Going Places: an interview with Katelyn Emerson

Robert McCormick has been organist and choirmaster of Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia, since 2016. Previously he held similar positions at Saint Paul’s Church, K Street, in Washington, DC, and at Saint Mary the Virgin, New York City. He is represented in North America exclusively by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists, LLC.

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this series may be found in the May 2022 issue, pages 20–21; Part 2 may be found in the September 2022 issue, pages 12–13.

Introduction

This is the third in a series of articles on improvisation, incorporating interviews with distinguished and distinctive American exponents of the art. The first two articles included enlightening contributions from Matthew Glandorf and Mary Beth Bennett, respectively; this article contains a discussion with Jason Roberts. Roberts is an alumnus of Rice University, Yale University, and the Manhattan School of Music. In recent years he has served numerous notable Episcopal parishes, and now is the director of music at the (Roman Catholic) Church of the Blessed Sacrament, New York City. Notably, he won the American Guild of Organists National Competition in Organ Improvisation (NCOI) in 2008. I have known Jason for nearly twenty-five years, and in addition to many other compliments that I easily can give him, in 2002 he also introduced me to the person who now is my husband, something for which I am most grateful!

As will become clearer later in the article, Jason’s responses led me to enjoy a fair bit of nostalgia. He and I met in the summer of 1998 in Macon, Georgia, my hometown. Jason and his family had moved to town the year before, and he spent his senior year of high school at the same school from which I had graduated the preceding year. For several summers running, while home from college, often we would “hang out” only as nerdy teenaged organists might—driving around town, playing organs, listening to sacred music, and discussing churches and church music in great detail. (I had forgotten that we specifically listened to Gerre Hancock, as Jason mentions, or that I improvised for him; I shudder to think what those efforts may have been!)

Going further back in memory, I have been thinking in greater detail about my early musical experiences, some of which I shared in the first article of this series. I grew up in a large downtown church in Macon, Mulberry Street United Methodist Church, with a strong tradition of formal worship and great music. My first influence, teacher, and mentor was Camille Bishop, for many years organist and director of music at Mulberry Street. Now retired from regular church work, she is an organist’s organist and musician’s musician. I suspect she does not give herself enough credit for playing fluently “off the page,” because on countless occasions I have heard her extemporize glorious hymn accompaniments, especially on the piano. I am not sure that I would be doing what I am now without her tremendous influence. Subsequently, when I was about nine or ten years old, at a summer church music conference with a group from my church, I heard the late Paul Oakley play services. Though sadly deceased, in the later years of his career he became known more as a choral conductor than an organist. Yet I would bet that not a few readers of The Diapason will share my recollection of his tremendously creative hymn improvisations and accompaniments. I wish I had a time machine to go back and listen to him again. 

All these influences, coupled with regular piano lessons yet only sporadic organ lessons until later in high school, led me to be brave and bold (. . . those poor listeners. . .) in improvising, mostly on hymns, at the organ and piano. My first-rate childhood piano teacher, Marian Gordon, even allowed me to improvise in her annual studio recitals. I believe all of this gave me a marvelous blend of inspiration and opportunities that shaped the musician I am today. How grateful I am to all these people and for all those experiences. By the time I got to college, I had not yet played a note of Dupré or Messiaen, something that seems now hard to fathom, but I had the good fortune to develop harmonic fluency and a willingness to extemporize. It has been eye-opening for me, in this series thus far, to learn more about when and how others began improvising. 

Discussion

Back to Jason Roberts. Jason is particularly gifted at the imitation of specific composers, periods, and styles, and that is one of the facets of improvisation that I wished to explore with him. 

When, how, and why did you start playing by ear and inventing your own music? Did it coincide with your early music training?

I never took piano lessons as a child, but my parents were both pianists, so I was always around lots of music. Not surprisingly, I refused to take any kind of formal advice from my parents, preferring to figure out how to play the piano on my own. I remember learning my first hymn. I practiced “While shepherds watched their flocks by night” (Winchester Old) for about two weeks, laboriously figuring out each note. I would play by ear quite a lot, but I wouldn’t say I really improvised. That came later.

Did you employ improvisation in public over the course of your childhood? Did you improvise in church in some way?

My early church experience was in the garage behind our house, which I transformed into a “cathedral” complete with makeshift rood screen and high altar. My closest friend played the archbishop, wearing vestments created out of old sheets with the proper liturgical colors, and I was the organist, playing an electronic keyboard. I would improvise enough to cover the “liturgical” action, but it really wasn’t anything to write home about.

Was there a watershed moment that inspired you to develop your skills seriously?

It’s odd that you, Robert, should be the one asking me about this, because you are the person who introduced me to the world of improvisation. When I was a senior in high school in Macon, Georgia, you had just started your degree at Westminster Choir College. You would come home for the summers and call me up, and we would drive around town and play every organ to which we could get access. You would play recordings of Gerre Hancock and sometimes improvise for me. It was the first time I realized that some people made an art of improvisation, and I thought it was fascinating and wonderful. 

To the extent that you improvised as a child, did you understand the music theory behind what you were doing, or did that understanding catch up later?

I think for me the theory came first. I’m not always so intuitive, so I would tend to get stuck if I didn’t know what was coming next. When I discovered musical forms, suddenly I could make a plan. It also allowed me to relate my improvisations to pieces that I knew. A hymn interlude could be organized like the development section of a sonata form, and there are thousands of models from which to draw inspiration. I learned ways to build musical tension and ways to extend a motive with sequences. When I discovered a new technique or form, I always was eager to find a way to use it and make it my own. 

Who were your principal teachers and influences in improvisation? How did you learn from them?

Bill Porter was a major influence on me. He encouraged his students to practice and perfect their improvisations. I know a lot of people think that this isn’t true improvisation, and maybe it isn’t. But I have found that when I practice a compositional technique enough, my speed can improve. I might have spent a week practicing my first fugue. Later, I could make one in a day, and now I can make one without any practice, provided the theme isn’t too complex!

McNeil Robinson was another great influence. I know it has been mentioned in these interviews already, but he taught improvisation and composition as one subject. I learned mostly by watching him work. He would take a theme and work out all its possibilities on paper. How could the theme be broken down? What were the most recognizable motives and their inversions? What were the implied harmonies? Then he would sit at the piano and try out what he had written, making phrases and sequences by recombining all the fragments. 

Even though I only met him once, I feel that I have learned a lot from Pierre Pincemaille. I know him primarily through his recordings, and I think I learn something every time I listen to him play. The same is true of Wolfgang Seifen. They are amazing musicians with so many wonderful ideas and the technique to turn their ideas into music.

You won first prize in the NCOI; to what extent has that influenced your career and your identity as an improviser? Have you entered other improvisation competitions?

The NCOI gave me an excuse to practice improvising, but it also made me think of improvisation as a legitimate pursuit—it was OK for me to spend my time on this. Later, having won the competition, I felt like it was all right for me to improvise in a concert or even just to improvise more in church. I might have been a little embarrassed to do this before. After all, it takes quite a lot of confidence to think that people want to sit and listen to music that I have just made up!

I entered the Haarlem Improvisation Competition once, and it was a great motivation for me to practice playing in more harmonically progressive styles. Often, competitors in Haarlem are given twelve-tone or free-atonal themes. It takes a completely different set of tools to extemporize a piece using such a theme.

When did you first improvise in a concert setting?

I think my first concert improvisation was a silent film accompaniment. It was a great start for me, because the film was really the center of attention. I was free to try out all sorts of things, and although some of them weren’t so successful, it was a good film and I think that covered my shortcomings!

Do you consider yourself to have your own distinct musical language? Is there anything distinctly “American” about your improvising?

I have two thoughts about this. First, even when trying to play in a historical style, a musician can’t help sounding unique. We all have our own voices, whether we like it or not. Second, I think it’s extremely rare to have a truly new musical style. If I improvise a twelve-tone piece, that has been done before. If I play in the style of Mendelssohn, that has also been done before. 

The question of style seems like it is more easily answered if one is a part of a school of playing. Pierre Pincemaille, one of my favorite improvisers, sounds a lot like Pierre Cochereau. But rather than saying that he was an imitator of Cochereau, we might say that they are both part of the French school of improvisation.

I don’t hear the same level of consistency among American improvisers. Some are influenced by jazz, but many are not. Some are more harmonically conservative, but others are not. So, I would say that there isn’t an American school of improvisation. This isn’t a criticism—it can be good that we’re not expected to sound a certain way. But it can also lead us to expect ourselves to come up with a completely new and unique style, which is extremely difficult. As for me, I don’t intentionally try to sound unique.

How does the creative process differ when you are imitating a historical style or particular composer? Is it a different process altogether, or a different side of the same coin?

All music has a style, whether it is one that has been around for a long time or not. I like music that is consistent, so I try to set limitations, regardless of the style in which I am playing.

What’s your procedure for practicing improvisation in historical styles?

My goal is usually to find out what compositional technique is generating the music and isolate it. This can be done in terms of harmony, texture, or form. I keep a list of harmonies, textures, and forms that I like to use in any given style. I will practice them on their own, and then will mix them. For example, I might make a piece using a sequence I like, and not be concerned with anything else. Then I might use the same sequence with several textures I like, often imitating pieces. (Can I play something that sounds like Louis Vierne’s Naïades using a circle of fifths sequence?) Finally, I’ll try to make a piece using my chosen sequence and texture in song form, or another form I have chosen. So, in the end I’m practicing three things at once. Sometimes these exercises sound a little dry, but often they yield good ideas.

What is your favorite sort of improvisation, either a form, or environment in which to improvise, or both?

I like liturgical improvisation. Probably my best improvisations are postludes, since after the service is over I don’t have to be worried about cadencing when the priest is ready to begin!

How does improvisation differ from composing to you? Do you prefer one or the other?

I like to compose at the keyboard, and I try to envision an entire piece before I work out the details and begin to write. This involves improvising until I settle on ideas that I want to include. I think the main difference between a composed piece and an improvisation is that the composition has to stand up to repeated hearings. Improvisations are heard just once, and music that might be perfect for a specific moment in time can sound dull or even ridiculous when it is recreated later. Composing gives me a chance to take an improvisation and improve its structure, its counterpoint, or its melodic appeal, so that it isn’t painful to hear repeatedly. Of course, notating music takes a very long time, so it’s probably more fun to stick with improvisation. 

How does your voice differ when composing versus improvising? Do you try to make it more “unique,” for better or worse?

As mentioned above, it seems that truly new musical styles are extremely rare, and they are usually not received well. We know that Stravinsky and Monteverdi wrote masterpieces that many people at the time did not even consider to be music. But there are also lots of composers who achieve a unique sound by mixing ideas from other musicians. I think Herbert Howells has a unique sound, but it’s not because he is doing anything new; instead, he is combining the modality of Vaughan Williams with some jazz harmony and maybe some impressionism. He does this masterfully, and the mixture is wonderful and decisively unique. 

I have never invented anything truly new. I think that my most successful compositions have been novel mixtures of things. I once wrote a piece with the same form as Mozart’s Fantasia, K. 608, which has a bold introductory motive and two fugues with a set of variations in the middle. My piece was in a Gershwin-esque style, and it came out sounding unique because I don’t think Gershwin would have considered writing a densely packed organ piece full of counterpoint! So, to answer your question, in both my improvisations and compositions I will look for undiscovered combinations of musical textures and forms, but the musical language for these styles is not my invention at all.

Reflection

I am grateful to Jason for terrific food for thought in all his responses. Perhaps the keenest insight I have gained from him is his helpful and clear distinction between “new” and “unique” musical styles. I would have to agree that a totally new musical language is a very rare thing indeed. I also note that both Jason and Matthew Glandorf said something similar about seeking a unique musical voice: Matthew said that he believes that “having a distinctive voice as an improviser happens by accident, so I try not to fuss too much about that.” Jason said that “[expectations of an American style] can also lead us to expect ourselves to come up with a completely new and unique style, which is extremely difficult. As for me, I don’t intentionally try to sound unique.”

I think I can safely say that I have never come up with a groundbreaking, new, musical language, myself! I have realized, however, more than ever, that I do aim to sound distinctive. Matthew Glandorf is probably correct that it would happen regardless, whether intentionally or not. Yet perhaps I have a previously undervalued fear of sounding only like a cheap imitation of some other composer or other improviser? I don’t mind at all if a listener hears a snatch of Howells there, or Vierne elsewhere; clear influences are inevitable, to be sure, in any composer or improviser’s music, as Jason also notes. (There have been occasions, however, when I have intentionally sought to pay homage to a particular composer by explicit imitation, yet those occasions are the exceptions to the rule.)

Something else that Jason wrote that will stick with me is, “Even when trying to play in a historical style, a musician can’t help sounding unique.” My assumption to date has been that if an improviser is attempting to imitate, say, Couperin, it should aim to be more or less indistinguishable from another improviser doing the same. Jason’s viewpoint is a new one for me, and I suspect it will bear fruit in my own endeavors. I shall ponder that, going forward!

Regarding whether or not there is a distinctive American school of improvisation, both Matthew Glandorf and Mary Beth Bennett (interviewed in the second article of this series) suggested that a blend or even melting pot of musical style might in itself be distinctly American, perhaps something of an American manner of improvising that happens by accident.

Yet, in the introduction to this series, I cited Gerre Hancock and McNeil Robinson as perhaps the foremost American improvisers of their generation. I wish that I could ask them some of these questions. In thinking both of their improvisations and written compositions, though they were very distinct from each other, each could be nothing else but American, to my mind and ears, with decided French influences of various sorts. 

Before closing, I would like to expand just a bit on the intersection of composing and improvising, a topic this series has begun to explore. Jason contrasts the two, saying, “. . . the main difference between a composed piece and an improvisation is that the composition has to stand up to repeated hearings. Improvisations are heard just once, and music that might be perfect for a specific moment in time can sound dull or even ridiculous when it is recreated later.” I believe there is a great deal of truth in this statement. I like to think that my own best improvisations might stand up to repeated hearings, but there have been more than a few I never wanted to hear again! (And like any performance, sometimes in listening back, the things I had thought might have been the best of the lot were in fact less so, and vice versa.) Some version of Jason’s assertion has been part of my response often when asked to transcribe my improvisations, that they were for a particular time and place. (The other part of the response is that I am too lazy to spend the time transcribing! Please forgive the shameless plug, but I recently relented and commissioned another trusted musician to transcribe three improvisations by request of Selah Publishing Co., which published them in June.)

At this juncture, I have just as many questions as possible answers to all these matters, and I am eager to continue to explore them as the series proceeds. Stay tuned!

At the Three Choirs Festival, Hereford Cathedral, England

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

The Three Choirs Festival celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2015. With a brief hiatus during each world war, this is the longest-running non-competitive classical music festival in the world. The festival is so named for the three cathedral choirs of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford. For more information, see Lorraine Brugh’s article on the 2018 festival at Hereford Cathedral in the February issue of The Diapason, pages 20–21. The festival included a recital by Olivier Latry on the cathedral organ.

This interview took place in the Hereford Cathedral gardens after Latry’s early morning practice time. His program for July 31, 2018, included: Prelude and Fugue in E-flat, BWV 552, Johann Sebastian Bach; Choral No. 2 in B Minor, César Franck; Clair de lune, Claude Debussy, transcribed Alexandre Cellier; Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, opus 7, number 3, Marcel Dupré; Postlude pour l’office des Complies, Jehan Alain; Evocation, Thierry Escaich; improvisation on a submitted theme.

Lorraine Brugh: I came in this morning to hear you practice a bit. It sounded wonderful. Is the organ tuned above 440?

Olivier Latry: Yes, a bit. It is always the case in summer when the temperature is high.

I am curious about your recital. Is this the first time you played at the Three Choirs Festival?

No, I was here fifteen years ago for the festival, so this is my second time. I have played recitals on all three of the cathedral organs, but only once before at the festival.

Your program tomorrow includes the Franck Choral in B Minor, a favorite of mine.

Yes, it works very well on this organ.

I’m curious about the Debussy transcription. How did that become an organ piece? It is your transcription?

The piece was originally transcribed for the organ by Alexandre Cellier, a contemporary of Debussy’s. In fact it was normal at that time, when a piece was composed, to make transcriptions of these new works to other instruments. It helped the publisher to sell more copies of the music. Many publishers did that. There are other Debussy pieces that were published that way. Vierne did the same thing with Rachmaninov. With transcriptions we often have to adjust the music. I don’t think it’s a problem to transcribe a transcription, since it was already on the way toward that.

I’d like to hear about Gaston Litaize as a teacher, and the way you have followed him in his footsteps.

Let me say first why I went to Litaize because it is important. I grew up in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in the north of France. I began to study the organ in 1974.

The year after, a new organ had just been built for the cathedral there, a very nice instrument by Schwenkedel in the German style. There were a lot of concerts there at that time.

We heard all the great organists. Pierre Cochereau came to play, Philippe Lefebvre, Litaize. Among them it was Litaize who impressed me the most. He had a way of playing the organ that was viril. (He looks up the word in a French dictionary.) In English it is virile, manly. (Latry makes a growl like a lion.)

I was so impressed because the organ sounded like I hadn’t heard it before. We knew that the organ wasn’t the master, he was the master. He played his own music, Franck on this German instrument, the Prelude and Fugue in D Major by Bach, and Clérambault. It was really great. Then I decided I wanted to study with that man at the Academy of Saint-Maur. He was very nervous, much like his playing in fact. Never relaxing, always speaking with a very big voice as well. He was impressive.

For my first lesson at the Academy of Saint-Maur, I was 16 and went on the train with my parents. He was not there that day. He had me play for his assistant. Then the next day he called me and said gruffly, “I heard that you are very good. We will meet next week, and you can play for me.”

So I went there, and he asked me to prepare the first movement of the [Bach] first trio sonata. I said OK, but I thought it wasn’t enough. He didn’t know anything about me so I prepared the whole trio, and then I also played the Bach B-minor Prelude and Fugue.

He first gave me a musicianship test, to see what I could hear, what kinds of chords he played. It wasn’t a problem to do that, it was almost like a game! Then, during the Bach, he made me play an articulation I didn’t like. I didn’t know what to say. I wondered if I should say I don’t like that, or just say yes. I said, “I don’t really like that. Would it be possible to do something else?” He said gruffly, “Ah, very good! Yes, of course, you can do that.” He was so happy because I had my own way.

That was taking a risk.

Of course, especially since it was the first time I played for him. From that day, really, it was very nice, because Litaize could teach his students at different levels. For those who didn’t know anything or have their own musical personality, he would say, “No, do it like this . . . that,” making everything very precise. When someone had enough of their own ideas, then he said they could do it on their own, which was very good. In some ways he taught me many things.

I remember some very nice teaching on the Franck Second Choral. It was just wonderful. The French Classical literature was also very nice. Then we became closer. The second year I went to Paris. I lived with a friend of Litaize who had an organ in his home. Litaize didn’t want to go back home during his two days of teaching in Paris, so he also stayed in that home. He spent all evening speaking about music, listening to music, which for me was very nice. I heard a lot of stories from the 1930s; it was great, great, great. He was also very nice to all of his students. He arranged concerts for his students, and he set up invitations for us to play recitals. The first concert I gave in Holland was because of him. He just gave my name, and that was it. The same thing happened in Germany, and that was very funny.

He said he had accepted an invitation to play in the cathedral in Regensburg, but he didn’t want to go there. He said to me, “Here is my program. You practice my program, and three weeks before the concert I will tell the people that I am ill and I can’t go there. Then I will give your name, and you will play it.”

Can we talk about Notre-Dame? You became one of the titulars early in your life. Can you speak about how the position is for you?

It’s just the center of my life (laughs) although I am not there very often. The three of us titular organists rotate, playing once every three weeks.

I see that you are on to play this weekend.

Yes. We make the schedule at least three or four years in advance; we are currently scheduled until 2022, so we know when we are free. If we need to be away, it is no problem to switch with a colleague.

Notre-Dame is the center of my life for several reasons. First, as you said, I began there early in my life, and it was quite unexpected.

Wasn’t it a competition for that position?

No, there was not a competition for that position. When Cochereau died, Jean-Jacques Grunenwald at St. Sulpice died almost a half year before Cochereau, so that meant that both big instruments had a vacancy for the titular organist at about the same time.

Cardinal Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris, made a rule for hiring the organists for the entire Archdiocese of Paris. We young organists all competed for that, to create a list for the Archdiocese of Paris. This is what the competition was for. I just applied, and was thinking, because I was the second assistant to François-Henri Houbart at La Madeleine, that perhaps there might be another opening there. I played some of the Masses there, and I thought François might move to Notre-Dame. He was one of the best organists in Paris. He first applied and then pulled out. He felt it was better for him to stay at La Madeleine than to be one of four organists at Notre-Dame.

In fact, I didn’t know that, but I suspected that many of the finest organists would apply for Notre-Dame, and that would create vacancies in other parishes. But a few weeks before the competition, I just got a letter saying I was chosen for the competition for Notre-Dame. I was surprised and wondered why. I think it was because I had already been a finalist twice for the Chartres competition, so I was already known by some of the organ world. In addition there was a scandal related to the second competition. In fact I was more known for not winning the prize than had I won the prize. Many people as well as the newspapers were on my side. They all reported that I didn’t win the prize, so everyone was talking about it.

That’s a good way to get famous if it works.

In fact, it was normal, well, not normal, but at least it happened many times in those years that competitions were contested. The Rostropovich competition, the Besançon conductors’ competition, which happened at exactly the same time, also the Chopin Competition, where Martha Argerich left the jury, because Ivo Pogorelich was kicked out.

Was it politics?

We never know. I was also known by the clergy because I was teaching at the Catholic Institute of Paris, so that’s probably why I went on the list for Notre-Dame.

I was so sure that I would not be chosen that I was totally relaxed. I just played. I almost never improvised at that time. The first time I improvised three hours in a row in my life was at Notre-Dame for the rehearsal for the competition. It was very funny. And it worked!

Evidently! That’s a good way to enter something, though, when you don’t think you have a chance.

It was not difficult afterwards, because I was ready technically, but I was only twenty-three. I had a lot of repertoire, but I wasn’t fully mature. With Litaize I played at least thirty to forty minutes of new music every week. I just wanted to spend my time learning repertoire.

Did he require that?

No, I just wanted to spend my time learning repertoire. I could learn pretty fast. It is how I was trained. If you are trained to learn fast, you can learn even faster. I remember, once on a Monday I started the Diptyque by Messiaen, and I spent nine hours that day, and I played it the next day for a lesson. I couldn’t do that now.

Do you think you have some unusual kind of memory or is that just how you were trained?

It is my training. I don’t have a photographic memory; that is actually my weakest kind of memory. Even so, visual memory would be the last kind I would use. When I see someone just use their visual memory it makes me nervous. I would use more tactile memory.

We call that muscle memory.

The best is always intellectual memory. I’ll come back to that.

When I began at Notre-Dame it was difficult because I was not ready for that kind of exposure to the public. When I played a concert before, perhaps forty a year or so, I had between eighty and two hundred people at a concert. Then, from one day to the next, it was never less than two hundred, and usually more. And why? I don’t play better or worse than yesterday, so why is it like this now? That is the first point.

The second point is that I discovered that people can be very tough. Many critics I had for a recording I made early attacked me for no reason. Just because I was there at Notre-Dame, I was the target. That was really difficult for the first two years, and then afterwards I was OK, I just said, ‘let’s go.’ Before that I was on my way to resigning. Some friends had said to me if I didn’t feel comfortable there, if I needed to protect myself more, perhaps I shouldn’t stay there. These were not organists who wanted to be there, they were just friends. Then I realized that I am an organist at Notre-Dame. I can’t leave it now. So I just changed my mind, and that was that. It was very hard.

Can we talk about your teaching and how much you do at the Conservatoire?

In fact, I started at Rheims, and then Saint Maur where I succeeded Litaize, and remained there for five years. Then I was approached by the Conservatoire in 1995. It was very funny because before that, I was assistant to Michel Chapuis. When he was retiring, the director of the Conservatoire asked if I would like to be one of the teachers. He wanted to divide the organ class in three different ways. One teacher would teach ancient music, i.e., the music up to Bach; another would teach Bach and after, including contemporary music; the third position would be for improvisation. He wanted me to be the teacher for Bach and contemporary music.

I said I wasn’t sure I wanted something like this because I like to teach every style of music. I don’t think it’s good to have some sort of specialization like that. One really needs to have a general approach to literature. He said that it was my choice, but think about it, and that if I didn’t want to do that, it was my decision. I was quite depressed about this and called my good friend Michel Bouvard. I said I had to tell him something, I was just asked to teach at the Conservatoire de Paris, and he let me speak.

Bouvard told me that he agreed with my approach not to specialize, and he said what he liked in music is what is common in all music. He let me speak for ten minutes, and then he said that the director had called him also. I didn’t know that! He wanted him to teach the early music part, and he would refuse because he didn’t want to do that. So we both refused. Then, finally, we decided to have an organ class with two teachers teaching all the literature.

The students can go to either teacher. It’s very nice, because it’s a different approach for the students. It is sometimes difficult for them, because Bouvard and I are never in agreement about interpretation. Often we have a student for one year, and then we switch, but it can be less, sometimes months or even one lesson. In fact, when they have the same piece with both teachers it is very funny because I might say, “Why do you do it like this?” and “It’s not right, you should do it like this.” And the same goes for Bouvard. The student wonders what they should do. It can be disturbing for the student in the beginning because they have to find their way, their own way. The only time we ask them to do something really as we want is when we both agree. Then they better do that.

It is very effective because we are friends, and don’t always agree, but we never fight, even over these twenty-three years. It is also a good thing for the students to see that we can disagree about some things. It is also good for the general idea of the organ world. It is not that we are only critical of one another. In fact since we have made these changes at the Conservatoire, other areas, the oboes, for example, have started sharing students. The best would be when the pianists will share students, but, for that, we will probably have to wait another hundred years.

It is nice because Bouvard and I have the same goal with the music but we always take it in different ways. We have a lot of discussion; we write and call each other five or six times a week and discuss and argue about musical points. We have long discussions.

That’s nice for the students, too, that they can see you dealing with each other in mutual respect.

Yes, I agree. Especially in Paris, where there are so many instruments and that long tradition of fine organists, it is important for the students to see and hear as many of the Parisian organists as possible, to meet them, hear their improvisations, like Thierry Escaich, as I did when I was a student. I went to Notre-Dame, to Madeleine, to Trinité. We encourage them to do that, too. Beyond that, though, we set up some exchange for the students to perform concerts, or to be an organist-in-residence. We have an exchange at the castle in Versailles. Not bad, eh?

Not bad at all!

Each student will play once on their weekly concert there in the French Classic tradition. For that they have five hours of rehearsal on the castle organ. The castle is closed, and they have the keys to the castle in their pocket. Can you imagine having that as a student?

It’s like heaven!

Yes, I think that too. This is one of the things that we do. We also have an exchange with the concert hall in Sapporo, Japan. We send a student there every year. They do teaching, playing concerts in the concert hall.

We have an exchange with the Catholic Cathedral in New Orleans, Louisiana. We send a student there the first Sunday in Advent, and they are in residence until the Sunday after Easter. They are playing for the choir there, also for Masses.

So they’re there for Mardi Gras. That’s rather dangerous.

(Laughter)

The Conservatoire makes the arrangements for this, but it is our decision to have this kind of exchange. We could just give our lessons, and that would be it. That is all that is required. We feel that it is so important for the students that we want them to have these experiences.

We also have now at Versailles a student in residence for a year there, and also at Notre-Dame. They play for the choir and other things. It would be like an organ scholar in the UK. They might accompany the choir, work with singers, do improvisations in the Mass, maybe play for Mass on the choir organ, anything that the professional organist would do.

At the Conservatoire we are trying to expand the students’ repertoire for the master’s students. They have to play fifty minutes of ‘virtuoso’ music the first year. This is music of their choice and proof that they can handle that. Then they play twenty minutes of music on the German Baroque organ, twenty minutes on the historical Italian organ from 1702 at the Conservatoire, then twenty minutes of French Classic music on the Versailles organ, to see how they react to different repertoire. Then for the master’s degree program they can choose the organ they want to play in Paris. They could say they’d like to play Vierne, Alain, or Florentz at Notre-Dame, or Messiaen at La Trinité, or Franck Three Chorals at St. Clothilde, or a Mass by Couperin at St. Gervais, and we arrange that.

I studied a few lessons with Chapuis one summer in Paris.

One really needs the instruments to do that.

And the teacher. He was wonderful.

Yes, he was. I also had lessons with him, together with the musicologist, Jean Saint-Arroman. Jean is still alive, in his eighties. He wrote a dictionary for French Classical music from 1651 to 1789. It is really incredible because so much information is there. Each time we have a question we just call him. Even when I would have a fight with Mr. Bouvard, we could call him up, and he would settle it! We will have a great project on the music by Raison next term at the Conservatoire, with all the approaches (old fingerings, story, religious and political context, figured bass, etc.) ending with two concerts.

I know one of the things you are interested in is new music.

Well, yes and no. What I love is music that is expressive, that brings something in an emotional way. So it could be something different for each piece of music. For instance, music can be angry. I don’t play music for that only. (laughs) I think sharing those emotions is important. It is also sharing in a spiritual way. Being an artist and an organist, I think we have that privilege to connect the emotional and the spiritual more than other instruments, even more than a pianist.

I like contemporary music that touches me. I play a lot of this music. Sometimes I just play it once, some I hope to play many times. The French composers like Thierry Escaich and Jean-Louis Florentz are so emotional. I also play a lot of music for organ and orchestra. It is a way to connect the organ to the real world of music. Otherwise the organ is always a satellite, only found in a church.

Those concerti help more people to be connected to the organ. I played a new piece by Michael Gandolfi for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I performed a piece by Gerald Levinson at the 2006 dedication of a new organ in Philadelphia.

In Montreal, we first premiered a piece by Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer. This piece was also performed in London and in Los Angeles under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen. It is important to me to have that kind of relation with orchestras and other musicians. I will play the Third Concerto by Thierry Escaich in Dresden, and then in 2020, I will play the Pascal Dusapin Concerto.

What is your relationship to the Dresden Philharmonie?

I have a position in residence there for two years, ending in June 2019. This allows us to do things we would never do otherwise. We will play a concert with the brass ensemble, Phil Blech of the Vienna Philharmonic, and they play wonderfully. We will also perform the same concert at the Musikverein in Vienna. Concert halls are important because some people don’t want to go into a church. Hearing an organ concert in a concert hall shouldn’t be a problem. In Paris we fight a lot to have organs in the concert halls. I just did a recording of transcriptions on the new organ at the Paris Philharmonie. It is an incredible organ. The CD Voyages is now available.

What would you like to say to American organists? Most of the readers are practicing organists or organ enthusiasts.

It is difficult to know, but what I would say is just hope and try to do our best. We need to convince people that the organ can really add to our life in many ways. I don’t know how it is in the United States with the relation to the clergy, but it can be complicated. I would say, at Notre-Dame, I only play the organ. I don’t have anything to do with the administration, with anything about running the cathedral. The organ is high, far away from everything. We are there, and if we don’t want to see the clergy, we can do that. It is better, though, to have a closer relationship.

The musicians go for an aperitif with the clergy after the Sunday Masses and we are all together. It is rather funny, because we talk about little details, and we can banter back and forth. We have mutual respect for each other, which allows us an easy rapport. It is a sort of communion between the priest, the choir, and the musicians. We rarely play written literature during the ritual action in the service. We cannot make the priest wait for two minutes because our chorale isn’t finished.

You time the organ music to the liturgical action?

Yes, so, for that, we usually improvise, and it is much better. We can improvise in the style of what we heard, in imitation of a motet by the choir, or the sermon. Sometimes the clergy react to what we do. After a prelude or a sermon, the priest might say he heard something from the organ and responds in the moment.

So the priests assume there is a dialogue going on with the music?

Yes, of course. It works both ways. It is not possible to do something against one another. We can do everything. The music isn’t something to just make people quiet; it can make them cry or be angry. Usually after the sermon we do something soft, on the Voix céleste or something similar. However it is not a problem to improvise for two minutes on the full organ, even clusters, if it is a response to what the priest said. We have never heard a priest comment that it is too loud. This can only happen with a kind of relationship that allows everything to be open for discussion.

We have an organ that has a lot of possibilities. We have to exploit all those possibilities rather than follow a prescribed response just because it’s the middle of the Mass. The context is not always the same. It is our job to create the atmosphere for the service.

One of my favorite times is the introit for the 10 a.m. Gregorian Mass. 11:30 is the polyphonic Mass, which is especially for tourists, and the evening Mass is the cardinal Mass, most like a parish Mass. Notre Dame is not a parish, but that is when the local people come. From the introit of the first Mass we have Gregorian texts and their interpretations. I read the texts before the improvisation. The texts will be the source for a ten-minute improvisation. It is like a symphonic poem. We can bring people to the subject of the day.

Let’s talk about memorization, because it is so important how to learn to learn. We try to do this with memorization, especially at the Conservatoire, because people are scared. We say that a memory slip is like playing a wrong note. Don’t be scared if you get lost. If you know how to come back to the music and learn the technique to do so, you won’t have a problem. It is also a question of confidence. If you are confident, there is no problem.

It is like riding a bike. One must know first how to memorize the technical way. For me the best way to memorize is to have all the connections together. Memorization is like a wall. When you see a wall, one sees that the stones are never the same size. In fact, the actual musical notes are one level of the stones. Another level is the harmony, another is the fingerings, and then the movements, the music. All combined makes the big wall. Then, if there is one step missing you are still OK. If you have too many holes, then the wall falls down. So it is important to be sure that everything is in place.

One must know what is the fingering there, without moving the fingers. Be able to copy the music down like it is in the score, to make sure it is the same as the score. What I do for the students, because they are so scared, is I say “stop” while they are playing. I ask if they know where they are, and ask them to pick up the music two bars later.

Then, finally I’d like to finish by talking about memorization with Litaize. We attended each other’s lessons with him because we were all friends. He didn’t require it but we wanted to. We were there at the same time. I listened to the lessons, and it was very nice. When he wanted to make an example to people, he could play, at the right tempo, the place in the music he wanted to demonstrate. It was like he had a film of the music going on in his mind, and he could play anywhere he wished. I do that with the students, and it is so effective. It is even better with a trio sonata. I ask the student to play, and then I turn one manual off and have them continue. This teaches them that they can go anywhere.

They have learned the music deeply.

Yes. Once you have the music in your head, then it is easy to practice all the time. You don’t need an organ to practice. Of course, you have to learn the notes on a piano or organ. Once it’s in your head you can practice while you’re walking, in the shower, sleeping. One can practice twenty-four hours a day.

It’s time we bring this to a close, and I think our readers will be interested in hearing what you have said today. I appreciate the time you have taken today to meet me the day before your recital. I look forward to hearing your recital tomorrow. Best wishes.

Thank you very much.

Editor’s note: On Monday, April 15, the world watched as Notre-Dame Cathedral of Paris suffered a catastrophic fire that has damaged much of the historic building. Some of the edifice and its pipe organs have survived in a state that continues to be assessed for eventual restoration.

Mr. Latry recorded a compact disc on the cathedral organ in January, the last CD recorded before the fire. Released by La Dolce Vita, Bach to the Future features the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. For information, readers may visit: www.ladolcevita.com. The disc is also available from www.amazon.com, and other resources.

Various news media sources of the world have reported that numerous donations have been made already to rebuild the cathedral. However, Mr. Latry has pointed out that a very different and very real problem exists as the 67 employees of the cathedral are now without an income. Those who wish to make a contribution to the rebuilding of the cathedral and to assist those who work at the cathedral may visit: https://www.notredamedeparis.fr/participate-in-the-reconstruction-of-th…

Photo caption: Olivier Latry and Lorraine Brugh (photo credit: Gary Brugh)

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

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

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

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

And you are also on faculty there?

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

How long have you been playing the carillon?

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

Were you aware of the carillon during your childhood?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell you what it wants to play?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you tell me more about what that means?

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

What else inspires you in your writing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

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

To continue telling the stories that people need to share.

Yes, exactly.

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

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

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

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra’s website: pamelaruiterfeenstra.com

Thinking about Gene Roan

This month I share thoughts about my teacher Gene Roan, as the ninetieth anniversary of his birth took place recently. He was born June 8, 1931, and died in 2006 at the age of 75. This recent birthday, significant yet also sad, has led me to think about him quite a lot. On June 8, I posted a lengthy commemoration of Gene on Facebook, recounting some of my interactions with him and reflections on what he meant to me. This was met with a gratifyingly large amount of favorable comment, with many colleagues and friends chipping in with some of their own memories. It was this experience that led me to feel that I should not miss the opportunity to commemorate Gene here. I studied with him formally off and on from the fall of 1974 through 1986. Gene and I remained colleagues in and around Westminster Choir College and close friends until his death on September 21, 2006, after a long illness.

I wrote a column about my other principal organ teacher, Paul Jordan, on the occasion of his death in early 2015. I had been studying with Paul, formally and informally, in New Haven, where I grew up and he worked, for several years when in the summer of 1974 I faced the prospect of going off to college at
Princeton. That was all very well, but working with Paul was so compelling that I was distraught about having to make any sort of change. As I recall, I initially assumed that I would continue to study with him, taking lessons when I was home, and maybe keeping in touch by phone. However, he made plans to leave New Haven that summer, taking a faculty job at the State University of New York at Binghamton, so I asked him to recommend a teacher in Princeton. Paul phoned his friend, the renowned choral conductor and teacher Helen Kemp, who was on the Westminster faculty at the time. He described what I was like as a student and what I might be looking for, and she remarked, “Well, I think Gene Roan is interested in Baroque music.” And thus, very casually, the whole rest of the course of my professional life was set.

I was pretty shy as a seventeen-year-old, so it took me a few weeks to call Professor Roan, even though I was very eager to resume organ lessons. (I also arrived at Princeton with a very nice letter of introduction to William Scheide from a mutual friend. I was too shy to follow up on that, which I have always regretted.) Roan and I arranged to meet at the console of the organ in the Princeton University Chapel. When we had both arrived we talked for a few minutes and then repaired to a small diner a few blocks away to continue chatting over tea. I felt comfortable with him right away. But I also had a concern; he had not asked to hear me play. Did this mean that he had already decided against taking me as a student? I could not imagine that an experienced, august teacher would agree to start working with a student without experiencing their playing. I had assumed that this event was in part going to be an audition. But none of this was true, and we made an appointment for our first actual lesson shortly thereafter. I was left a bit nervous that perhaps when he heard me play some doubt would creep in.

In fact, Gene had taught me his first lesson: how a prospective student already plays is the least important matter about that student. What matters is that they have decided that they want to study. By the time I started teaching regularly around 1985, I had really absorbed that idea. As far as I can remember I have never specifically asked anyone who inquired about lessons to play for me before agreeing to take them on as a student. I am pretty sure I have never declined to take someone on for any reason. If I did it would be because I suspected that they did not really want to be there, but normally it is up to the student to make that judgment.

Sometime soon into our work together, probably at that first real lesson, Gene explained to me that he never expected a student to play a piece the same way that he did. That fit in nicely with my own temperamental approach. I was very stubborn about doing things the way that I wanted to, and my mind was pretty closed to ideas about interpretation that I had not somehow already absorbed by then. (In the aforementioned Facebook post I wrote: “I am at this point the most open-minded person I know of as to artistic matters—maybe to a fault, in some people’s eyes—but when I was seventeen and had only been playing organ for a couple of years I was pretty sure that I knew how things should be done.”)

Everything that I “knew” about “how things should be done” I had gotten from somewhere, largely from Paul Jordan and the approach that he taught, and also from various non-organ musical influences. There is an interesting paradox involved in wanting to do things my way as a kind of declaration of independence when “my” way has been absorbed entirely from others. These kinds of conflicts are probably universal and inevitable, especially early in life. Maybe they are not really conflicts: just the stuff of which our various approaches are made. At first I greeted Gene’s disavowal of any intention of directing me to play a certain way with relief, because I did not want my existing notions to be challenged or changed. What he taught me over many years, starting with that declaration at our first lesson, was open-mindedness itself. And in doing so he opened me up to radical changes in my own playing, all of which came about organically. I was never at a stage where I was doing something just because someone else was requiring me to do it when I found it unconvincing. If you who are reading this today have read this column over the years, you know how much this approach of Gene’s has influenced my own teaching and thinking about teaching.

I have wondered whether one of his reasons for not expecting his students to play the way he did was that he needed for his own way of doing things to be flexible and subject to change. If you lock in an interpretive stance by convincing your students that it is right and necessary, then what happens when you evolve away from that stance? Nothing happens exactly, as a practical matter, but it seems like kind of an awkward state of affairs. I know that Gene was always a bit worried, in “one off” teaching situations like workshops, that the ideas presented might come across to the students as too cut and dried, too clearly “true” when they were really just part of a long thought process. When he taught workshops, as he did a lot over many years, he was careful to present his teaching in a way that avoided this as much as possible.

I know that Gene’s overriding concern in teaching was to give each student what that student specifically needed. As I evolved towards being more open to interpretive approaches other than those I had absorbed from almost the cradle, we had many talks in which I thanked him for his flexibility and non-dogmatic approach. And while he certainly did not remotely disavow that approach, he also took pains to remind me that there are all sorts of different approaches that might be needed for different students. In my case he never directly criticized ideas that I brought to lessons, even ones that I later figured out he thought were flawed, limited, or with which he disagreed. Constantly over many years he pointed me toward all sorts of other manners of hearing things and thinking about music—not so much to get me to adopt any of them as to get me to be open to various interpretations. There are students who perhaps need to be guided a bit more directly. There are also students who think that they need to be guided more directly but who really do not. There are students who learn most from the teacher, and there are students who learn most from other students. There are students who learn by listening, others who learn through analysis, and still others through just trying things. Gene probably thought more consciously and conscientiously about respecting these different needs than anyone else I have known.

Gene Roan was a very fine and accomplished player. During the years that we were both in Princeton he did not give many full-length organ recitals there. I believe that I heard him in such a recital only twice. The first of those was on the Casavant organ at Westminster in the same fall when he and I first met: a recital that included the Bach Fugue in G Minor, BWV 578. I had only ever heard that piece as light, clear, and relaxed—though with building intensity. (This was, to be honest, because I had only listened to the Walcha recording, and maybe tried to play it myself.) Gene played it fast and loud—magnificent, but also shocking to me. I remember that I asked him about it afterwards. I took it for granted that he knew that his way of playing it was kind of “out there” (though as far as I have any reason to believe now, it wasn’t!). He said that this was what he did with the piece when he wanted to shock people. I think that he was partly indulging my limited perspective on the piece by putting it that way, though it was likely also true.

Gene was a great admirer of Mendelssohn’s organ repertoire. We had several fascinating lessons on a couple of the sonatas and maybe a prelude and fugue or two, though I never did much with those pieces in performance myself. In a way that seemed to arise directly out of his love for and affinity with those works, as he was easily the finest Mendelssohn performer that I have ever heard. I heard more suppleness, expressivity, singing quality, and general sense that something consequential was going on with his playing of Mendelssohn than I have heard before or since. He was also especially interested in Reincken, and his analysis of the massive fantasia on An Wasserflüssen Babylon over the course of a couple of lessons was my introduction to the rhetoric of pre-Bach form.

Like many organists, Gene was interested in and focused on sonority. He knew a lot about organ design, both its history and how it works or can work in practice. He had an extraordinary ability to remember specific organ stops. He once told me that if he heard a particular Doppelflöte stop (just an example, but a favorite of his), he would recognize that specific stop forever, should he hear it again. I think that this in part led him to focus more on actual sound than on stop names. He used to delight in telling students that on one old electronic organ, the best-sounding diapason was the stop labeled French Horn. Not that this approach was unique to him or is unique to those who were his students, but it was eye-opening and influential to me and I believe to many others.

He also taught me a lot about the relationship between sonority and interpretation. In a column from 2008 I wrote in these terms about one salient example of that:

In the spring of 1979 I was studying . . . with Prof. Eugene Roan. . . . I played one of the Well-Tempered Clavier fugues for him on my new harpsichord, and he commented that he couldn’t hear a certain motif when it came in in the top voice. I think that I said something about harpsichord voicing, or acoustics, but he suggested that I simply make the theme a bit more detached, and he demonstrated that it could indeed be heard better that way. He floated the idea that the sound of the instrument was telling me something about how to play the piece. At the time I was very committed to the notion that this theme should be articulated a certain way, and that it should be played exactly that way every time that it came in. I didn’t want the instrument to try to force me to depart from my plan. However, that moment was the beginning of my considering the idea that interpretation could be, in effect, a collaboration between analytically derived ideas and acoustic- or instrument-derived sonic realities, and that neither side of that picture should be ignored.

When Professor Roan became head of the organ department at Westminster in 1995 he invited me to join the faculty as an adjunct, initially to teach harpsichord, but soon after also to teach organ and segments of various classes. He retired in 2000, and I left at the same time. These years were extraordinary. He was an extremely supportive “boss”—quotation marks meant to convey, of course, that he did not really feel or behave like a boss, but rather a very supportive colleague with lots of resources to make good things happen. I brought a lot of harpsichords to the campus, and there were a lot of organs there in those days. We had non-stop informal interaction among students and faculty over all sorts of instruments and repertoire. (This interaction was so fruitful and real that I sometimes cannot remember for sure whether a student whom I knew then actually took lessons from me or not.) I was given a lot of freedom to do whatever I thought was right with my students, guided by the notion that this is never the same from one student to another. I had students who didn’t play Bach over a whole year, or nothing but Bach, or who worked on only one piece for a whole semester or even a whole year, or who, for a while at least, just dabbled in many pieces in a row without really learning any; students who played in class every week, and students who did so very rarely: whatever was going to work psychologically and pedagogically to help that student get the most out of the experience. I would tend to run unconventional things by Gene expressly, and he would make sure that I could articulate what I was going for. There was never any top-down decision making.

As I mentioned above, we were good friends for about thirty-two years. He was a presence around Princeton and Westminster for over fifty years, and there are countless people there and spread out through the world who remember him vividly and miss him as I do.

Leonard Eugene Roan, Jr., was born June 8, 1931, in Albany, Georgia, and died September 21, 2006, in Princeton, New Jersey.

Robert McCormick is the organist and choirmaster of Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont, Pennsylvania. Previously he held similar positions at Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia, Saint Paul’s Church, K Street, in Washington, D.C., and at Saint Mary the Virgin, New York City. He is represented in North America exclusively by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists, LLC.

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this series (Matthew Glandorf) may be found in the May 2022 issue, pages 20–21; Part 2 (Mary Beth Bennett) in the September 2022 issue, pages 12–13; Part 3 (Jason Roberts) in the July 2023 issue, pages 16–17; and Part 4 (Dorothy Papadakos) in the December 2023 issue, pages 12–14.

Introduction

For this article, the fifth in a series on improvisation featuring interviews with American improvisers, we turn to Patrick Scott. Patrick won first prize and audience prize in the American Guild of Organists National Competition in Organ Improvisation (NCOI) in 2014 and is a member of The Diapason’s 20 under 30 class of 2016. Following numerous other distinguished positions, he presently serves as director of music and organist at Grace-St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Memphis, Tennessee.

Very early in the summer of 2023 I stumbled upon one of Patrick’s improvisation recordings. I was struck by a compelling balance of creativity, originality, and organization. His structure was abundantly clear. A few weeks later, I saw Patrick at the national conference of the Association of Anglican Musicians in Dallas, Texas, and told him how much and why I had enjoyed his recording. “That was all Gerre [Hancock],” he said, ascribing the structure in his improvisation to his legendary teacher at the University of Texas. I wasn’t surprised, knowing that Hancock was a masterful pedagogue and having had one terrific, lengthy lesson with him myself many years ago. Patrick was among his last students, and I was delighted when he agreed to participate in this series.

As Patrick describes in greater detail below, like many who are fluent improvisers, he began playing by ear before learning to read music. While it may not be a universal theme, this is a pattern among many who are comfortable and enjoy improvising. The marvelous Dutch organist-improviser Sietze de Vries discusses this in his online course in improvisation, which may be found on his YouTube channel. He encourages all musicians to improvise, strongly endorses its development in children, and likens learning how to improvise as adults to learning a second language. Like all analogies, I am sure it is only true to a certain extent, but it is a compelling idea: if introduced in childhood, it is much easier than “taking the plunge” in adulthood. (Nonetheless, I, too, strongly wish to encourage everyone and anyone to improvise!)

Discussion

When, how, and why did you start playing by ear and inventing your own music? Did it coincide with your early music training?

I grew up in a small town in southern Mississippi, where we attended what was a large church for our town, with a forty-one-rank Möller organ. The organist there, Betty Polk, had a degree in organ and had complete facility at the instrument; she became my organ teacher throughout high school. I remember being about four years old when she used full organ for the final verse of one of the hymns we were singing. It was one of the most thrilling things I’d ever experienced. I remember going home and trying to pick out the melody on our piano (as well as a four-year-old could). My older brother was already taking lessons, so we were fortunate to have a piano in our home.

I continued doing this for a few weeks until my parents decided to contact my brother’s piano teacher. She said she usually didn’t take students as young as I was, but my mother explained to her that I was playing things by ear at home, and they just weren’t sure how best to nurture that. She asked my parents to bring me to one of my brother’s lessons. I played a hymn for her, probably “What a friend we have in Jesus,” including a very simplified left-hand accompaniment. Ms. Jacobs, the teacher, said that she would take me!

A few months later, I was playing one of my short pieces for the week when Ms. Jacobs realized that while I was playing the piece accurately, it was in the wrong key. We realized that my brother had been playing my pieces for me, after which I memorized them and played them back by ear. So, we had to take a couple of steps back, but I did finally learn to read music. Over my early years, my parents and my teachers were always encouraging my playing by ear. My teachers at each lesson would ask what I had come up with the week prior.

In my home church, all the service music was based on hymns: preludes, postludes, and offertories. So that’s how I modeled the different pieces that I would make up. A little introduction of some sort, a full statement of the melody either on a solo stop or with chords like a hymn, sometimes an interlude, often a key change, and some sort of ending—sometimes a simplified coda, and probably most times, full-blown Hollywood!

How did you employ improvisation in public over the course of your childhood?

My home church was always very open to having people of all ages participate in various ways of making music. In addition to its usual Sunday morning services, there was always a Sunday evening service. In months with five Sundays, we would have an old fashioned “Fifth Sunday Sing.” Surely it was a chance for clergy and musicians to take a break from their weekly task of having to create yet another service, and often it would just simply turn into a talent show.

I was probably five years old the first time I ever played anything; I’m sure it was very basic, but it allowed me to play in public and began to foster what would become a life-calling of being involved with church music. Over the years I would play more and more, beginning to accompany morning and evening services as I got older and more capable. I would learn pieces to play, but most often the preludes or postludes would be things that I would create myself.

Even on Sundays when I wasn’t scheduled to play, our church organist would stop me and ask if I wanted to play the prelude that day. “I don’t have anything prepared,” I would say, and every single time Ms. Betty would look at me and with a glimmer in her eye, say simply, “just make it up!” It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized this was really improvising.

As a child, to the extent that you improvised, did you understand the music theory behind what you were doing, or did that understanding catch up later?

I studied music theory with my teachers, but I really don’t think I took any of this into account while I was playing. I just played what sounded good to my ears. And if it didn’t sound good, I’d make up something else that did.

Was there a watershed moment that inspired you to develop your skills seriously?

Yes! I’ll never forget it! I had become pretty good at this “making up” stuff throughout college. I could create a hymn prelude in almost any style and key and was able to mold it to fit whatever part of the service it needed to be close to.

When I got to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, all students were required to study improvisation with Gerre Hancock. I was so excited, but Gerre wasn’t teaching it until the spring semester, and this was the first semester of school. We had the famous French organist Pierre Pincemaille coming to play a recital and work with us in an improvisation masterclass. Gerre asked during the studio class earlier in the week who would like to improvise; immediately every student looked at the floor so as not to make eye contact. He called out a few students and then of course called my name.

I went up afterward and said, “Dr. Hancock, I’ve never studied improvisation before.” And in a way only Gerre Hancock could, he patted my shoulder, smiled, and said, “Oh, Patrico, it’s going to be wonderful!” It turned out he would be away that weekend playing his own recital, as would Judith Hancock, so I really was all on my own.

Then came the day of the masterclass and my turn to play. We had a student fluent in French who was translating for M. Pincemaille. He asked me what form I was planning to improvise in. My look of panic was clearly enough to give away that I had no idea what he was talking about. The translator turned back to him and said, “Free form.” I had prepared a short hymn prelude on SLANE: a brief introduction, the first verse on a solo stop, a modulation, the second verse with chords like a hymn, and finally a little coda after which I called it a day. I finished and M. Pincemaille started screaming with a very thick French accent, “No! No! No! You must always start and end in the same key!”

The horrific embarrassment was only allowed to last for a second as he made me start again. I began the same way, and by the time I got to the end of the first phrase of the hymn melody, he told me to change keys and repeat the first melody line again, and then change keys again, repeat the melody in some other way, over and over and over again. I felt like I had changed keys a million times at this point, and finally he told me to start finding my way back to the home key.

Of course, you probably wouldn’t want to actually modulate that often, but he was trying to break the mold that I had created for myself. It was at that moment that I realized that improvising was so much more than just playing a melody straight through—that embellishment, repetition, form, rhythm, and harmony played such important roles in improvising.

Who were your principal teachers and influences in improvisation? How did you learn from them?

I was very lucky to have been a student of Gerre Hancock while at the University of Texas at Austin. All students would work through Gerre’s textbook, Improvising: How to Master the Art. Through the book, Gerre taught strict form and counterpoint. In addition to carefully working through each chapter of his volume, there are two specific things I remember from lessons that I still think about today.

First, he would ask each student prior to playing what their plan was: what form or keys might be used, and specifically how long it would be. In class, these were just exercises, not long improvisations. So a student could say twenty measures or so. Gerre would then count each measure, counting to ten and then backward from ten.

Even in a short exercise, a student was expected to introduce whatever material was to be used, and then by the tenth measure begin finding a way to the end. It made us think about each measure and what we were doing, forcing us to stay in a structured time signature, not just wandering aimlessly around the keyboard without any organization. We had to build a scaffold for our musical creations, not just haphazardly playing things at random.

Second, Gerre was famous for saying, “There are no wrong notes,” and he meant that! Many times, while working through free improvisations, he would give us scenarios. “Walking through Paris gathering items for a picnic by the Eiffel Tower while car horns honk in the background. Riding an elevator up, it stops, and then it goes back down, maybe it goes quicker on the way down causing panic. Walking through a public space and seeing people you like and then people you don’t like, and one is walking a dog.” They were extremely random scenarios, but then he would allow us to create improvisations that created the scene for those scenarios. It allowed us to be as free as we could ever possibly imagine.

I perhaps learned most by just listening to Gerre play, both in person and through recordings. His harmonic progressions, clever ways of treating the theme, rhythmic excitement, and flawless registrations made me want to run out and improvise immediately.

I remember in graduate school having a small keyboard in my apartment and sitting on the floor listening to his recordings and playing chords repeatedly until I figured out exactly what he was doing. It’s not just playing one “crunchy chord,” it’s more about how it’s approached and what happens after that. Think of the famous chord in David Willcocks’s setting of the last verse of “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” It’s only effective because of the three chords leading up to it. The same is true when trying to figure out different chords in improvising; what happens before and after a great chord is often more important than the chord itself. Gerre’s brilliance always showed forth. But I think the first half of his recording Christmas Improvisations, recorded on the Taylor & Boody in the gallery of Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, presents his most incredible improvisations, offering the most unique and meticulous technique and style.

When did you first improvise in a concert setting?

I’m not sure I entirely remember, but what comes to mind was an improvisation on a submitted theme at the end of my master’s degree recital. It was not a requirement, but many of Gerre’s students would try their hand at this in degree recitals. Gerre would bring out a theme in a sealed envelope like so many did for him at the end of his recitals. The student would have to open the envelope with great suspense and then play through the tune.

I remember mine being the hymn tune HANOVER. Like most on-the-spot improvisations, I don’t remember much about it, but Gerre seemed pleased. I remember him mentioning that I had about three different endings and I could have perhaps wrapped it up sooner; I guess I was having too much fun!

You won first prize in the NCOI; to what extent has that influenced your career and your identity as an improviser? Have you entered other improvisation competitions?

The AGO’s NCOI competition is the only improvisation competition that I’ve been a part of. Preparing for it was quite daunting, but it pushed me to learn so many different styles and quite frankly return to the basics of being able to articulate what you’re planning to do in almost every measure.

I do feel like it was a turning point in my life as a musician, but especially an improviser. I always felt like I was never truly improvising, but just “making things up,” as I would always say. I felt like the word “improvise” was reserved for someone who knew everything they were doing at all times, through form and theory specifically, and I never felt like I had grasped that well enough. I’m not sure I still do today, to be completely honest, but preparing for and winning the competition allowed me to realize that I have put in a decent amount of study for all of this and could articulate what I was doing: specifically in regard to musical form, registration, theory, and so on.

Do you consider yourself to have your own distinct musical language? Is there anything distinctly “American” about your improvising?

I can’t say that I necessarily think of myself as having my own distinct musical language. I do love jazz, and there’s nothing more American than jazz, so hopefully there are some elements that can be heard in some of the harmony that I use. I’d like to think that my love for church music shines through more than anything else: I feel like my improvisations are more likely to sound like the hymn and psalm preludes of Howells, Brahms, Reger, Sowerby, Hancock, Willan, and Bach than the scherzos or huge toccatas of Vierne, Duruflé, and Tournemire. I love those works and composers, and I dabble in improvising in those styles sometimes when I sit down to play. I feel like the former is what’s most likely to come out of my fingers and feet.

Tell us more about imitating specific composers or periods: is it a different process altogether, or a different side of the same coin?

It’s always fun to imitate a composer or create something that sounds like it was composed during a specific period. A free improvisation or even a hymn prelude comes fairly easily to me, but it takes much more concentration to create something that specifically sounds like someone else. The Pachelbel partitas are always enjoyable to imitate and are actually a really solid way to practice improvising. It’s always fun to imitate the twentieth-century French improvisers like Tournemire or Langlais; just push tutti and come crashing down on dense French chords. I also love imitating French Classic composers like Nicolas de Grigny and François Couperin. It’s so satisfying to create a Tierce en taille, a Duo, a Récit de Cromorne, or Basse de Trompette. The counterpoint with these is often tricky and requires a good bit of practice, but it’s always worth it.

Do you compose much? How does improvisation differ from composing to you? Do you prefer one or the other?

I can’t say I compose very much. I wrote a book of hymn reharmonizations and descants published by Selah Publishing Company, and that’s about it. Because I don’t compose very often, it takes quite a bit of time to sit and write what’s going on in my head. I’d like to do more of it in the future. To me, improvising and composing are pretty much the same, because before I could compose anything, I’d have to play it first and figure it out. The problem comes when I can’t remember what I improvised the first time in order to write it down. I clearly prefer improvising to composing!

Conclusion

Patrick Scott’s humility came through when he wrote, “I felt like the word ‘improvise’ was reserved for someone who knew everything they were doing at all times, through form and theory specifically, and I never felt like I had grasped that well enough. I’m not sure I still do today, to be completely honest. . . .” While I (and anyone who hears him, surely) would say that Patrick is far more than worthy of being considered an extremely fine improviser, he does remind us of the adage, “The more one learns, the more one realizes what one doesn’t know.” I have learned a great deal from distinguished colleagues who have participated in this series thus far and look forward to learning even more as the series continues. Hearing their experiences, how they gained their skills, is at once informative and inspiring.

There are as many ways to improvise as there are to make music in general, yet most would agree that learning key skills in harmony, counterpoint, and form is essential to truly begin to unlock one’s potential. Along those lines, I recently shared on Facebook and Instagram a succession of posts on the above. I was pleasantly surprised that the first of them, especially, was shared very well beyond my own group of friends and followers. To follow what Patrick has said, and what he learned from the great Gerre Hancock, I conclude this article by incorporating some of my suggestions here, not necessarily in a particular order, except that the first six are under the banner of keyboard harmony and counterpoint, before moving on to form:

1. Be able to comfortably harmonize (using principles of sound voice leading) major and minor scales in all keys.

2. Practice simple circle of fifths sequences to be able to modulate quickly from a given key to any other key.

3. Learn to transpose any hymn into any and every other key, at sight.

4. Practice transposing to the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian modes, beginning on all pitches.

5. Learn to play figured bass.

6. Learn to read open score of four or more parts, especially works by great polyphonists.

7. Play as many great organ works as possible to build technique and to deepen one’s musical vocabulary. Using familiar tunes or themes, imitate as many of these works as possible when practicing improvisation.

8. Practice constructing phrases comprising only four bars. Begin with simple, stepwise melodies; count aloud. Repeat this exercise frequently. Then improvise a phrase ending in the dominant (a half cadence) followed by one ending in the tonic (specifically, an authentic cadence). Start with melody only, and then add simple harmony. Two phrases make a period; depending on how similar the phrases are, the period will either be parallel or contrasting.

9. After gaining some degree of comfort with the above, improvise a new phrase based on the above, only in a closely related key (relative or dominant). End that new phrase with a half cadence, then add yet another phrase ending with an authentic cadence in that related key. Keep counting aloud as you play!

10. Try to memorize these phrases as best you can. Do not be reluctant to make notes for yourself. Repeat the first period, perhaps with some elaboration, like passing tones or simple ornaments.

11. If desired, add a four-measure introduction, interludes, and a coda (all comprising four measures). Keep counting. These may be very simple, just basic accompaniment figures. Keep counting!

12. Putting together numbers 8–11 above results in one of the simplest musical forms, a ternary or 
song form.

All the above was drilled into me by McNeil Robinson in regular lessons over an extended period (along with much else) and must be practiced as much as possible. Gerre Hancock was also a force in solidifying this in my mind, via that one extremely long lesson, a masterclass or two, and his textbook.

I am grateful to Patrick Scott for sharing so much wisdom with us in his interview. I look forward to what we will learn in future interviews.

Students’ Listening II

Why should anyone ever listen to music?

That is, of course, a ridiculous question. It is obvious from history that listening to music is fundamentally human: a desire or even a need, and maybe a definitional part of human experience. Yet, I think it is important to continually remind ourselves that recordings, in addition to live performances, help us to strive to become better musicians. Musicians are often subject to self-doubt. (There is a cartoon that I see once in a while that shows a pie chart of the mind of a musician. The section labeled “crippling self-doubt” covers about 90% of the space.) That self-doubt comes from several questions, not the least of which is: “is this all worthwhile?” Yet, listening to great music provides us with an affirmative answer. The sort of self-doubt regarding the quality of one’s own playing can be exacerbated by listening—something that I will try to grapple with below.

One concrete reason for listening to music is to gain familiarity with diverse repertoire. This was the point of that “listening test” I encountered in college that I referenced last month. What repertoire? There are expanding circles ranging from music from a specific time period written specifically for our instrument to the entirety of written music. It is potentially frustrating and, for me, quite liberating to realize that it is impossible to know all of the music that is out there. Frustrating because of the inevitability of missing things that are wonderful. Liberating because, if we cannot experience everything, then we do not have to aspire to have experienced everything. We can hope to experience a substantial and meaningful subset of what there is.

How should any given student navigate the world of listening for learning about repertoire? Listening to music that you already know and like is a wonderful thing to do, but that’s not really part of this process. Going out in circles is always a good idea: if you love and listen to Brahms symphonies, try his chamber music; try symphonies by someone who influenced Brahms or whom he influenced. Then try their chamber music, piano music, and so on. If you like Schütz, listen to Gabrieli. If you like Beethoven, listen to Albrechtsberger. There need not be anything obscure, complicated, or subtle about constructing these circles. Fruitful connections can be found by perusing Wikipedia articles or CD booklets.

This is fairly obvious, and we all probably do it normally as we seek out things to listen to. But still, you should encourage your students to follow the process consciously, maybe in ways that are partly teacher-guided, perhaps with a written outline to keep track. But another idea is to seek out new things to listen to not by affinity but by opposition. If you love Brahms, listen to Wagner or Liszt. If you love Debussy, listen to a selection of music by Les Six, who consciously rejected his influence. If you love Bach, seek out the music of Marchand, who was apparently intimidated by Bach and fled from a possible competition with him. Or, if you have not already done so, listen to Handel, whose life, career, temperament, and music were so different from those of Bach.

Keeping a distance

Another way to find things to listen to is to search for music that is completely different from your norm. Whatever you have just been listening to and enjoying, move as far away as possible. If you have been listening to the Telemann Paris Quartets, find some late nineteenth-century Russian choral music. If you have been listening to a Bruckner symphony, find a clavichord performance of early seventeenth-century dances. This is a controlled randomness and guarantees avoiding ruts.

If a friend, teacher, critic, or scholar says that particular music is not worth getting to know (boring, pedestrian, unpleasant, lacking in importance), then try it out! This suggestion is not based on the notion that that friend or critic is someone of bad judgment or likely to be wrong. It is just a way of shaking things up. People of equal discernment and experience end up reacting differently to artistic experience as often as they end up reacting similarly, and that is just as true when they agree that they are people of similar tastes.

Some of my most important, rewarding, and long-term fruitful listening as a youngster came from LPs that an older musician had discarded as being of little or no interest. And the musician in question was someone from whom I learned a lot and whose taste and judgment I admired. We should never base our exploration on the assumption that any two people see things the same way.

When we talk about listening to music to broaden or deepen our familiarity with repertoire, we are mostly talking about listening to recordings. We expect to be able to find recordings of just about anything, whereas the concert offerings in any one locale can only cover a tiny amount of music, even over several concert seasons. The changes in the ways in which we encounter recordings that have taken place in the last several years are interesting to consider, especially as they influence the experience of students.

The revolution in the listening experience

In my experience, I would say that for at least five years now, 85% of the time that a student has come to a lesson and told me that they have listened to a piece, that listening has taken place on YouTube. A lot of listening is now done without any money changing hands. That opens music up to more listeners, though the effect on creators of performances is more problematic. I remember spending several days while I was in college agonizing over whether to spend, I believe, $4.99 on Ralph Kirkpatrick’s LP of four Bach harpsichord toccatas. I vividly recall going back to the Princeton University Store several times to look it over. (I did buy it.) Now anyone can find many performances of those pieces on YouTube.

When a student comes to a lesson and tells me that they have been looking into a particular piece by listening to a YouTube performance, I always ask who was playing. And never once in that situation has anyone been able to say who the performer was. Of course, that information is usually there to be found. And furthermore, all of the students in question have been extremely smart and clever people who pay attention to the world around them and care about artistic matters. It is just that expectations have changed; the ethos of how we listen has changed. YouTube is seen, for purposes like this, as a sort of neutral encyclopedia of music. It isn’t any more obvious that you would check on who was playing than it would be to dig into the question of who wrote a given encyclopedia or Wikipedia article.

Is this good, bad, neither, or both? I am not sure. I have an extreme interest in performers. Probably too extreme, in that it can get in the way; if I do not know who is playing, I have trouble feeling comfortable listening. But that is a foible of mine. If listening is being done only or mostly to learn something about what music is out there, then the identity or background of the player is perhaps best thought of as only one piece of information about what is going on, not necessarily more important than information about instruments, acoustics, recording technology, edition used, and so on. If a piece seems less interesting or compelling than you had hoped that it would be, it is often worth looking for a different performance before shelving your interest in that piece.

This modern paradigm has the effect of taking away some of the feelings of authority that we have traditionally bestowed on those performers who were invited to make recordings. Part of the dynamic of record listening over the twentieth century was that we assumed, by and large, that the recording artists were the most talented players and thoughtful interpreters. No matter how inspiring it can be to listen to great recordings, it can also be limiting. This limiting tendency has its feel-good side: getting accustomed to a certain undeniably effective performance approach and experiencing the satisfaction of absorbing and then perhaps recreating it. I would argue that the limiting nature of this outweighs the good feeling that it engenders. But even worse, there is the outwardly discouraging side: feeling intimidated by the reputed greatness of the recording artists, not just by liking their performances better than you anticipate liking your own, but being daunted by their celebrity and publicly heralded greatness. It is possible that the more democratic performance model that has taken hold now will have the psychological effect of freeing students to include themselves more easily in the universe of those whose performances are valid.

Listening to interpretation

In former days, a student might ask, “how can I hope to play as well as Marcel Dupré, Helmut Walcha, Fernando Germani, Marie-Claire Alain, etc.” Now we can say “you don’t even know who that player was. It could just as easily have been you. You can do that just as well!” This is an over-simplification, but not an unrealistic or inapt one, based on what I have seen.

This brings us to another major aspect of listening: to learn interpretation. As anyone will know who has read this column over the years, I am a strong believer in encouraging everyone to feel free to play as they want. This includes students, to such an extent that I want even beginners to make their own interpretive decisions. That is a big subject, and this is not the place to go into it fully. The role of listening to recordings in shaping interpretation or in learning how to think about the art of shaping interpretation is essentially two-fold. On the one hand, anyone’s playing can be a direct source of ideas about playing. There is nothing wrong with listening to someone else play and thinking about what that player did, the choices that he or she made, the effects that those choices seemed to have, etc. If a student is doing this as a conscious choice then it can be used in the ways that the student wants, with whatever guidance from the teacher seems useful. The teacher might do well to remind the student that anything heard in someone else’s performance is just one person’s choice.

But there is only so much that we can do by taking hold of this sort of listening consciously. To a greater or lesser extent from one person to another, but to a significant extent for almost everyone, performances heard repeatedly exert a subconscious influence, sometimes a very strong one. If we have heard a passage or a piece exactly the same way over and over again, our minds can define the piece as being what we heard as much as we define it by the notes on the page. This is true not only as defined by performance gestures—tempo, articulation, timing, etc., but also about registration or the often-irreproducible effects of acoustics. I recall an earnest conversation that I once had with an organist a bit older and more experienced than I was about what the registration “should” be for the middle section of a certain piece. I was arguing that the nature of the music called for something clear and light; he was equally sure that it needed a more “quinty”-rich sound. It turned out that each of us had had as our favorite recorded performance of that piece one that led us to these diverging conclusions. The point is not that we each liked the sound we were used to, but that we had absorbed it so deeply that we were prepared to argue that it was part of the definition of the piece.

As another example, I love the piano music of Schubert. However, I have lately realized that I so deeply absorbed Alfred Brendel’s approach to that music growing up that I have a hard time listening to anyone else playing it. For years I have sought out records or occasional live performances of Schubert by pianists whom I admire greatly. But I always react as if something is just not quite right—an interpretive/rhetorical analogue to pervasive wrong notes or bad tuning. I consider this a loss for me, and it may fade or otherwise change someday. It is not a big deal; rather, it is part of the give and take of life. But if I were trying to play that music, I would have the following bad choice: either I would play in a way that was a copy of someone else, or I would not like the way I played.

So the first antidote to getting one performance approach stuck in one’s head is to listen more or less equally to multiple performances. If you have heard each of five or six performances of a piece approximately the same number of times, then it is quite impossible that one of them can have established itself in your mind as the very definition of the piece. But this is also part of the give and take of life. If we listen to half a dozen performances of every piece that we might want to play, then we have that much less time to listen to other things. It is a question of managing what we want to do. I personally focus on pieces that I am actively working on or feel sure that I want to play some day. I solve the problem for those pieces by not listening to them at all. That is the opposite solution to listening to multiple performances. They both work for this purpose. For other music I sort of let the chips fall where they may.

Most of us spend much less time listening to live concerts in person than we do listening to recordings. Probably the major advantage of live performance is that when all is said and done, the sonorities, the effect of acoustics, and the spontaneity are simply different. A recording is not an “I couldn’t tell the difference” recreation of a concert or other live performance, and it is at least a common experience that concerts at their best are even better than recordings. This is kind of a cliché, and in this case it is only sometimes true. A given concert even by a great performer can happen to be uninspired, or something can go wrong: noise, tuning, acoustic. But there is a particular advantage to live concerts. If you hear a piece in concert and are intrigued or excited by it—a piece of the sort that you might want to play—then the chances are that you will not remember all specifics of the interpretation well enough or in enough detail to be overly influenced by them. They certainly cannot imprint themselves on your subconscious with the weight of authority that comes from repetition if that repetition has not happened.

There is a lot more to say about all of this, and I will come back to it. For the next column, I will turn to J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Some of the features of this piece that make it particularly interesting inspire me to think and write while working on creating a performance of it, as there are some important things about the work that we do not know. For instance, we do not know the order of the movements, what instrument or instruments it was intended for, what title the composer meant for it to have, or, since it is incomplete, how it was meant to end. We do know that Bach worked on it for years, right up to his death, and that his heirs worked thereafter on getting it published. As to all of these things that we do not know, we can make highly educated guesses or assumptions—enough to make it interesting to discuss and to be getting on with for performance.