Gathering Peascods for the Old Gray Mare: Some Unusual Harpsichord Music Before Aliénor

Larry Palmer

Pedaling the French: 

A ‘Tour de France’ of Revival Harpsichordists 1888–1939

 

I. Near-death and slow rebirth

“Make what you want: this upstart piano will never replace the majestic claveçin!” Thus began my 1989 book Harpsichord in America: a Twentieth-Century Revival with these combative words from the composer Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (1727–1799). Looking back from our historical perspective, we all know how that prediction turned out! Even for Balbastre himself: his capitulation was a work for the new “upstart” keyboard instrument, a Marche des Marseillois, “arranged for the Forte Piano by Citizen Balbastre, and dedicated to the brave defenders of the French Republic in the year 1792, the first of the Republic.” At least Citizen [Citoyen] Claude-B B survived!

Following a very few antiquarian-inspired appearances throughout the piano-dominated 19th century, the harpsichord’s return to the musical scene as a featured instrument occurred during the Paris Exhibition of 1888 at the instigation of Louis Diémer (1843–1919), a piano professor at the Paris Conservatoire. Diémer was able to borrow a 1769 Pascal Taskin harpsichord to play in several concerts comprising concerted works by Rameau and solo pieces by various French claviçinistes. Of the latter the most popular composer was Louis-Claude Daquin, whose Le Coucou became one of the most-performed works during the early harpsichord revival period.

Diémer and his concerts must have inspired the salon composer Francis Thomé (1850–1909) to write a Rigodon for this most recent French harpsichordist, and thus provide history with the very first new piece for the old instrument. Inspired by Daquin, but also meant as a tribute to Diémer’s “legendary trilling ability,” Thomé’s pièce de claveçin was published by Lemoine in 1893. Around the middle of the 20th century this work was discovered and later recorded in 1976 by harpsichordist Igor Kipnis on a disc of favorite encores. After being captivated by its simple antiquarian charm, I too was able to acquire an original print of the work, thanks to my German friend and European “concert manager” Dr. Alfred Rosenberger, who found it at Noten Fuchs, Frankfurt’s amazing music store, where, apparently, the yellowed score had been on their shelves ever since its publication date. 

As a somewhat-related aside, the probable first harpsichord composition of the 20th century, or at least the earliest one to appear in print, is a Petite Lied by French organist/composer Henri Mulet (1878–1967). This aptly titled work of only 17 measures in 5/4 meter was issued in 1910. (See Harpsichord News, The Diapason, January 2011, p. 12, for a complete facsimile of the score.)

The solo harpsichord works of François Couperin, in a fine 19th-century edition by Johannes Brahms and Friedrich Chrysander, also found some popularity among pianists. From the musical riches to be found in Couperin’s 27 suites, came the lone musical example to be included in the 20th-century’s first harpsichord method book: Technique du Claveçin by Régina Patorni-Casadesus (1886–1961), a slim volume of only eight pages, most of them devoted to stop-changing pedal exercises (thus the genesis of my title—“Pedaling the French”). This one tiny bit of Couperin’s music is the oft-performed Soeur Monique from his 18th Ordre, a work admired and used by many church musicians—some of whom doubtless would be shocked to read in the authoritative reference work on Couperin’s titles, written by Historical Keyboard Society of North America honorary board member Jane Clark Dodgson, that “Sister Monica” may not be a religious “sister,” but refers instead to girls of ill repute, as in a “lady of the night,” according to the definition of the word Soeur by the 17th-century lexicographer Antoine Furetière (1619–1688), “our sisters, as in streetwalkers, or debauched girls.” (See Jane Clark and Derek Connon, ‘The Mirror of Human Life’: Reflections on François Couperin’s Pièces de Claveçin, London: Keyword Press, 2011, p. 170.)

 

II. Early recorded sounds

Beyond printed music and pedagogical writings, how did the classic French keyboard repertoire fare in the newly emerging medium of harpsichord recordings?

After giving a historical salute to the 16 rare 1908 Berlin wax cylinders that share surface noise with some barely audible Bach performed by Wanda Landowska, the earliest commercial recording of a harpsichord dates from about 1913 and was issued on the Favorite label. It preserves an anonymous performance of a work with at least tangential connections to France: the Passepied from J. S. Bach’s French Overture in B Minor (BWV 831). (See Martin Elste, Meilensteine der Bach-Interpretation, reviewed by Larry Palmer in The Diapason, June 2000.)

More easily accessible today are the earliest harpsichord recordings made in 1920 for the Gramophone Company in England by the Dolmetsch-influenced harpsichordist Violet Gordon Woodhouse (1871–1948). Her repertoire included Couperin’s L’Arlequine from the 23rd Ordre (as played on Great Virtuosi of the Harpsichord, volume 3, Pearl GEMM CD 9242) and Rameau’s Tambourin, from his Suite in E Major. Mrs. Woodhouse became something of a cult figure among British music critics (George Bernard Shaw), upper-class society (the Sitwells), and adventurous musicians (including the avant-garde composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji [1892–1988]), who wrote of Violet’s powerful musical presentations that her playing was “dignified, moving, and expressive, and of a broad, sedate beauty, completely free from any pedagogic didacticism or stiff-limbed collegiate pedantry.” (Quoted in Jessica Douglas-Home: Violet, The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse, London: The Harvill Press, 1966, p. 228.) This should put many of us in our rightful places, although Sorabji’s own excursions into keyboard literature lasting from four to nine hours in performance (example: a Busoni homage with the title Opus Clavicembalisticum) just might call his own authority into question.

Eight years younger than Woodhouse, the better-known Wanda Landowska (1879–1959) made her first commercial recordings for the Victor Company in 1923, just prior to her American concert debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra. These six sides included short pieces by the three 1685 boys (Handel, Bach, and Scarlatti) as well as the Rigaudon and Tambourin from Rameau’s Suite in E Minor, and what might be considered the first recording of a contemporary harpsichord work, Landowska’s own Bourée d’Auvergne #1. 

Lesser-known players got recorded, too: Marguerite Delcour recorded Couperin’s Le Tic-toc-choc [Ordre 18] in 1924. The following year, 1925, one of Landowska’s Berlin students, Anna Linde, recorded the ubiquitous Rameau Tambourin and the even more ubiquitous Coucou by Daquin. If you recognize Linde’s name it might well be for her edition of Couperin’s L’art de toucher le Claveçin—with its translations into English and German offered side by side with the original French, and the printed music made unique by her Germanically precise “corrections” to the composer’s picturesque (but occasionally unmathematical) beaming of some quick roulades in his preludes. Both of Linde’s recorded legacy pieces sound amateurish enough that I seriously doubt that Sorabji would have enjoyed hearing these performances.

As a matter of history, however, it is quite possible that Anna Linde’s 1925 disc was the first harpsichord performance to be recorded electrically (rather than acoustically), and the difference in sound quality became even clearer in the years immediately following. A 1928 Woodhouse performance of Bach’s Italian Concerto sounds surprisingly present even today, and the performance shows—perhaps best of all her recorded legacy—what her admirers so rightly admired. Indeed her artistry is such that I have thought, often, that had Mrs. Woodhouse needed to earn her living as Landowska did, she could have eclipsed the divine Wanda as a concert harpsichordist. However, as the wife of a titled Englishman she could not make a career onstage for money . . . and that was that! It would have been fascinating to have had two such determined women competing for the title of “the world’s most famous harpsichordist.” 

Realistically, however, Landowska’s tenacity, as well as her superb musical knowledge and sensitivity, should not be denigrated in any way. The 1928 recording of her own second Bourée d’Auvergne (Biddulph LHW 016) especially highlights the rhythmic dimension of her exciting artistry.

In the United States, where Landowska was a welcome visitor during the 1920s, there were several earlier players of the harpsichord; and, not too surprisingly, all of them attempted at least some pieces by French composers. Some of these participants in harpsichord history are nearly forgotten: one of more than passing importance was the Princeton professor Arthur Whiting: a well-received artist in nearby New York City and a campus legend at Princeton, he was known for his ability to attract huge crowds of undergraduates for his popular recitals on both piano and Dolmetsch-Chickering harpsichord. I have not located any recordings by Professor Whiting. The New York Times did mention his concert at Mendelssohn Hall (NYC) on December 11, 1907, which included a Gigue and Rigaudon by Rameau. The unnamed reviewer praised Whiting’s playing as “clear, beautifully phrased, and skillful in ‘registration’ if that term may be used to denote the employment of the different timbres that the instrument affords.”

Writing a letter to the editor of The Times on January 11, 1926, the prominent music educator Daniel Gregory Mason offered a response to a letter from Landowska in which she made the statement that she had “single-handedly [!] restored the harpsichord to its rightful position in the world of music.” In this correspondence Professor Mason called attention to some other “‘Harpsichord Pioneers’—among whom he named the Americans: Mr. Whiting, Miss Pelton-Jones, Miss Van Buren, and Lewis Richards.”

The two ladies differed greatly: Frances Pelton-Jones was one of those wealthy women who could afford to pursue her artistic ambitions (rather similar to the would-be soprano Florence Foster Jenkins). Her recitals in New York were of the club-lady variety; baffled critics most often mentioned the stage decoration and the beauty of Pelton-Jones’s gowns. Lotta Van Buren, however, was a thoroughly professional player and harpsichord technician whose work with Morris Steinart’s instrument collection at Yale was very beneficial, as was her association with Colonial Williamsburg and its program of historical recreations, including musical ones. 

As for Lewis Richards, Mason proceeds: “Mr. Richards, who has played the harpsichord throughout Europe as a member of the Ancient Instrument Society of Paris, was, I believe, the first to appear as a harpsichordist with orchestra (the Minneapolis Symphony) in this country, and contributed much to the interest of Mrs. F. S. Coolidge’s festival in Washington . . .” 

Richards did indeed precede Landowska as the first known harpsichord soloist with a major symphony orchestra in the U. S. He was one of the few American musicians to record commercially in the 1920s. His Brunswick 10-inch discs of The Brook by Ayrlton, Musette en Rondeau by Rameau, Handel’s Harmonious Blacksmith, and the Mozart Rondo alla Turca were played for me by Richards’ daughter, whom I was able to visit in her East Lansing, Michigan, home (on the day following an organ recital I had played there). The sound is somewhat compromised, for I was recording a scratchy 78-rpm disc that spun on an ancient turntable in a garage; but one gets the impression that Mr. Richards was a charismatic and musical player.  

These discs went on to make quite a lot of money in royalties, and Richards actually taught harpsichord at the Michigan State Institute of Music in East Lansing, which almost certainly certifies him as the first formally continuing collegiate teacher of harpsichord to be employed in the United States in the 20th century.

All of these players played early revival instruments. All have, therefore, used their pedal techniques to obtain a more kaleidoscopic range of colors than we may be used to. Of great interest (at least to me) is the recent emergence of curiosity about, and interest in these revival instruments and their playing techniques, frequently demonstrated by questions received from students. One of the finest concert figures of the “pedal” generations was the distinguished Yale professor Ralph Kirkpatrick (now more knowable than previously, courtesy of his niece Meredith Kirkpatrick’s recently published collection of the artist’s letters; see our review in the April 2015 issue). In his early Musicraft recordings, especially those from 1939, we are able to hear the young player show his stuff, just before his 1940 appointment to Yale, displaying superb musical mastery of his Dolmetsch-Chickering harpsichord. From Kirkpatrick’s program that included four individual Couperin pieces, culminating in Les Barricades Mistérieuses, and five movements from Rameau’s E-minor set, I ended this essay with the Rameau Tambourin (as played on The Musicraft Solo Recordings, Great Virtuosi of the Harpsichord, volume 2, Pearl GEMM CD9245). Kirkpatrick’s mesmerizing foot-controlled decrescendo gives a perfect example of his skill in “pedaling the French.”

(From a paper read in Montréal, May 23.)

 

HKSNA 2015 International Conference in Montréal

Hosted by McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, the fourth annual conclave of the Historical Keyboard Society of North America (May 21–24) offered lectures, mini-recitals, and evening concerts, far too many events for any single auditor to encompass. Two papers that followed mine, Elisabeth Gallat-Morin’s beautifully illustrated “The Presence of French Baroque Keyboard Instruments in New France” and Graham Sadler’s innovative “When Rameau Met Scarlatti? Reflections on a Probable Encounter in the 1720s” attested to the depth of innovative scholarship.

McGill’s instrument roster includes the superb Helmut Wolff organ in Redpath Hall and 15 harpsichords. One third of these came from the workshop of the Montréal builder Yves Beaupré; among the other ten instruments is a 1677 single-manual Italian instrument from the collection of Kenneth Gilbert. This unique historic treasure was available for viewing and playing for small groups of attendees.

The Vermont builder Robert Hicks was the only harpsichord maker who brought an instrument for display. Max Yount demonstrated this eloquent double harpsichord in a masterful recital presentation of Marchand’s Suite in D Minor. Clavichord took center stage for Judith Conrad’s program. Karen Jacob’s thoughtful memorial tribute to Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society founder George Lucktenberg was enhanced by several solicited remembrances from others whose lives had been touched by the late iconic early keyboard figure.

Evening concerts were presented by harpsichordist/organist Peter Sykes and six former students who organized a tribute to McGill organ professor emeritus John Grew. Saturday’s concert brought the final stage of the ninth Aliénor international competition for contemporary harpsichord music. Six winning works (selected by a jury from nearly fifty submitted pieces) were performed by HKSNA President Sonia Lee (Laura Snowden: French Suite), Larry Palmer (Sviatoslav Krutykov: Little Monkey Ten Snapshots), James Dorsa (Ivan Bozicevic: If There is a Place Between, and his own composition Martinique), Andrew Collett (playing his own Sonatina for Harpsichord), and Marina Minkin (Dina Smorgonskaya: Three Dances for Harpsichord). Following an intermission during which the audience submitted ballots naming their three favorite works, Aliénor presented world premieres of two commissioned works for two harpsichords: Edwin McLean’s Sonata No. 2 (2014), played by Beverly Biggs and Elaine Funaro, and Mark Janello’s Concerto for Two (2015), played by Rebecca Pechefsky and Funaro.

And the three pieces chosen by the audience? Smorgonskaya’s Three Dances for Harpsichord, Collett’s Sonatina, and Dorsa’s Martinique. Bravi tutti.

 

Comments, news items, and questions are always welcome. Address them to Dr. Larry Palmer, e-mail: [email protected].

Larry Palmer

Recital programming: Program notes

Seated one day at the harpsichord, I was weary and ill at ease because the mid-July deadline for this column was approaching too rapidly, and my mind, in its summer mode, seemed frail as a lily, too weak for a thought as I searched for a topic. And then, a miracle: the printed program from my harpsichord recital at the 2012 East Texas Pipe Organ Festival fell out of a score. Rereading it brought not only a wave of nostalgia, but also a sense of continued satisfaction at both the balance and variety of the chosen pieces, selected painstakingly to present contrasting musical styles as well as offering a bit of respite to the ears of the festival participants who heard a number of organ recitals each day.

Some vignettes about the unusual logistics required to present this program at Trinity Episcopal Church in Longview on my 74th birthday may be found in The Diapason’s Harpsichord News column published in February 2013 (page 20). If any readers are curious, I refer them to that issue, which also contains Neal Campbell’s thoughtful commentaries on the entire 2012 festival. What follows in this month’s column has not appeared previously in The Diapason. These are my “notes to the program.” I present them now as examples of brief word pictures intended to aid a listener’s understanding of music that, for many, was probably being heard for the first time. As for the selections, I specifically tried to choose at least some works by composers who might be familiar to organists, while offering a variety of musical styles, durations, and tonalities both major and minor. 

 

The program notes

Introduction to the Program: The Italian composer Giovanni Maria Trabaci wrote in the Preface to Book II of his Pieces ‘per ogni (all) strumenti, ma ispecialmente per i Cimbali e gli Organi’ [1615]: “the harpsichord is the lord of all instruments in the world and on it everything may be played with ease.” [“il Cimbalo è Signor di tutti l’istromenti del mondo, et in lui si possono sonare ogni  cosa con facilità.”]  

While I am not totally convinced of the ease of playing offered by some of these contrasting selections from the contemporary and Baroque repertoires, I do suggest that each one of them has musical interest. The pieces by John Challis and Duke Ellington are probably unique to my repertoire since they remain unpublished.

 

The program

A Triptych for Harpsichord (1982)—Gerald Near (b. 1942). In addition to writing a wonderful Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings for me to premiere at the American Guild of Organists national convention in the Twin Cities in 1980, Gerald responded to my request for a new work to play at a recital for the Dallas Museum of Art’s major El Greco exhibition in 1983. The three brief contrasting movements suggest bells (“Carillon”), an amorous dance (“Siciliano”), and a homage to the harpsichord works of Domenico Scarlatti and Manuel de Falla (“Final”). 

Sonate pour Claveçin (1958)—Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959). During the final year of his life, in response to a commission from the Swiss harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer, Martinů composed this compact, but major, Sonate. Essentially it is a piece in one movement with three sections: the first and last are kaleidoscopic, filled with brief colorful musical ideas; the second is gentle and nostalgic, as the homesick expatriate composer makes short allusions to two beloved iconic Czech works: the Wenceslaus Chorale and Dvorák’s Cello Concerto. While quite “pianistic” in its demands, the Sonate also allows brilliant use of the harpsichord’s two keyboards in realizing both Martinů’s magical sonorities and his occasional use of bitonality.

“Chaconne in D Minor” (Partita for Solo Violin, BWV 1004)—Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), arranged for harpsichord solo by John Challis (1907–1974). One of Bach’s most-often transcribed works, this particular setting for harpsichord by the pioneering American early instrument maker survives only in a manuscript submitted for copyright (on Bach’s birthday in 1944), now preserved in the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Challis also was an early advocate of variable tempi in Baroque music, serving as a mentor in that respect to organist E. Power Biggs, who proudly owned one of the builder’s impressive large pedal instruments.¹

A Single Petal of a Rose (1965)—Duke Ellington (1899–1974), edited in 1985 by Igor Kipnis and Dave Brubeck, and by Larry Palmer in 2012. Edward Kennedy Ellington responded to Antoinette Vischer’s request for a piece by sending her a piano transcription of his A Single Petal of a Rose, a work already dedicated to the British monarch Queen Elizabeth II. When American harpsichordist Kipnis asked if I could point him to Ellington’s unique work for harpsichord, I referred him to the facsimile of Ellington’s manuscript published in Ule Troxler’s book Antoinette Vischer, which details the works to be found in the Vischer Collection at the Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. (See “The A-Team,” The Diapason, February 2017, pp. 12–13.) Years later, Kipnis sent me his one-page transcription for harpsichord, an arrangement made in collaboration with his friend, the jazz great Dave Brubeck. To fit my hands and harpsichord I have made some further adjustments to their arrangement of this lovely, gentle work.²

La D’Héricourt; La Lugeac—Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (1727–1799). These are two of the most idiomatic of French harpsichord works from the eighteenth century, and none is more so than the one honoring M. l’Abbé d’Héricourt, Conseiller de Grand’ Chambre. With the tempo marking “noblement,” this composition stays mostly in the middle range of the harpsichord, a particularly resonant glory of the eighteenth-century French instruments. In contrast, the boisterous, “music-hall” qualities of La Lugeac suggest that it may be named for Charles-Antoine de Guerin, a page to King Louis XV. Known subsequently as the Marquis de Lugeac, the former page became secretary and companion to the Marquis de Valery, the king’s representative to the court of Frederick the Great. The American harpsichordist and conductor Alan Curtis, who edited Balbastre’s keyboard works, noted that “few Italianate jigs—Scarlatti not even excepted—can match the outrageously bumptious and attractive La Lugeac.”

“Lambert’s Fireside,” “De la Mare’s Pavane,” and “Hughes’ Ballet” (from the collection Lambert’s Clavichord, 1926–1928)—Herbert Howells (1892–1983). The composer was the next to youngest person pictured in a 1923 book of Modern British Composers comprising 17 master portraits by the photographer and clavichord maker Herbert Lambert of Bath. As a tangible expression of gratitude for this honor, Howells requested 11 of his fellow sitters each to contribute a short characteristic piece to be presented to the photographer. All acquiesced, but one year later, only Howells had composed anything for the project, so he wrote the additional 11 pieces himself. Issued in 1928 by Oxford University Press, Lambert’s Clavichord was the first new music for clavichord to be published in the twentieth century. Several questions regarding names found in the titles as well as a few printed notes that were suspect led me to schedule a London interview with the composer during a 1974 trip to the UK, a meeting that led ultimately to my commissioning the Dallas Canticles, as well as a respectful, unforgettable friendship with the elderly master.³

Toccata in E Minor, BWV 914—J. S.
Bach. The shortest of the composer’s seven toccatas for harpsichord, the E Minor consists of an introduction (with an organ-pedal-like opening figure insistently repeated six times); a contrapuntal   “poco” Allegro; a dramatic recitative (Adagio); and a driving, perpetual motion three-voice fugue. Musicologist David Schulenberg (in The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach; Schirmer Books, New York, 1992) noted the close similarity of the fugue’s opening and some subsequent passages to an anonymous work from a Naples manuscript ascribed to Benedetto Marcello. While it was not unusual for Baroque composers to borrow from (and improve upon) existing works, the amount of pre-existing material utilized in this particular fugue is greater than normal; however, as Schulenberg concludes, “[Bach] nevertheless made characteristic alterations.” I would add that in no way do these borrowings detract from the visceral excitement of Bach’s propulsive and dramatic conclusion.

 

Heads up: Registration for the 2017 ETPOF

According to the East Texas Pipe Organ Festival website there is still an opportunity to register (at discounted prices) for the star-studded programs planned for this year’s festival. But do not delay: the opportunity for savings expires on September 15. Visit: http://easttexaspipeorganfestival.com.

 

Recent losses 

Elizabeth Chojnacka (born September 10, 1939, in Warsaw) died in Paris on May 28. Celebrated for her virtuosic keyboard technique, Chojnacka was known primarily as an avid and exciting performer of contemporary harpsichord music. Her renderings of all three of the solo harpsichord works by Ligeti are highly lauded, and the composer honored her by dedicating the third, Hungarian Rock, to her.

Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini (born October 7, 1929, in Bologna) died in that Italian city on July 11. Organist, harpsichordist, scholar, and instrument collector, Luigi was well known to us in Dallas, having been a guest at Southern Methodist University on several occasions. Most memorably, he was part of the so-designated “Haarlem Trio” organized by Robert Anderson as a week-long postscript to the 1972 American Guild of Organists convention in Dallas. The three major European visiting artists for that event—Marie-Claire Alain, Anton Heiller, and Tagliavini—each gave daily masterclasses for the large number of participants who remained in Dallas for a second week of study with these annual leaders of the Haarlem Summer Academies in the Netherlands, resulting in what may be the only time in Southern Methodist University history that the organ department achieved a financial surplus rather than a deficit!

Two vignettes from that stellar week have become an unforgettable part of   Dallas’s musical history: Luigi’s chosen workshop topic was the organ music of Girolamo Frescobaldi, and he had assigned to the prize-winning finalists from the AGO Young Organists’ Competition all of the pieces contained in that composer’s liturgical settings for organ, known as Fiori Musicali. One of the finalists who had not won an AGO prize left Dallas in high dudgeon. Unfortunately, this participant had been assigned the very first piece in this set of “Musical Flowers.” Professor Tagliavini began his afternoon class with a brief overview of the work’s history and importance, and then peered over his glasses as he announced, “And now we will hear the first piece, Frescobaldi’s ‘Toccata avanti della Messa’.”

The total lack of response became embarrassing; there was no respondent. So our guest teacher moved on to the next piece. And thus it was that each afternoon session began with the same question from Luigi: “And who will play the ‘Toccata avanti della Messa’?”—always followed by total silence. A stickler for completeness, on the fifth and final day of the course Luigi made his same query, again to no avail. So with his usual smile and slight lisp he intoned, “Then I shall play the ‘Toccata avanti della Messa’!” And so he did with total mastery and grace. And all was well within the Italian Baroque solar system,  for Frescobaldi’s magnum opus was, at last, complete in Dallas!

The second vignette, equally Luigi-esque, occurred when Dr. Anderson, always volatile and energetic, and I were awaiting Tagliavini’s arrival to play an evening organ recital for the workshop audience. It was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. and by five minutes before that hour Dr. Anderson was pacing the corridor near the door to the Caruth Auditorium stage. With less than two minutes to spare, Luigi ambled down the hallway. Bob called out, “Luigi, hurry!” To which the unflappable Italian stopped walking, carefully placed his leather briefcase on the floor, and, with his characteristically kindly smile, said, “Why, Bob? Has the recital already begun?” ν

 

Notes

1. For further information see my essay, “John Challis and Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor,” in Music and Its Questions: Essays in Honor of Peter Williams, edited by Thomas Donahue (Organ Historical Society Press, 2007); and my CD recording of the Bach transcription on Hommages for Harpsichord (SoundBoard 2008).

2. Concerning Lambert’s Clavichord, see my chapter on Herbert Howells in Twentieth Century Organ Music, edited by Christopher Anderson (Routledge, 2012).

Larry Palmer

Buried Treasures: 

The Harpsichord Pages 

in Retrospect (2006–15)

Once upon a time (well, twice actually, in The Diapason issues of January 1974 and February 1979), we offered cumulative indices of harpsichord-related matters in the journal, from Philip Treggor’s first harpsichord column (October 1967), through December 1978. Treggor continued his responsibility for harpsichord news until December 1968. Following his resignation, harpsichord submissions were managed by the magazine’s Chicago staff until September 1969, at which point I took over at the invitation of Editor Frank Cunkle.

As it has been 36 years since we have offered a third cumulative listing of harpsichord-centered writings, it may be time to offer this “backward” look, covering the past ten years. I cannot begin to count the number of instances in which the previous retrospectives have been of use to me: so much so that I keep these indices filed next to my bound copies of the magazine. If this present list proves useful to you, please let me know. I could then plan to complete indexing the years 1979 through 2005. Our January issue includes the journal’s composite index of the previous year; this would be a logical target date for continuing such offerings.

In the following citations, the title or subject appears first, followed by the month and year of publication, page number(s) in parentheses, and author. My contributions are indicated by the letters LP; other, less-frequent contributors, by their full names. I have added a few articles not specifically published under the Harpsichord News rubric. Categories sometimes overlap, particularly those of Personalities
and Obituaries.

 

Instruments and Builders

William Dowd: An Appreciation, Jan 09 (22), LP; The Earliest Surviving English Spinet by Charles Haward [c.1668], July 09 (12, 14), Charles West Wilson; Harpsichord News: ARTEK Goes German, July 15 (13), LP; Autobiography of a Clavichord (Dolmetsch-Chickering 2006), Dec 15 (12–13), LP.

 

Repertoire and 

Performance Practice

Mozart and the Harpsichord: An Alternate Ending for Fantasia in D minor, K. 397, Nov 06 (20), LP; “Entartete” Music: Hugo Distler and the Harpsichord, Aug 08 (22–23), LP; Harpsichord News: Chris DeBlasio Dances, Soler, Scarlatti, Lully, the Borrel Manuscript, May 09 (14), LP; Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s English Suite at 100, Dec 09 (36–37), LP; The Chopin Bicentennial at the Harpsichord, Feb 10 (23), LP; Addenda to Chopin, Aug 10 (11), LP; A Harpsichord Piece by Henri Mulet, Aug 10 (11), LP; Mulet Petit Lied—a complete facsimile, Jan 11 (12), LP; Harpsichord Works of Asiko Hirabayashi, Nov 10 (12–13), LP; J. S. Bach’s English and French Suites with emphasis on the Courante, May 11 (24–25), Renate McLaughlin; Gathering Peascods for the Old Gray Mare: Some Unusual Harpsichord Music Before Aliénor, Dec 12 (27–29), LP; Soler’s Fandango: new edition from Ut Orpheus and recording by Diego Ares, Dec 13 (12), LP; Multi-Media Mozart—Words, Notes, and Sounds [Harpsichord News], Feb 14 (12–13), LP; Christmas Music for Harpsichord, Oct 14 (12), LP; Going [J. William] Greene—Music for Harpsichord, June 15 (11), LP; Pedaling the French: A Tour de France of Revival Harpsichordists 1888–1939, Aug 15 (10–11), LP; Harpsichord Plus: The Accompanied Harpsichord Music of Jacques Duphly, Nov 15 (10), LP. 

 

Personalities in the Harpsichord World

Helmut Walcha, Oct 07 (28–29), Nov 07 (21–23), Dec 07 (21–23), Paul Jacobs; Oscar Peterson, Feb 08 (12), LP; Gustav Leonhardt (anecdote, footnote 3 in AGO National Convention Review), Nov 08 (27), LP; Pavana Lachrimae: A California Tribute to Gustav Leonhardt, Aug 12 (18), Lee Lovallo; Crazy about Organs: Leonhardt interview from 2000, Nov 12 (20–22), Jan-Piet Knijff; Gustav Leonhardt—a Letter to the Editor from Hellmuth Wolff, Jan 13 (3); Mamusia: Paul Wolfe Remembers Wanda Landowska, Oct 12 (23–25), Craig Smith; Janos Sebestyen, May 12 (12–13), Robert Tifft; Harpsichord in the News: Mahan Esfahani, Jory Vinikour, Frances Bedford, and a 1615 quotation from Trabaci about the status of the instrument, July 12 (10, 12), LP; Remembering Irma Rogell (and a review of Martin Elste’s book Die Dame mit dem Cembalo), April 13 (11–12), LP; A Triptych for Rafael [Puyana], May 13 (11–12), Betina M. Santos, Jane Clark, and LP; Virginia Pleasants Turns 100, Feb 12 (11); Harpsichord Playing in America after Landowska, June 11 (19–21), LP; Ralph Kirkpatrick Centennial, June 11 (13–14), Gavin Black; Remembering Wm. Neil Roberts, Sept 11 (12–14), LP; Joseph Stephens—In Memoriam, Sept 14 (15), LP; Remembering Hilda Jonas, Dec 14 (11), Glendon Frank and LP; Remembering George Lucktenberg, Feb 15 (11), LP; Remembering Richard Rephann, Mar 15 (25), Allison Alcorn.

 

Pedagogy and Technique

Dear Harpsichordists: Why Don’t We Play from Memory?, Sept 11 (24–25), Paul Cienniwa; Continuo (On Teaching), Nov 11 (15–17), Dec 11 (11–13), Jan 12 (16–17); Gavin Black; Recital Programing, Aug 12 (13–14), Gavin Black.

 

Reports on Harpsichord Events

Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society 2006 Meeting in Rome, Georgia, June 06 (12), LP; Westfield Center 2006 Conference, Victoria, British Columbia (includes mentions of Colin Tilney and Edoardo Bellotti), Dec 06 (29), Herbert Huestis; Boston Early Music Festival 2007, Sept 07 (22–23), LP; East Texas Pipe Organ Festival 2012: A Harpsichordist in Aeolian-Skinner Land, Feb 13 (20), LP; Continuo: the Art of Creative Collaboration—Westfield Center 2013 Conference at Pacific Lutheran University, 2013, July 13 (20–21), Andrew Willis; Historic Keyboard Society of North America 2013 meeting in Williamsburg, VA, April 14 (10–11), LP; HKSNA International Conference in Montréal and Aliénor Competition, Aug 15 (10–11), LP; Broadening a Harpsichordist’s Horizons: Remembering 2014 ETPOF, Sept 15 (11), LP. 

 

Reviews of Books, 

Music, and Recordings

A Guide to Musical Temperament (Thomas Donahue), reviewed by G. N. Bullat, June 06 (16); Guilty Pleasures: Mark Schweizer’s The Soprano Wore Falsettos, Choices (a novel) by Paul Wolfe, CD of Landowska reissues, DVD: Landowska—Uncommon Visionary [Harpsichord News] Mar 07 (10), LP; Peter Watchorn Plays Bach’s WTC I [Harpsichord News] Aug 07 (12–13), LP; Fernando Valenti’s Scarlatti recordings, Feb 08 (12, 14), LP; Peter Watchorn’s Isolde Ahlgrimm, Vienna, and the Early Music Revival and a published score for Richard Strauss’ Capriccio Suite, June 08 (12), LP; The Best Medicine—a review of Schweizer’s The Diva Wore Diamonds, Aug 09 (10), LP; New Harpsichord Music, Oct 09 (18–19), John Collins; a new compact disc set of Bach’s Six Partitas, and the publication of A Medici Harpsichord Book from Ut Orpheus, April 12 (12), LP; Joys of Re-Reading: Blue Harpsichord, Early Music mystery series by James Gollin, and more, Aug 14 (11), LP; Harpsichord News: Words and Music—Ralph Kirkpatrick Letters and Frank Ferko Triptych, April 15 (12), LP. 

 

Obituaries

Daniel Pinkham (d. 2006), Feb 07 (8); A Pinkham Memoir, Mar 07 (20), James McCray; Albert Fuller (d. 2007), Dec 07 (10); Remembering Albert Fuller—Trombones in Dido and Aeneas?, Feb 08 (14), LP; Fenner Douglass (d. 2008), June 08 (8); Thomas Dunn (d. 2008), Mar 09 (10); Virginia Pleasants (d. 2011), Feb 12 (11); Gustav Leonhardt (d. 2012), March 12 (10); Christopher Hogwood (d. 2014), Nov 14 (10); Bruce Prince-Joseph (d. 2015), July 15 (10); Paul Jordan (d. 2015), May 15 (18–19); Roger Goodman (d. 2015), Sept 15 (10); Alan Curtis (d. 2015), Oct 15 (10).

 

Esoteric Ephemera

Nineteenth-century harpsichord citings: Bizet and a Chopin student [Harpsichord News], Feb 08 (12), information from John Carroll Collins reported by LP; Historic 20th-Century Harpsichordists in Hungary, Italy, and the Czech Republic [Harpsichord News], Feb 08 (12), Robert Tifft; Bytes from the Electronic Mailbag: Fandango, Misspellings of the Word Harpsichord, April 14 (10–11), LP; November Musings: Blessed Cecilia (In Honor of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s 100th Birthday), Nov 14 (12), LP; A mystery, a cautionary tale: Mark Schweizer’s The Maestro Wore Mohair and Simon Menges’ misadventure [Harpsichord News], Oct 15 (12), LP.

 

And Something New: Mysteries
with Musical References

The American expatriate author Donna Leon (born in New Jersey in 1942) has published 24 books in her series starring Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venetian constabulary. Number one, Death at La Fenice (1992) introduces the soprano Flavia Petrelli who is singing Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata at the venerable opera house. German maestro Helmut Wellauer dies before the final act of the opera, and Brunetti finds that he has a complicated bit of detecting to do before solving this clever crime.

For Acqua Alta, book five in the series, Leon brings back this soprano, a “favorite character because of her voice.” By the novel’s end Flavia is off to sing her first Handel opera, a plot twist chosen so that, should Petrelli return in future books, Leon would be able to write about her best-loved music. In real life the author became closely associated with American conductor Alan Curtis; together they created an opera company, Il Complesso Barocco, to perform rare works by Handel and other baroque composers. References to harpsichord are found on pages 201–2 of Acqua Alta, and again on page 229 when Flavia’s companion Brett chooses Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony for listening rather than harpsichord music, the “plunky sound of which would snap her nerves.”

Volume 24 of the Brunetti stories arrived in 2015: Falling in Love is set in La Fenice again, this time with Petrelli starring as Puccini’s Tosca. Music figures prominently, the plot is gripping, and I particularly enjoyed a comment on page 154, where Brunetti is reminded of a CD shop owner who opined that “the weirdest customers were people who liked organ music. ‘Most of them shop at night,’ his friend said. ‘I think it’s the only time some of them ever leave their houses.’”

Further “baroquery” is to be found in Leon’s standalone novel The Jewels of Paradise (2012) which features a musicologist and a plot driven by the legacy of Italian composer Agostino Steffani (1654–1728). Highly recommended for all fans of mystery novels and baroque music. Finally, dear readers, should you come across references to the harpsichord, please send me the citations! ν

 

Comments are always welcome. Please submit them to [email protected] or by post to Dr. Larry Palmer, 10125 Cromwell Drive, Dallas, Texas 75229.

Artis Wodehouse

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.

Steven Young

The year 2015 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Pierre Kunc (1865–1941), possibly one of the most award-winning organist/composers in France’s musical history. Yet, despite his regional renown, as evidenced by numerous performances and prizes, his fame remained mostly local and limited to his lifetime. It seems unusual that any composer would enjoy such success and eventually be consigned to obscurity. The principal reason for his lack of lasting fame may be the lack of published music, as the bulk of Kunc’s output never appeared in print. Few of his awards offered the opportunity for publication; instead, they featured performances. The published materials in the Bibliothèque Nationale (BN) include several piano pieces, most of his organ works, numerous motets and Mass settings for voices, two transcriptions for organ, and his only two chamber works, the Sonate and Rapsodie, both for viola and piano. 

Not one of Kunc’s dozen or more orchestral works appears to have been published, nor are there any orchestral manuscripts listed in the BN catalogue. Certain works, such as Au pied des monts de Gavranie, suffered the typical fate of a new composition: they received their premieres and were almost instantly forgotten. But others, such as Été pastoral, enjoyed multiple performances throughout Kunc’s lifetime.¹ It seems likely that several works survived the ravages of World War I in France, as several pieces were performed both prior to and following 1914, but one has to question whether or not these were manuscripts or published scores, and if they still exist. It would be a great boost to scholars to have access to these scores in order to more fully analyze the music and Kunc’s contribution to the field.²

Born in Toulouse, Kunc began his musical training at home with his father, Aloys Martin, who was maître de chapelle at the cathedral in Toulouse, and with his mother, Henriette Marie née Dargein, who had studied piano with Louise Farrenc and organ with César Franck at the Paris Conservatoire. Pierre’s education continued at a Jesuit school in Toulouse, and later he pursued further study at the Paris Conservatoire, where he had organ lessons with Eugène Gigout, a lifelong admirer of Franck, and composition study with Ernest Guiraud, a winner of the Prix de Rome as well as a founding member of the Société Nationale de Musique. While in Paris, Kunc frequented concerts of the Schola Cantorum and developed relationships with some of Paris’s greatest musicians, many of whom were devotees of Franck, whose music clearly illustrates the influence of the Germanic school of Liszt and Wagner. This sphere of influence, coupled with Kunc’s devout Catholicism, may have influenced his style. 

 Little is known about Kunc’s personal life. He married twice, both times to singers. His first wife, Jane Gillet, was a former student of Kunc’s who performed with some of Paris’s finest musicians. She premiered several melodies of Guy Ropartz for the Société Nationale and performed a wide array of repertoire, including songs by her husband and brother-in-law, Aymé. Jane died from pleurisy in 1912. Three years later, at the age of fifty, Kunc married Elisabeth Tournier. That marriage lasted over twenty years before Elisabeth passed away from an illness she developed in 1931, which took her life some four years later. Neither marriage produced any children. According to his nephew, it was at this time that Kunc devoted himself to writing mostly sacred music.³ Perhaps this second devastating personal loss gave Kunc a reason to renew his interest in sacred music, turning to the familiar during a low emotional period.⁴

A very early review (1890) praises Kunc as a composer with a bright future, and notes that Kunc’s compositional ability might make him a future candidate for the Prix de Rome.⁵ Many of Kunc’s earliest musical compositions received reviews citing his stylistic kinship with Wagner. In his review of Kunc’s Prelude d’Helene, critic André Gresse claimed that Kunc was a disciple of Wagner, calling the orchestral work with voices that of a “real talent (réel talent).”⁶ This attachment to Wagnerian style remained part of Kunc’s musical vocabulary throughout his career, resulting in conflicting comments from reviewers.⁷ The extreme differences among them reflect the two prevailing schools of thought in Paris during this time. Some preferred the more Germanic style of symphonic music while others hoped that young composers would help give France a new voice, one that avoided Germanic styles and references.⁸ A review of the premiere of Kunc’s Été pastoral provides an example of the negative opinion, asserting that Kunc might best be a composer of “charming ballets and excellent pantomimes” rather than of serious music.⁹ Another reviewer, upon hearing this same performance, wrote that it was regrettable that a new work had so little to offer with regard to originality.¹⁰ In contrast to those comments, several reviewers praised this same work for its clarity, color, and great candor, as well as claiming that Kunc possessed rare qualities “not smothered in tricks.”¹¹ In an era where experimentation, creativity, and imagination were sought in new music, Kunc’s music may have seemed old-fashioned or outdated, so even the positive reviews were often lukewarm, such as this one from a concert of the Société nationale in 1906, assessing his vocal settings of some poetry by Camille Mauclair, pseudonym of Séverin Faust:

I am beginning to think that it (modern music) is a dirty trick, because the simple melody by Monsieur Pierre Kunc, titled “Complainte,” has given me great pleasure.  This musician appears to me to have chosen a poem quite suitable for music . . . I was less fond of the second piece, “Undergrowth,” but it does not lack originality.¹² 

However, in the same concert, Kunc’s performance of his Suite: Grand prière [sic] symphonique for organ was well received, though one reviewer did find the title questionable, as the work did not provide a prayer-like atmosphere.¹³

Kunc wrote in nearly every genre, composing works for voice, choir, organ, piano, chamber ensembles, and orchestra. It would seem he never stopped composing, producing a substantial body of work, much of which remains unknown, unheard, and unpublished. Throughout his career, Kunc continued to develop and hone his craft, and he enjoyed notable success. In 1900, he won a prize in a competition sponsored by the Société des Compositeurs for his Symphonie-Fantaisie, which he had completed in 1898. Pianist Georges de Lausnay performed the premiere with the orchestra of the Concerts Victor Charpentier.¹⁴ This work enjoyed many performances during Kunc’s lifetime, most often with de Lausnay as the pianist.

Four years later, Kunc survived the three competitive rounds of judging in the Concours de la Ville de Paris with his three-act tragedie lyrique, Canta.¹⁵ The work ultimately received a rather mixed review, one that referred to its energy as “snort[ing] with persistence,” and as being full of “clashing measures that sometimes compensate for emotion.”¹⁶ It should be noted that Kunc ultimately lost that competition to such notables as Charles Tournemire and Gabriel Pierné. In 1913, Kunc’s Symphony Pyrénéenne captured the Prix Antonin Marmontel from La Société des Compositeurs.¹⁷ Portions of this work received several performances over the next two decades, but it seems its first complete performance took place in Toulouse under the direction of Pierre’s brother Aymé in 1923, nearly a decade after its completion.¹⁸ Despite the ongoing war, or perhaps in honor of France’s accomplishments, Kunc’s Overture héroïque et triomphale premiered in Paris to favorable reviews at the Salle Gaveau in 1916, right in the middle of the global conflict.¹⁹

As late as 1929, Kunc, at sixty-four years old, was still entering his works in competitions and winning prizes, including the Prix Chartier given by the Académie des beaux-arts for a piece of chamber music.²⁰ (The award announcement does not give the title of the work; it may have been the Rapsodie pour alto et piano.) Two years later, Kunc was awarded the Prix Trémont (for a second time) by the Académie des beaux-arts. (The first time he won this prize was in 1909, when he shared it with César-Abel Estyle.²¹) Finally, in 1940, the year before he died, he received the Prix Jacques Durand from the Académie des beaux-arts for his Rapsodie for viola and piano.

Kunc’s music received frequent performances at the concerts of the Société nationale, an organization devoted to performing chamber and vocal works of young and upcoming French composers; many of these works received critical praise.²² Despite these positive reviews, many of his pieces languished in his library for years, while other pieces enjoyed numerous hearings. For instance, his Prélude to Les Cosaques, a play by Leo Tolstoy, was not performed until fifteen years after it had been completed.²³ By contrast, his piano piece, Rigaudon, which he subsequently arranged for piano and orchestra, received countless performances during his lifetime, and may have been among his best-known compositions. However, despite his local fame, numerous recognitions, and frequent performances, a great deal of Kunc’s output remains unpublished.²⁴

Kunc’s limited renown may be due to having come from a musical family, where his father Aloys and younger brother Aymé were extremely well known, so possibly greater things may have been expected. A review of the Quinze motets (1856) by Pierre’s father begins with this glowing statement: “If Monsieur Kunc was not an excellent musician full of verve and originality, we would tell him: ‘You deserve these words of praise, it is charming, gracious, and sometimes even brilliant.’” ²⁵

Aymé won second prize, along with Maurice Ravel, in the prestigious Prix de Rome competition of 1902, at the tender age of twenty-five. This honor catapulted him to great fame and well-deserved respect.

Although Pierre was a fine composer and musician, he suffered from being frequently confused with his brother. Two examples may provide a clearer picture of this awkward situation. A review in Le Ménestrel mentioned the pleasure of hearing the second movement of Pierre’s Symphonie Pyrénéenne, which was followed by a work of “his glorious brother, Aymé.”²⁶ (Another critic went so far as to claim that Pierre had been taught his craft by Aymé, who was twelve years Pierre’s junior!) One such confusion with his brother arose in 1922, during a search for a new director of the Conservatory of Nantes. Among the listing of possible candidates was Pierre, winner of the Prix de Rome, though this was likely a reference to Aymé, then serving as director of the Toulouse Conservatory.²⁷ Regardless of Pierre’s noteworthy abilities as a composer, he and his music remained in the shadow of his father and younger brother. In spite of these regrettable circumstances, Aymé appears to have been a strong supporter of his elder brother, conducting his music, including the aforementioned first complete performance of the Symphonie Pyrénéenne at concerts in Toulouse and Nancy.

 

Works for piano and organ

Since Kunc spent the bulk of his professional life as a teacher of piano and organ at the Ecole Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, it comes as no surprise that he composed a fair amount of music for both instruments.²⁸ His piano music was performed by many of the greatest interpreters of the era, including Alfred Cortot, Edouard Risler, and Blanche Selva. Kunc’s organ works (twelve in all) also remain little known, despite their accumulated accolades. Although Kunc won several premières prix for his organ compositions, not one of these compositions appears in the current concert repertoire. (Music of the other prize winners, Henri Mulet and Joseph Jongen, still appear in the concert repertory.) With his Libera Me: Pièce funèbre and Communion, Kunc took first place in the 1911 competition sponsored by the Procure générale de musique religieuse. Libera Me: Pièce funèbre was dedicated to the memory of his father; it uses techniques found in the music of the era, including thematic combinations, a technique often associated with Franck and Vierne. The order in which the thematic material appears creates the sense of a tone poem or musical drama depicting the human experience at the end of life (death, regrets in life, the fear of judgment, and the promise of redemption), as noted in the publication’s preface. The use of Gregorian chant themes pays homage to Kunc’s father, who was founder and editor of Musica Sacra, a periodical devoted to the Catholic Church and its music. 

In 1921, Kunc commenced work on his only organ symphony. Completed in 1923, the Symphonie en Ré mineur was entered into yet another competition sponsored by the Procure générale de la musique religieuse, and, again, Kunc garnered the premier prix. The work was published by the Procure générale the following year, and received its premiere at the Salle Gaveau in Paris in March 1924, admirably performed by Georges Jacob, to whom the work is dedicated. (Jacob performed many of Kunc’s organ pieces.) The work enjoyed several more performances over the next few years, all given by Jacob. The last documented performance of the Symphonie en Ré mineur took place in 1927, at a concert sponsored by the Union des Maîtres de Chapelles, once again by Jacob. 

Reviews of this symphonie were extremely favorable. Georges Renard penned an extensive article, which analyzed the piece in great detail.²⁹ Ultimately, it may have been this essay that aided in the disappearance of the work from the standard organ repertoire of the day, as Renard praised the work for its “Widorian concept of the orchestral symphony adapted to the organ.”³⁰ By 1924, the symphonies of Widor, which were the first of their kind, had been surpassed by the brilliant work of his pupil, friend, and former assistant, Louis Vierne, organist of Notre-Dame, who, by 1924, had published four of his six organ symphonies. It may be that the reviewer sought to place the work within the ever-growing genre of the organ symphony, but the suite-like structure initially used by Widor was, by this time, outmoded. However, the Kunc work, while containing traditional elements, certainly contains newer ones as well, such as cyclic thematic material, chromatic tonal language, and tightly controlled tonal relationships between the movements of the symphony. 

One unique quality of the Symphonie en Ré mineur is the structure of its opening movement. Usually Vierne and Widor, the principal organ symphonists of their day, relied heavily on sonata-allegro form or some version of a binary form, but Kunc introduces four themes in the work’s first movement, Fantaisie. Throughout the movement, these themes intermingle and receive diverse treatments, including rhythmic augmentation and varied harmonization; they undergo fugal treatment and imitation as well as modal changes. According to Renard, there are many unexpected events, including the return of the final statement of the first theme in the original minor key despite its having been heard in the parallel major mode for some time. 

The only other organ work that received significant mention during Kunc’s career is the Grande pièce symphonique, which he dedicated to his teacher Eugène Gigout. The work seems to have been part of a larger suite for organ, but this scherzo is the only movement extant. The piece appeared in 1901 as part of the series L’Orgue moderne, arguably the premier publication of new organ music by young French composers in the early part of the twentieth century. The work was played by both Alexandre Guilmant and Georges Jacob.³¹ Kunc also seems to have been taken with the music of his contemporaries such as Léon Roques and Camille Saint-Saëns, as he arranged several works of these men for smaller forces, including the Adagio from the so-called “Organ” symphony by Saint-Saëns, which Kunc set for violin, violoncello, harp, and organ.³²

Among the works for organ, some deserve special mention. The Grande pièce symphonique assumes the same name as the Franck work that is often credited as the composition that initiated the French symphonic organ school, but bears little resemblance to the earlier work. The Kunc work is in three large sections that together loosely resemble sonata form. The aggressive A theme is rhythmic and chromatic (Example 1). In contrast, the B section features sustained harmonies and limited chromaticism that abruptly becomes a fugato, whose subject uses the opening A material and then alternates with the B theme. A brief development section follows, which leads to a return of the A and B material, the A material in the tonic F# minor and the B material in the parallel major with just a few hints of the A theme
(Example 2).

Another noteworthy piece is the brief Adagietto in E Major from 1902, also found in L’Orgue moderne. This lyrical work utilizes some of the characteristic tone colors of the French symphonic organ, including the Cor de nuit and the Trompette harmonique. The closing section uses some rich and vivid harmonies, as seen in Example 3.

 

Choral works

Following the short-lived success of his Symphonie pour orgue, Kunc appears to have shifted his focus to chamber and choral music, though he did not cease writing works for large ensembles and even reworking music from earlier successes. (He extracted the Deux Danses hindoues from his Canta originally completed in 1900; this excerpt received glowing praise at its premiere some thirty years later.³³) During this period, Kunc composed two Masses for choir and organ (dedicated to St. Bernadette and to des Saintes Reliques—“holy relics”), as well as the aforementioned Rapsodie for viola and piano or orchestra (published posthumously). For several years, he served as maître de chapelle at St. Sulpice in Paris, where Charles-Marie Widor was still serving as organiste titulaire. Happily for Kunc, he was able to perform choral works that his father had written, as well as some of his own sacred music, while fulfilling his duties. His choral music seems to have enjoyed some local success throughout several regions of France, as many newspapers mention his works in their listings of music performed at religious services. Early works in the choral genre include the Hodie Christus natus est and Regina coeli from 1901. Several years later he composed settings of O Salutaris, Tantum Ergo, O Sacrum Convivium, Cantique de Communion, and Tota pulchra es (1910). Kunc dedicated these works to various maîtres de chapelle in Toulouse (his birthplace) and Paris (his adopted home). Kunc appears to have been well respected as a choral conductor, as a review of some sacred music quotes Kunc and comments that he is a connoisseur and an excellent musician.³⁴

 

In summary

Finally, Pierre Kunc proved himself to be a most well-rounded musician; not only did he compose and perform music, he wrote critically about it. He served as music critic for two journals, Le Guide musicale and La Nouvelle revue. He wrote at least three lengthy articles on various musical personalities, scores, and performances, including an insightful retrospective on the career of Charles Lamoureux, conductor and organizer of the Concerts-Lamoureux, and an extensive critique of a performance of Humperdinck’s Hansel et Gretel at the Opéra-Comique.³⁵

As a whole, Kunc’s organ repertoire, though small, admirably displays his competency as a serious composer. His entire extant output for his preferred instrument follows, with asterisks indicating the prize-winning works.³⁶

 

Grande pièce symphonique 

* Communion (in A-flat)

* Pièce funèbre

Douze pieces pour orgue ou harmonium sur des noëls français

Adagietto (L’Orgue moderne)

Sortie fuguée (L’Orgue moderne)

Marche religiuese

Entrée solennelle, Fughetta

Offertoire en fa majeur

Offertoire sur deux Noëls en si b majeur

* Symphonie en ré mineur 

Adoremus (et laudate)

Élévation

 

Kunc’s Symphonie en ré mineur is unlike many of its predecessors within the genre in its compactness—it has only three movements whereas a four- or five-movement design had been the standard. This brevity is intensified by Kunc’s use of a singular rhythmic idea, which supplies the momentum in each of the latter two movements. One might find such motoric patterns tiring on the ear, but the use of countermelodies and unusual harmonic progressions keeps the listener’s interest.³⁷

Sadly, much of Kunc’s organ music remains unavailable, though a few pieces appear in online catalogues. Both Kunc’s record of prizes and awards and fresh analyses of this works indicate an output of considerable musical merit, worthy
of rediscovery.

 

Notes

1. Among the orchestral works, one finds the Prélude d’Helene (one tableau appears to be in print in a British Library), Canta, Symphonie fantaisie pour piano et orchestre, Prélude (pour Les Cosaques), Deux Danses hindoues, Symphonie Pyrénéenne, and Été pastoral (premiered in 1905 and performed as late as 1943), to name a few. 

2. According to a personal e-mail correspondence with Francois Pellecer, Kunc’s nephew, whatever scores Pellecer possessed have been given to the Bibliothèque Nationale, though they do not as yet appear in the catalogue. The BN collection has six manuscripts of Kunc, all but one for piano. 

3. Pellecer, Pierre Kunc. 

4. In December 1937, the cathedral of Nantes gave the premiere performance of the Messe de Sainte-Bernadette (L’Ouest-Éclair, December 27, 1937, p. 4). 

5. Revue des Pyrénées et de France méridionale, p. 874 (1890). Kunc was awarded two first prizes from l’Academie de musique in Toulouse; one for an overture for orchestra, and the other for his song, Extase. The judges cited his work as being of a “modern and alluring style” and of “great originality. ”

6. Le Journal (Paris), February 25, 1895, p. 4, in a review of the Concerts d’Harcourt. 

7. A review of Kunc’s Diptych Breton lamented the need for young composers to “compose La Morte de Isolde” over and over again, suggesting that this music has already been written (Revue musicale de Lyon, vol. 7, no. 25, 1910, pp. 750–753). However, another review called the music “very evocative.” It claimed that these “pages of music were not negligible.” (See Le Rappel, March 22, 1910.)

8. A reviewer of a performance of some songs of Kunc lamented that “Kunc’s sin” was a vain attempt to develop the work in a pseudo-Wagnerian vain. (See Le Mercure musical, May 15, 1906, p. 471). 

9. Le Mercure musical, December 15, 1905, p. 546. Interestingly, this work was awarded a prize from la Société des Compositeurs in 1903. A more gracious review appeared in Le Matin (October 30, 1905, p. 5) immediately following the October premiere, though it too claimed that the piece lacked originality, possibly due to the Wagnerian influences that dominated much of Kunc’s music. 

10. Le Ménestrel, vol. 71, no. 43, November 5, 1905, p. 357. 

11. Revue Illustré, vol. 40, no. 23, November 15, 1905, p. 1. 

12. “Je commence à trouver que c’est un villain tour, et ce porquoi la simple et franche mélodie de M. Pierre Kunc, qui a pour titre “Complainte,” m’a cause un vif plaisir. Ce musicien me semble avoir choisi une poème tout a fait “musicable” . . . J’ai moins aime la seconde mélodie, ”Sous bois” . . . mais elle manqué par trop d’originalité.” Le Mercure Musical, 1906, vol. 2, p. 471 features a review of the Société Nationale concert of
March 17, 1906. 

13. Kunc’s work is properly titled Grande pièce symphonique. It was published in 1901 by Alphonse Leduc. So, it would appear, that the critic either misread the title or there was a misprint in the program. 

14. Le Ménestrel, vol. 69, no. 2, January 11, 1903, p. 13. The work is entitled here as Suite pour piano et orchestre with Pierre Kunc conducting. 

15. There were thirty-one entries in that competition; only six received awards and performances. According to Kunc’s biography, Samuel Rousseau considered the work to be “a little too Wagnerian.” (Pellecer, François, Pierre Kunc. Self-published, 2001). 

16. Le Ménestrel, vol. 70, no. 21, May 22, 1904, p. 162. 

17. Le Ménestrel, March 14, 1914, p. 87. 

18. Comoedia, April 16, 1923, p. 3. The review mentions that fragments had been performed at several of the Concerts-Lamoureux, but it was finally performed in its entirety in Toulouse, the composer’s hometown. 

19. Le Gaulois, January 3, 1916, p. 4. The work originally premiered in Toulouse as the Overture to Salammbô (see Revue française de musique, November 15, 1912, p. 110.) Interestingly, the overture had three movements (sections): Gloria, Luctus, Victoria, possibly due to the storyline of the Flaubert text. 

20. Académie des beaux-arts [Annuaire], 1929, p. 20. 

21. Le Journal (Paris), May 17, 1909, p. 7. 

22. Le Ménestrel, vol. 82, no. 23, June 4, 1920, p. 234; Le Ménestrel, vol. 84, no. 5, February 3, 1922, p. 49. The reviewer mentions that the composer achieved a happy balance between the dramatic opening movement and the flowery exuberance of the third movement in the Sonata. 

23. The work, premiered at Concerts-Colonne, received a positive review in Paris-Soir, March 24, 1925, p. 6. 

24. Francois Pellecer, Music et Memoria, Pierre Kunc (2001), www.musimem.com/kunc_pierre.htm. According to Pellecer, as of the publication, numerous works are still in the family’s collection with hopes of being published posthumously. 

25. “M. Kunc n’était pas un excellent musician, un artiste plein verve et d’originalité, nous lui dirions: ‘Ce que vous avait fait mérite des éloges; c’est charmant, gracieuse et parfois même brilliant.’” Revue de musique ancienne et modern, 1856, p. 776. 

26. Le Ménestrel, vol. 86, no. 23, June 6, 1924, p. 261. 

27. L’Ouest-Éclair, April 30, 1922 p. 4. 

28. Among his more popular works for solo piano is the Suite symphonie. The earliest documented performance took place at a concert of the Société national des beaux-arts in May 1906, performed by Jean Batalla (see Le Figaro, May 29, 1906, p. 5). 

29. Georges Renard, Revue Sainte-Cecile, 1927, pp. 103–104. 

30. “ . . . conception widorienne de la symphonie orchestrale adaptée à l’orgue.”

31. Le Mercure musical, January 1, 1906,
p. 317. 

32. Published by Durand et Cie. in 1924. Kunc also adapted Saint-Säens’ Laudate
Dominum.

33. Le Journal, February 13, 1930, p. 6. See also La Semaine à Paris, February 21, 1930, p. 16, and Le Matin, February 10, 1930, p. 5. 

34. Paris Musical et Dramatique, May 1906, p. 4.

35. See La Feu follet, volume 20, tome XI, no. 1, pp. 152–155, and La Nouvelle revue, May–June 1900, pp. 624–630. 

36. Pellecer, op. cit. He mentions Vingt prières but there is no record of them in the Bibliothèque nationale catalogue or
elsewhere. 

37. The reader is referred to the previously cited article by Georges Renard for more details about the work. 

 

 

Larry Palmer

A harpsichordist in Aeolian-Skinner land:

2012 East Texas Pipe Organ Festival 

One recurring category in my performing career has been as a harpsichord soloist for conventions of organists: filling in when the planners wish to utilize an historic space in which the organ is not as interesting as the building (St. George’s Methodist Church, Philadelphia, for the International Congress of Organists, 1977); to showcase a lovely church in which the organ is not playable (New Orleans, Organ Historical Society, 1989); or to feature an orchestra hall bereft of any pipe organ whatsoever (Minneapolis, Twin Cities American Guild of Organists national convention, 1980).

Thus, an invitation to play harpsichord during the 2012 East Texas Pipe Organ Festival (November 12–15) was not a total novelty. The justly famous mid-20th-century Aeolian-Skinner organs in Kilgore and Longview were the primary focus for this second annual gathering of organ enthusiasts, but Kilgore’s First Presbyterian Church organist Lorenz Maycher, the originator and organizational wizard who put it all together and made it run smoothly for the 75 registered participants as well as large numbers of local concert attendees, decided that a quieter musical offering at mid-day on November 13 (my 74th birthday) might serve as a respite for “ears tired of too many mixtures.” While my program in Longview was ultimately scheduled for Trinity Episcopal, a church without an Aeolian-Skinner instrument, the parish’s three-manual organ by Fort Worth organbuilder Ross King was featured beforehand in a stellar morning recital by Jeremy Bruns, who demonstrated the organ and showed it to be a  thoroughly satisfying and versatile musical instrument in a warm acoustical space.

Often the greatest obstacle to a successful harpsichord recital turns out to be the instrument on which it is played, so the decision was made to transport my own 1994 Richard Kingston Franco-Flemish harpsichord for the program. When asked if a concert would be expensive, I responded, “No, but moving my harpsichord will be!” Longview is 110 miles east of Dallas, an easy but time-consuming trek for my local instrument mover, himself a busy professional percussionist. Lorenz solved the transport problem by enlisting the aid of the Rader Funeral Home’s J Mitchell, who agreed to provide harpsichord moving. The Rader firm already had a history of supporting the local organ scene by moving large pipes during installation and recording projects. I was expecting that my nine-foot-long “Big Blue” would be transported in a hearse (reminiscent of at least two harpsichord deliveries from Willard Martin, who customarily bought used hearses, citing the ease of double parking them without penalty for deliveries “even in New York City”)! However, Mr. Mitchell substituted an unmarked white van and also provided its careful driver, Logan Montana, a student at Kilgore College.

Another necessity for a successful recital is the thoughtful choice of an appropriate program. How often have I attended a concert played for a general audience only to be underwhelmed by an overly esoteric choice of repertoire! For this particular outing, I figured that the audience would be appreciative and knowledgeable about organ music, but perhaps somewhat less familiar with the harpsichord offerings. Therefore I attempted to choose some works that might have at least a tenuous connection to the organ. After many draft programs were drawn up and discarded, I settled on one that included works by several composers likely to be known to the festival registrants. From J. S. Bach, two compositions to end each half of the recital: first, a transcription of his profound Chaconne in D Minor (from the Solo Violin Partita, BWV 1004) in an unpublished 1944 arrangement by the American harpsichord maker John Challis (who was also an organist), and, to conclude the concert, Bach’s shortest harpsichord Toccata (in E Minor, BWV 914), which opens with an ostinato figure suggestive of an organ pedal motive, includes a highly dramatic recitative, and ends with a brilliant chromatic fugue.

Additional composers probably familiar to organists included Herbert Howells (represented by three short dance movements from Lambert’s Clavichord) and Gerald Near, whose Triptych for Harpsichord I commissioned in 1982. This work, beginning with an atmospheric Carillon, proved site-appropriate, since the church’s hour chimes struck at two, providing thereby an unforeseen, but appropriate, introduction to the recital.  To these works I added pieces that have been favorites in many of my concerts: Bohuslav Martinu’s Sonate pour Claveçin (1958), and two idiomatic baroque works: La D’Héricourt and La Lugeac by Claude-Bénigne Balbastre. Finally, a rarity newly added to my repertoire this season, Duke Ellington’s unique harpsichord work A Single Petal of a Rose (1965) in my own revision of an unpublished arrangement by Igor Kipnis and Dave Brubeck. It must have worked, for applause solicited an encore, Cantilena (from Trifles) by Texas-born, Denver-resident composer Glenn Spring.

The four-day festival sported a roster of players that easily might be the envy of most convention planners: evening recitalists included Ken Cowan (Rice University), Richard Elliott (Mormon Tabernacle, Salt Lake City), Thomas Murray (Yale University), and Bradley Welch (Highland Park Methodist Church, Dallas). In morning and afternoon programs the attendees heard organists Walt Strony, Jeremy Bruns, Ann Frohbieter, Charles Callahan, Christopher Houlihan, Scott Davis, and Christopher Jennings. A late evening showing of the silent film Phantom of the Opera featured organ accompaniment by Brett Valliant. Michael Barone, host of the nationally syndicated organ program Pipedreams, recorded all the concerts, and was a familiar and supportive presence throughout the festival. 

A larger-than-expected number of registrants had indicated an arrival well before the official opening recital on Monday evening, so the resourceful Lorenz added a shopping tour of Kilgore antique and specialty stores, lunch, and an afternoon program at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, during which Charles Callahan gave an effective brief improvisation in the form of a stop-by-stop demonstration of  the church’s two-manual Aeolian-Skinner organ (1952) as a musical prelude to an informal conversation between the two of us on our assigned topic “Composers We Have Known.” Charles and I had not met previously, but we formed an instant camaraderie as we reminisced for more than an hour about associations with Leo Sowerby (and heard a recording of his anthem for SAB choir and organ, Jesu Bright and Morning Star), Gerald Near (with brief examples from his three-movement Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings), Daniel Pinkham, Thomas Matthews, Paul Creston, Alexander
Schreiner, Olivier Messiaen, Jean Langlais, George Thalben-Ball, Francis Jackson, Alec Wyton, Calvin Hampton, Herbert Howells, Vincent Persichetti, Ross Lee Finney . . . quite a diverse compilation of memorable luminaries!

Housing in the Comfort Suites at Kilgore was truly comfortable, with a full hot breakfast available each morning at no extra charge, a complimentary late afternoon happy hour (if one happened not to be at a recital), and an “even happier hour” that extended late into the night, where all could mingle to talk of the day’s events, enjoy a libation and snack, or purchase recordings, books, and music presented for sale by the festival artists. What better place could there be to acquire Callahan’s Kilgore Suite or reissues of historic Aeolian-Skinner organ recordings on compact discs produced by Lorenz Maycher’s Vermont Organ Academy?

The festival honored the life and work of Roy Perry (1906–1978), Aeolian-Skinner tonal finisher and Texas sales representative, a much-beloved musician and unforgettable character who served as organist of Kilgore’s First Presbyterian Church from 1932 until 1972. Perry is buried in the private Thompson Family Cemetery, a quiet and peaceful gravesite visited by the bus-travelling attendees on their way to a celebratory lakeside dinner in honor of the Crim family, donors of Aeolian-Skinner’s 1949 opus 1173 at First Presbyterian. Celebrated as well were the musical achievements of the Longview-born organist Alexander Boggs Ryan (1928–1978), who was remembered with a recital at First Baptist Church, Longview, featuring several works he had played there in 1959 on Aeolian-Skinner’s 1951 instrument (opus 1174), an exhibition at the Gregg County Historical Museum, and a gala reception. 

It is this sense of connection, of place, and of gratitude to those whose gifts caused such treasured instruments to be built in these Texas churches that assures the festival’s success not only with those who come from afar, but also for the local residents who attend in generous numbers. All the musical programs are open to the general public at no charge, and it was especially gratifying to see many young people at these recitals, including students from the local college and a group of organ students from Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, who had made the long trip to Texas in a van with their teacher Joby Bell.  

It was an honor to be a part of this event, and I felt a great sense of anticipation when informed that my picture (in color) had been published in the Longview News-Journal for Wednesday, November 14. When the festival bus arrived back at the hotel late that evening, I set out on foot to find a copy of the paper, and, after two false attempts, actually found one! And there, at the bottom of page 6A was the photo with the caption, “Larry Palmer performs Tuesday on an autochord at Trinity Episcopal Church.” For years I have collected misspellings of the word harpsichord (and there are many of them that have appeared in print), but here was a totally unique attribution, only one of many pleasant experiences afforded by the East Texas Pipe Organ Festival, 2012.

For a more detailed account of this festival, see Neal Campbell’s report on pages 22–25 of this issue. For more information about past and future festivals, see www.EastTexasPipeOrganFestival.com. ν

 

Photo credit: Bill Leazer