for nearly obsessive, non-sequential, naive repetitions of a simple idea: compare bars 4 ff. in 565, toccata. [Example 5]

5. Frequent use of large chords of a widely varying number of notes. In Dretzel, up to ten notes in a chord (adagiosissimo, measure 16). In the Toccata, chordal structures of five through nine notes. Where else does Bach simply “lay on” in the manner found in the Toccata—regardless of instrument? (He certainly minds his voice-leading in the Toccata in F, in the French Overture, and in the Italian Concerto.) In Bach, a particularly thick sonority generally signals a beginning or ending, like the gong in a gamelan; in general, one can account for all voice parts. Both the Divertimento and 565 demur from the principle that neatness counts. The allegro and fuga have passages where, for dramatic purposes, handfuls of notes are called for—frequently set off with fermate. A prominent feature of the Divertimento is its frequent use of these, both as prolongations of chords and rests, and to mark the end of movements. Williams notes the presence of these in the Ringk ms. as raising questions of authenticity.³⁷

It is true that thick sonorities of different size are found in the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. However, that is virtually the sole similarity between the two pieces (see previous heading), and an uncommonly thick texture is more justifiable in harpsichord than in organ performance.

In these two examples, the “drama” chord is also in the third inversion. Compare the Toccata, bar 21. (This device occurs quite a bit more frequently in the Divertimento than it does in 565.) [Examples 6 and 7]

6. In both the Divertimento and 565, there is a marked preference for diminished harmonies; for diminished harmonies followed by their simple dominant-seventh versions; for third-inversion dominant harmonies, presented emphatically for rhetorical purposes; and for dominant harmonies over a tonic pedal or bass note.

7. There is a very strong resemblance between a run of diminished triplets in adagiosissimo, measure 6–7, and those in the Toccata, measure 22 ff. The figuration is for all practical purposes identical; in the Toccata, it is “harmonized” in two voices, but the pattern is virtually the same, including the occasional reversing of direction. [Example 8]

8. Several of the above examples also show Dretzel’s pervasive use of bariolage: string idiom as a basic style feature. In both works, the fugue subject is nothing but bariolage (but see also Toccata, 12 ff.) The bariolage style is never quite so expressly invoked in the Bach canon (nor the public quite so overtly courted.)

The theme of the fugue, and its extremely simple handling (Example 3), may well strike the reader as reminiscent of the famous theme in D minor. Ahlgrimm’s commentary on the Divertimento fugue is resonant:

One sees . . . that Dretzel’s music is composed after the taste of his day, aimed chiefly at the amateur; Italian influence is clearly discernible . . . It seems that Dretzel strove to show that a fugue can be accessible and joyous, so that it is not just for the amusement of the connoisseur.³⁸

Note that the Divertimento fugue begins with an upward arpeggio, tonic to tonic. This device, though not particularly interesting in itself, allows for a real answer in the dominant. This is essential in order to preserve the punchiness of the repetitions of the fifth scale degree. In 565, however, the fugue subject begins directly on 5, a dramatic and effective choice, which also requires an unusual solution if it is to be maintained. Hence, the highly unusual subdominant solution. (This subdominant argument is appropriately echoed in the final plagal cadence.)

On the grounds that the fugue of 565 dramatically dispenses with the setup needed for a real answer, I incline to the theory that Dretzel composed it later than his Divertimento. I might adduce other stylistic grounds for my inclination, including the tightness of the Toccata versus the diffuse nature of the adagiosissimo; as well as the greater variety of treatment in the D-minor Fugue. Of course, the piece could have been a “bolt from the blue,” composed in a fit of inspiration conferred by the ambience of Weimar and the proximity of Bach.

9. The use of a surprising cadence to set up a virtuosic passage or especially a coda: Dretzel, 21; Fugue, aforementioned recitativo, and the link from adagiosissimo to presto, 132–133. In both situations—one following immediately after another—an unexpected resolution hangs in the air, then dissolves into a shower of notes. [Example 9]

10. Final cadences. The cadence ending the adagiosissimo cannot simply be called a Phrygian or “Corelli” cadence, because the leading tone occurs, and there is a strong tritonic resolution in context of a “French Sixth” sonority. Nothing in the literature, of course, is quite comparable to the cadence of the fugue of 565. [Example 10]

One could, of course, continue to argue that 565 is a very unusual work by Bach, or accept (as I do) that it is a characteristic specimen of Dretzel. I do not think it is an immature work by a great composer, but rather a mature work by a very good composer.

There are some specific issues with 565 that raise further doubt. One is the troubling first episode in the fugue—measures 34–39—uniquely atypical of Bach in its strangely-approached unisons and fifths, and the frequent noticeable fourths, fifths, and octaves. [Example 11]

Dretzel is similarly unconcerned when an empty unison or fifth, or a perfect fourth, falls on a strong beat. Refer to Example 3 for an example. There is also the following passage in the allegro. [Example 12]

Also, there are rules concerning resolution of a tritone, and these are egregiously broken by the C–G movement in the pedal in measure 140–141. This is the problem alluded to earlier that “disappears” in the Williams violin arrangement. Note also the inconsistent number of voices and the questionable movement in the alto from B-flat to C-sharp. [Example 13]

These minor solecisms are unlikely to trouble the modern ear, but they are telling. I believe we are dealing with a composer to whom the grand gesture matters more than the fine points. Bach never trades one of these off for the other; he need not.

The Fugue of 565 is of tighter construction than its Toccata, but its peculiarities have also long been noted. Among these are a theme that prominently features the fifth scale degree; a solo annunciation of the theme in the pedal in the middle of the piece; a statement of the theme in the subtonic minor key; and in general the driven, almost monomaniacal character found throughout. Meanwhile, there are no signs of advanced counterpoint, such as stretto, augmentation, or the like. Where Bach is inclined to pile on artifice as he reaches a conclusion, this piece devolves into passagework, linking it back to the toccata.³⁹ (The work, overall, seems to bear the hallmark of the classic threefold rhetorical plan of introitus, centrum, and exitus.) All of these features—save the pedal solo!—are to be found in the third movement of the Divertimento. The theme is always harmonized in thirds and sixths; the counterpoint is minimal; the episodes are either a solo line or a simple harmonic sequence. As to strange keys, the fuga of the Divertimento wanders (albeit very briefly) into B-flat minor.

Conclusion, performance notes

I alluded earlier to Williams’ recent
J. S. Bach: A Life in Music. His comments on 565 hit a double bull’s-eye with the Divertimento: he points to “a few rhetorical gestures, thin harmonies, simple shape, much repetition and virtually no counterpoint.”⁴⁰ This “thin” work also evokes universal delight; people who know nothing else about the organ know and thoroughly enjoy that piece. It must be admitted that this is not the usual reaction to the magnificently intelligent and often arcane Bach.

In a review of Williams’s The Life of Bach, Jan-Piet Knijff speaks for many when he asks “ . . . who on earth could have been the composer?”⁴¹ It is precisely because this question is daunting—who on earth could have been the composer?—that an answer is delayed. We have had to choose: to remain faithful to an unhappy marriage, or to start all over again in the treacherous world of dating. Finding a likely candidate is as much a matter of good luck as anything else.

Still, we knew what we were looking for. We sought a German composer with some Italian blood, strong technique, and a recognizable, facile voice; someone from a rhetorical community other than the North German. We sought someone who composed to a popular, gentlemanly taste; no fatiguing artifice of counterpoint, please, and arresting cadences are a plus. We needed someone who is not Bach: early Bach, late Bach, or Bach with a few bits left over. We needed someone who was a lesser and different composer, and probably younger; possessing an audience, an organ bench of note, and a finished identity in his own right. The work is neither early nor late; it is right on schedule. Whose schedule is the only question.

Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel fills these criteria remarkably neatly, and what we possess of his music is cut from the very same cloth as 565. Once we see the possibility that a now-forgotten organist from Nuremberg is the likely composer, the pieces show a striking inclination to fall into place. Perhaps all that stands in the way is our own surprise.

A note on performance. If 565 is southern German in origin, as I believe it is, it may best be realized with less grandeur and Angst than has been typical. One might seek smaller and lighter South-German organs; not a “little village church in Saxony” per Williams,⁴² but an exquisite city church in Bavaria, with a silver-toned organ, few reeds, and an Italian inflection. Playing the Toccata and Fugue in a dignified, lyrical, and fluent way lightens and clarifies the piece in a way that works for this writer.⁴³ Fox-Lafriche is on the right track when he argues for the piece’s “brilliance, lightness, intimacy, and grace.”⁴⁴

It may help to visualize some of the more remarkable organ cases from this region: gleaming in white rococo splendor, toothsome as a dessert; but offering a modest, simple, clear, tonal design. Like 565, these organs make a magnificent show but contain surprisingly few ingredients—the equivalent of egg whites and sugar. Dessert, in fact, is probably the perfect gustatory metaphor for the composition in question.

If one is prepared to entertain the idea that a once-famous and now-forgotten composer wrote the greatest “hit” the organ has ever known, a door opens to a more egalitarian, less Bach-centric view of German organ culture. We might examine a successful popular approach to the instrument and the musical public that is not entirely attributable to a learned Bach, or to the Bach of hagiography. Pierre Boulez reminds us: “History is not a well-oiled machine that advances smoothly along rails composed of masterpieces . . . ”⁴⁵ The masterpieces themselves, and the posthumous careers of their creators, do not always advance smoothly on rails of due attribution.

Perhaps C. H. Dretzel was, in popular terms, a “one-hit wonder.” Perhaps more of his compositions await rediscovery. I am left wondering about what we may have lost. In any case, it could well be that Nuremberg is home to another, and marvelously unanticipated, Preislied. ν

*The author thanks the Germanisches National Museum, Nuremberg, as well as the Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, Budapest, for their prompt and professional assistance. Otto Krämer of Straelen and Leonardo Ciampa of Boston assisted with German and Italian languages. Bill Powers assisted with research.

Notes

1. Peter Williams, “BWV 565: A Toccata in D Minor for Organ by J. S. Bach?” Early Music (July 1981), 330–337.

2. Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2000), 169. “Bach’s Toccata in D Minor and the Issue of Its Authenticity,” Perspectives in Organ Playing and Musical Interpretation (New Ulm, MN: Heinrich Fleischer Festschrift Committee, Martin Luther College, for the Gesellschaft der Orgelfreunde, 2002), 85–107.

3. Williams, “BWV 565.”

4. Bruce Fox-Lefriche, “The Greatest Violin Sonata that J. S. Bach Never Wrote,” Strings (October 2004), 44–55.

5. Mark Argent, “Stringing Along,” The Musical Times, 141/1872 (Autumn 2000), 16–20, 22–23. (Also available as “J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565) Revisited,” from www.markargent.com.)

6. Eric Lewin Altschuler, “Were Bach’s Toccata and Fugue BWV 565 and the Ciacona from BWV 1004 Lute Pieces?” The Musical Times (Winter 2005), 77–86.

7. Bernhard Billeter, “Bachs Toccata und Fuge d-moll für Orgel BWV 565: ein Cembalowerk?” Die Musikforschung 50/1 (1997), 77–80.

8. David Humphreys, “The D Minor Toccata BWV 565,” Early Music 10/2 (April 1982), 216–217.

9. Rolf Dietrich Claus, Zur Echtheit von Toccata und Fugue d-moll BWV 565 (Cologne: Verlag Dohr, 1998), 123.

10. Peter Williams, The Organ Music of J. S. Bach (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 454.

11. Wolff, Learned Musician and Perspectives on Organ Playing.

12. Williams, “BWV 565,” 332.

13. Peter Williams, The Life of Bach, “Musical Lives” series (Cambridge, 2004), footnote 11, 161. J. S. Bach: A Life in Music (Cambridge, 2007), 82.

14. William, Organ Music of Bach, 155 ff.

15. Fox-Lefriche, “Greatest Violin Sonata,” 53.

16. Ibid., 53.

17. Note by Elisa M. Welch, Fox-Lefriche, “Greatest Violin Sonata,” 54.

18. Fox-Lafriche, “Greatest Violin Sonata,” 50.

19. Ibid., 53.

20. Humphreys, “D Minor Toccata.”

21. Peter van Kranenburg, “On Measuring Musical Style: The Case of Some Disputed Organ Fugues in the J. S. Bach (BWV) Catalog.” Online, author-preferred version via author’s website, http://www.lodebar.nl/pvk/. Originally published as “Assessing Disputed Attributions for Organ Fugues in the J. S. Bach (BWV) Catalog,” Computing in Musicology 15 (2007–9).

22. Claus, Zur Echtheit.

23. There are several references to Dretzel in connection with Bach in Bach-Dokumente (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1972), volume 3, and in other sources, albeit displaying variants of his name. Dretzel is also usually included in lists of Bach’s students during the latter’s final year at Weimar.

24. Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, “Bach-Schüler in Nürnberg,” Bach-Dokumente, vol. 3, article 837, 330.

25. Georg Andreas Will, Nürnbergisches Gelehrte-Lexicon, ed. Christian C. Nopitsch (Altdorf, 1802), 251–252.

26. Schubart, Ideen zu einer Ästhetik, 1806, quoted in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001), Personenteil 5, 1411. See also Bach-Dokumente (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1972), volume 3, article 903a, 411. Schubart refers to Dretzel as ‘Drexel,’ leading some to confuse him with the Drexel who was organist in Augsburg–even though this man was born in 1758.

27. F-J Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens (Paris, 1883), 58. He can only give Dretzel’s birth as “au commencement du dix-huitième siècle.”

28. See, inter alia, Johann Georg Meusel, Lexicon der vom Jahr 1750 bis 1800 verstorbenen teutschen Schriftsteller (Leipzig, 1803), 426–427.

29. The final page of the March 17, 1763 issue of this little magazine contains a short piece called “Alla Breve dal S^re. D.” It is a light, forgettable work in two voices; even here, though, elements of style such as facile dialogue and perfect intervals on strong beats can be seen.

30. Isolde Ahlgrimm, “Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel, der Autor des J. S. Bach
zugeschribenen Klavierwerkes BWV 897,” Bach-Jahrbuch 1969, 67–77.

31. Ergötzung: from ergötzen, to regale or feast (someone).

32. I am grateful to the eminent Bach scholar Daniel Melamed of Indiana University for his feedback on my research. In particular, he has pointed out a number of occurrences of the word Ergötzung in musical publications of this period. Its use seems to be linked to the Liebhaber side of the Kenner/Liebhaber divide: indicating a piece written for general enjoyment, rather than for the delectation of the connoisseur.

33. It is also true that the allegro movement uses a ritornello form, and thus is to that extent superficially similar to the first movement of the Italian Concerto.

34. Russell Stinson, “Toward a Chronology of Bach’s Instrumental Music: Observations on Three Keyboard Works,” Journal of Musicology, Volume 7, Number 4 (Autumn 1989), 443.

35. Christoph Wolff, “Bach’s Toccata in D Minor and the Issue of Its Authenticity,” Perspectives in Organ Playing and Musical Interpretation (New Ulm, MN: Heinrich Fleischer Festschrift Committee, Martin Luther College, for the Gesellschaft der Orgelfreunde, 2002), 90.

36. Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG), Personenteil 5, 1411.

37. Williams, Organ Music of Bach, 155.

38. Ahlgrimm, Bach-Jahrbuch, 72, 73, translated by the author.

39. It is true that Bach’s youthful work often places passagework at the end of a fugue; those works, however, invariably display hallmarks of North German style and less polish.

40. Williams, J. S. Bach: A Life in Music, 82. 

41. Jan-Piet Knijff, review of The Life of Bach, Bach Notes, number 3 (spring 2005), 8. 

42. Williams, “BWV 565,” 330.

43. In this connection, it is useful to mention that the issue of short bottom octaves (without low C-sharp) would not have come up, in particular at the Egidienkirche, which was rebuilt around the time Dretzel took up his post there, succeeding the younger Pachelbel.

44. Fox-Lafriche, “Greatest Violin Sonata,” 53.

45. Pierre Boulez, “Aesthetics and the Fetishists,” Orientations, tr. Martin Cooper (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 35.

Myron Patterson is associate librarian and adjunct associate professor of organ at the University of Utah and organist and director of music at Holy Family Catholic Church, Ogden, Utah. He holds a doctorate in sacred music from the Graduate Theological Foundation and degrees in music and library science from the University of British Columbia, Northwestern University, and Trinity College of Music, London, England. Patterson has performed recitals in the United States, Canada, England, and Germany. He has served as an examiner for the American Guild of Organists and is a former dean of the Salt Lake City AGO chapter. He has served on the board of directors of the Association of Anglican Musicians and the Anglican Musicians Foundation. 

No doubt exists about the pedagogical value of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Das Orgelbüchlein. Perhaps the clearest statement of its importance can be found in George B. Stauffer’s notes in the preface to Russell Stinson’s Bach: The Orgelbüchlein (Monuments of Western Music) [New York: Schirmer Books, 1996; reprint, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], xi:

No other volume of music is so well known to organists as the Orgelbüchlein of Johann Sebastian Bach. For generations of players it has stood as the first resource for honing manual and pedal skills . . . It is central to the educational process, a pedagogical vade mecum that no student or instructor can be without. 

The purpose of the Orgelbüchlein can be viewed as a multifaceted fabric woven together from the following interconnected areas: compositional treatise, liturgical organ music, organ teaching method, and a theological statement.

Although the chronology of the Orgelbüchlein has been a point of question, as Ulrich Leisinger suggests, watermarks and handwriting on the original autograph show that the work was conceived at Weimar, where Bach was primarily court organist, and that these pieces were for the professional organist. This contradicts the title page indication of the collection’s pedagogical nature. Leisinger states that the handwriting on the title page is from about 1720 but that most of the musical content is from a later period. He suggests that Bach may have emphasized the pedagogical nature of the collection around the time of his application to St. Thomas, Leipzig. 

The pedagogical nature of the Orgelbüchlein is certainly substantiated by the number of copies made and used by Bach in his lifetime.¹ However, Russell Stinson gives a much fuller and comprehensive assessment of the chronology by citing multiple scholars who have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to authenticate the timeline of this work.² Stinson himself proposes and gives clear reasons for what may be the most plausible timeline: an early phase from about 1708–12, followed by a second or middle phase from 1712–13, and a late stage from 1715–16.³

Pedagogy

By the time he arrived in Weimar, Bach was established as a teacher and no doubt used the Orgelbüchlein as part of his teaching resources. Although the title was added later, it does state the following about the Orgelbüchlein: “guidance is given to a beginning organist . . . and become practiced in the study of pedaling. . . [and] for my neighbor, that he may instruct himself from it.”⁴ However, it should be noted that the work was not designed as a teaching tool in a graded sense, as most organ method books are today. It does ensure proficiency in the use of the pedals and the coordination connected with that skill, while the individual chorale settings serve as compositional models. The facsimiles of the Orgelbüchlein do not have the pedal line on a separate staff; all of the notation is on two staves. Further evidence for this work having been used as a pedagogical tool is shown by the number of copies made by Johann Tobias Krebs, Bach’s pupil in Weimar.

Because of its pedagogical value, clearly suggested by Bach himself in the title and through his use of it with his own pupils, it is not surprising that numerous teaching editions of the Orgelbüchlein have appeared in the twentieth century. The purpose of this article is to explore several twentieth-century editions of Das Orgelbüchlein as pedagogical and practical editions. The choice of editions is purely my own; the choices are drawn from my experience and perspective as a teacher and a performer. Omission of the Neue Bach Ausgabe volume of Das Orgelbüchlein is deliberate, since the Neue Bach Ausgabe is a scholarly edition and does not contain the added educational materials that are found in the editions I have included in this article. 

The Editions

The Liturgical Year: Forty-Five Organ Choral[e]s = Orgelbüchlein. Johann Sebastian Bach; edited by Albert Riemenschneider. Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania: Oliver Ditson, distributed by Theodore Presser, c. 1933. 1 score (xvi, 138 p.); 31 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

The title of this edition, which is based on the Bachgesellschaft edition as stated in the preface, is “The Liturgical Year.” While accurate, this differs from Bach’s original title, more accurately translated as “The Little Organ Book.” Riemenschneider explains his choice of title this way: “The whole was to cover the needs of the Church Year, and it is because of this that the set is known in America as ‘The Liturgical Year.’⁵ Riemenschneider goes on to explain the interpretation of the organ chorals [sic], which leads to his comments on performance tempo, phrasing, and dynamics coupled with expression. He gives a chart explaining how embellishments are to be interpreted, along with abbreviations and sources consulted. In “Some General Rules for Playing Bach,” Riemenscheider advocates fingering that allows for “perfect legato.” He states that “singing legato is the natural element of the organ. . . [and] remains paramount.”⁶ Precise attack and release of notes is essential. Repeated notes are addressed, as is the interpretation of voices being played on different keyboards. The organist is cautioned to avoid “buzz” by taking care when playing from white key to white key; black key to black key; white key to black key; and black key to white key. How to play octave leaps is also explained.

A clear outline of the whole plan of the Orgelbüchlein is given, along with an indication of which pieces were actually completed. Each individual chorale prelude is preceded by a four-part harmonization of the chorale melody along with German and English texts of one verse. There is one exception to this model and that is Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schaar, which lacks the usual four-part harmonization. Instead, a realization of the figured bass is given, along with a lengthy explanation regarding the difficulty finding a suitable choral harmonization. Alternate editions and references are also listed, along with “suggestions for interpretation.” 

Spacing and layout is clear and easy for the player to read at the organ console. Fingering and pedaling suggestions reflect the common practice of Riemenschneider’s time, which was based on a rather Romantic conception of Baroque performance practice. That this edition is still in print reflects the scholarship value of its contents and Riemenschneider’s stature within the organ teaching community, even though the points of view are now dated.

Orgelbüchlein: The Little Organ Book. The Organ Works of J. S. Bach, Book XV. Edited by Ivor Atkins, with an introduction by Ernest Newman; revised by Walter Emery. London: Novello, 1957. 

This edition of the Orgelbüchlein reflects numerous editorial hands, all of whom are respected twentieth-century scholars. Under Atkins’ editorship the edition is based on that of the Bachgesellschaft, while Emery’s revision is based on the Berlin autograph. Unlike the Riemenschneider edition, this edition’s educational or pedagogical value (aside from being extremely physically well laid-out, with chorale harmonizations designed for singing and ornamentation interpretations being included in the musical text) lies in the prefatory material dealing with stylistic observations regarding composition. 

Newman’s introduction is thorough. In it, he covers many aspects of the compositional style of the Orgelbüchlein—for example, stating that for “a great number of preludes [in the collection] polyphony is the life and soul; and this polyphony assumes various forms.”⁷ Newman points out other examples that are more harmonically intense and have some melodic decoration, such as Liebster Jesu wir sind hier, and Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ. A third style Newman refers to is arabesque treatment of the chorale melody. In the third part of the introduction, Newman discusses poeticism, pictorialism, and symbolism as found in the Orgelbüchlein chorales. 

As editor of the original edition, Ivor Atkins presents commentary regarding phrasing, registration, and classification of the preludes. One specification of a Bach organ at the Weimar Castle is given, but registration considerations are minimal and general. Walter Emery, as reviser of this edition, gives more up-to-date insights than Newman and Atkins. However, Emery’s notes are representative of scholarship in 1957. While valuable as a student edition, the Novello edition does not represent later twentieth-century scholarship; its value is in its layout, ease of use, and editorial comments with each of the preludes, including interpretation of ornaments and notes about the chorale. 

Orgelbüchlein, Johann Sebastian Bach. With introduction, figured–bass chorales, texts and commentary, edited and prepared by Robert Clark and John David Peterson. St. Louis: Concordia, 1984. 

In their prefatory material, Robert Clark and John David Peterson clearly state that their edition is based on the Berlin manuscript referred to in endnote 7. The educational value of the introduction in this edition is multifaceted. It contains a brief history of the chorale and states that the organ was used minimally in sixteenth-century Lutheran services. Because of the organ’s minimal use, there was a lack of organ chorale collections; these came at a later time, as did more elaborate organ settings of chorale melodies. The pedagogical use of the Orgelbüchlein is clearly explained, indicating that its goal is to teach how to work out a chorale and provide studies in pedaling, while its liturgical use within the Lutheran liturgy is unclear. The editors speculated upon where the organ chorales might have been placed within the liturgy, since Bach gave no indication of this.

The types of organ known to Bach are discussed in general terms, but the specifications of organs at Weimar, Erfurt, Mühlhausen, and Grosshartmannsdorf are given and can help students to understand how to register these chorale settings. Broad guidelines regarding the registration of the individual chorale settings are given. These guidelines include: 1) the expressive character of a piece, in other words, the use of Affekt; 2) historical possibilities for registering a piece based on Bach’s eclectic view of organs; 3) the purely musical possibilities of registration. Examples are provideddemonstrating these concepts.

Ornamentation common to Bach’s time is discussed, noting that the trill and mordent are the primary ornaments used in the Orgelbüchlein. Examples from the chorales are given to illustrate their execution.

Articulation is thoroughly, yet briefly explained. Rhetorical figures are explained in detail, with specific examples from the chorales provided. Discussion of rhetoric is unique to this collection and has great pedagogical value regarding interpretation and performance. Understanding rhetorical figures can prove useful in interpreting other Baroque organ works, especially, but not limited to, those of Bach. A complete list of the chorales in liturgical order, including those that were never composed, is given. Some rather poor facsimiles are included. While not stellar reproductions, they do have some teaching value.

Each of the chorale preludes within the collection is preceded by comments regarding compositional style, possible performance approaches, registration suggestions, and where each setting fits into the church year. A four-part harmonization of the chorale melody, including figured bass, is given. The layout of the music is clear, making the music easy to read. All of these characteristics make it an excellent teaching and learning edition. 

J. S. Bach, 1685–1750, Basic Organ Works: Orgelbüchlein, Three Free Works. Edited by Quentin Faulkner. Wayne Leupold Editions WL 500006, 1997.

In 1997 Wayne Leupold Editions published J. S. Bach, Basic Organ Works edited by Quentin Faulkner. Three freely composed works are included in the volume containing the Orgelbüchlein. This edition, which is based on the Berlin autograph and other sources, is an exemplary pedagogical tool in many ways. 

Quentin Faulkner discusses the Orgelbüchlein’s history and the “Bach Organ,” particularly those at Altenburg Court Chapel and St. Wenceslaus Church, Naumburg. Knowing something of the Bach Organ leads to a better understanding of how to register the Orgelbüchlein chorales. Faulkner’s discussion of organ registration includes reference to Agricola’s writings on this topic, since this is the most complete resource coming from the Baroque period. Reflecting on Agricola’s writing, “plenum” and “combinations of the flute stops” are explained, along with reed stops and Bach’s own registrational practices. Two observational statements are made by Faulkner regarding registration: 1) organ registration is a matter of taste as discerned by the ear of the performer; and 2) greater familiarity with the organs of Bach’s time results in more informed performances. 

Detailed discussion of articulation is given, particularly dealing with the areas of touch, musical phrases, and the doctrine of figures. Meter and tempo are considered and, unlike the Riemenschneider edition, which views meter and tempo in a subjective and emotional context, Faulkner refers to Johann Kirnberger’s theory of musical meter and tempo being comparable to speech. Only three tempo indications are found in the Orgelbüchlein: Largo, Adagio, and Adagio assai.

Posture, hand position and fingerings, pedaling, and ornamention are explained and a rationale for the fingerings used in this edition is given. The enigmatic corona (fermata) is addressed. Hymn tunes and their texts are explained. A very useful teaching and learning aid is the listing of the chorales in order of difficulty, along with the criteria used for creating this list. Also provided are a systematic learning guide and a bibliography of sources in English for further reading. All topics in this preface are illustrated clearly with musical examples, which give clarity to the written text. Black and white illustrations of places, organs, and music facsimiles appear throughout the edition.

The completeness, reference to historical documents, clarity of writing, comprehensiveness of written text illustrated by equally comprehensive musical examples, learning aids, historical fingerings in the musical text, and reference to additional sources make this perhaps the most valuable pedagogical edition of the Orgelbüchlein.

Both of these editions, first that by Clark and Peterson edition and then that by Faulkner, became popular teaching editions and both have much to offer. The Clark edition is clearly printed in oversize format with an excellent preface. As in the other editions covered in this article, a complete list of chorales as Bach planned them is given along with several black and white facsimiles of chorales. A bibliography of articles dealing with the Orgelbüchlein is given at the end of the edition. By contrast the Leupold-Faulkner edition has extensive prefatory material, and fingering representing what is believed to have been the performance practice of Bach’s time. Both of these editions have strengths and value as pedagogical volumes. 

An American Bach Edition

Johann Sebastian Bach, The Complete Organ Works. Edited by George B. Stauffer. Series 1A and 1B. Colfax, North Carolina: Wayne Leupold Editions WL 500020 and WL 500021, 2012.

Wayne Leupold has taken on an even more intense project, which Barbara Owen’s review refers to as “an American Bach Edition.” The editorial team used American evaluation techniques that include the testing of each volume by pedagogues and students. The Leupold Edition is in two parts: Series I comprises fifteen volumes that include the music and pedagogical works. Series II comprises monographs dealing with sources of Bach’s organ works; Bach’s organ chorales, that is, tunes, texts and translations; and performance issues. 

Within the first series the Orgelbüchlein appears as both a “Practical Urtext” and a “Standard Urtext.” In the commentary, Stauffer discusses the historical progression or development of the Orgelbüchlein, which he divides into early, middle, and late periods during Bach’s time in Weimar and later revisions linked to Bach’s students Krebs and Kittel in Leipzig. These musical variants are given within the musical text as ossias. Although not from Bach himself, the edition suggests eighteenth-century registrational possibilities based on Kirnberger’s Berlin Circle. New readings and performance suggestions along with detailed historical background are given, along with a generous inclusion of facsimiles, some of them in color. Problematic passages are discussed.

A unique feature of the Orgelbüchlein, in this edition, is its appearance in two urtext versions with the repertoire being almost the same in both. However, there are differences. The standard edition has nine variant readings while only one variant (BWV 634) is included in the practical edition. The chorales appear in both versions; the chorale melodies are harmonized in the practical version. The Orgelbüchlein content from Bach’s autograph is included in the standard edition only, while the practical edition contains two tables of ornaments. A detailed editorial report is given in both versions.

There is a rationale for having two versions of the Orgelbüchlein. In his review of the new Leupold Bach Edition, Lawrence Archbold suggests that with some modification, the standard edition could serve as an organ tutor while the practical edition may be more useful to students because of the explanation of ornaments and the inclusion of fully harmonized chorales. In fact, Archbold asserts that the practical edition most likely will be the choice of students because of the way it draws them to the music. 

Archbold’s final statement is: “one regrets the empty pages in J. S. Bach’s copy of the Orgelbüchlein.” This makes a wonderful segue to an innovative project currently underway and connected to the Orgelbüchlein.

The OrgelbЯchlein Project 

Noted British organist William Whitehead has set about a thrilling and imaginative project in which he plans the completion of the Orgelbüchlein. Bach wrote the titles of 164 chorales in the Orgelbüchlein and finished only 46, leaving 118 “ghost” compositions—gaps that Whitehead wants to fill with compositions that will bring to completion Bach’s initial vision. The rules for submission are simple. First, the chorale melody must be one of those inscribed by Bach but never started or finished. Second, the length of each composition should be between one and two-and-a-half minutes, but should not exceed five minutes. Third, any style is encouraged, but the pieces must be for organ solo and have a pedal obbligato as Bach indicated in the full title of the Orgelbüchlein. 

The project was launched in 2009 at the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music with six compositions being played by organ students from Trinity College of Music. The stylistic palette varied in style from jazzy to astringent. A second phase of the project took place in Cambridge, where the whole of Bach’s original Orgelbüchlein compositions and new pieces by British composers Thomas Neal, Jeremy Thurlow, Cecilia McDowall, Robin Holloway, Jeremy Coleman, and Iain Farrington were performed. A web page dedicated to this imaginative project can be accessed at www.orgelbuechlein.co.uk. Here can be found links to various aspects of this project including recordings, composition rules, commissioned chorales, and the Orgelbüchlein community.

Conclusion

Bach’s Orgelbüchlein continues to fascinate the creative mind and has proven to be a lasting source of pedagogical interest while serving as a foundational tool in developing the technique and skills of organ students. Because of this ongoing fascination and interest, there have been numerous editions edited by eminent scholars and equally eminent publishers. In this overview, I have shown the strengths of several of these editions and, hopefully, have introduced new insights regarding lesser-known or  infrequently used editions. ν

Acknowledgements

Images of pages from Bach’s autograph of the Orgelbüchlein, from the Bärenreiter Faksimile, are courtesy
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Musikabteilung mit Mendelssohn-Archiv (Mus.ms. Bach P 283).

Notes

1. J. S. Bach, Orgelbüchlein (Little Organ Book), Ulrich Leisinger, editor, with notes on interpretation by Ewald Kooiman. Vienna: Universal Edition, ix.

2. Stinson, 12–17.

3. Stinson, 14–17.

4. Peter Williams, Playing the Organ Works of J. S. Bach (Cambridge Studies in Music). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quoted in Stinson, 31.

5. Riemenschneider. p. v.

6. Ibid., x.

7. Atkins, v.

Bibliography

Archbold, Lawrence. “Johann Sebastian Bach: the Complete Organ Works,” The American Organist 45, no. 11 (November 2012): 53–54.

Bach, Johann Sebastian. Orgelbüchlein, BWV 599–644: Faksimile der autographen Partitur. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1981

Owen, Barbara. “An American Bach Edition At Last,” The Tracker 55, no. 3 (2011): 24–26.

Roberts, W. Peter. “The Orgelbüchlein Project—Blessing and Curse.” The Organ 91 (2012): 58.

Stauffer, George B. “The Complete Organ Works of J. S. Bach: The Leupold Edition,” The American Organist 44, no .9 (September 2010): 41–43. 

Stinson, Russell. Bach: The Orgelbüchlein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

The 2012 inaugural meeting of the new Historical Keyboard Society of North America (HKSNA), formed by the merger of the Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society (SEHKS, founded 1980) and its slightly younger sibling, the Midwestern Historical Keyboard Society (MHKS, organized 1984), was an historic event in itself. The late March gathering in Cincinnati included both the seventh iteration of the Jurow Harpsichord Playing Competition and the eighth occurrence of the International Aliénor Composition Competition, plus scores of scholarly presentations and short recitals, loosely organized into ten sessions, each with a general connecting theme.  

For my contribution to Session Seven (The Old Made New) I attempted to craft a title enigmatic enough that it might pique the curiosity of a few potential auditors, but with the higher goal of providing information about some of the earliest and relatively obscure “new” compositions for harpsichord from the early 20th-century. I hoped, as well, to underscore, at least by implication, the major stimulus for a continuing creation of new repertoire that has been provided by the Aliénor’s prizes, performances, and publications since its inception in 1980. 

Woodhouse plays Cecil Sharp

As early as July 1920, Violet Gordon Woodhouse, the most prominent and gifted of early 20th-century British harpsichordists, recorded three of folksong collector Cecil Sharp’s Country Dance Tunes. Thus Sharp’s 1911 piano versions of the tunes Newcastle, Heddon of Fawsley, and Step Back serve as the earliest “contemporary” music for harpsichord committed to disc.¹

These were followed, in 1922, by recorded performances of two more Cecil Sharp transcriptions, Bryhton Camp and the evocatively titled Gathering Peascods.² While the 1920 recordings were already available in digital format, courtesy of Pearl Records’ Violet Gordon Woodhouse compact disc,³ I had never heard the 1922 offerings. Peter Adamson, an avid collector of these earliest discs, assured me that he could provide the eponymous work listed in the title of this article. Both of us were surprised to find that Gathering Peascods was never issued in the United Kingdom, but Peter was able to send me some superior dubs from the original 1920 discs, as well as a few seconds of authentic 78-rpm needle scratching. Combining this acoustic noise with Sharp’s keyboard arrangement, quickly located online via Google search, made possible the restoration of Peascods to the roster of earliest recorded “contemporary” harpsichord literature. It is equally charming, though perhaps less historically informed, when performed without the ambient sound track. 

Thomé

New harpsichord music composed for the earliest Revival harpsichords⁴ actually predates any recording of the instrument: Francis Thomé’s Rigodon, opus 97, a pièce de claveçin, was written for the fleet-fingered French pianist Louis Diémer, and published in Paris by Henry Lemoine and Company in 1892.⁵

The first 20th-century harpsichord piece?

There are currently two contenders for “first place” in the 20th-century modern harpsichord composition sweepstakes. The first may be Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s English Suite, originally committed to paper in 1909 during his student years in Florence, then recreated in 1939 shortly after the Italian composer’s immigration to the United States. That version, sent to prominent harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick in 1940, seems to have been ignored by the artist, but it was ultimately published by Mills Music in New York in 1962.⁶

A second contender (dare we call it a “co-first”?), which is, thus far, the earliest published 20th-century harpsichord work, is Henri Mulet’s tender and charming miniature Petit Lied. Mulet is most often remembered, if at all, for his ten Byzantine Sketches for Organ, a set that ends with the sometimes-popular toccata Tu es Petrus (Thou art the rock). Comprising a brief seventeen measures, Mulet’s “Little Song” is dedicated to fellow organist Albert Périlhou, who was characterized by his more famous contemporary Louis Vierne, as “a composer of the 18th century.” So perhaps this delicate, nostalgic work, published in 1910 “pour claveçin [ou piano]” was intended to pay homage to Périlhou’s antiquarian tendencies.⁷

Busoni

1916 saw the publication of Ferruccio Busoni’s 1915 Sonatina ad usum infantis Madeline M.* Americanae pro Clavicimbalo composita⁸—a strange, but ultimately satisfying keyboard work that, with some imaginative editing, is playable on a two-manual harpsichord, which one assumes the composer did, since he was also the proud owner of such a 1911 Dolmetsch-Chickering instrument.⁹   

Delius

Often described as “unplayable,” the very original Dance for Harpsichord (for piano) by Frederick Delius came into being in 1919, inspired by the artistry of Violet Gordon Woodhouse. Kirkpatrick included it in a unique program of 20th-century harpsichord music presented at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961¹⁰ and Igor Kipnis recorded it in 1976.¹¹ I have occasionally enjoyed playing Delius’s purple-plush harmonies in a shortened version arranged by Baltimore harpsichordist Joseph Stephens. Each time I play the work I find fewer notes to be necessary, and decide to omit more and more of them, often an approach that best serves these piano-centric harpsichord refugees from the early Revival years. Since Delius surely ranks among the better-known composers who attempted to write anything at all for the harpsichord, it seems worth the effort to forge an individual version that serves to bring this quite lovely piece to the public.

Grainger

Inspired by the recent anniversary year (2011) of the beloved eccentric Percy Grainger (he died in 1961), it seemed fitting to rework another of my own arrangements, that of his “Room-Music Tit-Bits,” the clog dance Handel in the Strand, particularly after coming across Grainger’s own mention of the harpsichord’s influence on his compositional career. In a letter to the pianist Harold Bauer, Grainger wrote:

. . . the music [of my] Kipling Settings . . . [is] an outcome of the influence emanating from the vocal-solo numbers-with-accompaniment-of-solo-instruments in Bach’s Matthew-Passion, as I heard it when a boy of 12, 13, or 14 in Frankfurt. These sounds (two flutes and harpsichord . . .) sounded so exquisite to my ears . . . that I became convinced that larger chamber music (from 8-25 performers) was, for me, an ideal background for single voices . . .¹²    

So why not present Grainger’s Handelian romp edited for one player, ten fingers, and two manuals? Grainger’s own arrangement (“dished-up for piano solo, March 25, 1930, [in] Denton, Texas” according to the composer’s annotation in the printed score) provides a good starting place.¹³

Persichetti and Powell

Two major solo works from the 1950s composed for the harpsichordist Fernando Valenti deserve more performances than they currently receive: Vincent Persichetti’s Sonata for Harpsichord (now known as that prolific composer’s Sonata No. One), still, to my ears, his most pleasing work for our instrument, and Mel Powell’s Recitative and Toccata Percossa—another wonderful work included on Kirkpatrick’s contemporary music disc.¹⁴

Duke Ellington

For aficionados of jazz, the 44 measures of Duke Ellington’s A Single Petal of a Rose comprise three manuscript pages now housed in the Paul Sacher Foundation (Basel, Switzerland), available only as a facsimile in Ule Troxler’s invaluable volume documenting the many commissions bestowed on contemporary composers by the wealthy Swiss harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer.¹⁵ About Ellington’s unique work, Mme. Vischer wrote to the composer late in 1965: 

Just on Christmas Eve I received your marvelous piece . . . I am very happy about your composition and I want to assure you of my greatest thanks. . . . could I ask you the favour to give me the manuscript with the dedication to my name as all other composers are doing for me, with a photo from you who always belong to my collection . . .¹⁶  

When Igor Kipnis asked whether I had any idea as to where he might find this score, I shared the citation information with him. Some years later he reciprocated by sending an arrangement made in collaboration with jazz great Dave Brubeck. A damper pedal would certainly make playing even this somewhat more idiomatic keyboard arrangement easier, but the gentle beauties of Ellington’s only “harpsichord” work deserve to find their place in our repertoire. In the spirit of jazz improvisation, I suggest adapting the written notes to fit one’s individual finger span, as well as assuming a free approach both to some of the notated rhythms and repeats, and not being afraid to toy with the tessitura by changing the octave of some notes in order to achieve a more lyrical legato line on our pedal-less instrument.

Prokofiev (for two)

In 1936 Sergey Prokofiev surprised the western musical world by forsaking Paris and returning to live out the rest of his days in his native Russia. One of his first Soviet musical projects was the composition of incidental music for a centenary production of Pushkin’s play Eugene Onegin. In this dramatic and colorful orchestral score a dream scene is integrated with the house party of the heroine, Tatyana. 

In his recent book, The People’s Artist, music historian Simon Morrison writes,

The party scene opens with the strains of a . . . polka emanating from a distant hall. Aberrant dance music represents aberrant events: much like Onegin himself, the dance music offends sensibility. It sounds wrong; it is a breach. Prokofiev scores the dance (No. 25) for two provincial, out-of-tune harpsichords, the invisible performers carelessly barreling through the five-measure phrases at an insane tempo—a comical comment on the hullabaloo that greets the arrival . . . of a pompous regimental commander. There ensues an enigmatic waltz (No. 26), which Prokofiev scores first for string quintet and then, in a jarring contrast, for the two harpsichords . . .¹⁷   

One wonders just how many provincial harpsichords there were in mid-1930s Russia, but this Polka from Eugene Onegin, played at a slightly more moderate pace, has served as a delightful encore for performances of Francis Poulenc’s Concert Champêtre when that enchanting work is performed as a duo with piano standing in for the orchestral parts, just as it was presented by Wanda Landowska and Poulenc in the very first, pre-premiere hearing of Poulenc’s outstanding score.¹⁸   

The Old Gray Mare, at last

Having fêted a pompous general with Prokofiev’s Polka, it is time to explain the reference to The Old Gray Mare. American composer and academic Douglas Moore composed a short variation set based on the popular folk tune to demonstrate the culminating amicable musical collaboration between the previously antagonistic harpsichord and piano, a duet that concludes the mid-
20th-century recording Said the Piano to the Harpsichord. This educational production has had a somewhat unique cultural significance as the medium through which quite a number of persons first encountered our plucked instrument. While Moore’s variation-finale remains unpublished, it is possible to transcribe the notes from the record, and thus regale live concert audiences with this charming entertainment for listeners “from three to ninety-plus.” 

Other musical examples utilized in this clever skit include a preludial movement, the mournful Le Gemisante from Jean-François Dandrieu’s 1èr Livre de Claveçin [1724]; the violently contrasting Military Polonaise in A Major, opus 40/1 by Fréderic Chopin, in which the piano demonstrates its preferred athletic and happy music and then goads the harpsichord into a ridiculous attempt at playing the same excerpt, sans pedal. That confrontation is followed by Jean-Philippe Rameau’s ever-popular Tambourin, which manages to sound nearly as ridiculous when the piano tries to show that it “can play your music better than you can play mine!”—an attempt heard to be futile when the harpsichord puts that notion to rest by playing it “the way it ought to sound.”

The 2012 Aliénor winners chosen by judges Tracy Richardson, David Schrader, and Alex Shapiro from some 70 submitted scores: Solo harpsichord (works required to emulate in some way the Mikrokosmos pieces by Béla Bartók): composers Ivan Božičevič (Microgrooves), Janine Johnson (Night Vision), Kent Holliday (Mikrokosmicals), Thomas Donahue (Four Iota Pieces), Mark Janello (Six Harpsichord Miniatures), and Glenn Spring (Bela Bagatelles). Vocal chamber music with one obbligato instrument and harpsichord: Jeremy Beck (Songs of Love & Remembrance), Ivan Božičevič (Aliénor Courante), and Asako Hirabayashi (Al que ingrate me deja).¹⁹ ν 

Notes

1. Jessica Douglas-Home, The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse (London: The Harvill Press, 1996). Discography (by Alan Vicat), p. 329. 

2. Ibid. Matrices issued in France with the catalogue number P484.

  3. Great Virtuosi of the Harpsichord, volume 3. Pearl GEMM CD 9242 (1996).

4. Three newly constructed two-manual harpsichords built by the piano firms Érard and Pleyel, and by the instrument restorer Louis Tomasini, were shown at the Paris Exposition of 1889, and heard in performances at the event. The modern harpsichord revival is often dated from that year.

5. See Larry Palmer, “Revival Relics” in Early Keyboard Journal V (1986–87), pp. 45–52, and Palmer, Harpsichord in America: A 20th-Century Revival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; paperback second edition, 1993), pp. 4–6; page six is a facsimile of the first page of Rigodon.

6. See Larry Palmer, “Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s English Suite for Harpsichord at 100.” The Diapason, December 2009,
pp. 36–37.

7. See these articles in The Diapason: Donna M. Walters, “Henri Mulet: French organist-composer,” December 2008, pp. 26–29; Harpsichord News, August 2010, p. 11; and, for a complete facsimile of the original publication, the issue of January 2011,
p. 12. 

  8. Edition Breitkopf Nr. 4836 “for Piano Solo.”  

9. See Larry Palmer, “The Busoni Sonatina,” in The Diapason, September 1973, pp. 10–11; Palmer, Harpsichord in America: “Busoni and the Harpsichord,” pp. 25–26; the first harpsichord recording of this work is played by Larry Palmer on Musical Heritage Society disc LP 3222 (1975). A fine 2002 digital recording, Revolution for Cembalo (Hänssler Classic CD 98.503) features Japanese harpsichordist Sumina Arihashi playing the Busoni Sonatina, as well as Delius’s Dance, Thomé’s Rigodon, and other early revival works by Ravel, Massenet, Richard Strauss, and Alexandre Tansman.

10. The list of included composers is given in Palmer, Harpsichord in America,
p. 146. Kirkpatrick also recorded this program in 1961. 

11. “Bach Goes to Town,” Angel/EMI S-36095.

12. http://www.percygrainger.org/prog not5.htm (accessed 20 October 2011).

13. Published by G. Schirmer.

14. Persichetti’s ten sonatas for harpsichord are published by Elkan-Vogel, Inc., a subsidiary of the Theodore Presser Company, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010; the First Sonata, opus 52 (1951), was published in 1973. The Powell work remains unpublished.

15. Ule Troxler, Antoinette Vischer: Dokumente zu einem Leben für das Cembalo (Basel: Birkhäuser-Verlag, 1976). Published by Schott & Co. Ltd., London; U.S. reprint by G. Schirmer.

16. Ibid., pp. 99–100. 

17. Simon Morrison, The People’s Artist—Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The quotation is found on page 130. I assembled the two harpsichord parts by cutting and pasting them from the orchestral score of Eugene Onegin (his opus 71).  I am unaware of any other published edition.

18. Personally I find the balances for the Poulenc much better in duo performances than in live harpsichord and orchestra ones. Another interesting possibility, at least as demonstrated by a recording, may be heard on Oehms Classics compact disc OC 637, where harpsichordist Peter Kofler is partnered by organist Hansjörg Albrecht and percussionist Babette Haag in a compelling performance, recorded in 2009 in Munich.

19. For more information about Aliénor and its history, consult www.harpsichord-now.org.

2012 marks the 50th anniversary of harpsichord editor Larry Palmer’s first published writing in The Diapason: a brief article about Hugo Distler in the issue for November 1962. Since those graduate student days he has taught at St. Paul’s College and Norfolk State and Southern Methodist Universities, served as President of SEHKS from 2004–2008, and is a continuing member of the advisory board for Aliénor. At the Cincinnati gathering in addition to “Gathering Peascods” he played Glenn Spring’s Bela Bagatelles at the Awards recital and chaired the Sunday session devoted to “Swingtime—The Mitch Miller Showdown.” 

David Rumsey⁴⁴ was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He studied with Anton Heiller and Marie-Claire Alain in Europe 1963–66, then returned to a position at the University of Adelaide. Moving back to Sydney in 1969 he established a Department of Organ and Church Music, which survives the recent Australian educational and research funding cuts. For over 25 years, until 1998, he was the regular organist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and as such frequently presided over the Grand Organs of Sydney Opera House and Sydney Town Hall. Associations with multimedia events have included performances of the Saint-Saëns “Organ Symphony” to 100,000 people with the orchestra in the Sydney Domain, the organ via microwave link from Sydney Town Hall. In 1998, he wrote, produced, acted, and performed in a highly successful 14-hour musical and dramatic spectacle on the life of J.S. Bach, with actors in period costume from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (AUS), and musicians playing period instruments. He resigned his post in Sydney in 1998 and moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he continues working as an organist and consultant, and as a Senior Researcher at the University of Bern. Since 2007 he has been responsible for the editing and CD-production of historic organ recordings released under the OehmsClassics label using the historic Welte organ and its player-rolls at Seewen (SO-CH) and is regarded as an authority on aspects of medieval organ culture. He is organist at Herz Jesu Kirche in Laufen (BL-CH) and in-house consultant and organist to the Museum der Musikautomaten, Seewen (SO-CH).

On Friday and Saturday, June 9 and 10, 2012, a concert and workshop focusing on the medieval organ were held at the Basel (Switzerland) Peterskirche. They dealt with concepts, designs, repertoire and the medieval organ used in ensemble.¹ Another symposium and series of concerts was later organized in and around East Friesland (Rhede), commencing Monday, September 3, 2012, running until Sunday, September 9, dealing with much the same topics.² Some instruments and participants were common to both events. Elsewhere Kimberly Marshall played and held courses in Sion (Switzerland) during October 2012. Other events in Europe during the summer of 2012 dedicated to the medieval organ included one arranged by Jos van der Giessen in the Netherlands.

Kimberly Marshall’s 1989 book, Iconographical Evidence for the Late-Medieval Organ in French, Flemish and English Manuscripts,³ was of seminal influence to much of this blossoming culture. It was the most oft-quoted work at the Basel and Rhede conferences. A colloquium in 1995 at Royaumont (France), two years after an 11th-century Theophilus organ had been reconstructed there by Antoine Massoni, was a most important sequel.⁴ Marcel Pérès, responsible for the Royaumont Theophilus organ, also played in Basel during August 2011. The 2012 events were significant vantage points in an ongoing search for the Holy Grail of understanding medieval organs and performance practices. They continued to push back through the 15th, 14th, 13th centuries, even to the 3rd in Rhede.

The Phenomenon

The observant phenomenologist might well note something in the air: research into and performance of early music has now spread both forwards and backwards in time—from a “Bach-fulcrum” that began with Mendelssohn,
S.S. Wesley, et al. in the early 19th century. By the late 20th century it had reached fortepiano, early Steinway, the “real” Wagner orchestra, and even Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, where authenticity of instruments used was a measure of performance excellence. Concurrently, moving back to ever earlier eras, the music of Buxtehude, Frescobaldi, Couperin, Correa de Arauxo, and Sweelinck—among many others—has been vigorously regenerated through performance on historic organs, careful emulation of their temperaments, key proportions, wind quality, specifications, tonal and mechanical attributes, all of which illuminate performance practices.

Other 19th- and 20th-century contributions to this historical consciousness included the continuum of English choral music, the rediscovery of Palestrina, and parallel developments in Gregorian chant. In the educational arena it seeped into musical institutions such as Eugène Gigout’s 19th-century Organ School in Paris or the early 20th-century Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, not to forget the work of Solesmes and similar centers. High-profile specialist performers such as Gustav Leonhardt then came on the scene, increasingly promoting serious research, publications, recordings, and concerts. Discrete organ cultures began to be brought back to life by dedicated builders, researchers, performers, and luminaries. A veritable explosion of knowledge and activity erupted around the turn of the 21st century.

The phenomenon is now neither confined to the organ nor the 16th–19th centuries, but takes in viola da gamba, cornetto, medieval fiddle, lute, harpsichord, hurdy-gurdy, harp, bells, whole families of antique instruments, and virtually all music of any period. The ongoing challenge in the medieval arena for instrumentalists is that of surviving originals. Certainly extant and truly original 16th-century organs are scarce. Precious little material dating from before the 15th century is known—and then essentially only fragments. Iconography, contemporary descriptions, the few comprehensible early organbuilding tracts, and much circumstantial evidence taken from extant contemporary repertoire are about all that there is to go on. At the Rhede conference, Winold van der Putten, who was responsible for building many of the instruments present, added another significant factor: the experience of specialist organbuilders who have now regularly interpreted these old sources and learned how to put theories or confusing historic descriptions into practice. This is a cutting edge where artistic fringe-dwellers live dangerously by constantly expanding boundaries. It is a little like “walking the plank,” just that the board gets narrower as it seemingly extends back forever, engaging the enquirer in an ever more precarious balancing act. But the rewards are tangible, and in the past few years fully successful medieval constant-scaled ranks have been constructed and voiced. They were commonplace enough for much of medieval instrument-building history and essential to its performance.

Walter Chinaglia, from Como (Italy)⁵ was another of those present in both Basel and Rhede with several of his own positives and portatives built from extending what is “seen through a glass darkly” into convincing practical realities, another fruit from the experiences of these increasingly skilled specialist builders. There are others—Marcus Stahl of Dresden⁶ and Stefan Keppler of Kötz,⁷ to name but two from Germany.

2012—European Medieval 

Organ Summer

On Saturday afternoon, September 8, 2012, the Rhede symposium was nearing its conclusion and running rather late, since so many people had had so much to offer. The interest was exceptionally keen; most sessions had extended well beyond their scheduled times. About 15 different organs had been assembled in a kind of “grand general meeting of gothic organs.” They emulated everything from a hydraulis to 13th, 14th, and 15th-century portatives and positives. There were also some renaissance instruments, including an original 16th-century Italian organ, the most modern of the assembly, a permanent fixture in the Old Church at Rhede, nodal point of this symposium. Other venues around this East-Friesland region included Weener and Rysum. Attendees came from Germany, Netherlands, Scotland, Switzerland, Australia, Czech Republic, USA, and Scandinavia. 

At the outset Harald Vogel made the poignant observation that this unusual gathering of medieval organs was an exceptionally important event in the history of the instrument, a hitherto virtually unthinkable assembly. It was organized by the Weener Organeum, Winfried Dahlke in charge, supported by a squadron of organists, organbuilders, and others whose burning curiosity clearly motivated them strongly. 

Dr. Vogel inaugurated the “Rims” instrument, made for a German organist by Orgelmakerij van der Putten after mid-14th-century practices: constant-scaling, two 8′s in parallel (effectively 8′ II-ranks, always playing, no stop control) and a 6′ (on a separate register, slider above the windchest). The resemblance to an organ described in the 10–12th-century Sélestat Manuscript gives its 8′+8′+6′ specification full credibility.⁸

The prototypical culture that inspired the Rims instrument used lead as pipe material, constant scaling after the 11th-century Berne Anonymous MS,⁹ and keys as described by Praetorius for Halberstadt.¹⁰ Its Gamba-Quintadena-like bass tones with Principally-Flutey trebles were an experience all of their own. They came into good use during the symposium in Gregorian alternatims, borduns supporting chanters, and works such as medieval Redeuntes with long-held bass notes under more agile trebles. This instrument presented a left-hand cantus firmus of an early Felix namque¹¹ with remarkable ease and complete conviction; its scaling allowing the “slow-note cantus firmus” to stand out against right-hand elaborations as if two manuals were being used. Yet no normal two-manual organ could ever achieve the effect so convincingly. An understanding of the 13th-century Notre Dame school of Léonin and Pérotin—also tried out at the conference—was clarified through performance on this instrument. All present knew instinctively that they were in the presence of a special musical integrity and masterly instrument building.¹²

Another organ, of an altogether different, rather later style, was the largest of several provided by Walter Chinaglia. This remarkable organo di legno brought to mind a passage in Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography: 

My father began teaching me to play upon the flute and sing by note; but notwithstanding I was of that tender age when little children like to take pastime in whistles and such toys, I had an inexpressible dislike for it, and played and sang only to obey him. At this time my father fashioned wonderful organs with pipes made of wood, spinets the fairest and most excellent which could then be seen, viols and lutes and harps of the most beautiful and perfect construction.¹³

What could be called Chinaglia’s Cellini Principals are exceptionally fine ranks, made from a beautiful red-yellow cypress, which even contributes scent to the total experience of this organ. They run through the entire range of its keyboard at both 8′ and 4′ pitches. The third register, an exquisite Krummhorn-Regal with a beautifully full and rich quality in spite of its pencil-thin resonators, adds a strong and spicy finish to the tonal resources.¹⁴ He also brought along several positives and portatives, one very fine positive emulating that in the van der Goes painting in Scotland.¹⁵

Of particular interest to everybody at the symposium was a new interpretation of the ancient Roman organ finds from Aquincum (Hungary). It was built by
A. Schuke Potsdam-Orgelbau GmbH (Germany) for the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz (Germany); research, design, and concept were by Susanne Rühling M.A. and Michael Zierenberg.¹⁶ Extra time had to be allocated, taken from later sessions, allowing a second round of discussion about this amazing but potent little replica. It stood there, like a proud Roman sentinel, on its brown hexagonal pedestal, a living and working monument, mostly in copper or bronze, to the organ belonging to Aquincum’s 3rd-century fire brigade. Its prototype ironically survived a fire by falling into the cellar. Were they all out that night? Perhaps the seemingly unanswerable question—“Was it a hydraulis or a bellows organ?”—might be given a nudge towards hydraulis, since its survival could have been the result of having water poured over it as it fell? It is doubtful that burning floors falling into cellars with highly flammable organ bellows would do anything more than increase the conflagration. Such speculations aside, this instrument looked more like something from the age of steam and polished brass. Indeed, its amazing sounds were quite reminiscent of steam whistles. Justus Willberg also tours Europe with a hydraulis,¹⁷ complete with air-pumps, water cistern, pnigeus, and Greek repertoire, but following the older, Walcker-Mayer interpretation. He was in Basel not so long before the June event, another manifestation of this fascinating phenomenon. The sounds of these Roman organs seem not unrelated to the new Rims organ when first heard from a modern perspective, although they are in reality tonally, musically, and mechanically universes apart.

Another star of both events was the two-stop, one-manual and pedal positive made for the author in 2010 by van der Putten. This instrument was also partly influenced by the van der Goes painting. The organ and I had been invited to make the trip from Basel specifically to talk, play, and be played at this conference. Much of the woodwork is Lebanese cedar, again contributing scent to the total experience. It was used in every concert and demonstration and featured twice on the cover of the flyer. (Rysum was the third.) The two Rhede flyer photos were taken at the Basel event by Jos van der Giessen where the Peterskirche appropriately provided a neatly framed, truly “Gothic” background.¹⁸ The positive was moved from Laufen (Switzerland, near Basel) to Rhede (Germany), then Huizinge (Netherlands), Rysum (Germany), Rhede (Germany), Groningen (Netherlands), Finsterwolde (Netherlands), and back to Laufen (Switzerland) during this northern sojourn—about 12 days.

The rest of the Rhede Symposium consisted of demonstrations, concerts, lectures, a church service, socializing, and networking. The invitees included Harald Vogel, Winold van der Putten, Koos van de Linde, Cor Edskes (paper read in absentia), Susanne Rühling, Winfried Dahlke, Jankees Braaksma, Tomas Flegr, and myself. Themes ranged around gothic pipe-making, wind pressures, voicing, repertoire, performance practice, the problems and advantages in the anachronous use of tuning slides in modern copies of early organs, the towering figure of Arnaut de Zwolle, medieval organ design (cases, windchests, specifications, keys), the Blockwerk, surviving literature, touch sensitivity on portatives, the use of bells with medieval organs, Pythagorean tempering, and much more.

Time simply ran out. The richness of thematic material, available expertise, the many discussion by-products, and the ravenous cultural, intellectual, and musical hunger of all gathered together for this event turned out to be quite overwhelming for the organizers. Some speakers and players had to seriously curtail their offerings. Frustrating though this was, it should be no enduring problem as long as the need for more is acknowledged.

Thus it was that, on Saturday afternoon, September 8, 2012, momentarily lacking a program, I turned to Jos van der Giessen and asked, “When does this finish?” Even the fascinating unscheduled double session by Koos van de Linde (Netherlands/Germany) ranging from Arnaut de Zwolle to the much-discussed Utrecht Nicolaïkerk organ restoration¹⁹ was not fully done. Three more speakers were impossibly scheduled in the 30 minutes before the close at 4:30 pm. My question was intended to be “When does this (session) finish”—but the response fittingly, amusingly, and intentionally misinterpreted it, summing up the spirit which had been engendered by all the 2012 events: “Never, I hope!”

For the phenomenologists, at least four medieval organ events in around four months—Basel, Netherlands, Rhede, Sion—must be something of a landmark for 2012.

•

Immediately following the Rhede Symposium, on Sunday, September 9, after the closing church service in Rysum, a further concert was held in Groningen’s De Oosterpoort Concert Hall. Arrangements had been made that my instrument would remain in the Netherlands for a few days before being returned to Switzerland. Jankees Braaksma (Netherlands) and Tomas Flegr (Czech Republic) played it with the group Vox Resonans, the ensemble adding that sparkle and transformed sound that has been frequently noted with this organ: those who had attended both events were still commenting on Tobie Miller’s hurdy-gurdy playing in Basel and the amazing soundscapes created when organistrum and organum are played in ensemble. The dance group, RenaiDanse,²⁰ led by Veronique Daniels (Switzerland), and instrumentalists also featured in two of the Rhede Symposium concerts as well as this Groningen event. They all earned a double standing ovation in Groningen—one after the concert, another after the encore. The calcant (the organ’s builder), physically exhausted and suffering from a serious workshop injury incurred just before the symposium, was fittingly included with the performers in these accolades.

Quo vadis?

The many themes raised by these conferences can only be dealt with through an enduring continuum of instrument building, research, discussion, publication, and many more such events. This arena is a collection of musical swords that still need much more rattling in their scabbards. Basel and Rhede together were able to pose important questions, and even answer some, at least in the short term. But long-term answers are needed, since both the practice and the research is relatively recent, tends to be revelatory, and is ongoing—very much an essential part of the phenomenon.

There were questions posed about the nicknaming of the Rutland Psalter copy as a “Theophilus” organ. Of course, with hindsight we can now view this as two ends of a historical progression and clearly distinguish between them as organ types. Simple, well-intended glossing can grow into habits that become less correct as time progresses. Such expressions tend to stick, even when more recent knowledge overtakes them. Another habit of this kind began to be formed at these conferences when—rightly enough as a new venture in recreating pipe-making history—the so-called “pigeon’s egg” registers (three on the Rims organ, one on the Rumsey organ) were referred to just so: “pigeon’s egg ranks.” The term comes from the 11th-century Codex Bern (see endnote 9), where the measure of pipe diameters is explained as “the width of a pigeon’s egg.” Yet the eggs chosen were different and correctly discriminated between the eras the two instruments represented. Thus the ranks were not scaled to the same widths. The terminology really should have been “constant-scaled.” After that we might talk ancient treatises and ornithology.²¹ Likewise, in discussing the “wolf” in Pythagorean tempering, the interval really should have been referred to as “b to g♭” rather than “b to f♯”. And what were referred to as “pure thirds” are in fact just ever so slightly impure acoustically, since they are really Pythagorean diminished fourths, e.g., d–g♭, which are 384.36 cents, whereas a truly pure major third is 386.31 cents. True, normal human perception cannot distinguish between them.²² Again, strictly speaking, the hydraulis presented was closer to a bellows organ. 

These matters need little further comment here; the intention is clear in every case once the context is clarified and human nature to gloss, nickname, and abbreviate is acknowledged. Exact terminology usually sorts itself out eventually as needs arise and awareness increases—although a general tendency to slow progress is lamentable.

What needs probing now includes the following:

Medieval Tuning and Tempering: A frequent modern assumption that earlier Pythagorean temperaments mostly had the “wolf” at G♯–E♭²³ seems only rarely to be hinted at in ancient sources. It has sometimes been recommended or assumed by exponents of this culture, including Mark Lindley, although often with serious reservations or caveats.²⁴ Others, such as Adam B. Rahbee, are known to be investigating this.²⁵ Further results are eagerly awaited from him and others. However, the most likely outcome, endemic to this medieval discipline it would seem, is that there was no single standard. One particularly fascinating development of this was how, in the half-century or so before Schlick (the work of Arnaut de Zwolle, Pietro Aaron, et al), the pure thirds/diminished fourths were shifted and came into line with four of what became mean-tone temperament’s normal eight.²⁶

Fingering: The use only of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th fingers when playing medieval keyboard music was strongly promoted in the Rhede masterclasses. There was a claim that it was impossible to use thumb and 5th finger anyway, especially when playing portatives. Yet this was proven wrong by at least one participant, who repeatedly and comfortably used all fingers. When an octave span is required in, e.g., a 3-part Buxheim²⁷ piece, and it can only be played by one hand because the other is too far removed to help out, then how can the thumb not be used, especially if the keys are substantially wider than modern keys and there is no pedal? (Horror of horrors: was the rule of exclusively 2nd, 3rd, and 4th fingers partly formulated by people playing relatively narrow modern keyboards?) Aside from Tobie Miller’s hurdy-gurdy playing in Basel, the finely fingered performances by Brett Leighton—who takes Buchner’s Fundamentum organisandi of c. 1520 and his Quem terra pontus as a point of departure—also linger very well in collective memory.²⁸

Music and its structures: Much of the medieval repertoire could have been intended for constant-scaled ranks. The music of Robertsbridge²⁹ and Faenza³⁰ seem often to rely on the development of tension through tessitura variation and the relation of this to changing tonal qualities induced by scaling practices. Redeuntes, for example, sound wonderful on constant-scaled ranks as the figuration rises and falls. This music thrives on “intensity climaxes” that higher-pitched, fuller and flutier constant-scaled ranks produce. No modern scaling can possibly achieve this. The first Estampie from Robertsbridge has one “punctus” after another, each getting successively higher than the preceding, until the final one just blooms with the highest and most intensely flutey notes of all. It is not just constant-scaled ranks but also other scaling practices from this era—e.g., Arnaut’s “halving on the octave with addition constant”—that can produce this effect. Essentially all early scaling practices do to varying degrees, but the more scaling practice approaches modern schemes, such as Töpfer’s norms,³¹ the less marked this effect becomes, and the music ends up sounding relatively flat and lifeless.

Metallurgy—copper, lead, tin, and alloys—plays a most critical role. The use of wood for pipes is another question, particularly the issue of its first clearly recorded use—Italy, late 15th century?³² The Sion (Switzerland) Valeria organ has a “Copel” made from wood, now dendrochronologically dated from around early 15th century.³³ Of course, wood was introduced at some stage between the hydraulis and Arnaut de Zwolle as a material replacing the earlier copper/bronze variants used in making windchests.³⁴ Similarly, early conical metal pipe-forms and the potential confusion they cause in the iconography with wood needs investigation.³⁵ The relics at Hamar, Norway, may eventually provide a key.

The apparently sudden change from copper/bronze to lead at the turn of the 13th century is an interesting phenomenon: that lead was far more malleable than copper may have been a driving motivation clinching change. But the tonal effect was so strikingly softer and sweeter that this was expressly noted in many contemporary tracts.³⁶ It must have come as a profoundly exciting development, part of the Ars Nova/Ars Antiqua watershed. Notated organ music first consistently appeared just after the change—some of it might suit the sound of tin or copper but most of it plays remarkably well on lead pipework. Did the notion of accompanied voices rather than alternatim also receive some kind of stimulus here? And the desire to separate a single 8′ out from a Blockwerk: was this also part of the switch to lead? Later register names, such as Doof, hint at this, for the softer tones of lead must have seemed “deaf” compared either to copper pipes or the presence of upperwork of any kind. It was mainly in the centuries after this change that the typical, relatively small, medieval organ began to share the stage with some increasingly multi-ranked Blockwerks. The facility of the larger Blockwerks to be reduced to a single, sweet foundation rank must have been very alluring, whether for accompaniment or contrast.

Blockwerk registrations were sometimes recommended for pieces played by participants in Rhede—but how many organs pre-15th century had more than about one, two, or three ranks? Two of these ranks were often enough simply a doubled unison. The most spectacular Blockwerks were reported by Wulstan at Winchester in the 10th century or Praetorius at Halberstadt in the 14th or 15th century. Were some of these chroniclers, like us, more impressed with size—or hooked on hyperbole—than with making sober inventories of what was really there? Certainly, the three-rank Rims organ was closer to many Blockwerks of that era than the concept of a “Lokaz of at least 50 ranks,” to cite Schlick at the end of the era around 1511. And the Winchester organ: did this have copper pipes? Presumably. Was that—apart from its apparently anachronistically large mixture—another reason why it was reported as being so loud? Prima facie, sources and iconography prior to the 15th century indicate the existence of relatively few large Blockwerks compared to the many Positives and Portatives.

As with scaling, pitch, keyboard design, metallurgy, and everything else about medieval organs, there were no DIN specifications. Any investigative path is flawed if standards like this are sought. A variety of options needs to be tried within known tolerances, then optimums and limits found. Assessments can then follow, which might be region-, collection- or even specific work-oriented. It would be wonderful if some day money could be found to build an entire series of constant-scaled ranks from very thin to quite wide scaling, note the true ranges available, and try out repertoire on them, for instance that spanning the era between the Robertsbridge Codex and Buxheimer Orgelbuch. If further funding were available, then some copper pipes might also be tried, not for keyboard repertoire before this, since it virtually does not exist, but for ensembles (especially those commonly iconographically represented) and alternatim.

Did some or all the music in Faenza assume copper pipes, lead pipes, tin pipes, alloys? Constant or variable scaling? Pitches equivalent to A440, A466, A520 or something else? And where to place the “wolf”? A520, lead pipes, early Pythagorean tempering, and constant scaling certainly seem to work very well. But are our criteria correct? The experience of beautifully pure major thirds from Renaissance mean-tone tempering, or major thirds ranging from pure to mistuned in the circular temperings of the Baroque era, is very enticing to impressionable musicians travelling back from an accustomed equal tempering. Yet the sober reality is that pure thirds were sometimes expressly avoided, e.g., by Bach using remote keys with dissonant thirds to represent crucifixion, or even just sheer doggedness as with Thomas Roseingrave’s self-proclaimed love of F–G♯ rather than F–A♭ in his deliberate choice of a “nasty” F-minor tonality. Was the Pythagorean “wolf” sought out in like manner, or studiously avoided by these earlier musicians? Probably it was avoided if the evidence of modal transpositions is taken at face value—but even here there are questions that need working through.³⁷ In any case, there is no significant evidence in medieval music for an Affektenlehre and Figurenlehre: that was the culture of Bach, Handel, and Roseingrave.

To a degree, medieval voicing seems somewhat weather-prone: what barely works one day, might work well or not at all in the next cold snap or heat wave. And the organs of those days were only marginally protected from weather change compared to ours in air-conditioned buildings today. Thus: were their tolerances of pitch and tuning, including in ensemble, and with bells, more flexible than ours are today? Within limits, slight differences actually make these organs more interesting, as do historical voicing techniques—particularly the lack of total control with wide-open footholes. The lowest generally workable pitch from 27mm constant-scaled lead pipes is about modern (A440) tenor E♭. With 33mm it extends down to B♭, a fourth lower. Thus, pitches of organs produce differing manual compasses, or a few low pipes with ears needed to make them speak. As Winold van der Putten pointed out in Basel, “Medieval organ builders were no fools: it only takes cupping a hand around a pipe mouth to make it speak.” Iconography showing ears is, however, extremely elusive—jury out, experimentation and investigation still in. If, as seems likely, constant scaling was perpetuated well after the 11th century, whence these “pigeon’s egg” figures derive, then diameters could well have increased in time, allowing lower bass ranges and even more blooming trebles. The iconography, inter alia, suggests that this tendency could have persisted until early 15th century as diameters apparently became wider.³⁸ A targeted study of this is overdue.

If we retain all the parameters noted above, then reduce the size of the pigeon’s egg taken to 27mm, as with the Rims organ, little of Robertsbridge and Faenza at its notated pitch can be played satisfactorily unless the instrument is higher than A440. The very low notes cannot be voiced reliably using known medieval tools and techniques. Yet Léonin, Pérotin, or the Felix Namque of the Oxford MS sound totally convincing here with their more agile trebles—everything just bringing this music to a radiant vitality. The same applies for other parameters with Buxheimer, Ileborgh,³⁹ or various regional- or even specifically single-work instances.

Even so, did Léonin and Pérotin ever know lead pipes?

Research and experimentation not possible hitherto has now shown that constant scaling with pigeons’ egg dimensions around 33mm, and a pitch of at least A465 makes the first Estampie from Robertsbridge sound simply magnificent when transposed up a tone. That equates to A520—which should make some players of medieval instruments happy, since many project that pitch for some of their repertoire. All this, or an even higher pitch, brings “43” from Faenza truly to life in 33mm constant scaling. Lower that pitch and the bass notes of the Estampie are poor or missing, while the overall effect of “43” is relatively dull from trebles that simply do not bloom so well.

Of necessity, these assessments will always have a component of subjectivity in them. But not entirely: low pitches and constant scaling yield bass notes that do not repeat promptly, and others that will not speak properly, if at all—indicators that either pitch is too low, scaling too narrow, or later scaling practices could be appropriate. The physical limits of medieval organ compasses and pitch now need probing and defining. Any temptation to a general conformity of anything—pitch, scaling, metal alloy, tempering, fingering—must be addressed as a range or tolerance, given a specific set of parameters. This expressly includes repertoire and ensemble playing.

Standardization was a new concept that had to wait for Arnolt Schlick and later centuries. Interestingly, Schlick, relatively modern by comparison to the main thrust of these conferences, barely made it into the discussions.

A sequel? 

Thus, there was a consensus that intellectual and musical exchange should not simply vanish after this flush of medieval organ symposia during the European summer of 2012. Several events are already known to be foreshadowed. Of considerable interest will be a major symposium planned for the Amsterdam Orgelpark, June 6–8, 2013.⁴⁰ Wherever future events are held, it would be most welcome if they were not primarily talk-fests, but also included strong performance components. One small criticism of the Rhede Symposium was its predominance of talk over music. A four-way balance will always be needed with medieval organ cultures: talk, solo organ, alternatim, and in ensemble. In a way, these instruments were born to work in alternation with speech, chanting, silence, and possibly bells. It is particularly in ensemble that the iconography, literature, and extant music seems to be signposting the way ahead. Both Basel and Rhede showed that all four are needed for a completely balanced presentation of this highly fascinating culture. Basel strongly promoted alternatim and ensemble, and so did Rhede, the latter chiefly in concerts where dance was also represented. Would the miracle or mystery plays of the era be a good suggestion for some future events?

The Mainzer Hoftag of 1184 is usually reckoned as the greatest medieval festival in history. It was here that Friedrich Barbarossa knighted his sons, Heinrich VI and Friedrich V. A contemporary description of it included these lines:⁴¹

Dâ was spil end gesanc

End behurt ende dranc,

Pîpen ende singen

Vedelen ende springen,

Orgeln ende seitspelen,

Meneger slachten frouden vele.

There was playing and song,

And pushing and shoving,

Piping and singing,

Fiddles and dancing,

Organs and strings playing,

Many joyful things mingling.

Epilogue

The standing ovations in Groningen mentioned above had something of a cathartic feel to them, reflecting the exegesis in medieval organbuilding and musical performance that has taken place over the past several decades, especially in the events described above. Winold van der Putten’s organs were not at all alone in this, but he and his work were at the center of two of these conferences.⁴² His 1999 realization of the copy of the Rutland Psalter organ was an important trailblazer. This instrument was featured at the Rhede conference, along with some portatives for Jankees Braaksma and his group, Super Librum.⁴³ These were prototypes for most of what has followed as van der Putten and others investigated, experimented, and cracked the codes of medieval organbuilding and voicing. His recent constant-scaled ranks for myself and the Rims instrument were essayed only after much investigation and experimentation. In their own way, they alone deserved their rightful share of those standing ovations. Medieval organ scaling of this kind now seems set to be one of the next “revelations” in the performance of this music—not least in portatives where, oddly enough, it remains relatively untried.

David Rumsey⁴⁴ was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He studied with Anton Heiller and Marie-Claire Alain in Europe 1963–66, then returned to a position at the University of Adelaide. Moving back to Sydney in 1969 he established a Department of Organ and Church Music, which survives the recent Australian educational and research funding cuts. For over 25 years, until 1998, he was the regular organist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and as such frequently presided over the Grand Organs of Sydney Opera House and Sydney Town Hall. Associations with multimedia events have included performances of the Saint-Saëns “Organ Symphony” to 100,000 people with the orchestra in the Sydney Domain, the organ via microwave link from Sydney Town Hall. In 1998, he wrote, produced, acted, and performed in a highly successful 14-hour musical and dramatic spectacle on the life of J.S. Bach, with actors in period costume from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (AUS), and musicians playing period instruments. He resigned his post in Sydney in 1998 and moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he continues working as an organist and consultant, and as a Senior Researcher at the University of Bern. Since 2007 he has been responsible for the editing and CD-production of historic organ recordings released under the OehmsClassics label using the historic Welte organ and its player-rolls at Seewen (SO-CH) and is regarded as an authority on aspects of medieval organ culture. He is organist at Herz Jesu Kirche in Laufen (BL-CH) and in-house consultant and organist to the Museum der Musikautomaten, Seewen (SO-CH).⁴⁵

Acknowledgements

(*) Seemingly the only images currently available, taken here from Stein Johannes Kolnes, Norsk orgelkultur—Instrument og miljø frå mellomalderen til I dag, Det Norske Samlaget, Oslo, 1987.

Thanks to John Liddy, Jos van der Giessen, Marc Lewon, and Elizabeth Rumsey for their help with this article, and to all who contributed photos and good advice. My apologies to Walter Chinaglia for not writing more about his organo di legno—space allocation just became too acute and this instrument really belongs to a slightly later epoch than the one mainly under discussion here. A fuller report on it can be seen at http://www.davidrumsey.ch/Chinaglia.htm.

Notes

1. Some details are available at www.david rumsey.ch/Medieval.php.

2. www.ostfriesischelandschaft.de/1097.html

3. Kimberly Marshall, Iconographical Evidence for the Late-Medieval Organ in French, Flemish, and English Manuscripts (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), ISBN 0-8240-2047-2.

4. A description of the background to this, including mention of an earlier instrument by Yves Cabourdin, is available in Marcel Pérès, editor, Les orgues gothiques: Actes du Colloque de Royaument, 1995 (Paris, Editions Créaphis, 2000).

5. www.organa.it

6. www.marcus-stahl-orgelbauer.com

7. Wolkenstayn Orgelbau—also represented at the Basel event—www.wolkenstayn.de. He is arranging a course March 8–10, 2013, the “13. Etappe zur Frühen Musik,” dealing with Organetto/Portative playing, to be held at Burg Fuersteneck. Details on his website.

8. www.davidrumsey.ch/Bibliography.htm (see under 11th century)

9. Anonymous of Bern(e) or Codex Bern, Anonymus Bernensis etc., excerpt De fistulis organis/De organis.

10. In Michael Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum, Volume II, Wolfenbüttel 1618 (1619/20), section V, and Volume III 1619, section 7: “Das I. und II. Diskant-klavier.”

11. Oxford Douce MS 381

12. An alternatim (Veni creator spiritus) from an ad hoc Rhede performance can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgtszdCw91o&feature=youtu.be.

13. John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), trans., The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Chapter V. It is now available online as part of the “Gutenberg” project (see www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4028).

14. Further details at: www.organa.it/page1/page14/page41/page41.html.

15. Hugo van der Goes, Ange jouant de l’orgue (Angel playing the organ), Flemish ca. 1480, Sir Edward Bonkil, Holyrood Castle, Edinburgh collection. For a sample (second from left) see https://d30dcznuokq8w8.cloudfront.net/works/r/bal/6/8/0/399086_full_102….

16. www.schuke.com/pages/de/projects#reconstructions

17. www.hydraulis.de

18. Remains of a hydraulis were excavated in Dion, Greece, in August 1992. A reconstruction has since been toured. See Peter Williams and Jean-Paul Montagnier, eds., The Organ Yearbook #33 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2004), p. 163; Michael Markovits, Die Orgel in Altertum (Leiden: Brill, 2003); and websites: www.culture.gr/2/23/232/epked/en/00_standard_menu/00a_ydraulis/00a.htm and www.mlahanas.de/Greece/Cities/Dion.html.

19. See Peter Williams, ed., The Organ Yearbook #41 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2012), pp. 7–35. Program at www.david rumsey.ch/index.pdf, images at www.david rumsey.ch/2012/album/index.html.

20. www.renaidanse.org/page/de/act.html

21. The sizes of pigeons’ eggs are discussed in a footnote to Part II, Section 1, of Christhard Mahrenholz, Die Berechnung der Orgelpfeifenmensuren vom Mittelalter bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Bärenreiter, 1968); also in English translation (Oxford: Positif Press, 1975). 

22. See also www.davidrumsey.ch/
tempering.pdf.

23. Really not a quint at all, but a diminished sixth, which has to function as a quint on the vast majority of keyboards where no split keys provide any better-tuned alternatives. This also applies to diminished fourths, which, in the Pythagorean temperings under discussion here, more accommodatingly or even fortuitously provide a near-pure major third.

24. An important essay on this subject by Mark Lindley can be found online at http://independent.academia.edu/MarkLindley/Papers/242254/Pythagorean_i…. See particularly Table 2, page 27, and the general discussion involving Odington, Spechtshart, et al. Certainly he presents much evidence for the B–G♭ wolf having more than a century’s demonstrable currency from 1413 to 1513 and correctly reminds us that the organ’s tuning cultures were often at variance with those of other instruments. The only significant assertion he makes for a G♯–E♭ wolf is for Robertsbridge (p. 33). Another essay, by Margo Schulter, can be viewed at www.medieval.org/emfaq/harmony/pyth4.html#1. See especially around “4.5 Pythagorean tuning modified: a transition around 1400,” where she assumes a G♯–E♭ wolf. In the final analysis, these do not argue very convincingly for a wolf at G♯–E♭ on purely statistical grounds. Of course, this only became a pressing issue when keyboards came to be divided into 12 or more discrete notes.

25. E.g., in a series of e-mail exchanges between Rahbee and the author dating June 28 to July 22, 2012. He is particularly interested in 15th- and 16th-century tempering practices and takes such relatively new material as the Cambrai MS into account (see Patrizio Barbieri, “An Unknown 15th-century French Manuscript on Organ Building and Tuning,” in Peter Williams, ed., The Organ Yearbook #20 [Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1989]). Rahbee is also exploring a hypothesis that meantone tempering may have come into widespread use somewhat later than is commonly believed. The apparently dual-tempered instruments of late 15th century, e.g., the Lorenzo da Pavia style of organ, may yet have much to offer on this topic. See http://www.david rumsey.ch/Iconography.pdf, pp. 7 and 8, and Marco Tiella, “The Positive Organ of Lorenzo da Pavia (1494),” in Peter Williams, ed., The Organ Yearbook #7 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag 1976), pp. 4–15.

26. With a B–G♭ wolf giving near-pure major thirds (really diminished fourths) on A, D, E and B as opposed to the four (from a G♯–E♭ wolf tuning) quasi-pure major thirds on B, G♯, F♯, C♯ (see also endnote 22). This awakens interest in the potential adaptation of Pythagorean/B–G♭ tempering—seen as part of a transition to meantone—bearing, e.g., on the E-major/e-minor tuning dilemma in some Bruhns and early Bach organ works.

27. Das Buxheimer Orgelbuch, MS 3725, Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, München.

28. Leighton’s point of departure is that Buch-ner was a Hofhaimer pupil, barely outlived his master, and most likely merely codified what he had been taught. The “good” fingers are 2 and 4, with scales played on lower keys executed, r.h. ascending and l.h. descending, as 2-3-2-3 (starting on strong beats), r.h. descending and l.h. ascending as 4-3-2-3-2-3, turn figures r.h. high-middle-low-middle and l.h. low-middle-high-middle as 4-3-2-3. The hand can be turned in the direction of travel when using paired fingerings (turning the hand in the direction of movement and keeping the fingers parallel to the keys were techniques used in the outgoing 16th century, their relative employment before that is a matter of speculation; Santa Maria and Diruta were in disagreement about this). Thumbs and fifth fingers are used in both hands (especially the left) when larger intervals require them. The iconography indicates use of left thumb when that hand played longer note values in three parts. Impractical passages sometimes need rule-breaking exceptions. Prohibition of using the same finger twice in succession is not endorsed in Quem terra pontus (which seems to have been fingered by a scribe rather than Buchner) and in polyphony, finger repetition is often the best musical and technical solution. (E-mail correspondence of 12.11.2012-3.12.2012).

29. Robertsbridge Codex/Robertsbridge fragment, London, British Library Add.
MS 28850. 

30. Faenza Codex, Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale, ms. 117.

31. See J.G. Töpfer, Lehrbuch der Orgelbaukunst, in 4 volumes (Weimar, 1855, and Mainz: Rheingold-Verlag, 1955–60).

32. See www.davidrumsey.ch/Technology.htm.

33. See Friedrich Jakob et al. in Die Valeria-Orgel. Ein gotisches Werk in der Burgkirche zu Sitten/Sion (Zurich, Verlag der Fachvereine, 1991), ISBN 3-7281-1666-1 and the updates in La Tribune de L’orgue, ed. Guy Bovet (Geneva), in numbers 56/3 and 61/2. A subsidiary issue here is that many of the older metal pipes at Sion appear not to have been hammered, but retain a thick, rough—even slightly porous?—post-casting appearance.

34. As noted, e.g., by Markovits in Die Orgel in Altertum. See, e.g., pp. 342, 418, and especially p. 444, where metal scarcities in the middle ages are said to have driven the change to wood, etc. (cf. pp. 198). Note also the tin- or copper/bronze-veneered wooden plates of windchests. This book is also available for viewing online at http://books.google.ca/books?id=p7amFlH7Bg0C&pg=PA401&source=gbs_toc_r&….

35. A need to be cautious here is underscored by an illusion in some representations, such as that of the Dame à la Licorne tapestry (http://www.davidrumsey.ch/Iconography.pdf, p. 5), where the pipe tops appear cylindrical, but lower down, under the bar, seem square.

36. E.g., see www.davidrumsey.ch/index.pdf—the Jerome de Moravia quote. In that connection a question (cf. Markovits endnote 33 above) that needs raising may well be: If metal was scarce, then what drove the change to lead so strongly (and e.g., not to wood)?

37. Lindley (op. cit., p .5) for example claims that most of Buxheim seems “. . . in certain cases at least, to require some form of meantone temperament for its proper effect” but gives no clear criteria. My own experience is contrary to this, having tried both, and I am mostly very comfortable with a Pythagorean/B–G♭ wolf for Buxheim. Criteria of this kind are difficult to formulate, save to note that resting points in the music, apart from open fifths and octaves, seem often enough to occur with the near-pure thirds of e.g., an A-major or D-major triad (a feature also noted by Lindley, pp. 42–43). We have to face the fact that medieval musicians themselves applied no consistent criteria here—a proposition that Lindley gives credence to with his quotation (p. 4) of the Spataro/Gaffurio and many other bitter contemporary conflicts around such issues. By virtue of its three additional pipes per octave, the medieval organ built by Winold van der Putten for me in 2010 is capable of playing in a variety of early Pythagorean temperings. With options of pipes to play either D♭ or C♯, G♭ or F♯, and A♭ or G♯, this currently allows any of the following tempering configurations:

Wolf G♯–E♭: E♭ B♭ F C G D A E B F♯ C♯ G♯

Wolf C♯–A♭: A♭ E♭ B♭ F  C G D A E B F♯ C♯

Wolf F♯–D♭: D♭ A♭ E♭ B♭ F C G D A E B F♯

Wolf B–G♭: G♭ D♭ A♭ E♭B♭ F C G D A E B

E♭/D♯ and B♭/A♯ choices (not yet built 2012) would further increase these options with:

Wolf D♯–B♭: B♭ F C G D A E B F♯ C♯ G♯ D♯

Wolf A♯–F: F C G D A E B F♯ C♯ G♯ D♯ A♯

So far a lack of available time has allowed only limited exploration of these variants.

38. www.davidrumsey.ch/Iconography.pdf

39. Incipiunt praeludia diversarium notarum secundum modernum modum subitliter et diligentor collecta cum mensuris diversis hic infra annexis by Adam Ileborgh of Stendal, 1448 (Ileborgh: Paris, private collection [‘Ileborgh Tablature’]).

40. www.orgelpark.nl/pages/home

41. Quoted in Jean Perrot, The Organ, from Its Invention in the Hellenistic Period to the End of the Thirteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1971, ISBN 0 19 318418 4), trans. Norma Dean, p. 268. Perrot is sourcing this from Th. Gérold, La Musique au Moyen Age (Paris: Champion, 1932), p. 419.

42. www.orgelmakerij.nl

43. www.superlibrum.nl

44. www.davidrumsey.ch/index.php

45. www.bundesmuseen.ch/musikautomat en/index.html?lang=en

Leonardo Ciampa is Maestro di Cappella Onorario of the Basilica di Sant’Ubaldo in Gubbio, Italy, and organist of St. John the Evangelist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it. And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.

—Yuko Hayashi

Yuko Hayashi is gone.

I feel unworthy of eulogizing her. I do not presume to rank among her greatest students—a very long list that includes James David Christie, Carolyn Shuster Fournier, Mamiko Iwasaki, Peter Sykes, Christa Rakich, Gregory Crowell, Mark Dwyer, Kevin Birch, Kyler Brown, Barbara Bruns, Ray Cornils, Nancy Granert, Hatsumi Miura, Tomoko Akatsu Miyamoto, Dana Robinson, Naomi Shiga, Paul Tegels, and others too numerous to name. 

I cannot describe, or comprehend, the fortune of being her student between the ages of 15 and 18—at the time, her only high school student. She was in her late 50s—still at the height of her powers, still performing internationally and recording. She brought a constant parade of heavy-hitters to Old West Church in Boston for recitals and masterclasses. During those three years alone (1986–1989), there were José Manuel Azkue, Guy Bovet, Fenner Douglass, Susan Ferré, Roberta Gary, Mireille Lagacé, Joan Lippincott, Karel Paukert, Umberto Pineschi, Peter Planyavsky, Michael Radulescu, Montserrat Torrent, Harald Vogel, and the list goes on. Yuko was something of an impresario. In the 70s, when Harald Vogel was completely unknown in America, she brought him to Old West to play his very first concert here—for $100, which she paid out of her own pocket! Guy Boet, same story—his first concert in America, for $100. In 1972, at the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, Yuko organized the very first organ academy ever held in Japan, bringing both Anton Heiller and Marie-Claire Alain. In 1985, Yuko, Umberto Pineschi, and Masakata Kanazawa started the Academy of Italian Organ Music in Shirakawa. A list of her accomplishments would be long, indeed.

At the time, I knew virtually nothing about Yuko’s life or career. Meeting her was truly random. It was September of 1985 (Bach’s 300th birthday year). I was skimming the concert listings in The Boston Globe, and I happened to see that there was going to be an all-Bach organ and harpsichord concert at Old West Church, given by Peter Williams. I had never heard a “real pipe organ,” and I had never set foot in a Protestant church before. I had no idea who Peter Williams was, and I had no particular interest in the organ or harpsichord. I was a 14-year-old piano student in the New England Conservatory prep school. The craziest part of all? I had not the faintest idea that the New England Conservatory organ department held their lessons, classes, and concerts at Old West, or that the church’s organist happened to be department chair. Attending the concert was nothing more than a whim.

I was immediately grabbed, both by the sound of the Fisk’s ravishing plenum, and by Williams’s exquisite selections, all from Bach’s youth. I still remember every piece on the program, which opened with Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739. After the concert, a short but elegant Japanese woman introduced herself to me and shook my hand. I had no idea she had any affiliation with NEC. I’m not sure I even understood that she was the church’s organist.

Who could have predicted that, one year later, September 1986, I would quit the piano and become an organ student of Yuko, taking lessons on that same instrument? But even that was random. In the NEC prep school catalogue, under “Organ,” Yuko’s was the name listed. That’s the one and only reason I contacted her.

Early years in Japan

(1929–1953)

Yuko Hayashi was born in 1929 in Hiratsuka, a coastal town 24 miles from Yokohama. She was born on November 2. (She used to joke about having been born on All Souls’ Day, having missed All Saints’ Day by only one day!) Many of Yuko’s students would come to notice her unusual perceptiveness. A couple of us thought it bordered on ESP. She had the ability to reach for things even when she couldn’t see them. Case in point: why did a woman who was born in 1929, in a country that was only one percent Christian, decide that she wanted to become an organist, when she didn’t even know what an organ was?

Yuko’s father was a Japanese Anglican priest. He was the pastor of St. Andrew’s Church in Yokohama. At age five, Yuko started playing the reed organ at St. Andrew’s. (Soon enough, she became sufficiently proficient to play an entire Anglican service.) In sixth grade, her music teacher suggested she learn the piano. “Hanon: hated it. Czerny: a little better. Burgmüller: not as bad. But then, Bach Inventions! I became hooked on this music. I practiced all hours; I didn’t want to quit.”¹ She reasoned, “If Bach wrote pieces for the organ, then the organ must be a wonderful instrument.”² She knew that she wanted to play the organ, even before she had ever seen one! The only instruments she knew were the reed organ at church and a Hammond. In 2007 I asked her, “When you were young, how did you know you wanted to play the organ if you didn’t even know what an organ was?” She replied, “I knew when I met J. S. Bach.”³ In a 2009 email she wrote, “If I was not exposed to the two-part Inventions by Bach just by chance in my youth, I am positively sure that I [would] not [have been] drawn into music for so many decades since. Certainly, I would not have chosen organ as my main instrument.”⁴

Finally at age 15 she saw a pipe organ for the first time, in Tokyo. It was important to practice on a pipe organ, for she was preparing to audition for the Tokyo Ueno Conservatory (now named Tokyo University of the Arts). Imagine this 15-year-old girl, in 1944, with bombs falling around her, traveling two and a half hours to Tokyo to practice for two hours on this organ, then making the two and a half hour return trip home. (I recall that, in the 1980s, she told me that this organ was an Estey.⁵ However, other students remember her saying it was a Casavant.⁶)

She passed the audition and enrolled in the conservatory. Eight students had to share “a Yamaha and an electric-action pipe organ with a hideous sound. We each practiced for 50 minutes and then let the motor rest for ten minutes in between because it was old and cranky.”⁷ 

Study in America (1953–1960)

In the early 1950s, Yuko’s father urged her to visit America. She accepted a scholarship to attend Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. The port of entry was faraway Seattle. The sea voyage from Yokohama to Seattle took 12 days. She arrived in Seattle on July 23, 1953. Tuition, room, and board were covered, but she had only thirty dollars in her pocket (which was all she was allowed). She stretched the thirty dollars as far as she could, though at least she had an Amtrak pass that enabled her to travel by train anywhere in the country.  

My father arranged a train trip for me around half of the country, visiting some of his friends. When I arrived in Seattle on July 23 [1953], his friend’s daughter, who was the secretary of St. Mark’s Cathedral, came to pick me up. Within two hours of setting foot on American soil, I played the organ at St. Mark’s. I think it was a Kilgen.⁸ I met Peter Hallock, and he gave me some of his compositions. From Seattle I went to San Francisco and stayed with my father’s friend there. I heard Richard Purvis play a recital in a museum, and I remember I kept looking around for the pipes, which were not visible. That was my second American organ experience. Next I stayed in Los Angeles for a few days. I didn’t see any organs there, but what I remember most was my first American picnic, a culturally foreign experience for me. Then I went to Salt Lake City, found the Mormon Tabernacle organ and went to two concerts in one day. Alexander Schreiner was there. Can you imagine? Next I visited my father’s friends in Minneapolis, and then the remainder of the summer stayed in a guesthouse at the University of Chicago. Finally, I arrived at Cottey College, and do you know what I found there? A Baldwin organ!⁹

After a year she was no longer able to stay at the school; however, she received a scholarship to go to any other school of her choice in America. Where would she go? She knew nothing about Oberlin or Eastman. Ultimately, her decision was influenced by having grown up by the sea.

At that school in Missouri, every Friday you know what we had to eat? Fish. That fish must have been dead for ten days by the time we had it. The fish was so fresh in Japan. So I knew I wanted to live near the sea. New York was too big. Washington, D.C., was too political. But Boston . . . .¹⁰

And so in 1954 she entered the New England Conservatory and studied organ with the legendary George Faxon.  

I spoke almost no English, and he didn’t say very much. So our lessons were filled with music but had long silences! One week he asked me to bring in the Vivaldi[/Bach] A-minor concerto. And I memorized it. I’d never memorized anything before. He didn’t say much. But you know what he did? He wrote on a piece of paper “Sowerby Pageant” and told me to go to Carl Fischer [Music Company] to pick up the music. When I got to the store and showed the man the piece of paper, he said, “Oh, you’re playing this?” I said, “Yes.” I had no idea what it was. Then when I opened the music! Incredibly difficult. At my next lesson Faxon wrote in the pedalings, very quickly, from beginning to end. What a technique he had. And you knew where he got it? Fernando Germani. Once Faxon took me to Brown University to see his teacher, Germani, play the Sowerby. I got to sit very close to him, so I could see Germani playing. And there he was, five-foot-three, his feet flying all over the pedalboard.¹¹

On February 6, 1956, Yuko played her bachelor’s recital in Jordan Hall, her first recital ever. In only three weeks Yuko memorized the daunting program, which included Vivaldi/Bach A-minor concerto (first movement), D’Aquin Noël X, Schumann Canon (probably B minor, op. 56, no. 5), Bach Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue, Liszt “Ad Nos” (second half), Sowerby Pageant, Titcomb Regina Caeli, Dupré Second Symphony (Intermezzo), and Messiaen L’Ascension (third movement).

In 1956, Faxon told Yuko, “This is still a secret, so you can’t tell anybody. But I’m leaving NEC and going to teach at B.U. [Boston University]” Yuko was disappointed at the news. “I wanted to follow him to B.U. I didn’t know anybody else. But he said, ‘No, don’t follow me. You studied with me two years—that’s enough. Stay at NEC.’ And then he said, ‘You must make Boston your home.’”¹²

Yuko was disheartened and considered returning to Japan. But Chester (“Chet”) Williams, beloved dean of NEC, would have none of it. Faxon’s imminent departure was still a secret. But Chet had another secret for Yuko: “There is another man coming, someone with great ideas.” That man was Donald Willing. On Chet’s advice, Yuko stayed at NEC.

Willing had been to Europe and was galvanized by the new tracker instruments being built. He immediately arranged for NEC to purchase new practice organs by Metzler and Rieger. The 1957 Metzler was voiced by Oscar Metzler himself.

As soon as I touched the instrument, I had an immediate reaction: “This is it! This is a living organism!” My teacher did not persuade me to have this reaction—I had it on my own, from touching the instrument myself. That was 1957. The next year, 1958, I got my M. M. from the conservatory. And that same year, the Flentrop was put in at Busch-Reisinger [now Adolphus Busch Hall]. That was Biggs’s instrument. He let all the students play it. We had to practice at night, when the museum was closed. And we were poor; we couldn’t afford to pay a security guard. So Peggy [Mrs. Biggs] would act as the guard. The Biggs’s were so generous to organ students.¹³

Not all the organ students were taken by these new instruments. “They would say, ‘Are you going backwards?’”¹⁴ Yuko was undeterred. She played her Artist Diploma recital on the Flentrop in 1960.

Leonhardt and Heiller (1960–1966)

In 1960, Yuko joined the faculty of the organ department of New England Conservatory. At this point she had not yet heard of Gustav Leonhardt.  

I first heard of Leonhardt from John
Fesperman. Before John went to the Smithsonian, he taught at the Conservatory. The organ faculty was Donald Willing, John
Fesperman, and I, who had just been hired. I don’t know why, but John had been to Holland already, and he said, “Leonhardt is coming; you should go study with him.” So I did. I used to go to Waltham [Massachusetts] to practice cembalo at the Harvard Shop, and once a week I went to New York to study with Leonhardt. He was young, late 20s. A whole summer [1960] I studied with him.¹⁵

Yuko so enjoyed her study with Leonhardt that she considered switching to harpsichord. Indirectly it was Leonhardt who dissuaded her.

Finally [Leonhardt] said, “You really should study organ with Anton Heiller.” And I thought, “Who is that?” So I bought records of Heiller. You know, the old LP records. [. . .] [I]t was grand playing. Already I noticed something.¹⁶

1962 marked Heiller’s first visit to America and his first ever trip on an airplane! He gave two all-Bach performances on the Flentrop at Harvard University. Yuko attended the first performance and was so impressed that she attended the second one as well.  

And you know the most wonderful thing he played? O Mensch . . . with the melody on the Principal . . . . The whole program swept me away. And I immediately said, “This is the man I want to study with.” But I was shy, so I didn’t go to him right away. [. . .] He used to come to America every three years. He had come in ’62, so in ’65 he came back, and he returned again in ’68, ’71, etc. So in ’65 he was teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. I went down there, and for the first time, I met him. [The course was] six-and-a-half weeks. Every morning, he gave four hours of classes. Bach, David, Reger, and Hindemith—on a Möller! Then, in the afternoon, private lessons on a 10-stop Walcker organ in a private studio.¹⁷

Heiller urged Yuko to enroll in the summer academy in Haarlem the following year (1961). This marked her very first visit to Europe. She went on to study with Heiller sporadically, following him wherever he happened to be playing. (She was the only Heiller student who didn’t study with him in Vienna.)

Maybe [Heiller] taught differently with other people, but with me, most of what I learned was from his playing, not from his words. [H]e played a lot [during lessons]. But I would move and he would sit on the bench. He didn’t just play over my shoulder. With him, nothing was halfway. [. . .] Funny thing: when he was just standing there, without doing anything, I played better. He felt the music inside him, and it came out. It was a weird thing. [. . .] I performed his organ concerto. Of course he wanted to hear it at a lesson. But I wasn’t ready. He only told me about it three weeks before. But again, he was standing right there. And it’s funny, I was able to play it. You see, he was so perfect, he made me feel I could play. [. . .] You know, I was so little—I’m still little. (laughter) And he was much bigger than me. But he said to me, “Don’t be afraid of the piece.”¹⁸

In 1969, Yuko became chair of the organ department of NEC. She remained until 2001, a total of 41 years on the faculty, 30 of which as chair.

First European tours (1968)

Yuko’s first concert in Europe was at the 1968 International Organ Festival in Haarlem. From there she went on to play many concerts on historic instruments in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. “The wife of Hiroshi Tsuji, the Japanese organbuilder, arranged my first concert tour in Europe. [. . .] I soon discovered that I loved going to places where I didn’t know the people or the organs. I like to explore things I don’t know.”¹⁹ Here again we see Yuko’s fearlessness in reaching for things she could not see. As Nancy Granert reminisced, 

One time, Yuko and I were talking about traveling alone through Europe. I was saying that I always had a map in my purse, and that I really didn’t like being lost. She replied that she loved being lost and to find new places. She, after all, always knew where she was, right?²⁰

Old West Church (1974)

Charles Fisk built one of his most beautiful instruments, Opus 55, for Old West Church in Boston.²¹ It went on to become the main teaching instrument for the New England Conservatory organ department for decades. The organ was dedicated on Easter Sunday 1971 by Max Miller and Marian Ruhl Metson.

In 1973, Old West was conducting a search for a new organist. The organ committee consisted of the Rev. Dr. Richard Eslinger (pastor of Old West), Charles Fisk, Max Miller, and Jeanne Crowgey.²² Sneakily, but fortuitously, Eslinger and Fisk invited Yuko to attend a committee meeting in December 1973. After this meeting, they took Yuko across the street for a beer or two at a Chinese restaurant and lounge. Yuko enjoyed telling this story.

Charlie said, “Yuko, have you ever thought of becoming the organist for Old West Church?” These were absolutely unexpected words, and my answer was simply, “No.” Charlie kept a smile on his face and went on to tell me how convinced he was for me to be the organist of his organ at Old West, and that it was the right thing for me to do.

I was overwhelmed by his totally positive thoughts, and by the end of the conversation that evening I was convinced that Charlie was right and said “Yes” to him without knowing what the future would hold. [. . .] In February of 1974 I began to play for worship services (as a non-salaried organist), organized organ recitals for the season as well as the weekly lunchtime concerts that, after a decade, evolved into the Summer Evening Concerts.

As I look back [. . .] I say to myself, “How on the earth did Charlie know that I would be the appropriate one?” [. . . .] Charlie then knew that if I were caught by [the] beautiful sonorities that I could not leave them, would enjoy them, would maintain the instrument, and would let it be heard and played by all. [. . .] 

As I listened to organ students of the New England Conservatory day by day, year after year, and, of course, through my own practice, I became convinced that the 1971 Charles Fisk organ at Old West is a living organism and not just an organ with extraordinary beauty. This organ responds to the high demands of an artist as if a lively dialogue between two humans is being exchanged. I even dare say that the spirit of Charlie, an artist/organbuilder, is present when the organ is played by any organist who wishes to engage in conversation.²³

Yuko remained organist of Old West for 36 years. I was so fortunate to hear so many of her recitals there during the 1980s. I remember matchless performances of Bach’s Passacaglia, Franck’s Grand Pièce, and the Italian Baroque repertoire for which she had an incredible knack. (In fact, I never in my life heard a non-Italian play this music as well as she.²⁴) As late as 2008 (her last recital was in 2010), she gave a performance of Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue that to me remains the benchmark for all others. Few organists can play the middle gravement section without it sounding too long and too heavy. In Yuko’s hands, I was astonished by the articulation of each entrance of each of the five voices. I say without exaggeration that it sounded like a quintet of breathing musicians. I was so gripped by it that, when she got to the final section, I couldn’t believe how short the gravement had seemed.

As a teacher

Yuko made good use of her ESP. As a teacher, not only did she adapt to each individual student, but she adapted to each individual lesson with each student. Each lesson with her was a brand new experience—based solely on what she was sensing in the room at that moment. Besides her perceptiveness, she had something else: a regard for the value of each student. I can never forget something she told me many years later: “When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it.”²⁵ Her next sentence was even more unforgettable: “And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.” It would be hard to find a famous teacher with that level of regard for even the least talented among of her students.

Yuko’s ear was astonishing. She could have used that ear to be a critic or an adjudicator towards her students. Instead, she worked tirelessly to get them to use their own ear, to make their own decisions and judgments. In her gentle, quiet way (her voice never rose above a mezzo piano), she was relentless in making her students listen to the sound coming from the organ, in particular to be aware of the air going through the pipes. Most of all, she wanted her students to learn directly from the composer.

I will never forget playing Bach’s Allein Gott, BWV 664. The moment I stopped listening to one of the three voices, within milliseconds she started singing it. Then I would get back on track. Then, the millisecond that I stopped listening to another part, she would sing that one. That was how perceptive she was—which was both comforting and frightening! Another astonishing moment in our lessons that is worth mentioning is the one and only time I played Frescobaldi for her. In modern parlance, you could say that I was “schooled.” I was playing the Kyrie della Domenica from Fiori Musicali, which is in four voices. I played it and could tell from her facial expression that she was not pleased. She said one sentence: “You know, this music was originally written on four staves.” I played it again. This time, her face was even more displeased, and she said nothing at all. She sat down on the bench next to me and said, “OK, you play the alto and the bass, and I’ll play the soprano and the tenor.” I was floored. Her two voices breathed. They sang. She got up from the bench, without saying a word. Her point was made, and powerfully.

Later years

Yuko and I exchanged many emails in 2009. Many of them concerned administrative details of the Old West Organ Society (of which I was then a board member). However, more often the emails were simply about music.  

I remember when I first heard Mozart, in a castle outside Vienna, in [the] early 1970s. It was a big shock to me. While they were performing Mozart’s chamber music, I started to have the image about the leaves of the tree which show the front of the leaf and the back of the leaf, back and forth. Their colors are very different from each other, yet [the] only differences are front or back of the same leaf. It influenced the dynamic control as well in their performance at the castle.²⁶

During this era she always wrote to me as a friend and colleague, never as a “student.” Only once did she give something resembling “advice:”

I believe, there are only two emotions that stand out, “Love” and “Fear.” You have plenty of both, which in [an] actual sense make [a] great artist. Your potentiality is enormous! Don’t waste it, please! After all, it is the gift from God.²⁷

She was pleased, then, when not long after that email I became artistic director of organ concerts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (home of two historic Holtkamps from 1955). In October, Yuko called me to congratulate me. She reminisced about Walter Holtkamp, Sr., whom she met in Cleveland.

He was a strong character, and rather difficult to get along with. Yet, we liked each other. Walter took me for dinner, and to his organ in the Episcopal Church in Cleveland, and I played the organ for him. He liked my playing because I played exactly as I believed.

That led to reminiscing about Melville Smith, who dedicated the larger Holtkamp in Kresge Auditorium. She even knew about Saarinen, the architect who designed both Kresge and the MIT Chapel. One thing led to another. She ended up telling me practically her whole life story. We spoke for four (!)
hours. She did almost all of the talking. There wasn’t a single dull moment. Every sentence was imbued with energy. She talked about growing up in Japan during the war, doing forced labor even as a teenager. She talked about her earliest musical experiences and about more recent organbuilding trends in Japan. She spoke at length about Marc Garnier, who built the monumental organ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Center. She told story after story about Guy Bovet, Harald Vogel, Peter Williams, and Karel Paukert (in whose presence she set foot in Old West Church for the very first time). She told me about the time she was in France with Michel Chapuis, and she was playing a three-voice work, and Chapuis reached over and improvised a fourth voice over what she was playing. She spoke of Heiller (which she did in most every conversation I ever had with her). She even spoke of events and feelings in her personal life. It is safe to say that it was one of the most extraordinary phone conversations that I have ever had, with anyone. The next time I saw her, in 2010, she showed signs of memory loss. Clearly this was Yuko’s instinct at work, once again: she knew that in that phone conversation in 2009, she needed to tell me her life’s story.

At the 2014 AGO national convention in Boston, there was a workshop entitled “The Organ as Teacher: The Legacy of Performance Pedagogy at Old West Church,” moderated by Margaret Angelini, with Barbara Bruns, Susan Ferré, and Anne Labounsky. Indirectly it was an event honoring Yuko. (Had it been entitled “An Event in Honor of Yuko Hayashi,” she would have strongly objected.) It was hard for Yuko’s friends to see her in this state of diminished powers—at times aware of what was going on, at other times not so much. But then came a moment, after the workshop, when Yuko was standing, chatting with Ferré and Labounsky. All of a sudden she looked at them, pointed to me, and told them, “He’s a wonderful musician.” For me, that was the equivalent of a New York Times review. I have sought no other musical validation since that moment.

Last summer Yuko’s health declined. In September I learned that her condition was so grave that her family in Japan were contacted. Her 88th birthday was to be on November 2, followed eight days later by a celebratory concert at Old West, featuring some of her greatest former students. None of us thought she was going to live until the concert—we expected it to be a memorial service. Each day I checked my iPhone compulsively, not wanting to miss the terrible news. But the news didn’t come. Now it was November 10, the night of the gala concert. Apparently she was still with us—I had not heard otherwise. I arrived at Old West on that bitter cold night. I walked out of the cold into the warm church, and I heard people saying that Yuko was there! At Old West! I didn’t fully believe it. I looked around, and then I saw it: the back of a wheelchair. I raced over, and there she was. Her eyes were as alert as I had ever seen them. This isn’t possible! How did they even get her there, on that bitter cold evening? But Barbara Bruns made it happen. Yuko took my hand in hers and kept rubbing it, looking me straight in the eye the whole time. Not a word was said.  

The entire evening Yuko had that same alertness in her eyes, start to finish. Being at Old West, among her students and friends, hearing Charles Fisk’s beloved Opus 55—the energy from all of it must have thrilled her.

A few months passed. For Epiphany weekend, January 6 and 7, 2018, as a prelude at all of my Masses, I played Bach’s Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739—the very first piece at Peter Williams’s life-changing recital at Old West so many years ago, the night I met Yuko Hayashi. Eerily, but not surprisingly, only three and a half hours after my last Mass, Yuko Hayashi left this world.

Notes

1. Phone conversation with the author,  July 25, 2007.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid. 

4. Email to the author, October 19, 2009.

5. 1918 Estey (Opus 1598) at Rikkyo (St. Paul’s) University, Tokyo. Replaced by Beckerath in 1984.

6. 1927 Casavant (Opus 1208) at Holy Trinity Church, Tokyo. Church and organ were destroyed by a firebomb in 1945.

7. Diane Luchese, “A conversation with Yuko Hayashi,” The American Organist, September 2010, p. 57. 

8. It was a ca. 1902 Kimball (not Kilgen), with tubular-pneumatic action.

9. Luchese, op. cit., p. 57f.

10. Phone conversation with the author, July 25, 2007.

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. From an unpublished interview between Yuko and the author, which took place in Boston on February 17, 2004. 

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Luchese, op. cit., p. 60. 

20. Conversation with Nancy Granert, January 11, 2018.

21. Seven years previous, and 500 meters down the road, Fisk had installed his Opus 44 at King’s Chapel, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ built in the second half of the twentieth century. The organ was a gift of Amelia Peabody. Thanks to the friendship between the pastors of Old West (Dr. Wilbur C. Ziegler) and King’s Chapel (Dr. Joseph Barth), Amelia Peabody gave a grant to Old West for their new organ. The choice of Fisk was endorsed by the organists of both King’s Chapel (Daniel Pinkham) and Old West (James Busby), as well as E. Power Biggs.

22. Jeanne Crowgey was a member of Old West from 1972 to 1980. She was also an organist, who served unofficially as an interim before the selection of Yuko Hayashi. Crowgey went on to be Yuko’s invaluable assistant during the first six years of the Old West Organ Society. Crowgey did a large amount of the administrative work for the international series, the summer series, and the weekly noontime concert series. She was one of the last friends to visit Yuko before her passing.

23. From a reminiscence written by Yuko in 2004 and posted on the C. B. Fisk website (edited by L. C.).

24. Once in the 1960s she played a recital at the Piaristenkirche in Vienna, which included a piece by Frescobaldi. Heiller was in attendance and raved about how she played the Frescobaldi, a composer she had never studied with him (phone conversation with the author, year unknown).

25. Phone conversation with the author, year unknown.

26. Email to the author, June 10, 2009.

27. Email to the author, September 2, 2009.