Harpsichord Notes

From A to Z: Harpsichord Notes

Seated one day at the computer, I was weary and ill at ease, and my fingers wandered idly over the noisy keys . . . oops, wrong setting. Or is it? I have just been searching a list of past winners of the quarterly Global Music Awards bestowed on independent musicians who submit their recordings for judging by a California company, and I have come across the welcome information that Asako Hirabayashi, harpsichordist and composer, won a first prize medal in the year 2018.

Thus, belatedly, I wish to congratulate Asako for the recognition that has been bestowed on her for the compact disc The Harpsichord in the New Millennium (Albany: Troy 1180) that I have mentioned previously in these columns. Asako, who also won first prizes for her submissions to the Alienor Harpsichord Composition Competitions in 2004 and 2012, is a current member of the Historic Keyboard Society of North America (HKSNA), and she continues her career as a virtuoso player as well as a celebrated composer. Brava, Asako!

A duo and The Harpsichord Diaries

One of the highlights of the HKSNA meeting in Huntsville, Texas, this past May was the elegant presentation by Elaine Funaro and her husband Randall Love, “The Salon of Madame Brillon”—to my ears the most enticing of duos for harpsichord and fortepiano—a four-movement Duo in C Minor by Anne Louise Brillon de Jouy (1744–1824), a composer totally new to me. To introduce her, I quote from a brief program note, “Pupil of Schobert and friend of Boccherini, Mme. Brillon, (according to Charles Burney), one of the greatest lady-players on the harpsichord in Europe, and to this lady many of the famous composers of Italy and Germany, who have resided in France at any time, have dedicated their works.” Her music is a fascinating window into the cosmopolitan culture of pre-revolutionary France. Also of somewhat prurient interest was the declaration by the Love-Duo that the lady had also been a special friend of Ambassador Benjamin Franklin, whom she addressed as “mon cher papa!”

The finesse and delicacy of nuance displayed by Elaine at the harpsichord and Randall at the fortepiano provided some of the best music making of the entire meeting. The Love family is totally engaged in the arts, both aural and visual.

For some years now I have had the pleasure of a preview copy of the forty-four-page book, The Harpsichord Diaries: A Musical Journey, given to me by Elaine at the HKSNA conference in Montreal. Another brilliant event in Huntsville was an impromptu viewing of the video now completed to accompany this book, the purpose of which is similar to that of the recording “Said the Piano to the Harpsichord,” the first exposure to our instrument touted by so many prominent harpsichord aficionados and professionals such as master builder Richard Kingston, who claim that iconic recording as their first exposure to historic keyboards. With Haiku written by Elaine, who with her pianist husband made the compact disc that accompanies the written story, and narration by son Eric Love (a Broadway actor), plus the book’s illustrations by his twin sister Andrea Love, one may say accurately that this is a “family endeavor.”

The book itself is a musical tale about a girl named Elena who discovers a magical book in her grandmother’s attic. Transported through five centuries, Elena meets eccentric talking harpsichords that bring music and history to life. Check it out online at www.harpsichorddiaries.com, and be enchanted anew by a delightful musical and visual journey.

Twentieth-centuryharpsichord concertos

A most satisfying compact disc by the virtuoso harpsichordist Jory Vinikour is the latest offering from this artist for Cedille (CDR 90000 188, www.cedillerecords.org). Ably supported by the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Scott Speck, at long last one can hear Ned Rorem’s Concertino da Camera. Composed in 1946, the work provides seventeen minutes of legendary status, finally receiving its world premiere recording.

I had known of this concerto, but did not expect ever to hear it. With typical Rorem finesse, and the aid of a cornet that serves as excellent melodic foil to the virtuoso keyboard writing, this work, at least from my point of view, is the best reason for purchasing this disc.

The other concerti on this bountiful disc offer the three far too brief movements of Walter Leigh’s (1905–1942) hauntingly beautiful Concertino (three British pastoral beauties by a composer who died far too soon). I have performed this work for harpsichord and strings quite a number of times, and, together with my listeners, always wanted more of this pastoral beauty.

Two more bracing bits of modernism fill out the disc: Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings, opus 42 (just slightly more than twenty-eight minutes comprise its three movements: “Allegro,” “Andante,” and “Allegro vivo”) by Victor Kalabis and the Concerto for Amplified Harpsichord and Strings by Michael Nyman (twenty-one minutes). This is not for the weak of heart, but I suspect it grows on one with repeated listenings.

Jory Vinikour, who with his duo partner Philippe LeRoy performed the stunning duo harpsichord opening concert at the Huntsville HKSNA meeting, sought suggestions from Robert Tifft, friend and colleague at Southern Methodist University, when he began selecting the works for this recording. As I have said many times, Robert is indeed the person to consult. He is not only knowledgeable but extremely generous in sharing this information—another prince among harpsichord aficionados.

One Hundred Miracles: A Memoir of Music and Survival, by Zuzana Ružicková (with Wendy Holden)

This most remarkable book from Bloomsbury Publishing (London, 2019) is the great Czech harpsichordist’s autobiography as told to British author Wendy Holden in recorded interviews, completed shortly before Ružicková’s death in 2017.

It is dedicated to Johann Sebastian Bach, to whom she devoted a significant amount of her career studying and performing. In fact, it was a small copy of one of Bach’s works that helped give her the stamina to survive three Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

With striking prose presented in chapters that are not ordered chronologically, but are arranged as a surprisingly effective back and forth narrative that begins with a 1960 post-war concert tour in Transylvania and continues with chapters about childhood and adolescent memories, these are interspersed with other chapters that detail Zuzana’s survival of her internment in three Nazi death camps, her happy marriage, and her very successful post-war life as a concert harpsichordist and teacher. Each of these units is titled simply with the name of the city, town, or other location in which the events occurred.

This memoir details a long and productive life made most meaningful by music and Zuzana’s prodigious musical abilities that included a fantastic memory for the works she performed. As I read the 327 pages of this amazing memoir, I became more and more awestricken with her incredible ability for survival, her deep love for her husband—the composer Victor Kalabis (who predeceased her in 2006)—and for her devotion to Bach’s sublime artistry as a composer.

The interviews with the Suffolk author Wendy Holden, who had previously written the book Born Survivors about three mothers and their babies who survived the Holocaust, were completed only a few days before Ružicková’s death in 2017. They are effectively utilized to tell the compelling narrative of a most important life: that of a person who realized the necessity for keeping these true events in the memories of succeeding generations to help insure that history does not repeat such horrors.

I was reminded how my driving instructor during high school days in Crestline, Ohio, shared photos that he had taken while serving in the armed forces that helped to liberate one of the German concentration camps. Even as early as 1952 there were those who insisted that the Holocaust never happened, but those of us who had seen these actual onsite photographs knew otherwise. This book should be required reading for each succeeding generation in years to come.

The organization into fourteen chapters struck me, as well, since fourteen is a symbolic Bach number. I wonder if that simply happened, or if it was another demonstration of Ružicková’s veneration for the great composer. (In case this bit of number symbolism is unfamiliar to some readers, fourteen is the sum of the alphabetical placement of the letters B-A-C-H
(2 + 1 + 3 + 8); once one begins to comprehend Bach’s love of numbers and clever hidden riddles, it becomes rather evident that he often incorporates his name in measures that are strategically placed in measure fourteen, or after fourteen notes, etc. And, of course, there is his musical signature: B-flat [the German B], A, C, and the H which is B-natural in German musical notation).

I recommend One Hundred Miracles as a book you will find difficult to put down once you have begun to read it; and I believe it might cancel any doubt about the importance of Ružicková and guarantee her a spot among the other great female players of the twentieth century. I do have one caution about the claim that she was the first to record the entire keyboard literature of her favorite composer. Isolde Ahlgrimm recorded thirty volumes for Philips of the Netherlands quite a few years before the Czech artist, and Ralph Kirkpatrick also made a number of German recordings earlier as well.

I checked these facts with Robert Tifft, who suggested that when a documentary was made about Ružicková the producers made the “first recording” claim so often that it is now considered to be a fact. He also agreed with me that, while she was definitely one of the earliest (and while she may have recorded a few obscure pieces that were not in other artists’ repertoire), she was definitely not the very first. However she belongs, without a doubt, among that revered group that includes the remarkable female players Wanda Landowska and Ahlgrimm—and neither one of them left us a written memoir of such brilliance and intensity!

Warren R. Johnson, a retired organist-choirmaster, is a freelance writer living in Boquete, Panamá. Some of his works can be seen in part at www.clippings.me/warren-r-johnson. He also publishes the blog www.TravelSketches.info.

It is one thing to love a pipe organ, but to be buried under one is another thing. Yet that is exactly what Josef Anton Bruckner did. He designed his own sarcophagus and had himself placed under his favorite organ in Saint Florian Monastery in Austria.

Like Johann Sebastian Bach, Bruckner was an organist, though he composed no significant organ works. Unlike Bach, he traveled outside central Europe, concertizing in England and France. Bruckner did eventually achieve fame with his symphonies and choral works allowing him to (unofficially) become the fourth “B” after Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.

Bruckner was born into a musical family in the farming community of Ansfelden, Austria, the oldest of eleven children. His father was an organist, and his mother sang in a choir. He received his initial schooling in Ansfelden and then progressed to Hörseling for more education, studying organ with Johann Baptist Weiss, his cousin and godfather. Weiss was an impetus for Bruckner becoming a fine organist. Bruckner was as serious about the organ as he was later about composing, often practicing as long as twelve hours a day.¹

When Bruckner was thirteen, his father died. With eleven children in the family, Anton’s mother could not support all of them. Consequently, he was sent to the Augustinian monastery in Saint Florian. There he sang in the boy choir while also studying violin and organ. Saint Florian Monastery possessed two organs; the larger one was known as the “Chrismann Organ.” This organ was originally built in the Baroque style between 1770 and 1774 and was rebuilt the year Bruckner arrived at the monastery. It was expanded to four manuals, seventy-eight registers by Mathias Mauracher of Salzburg² and was the second largest organ in Austria at the time.³ Bruckner was able to occasionally play services on this instrument. The organ later came to be called the Bruckner organ.

Bruckner needed to earn a living, so he left the monastery in 1841 to become a school teacher. His mother arranged for him to attend a teaching seminar in Linz that year, returning to the monastery in 1845 as a teacher and one of the organists. He passed a teaching examination that year so that he could work as a teacher’s assistant. He continued taking teaching courses earning a good grade that allowed him to teach upper-level courses. In 1851, he became the official organist of the monastery and served until 1855.

He left Saint Florian fearing a limit to his musical growth if he remained there, and, at the urging of friends, he applied for the position of organist at the cathedral of Linz. He won this position and remained there for twelve years. During his first three years in Linz, Bruckner began studying composition with Simon Sechter of Vienna. He did this from Linz by correspondence and six-week visits yearly.⁴ Working with Sechter, himself an organist, resulted in profound growth in his compositional skills.

He left Linz so that he might take the position of instructor at the Vienna Conservatory replacing Sechter, teaching both composition and organ. He remained there for twenty-four years, with such students as Hans Rott and Franz Schmidt, the former who influenced Gustav Mahler. Mahler was also a student at the conservatory and may even have studied with Bruckner. In 1875, Bruckner was appointed lecturer of harmony and counterpoint at the University of Vienna and was later awarded an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree there.

While in Vienna, Bruckner also held the position of organist of the Imperial Court chapel (1868–1892).⁵ By then, he had established an international reputation and began a concert career. At the invitation of organbuilder Merklin-Schütze, he played an organ recital in France at Saint Epvre, Nancy, in 1869. This was quickly followed by recitals at Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, in 1870 and in England in 1871, where he gave six recitals at Royal Albert Hall on the new Willis organ and five more at the Crystal Palace.⁶

Much of Bruckner’s organ playing was improvisational; consequently, no transcriptions are available. There are nine organ compositions attributed to him. It is likely, however, that he composed only six of these works:⁷

• WAB 127, Prelude in E-Flat Major (c. 1836)

• WAB 128, Four Preludes for Organ (c. 1836)

These two works and possibly WAB 126 are likely not by Bruckner.⁸

• WAB 126/1, Prelude in D Minor (c. 1847)

• WAB 126/2, Postlude in D Minor (c. 1847) (Manuscript stored in the archives of Saint Florian Monastery)

• WAB 130, Prelude in D Minor (c. 1847)

• WAB 131, Vorspiel und Fugue (1847) (The incomplete score was completed by Franz Phillip in 1929.)

• WAB 125, Fugue in D Minor (1861) (This was composed for an examination in Vienna at which he astounded the judges.)⁹

• WAB 129, Perger Prelude in C Major (1884)

• WAB 241, Three Themes for an Organ Improvisation (1884)

• WAB 240, Improvisation Sketch Ischl (1890).

Two incomplete works are improvisational themes sketched by Bruckner. The first, WAB 240, was sketched in July 1890 to be played on the organ during the wedding of Archduchess Marie Valerie of Austria with Archduke Franz Salvator in Bad Ischl. The second was an “Adagio” in B major for organ. Found in 1953, this was a first draft of the main theme of the slow movement of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony.¹⁰

All of these are works for manuals only, though they can be adapted for the use of pedal. An Album of Various Pieces including preludes, postludes, and transcriptions by Bruckner can be digitally downloaded from SheetMusicPlus.com.¹¹

Many musicologists today find Bruckner’s symphonic works influenced by his principal instrument, the organ. One example of this is his propensity to alternate between groups of players, much like the changing of manuals, and in the wide range of dynamics. Bruckner composed several Masses, with Numbers 1 and 3 utilizing organ with orchestra.¹²

Bruckner was a self-effacing man, quiet and humble. He held other musicians in awe, especially Richard Wagner. There was nothing shy about his composing, though. This has resulted in a personality of contrasts. Hans von Bülow, a contemporary of Bruckner and well-respected conductor who promoted the careers of Wagner and Johannes Brahms, described Bruckner as “half genius, half simpleton.”¹³ Karl Grebe wrote, “His life doesn’t tell anything about his work, and his work doesn’t tell anything about his life . . . .”¹⁴ Still, Bruckner was held in high regard by other composers, especially his friend Mahler.

Adolph Hitler was another admirer of Bruckner’s music. When he took over Saint Florian Monastery and removed its monks, he paid for the restoration of the organ and the publication of Bruckner’s scores. Hitler was also the instigator for the formation of the Bruckner Symphony Orchestra, which played the “Adagio” from his Fourth Symphony on German radio at the announcement of Hitler’s death in 1945.¹⁵

After Johann Sebastian Bach, some may consider Bruckner to have been the next great musician to base his work in the Church. Unlike Bach, who was Lutheran, Bruckner was a life-long Catholic, yet they each composed with the intent of Soli Deo Gloria. Hans Redlich, a Bruckner biographer, stated that Bruckner was undoubtedly “the only great composer of his century whose entire musical output is determined by his religious faith.”¹⁶

Bruckner died at age seventy-two, still a bachelor. He is buried in the crypt of Saint Florian Monastery, directly below his favorite organ.¹⁷ The instrument, rebuilt several times since Bruckner’s tenure, now comprises four manuals, 103 stops, and 7,343 pipes.

Notes

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Bruckner.

2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Florian_Monastery.

3. Mosco Carner, “Anton Bruckner’s Organ Recitals in England and France,” The Musical Times, February 1937, pp. 117–119, accessed at jstor.org/stable/920730.

4. biography.yourdictionary.com/joseph-anton-bruckner.

5. Ibid.

6. classicfm.com/composers/bruckner/guides/discovering-great-composers-anton-bruckner.

7. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organ_compositions_by_Anton_Bruckner.

8. Ibid.

9. britannica.com/biography/Anton-Bruckner.

10. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organ_compositions_by_Anton_Bruckner.

11. sheetmusicplus.com/search?Ntt=bruckner+album+of+various+pieces.

12. radioswissclassic.ch/en/music-database/musician/25409488567851fde6a61f8e916b9befbb395/biography.

13. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Bruckner.

14. mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/contemporaries/anton-bruckner.

15. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Bruckner.

16. newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Anton_Bruckner.

17. John Henderson. A Directory of Composers for Organ, published by the author, Swindon, UK, 1996.

Program planning

I write this column just as July is about to give way to August; even as a retired academic, this autumnal month nurtures my urge to begin making plans for musical programs of the fast-approaching fall semester! It was my custom through all fifty-two years of university employment to present my faculty recital on the second Monday of September—one week after Labor Day. Sometimes I played both organ and harpsichord, occasionally only one or the other.

This past summer has been especially full of planning (and playing) organ recitals on two very special instruments. One is the 1762 Caetano-Oldovini single-manual organ housed in the Meadows Museum of Art, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, an instrument originally in Portugal’s Evora Cathedral, and, just incidentally, the oldest playable pipe organ in Texas. My two demonstration concerts for the Organ Historical Society during its first conference to be held in the Lone Star State and my tenth annual organ recital program in the TGIF Concert Series of Santa Fe’s First Presbyterian Church, a program and lecture that concluded the tenth anniversary celebration of the Fisk pipe organ, Opus 133, were two separate events that required differing repertoire to show the capabilities of these two very different instruments.

The choices that were made from the organ repertoire are no different than those I usually make when developing programs for harpsichord concerts. Thus, I hope that my thoughts on planning and audience reactions may be of some interest and use to our readers, no matter which instruments they may utilize.

First and foremost, I would suggest that lengthy programming of music by only one composer is generally best reserved for recordings (which allow the listener to choose from the selected repertoire and use the on/off switch if necessary). It seems to me that only a very few composers (such as J. S. Bach) are able to fill an entire program’s span and keep the audience’s attention without a danger of ensuing boredom. A lengthy work such as Bach’s Goldberg Variations is usually accepted with sincere affection and continued interest, especially if it can be done in my favorite form of performance for this monumental work: dividing the playing with another player, each of the two alternating variations on two different harpsichords. While I have only done this once with a brilliant graduate student, it seemed to me that the somewhat contrasting timbres of the two instruments and the respite it gave to each of us as players was beneficial in many ways.

As I was attempting to decide what I would want to play in Santa Fe this past July, I was inspired by an art exhibit that had been mounted earlier this year by the Meadows Museum, entitled Dali—Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936. It comprised a generous collection of works small in format that surveyed the great artist’s output during those early years of his career. The exhibition did not travel to any other venue, but an illustrated catalog is available from the museum, should one wish to investigate the visual stimulation that I tried to emulate with similarly shorter musical compositions from a wide variety of composers.

Thus Poetics of the Small did provide a program of short pieces in many styles and genres. Variety of this sort and careful attention includes choosing pieces both in major and minor keys (plus, perhaps, an occasional piece that detours to yet another idiom—maybe utilizing a mode), the variety of which may keep the ears free from boredom, open, and listening. Thus my Santa Fe program lasted about forty-five minutes (with the rubric that applause was to be withheld until the final chord was sounded), and it consisted of works by composers Healey Willan, César Franck (the program’s one lengthy piece, Fantaisie in C, which is made up of short sections), J. S. Bach, Herbert Howells, Dame Ethel Smythe, Germaine Tailleferre, Calvin Hampton’s Consonance for Larry (1957)—my first commission to the Oberlin classmate, for whom it was also his first commission—and Maurice Duruflé’s Fugue on the Bells of Soissons Cathedral, which I dared to end with a triumphant final major chord, rather than the repeated minor one.

The demonstrations of the 1762 organ were also presented within stringent time limits and with the necessity of including an audience-sung hymn, a requirement for every OHS convention program. Fortunately fulfilling my expressed desire for variety, it was possible to devise a twenty-five-minute program that did just that: a Tiento by Cabanilles was followed by my SMU colleague Simon Sargon’s Dos Prados (From the Meadows) composed at my suggestion in 1997—a stately pavane with variations that utilized every stop on the organ and showed, with particular beauty, the treble half-stop Sesquialtera that allows a melody to be played using the keys from middle C-sharp to the organ’s top C while playing an accompaniment using the notes from middle C down to the lowest C in a bass short octave. Also included were sonatas by Scarlatti and Seixas, the hymn Pange Lingua, and a rousing frolic by Lidon, using the full organ to give all the volume that one could possibly want.

So, I suggest that a wide-ranging variety of musical ideas can keep an audience interested in our historic instruments (or in the modern replicas thereof).

Another idea that I have been pursuing during my long career is the occasional introduction of quite unexpected works from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century repertoires. I have mentioned some of these previously in various Diapason articles, but has anyone followed through with this idea? I would be interested in hearing from readers who may have done just that. Do not forget that Chopin composed a short Fugue in A Minor, found in his keyboard works; Schuman’s Fugue III on BACH from the organ works requires only a few pedal passages, all of which may be negotiated with the left hand on the harpsichord. Works by Herbert Howells, particularly his Lambert’s Clavichord, contain a selection of delightful pieces that may be played on any keyboard instrument (as I can attest to words that came directly from the composer’s mouth when I first queried him in his Royal College of Music studio in London), plus two volumes of Howells’s Clavichord that comprise many pages of beautiful music to be explored.

Of the Revivalist works, do not eschew Ferruccio Busoni’s Sonatina for Cembalo—not the easiest piece to adapt to the harpsichord, even though he mentions our instrument in the title, he manages to write as least several notes that do not exist on any harpsichord in my collection of instruments . . . . So rewrite a measure or two if needed, but enjoy the piquant harmonies and the very idea that this well-known musician felt compelled to write for our instrument. Francis Thomé’s Rigodon still ranks as one of the earliest pieces to be designated for harpsichord, as does Mulet’s Petite Lied, which has been published in all its small-format glory in an issue of this very journal.

For more recent works I return often to Duke Ellington’s A Single Petal of a Rose (dedicated to Antoinette Vischer, although it had been written earlier for Queen Elizabeth II). It is a piece that is, to my knowledge, unpublished except for the facsimile in a book about the Swiss patroness. I base my own performance copy on an arrangement sent to me in 1985 by Igor Kipnis, who credited jazz great Dave Brubeck as co-arranger. I make many adjustments to cope with wide hand stretches and to keep the feeling of a jazz improvisation, and I can report that it is always an audience toe-tapping favorite.

Among a host of contemporary composers I have my favorites such as Vincent Persichetti, Gerald Near, Neely Bruce, Glenn Spring, Rudy Davenport, Knight Vernon, Timothy Broege, and William Bolcom—all of whom write beautifully and knowledgeably for the harpsichord. To peruse the literally hundreds of possible twentieth-century works, see Frances Bedford’s magisterial catalog, Harpsichord and Clavichord Music of the Twentieth Century  (Fallen Leaf Press, Berkeley, California, 1993).

Christmas gifts:
a few suggestions

Writing this column in mid-October means that I have not given much thought to Christmas shopping. Instead I have spent most working hours planning programs (and then practicing) for the second in our annual schedule of three house concerts, enjoyed the opening nights of Dallas Opera’s fall season by attending Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and Bizet’s Carmen, and preparing for the first-ever wedding to take place in our spacious music room. (After all, with a pipe organ and seating for forty guests, why not?)

However, now as you read these December Harpsichord Notes, I hope they may contain some suggestions that could be of help for all who have yet to make gift selections. So, tally-ho and read on!

• Eagle-eyed subscribers to The Diapason will have seen the notice of J. William Greene’s new compact disc Christmas Ayres and Dances in the Here & There section (page 12) of our October magazine. The disc (Pro Organo CD 7281) comprises Greene’s performances of his genial compositions played on a Gerrit Klop continuo organ and a single-manual harpsichord by Peter Fisk. The clever Baroque-style arrangements of familiar carols and secular songs of the season are sure to delight the ears of music-loving friends. Among my personal favorites is Greene’s Bell Fugue (based on Jingle Bells), sure to be a hit. For colleagues who are fellow keyboardists, why not purchase not only the compact disc, but also the printed scores for these captivating arrangements? All three volumes are available from Concordia Publishing House. Bell Fugue is the final piece in Volume II.

• An earlier publication by Edwin McLean (born 1951) bears the title A Baroque Christmas—Carols and Counterpoint for Keyboard (New Interpretations of traditional seasonal pieces for piano, organ, or harpsichord), issued in 2003 by Frank J. Hackinson (FJH Publishing Company), Fort Lauderdale, Florida. With works somewhat easier than Greene’s compositions, McLean offers a single forty-page volume of charming and useful pieces equally suited for all the instruments mentioned in his introduction, including digital keyboards. Eleven tunes are set: Noël Nouvelet, God Rest You Merry, Greensleeves, Coventry Carol, Kings of Orient, Pat-A-Pan, In dulci jubilo, Veni Emmanuel, Tempus Adest Floridum, Stille Nacht, and Adeste Fideles. I have used most of these for church and concerts and continue to enjoy them very much.

• Now for something completely different: author Mark Schweizer has made a slight deviation from the fourteen murder mysteries that began with The Alto Wore Tweed and progressed through the various vocal ranges (The Tenor Wore Tapshoes, The Diva Wore Diamonds, The Organist Wore Pumps, etc.), a series of novels that has captivated so many of us.  A fifteenth story, also set in St. Germaine (Schweizer’s fictitious small town in North Carolina), is replete with the familiar cast of characters headed by Hayden Konig, police chief and organist/choirmaster extraordinaire of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. But in the shorter novella titled simply The Christmas Cantata the author deviates slightly from the others in his series. It is available in the original paperback format (95 pages) or as a more recent hardback edition, both of which present exactly the same text, but the second edition is in a slightly smaller book format that requires 128 pages—more elegant and better, perhaps, for stocking stuffing. ’Tis a gentle tale, still filled with hilarious episodes, musical references, and sly liturgical guffaws: available from St. James Music Press (SJMP Books). You may wish to include a special handkerchief in that stocking, for the denouement is beautifully touching and may bring tears to the eyes. Also, a warning: this author’s mysteries are habit forming; I sincerely doubt that anyone can read just one! In a surprise email, received as I write this essay, Schweizer announced the fifteenth, and final, St. Germaine mystery: The Choirmaster Wore Out. Definitely a brand-new entry for acquiring and giving away!

• Thanks to my mother I began listening to operas at a tender age. Each Saturday afternoon in fall and winter, beginning when I was nine years old, my ears would be focused on our radio speaker as Mom and I listened to the New York Metropolitan Opera broadcasts in our small town of Corsica, Pennsylvania. I am grateful for this background as well as for my grade- and high-school experiences as a wind player, especially the ones after I began to play oboe. That, plus the choral directing experiences that were part and parcel of my graduate work and early professional engagements taught me a great deal about phrasing and making the music “breathe” in natural ways. I firmly believe that every keyboardist needs this type of training to become a better musician. Later these experiences engendered many a humorous moment in organ or harpsichord lessons when I would stop a student to suggest some necessary phrasing here or there, and often end with the comment, “I still can’t believe that you pay all this tuition for me to remind you to breathe and count!”

As an aid to the development of vocally informed musicality I would suggest as a Christmas gift, both to “self” and “others”—and a most unusual one, at that: ARC, which is the title of the Decca Records debut CD performed by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. This artist (who has been selected as “Vocalist of the Year” by Musical America) has put together a program that demonstrates his self-admitted 50% love of Baroque music and 50% devotion to contemporary works. On this magnificent disc Costanzo performs works by Philip Glass and George Frideric Handel. This modern mastersinger of both styles convinced me of the beauty to be found in each, and I have listened repeatedly, enraptured by his musicality. Costanzo made his Dallas Opera debut on October 30, 2015, in the world premiere of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s opera Great Scott. Since that magical evening I have been following Costanzo’s brilliant career. His artistry, both as singer and actor, earns him my highest recommendation and admiration.

• Another Handelian who could bring tears to the eyes with her exquisite vocalism was the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who began a musical career as violist, but soon was discovered to have one of the great female voices of the twentieth century. Sample her exquisite singing on the Avie CD 30, released in 2002—only four years before her untimely death at age 52. Lieberson is ably abetted by the Baroque specialist, conductor, and harpsichordist Harry Bicket, playing an Italianate single-manual harpsichord by Douglas Maple (after Zenti). This recording is another musical experience that just might be life changing.

• August 16, 2019, will be the sixtieth anniversary of Wanda Landowska’s death. The “mother of us all,” this pioneering harpsichordist still resonates through her recordings and through the memoirs contributed by her devoted friends (and occasional detractors). I was incredibly fortunate to have known Mrs. Putnam Aldrich, known universally as “Momo,” Landowska’s first private secretary during the years they spent together at Wanda’s “Temple of Music” in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, France. I became acquainted with Momo through our mutual friend Richard Kurth, a fellow Ohioan who has spent most of his career teaching French and Spanish at the Kamehameha School in Honolulu. Richard, who drove Momo to the local Alliance Française meetings, actually accomplished our mutual introductions, and thus resulted my invitation for Momo to tell her account of those years for The Diapason. For many subsequent winters I spent my Christmas holidays visiting Richard and Momo in Hawaii (a tough choice, but someone needed to do it), interviewing Mrs. Aldrich year after year and taking notes that eventually found their way into Harpsichord in America: a Twentieth-Century Revival.

It was during one of these remarkable meetings that I, quite brazenly, asked Momo who might inherit a caricature of Wanda that was prominently displayed in each of Momo’s dwellings (she changed addresses several times during these years). That query remained unanswered until the last day of that year’s Honolulu sojourn when Momo handed me a wrapped package, approximately eight and a half inches by six and a half inches. I knew without looking what was enclosed in that brown paper, and I said, “You must keep this! I know what it means to you.” But Momo insisted, and, I confess, I did not argue with her for very long. The caricature, an unsigned watercolor, is widely considered to be the finest of all such drawings, especially in its perfect details.

When I arrived home in Dallas I immediately had some photographs made, and sent them to Momo so she would not be without that beautiful image. Eventually I loaned a professional high-decibel print of “my” Wanda portrait to Martin Elste for his 2009 Berlin Landowska Symposium and Exhibition, and it served as the signature work of that event. It also is published in Dr. Elste’s magnificent book Die Dame mit dem Cembalo [The Lady with the Harpsichord] (Schott Music, 2010, Order Number ED 20853; ISBN 978-3-7957-0710-1). The full-color print of the caricature may be found on page 98. The book’s text is entirely in German except for the four pages from the memoirs of American harpsichordist Irma Rogell: “Walks with Wanda,” on pages 146–150. Even if one is not fluent in German the comprehensive range of Elste’s illustrations (many of which are photographs that he travelled far and wide to make) places this deluxe 240-page volume at the top of the list as the most comprehensive pictorial history of our beloved “Mamusia.”

• I was tremendously moved by Martin Pearlman’s generosity with his Armand-Louis Couperin Edition, made available for all of us to download and print, free of any copyright restrictions. In a recent email Martin included a shorter URL for accessing his gift: http://tinyurl.com/ALCouperin. I pass it on to our readers as per Martin’s suggestion, and wish you, once again, a happy downloading experience.

It is with a small, Pearlman-inspired gesture that I offer my Christmas gift to our readers: free use of my Landowska caricature. Like Martin, I urge you to use it wherever and whenever you wish, copyright free. And, I would ask only that you use the credit “Larry Palmer collection, gift of Momo Aldrich.”

• As my final Christmas suggestion: if you have a friend or acquaintance who does not subscribe to The Diapason, why not present that lucky person with a year’s subscription to this journal? It would benefit your friends and help to ensure that the magazine continues in its beautiful, full-color format for many years to come. What could be nicer? And twelve times a year you make your friend(s) happy­—and perhaps more involved in your musical world.

Discovering Spring this summer

In his own words: composer Glenn Spring

As a young boy in the late 1940s I attended a piano recital at the studio of Q’Zella Oliver Jeffus in Fort Worth, Texas. Her studio featured shiny black side-by-side Mason & Hamlin grand pianos, but people could not help noticing a smaller instrument off to one side, one that they did not recognize. In response to questions, Jeffus gave a brief introduction to the harpsichord and an impromptu performance of Mozart’s Alla Turca. It was many years before I learned that “Turca” was a staple of harpsichord recitals at the time, and even longer before I found out that Q’Zella’s instrument was a recent acquisition built by the noted instrument maker John Challis.

Years later, as a young man I had my first hands-on encounter with a harpsichord: William Byrd’s Earle of Salisbury: His Pavane and Galliard was in place on the rack. I was overwhelmed by both the music and the sound of the instrument, so much so that I could not stop playing it!

Such encounters were rare until 1982, when Walla Walla University, where I was teaching at the time, took delivery of a long-awaited powder blue William Dowd French double. Sitting at that keyboard was déjà vu, so exploring the technical and expressive potential of the instrument struck me as something I must do. I had no clue for what to call the six-minute piece that resulted from those efforts, but a perceptive organist friend who was the first to try it suggested William Dowd: His Bleu. I recognized the name immediately as “just right.”

His Bleu was selected as a finalist in the 1990 Aliénor Composition Competition Contest, and my colleague Dr. Kraig Scott performed it at the Southeastern Historic Keyboard Society (SEHKS) conclave in Augusta, Georgia. That event put me in touch with the wider harpsichord fraternity, spawning many new friendships and performances in the ensuing years. Larry Palmer went beyond performance by selecting William Dowd: His Bleu for publication as the centerfold in the February 1992 issue of The Diapason, a memorable tribute to Bill Dowd on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.

Other composition projects kept me away from the harpsichord during the 1990s, but in 1999, between larger works, I decided to write something just for fun. Trifles, a suite of seven miniatures, was born in short order, bridging a temporary move from Washington State to Denver, Colorado. History does repeat itself: Kraig Scott was the first performer of the piece that became another Aliénor finalist, and Larry Palmer played the 2004 SEHKS performance in Durham, North Carolina. Trifles has since been adopted by pianists and organists as well, becoming one of my most played compositions.

Fortunately for me, Palmer liked my music well enough to have commissioned and premiered my next four works for the instrument. Suite 3-D for harpsichord four-hands was premiered in 2002 at the Washington, D.C., house concert featuring Charles and Susan Mize’s new Richard Kingston “Millennium” harpsichord, with Palmer and Charles Mize at the keyboard. In 2003 the composer’s wife, violinist Kathleen Spring, joined Palmer for another house concert premiere, this time in Dallas, Texas: Images from Wallace Stevens for violin, harpsichord, and narrator. Hommages followed in 2006 as a commissioned work for Southern Methodist University’s harpsichord workshop (number 17) in Denver, Colorado.

In Memoriam Georgia O’Keeffe was first heard in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during July 2008. Béla Bagatelles (not a commissioned piece) consists of six short pieces, inspired by Bartók’s shorter piano pieces and violin duets. Another Aliénor finalist, the work received its premiere by Larry Palmer in Cincinnati, Ohio. Though I am not really a keyboardist, and I do not own a harpsichord, I continue to enjoy writing music for the instrument. I still think the harpsichord’s expressive capacity is underutilized!

Truly audience-friendly music

Glenn Spring’s beautiful music for harpsichord is all self-published in clear, readable sheet music, some of which features beautiful covers by his daughter, California artist Heidi Spring. 

• If one is a subscriber and a keeper of past issues, you will already have William Dowd: His Bleu in your February 1992 magazine. (The issue is also available in PDF format for subscribers at the website, www.thediapason.com.) The composer lists it at his website as a special order and does not quote a price. Warning: it is among the more technically difficult pieces.

• Trifles is “intended for the amateur harpsichordist” (I love to play them). One-page: “A Start;” two-pages: “Blues for Two;” “Burlesque;” “Cantilena” (if you are feeling in need of sheer beauty this one is highly recommended); one-page: “Habañerita” (great fun; I wish it were longer, but you can play it twice—or more); “Recitative;” which leads into the concluding one-page “Introspection,” $15.

• Suite 3-D (Denver, Dallas, DC) is for four-hands at one harpsichord. Five movements “covering a wide expressive range,” $20.

• Images from Wallace Stevens is scored for violin and harpsichord with narration. There are seven short movements each introduced by verses from the poet, $20.

• In Memoriam Georgia O’Keeffe: “Prelude: Ghost Riders;” “Toccata: Colors;” “Fugue-Fantasia: The Faraway Nearby” (cover by Heidi Spring), musical depictions of three of O’Keeffe’s most beloved paintings, $30.

• Bela Bagatelles, Spring captures the moods of Bartók. Fun to play, fun to hear, $15.

• Hommages, quoting the composer: 

With the passage of time I become ever more aware of how much I have learned from those who went before. Hommages was composed in recognition of my personal indebtedness to five among many composers whose works have contributed to the way I think as a composer. The five movements are not intended as emulations of the various composers’ styles, but rather as personal responses to the sound world of each.

“Fugue” (Schumann); “Teasing Song” (Bartok); “Le soir dans la ruelle” (Debussy); “Hang On!” (Stravinsky); and, finally, “Sehnsucht” (Longing)—a heart-wrenching evocation of Gustav Mahler. I had long wished for a work by the great German Romantic, and here is one in tribute to him. I think he would be deeply moved. It is difficult to play this piece without tears. Quite possibly the best bargain of the lot, $15. 

The composer’s directions on the list: all prices in US$ include shipping within the United States. Order via email: [email protected]. Just in case, his mailing address: 9050 E. Cherry Creek South Dr., Unit E, Denver, Colorado 80231.

Photo: Rancho di Chimayo, New Mexico, July 30, 2011: Clyde Putman, Larry Palmer, Kathleen Spring, and Glenn Spring

Celebrating Herbert Howells

Born on October 17, 1892, Herbert Howells lived until February 23, 1983. While he was seeking information needed to write his book on Domenico Scarlatti, Ralph Kirkpatrick found several Scarlattis listed in a Spanish telephone directory, phoned them, and discovered that they were, indeed, descendants of the great master. Imitating that search for knowledge, I found Howells’s address and phone number in the phone directory for greater London and made my telephone call to his Barnes home during a visit to the UK in 1974. I have often thought that Mrs. Howells, by this time hard of hearing, may have thought that I was Herbert’s biographer, Christopher Palmer, when she directed me to contact her husband in his studio at the Royal College of Music. I made an appointment for the next day, and, with the utmost delight, spent one of the most stimulating and memorable visits of a lifetime, one that initiated a foundation for several subsequent meetings, and ultimately resulted in my commissioning the Dallas Canticles for St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Dallas, Texas, the only set Howells composed for an American parish church. As our friendship blossomed he also transferred to me the copyright for his glorious Dallas “Magnificat” and “Nunc Dimittis,” and we had quite a prolific correspondence about the various legal matters involved.

One of my reasons for wanting to speak with Herbert was that he had never responded to my written questions about the persons named in each of the twelve pieces that comprise Lambert’s Clavichord, the first contemporary music for the instrument to be published in the twentieth century. I wrote about his generous answers in The Diapason issue of December 1974 (pages 7 and 8), but there have been some interesting addenda in various publications since that time, and what better way to celebrate the 127th occurrence of HH’s natal day than to share this information?

The first mention of Howells’s neo-Elizabethan keyboard works came during my very first year of harpsichord study with Isolde Ahlgrimm in Salzburg (1958–1959). In 1961 I acquired my first copy of Lambert’s Clavichord (Oxford University Press). It is a reprint in larger format of the original printing, which was a deluxe limited edition of 175 hard-bound copies autographed by Lambert (with a faint pencil signature below the photograph of Howells and the clavichord built by Lambert, who was a famous photographer, and autographed also by the composer, who numbered each volume and signed his name in bold black ink). I acquired my prized copy of this deluxe edition (number 8) at a London antiquarian bookshop in 1981. The hardbound volume is the perfect size for a clavichord’s music desk: 10 inches wide by 61⁄4 inches high, exactly one half the height of the later trade print edition.

Very briefly, the reason that Howells composed all twelve of the keyboard pieces was that, in gratitude for his being the next-to-youngest composer photographed and included in Lambert’s 1923 publication, Modern British Composers (from Elgar, born 1857, to Howells and Goossens, born 1893), he wrote the first piece (“Lambert’s Fireside”) while at the photographer’s home and decided to invite his fellow composers to create a similar gift for Lambert and his clavichords. All of them responded in the affirmative, but a year or more later, no other musical offering had been received, so Herbert decided to write the remaining eleven pieces himself. Each is dated, and each has a designated musical figure in the title (not necessarily one of the photographed composers).

All of the identities spoken to me by Dr. Howells are confirmed by the “other Palmer,” Christopher (1946–1995), who died at age 48, but left an amazingly large list of compositions and studies of musical figures. In his 1978 Novello small book, Herbert Howells: A Study, CP’s listings of the Lambert’s Clavichord titles agree with my 1974 verbatim ones from the composer himself, except for one: the dedicatee of “Sargent’s Fantastic Sprite.” Howells told me that it was meant for Sir Malcolm Sargent, the conductor; however, in Christopher’s copy of the score (as quoted in the Novello volume) Howells wrote: “There never was another Sargent save the painter.” So one might choose a favorite, or mention dual remembrance, since both the composer and author have passed on. I rather think the music could suggest the painter, but . . . who knows?

Music by Howells is never far from my various music desks, and much of the inspiration for this column was through a chance finding of a score that I had forgotten: Six Pieces from Lambert’s Clavichord, arranged for oboe and piano. The half of the collection chosen—“Lambert’s Fireside,” “Fellowes’s Delight,” “Hughes’s Ballet,” “My Lord Sandwich’s Dreame,” “De la Mare’s Pavane,” and “Sir Hugh’s Galliard”—are my favorites, too, and I hope to program them, using harpsichord, later during the 2020 season. (The pieces are published in one volume by Oxford University Press; the arrangements are by Patrick Shannon.) That these pieces were favorites of the composer is evident, both from his own mouth, and from yet another source, thanks to Christopher Palmer. In his very comprehensive book, Herbert Howells: A Centenary Celebration (London: Thames Publishing), I noticed on page 458 a listing of three arrangements for cello and piano from the RCM Library Howells manuscripts: “My Lord Sandwich’s Dream,” “Sir Hugh’s Galliard,” and “De la Mare’s Pavane”—it might lead one to make some transcriptions of one’s own, should any of the other movements be special favorites.

And finally, two suggestions for those of us who play the organ: a gentle, lovely two-page “Cradle Song,” Howells’s contribution to the Organists Charitable Trust Little Organ Book: eleven pieces for solo organ from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, selected and edited by Martin Neary, published by Novello (2010). And, reminiscent of his close friendship with Ralph Vaughan Williams, Howells’s Master Tallis’s Testament, another ravishingly lovely creation, and another indication of how comfortable he felt dealing with the harmonies of Elizabethan music.