He said, she said: A conversation with James & Marilyn Biery

Notes 1. Frank Rippl, “OHS 52nd National Convention, July 11–17, 2007, Central Indiana,” The Diapason, February 2008, vol. 99, no. 2, pp. 24–29.

Since the beginning of this century, the recital calendar of The Diapason has included numerous listings for Ken Cowan. A native of Thorold, Ontario, Canada, Cowan was first taught organ by his father, David Cowan; he subsequently studied with James Bigham, with John Weaver at the Curtis Institute of Music, and with Thomas Murray at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. He has held organist positions at St. Bartholomew’s, St. James Episcopal Church, and the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in New York City, and St. Clement’s Church in Philadelphia; during his college years he was on the roster of associate organists for the Wanamaker Grand Court organ in Philadelphia. He presently serves as Assistant Professor of Organ at Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton, New Jersey; Rider University has honored him with the 2008 Distinguished Teaching Award.
A featured artist at the 2004 AGO convention in Los Angeles and during the 2008 AGO convention in Minneapolis (as one of several players during a concert recorded for Pipedreams), Ken Cowan has also performed at many AGO regional conventions, as well as at conventions of the Organ Historical Society and the Royal Canadian College of Organists. His discography comprises numerous recordings (for the JAV label) on Skinner instruments, including The Art of the Symphonic Organist, recorded on the 1921 Skinner organ at the Parish Church of St. Luke, Evanston, Illinois. (Note: John Speller’s review of this recording in The Diapason praised Cowan’s choice of repertoire, demonstration of the organ’s colors, and skill with buildup and decrescendo, calling the disc “one of the finest I have heard in some time.” See The Diapason, August 2004, p. 14.) With Justin Bischof, he recorded Aaron David Miller’s Double Concerto for organ with the Zurich Symphony Orchestra, on the Kleuker organ in the Tonhalle in Zurich (Ethereal Recordings). Cowan’s repertoire is broad, but favors nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers, from Bossi to Liszt, Wagner to Widor, Dupré to Roger-Ducasse, and much in between. He is associated with transcriptions, yet these do not dominate either his recital programs or his recordings. As a performer he seems relaxed, taking any difficulties in stride. Ken Cowan is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists.

JR: Let’s talk about your DNA! Your father is an organist, and other grandparents were too, correct?
KC: Yes, two grandmothers and great-grandmother Cowan. Thurza Cowan was an organist, and I think she must have been pretty good too, because the repertoire that is still sitting around my house in Canada shows she played some really difficult things.

JR: Were those the days when you had to have a pumper?
KC: A little bit after that, I think it was. She played a Woodstock organ. I saw a picture of the old console, and it looks like a theatre organ console. But it would have been electrified, I think.

JR: And your grandmothers?
KC: My father’s mother and my mother’s mother both played, each as a local parish organist.

JR: Did your grandmother teach your father?
KC: No, actually; that’s not our family’s habit. My father studied with a local organist named George Hannahson, actually a very good player; the brothers Hannahson did a lot of the church music in the area. Except for the things that my dad showed me to get me started at the organ, I think everybody in my family who learned an instrument always studied with somebody outside the family.

JR: Were your first lessons with your father?
KC: He got me started with the instrument. He didn’t teach me piano, so we always had it in mind that I would eventually find an organ teacher outside of our house.

JR: Did you insist on organ lessons, or did he suggest you should take them?
KC: No, it was me. He insisted that I study the maximum amount of piano possible before I ever touched the organ. Ever since I was three years old, I would hang around the organ bench, and I knew what all the stops were. I knew the difference between a Lieblich flute and a Rohr flute when I was little—before I could play anything. And I was the token key-holder in the family—if the reeds needed to be tuned, I would be carted down to the church. The arrangement was that if I was well-behaved in church, he would play whatever my favorite organ tunes were before we would go home. I still remember that.

JR: So what were your favorite organ pieces when you were a wee lad?
KC: They were a little different from what they are now! (laughter) Probably mostly little songs that I knew how to sing at the time. Or wedding pieces and old campy hymns, I used to like those too—and I knew all the words. Somewhere I have a tape of myself singing along, I think—locked away! Anyway, I was fortunate that there was a really nice Casavant organ from the ’20s in the church where my father played, a three-manual organ, so it was great just to get to know registration on a nice instrument first. And we always had a lousy piano—which is still there, actually! So to have this really nice organ—I couldn’t resist but to learn how to play it—or try.

JR: How old were you when you started playing the organ?
KC: I knew how to play a hymn on the organ, but I really started to learn pieces around eighth grade, so twelve or thirteen. I knew how to play the piano pretty well by then. In fact, I got a lot more interested in piano after I realized how much I really liked playing the organ. I learned about some organ pieces that had been arranged for piano—I remember one was the Liszt B-A-C-H—I guess if you don’t realize that it’s a hard piece
. . . . So I improved a lot as a pianist after I decided I wanted to try to become as good an organist as I possibly could, and realized at that time, too, that piano was the key, at least for a lot of it. A couple years after that, studying some Bach and other things, I heard music of Dupré for the first time. So I went along for a while just learning all the pieces that made me think “oh, that’s a really neat piece!” It wasn’t the most logical progression, but it worked out all right.

JR: What was your first recital like?
KC: First recitals on the organ—I was 13 or 14. At that time it was mostly playing the Widor Toccata, the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor—I used to work on lots of Bach pieces when I was in high school, so I always programmed that. I could practice the same pieces quite a lot, unlike now where there are piles and piles of things to get through in a short amount of time. But at least when I began performing I was confident that “I’ve been playing this Bach piece for a few months, it’ll probably be all right.”

JR: What was your first church position?
KC: I was sort of the perpetual assistant organist! I worked that way alongside my dad for the last year or so of high school, so I guess outside of any kind of familial supervision was when I went to college. I was assistant at St. Clement’s Church—and that was being thrown into the deep end of the pool, because Peter Conte was the organist at that time and of course ran a pretty tight ship, and still does there. I stayed at St. Clement’s the whole time I was in college in Philadelphia, and worked for a couple years at St. Mary the Virgin, and then at St. James Madison Avenue, and then at St. Bartholomew’s.

JR: You had said that when you were first studying, you weren’t sure about a career. At what point did you know that this was going to be your life’s work?
KC: I think that when I went away to college I knew pretty well that music was going to be what I would do primarily. And I never had any doubt that certainly I’d always be involved in music in my life. But I guess I was brought up in a casual enough way that no one ever said “You must be a musician.” And there are plenty of other interesting things out there to do! So it was by the time I went away to Curtis for college. I was fortunate that they were willing to take me in, and it was a great experience. I’ve been fortunate, in every place and with everyone with whom I’ve studied—I really made some lucky choices.

JR: At this point, could you identify who your big influences are?
KC: I think now it’s sort of a conglomeration. But there’s no one that I’ve ever studied with who hasn’t been an influence, and recordings are very valuable too. I remember when I was in high school—even though it wasn’t a complete immersion in music like college, I remember clearly what I learned from James Bigham, who was my teacher at that time—a major influence and a masterful player and teacher. At Curtis, of course, I was studying with John Weaver, and he had a different approach to teaching and was demanding about what was to be expected week to week.
My experience at Curtis was great. I still remember bringing in—I think it was my second year there—the Liszt Ad nos, and I was trying to be conservative, in the sense of not using countless general pistons. At that time the organ at Curtis Hall had just twelve general pistons, so I learned it using only one level, and I thought, “well, that’s a bit of restraint here”—a mere twelve generals, with lots of divisionals. I finished playing through it, and we talked about the music, and John Weaver said, “Now, I just should tell you, that when you’re approaching the registration of a piece like this, you can’t always count on having a dozen general pistons. I just bet that through use of more divisional pistons, I could work out all the registrations for this piece with no compromise whatsoever, on six general pistons.” And the amazing thing is—that he could! He was really impressive in that way, because, having decades of touring experience, he’s mindful that there weren’t always multiple memory levels. So he was very encouraging about people not being a slave to a computer combination action. For example, if you hit a piston for a chorale prelude registration that had a flute here and a cornet there, you’d be asked—“Can’t you remember these stops? Why do you have to hit a piston?”
Then of course, Thomas Murray is sort of a wonder in his own way. I enjoy just watching him at an organ—how he approaches the instrument, how to choose registrations—musically and registrationally always doing the most with the least, and loving every minute of it. I think a lot of people associate him with “oh, and he hits 500 Swell pistons.” Actually he doesn’t; he uses the fewest number to get the greatest effect. I didn’t realize that until really watching.
Martin Jean began teaching at Yale the same year I began studying there, and he was a really interesting person to study with as well. I had lessons with him for a semester at Yale while Tom Murray was on sabbatical; in addition to a coaching here or there at other times, students in the Yale department were free to coach with faculty outside of their own studio. Martin was full of curiosity about compositions and their possible interpretations, so I would always leave lessons with him pondering many possibilities. And I remember along the way I had a few lessons with McNeil Robinson, and he, in terms of how to learn a piece of music in a really thorough way, is just masterful. But you don’t have to study with someone for five years to get something immensely valuable, that you’ll never forget.

JR: Were you fairly confident with your registration ability before you studied with John Weaver and Tom Murray?
KC: I guess I was. Since I was a little kid I was fascinated with how stops were built, what the different ones did, the difference between the various colors, and so on. And there were enough nice instruments around that I pretty much understood how that worked—also, my dad was good at registration himself; that helped. If you’re around someone just an hour a week, that’s different than being around somebody all the time—as an aside, you can at any point say, “hey, how come you would do this, as opposed to something else?” And then Jim Bigham, with whom I studied in high school, just has an amazing imagination for registration and a huge instrument at Holy Trinity Lutheran; that was another great stroke of good fortune for me.

JR: When you studied with John Weaver and Tom Murray, did you work more on interpretation, or did they spend a lot of time with registration?
KC: A little of everything. Tom Murray in particular is very attentive to registration; even if he doesn’t change something radically, he is very sensitive to the finest details. Even if you can row your own boat to start with, I’d say to study with Weaver is to learn his system of managing a big instrument. He’s quite amazing in that he can register an entire recital in a couple of hours, and it will sound as though he’s played the organ for a long time, just because he’s so clear about exactly what he’s going to do at every point in a piece. Tom Murray is known as this “orchestralist,” who gives each color in an instrument its best opportunity to shine, so just to watch him do what he does is really an education!

JR: At Curtis, you were required to play pieces from memory. How many pieces have you memorized?
KC: Oh, probably hundreds. I think from year to year there are pieces—especially pieces that I learned when I was in high school—that I find I can usually play without really thinking about it much at all. From year to year I’ll carry around a few recital programs’ worth of repertoire, at any given time, and I try to keep on expanding that. During school semester, for example, there’s just not time to practice the number of hours a day that I’d love to, so I’ll always practice technical things on the piano, even if I don’t touch an organ. I find that to maintain a few hours of music is manageable, but it takes a lot more time to be constantly learning dozens of pieces.

JR: Do you have some favorite pieces? Desert island pieces?
KC: I’ve always loved Bach, and I think as is the case with so many people I ended up playing the organ because of the music of Bach. As things have gone, I’ve gotten into a lot of repertoire that is far from Bach—I’ve always loved symphonic organs, orchestral transcriptions and that sort of thing. But I think I could do just fine with some of the great works by Bach.
Now as far as what’s fun to play in a concert, on, say, a particular type of organ—for Skinner organs, they’re great at something English Romantic; the Willan Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue is a fun piece to play because it relies quite a lot on the interpreter, as does Liszt, Reubke, Reger—if you hear three people play the same piece by Liszt, or Reger, or Reubke, it will sound completely different, as I think it should.
Many people who play those pieces think that it couldn’t possibly be done any other way than their own, because they require a very strong interpretive perspective, but in reality there are of course many possible interpretations. I love playing transcriptions, because on an American symphonic organ, you really push the instrument to the edge of what it’s able to do, and that’s always kind of fun. And historically it’s been controversial because for much of the twentieth century the attitude of most organists was “why would you do such a thing? Go learn some more legitimate organ pieces!”

JR: It’s nice stuff!
KC: Yes, there are so many great pieces that weren’t originally composed for the organ. I think once you do learn most of the standard organ repertoire, it’s fun to look beyond it a little bit and see how an instrument can work at interpreting something else. I have to confess, too, that I started listening to records of transcriptions when I was in high school. I have old recordings by George Thalben-Ball, for example, and I still remember getting two recordings of transcriptions by Tom Murray and Thomas Trotter, I think both made in the ’80s, and so I thought, “Wow! That instrument sounds great—and very expressive. Wouldn’t it be fun to learn how to do that?”
Anybody who gets into this kind of orchestral stuff might be pigeon-holed with “Oh, all he plays is Wagner,” or, “All he plays are transcriptions,” which of course I don’t think is true of anybody who does. One of the keys to having success with transcriptions, though, is to know when it’s a good idea not to play something, because one of the pitfalls about the organ is you cannot bring exactly the same program to every instrument, or else you’ll win some and lose some. I find as with some of the big Romantic works, a transcription can sound great on an ideal instrument and it can sound like a dismal failure on the wrong instrument. I hope to usually be a good judge of when’s the time, and when’s not the time, to play a particular part of the repertoire.

JR: How about the future of this instrument with young people?
KC: I’m always glad when I know someone is bringing kids to a recital. And in a way, it’s a good reason to think about programming very carefully. Every once in a while I’ll play a program that might get a little too—mature for the newcomer.
If I were only playing for myself, I could go on for days listening to very intense-sounding organ music. But I’m not just playing for me; though I guess some people would say you should always be playing as though no one else is there—but someone else IS there. (laughter) So I am usually quite cognizant of the fact that there may be some young person there who’s never heard an organ recital before.

JR: Do you ever program a specific piece with children in mind?
KC: If I know they’re going to be there, yes. Things that are very effective with kids are pieces that are programmatic and tell a story, or pieces that really are “visual” in how the instrument is used. Kids immediately get a kick out of the fact that there are all these different colors and that wow, the organist plays with his feet, and beyond that things like Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre are great for kids, because they understand—they can tell what’s going on in the story as it’s going along. Of course, that’s a transcription, but there’s George Akerley’s A Sweet for Mother Goose nursery rhyme suite—that would be just the thing. I’ve heard some people do things like Carnival of the Animals and so on—that’s another work that’s not originally an organ piece, but can certainly get children’s interest in the instrument. And they all love the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor!

JR: How do you plan a program? Fast–slow, or loud–soft, or keys?
KC: Having interesting key relationships can be nice, particularly if you segue from one piece to the next. More importantly, just not flogging people with the same kind of piece over and over again is a good rule of thumb. For example, I wouldn’t play half a program of, say, a prelude and fugue by Bach, followed by a preludium by Buxtehude followed by Prelude and Fugue on the Name of BACH, and so on—but contrasting forms, contrasting styles. I’ve never been much into the philosophy that “we should always go in chronological order.” It’s more a question of how can you give a good psychological flow to it? I guess that’s the right way to describe it. And it’s different on recordings, too. I think how you listen to a recording is a little different. In a concert, you can go from fast and furious to very intimate, to scherzo, back to this, back to that. On a record, if you do exactly the same thing, you end up with people constantly adjusting the volume control.
Programming is a constant challenge. And then the trap is, when you find a combination of things that you think works really well, to then be able to get out of it. I remember reading an article years ago about Glenn Gould’s thoughts on why he stopped playing concerts; he said he was feeling that sometimes he settled in on the same small number of pieces, the philosophy being, “well, the Beethoven worked in Toronto, it’ll probably work in New York, too, so I’ll play it again!” And again, and again—and so on it goes. Trying something new, even if it means going out on a limb, is a good idea, I think.

JR: You’ve long been an Organ Historical Society convention favorite. How did that get started?
KC: Good fortune, I guess! When I was working at St. Clement’s in Philadelphia, I think it was 1996 the OHS had their convention in Philadelphia; at that time we were doing an Evensong at St. Clement’s as part of the convention, and they wanted Peter to play something, and he was already going to play a recital at the Wanamaker Store, so he said, “I’ll play the prelude, and why don’t you have my assistant play a short program after the Evensong?” I think there was some trepidation at first; “who is this guy?” I guess they liked it. And one thing led to another there; I’ve been back several times since.

JR: Yes, including in 2007 with your wife! Tell me about her, and how you cooked up this scheme.
KC: We met in graduate school; she went to Yale too. While we were students there, I had always liked an old recording I had of Jascha Heifetz and Richard Elsasser playing the Vitali Chaconne, as arranged by Leopold Auer. So on one of JAV’s Skinner series recordings, Joe Vitacco asked me to go out to Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian in Detroit, and I checked out the organ and it’s a great instrument—huge sound, and very mellow sound. I thought this would be a good accompanying organ, and that it would be neat to try and do a violin piece. So I asked Lisa to come along then, and that was the beginning of playing together. In the last seven or eight years, we’ve been asked to play duo programs together, so we’ve always been on the lookout for good repertoire that has been written for violin and organ, and things that transcribe well. We’ll often do an early piece, maybe something that’s contemporary written for those instruments; from the Romantic period, Rheinberger wrote some violin and organ works. I’ll often transcribe a concerto accompaniment for the end, and do a violin concerto as a violin and organ piece. And then we’ll usually do a solo piece each, too.

JR: The review of the OHS convention in the February 2008 issue of The Diapason mentions Lisa playing behind a screen.1
KC: We did the Karg-Elert Fugue, Canzona and Epilogue, for organ and violin, and a quartet of women’s voices is included at the end. I think Karg-Elert may have started this tradition himself, but there’s been a long practice of putting the violinist and the singers either offstage or in the Swell box. And at this particular church it worked, because you could open the door behind the Swell box and there was a hallway in behind. So everyone crammed in behind the chamber and you could have this diminuendo to nothing at the end. It was very unexpected color coming out of the organ chambers suddenly! It was a lot of fun, and everyone was a very good sport about the whole thing. The instrument was a Kimball organ, and certainly played repertoire well, but maybe accompanied even better. So it was nice to show that side of things.

JR: At the AGO convention in Minneapolis you played some new works. Do you play new pieces from memory?
KC: Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. One of the things I’ve been working on this week is memorizing them. I find if I have a deadline, it doesn’t take long to get things like that learned. I probably spent a week or so learning each of the preludes and fugues. But then the question is—what do you want to do with it? There’s no question that I play a piece better after a year than after a week. So the rest of the time is spent just trying to refine things and get a clear interpretation, especially with brand-new pieces. The composer Henry Martin is a pianist and is probably known for composing 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano, and he teaches jazz and music theory at Rutgers, Newark. The reason for the commission was that Michael Barone really liked his piano pieces, and so commissioned him to write a couple for organ. Not knowing what his musical taste is—of course, when you learn a piece like that, I found I was initially sort of cautious in an interpretive sense—if it’s not written in the score, well, is it OK to do something? Well, he has a great imagination, and is a good sport about everything. That was actually nice to discover. Interpretive freedom is good! So I really liked them—they’re difficult, but I think will make nice pieces.

JR: Teaching versus performing—do you enjoy the balance that you have right now?
KC: Absolutely! I think it would probably be hard for me to only teach, because you end up living musically only through your students, instead of being able to do something yourself—so you need an outlet. On the other hand, it’s great to work with other people—it’s so satisfying and exciting when students work very hard and get a lot better, and you can help them along their way. This year, it was only the second time in recent memory that I didn’t play Easter Sunday some place. So before cooking dinner for family, I went to Trinity Church where two of my students play, and I had a better time listening to them accompany the Easter service than I would have if I’d done it myself! I’ve always been interested in teaching, so I have no regrets there at all.

JR: Tell us about your position at Westminster. Do you teach service playing, or does your teaching concentrate just on recital literature?
KC: Mostly my colleagues Alan Morrison, Matthew Lewis, and I end up concentrating on creating some kind of structured program of study for each student. I do at times make students learn hymns and accompaniments as part of their lessons. I find that you can teach somebody about as much about creative possibilities at the organ through hymns and accompaniments, at least from a registration point of view, as from anything else, because so often with a lot of the primary parts of the repertoire—Bach, Franck, Vierne, and so forth—you frequently follow convention or instructions for registration; in service playing you have a blank slate, and can really get acquainted with the organ in a more individualistic way.
The school’s strong emphasis on choral training provides a great background for developing graduates who can become very effective church musicians. There are classes in improvisation, courses in organ literature, there’s a class on accompanying at the organ, which is primarily a service playing course. Then the sacred music department offers courses on the history of church music, theology, choral pedagogy and management of programs, worship planning, and congregational song. A broad range of guest lecturers in the organ and sacred music departments address other specific topics. It could be a masterclass on organ playing or literature on some occasions, or frequently guest perspectives on the general field of church music in America.

JR: Do you see any consistent patterns of problems among your students?
KC: Nothing that applies to everybody. In fact, that’s one of the fun challenges of teaching—it’s all problem solving, but everybody’s a different case. For example, some students don’t learn pedal technique in a structured way, and I’m surprised that students coming in at the graduate level sometimes don’t understand very much about registration—that can be a big project. But that’s certainly not unique to everybody; some of them are great at that. Nuanced registration is a hard thing to teach in a short time. And if you encounter people who are trained to do only one thing in a particular situation, it can be a real challenge to make them more curious and sensitive to the precise character of each stop or chorus on different instruments, and how they combine with others. Then comes the issue of how to control the instrument in the context of a complex piece if they’ve never been trained to manage a console with a combination action.

JR: Do you have responsibilities at Westminster besides teaching?
KC: I also am the coordinator of the organ and sacred music program. That involves plenty of meetings, planning, and discussions with other faculty about how to proceed with programs and curriculum. In the past year we have revised the entire curriculum in organ and in sacred music. This year began the implementation of those revisions, which is a big undertaking, but a necessary step to try to keep the program from getting behind the times. Of course, I’m not doing that on my own, but I certainly have to stay involved with how things develop. And then another task for sacred music at Westminster will be to find a faculty member to succeed Robin Leaver, who just retired. Hopefully we’ll soon be looking for the next teacher of sacred music there, but in the current economic climate, universities can be tentative about filling vacancies. Always something, you know! It’s the sort of place where I can stay there until ten o’clock every night and have plenty more to greet me the next morning.

JR: Are you ever able to go hear other organists or other concerts?
KC: Here and there. There’s not as much time as I’d like there to be, because I’m often away weekends, when a lot of great concerts happen. Going to conventions and so forth, I can hear a lot of things in a short amount of time, just to keep track of who’s doing what. And then the nice thing living between New York and Philadelphia is oftentimes there will be good concerts on week nights. Plus, Princeton has some really good music series right in town. So whenever possible, I attend performances.

JR: Do you have any big projects planned?
KC: For Westminster, keeping the department growing stronger is a priority. As far as playing goes, it’s asking myself, what do I want to play now that I haven’t played before? And I’ve got lined up some recordings that I’ve been promising to make and that I haven’t gotten around to yet, so I’ll just keep chipping away at them. A new CD on the big Schoenstein organ at First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, was just released this February on the Raven label. That disc has German Romantic repertoire (Reger, Reubke, Karg-Elert) and a transcription of the Liszt Mephisto Waltz #1. But otherwise it’s a question of just balancing responsibilities out—and finding some time for fun, too.

JR: Thank you so much, Ken!

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of THE DIAPASON.

Back in 1915, for the Panama-California Exposition, John D. Spreckels dedicated an organ pavilion in Balboa Park to “the peoples of all the world.” The post of Civic Organist of San Diego was first held by British-born Dr. Humphrey John Stewart (one of the founders of the American Guild of Organists), who served from 1917-1932. Stewart’s latest successor is Dr. Carol Williams, also British-born--and the first woman to be appointed to the post. Trained both in the UK and the USA--at London’s Royal Academy of Music, Yale University, and the Manhattan School of Music--Carol’s career today is anchored by her Civic Organist activities, but not limited by them. She has concertized throughout Europe, North America, and Asia, and continues her musical travels when possible. She has recorded a video and twelve CDs (details are available from her website, www.melcot.com). Carol Williams is represented in the USA by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists, and in the UK by PVA Management.

Carol traveled to Illinois in March, and we had the opportunity to meet with her as she was preparing for a concert at Chicago’s St. Vincent de Paul Church, home of a 1901 Lyon-Healy organ that is undergoing restoration.

JR: Carol, I’m curious about your theatre organ background--you said you grew up playing theatre organ. Did you start with piano lessons?

CW:  Yes, that’s right. I started piano at age 5; I read music before I could read. There were electronic organs in the family, Hammonds, Lowreys--my aunt had a Hammond--and it just naturally progressed from having a Hammond, then to hearing a theatre organ.  I started theatre organ playing when I was about 13 or 14, and all the way through I continued a very strict piano training. I didn’t start classical organ until I was 17. But it was a natural progression.

JR: By the time you started classical organ, were you playing in theatres?

CW: I was doing concerts, yes, playing some theatre organs. But there were very few theatre organs left in their original surroundings; some had been moved into concert halls in England. I guess I started playing late since I didn’t sing in a boys choir, because I was a girl! The natural progression for the cathedral organist was you sang in the choir and then you naturally moved over--this didn’t happen to me, I just moved over. I heard Carlo Curley at the Alexandra Palace, and that was a turning point, because I thought, “this is really exciting!”

JR: Was it what he played, or how he played it, or the instrument?

CW: Everything! The Father Willis there was not working and there were electronic organs on stage and there were, I think, three or four organists. He was chauffered in, in a white Cadillac, I remember that. And Virgil Fox was there--he didn’t play; he stood out--that’s the closest I got to him. I was seventeen; I just clicked--”that’s my instrument!” I really do see myself as a concert organist. I enjoy playing light music, and it all feeds me, in the sense of keeping me alive. But I don’t see myself as a theatre organist. I enjoy playing it, and you have to be able to play light music in the park; you can’t just play a straight Buxtehude-Bach program--it would just go down like a lead balloon.

JR: I’ve been fascinated by your programming choices and liking them, because I’ve seen how audiences react to a varied program.

CW:  A lot of people find it hard to go into a church--I mean, they don’t see it as a concert venue. That’s why the park is great, because there are no “sacred” connotations, so you can play whatever you like. You can’t always do that in a church--you’ve got to show some respect. But you’ve got to get them in there, you’ve got to get them to stay, and you’ve got to get them to go again. So, you must play what they want to hear.

JR: Did you actually have theatre organ training? It’s definitely a different style of playing and registration. And did you learn how to create theatre arrangements, with the little fill-ins after a bit of melody?

CW: A lot of theatre organ arrangements are done from piano score and piano conductor score. I had two theatre organ teachers. Vic Hammett, who was a really fine artist, had so many innovative ideas, and my second teacher  was Eric Spruce, who was organist at the Empire Leicester Square in London--a very famous venue. They both knew what was entailed for playing theatre organ programs. That was alongside my classical organ training, so they were both feeding each other. It’s musicianship--you listen to orchestral scores, and then sometimes you might take a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical and you carve out your own ideas. You just let the music flow through you. But the training really helps. You work a lot from piano scores and novelty numbers--Zez Confrey . . .

JR: Kitten on the Keys!

CW: Beautiful stuff! James P. Johnson, Scott Joplin, they’re all quite delightful. They work well on a classical program, too. I love playing them!

JR: You play it very well. Some people just can’t make it work and you do.

CW: I like jazz. I think it should be like a soufflé, very light--and the pedal should be more 8-footish than 16 foot, so it really is more light, like a double bass plucking away. It shouldn’t be heavy. If you play Lefébure-Wély, this approach really helps, because that music is very flamboyant--it shouldn’t be stiff and stodgy.

JR: There are people who look down their nose at Lefébure-Wély.

CW: But he was an eminent musician. He was organist at Saint-Sulpice and he was one of Cavaillé-Coll’s key players. There is a funeral march by him, his opus 122, it’s some lovely music--not all oom-pah, oom-pah.

JR: You had so much training in England, then you came to the United States and you earned a DMA here. Why did you feel the need for training in America after such a good solid grounding in the UK?

CW: Well, I came to the States in ‘94, and I did a series of concerts. I really liked it out here. I went back and I happened across a CD of Thomas Murray--The Transcriber’s Art--and I just fell in love with that. You can never learn enough. I remember one teacher saying to me, “you should always remain a student,” always willing to learn. It just seemed right to come out here and do an artist’s diploma with Tom Murray, so I did. And I felt I really should do that DMA--you know, it’s worth having. I admire McNeil Robinson greatly; he’s a tremendous teacher. I enjoyed the scholarly aspect behind it; I did my thesis on 19th-century concert organs in England. The DMA at Manhattan School of Music is fairly performance based, which is me. I didn’t want to spend my time with textbooks and not play the organ. I wanted to play. So it worked out well. And for remaining in this country, I think a DMA really probably does help.

JR: Do you hope to teach some day, or just keep playing? 

CW: I think keep playing. It’s hard for me to take on a series of students because I’m traveling a fair amount and it’s not fair. At this stage I just want to play.

JR: But you did have one church job when you were in New York.

CW: Yes, I was an assistant organist at Garden City Cathedral, and that was good fun; I enjoyed the work. But doing that job, I realized that’s not what I want to do, because I didn’t want to immerse myself in conducting a choir, playing anthems--it just wasn’t me. But it fed me musically. While doing study at Yale, I was organist at Yale University Chapel; that was a good position. But from doing something, you learn something: that you don’t want to do it (if you follow me!).

JR: You seem to have a lot of fun with the Spreckels Pavilion concerts, including dressing up for them. You’ve got your Mexican dress for Cinco de Mayo, and if it’s a sunny day you have sunglasses--have you had to make any wardrobe investments just for that job?

 CW: Yes. A lot of warm stuff! (chuckles)

JR: Really? San Diego is warm!

CW: The building faces north, and it is so cold there this time of year. Actually they’ve just had a heat wave there this week. Yesterday it was in the 90s; this time of year, from October-November-December-January-February, and especially now, February-March, it’s the worst season. So the audience is in the sunshine, but you’re in the cold. And the organ is outside, the console is on the platform, and it kicks up a wind. It is the coldest place I have ever played! I remember Robert Plimpton saying to me, “You’re going to be cold.” I know English cathedrals--how could anything be as cold as an English cathedral? Well, he was absolutely right! I have a lot of silk things, underwear and stuff, layers--I wear a hat and warm coat. What I did start doing is going to the gym a lot, so I work out and that has helped me enormously--just keeping fit. Getting fit, I should say!

JR: What type of exercise do you do?

CW: Pilates and just general workouts--Pilates is really good for an organist, because of the neck--sitting at the organ, especially practicing under a lot of pressure, your neck is vulnerable. I’ve had serious neck problems, actually, and Pilates just strengthens your whole core. It makes you strong, and is well worth it.

JR: How about your shoes? I’ve also noticed that you don’t wear the standard organ shoes like a lot of us do. You’ve found shoes you can manage in?

CW: Yes. I think it’s personal. These are ballet shoes--and the sole is suede, so I can feel the pedals. And I have the heel made up so it’s not too flat. People have criticized them, but they work for me. Everybody’s feet are different. I have a very high arch, so I can’t wear a lot of flat shoes. But these work perfectly for me; other shoes don’t. I find them too solid. I wouldn’t feel supple--I want to feel like a dancer when I play--to feel that your feet are as nimble as your hands. If they’re solid, then it just doesn’t work. But I get a lot of shoes--different colors, too.

JR: Since you’ve had formal training in the UK and here, is the approach to playing any different? Would you say that there are different “schools” between the two countries?

CW: Yes. We have bigger acoustics in England. A lot of the cathedrals have tremendous resonance. A lot of the buildings over here do not have big resonance. One can play faster in dry acoustics; you go back home to England, or France, and you can’t do the same thing.  You play at St. Sulpice, you’ve got to really listen to that organ or it’s like having an argument with somebody and the organ would win. You’ve really got to listen to the instrument.

Each country, each acoustic, the voicing of each organ will bring out a different interpretation; you’ve got to be flexible.

JR: You clearly thrive on travel. Do you have an approach when you come to a new place and you have to learn the organ fast, because you’ve only got so many hours before that concert starts?

CW: It initially starts with them sending you a specification, getting that through the management. That gives you some idea of what you’re dealing with.  But it’s only something on paper. It’s nice to have two days if it’s possible--it should be possible, yet in England, many places, at cathedrals, they’d just give you a couple of hours. And it’s not fair; you barely get through a program, registering; it’s no way for musicians to work. You need that time to register, you need that time to savor the sounds, keep playing it through, always changing sounds--you know, change your balances. It takes a long time! I don’t like to work with my back against the wall because I don’t think I give my best.  I’d like to have two days if I could with an instrument.

JR: And the specification is just the starting point; you don’t know what the organ really sounds like or how responsive it is.

CW: Some of the big organs in this country with a big acoustic may have an action that is very light, and this can be a problem. Playing somewhere like St. Sulpice, the action is heavy but this can be very helpful with a large acoustic as this then allows the music to really make sense in the building.

JR: Are you saying that a heavier action works like a brake?

CW: It helps you. It makes you then appreciate what you’re dealing with: a big, big animal, a big friend. You’ve got to listen to it breathe; and you can’t do that at breakneck speed. Like the organ here: it’s got a big acoustic, the action is nice, but it’s light. You’ve got to switch off and put your ears in the building and listen to it as you play.

JR: About your Spreckels position--when you heard about it, what was it that made you think, “you know, I’d like to apply for that”?

CW: (chuckling) I saw it in The Diapason.

JR: Really!

CW: I did, yes. I remember reading it in The Diapason and I thought, “now that is an interesting position and that’s a position I know I could do,” because it was performance all the time. I always had in the back of my mind if there’s ever any job I wanted, it would be to be a civic organist--Lemare and people like that; his autobiography is fascinating, and the programs he played. I knew that would be me. So I applied. They had many applications--I understand about 100 applications--they narrowed it down to five, and the five were invited to give a Sunday afternoon concert. And I did; I did my best show, I thought. I loved the atmosphere because the audiences there are the general public, because it’s right in the middle of the park, it’s not far from the zoo, and there’s a museum of art, there’s all the big museums there. It’s a beautiful environment--there are about a thousand people there every Sunday afternoon. And I played a concert and I just clicked with the venue, I thought. Because you’re not limited as to what you can play, you can play what you want, within reason, on a big 73-rank Austin organ. And the organ itself is very versatile; it’s basically a good concert organ--plays the main repertoire incredibly well, and transcriptions. But it’s also got a tibia rank, so it plays theatre organ music well, and if you use the orchestral reeds and the couplers and the strings, you can get a good Wurlitzer sound from it. So it’s very versatile and it suits me, because I like to play all types of music. The organ and I, we’re a good marriage, I think.

JR: Do you remember what you played on your audition concert that sealed the deal for you?

CW: Well, I didn’t know for a while afterwards--not knowing is worse than anything! I played from Marchand right through to the Beatles, I remember. I just went the whole spectrum: Widor; Reger; as I said, the Beatles; Bach; a varied program.

The people there, they want to hear all types of music. The concerts are free; the organ was given by John D. Spreckels. And part of the deed was that the concerts have to be free. And I think it’s the hardest audience to play to, because  you get a lot of people who wander by, sit down, and the only way you can keep them there is if you play things that they want to hear, and in a way that they find exciting. If somebody’s paid 30 or 40 dollars for a concert, they’re going to sit right to the end. But if it’s free, they’ll go to another museum. So it’s hard. You’ve really got to connect with them--tell them about the organ, tell them about the music. You mustn’t be stuffy, play things that maybe two people might want to hear. With maybe 1000 people, you’ve got to try and connect with those thousand people. For the Monday night festival concerts we average 2500 people, and then on opening and closing nights we get about 4000. I shared a concert with Joshua Rifkin--I did the first half, he did the second half. He did beautiful ragtime; oh, it was fabulous! And then we did some duets at the end. We had 4000 people! It really was magic.

JR: Did you do Joplin duets with Rifkin?

CW: Yes. Maple Leaf Rag.

JR: You’ve recorded that already on your own.

CW: Yes--I love ragtime!

JR: Duets with Rifkin! He started the whole ragtime revival.

CW: Yes, he did. We owe the revival to him. He has exquisite playing, and it suits the tasteful construction of the music; they work well together. And he’s a great man, too; he’s a lot of fun.

JR: You’ve already talked about one occupational hazard at Spreckels, and that’s the cold. What about in summer? Does it get impossibly hot?

CW: It does get hot. We sometimes have the hot weather from the desert, and that’s what really fueled the fire in October. And it’s a dry, hot wind; it’s unbearable. As soon as you raise that big door on the organ, you suffer; so does everybody. It seems to suck out something from the atmosphere and the tuning unfortunately goes; there’s nothing you can do about that. But the Monday night festival concerts, because they’re at night, don’t have that problem so much. Sometimes you get an atmosphere problem, with moisture in the air, during late August and it can be very damp at night. That’s a problem; the keys get wet and the bench is wet; these are things you have to deal with.

Last year I shared a concert with Hector Olivera. He brought the Roland Atelier. We did the Guilmant First Symphony--he did the orchestra, and I did the solo organ. It was fabulous, absolutely fabulous. As we got to the second page of the Guilmant, I saw the biggest bug on the pedals! And I looked down and thought, “oh, no!” I didn’t have much to do that page, and I jumped off the bench. Lyle Blackinton, the organ curator, removed the bug; Hector looked at me, dazed, like “we haven’t finished, we’ve only just started,” and I jumped back on. The bug was crawling away--it was huge! I was terrified. We have these bug problems and I tell women not to use hair spray or anything like that. There are certain things that you cannot do!

JR: Does the Spreckels program have an endowment that funds the concerts?

CW: My position is two separate positions, actually. I’m the civic organist for the city, and then separately I’m the artistic director for the Spreckels Organ Society. And they put on the summer festival. They work on funding and donations and that’s a lot of work. From that we can put on concerts and pay artists to come and play. But it’s a lot of work because we can’t charge for programs, so it has to be done with donation. Next year is the 90th year with the instrument--she started life December 31st, 1914, so next season, the official 90th birthday, will be a very special year. For the opening concert we’re going to have the three civic organists--Jared Jacobsen, Robert Plimpton, and myself--they’ll call us the Three Tenors of the organ world!

This year’s an international festival; we have organists coming from Poland, Australia, France, Germany, and they’re going to be playing some music from their own countries. So that’s the flavor for this year. Next year will be very much linked with the celebration of the organ. So programs must have a connection with the instrument and the city. I have to say, it is a lot of work planning a festival.

This year, closing night, we are doing a Lloyd Webber Spectacular--including  artists in costumes. I’m playing the accompaniments to Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, etc. After a very serious festival and after a lot of serious organ music, I think it’s good that you have something that’s completely different, and this will bring in a different audience. Otherwise, you keep attracting the same audience, the same organ enthusiasts. So I’m always looking for something different each year that’s going to have a different appeal. I am also going to play some of Lloyd Webber’s father’s music--his father, W.S. Lloyd Webber, was an eminent musician.

JR: The Spreckels website shows pictures that look especially delightful, from programs where you were accompanying young people playing other instruments. That looked like so much fun!

CW: It was good. The concert was with children--”Music with children 2003”--and it’s getting young people involved, and not just organists. I’ve got a singer who’s actually going to be with me opening night--eleven years old and he has a voice that’s just amazing. His name is Daniel Myers.

JR: Is it a boychoir voice?

CW: He’s a boy soprano, but his voice hasn’t broken yet. It’s got power behind it. The director of the San Diego Children’s Choir, Dr. Garry Froese, recommended this youngster--said he wanted to sing Granada. I thought, singing Granada? But I couldn’t believe it when I heard him. Goodness me, the power behind it! So he’s going to be with me opening night.

We do something for children that’s important. That’s for the people of San Diego, that the instrument is used for really good things. I don’t mind if kids play violin, or sing, or whatever--they get a chance to play for a thousand people. And they love it!

JR: When you’re in San Diego, you’re playing at the pavilion. Do you do your practicing there, or how do you manage? Do you have an instrument of some sort at home?

CW:  I have a Rodgers at home. But I actually like going into the park early in the mornings to do practice, because it’s so quiet. I like working with the organ when there’s nobody around, telephones not around. I turn my cell phone off--I know I shouldn’t do that, but I just like to be left alone sometimes. Just get into the music. And there’s a piano in the pavilion, and the building’s very quiet. It’s very peaceful, so I can really get into my work. I make sure that I do so much practicing, then I will put on the computer and sort out the e-mails. I’m really disciplined about that. You can get so stuck into paperwork and e-mails and that; practice comes first for me! If people get in the way of my practicing, I can be very difficult. I mean, I’ve got to practice--that’s what I’m supposed to do! If you get in the way of that, then you’re not going to be performing so well. So that’s definitely first on the list every day.

JR: How much do you practice?

CW: At least three hours a day. I’m happy when I can do five, or when I’m traveling and working with new instruments, it can be up to eight hours a day. It’s a different type of work, getting used to a new organ.

JR: Let me ask you one last question. Where do you go from here?

CW: I love being busy, I love traveling, I love playing. The San Diego position I very much enjoy because you’re getting through to new people all the time. People come there specifically to hear that organ; people come from all over the world to hear it. It’s really refreshing to hear that. Just doing more and more recording; I love French organ music, I want to do some more recording of French organ music. Just keep busy--I’ve hardly started!

JR: Thank you so much.

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of The Diapason.

Christopher Houlihan may very well be the youngest organist ever interviewed by The Diapason. A Connecticut native, Houlihan—sometimes known as “Houli”—made his debut album at 19 (a recording of the Vierne Second Symphony, made before he went to France in his junior year; see the review by David Wagner in The Diapaso, January 2009, pp. 19–20). His second recording (Joys, Mournings, and Battles, Towerhill Recordings) was recently released—a significant achievement for any artist, but all the more amazing given his youth. Houlihan, who placed first in the High School Division of the Albert Schweitzer Organ Competition (see David Spicer, “Albert Schweitzer Organ Competition 2003,” The Diapason, November 2003, p. 17), is a graduate of Trinity College, where he studied with John Rose; during his senior year he made his orchestral debut with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, performing Barber’s Toccata Festiva. Rose had insisted that Houlihan pursue some study with a different teacher, so during his junior year Houlihan studied with Jean-Baptiste Robin at the conservatory in Versailles, where he earned the French equivalent of an artist’s diploma. He also served as assistant musician at the American Cathedral in Paris, under Edward Tipton, working as choral accompanist and directing two children’s choirs. One Sunday when Tipton was away and Houlihan was to serve as both organist and choir director, the cathedral received a few hours’ advance notice that the President and First Lady of the United States, Mr. and Mrs. George W. Bush, would attend.
Houlihan’s first teacher, John Rose, described meeting the youngster prior to playing a recital—the young man and other family members came an hour early to get a bird’s-eye-view seat, in order to see the console and player up close. This initial meeting led to lessons with Rose at Trinity College, and subsequently to Houlihan’s matriculating there. Rose notes that one of Houlihan’s qualities is the ability to generate excitement about the organ and its music, to be able to communicate the music and his passion for it to an audience, and credits some of this to Houlihan’s technical mastery of rhythm and accent in way that makes the music “electrifying.” Rose feels that Houlihan’s “thirst for knowledge and learning” lead him to be “well informed about various performance practices,” yet realizing “the importance of bringing his own ideas and a fresh outlook to his interpretations. He also understands (and enjoys) the need to adapt his ideas uniquely, as needed, from one organ to the next.”
Christopher Houlihan’s fans are of all ages and include an 85-year-old retired math teacher at Trinity, along with students at the college; they have formed a group known as the “Houli Fans,” and this has expanded into marketing: t-shirts, caps, and mugs are available. Most of these students had never experienced an organ recital before supporting their friend. When he performed with the symphony during his senior year, they chartered buses to take throngs of students to the orchestra hall, where they rained down loud cheers from the balcony. Christopher Houlihan currently studies with Paul Jacobs at the Juilliard School, and is represented by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists (www.concertartists.com). Houlihan can be found on Facebook and YouTube, and his website is www.christopherhoulihan.com.

Joyce Robinson: Do you come from a musical family?
Christopher Houlihan: My family isn’t musical, but my parents have always been incredibly supportive of my passion. I think my mother signed me up for piano lessons just so I would have something to do after school. At the beginning I liked it, I thought it was all right, but I kept practicing and eventually joined a church choir in my hometown of Somers, Connecticut when I was about 8, and discovered the organ. The organ in the church was an electronic organ, and the organist there always had the tremolos on, but she showed me everything she knew and encouraged me to explore. She let me practice on the instrument. I was immediately excited by it and drawn into it, and I started reading as much as I could about the organ and tried to talk to other organists, but at the same time, I had no idea how to take organ lessons. It was obvious you could take piano lessons or lessons on any other instrument, but the organ was kind of a mystery to both my parents and me. My mother loves telling the story of walking into my bedroom and seeing me at my digital keyboard, moving my feet around. She discovered I had put rows of masking tape on her hardwood floor, in the outline of the pedalboard, so that I could learn how to play the pedals. She was a bit horrified that I had put tape all over her floor, but at the same time, she thought it was pretty clever.
Then, in 1999, my mother read in the newspaper that there was an organ concert going on in Springfield, Massachusetts. We’d never been to an organ concert before, never really heard any classical organ music, but we went, and I got hooked. I still have the program from that recital, and, looking back on it, I can’t imagine having had a better introduction to concert organ music: I heard Franck’s Pièce Héroïque and Vierne’s Third Symphony for the first time that day. After the concert, we spoke with the organist, and I said, “I want to take organ lessons, what do I do?” And the man said, “Why don’t you come down to Hartford and play for me?” This was John Rose. We went to Trinity, and I played for him; I was twelve years old, and he took me on as a student. From there, it just took off—I kept studying with him throughout high school, and when it came time to look at colleges, Trinity turned out to be a very good fit for me. John never pushed for me to go to Trinity; he would have been supportive of any decision I made, but for a lot of reasons I chose Trinity, and I’m really glad I did.

JR: Is that where your interest in Vierne came from? John Rose is well known for his work on Vierne, and your first recording was mostly Vierne.
CH: Yes, it was. John has been a wonderful mentor, and he’s never forced any particular style of playing on me, and I’ve studied all sorts of repertoire with him. But I do suppose I’ve had more exposure to Vierne than many other people, certainly because of his love of Vierne. I remember working on the “Berceuse” from the 24 Pieces in Free Style; that was probably my first Vierne piece.

JR: How old were you then?
CH: I’m not sure! I was in middle school, probably 13. Then when I got to Trinity, he said “You should really learn the Vierne Second Symphony, I think it would be a good piece for you.” And I learned it, and I absolutely loved it. Vierne is very chromatic, it’s very different from most Widor . . . Some people say things like, “You should never play a complete French symphony, it’s too long, it’s trash, audiences don’t like it,” but I find it incredibly gratifying as a performer and as a listener to hear a complete symphony. You rarely go to an orchestral concert and hear the Finale from a Beethoven symphony—you hear the whole work. I think a Vierne symphony works much better as a complete piece . . . the individual movements speak much more profoundly when you hear them in the context of the whole symphony.

JR: You must have worked on quite a bit of French repertoire with John Rose before you went to France.
CH: I did.

JR: And when you got to France, did you find the approach to French music to be different?
CH: That’s a complicated question to answer, but yes, the approach was very different. I went to France because I had a strong affinity for French romantic music, but I also wanted to learn more about French classical music, as well as study modern French music. Certainly one of the most beneficial aspects of studying organ music in France is hearing and playing on French organs. But having grown up on American organs, playing primarily in drier American acoustics, and approaching music from an American perspective in general, I really had to learn a new style of playing, one that was more effective for those instruments and rooms. My teacher, Jean-Baptiste Robin, often talked to me about “taste,” which is, of course, completely subjective, but I became more aware of the fact that taste is also cultural, and people from two different backgrounds (musical and otherwise) will have very different opinions about what they consider to be “in good or bad taste.” For example, sometimes I would phrase something a certain way, or accent something a certain way, and Jean-Baptiste would remark that it sounded “American.” Well, I am American, after all!
What is true, though, is that French music sounds most “at home” on French organs. One of the most incredible experiences I had was going to Poitiers Cathedral, where Jean-Baptiste Robin is titulaire, and hearing the 1791 Clicquot organ there. When I heard French classical music on that instrument I was almost in tears, it was so beautiful. That music came alive and worked in a way I had never heard it before. The same can be said of romantic music, but to a less extreme degree, when hearing it on French romantic organs. But what I’ve come to believe through those experiences is that what is far more important than choosing the historically correct stops, or playing in a historically correct way, is the type of musical effect that comes across to a listener. If hearing Widor played at St. Sulpice brings you to your knees, then that music should have the same effect wherever you’re playing it, and, typically, in my opinion, to get that kind of effect on American organs, you have to play the music in a very different way than you might in France.

JR: So are you saying that one must register more with one’s ears than just looking at labels on the knobs?
CH: Yes, absolutely. And at the same time, you don’t have to travel all the way to France to register that way. I think you have to go with your gut—you have to look for what’s the most musical solution when you’re registering anything. It’s not what the book says is the correct registration, but what has an effect—what makes the music come alive.

JR: Was there any particular aspect of registration that you had to make adjustments for when you returned to the U.S.?
CH: There are all sorts of things one can do. One basic idea that is important to know about is the upward voicing that a lot of the French organs have, where things really sing in the treble in a way they don’t on most of our organs. There’s not an easy solution to this, but it’s something to keep in mind and listen for. The other thing is that our Swell boxes are, generally, much more expressive even on smaller organs, and you can use them in a different way for the kinds of musical effects that naturally occur without moving the box on a French organ. The reason Franck used the Hautbois with his 8′ foundations was to make the Swell more expressive . . . if the oboe isn’t needed, I leave it off. Many American organs have the only chorus reeds in the Swell, and they might be quite loud; therefore, you don’t always have to play with the full Swell on where Vierne or Widor says “full Swell.” If you’ve only got a full Swell and one more reed on the Great, you don’t get a crescendo effect; you go from loud to louder. You’ve got to allow more liberty for these things, because in the end you’re being truer to the composer’s intentions . . .

JR: Tell us a little more about your time in France. Life in Europe is usually different than it is here, so what was it like for you—your schedule, your study, your practicing? Did you spend time learning the language?
CH: I was there through the Trinity College Paris program. They have about 20 to 30 students there each semester, and through that program I took French language classes, a class on French culture, a course on art history and architecture—they offer all sorts of courses, ranging from history of the European Union, to independent studies on anything you want to learn about. I did part of my coursework through them, and Trinity gave me credit for my organ lessons at the conservatory in Versailles, and my private harmony lessons with Jean-Baptiste.
I was also lucky enough to have an incredible job at the American Cathedral in Paris, working with Ned Tipton. I was the assistant musician, which meant that I accompanied the choir on Sunday mornings, and I directed two children’s choirs—the children’s group, and a teenager group—and along with all this I had an apartment in the cathedral tower, which was really incredible! You could climb to the top of the tower, and you had one of the most spectacular views of Paris. You could see all of the major monuments, really stunning. The cathedral is on the Avenue Georges V, which is right off the Champs Elysees . . . the whole experience was very surreal and I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity. And the people at the cathedral are so wonderful. There are a lot of Americans, of course, and people from England, from Australia, and French people too!

JR: During your time in France, you performed for George and Laura Bush at the American Cathedral in Paris. Can you recall that day?
CH: I’ll certainly never forget it. It actually began on a Saturday afternoon when I got a knock at the door of my apartment. Now, my apartment was 83 steps up a cement spiral staircase, so I didn’t get very many knocks on the door . . . I was fairly surprised to discover the dean of the cathedral and two French police officers with enormous rifles standing in front of me. They explained who would be coming for a visit the following morning. To complicate things, Ned was away, the adult choir hadn’t had a rehearsal the previous Thursday, and we had the children’s choir scheduled to sing that morning too. Unfortunately, we had to keep the news completely secret for security reasons, so I couldn’t let the choirs know what would be happening. Sunday morning was a little hectic . . . security came and set up metal detectors, dogs sniffed through the whole building, and of course, they didn’t care that I had a choir to rehearse! We wound up with about 15 minutes to run through the anthems, but we pulled it off pretty well.

JR: What were your studies like with Jean-Baptiste Robin?
CH: Robin was an excellent teacher and I learned a great deal from him. At his recommendation, we spent the year working almost exclusively on French music, and nothing could have made me happier. Each week I would prepare a different piece, by de Grigny, Marchand, Couperin, or one of the other French Baroque composers. We worked a great deal on Franck, of course, on Alain’s Trois Danses, as well as one of Robin’s own pieces, Trois Éléments d’un Songe.

JR: What made you choose Juilliard for graduate study? For that matter, why even bother with graduate study, because you had already made a recording, you were signed to professional management before you even got a bachelor’s degree, if my calculations were correct?
CH: True. I chose Juilliard because I really wanted to work with Paul Jacobs and I have had a wonderful time studying with him. I’ve been lucky at this point to have studied both at Trinity and at Juilliard, and have had vastly different experiences at both schools. At Trinity, the focus was on studying music in a broader context—a liberal arts school; I took classes in all sorts of things: science, math, philosophy—it was wonderful, and I made friends with all sorts of people studying all different subjects, and I can’t say enough positive things about how that can affect one’s perspective on making music. But I really felt I was ready to study music in a much more intense environment, and Juilliard was a great choice for that. I love being in New York City, being at Juilliard, and working with Paul. It’s been very rewarding.

JR: Has it been an opportunity to learn a lot of new repertoire, or just refine what you already know?
CH: One of the unique things about the Juilliard program is that we’re required to perform a new piece each Thursday morning in our organ studio class, which is open to the public. And that was definitely a big draw to go there, to learn a lot of repertoire. It can sometimes be difficult to learn a piece very deeply when you’re going through so much music so quickly, but you can always bring things back to Paul and work on them more, and of course work on them more on your own, which is where the real music happens, spending time getting to know the music very intimately. To touch on the last question again, even though I’ve been lucky to have these opportunities to record a CD and study in France and work under management, which I’m incredibly grateful for and excited by, I believe one never really stops learning. Juilliard has been a wonderful place for me to grow more as a musician, and I hope to continue to do that for the rest of my life.

JR: You have a website, and a presence on Facebook—do you find that these media help build your audiences?
CH: I’m not sure, but I do think they’re incredibly important tools. How many people are on Facebook now? I have no idea, but there’s no reason not to take advantage of it and to be communicating in the world where most people are interacting today. I don’t know if my online presence necessarily helps build my audience, but it certainly doesn’t hurt it. It certainly helps attract younger people.

JR: Do you notice that your audience has a younger demographic than that of other organists?
CH: I don’t think so, not yet at least, but attracting younger people to classical music is something I feel very strongly about. And one of the greatest things I experienced at Trinity was bringing my friends who weren’t musicians to my organ concerts, and getting them excited about it. They responded very positively.

JR: Would that be the Houli Fans?
CH: The Houli Fans grew out of that, from friends of mine who weren’t musicians, but who came to my organ concerts and got excited by the music and discovered something far more fantastic than they ever expected to. I would have never guessed some of my college friends would greet me by humming the opening bars of Vierne’s Second Symphony—or talk to me about how fascinating a Bach fugue was. Houli Fans has caught on in a very organic way, and audiences everywhere I go are interested to hear more about it. At Trinity, students came to the concerts and saw that I loved performing, thought the music was exciting, and they responded by getting more people to come! This is such a good sign for organ music, to see people, of any age, who don’t know anything about organ music responding to it. I think in a way the organ may stand in a better place now than it ever has, I suppose you could say—it has been so dismissed and ignored for so many years, that now it stands to be rediscovered. We’ve all been in situations where people ask about being an organist. They really don’t know what that is, they don’t know what that means, what we actually do. When they hear exciting classical organ music, they’re so wowed by it—it’s true. I’ve played recitals this year and people come up to me and say, “This was my first organ concert and it was way better than I ever expected!” I tell them, “Now go tell somebody else. And come back again and bring them!” Once people discover what’s going on, they’re excited by it. And that’s a really good sign.

JR: Do you see any special role for technology such as iPods or YouTube to advance organ music, or are those just tools like a CD would be?
CH: I think what’s important is reaching as many people as you possibly can. And people are on Facebook, on YouTube—a lot of people are using these things, and if we ignore them (and I’m not suggesting we necessarily are), you’re ignoring a big part of your audience. So I think it can absolutely help. YouTube is a fantastic resource for hearing and seeing performances—it’s an incredible archive of music and musicians and organs and all kinds of music, not just organ music, and quite a tool for marketing and advertising. Everything links to something else, and people can see you and discover other organ music and other performances.

JR: Well, back to the Houli Fans. What are they up to these days?
CH: We have shirts and hats and coffee mugs, and people are really responding well to it. Everywhere I’ve been this year I hear “Oh, I’m going to join the Houli Fans” and “I’m your newest Houli Fan” and things like that. And I find that both musicians and non-musicians want a very fun way to connect with the performer and somehow be involved in the performance. It’s fun!
And there’s nothing wrong with having a little bit of fun, or with classical music being fun. It’s been fun for centuries!

JR: You also have an interest in musical theater. Do you have much time for that any more?
CH: No, not right now, in graduate school, and with a busy performance schedule. But I did a lot of it in high school—I was music director of several shows. That was a lot of fun, and actually a really great learning experience. And I did a lot of it in college, too—music directing, performing on stage, singing, dancing, and all of that. I really enjoy it. At the moment I don’t have plans to do it professionally, but it’s a small passion of mine. I particularly love the music of Stephen Sondheim, and, coincidentally, I’m going to be inaugurating the organ at the Sondheim Center for the Performing Arts in Fairfield, Iowa.
I think there’s a lot that musicians can learn from theater, both from straight drama and musical theater, about how to approach a musical score, similar to the way an actor takes a script and analyzes everything that’s going on to create a character, and perform that character night after night. I try to approach music the same way—take the score and truly consider how to create a musical experience—in a way . . . a whole play. Not necessarily a story, but create the kind of experience I’d like to have as a listener. I think there’s a lot we can learn from theater and the other arts.

JR: Of what you’ve worked on so far, is there any particular repertoire you found a difficult nut to crack—you mentioned finding the character and learning how to bring that out; is there any music that’s been, say, a little more opaque for you?
CH: One of the most incredible things about the organ literature, and one of the most daunting, is the centuries that it spans. All this repertoire and all these different styles—personally, I think it’s impossible to be fluent in and to perform all these styles in a convincing way. Maybe it’s possible; I’d like to be wrong. When I’m learning a piece in a different style that I haven’t studied before, I try to approach it with respect for the scholarship that’s been done on it and its performance practice, but also perform it in a way that feels honest to me, so that I can perform it and convince the audience of the music. I don’t think there is much value in performing something just because you think you should—that you should play so-and-so’s music. Well, what if you don’t like so-and-so’s music? A lot of people may like so-and-so’s music, and a lot of scholars may say it’s important . . . But I don’t have to perform everything under the sun.

JR: In one of Gavin Black’s regular columns in The Diapason, one of his points was that if you don’t really like something, why waste your time learning it? Life’s too short—unless you’re in a competition and it’s required.
CH: At the same time, I’ve learned some pieces—I’m not sure I can name a specific one—where I’m not sure about it at the beginning, or I think I’m not going to like the piece. But then after I learn it I think, “Wow, now that I’ve studied it, and learned more about what the composer was trying to do, and found ways to make it come alive for my own performance, it really is a good piece.” And sometimes I decide to learn a piece, starting off by thinking it’s a great piece, and then after becoming more familiar with it, decide “This isn’t right for me.” It works both ways.

JR: You’ve already recorded two CDs—are you preparing any other recordings? What are your other plans for the future?
CH: I hope to be able to keep recording, and I hope to be able to continue performing. I really enjoy traveling and meeting new people, but most importantly, I love performing and bringing music to an audience. I believe it’s more like making music with an audience. Sometimes I even tell that to the audience too—I thank them for making music with me, since I can’t do it by myself, and since I get so much joy from performing. Eventually, I’d love to be teaching and sharing my love of organ music with others in any way I can.

Jerome Butera is editor of THE DIAPASON.

One of America’s leading concert organists, Todd Wilson is head of the organ department at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He also teaches at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, and serves as organ curator of the Norton Memorial Organ (E. M. Skinner, 1931) in Severance Hall, Cleveland, Ohio, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra. He has recently been appointed as Artist-in-Residence at Trinity Cathedral (Episcopal) in Cleveland, and as House Organist at Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens in Akron.
For nineteen years he was director of music and organist at the Church of the Covenant (Presbyterian) in Cleveland. From 1989 through 1993 he was also head of the organ department at Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music in Berea. Prior to these positions, he served as organist and master of the choristers at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York. In New York, he taught on the faculties of Adelphi and Hofstra Universities and was organist of the George Mercer School of Theology.
Todd Wilson has been heard in concert throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 1992 he was a recitalist for Austrian Radio in Vienna, and he has performed for the American Guild of Organists national conventions. He has recorded on the JAV, Delos, Disques du Solstice, and Gothic labels.
Todd Wilson has won numerous competitions, including the French Grand Prix de Chartres, the Fort Wayne Competition, the Strader National Scholarship Competition, and the national competition sponsored by the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. A sought-after adjudicator, he has been a member of the jury for many of the world’s most prestigious competitions such as the Nuremberg Competition (Germany), the Calgary International Organ Festival and Competition, the St. Albans International Organ Festival (England), the Grand Prix de Chartres and the Toulouse Festival Competitions (France), and the American Guild of Organists National Young Artists Competition. Todd Wilson is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists, <www.concertorganists.com&gt;.
I met with Todd at the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland in May 2008 and at Trinity University, Deerfield, Illinois in April 2009.

Jerome Butera: Tell us about your childhood and early training. Where did you grow up? Did you come from a musical family?
Todd Wilson: I grew up in Toledo, Ohio. My father was an amateur musician—he played the French horn in his early years and always loved the horn. During the years I was growing up, he didn’t have the time to keep up his playing. Then, much later, ten years before he passed away, he went back to horn playing and enjoyed it greatly. My early musical recollections are LPs of Sousa marches and the Mozart horn concertos played by Dennis Brain. My dad played those all the time. To this day I still adore Sousa marches and all the standard horn repertoire.

JB: Did you start with piano lessons?
TW: Yes—my real start in music was at age nine or so. The church we attended was Trinity Episcopal in downtown Toledo, which had a wonderful Skinner organ and in those days a thriving men and boys choir. When I was in the fourth grade I was recruited for the choir. The choirmaster was a wonderful man named Wesley Hartung. He came to our house, we all sat down in the living room, and he said “I think Todd would be a good boy for the choir.” I was just transfixed by the whole thing—I loved the choir, the camaraderie, the singing, and the organ. This was quite a grand old Skinner organ that had many beautiful sounds and a thrilling 32-foot Bombard that shook the whole building.
You can imagine this 9-year-old drinking all this in. I went to Wesley Hartung and said “I want to play the organ.” I can still remember him looking down at me and saying “You shouldn’t even touch the organ until you’ve had many years of piano.” So I said “OK, let’s get going with the piano right away.” He was a wonderful teacher, a very strict old-school teacher, and you didn’t pass one piece until every “I” was dotted and every “T” crossed and you could play it perfectly from memory. Everything had to be just so. He started me off by setting the bar very high, and I’ve always been hugely grateful for that.

JB: Did you study organ with him also?
TW: No, unfortunately he passed away before I was able to start on the organ. I always kept up the piano, and to this day I still love playing the piano. The literature and the feel of the piano—it’s so good for the fingers. I continued piano study with Hugh Murray, who was the organist at Rosary Cathedral in Toledo, and started the organ in high school with a wonderful man also there in Toledo named James Francis, who was the organist at Collingwood Presbyterian. Collingwood Church has a Holtkamp, Sr. organ from about 1955 in the balcony—Rückpositiv on the railing, all exposed, so it was the opposite of the big Skinner organs that I had experienced at that time.
I can still remember walking in for that first lesson with Jim Francis when I was a freshman in high school. I remember the sound of the organ and the feel of it—I remember being struck by how different and how clear this organ was. That was another little turning point for me as an organist—my first exposure to a “modern organ,” as it were.

JB: What kind of teacher was he?
TW: He was a terrific teacher, very encouraging to me. He allowed me to play some things that were a little beyond what I should have been doing through high school, but at the same time that stoked my enthusiasm in a big way. I remember I did a recital my senior year in high school and really worked hard on it—that was the first full organ recital I played. Jim Francis was a wonderful man and fun—a very different personality than Wesley Hartung. He was younger with a vivid sense of humor.

JB: Were you playing at a church in high school?
TW: Yes, all through high school I always had little church jobs around Toledo, and Jim would set me up with substituting here and there. I remember a few jobs where an organist would be out for several months. Jim would get wind of it and recommend me.

JB: That’s great experience; you got to see a lot of different organs.
TW: Different organs, different services, different denominations, hymnals and all that. My senior year in high school I had a nice little Methodist church that was my first time being responsible for a choir week by week. I still keep in touch with a few people from that choir. There was a nice two-manual organ and the choir was right in front, and I got to do lots of standard choral literature, Palm Sunday cantata, all sorts of things like that. For a senior in high school to be in charge of planning, rehearsing, performing, publicizing—it was all a valuable and exciting experience.

JB: What led you to the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music?
TW: Jim Francis had studied there in the early ’50s with Wayne Fisher, with whom I went on to study.

JB: What kind of teacher was Wayne Fisher?
TW: He was a remarkable teacher. I was so lucky when I think back on it, to have stumbled on these fabulous teachers—my folks didn’t know much about organ teachers so they weren’t in a position to choose one who was better than the next, and I didn’t know enough—it was all just mostly dumb luck to follow on these people one right after the other. I always felt very fortunate about that. Jim Francis suggested I should go down to Cincinnati for a high school summer music institute. I went for two summers in high school, and Wayne Fisher and I hit it off right from the beginning.
He was a fabulous teacher. He was one of those bachelors whose students were his family, and it was a multi-generational family. He kept in touch with all the students from years before; there’d be parties and it was such fun. I would say that I worked very hard and played very hard in those college years. I practiced like mad and learned a lot of things then that are still at the core of my repertoire—because I learned them so well in those years and memorized them solidly.

JB: As a player, was Wayne Fisher flamboyant or scholarly?
TW: No, not scholarly, he was not of that scholarly generation. He grew up in the ’20s and the ’30s and studied with Dupré in France in the ’30s; his bachelor’s degree was in piano, and his master’s degree was in organ. So he had wonderful fingers, very live fingers I would say—he was that kind of player. His playing at its best was full of rhythm, full of vitality, full of color. He was a musician who loved the organ and played it very well, but his interest in music and I think his general approach to music was not that of an organist only. He had a huge record collection, and only a small bit of it was organ. He was a great fan of the piano literature and Rachmaninoff in particular. I remember Wayne Fisher telling me about traveling in the early ’30s to hear Rachmaninoff play a solo recital at Severance Hall in Cleveland.

JB: Todd, you’ve been in Cleveland for almost 20 years. Can you tell us a little bit about the positions you had before you came to Cleveland?
TW: I had always been much involved with and enthusiastic about the English cathedral repertoire and Anglican music in general. I really wanted to go to England and spend some time soaking up things day by day in an English cathedral. During my master’s degree preparation I thought more seriously about that, and several people helped me out, Gerre Hancock in particular.
I wrote letters to several English cathedral organists asking if I could come over and hang around. Nowadays that sort of thing is pretty common, but in those days there weren’t so many opportunities. I remember Jim Litton had done that early in his career and John Fenstermaker had as well. I talked to both of them and they suggested a few people to write to.
One of them was Allan Wicks at Canterbury Cathedral. Of the folks I wrote to, the first one who wrote back and said yes was Allan Wicks. So, after finishing my master’s degree, I spent about a year in Canterbury, playing some and accompanying some, watching the rehearsals day by day, and listening to every service the choir sang. I helped out in various ways and also had the chance to travel around England and Europe and hear the music in other collegiate chapels and cathedrals.
It was during that fall that I thought I should enter the Chartres Competition. I was feeling burned out from competitions because I had entered a lot of them in college, and I thought I’d do one more and really give it my best. So I worked hard that summer preparing. There were three rounds, and you had to play everything from memory, and it was a very demanding competition. I was very fortunate to win, and that enabled me to play some concerts around France—it was great fun. But I spent that year mostly in England, based at Canterbury, and it was a wonderful experience.
When I came back to the U.S., I took the job that my former teacher had had at Collingwood Presbyterian Church in Toledo for a year. I was able to do lots of things because I was full of youthful enthusiasm, and we did concerts and many ambitious programs that I never had the resources to do at a church before.
But I really wanted to be in an Anglican situation, so I was very happy a year or so later to get the job at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York. That’s a cathedral with quite a long and interesting history—not a terribly large building, but very beautiful. I loved working with the men and boys choir. The years there were some of the happiest of my life. I still look back with the fondest memories and still keep in touch with some of the kids who were in the choir—those were very special times.

JB: Did you go from Garden City to Cleveland?
TW: Yes, after brief stays back in Cincinnati and in Paoli, Pennsylvania (outside Philadelphia). Our first child had been born in Garden City, but even in those days, of course, Long Island was a very expensive place to live, and we paid what seemed a fortune for a small one-bedroom apartment. We came back to Ohio where housing prices and the cost of living in general were much more modest and still are.

JB: In Cleveland you were able to combine Church of the Covenant and the Cleveland Institute of Music. Was that a joint appointment?
TW: There was the possibility of it. I started teaching at CIM the second year I was here. Karel Paukert who had taught at CIM was ready to give that up, and it was very nice that it worked out.

JB: And you were able to have some of your organ students as organ scholars at the church.
TW: We’ve had church music interns over the years at several churches here in Cleveland––Covenant being one of them—a terrific succession over 20 years of wonderful students, several of whom have gone on to fine careers of their own.

JB: Was the choir an all-professional group?
TW: No, it’s a mixed group, with usually ten paid singers. We often had some students who sing with us, but I tried to have section leaders who were not students to lend continuity over the years. We had some wonderful singers who stayed with us for a long time.

JB: How do you balance the demands of your church work, teaching schedule, recitals, recordings, and family—what’s your secret formula?
TW: As you well know, it’s never easy and it’s a constant juggling act. It’s very rare that I feel I’ve done a perfect job of it.

JB: What do you enjoy doing the most?
TW: I enjoy all of those things. As an “older” father with kids spanning quite a number of years, I love the time with each of them. It’s a challenge to do everything and feel like you’re doing your best all the time. Sometimes when you’re doing that many things you feel you’re stretching yourself a little thin. Often it’s good for us to be stretched; you realize it forces you to be economical with your time and make really good use of a limited number of hours.
I love the teaching, I love the church work; the balance of those two things over the years has been very rewarding. We’ve had some terrific students who have been such a joy, and the annual cycle of the church year has been very helpful, sort of an anchor in life. I love playing the Sunday service. No matter how scattered you may feel in other ways, having the chance to play great hymns on a wonderful organ with a really good choir—it keeps you grounded. So much inspiring choral literature comes up again and again; you think of all the wonderful Advent anthems, and you think “oh boy, it’s about to be Advent again,” and the same for every season. I’ve enjoyed all of that tremendously.

JB: When did you come under management?
TW: A long time ago—just before Karen McFarlane moved the agency to Cleveland, it must have been about 1982 or so. I was in Garden City. I remember quite vividly Karen called me and asked if we could have lunch, and we met at a little deli in New York. She invited me to be part of the management, which I accepted very gratefully, and have been happily a part of the management ever since.

JB: You’ve played recitals all throughout the United States, Europe and Japan, including some of the significant orchestra hall installations—Walt Disney Hall, the Meyerson, and here in Severance. Could you single out a few especially memorable recitals on fine organs?
TW: Well, there are so many organs that are really a delight in various ways. I always find that question a little hard to answer, because I usually forget to mention some organ. In recent years I certainly loved playing the Disney Hall organ because I was able to play with the L.A. Philharmonic—and I especially love playing with orchestra. I think for any of us those gigs are always infrequent, especially when you get to play with a top-level orchestra in a beautiful hall on a wonderful organ. It’s rare that all those things happen to come together. So that was a real treat. I played a number of years ago for the OHS national convention at Girard College in Philadelphia, and that was a big thrill. Just recently I have to say the new Fritts organ at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Columbus is sensational—certainly one of the great organs I have played in this country or anywhere else.

JB: Tell us about your role as organ curator at Severance Hall and about the restoration.
TW: I wasn’t really a part of the restoration. They invited me to take this position as curator when the organ was done, and it’s a joy to be connected to such a fine organ in a beautiful hall, and with one of the world’s great orchestras.

JB: And you’ve done recordings here too, haven’t you?
TW: A couple of recordings. The Musical Arts Association of the Cleveland Orchestra asked me to do one of Christmas music, which I believe is still the only solo recording of that organ, and then a couple of years ago a CD with Michael Sachs, the principal trumpet player of the Cleveland Orchestra. We did a recital at Severance of organ and trumpet things and recorded that program.

JB: I’m looking over your discography, and there’s such a range. You’ve done the complete Duruflé works, a disc of Widor, Jongen, Langlais, Bonnet, Demessieux and Dupré, the complete Thalben-Ball, the complete Frank Bridge, a 2-CD set for Delos (In a Quiet Cathedral), Double Forte with David Higgs, and National Cathedral Live. You’ve mentioned the trumpet and organ CD here and you’ve done an organ and cello recording with your daughter Rachel. Tell us about that one.
TW: That was really fun to do, and we did it in your neighborhood at St. Luke’s in Evanston. Rachel is my oldest daughter, and she recently graduated from Ohio State University. She studied cello from about age five and is a very gifted cellist, really a beautiful player with a very fine ear. Her ear is certainly much better than mine. I remember when Rachel was nine or ten she’d hear a soloist in a choir, someone I’d think was singing magnificently, and she’d say “you know, that note was a little sharp.” It sounded fine to me, but that’s the kind of ear she has.

JB: The list of recordings represents, one would have to say, a very eclectic repertoire. Do you find yourself drawn to any particular period of music or any particular composer?
TW: I think as the years go by my interests in music and organ music are more and more eclectic. I’ve always enjoyed playing 19th and 20th century music, and I suspect that if I were going to name any area I might say that, but I certainly would not want to be limited only to that repertoire.

JB: You’ve had experience with Skinner organs and have played many Ernest Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner organs—do you have particular fondness for that type of organ?
TW: I enjoy them very much, and appreciate all the remarkable craftsmanship and the beautiful sounds, often very extraordinary sounds. But I enjoy playing lots of different organs, and as the years go by I am more and more persuaded of the great value of playing mechanical-action organs on a regular basis. So I wouldn’t want to limit myself to playing electric-action organs by Skinner or anyone else. Mechanical action makes you more aware of details that even with your best efforts you’re not sensitive to in electric-action instruments. You listen in a different way, your perception is much heightened, I think. I’ve certainly noticed that in teaching. I can see such a difference in students when they play regularly on a mechanical-action organ.

JB: Do you have any comments on the current organ scene—the renewed interest in Cavaillé-Coll, certainly in Skinner and Anglican-style organs, as well as the continued interest in historical building styles?
TW: It all seems to me very healthy. I remember so well growing up that there were very rigid camps: this was OK, and that was not OK, and there was very little sympathy or empathy between those various camps.
There’s not much of that anymore, and so many fabulous organs are being built in all these different styles, with a remarkable degree of quality and musicality. It’s all very good. It’s wonderful as players, as musicians in the broadest sense, to be able to play all these different kinds of organs with an appreciation for what it takes to play a particular type of organ really well. It makes us broader and more complete musicians. The organ profession is much livelier, I think.

JB: Do you have any observations on the general style of teaching and playing from your college days to where you are now?
TW: I think the teaching and the playing reflects that same thing. The standard, the versatility, and the knowledge required to be an adaptable organist nowadays are a great deal broader than they were 30 years ago, and that’s all to the good.

JB: Has your playing changed in the last 30 years?
TW: I hope so! It’s hard to be your own best judge, but one learns so much through teaching. It’s listening, it’s thinking how does this music work, what is it all about, how can I help this student to zero in on that. Of course, you deal with that in terms of your own playing as well, and I think the instruments are a great prod to better playing, better teaching, better listening with all these different styles. You travel around and play recitals and you’re going to play a wide variety of organs nowadays in all the styles that you mentioned.

JB: Now you’ve also done some silent film accompaniment. Tell us how you got involved in that.
TW: I’ve always enjoyed improvising, and the first year I was in Cincinnati was Gerre Hancock’s last year there before he went to St. Thomas in New York. Another influence for me was Jim Francis, my teacher in Toledo. When I went down to Cincinnati as a high school student, he said “Now you’ve got to visit Christ Church and hear Gerre Hancock play.”
I was so bowled over, I can still remember that first service I heard. It was the middle of the summer, nothing big going on, but his service playing was such a departure from anything I had heard before. I was smitten by it, and have been a huge admirer of Gerre’s ever since. We had him here at Covenant for a weekend a year ago. He worked with the choir and improvised and gave a talk at our AGO annual dinner. It was such a treat for me to have him work with the choir—we did a whole program of his music.
Hearing Gerre play really fired my interest in improvisation, and I’ve always kind of dabbled in it. I started doing the silent films at Covenant on our summer concert series. Sure enough a lot of people showed up, and one thing led to another. Every so often someone asks me to do a silent film.

JB: What music do you play for that?
TW: My repertoire of films is not very large, so I usually have some themes for each film and I do leitmotifs, a kind of quasi-Wagnerian approach. I have a little theme for each main character, drama themes, and love scene themes; but mostly I try to have some identifiable themes for the main characters and then fill in around that. And then it’s fun to put in little snippets of standard organ literature depending on the audience. If I’m playing for an AGO chapter, I try to put in dibs and dabs of famous organ pieces, just sneak enough in that they might guess what that is.

JB: You’ve referred to your cellist daughter Rachel; can you tell us more about your families?
TW: Anne and I had two children, Rachel and Clara; Clara just finished her sophomore year at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and is working on a pre-med track. She’s a fine pianist and loves to play. I’m married to a wonderful woman, Jenny Eppich, who is an urban planner, and we have two children: Ben who just turned nine, and a little daughter Ruth who is four.

JB: Are they musical children too?
TW: Ben has a very sweet voice, and I think he could be a fine member of a boys choir. He matches pitch well and also plays the trumpet. We did Britten’s St. Nicolas a while ago at Covenant, and Ben sang the boy Nicolas to great acclaim—that was a very special moment for me as his proud papa, as you can imagine.

JB: You’ve had an interesting year. Tell me about the time at Indiana University.
TW: It’s been an interesting and challenging year! I taught at CIM one day per week, and continued as curator of the organ in Severance Hall, while commuting to Bloomington and teaching there for three or four days each week. I enjoyed teaching at IU, but ultimately we were not able to move to Bloomington on a permanent basis. I sure became a fan of books on tape during those long drives back and forth!

JB: What are some of your goals now in Cleveland?
TW: I look forward to the continued evolution of the CIM organ department. We have a wonderful new president of the school, and it really is the start of a new era there. We’ve been fortunate to have terrific students, and I enjoy working with them as performers and church musicians. It’s an ongoing pleasure to look after the organ at Severance Hall, certainly one of the most beautiful concert halls in the world. I’m thrilled to be part of the music program at Trinity Cathedral! It’s a beautiful building with two Flentrop organs, a very lively and diverse congregation, and a superb new musician in Dr. Horst Buchholz. Another fun new project will be to create a concert series and other uses for the newly restored Aeolian organ at Stan Hywet Hall in Akron. Stan Hywet is the amazing Tudor Revival-style home built by F. A. Seiberling, the co-founder of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. The house organ is located in a spacious and remarkably beautiful music room.

JB: Do you have any recording projects on the horizon?
TW: I’m making a recording on the new Fritts organ at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Columbus, Ohio. It’s a sensational organ, pretty eclectic, really more so than Fritts’s earlier work—very successful and very exciting. You can play quite early music, Renaissance and pre-Bach, and everything right down to the present day. It’s a very large and complete 3-manual organ in a superb acoustic. We’ve already recorded the music for organ, cello, and English horn, and I’ll record the solo pieces in the next few months.

JB: What’s on the recording?
TW: The Reubke Sonata, which people have been after me to record for a very long time. It’s been one of the cornerstone pieces of my repertoire since college days. So often people ask after recitals if I’ve ever recorded it, and I never have. When I played that organ in Columbus I thought it would sound fabulous there. So, the Reubke, some Widor, a piece for organ and cello by Craig Phillips, and Calvin Hampton’s Variations on Amazing Grace for organ and English horn, which is a piece I’ve always been very fond of and I don’t believe there’s any commercial recording available. This will be on the Delos label.

JB: Any humorous experiences you would care to share?
TW: I don’t have the best memory for funny events, except when they happen to float to the surface prodded by something else. I was recently reminded of one quite funny story, which is funnier now that I look back on it some years later.
This would have been ten or twelve years ago when we got a new console at Covenant, a movable console that’s been such a joy to play, built by the Holtkamp company. The organ is essentially an Aeolian-Skinner. In the mid-90s Holtkamp provided a console and made a few tonal additions as well. We had a dedication service for new console, with fancy music and blessings. Tom Trenney was my student assistant at the time, and we both played lots of stuff.
There is a big hooded trumpet in the rear balcony that’s by far the loudest stop on the organ—a wonderful stop, and it plays from the gallery Swell. One of our frequent habits was to put that on with the Unison Off so we could have it available when we wanted it, but it wouldn’t play through the normal Swell to Great coupler. Unbeknownst to us, there was a little electronic bug in the console, and all the gallery Swell played through the front Swell coupler—so when we had that big trumpet ready it turned out to be playing all the time. The console is positioned around the corner and we really couldn’t hear all that well. So, I think we played nearly every verse of every hymn with that great big Chamade trumpet on without knowing it—which would have been deafening in the congregation and most atypical certainly. The grande dame of the congregation said after the service that the organ now had “that Holtkamp edge.” Chick Holtkamp and Karen and everybody laughed greatly afterward.

JB: What are some of your non-musical interests?
TW: I treasure time with my family, as the years seem to pass ever more quickly. We all especially look forward to our annual summer get-away to Wellfleet, Cape Cod. Jenny and I love bike riding and gardening together. I’m an avid reader, particularly of anything historical. Sports-wise, I am a lifelong baseball fan, and also enjoy golf, even though my golf game has gone mostly downhill since I was in high school. Pie baking has become my cooking specialty, and I hope to find time to broaden my cooking repertoire in the years to come.

JB: Todd, thank you for the interview. We wish you continued success and will follow your career with great interest.

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of THE DIAPASON.

James Kibbie is perhaps best known through his position as professor of organ at the University of Michigan, where he has served on the organ faculty since 1981. Also quite active as a performer and clinician, Kibbie is at present involved in a project to record all of J. S. Bach’s organ works, with the recordings to be made available, free of charge, through Internet distribution rather than CDs (see www.blockmrecords.org). A portent of this is Kibbie’s own website (www-personal.umich.edu/~jkibbie/), where the professor has presented a yearly “Christmas card” of a downloadable performance, recorded on the Létourneau instrument at his home. We talked with James Kibbie during a visit he made in May 2007 to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois to present a recital and masterclass.

Joyce Robinson: Let’s begin by asking how you got “the bug.”
James Kibbie: I’m from Iowa! A lot of organists are from Iowa, and the way I got interested in the organ was the way that every single organist does, by hearing it played in church. It is a really valuable thing for churches to allow young musicians access to the organ. That was the case in the congregation where I grew up, and I think that experience is what creates organists.

JR: Did you come from a musical home? Were your parents musicians? Did they encourage your musical studies?
JK: My mother was a pianist, and I begged her to teach me to play. She was a school teacher, and she knew kids pretty well. She was smart enough not to try to force me to practice. Instead, the rule was that either I practiced regularly, or I had to give up completely and never touch the piano. That was enough motivation (sometimes just barely). My father was also a teacher, and he believed fervently that young people should pursue their own dreams and goals, wherever that led them. He always encouraged me, though I think it was a surprise to him to have a musician for a son.

JR: I notice you are wearing a POE shirt!
JK: This is from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a couple of years ago. I am so hot on this idea of pipe organ encounters! They have been enormously successful. I’ve taught at a number of them with somewhat different formats, and it turns out that any format for the POE works, because if you just bring young people together with the organ, the instrument sells itself.

JR: AGO statistics don’t show college enrollments going up. By now POEs should have had an effect, but they don’t seem to be increasing enrollment in organ programs.
JK: We’re doing well with enrollment at the University of Michigan. Not just in numbers, but in terms of quality—phenomenally gifted students, particularly undergrads. We routinely see now on résumés from students who are applying that they have as high school students attended at least one, many times more than one, POE. We definitely see the results—not just in numbers, but in the level of preparation for students.

JR: That’s reassuring. Now where did you get your bachelor’s degree?
JK: What at that time was called North Texas State University. It’s now the University of North Texas. I got bachelor’s and master’s there, with Donald Willing.

JR: And then you went on to Michigan, and you studied with Marilyn Mason—who’s now your colleague!
JK: Yes. I was really lucky—I had those two master teachers, who are very different as musicians and as people, but they were both so kind to me. And it turned out later that they were both exactly the right teacher for me at that particular time in my development.

JR: You went on to win some competitions—the Grand Prix de Chartres and the Prague competition. You had recorded and played music of Czech composers—Ropek, for example—was that an outgrowth of the competition?
JK: This was in 1979, at the height of the Cold War, so it was a very different place than the Czech Republic is now. After the winner’s recital at Dvořak Hall in Prague, Jiří Ropek came up and introduced himself and invited me to have dinner with him and his family. He was professor of composition at the Prague Conservatory and also organist at St. James Church, which is a historic church in the Old Town section of Prague. That started a long, warm friendship. In fact, one of the pieces I’m playing tonight is his variations on Victimae Paschali—he gave me a copy of the score to those variations at that first dinner, and said that he hoped maybe I would learn them and perform them, and I have performed them many times over the years. He passed away in 2005.
During the first years that I knew him, we corresponded—though not too often, because he said if he received too many letters from the West, it was a red flag to the Communist authorities, and he got in trouble, because he was a known opponent of the Communist regime, so it was certainly easier for him after the fall of Communism. He had earned a doctorate at the Carolinian University in Prague, but the Communist government had prevented it being awarded. Finally, in 1990, when Communism ended, the university could officially award him the doctorate that he earned over 40 years earlier. It’s remarkable!

JR: You’ve been at the University of Michigan now for over a quarter of a century!
JK: That’s right, 26 years. I love it! I get up most mornings looking forward to most of the things I’m going to do that day. I realize that’s a gift that not everyone has.

JR: Over the course of over a quarter of a century you must have noticed some changes, both in the program and in the students.
JK: There have been big changes in the field of church music, and all of us are either working as church musicians, or teaching students who will work as church musicians, so it’s central to everything that we do. I don’t think anyone of us could have foreseen all of the ways that church music has changed over the past 25 years. That means we can’t foresee how it’s going to change in the next 25 years.
I’ve been thinking about this—how do I prepare my students when I can’t foresee exactly all of the ways they’re going to need to change and adapt professionally? The answer must be to return to core values—to teach the commitment to excellence. If I can communicate to students that there’s one standard of music-making for everything that we do—our best effort—that is the thing that will serve them well no matter how the field changes.
If I’m coaching how you play an ornament in Bach, or how you achieve a legato line in Franck, I’m not just dealing with that repertoire, I’m modeling for the student this attention to detail and integration of all of the elements of performance that they’re going to have to rely on to create music in ways that I might not be able to imagine right now.

JR: Do you talk with your students about the job situation in church music?
JK: Yes, and without apology, we position our students to compete for the jobs at the top end. There the situation is quite favorable—salary, working conditions, the artistic content of the jobs—can be very satisfying. Where our profession is really struggling is in the part-time positions, particularly in some communities where there is not a tradition of paying well for church musicians. Those aren’t the kind of jobs necessarily that our graduates from the University of Michigan apply for, but they’re the jobs that the majority of our professional colleagues nationally are holding.

JR: Have any of your prior students been in touch with you and communicated that a church job they were in was starting to go in the “happy- clappy” direction?
JK: Oh my, yes, sure! (laughter) But if nothing else, we can take Johann Sebastian Bach as our model—if things don’t go well in a church job, you look for another one, but you don’t quit the present job until you find the new job first, which is what he did!

JR: Can you discuss the imbalance of today’s high level of talent, yet fewer college teaching positions and fewer upper-rank positions for church musicians?
JK: I recall something that I heard about the American jurist Daniel Webster. When he was a young man, he apparently wanted to become a lawyer. He went to his father and said, “I’m interested in the law as a profession, but it’s very crowded. I’m not sure about the job prospects.” His father said, “Remember—there’s always room at the top.” I’ve told that story to my students countless times. The answer for them is that they have to position themselves in terms of their abilities and their résumé and their preparation to compete at the top.

JR: How has your teaching changed over the last 25 years? Do you use different method books now?
JK: The longer I’ve taught, the more comfortable I’ve become communicating my own point of view. That’s what students come to their teacher for, and ultimately it’s all the teacher has to offer. I’ve used several method books successfully, but I keep coming back to The Organist’s Manual (love the pun) by Roger Davis. It has a superb selection of repertoire and just the right amount of technical exercises and explanations. If students balk at the price, I explain how expensive it would be to buy all of the repertoire separately.
When I was a freshman organ major, I assumed I’d study the “canon” of great organ music. Most organ students still expect that today, but there has to be room in our canon for great, noble music by living composers, including women, and music from many cultures and traditions—African-American composers, for example.

JR: At the University of Michigan there is a scholarship fund established in your name. How’s that going?
JK: It’s going very well! It’s endowed permanently, so we award it in perpetuity every year. It’s one of a number of named scholarships that we have and it is so necessary. You know that the costs of education are far beyond many families’ ability to pay, and church musicians don’t have the potential for large income after graduation the way some other fields do, so we have to have scholarship funding for our students. It’s essential.

JR: That’s quite a tribute. It was your students who set that up.
JK: They did, and it was done at the conclusion of the complete Bach works series that I played in 2000. It was announced at the final concert of that Bach series. They “passed the hat” at that concert, and then one of my alums, Dr. Edward Maki-Schramm, led the fund-raising, and it’s done very well since.

JR: As musicology evolves there’s always something new in performance practice. Do you keep integrating this with your teaching?
JK: I do, and particularly for older music—Bach and Buxtehude—there are so many questions that all of us have that must be answered just to play the piece. That’s what I concentrate on—the practical performance-based decision-making that performers must face. I have gradually come to understand that some of those questions—for example, in Bach’s time—had a precise answer. Whether or not I can discover it after more than 250 years is another question. Some of those questions never had a single answer. There was a range of possibilities open to the performer, and the individual performer was expected to make personal choices from that range of what was possible or appropriate.
That’s what resulted in a unique personal performance, which is so vital to all music, especially Baroque music. Performing Bach or Buxtehude is more of a partnership between the composer and the performer than is true of music of some later generations. I have increasingly moved in teaching to encouraging students to identify what that range of possibilities, historically, is, and to make their own choices within that range to create a performance that might be very different from my conception of a work—or someone else’s—but still faithful to the intent of the composer.

JR: Do you have an overall philosophy of performance practice?
JK: What I value most in music performance is the sense of certainty—a compelling performance, a convincing performance: “This is the way it goes!” Dr. Karl Schrock, one of my doctoral students years ago, said to me, “I think the most authentic performance is a convincing performance.” I have decided that what creates that sense of being so convincing is not just making effective decisions about all of the issues of performance—registration, tempo, ornamentation, articulation, nuance—but that intuitive ability of some performers to integrate all of their choices into a single vision of the music.
That’s what I concentrate on in teaching. When I judge competitions, I think that’s what I respond to—not necessarily looking for somebody who plays the piece the way I do, but who creates that sense of certainty.

JR: Some performers maintain that Bach, for instance, should be played in a certain way.
JK: Anybody who knows the nature of the historic record has to acknowledge that there is so much we don’t know. The answer to so many of these questions is—we don’t know. If anyone pretends to know how Bach played the organ, they’re deluding themselves. We have to be intellectually honest enough to be able to say the words “I don’t know.”

JR: Bach was such a musician and so knowledgeable about the organ; if he had the instruments and technology we have today, would he have used them?
JK: He might have written very different music. All of these people—Bach, Buxtehude, Franck, Dan Locklair—are using the materials that they have at hand to create great music: the kind of organs, the way people play the organ, the abilities of the musicians they’re working with. And because they’re geniuses, they use that raw material to create great musical works. So then if, after the work is created, I depart from that, I introduce anachronisms—the word means “out of time,” something that doesn’t belong to the time of the composition—I weaken it.
Even though it’s true that Bach might have used different sorts of organ effects that weren’t available to him then, the fact is that not having had them, he wrote music that doesn’t need them. Actually, by introducing them, we’re weakening the musical content of what he provided us. Our generation’s contribution to the understanding of performance practice has been that the music sounds best if you hear it approximately in the context of how the composer conceived it. Within that, as I said, there’s so much that we don’t know.
Our generation hasn’t grappled with what may be the central question: if I can create a 100% authentic performance, if I could play the organ exactly as it existed, the instrument that Bach knew, in exactly the acoustics, and play every detail of the performance exactly as Bach did it, my audience would be listening to it with 21st-century ears, not 18th-century ears. As a result, it’s a radically different piece of music.
We have not begun to address that limit on authenticity, and I think it’s probably the next generation that’s going to have to grapple with that. Our generation seems not to have been willing to think about that.

JR: One of the current trends in organ building is in the direction of larger scales and higher wind pressures—we’ve moved away from the Orgelbewegung and now we’re in another direction. Is this a fad?
JK: The best organ builders may draw inspiration from various historic periods, but they invariably build instruments that are of their own time and their own place, and that reflect the personality of that builder. The artistic direction of the particular builder doesn’t come essentially from historic models; you can learn from E. M. Skinner or Arp Schnitger or whomever, but the finest builders must gradually develop their artistic personality. I am not as interested in historic modeling as I am in the quality mechanically and tonally of the instruments, judged by contemporary standards.

JR: You have a Létourneau instrument.
JK: In my house—I’m so proud of it. We have another Létourneau at the University of Michigan. My colleague Michele Johns recently led a project to relocate that organ to a newly created small concert hall that’s a joint project of the School of Music, Theatre & Dance and the School of Public Health. It will be the focus of an ongoing series of chamber music concerts and will also be used for teaching and practice. The room is great—cabaret seating, a catering kitchen, and even a rose garden.

JR: Let’s talk about the instruments at the University of Michigan.
JK: Our students typically have some of their lessons on the big four-manual E. M. Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ in Hill Auditorium, some lessons on our Fisk in the style of Gottfried Silbermann, and some lessons on one of the two studio organs. We also have the Létourneau organ in its beautiful new hall, and we have a number of tracker and electric-action practice organs. All are pipe organs, of course. That’s what students expect, and only a pipe organ allows for performance of the repertoire to the standards we require. We also have access to some fine organs in local churches—Ann Arbor is a great “organ town.”

JR: Did you choose a Létourneau for yourself because of the one at the university?
JK: Yes, and because I had worked as consultant on a number of projects where Létourneau had been the builder chosen, and I developed a particular fondness and respect for his instruments. When I got this house organ in 2000, I wanted to make a little recording—sort of like a baby picture, you know, the proud parent!—so I recorded a partita Hugo Distler had written for his own house organ and put it on my website as a free download at Christmas time. That began what’s now an annual tradition.

JR: Your Christmas card!
JK: Yes! And I tracked the month-by-month downloads for those various recordings, and where the requests for downloads were coming from. It’s phenomenal, the number of people that month after month download these little house organ recordings—from Romania, China, western Europe, South Africa—all over the world! That’s what alerted me to the importance of this field of Internet downloads, and it’s one of the things that made me decide to release the Bach recordings as free Internet downloads rather than as commercial CDs.

JR: Do you have a grant for the Bach recordings?
JK: It’s very expensive, about $60,000 over three years to make the recordings, plus the expenses connected with the website. I puzzled a long time over how it could be possible. Then Dr. Barbara Sloat came to see me. I hadn’t met her before, but she explained she wanted to do something to honor her husband Barry, who was nearing the end of his life. He had attended all 18 recitals in the complete Bach series I had given at the University of Michigan in 2000. She wanted particularly to recognize Barry’s interest in the organ and in Bach, and she offered a very generous donation toward my Bach recording project. The University of Michigan has provided the remainder of the funding.
It’s a three-year project to record the complete organ works of Bach on historic 18th-century organs in Germany. As the recordings are made and mastered, they’re put on this website (www.blockmrecordings.com), sponsored by the University of Michigan, so that they can just be downloaded free by anybody, anywhere in the world.

JR: Your project is recording Bach on historic instruments. What were the criteria you used for choosing instruments to record on?
JK: There’s no single “Bach organ,” because he wrote for such different instruments over the course of his life, from the North German organs he knew in his youth to the late Baroque organs of his Leipzig years. I haven’t tried to make my recordings an anthology of historic organs. I’ve chosen a limited number of instruments, so I can deal with each instrument in detail. The 2007 recordings are on three Silbermann organs, the one-manual and two-manual instruments in Rötha, and the magnificent three-manual organ in the Dresden Kathedrale. About seven hours of repertoire on these organs is now posted on the website.

JR: Robert Clark recorded on the organ at Naumburg. Is that one of the instruments?
JK: No, instead I’m using two Trost organs next year that have a similar late-Baroque character, in Waltershausen and Grossengottern. But I love that recording of Robert Clark! I think the performer, the repertoire and the organ all match perfectly. He must have thought a long time in putting it together—selecting not only the organ, but the pieces that would go with the organ and go with him and what he wanted to do. I think it’s one of the great Bach recordings.

JR: What will you tackle next after your Bach project on the Internet?
JK: Bach is enough to think about right now, but I’ve already decided that my reward in 2009, when I finish all of the Bach recordings, is going to be particularly to go back to the organ works of Franck. It’s been several years since I’ve performed Grande pièce symphonique, for example. I’ve performed all of the Franck works, but I’m looking forward to going back to them as a sort of reward for finishing the Bach project.

JR: Do you have any favorite instruments that you like to play, besides your own?
JK: Instruments that belong to the time and place where they were built, not instruments that try to do everything, but instruments that do one thing, or one slice of the pie, particularly well. If you have a beautiful instrument, it lends its beauty and its integrity to anything that you play on it. Silbermann never thought of his organs playing anything other than contemporary music—music of 18th-century Germany—and yet churches with Silbermann organs have very multi-faceted musical programs, and the organ is central to that music program now in the 21st century as much as it was in the 18th, in ways that Silbermann couldn’t imagine. Because the instrument is so beautiful and so well built, it becomes flexible over time.

JR: Do you have an overall hopeful view of the organ world, especially in our culture? Ours is a culture of mediocrity, feeding off the bottom. How do we who feed off more lofty things deal with this?
JK: I’m enormously optimistic. The level of organ performance right now in this country is the highest that it’s been, I think anywhere, historically. The students, particularly the undergraduate students that we’re getting at the University of Michigan, are some of the finest talents that we’ve ever had. The quality of organ building is as high as it’s ever been in this country; there are new pipe organs being built all the time, including some really significant instruments in high-visibility venues. I am not worried!

David Kelley is Director of Music at Concordia Lutheran Church in Wilmington, Delaware, and Assistant Conductor of CoroAllegro, Delaware’s premier chamber choir. His compositions have been included in The Crowning Glory, a collection of hymn descants, and the Delaware Organ Book, a collection of solo organ works by Delaware composers. Mr. Kelley recently began doctoral study in organ at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland.

An increasingly popular composer of organ and choral music, Craig Phillips was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1961. By the time he was in his early thirties, Phillips had won First Prize in the Clarence Mader Competition for organ composition (in 1994). Since then, he has published works with increasing frequency, and has completed commissions for the American Guild of Organists, the Association of Anglican Musicians, several American cathedrals, and such notable performers as the Chenaults and Tom Trenney. Phillips’s compositions are engaging and satisfying, and they demonstrate his understanding not only of the voices and instruments for which he writes, but also his audience. He recently launched a website about his work: www.CraigPhillipsComposer.com. Dr. Phillips and I spoke in February 2008.

David Kelley (DK): You have extensive musical training, including a doctorate among other things, but you were not trained as a composer.
Craig Phillips (CP): I was never a composition major; I did study composition when I was an undergrad, for two years as a minor. Then I was a theory minor at Eastman during my graduate studies. I also studied orchestration at Eastman and then coached with Byron Adams here in Los Angeles. Organ was my primary focus during my student years, but I also had been composing since the age of fourteen, and I wanted to keep it going all the time. I think I was mainly known as an organist, especially early on, and it’s just fascinating that I’ve ended up in some ways much more well known as a composer: that’s pretty much since the mid ’90s.

DK: What motivated you initially to start composing? Fourteen is a very early age to begin that!
CP: I’d been playing the piano since I was seven; I would just sit down and improvise and come up with little ditties and so forth; I decided to start writing them down on my own. Then I was encouraged a lot in that direction by the organist at the church I grew up in, a woman named Sharron Lyon, and then when I started studying organ as well, with Peter Fyfe, he also encouraged me in that direction, so that had a lot to do with it.

DK: The liner notes for your CD “A Festival Song: The Music of Craig Phillips” suggest that your theory background is a large contributing factor to the development of your style. Do you think that those studies really enabled you to grow as a composer—or do you even use theory when you compose?
CP: (laughs) You know, I don’t think about it that much at this point! It’s all in my craft, I guess, and because I studied counterpoint and all the theory courses, there is a very solid foundation.

DK: So do you use theory as a tool?
CP: As a tool? Definitely. It’s really the tool that allows you to look at and understand something of how the great masters put their scores together, which in turn can provide an underpinning and foundation for your own work. That being said, once you have that foundation, I think it ultimately frees you to “break all the rules” as it were and forge your own path.

DK: To my ear, one of the things that I admire about your style is its very fluent and mobile harmonic language. You travel very quickly to different places and move very easily.
CP: Yes.

DK: How would you describe your own style?
CP: Well, I don’t think it’s anything you could put a label on—yes, there are modal inflections and that sort of thing, perhaps a sort of romantic, lyrical leaning. I think it’s really an amalgamation of a lot of my influences: the music that I’ve loved growing up and as an organist as well. I think a lot of the organ composers influenced me to a large degree.

DK: I have often heard a little whispering of Herbert Howells, perhaps, in there; maybe a little Duruflé . . .
CP: Absolutely, others have said that as well. I play their music, I know their music—so that becomes a part of me.

DK: Are there any other composers that have been particularly influential?
CP: Of course—Bach—probably the greatest!

DK: The counterpoint?
CP: Yes, and then I’ve always loved the Romantic repertoire as well; I think that’s also a major influence on my style. And I listened to tons of pop music when I was growing up, and even that, I think, has a certain role in what ultimately makes up my style.

DK: Perhaps contributing to your ability to move from one place to another quickly?
CP: (animated) Maybe! I don’t know, because I grew up in the ’70s listening to all kinds of music, Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Mahler, Bartók, and so forth, and lots of rock/pop—even film music had an influence I would say, so . . . who knows!

DK: (laughs)
CP: You know, I don’t sit down and analyze my own music that often.

DK: There probably isn’t time for that!
CP: (laughs) This is true, and I’d just as soon leave that to others! I tend to be very instinctive and intuitive about the whole process.

DK: Your organ works are very idiomatic, and they lie under the hands quite well.
CP: I hope so! (laughs)

DK: That indicates to me that you have a performing pedigree, if you will; I have to wonder if you do your composing at the keyboard, or if you do any improvisation—certain elements of the fantasy pieces, the Fantasy on Torah Song in particular, seem almost improvisatory in style. Do you bring those types of elements into your composition?
CP: Let’s see . . . I improvise, but not on that level—I really was not trained in improvisation—I could not just sit down and improvise a piece on the level of, say, the Torah Song. I have to work these things out very carefully, and usually at the keyboard; not necessarily at the organ, but at the keyboard most of the time. But yes, I do think there is an improvisatory aspect towards the way I develop a lot of my ideas—especially the fantasy pieces such as you’re talking about. So it doesn’t bother me if these pieces come off as improvisatory, I think that is just the way my imagination tends to work.

DK: It gives them a spontaneity that is very enticing.
CP: Yes, I think that’s right, and I’ve written several pieces in that same vein actually—some recently—that aren’t yet in print. It seems to be a successful formula for me in terms of organ pieces.

DK: You compose on commission quite a bit.
CP: Yes. I am lucky to have pretty much a steady stream of commissions.

DK: How do you go about tailoring a piece for a commission? I would imagine your own technical ability might lead you astray if you’re writing for a particular audience. Is that ever a problem or something you keep in mind?
CP: Sometimes they stipulate the difficulty level of a piece or specific voicing and so forth. The commissions I’ve had don’t often put limits on me—but I think it’s great discipline to be able to write something that’s very simple if that’s what they’re looking for. I remember the Torah Song fantasy: I think the rules specified that it would be a concert piece, but of moderate difficulty, which is kind of an odd combination—I think I managed to strike a happy medium in that piece.

DK: And that one won a prize.
CP: Yes, the 1994 Clarence Mader Foundation prize in organ composition.

DK: How generalized must you be in assigning registrations to organ works, and how much leeway do you imagine your performers and interpreters having? Some composers, especially French composers, are very specific; many American composers give nothing more than dynamic indications. How do you make those types of decisions?
CP: I have typically put in registrations in most of my pieces, at least as a guideline, but I’ve always told the people I have written these pieces for that they should have leeway to do what works on their instrument, or if they feel strongly about doing something a certain way I’d like to leave a certain amount of freedom to the performer. But I usually suggest various colors or the kind of sound I’m thinking about, and a lot of my pieces do have that sort of French romantic registration ideal behind them.

DK: How much does the instrument at All Saints’ [Beverly Hills] influence—
CP: Oh, probably it does! (laughs)

DK: That’s where you spend most of your time, I imagine.
CP: So it does, I think—the colors that are on that particular instrument often influence what I indicate in my pieces—it’s a pretty comprehensive instrument, I might add! But they can be expanded on.

DK: Well, every organ’s different.
CP: Yes.

DK: I know you have been commissioned by the Association of Anglican Musicians, by Washington National Cathedral, and your works are often performed at All Saints’. Do you feel that you are part of a continuing Anglican musical tradition in the church?
CP: I think I could put myself into that category. Most of my choral commissions have been from Episcopal churches or cathedrals. And the choir that I work with here at All Saints’ is one of the best—I don’t mind saying that I think it’s one of the best choirs in the country in the Anglican tradition, so that’s had a big influence on me, and on my choral writing. We perform a great deal of the English repertoire, as well as American music that flows from that tradition, and I think my own music certainly falls into that continuum.

DK: How would you describe the essential elements of that style?
CP: In terms of the way that I write for the choir, I’m used to a straight-tone sound, and really favor that sound. In the Anglican approach to choral singing there is also a great attention to word accentuation or localized word stress, and that is something that I pay a great deal of attention to in my setting of texts. And as far as texture goes, I use a combination of polyphonic and homophonic textures that ebb and flow—and not strictly one or the other.

DK: A hybrid.
CP: It is sort of a hybrid in a way.

DK: Many English organs are designed primarily as liturgical instruments and choral accompanying instruments, and that certainly has affected many of the composers coming out of those places; do you think that that’s something that you relate to as well, or are you more in that French category where the instrument is more soloistic?
CP: I think maybe I’m a hybrid as far as that goes as well, perhaps leaning to the French side. A lot of my commissions have pretty substantial organ parts—a lot of my choral pieces in general: I like to think of the organ and choir as basically equal partners most of the time, unless specifically it’s not intended to be that way. But, generally speaking, that’s the way I like to treat the organ.

DK: Do you think that there are specifically American traits to the Anglican tradition here that distinguish it from our British counterparts, and perhaps in your works in particular?
CP: I’m sure. I think we take their tradition and make it our own in certain ways, because we have our own unique set of influences—American folk tunes, jazz, spirituals, and popular music. I’m thinking of the New York composers Calvin Hampton, Larry King, and all sorts of people . . . David Hurd and others. I think a lot of that music flows out of that Anglican tradition but is also highly original and very much American, I pretty much see myself falling into that tradition.

DK: Perhaps there’s a little more adventuresome spirit in the American style?
CP: I think you could possibly say that. (pauses) Not to say anything negative about the English at all!

DK: No, no. Well, there’s that classic Anglican restraint, which sometimes we Americans don’t do quite as well.
CP: Probably we’re less restrained. Perhaps. (laughs) I don’t know!

DK: Do you have particular favorites among your own works, pieces that came off particularly well in terms of your expectations when you sat down to write them, or perhaps an organ piece that you like to play a lot?
CP: One of my special pieces is not a solo organ work, but the Concertino for Organ and Chamber Orchestra, which was my first big commission, and it led to all sorts of other things and opened a lot of doors—I think of that as an extremely special piece. Well, I try to make every piece (laughs) something to think of in that way. The chorale preludes are in some ways among the most popular things that I’ve done, and I use those all the time. The Toccata on Antioch, for instance: I sat down and wrote that little set of pieces [Joy to the World: Three Preludes for Christmas] a few years ago, but I use them all the time, they’re very popular, they get played often. Also the Triptych [for Organ] that I wrote in the mid ’90s I use frequently. Those can be played together or separately; I use them separately all the time. They’re quite effective in the service context, and I’ve used them as recital pieces as well. Of my pieces for organ and instruments, the Suite for Organ, Brass [Quintet] and Percussion has certainly been one of the most successful for me.

DK: We spoke earlier about your Fantasy on Torah Song, which is one of my favorites; another I particularly like is your Fanfare. Can you tell me a little about the origin of that work—it was a commission, wasn’t it?
CP: It was commissioned by Pat Gillis, a parishioner at All Saints’, Beverly Hills when we installed a new fanfare trumpet on the organ. It’s a big high-pressure hooded trumpet—it’s quite a brilliant stop—and he actually was the one who paid to have it added to the organ. It was his wish to commission a piece to feature the new trumpet; also it was dedicated to his mother, who was a long-time church organist. So I designed this work to really “show off” the new trumpet stop. It’s basically a rondo with a “big tune” on the solo trumpet making several appearances, and other splashy, colorful things in between. That’s another piece that I think works extremely well as either a recital piece or in the context of a big service or what have you—if you have the right organ.

DK: So, what’s next for you? What’s on your horizon?
CP: Well, I just got today—believe it or not, it was today—confirmation of a commission for the 2010 AGO convention in Washington, D.C. This is for a new work for organ and instruments. It looks like it will be a piece for chamber organ and four winds, probably ten minutes in a single movement . . . the idea is still under development! (laughs) So, that’s kind of a big thing that’s coming up, and there are some other interesting things in the works.

DK: And I believe you told me that you’re launching a website?
CP: Yes, it’s actually up and running now, and has a complete list of my compositions, both published and unpublished, as well as a list of current commissions and other information. You can find it at
<www.craigphillipscomposer.com&gt;.

DK: When you get a commission, how do you decide what to do? I’m sure some of these commissions can be very specific, but others may be rather general.
CP: It depends. If it’s, for instance, a choral piece like what I’ve just been working on, the primary task is to come up with a good text. The people who commission a piece are usually looking for something for a particular occasion, so [we have to find] an appropriate text; usually something in the public domain, or, once or twice, we’ve done things where the text was commissioned simultaneously. So that can be fun, too.

DK: That would be a rather rare opportunity.
CP: I wrote a big Easter anthem a few years ago called On This Bright Easter Morn, which has been very popular. The text was also commissioned and written by a poet named Janine Applegate, who lives in Portland. I collaborated on two pieces with her, which was a lot of fun. But generally speaking I tend to go with things that are in the public domain.

DK: That’s always a safe bet.
CP: It’s a safe bet—less complicated. I’ve set a couple of works to texts by more recent poets—secular pieces—whose foundations, alas, don’t yet allow their texts to be set to music for publication. But they generally specify a length of a piece, and I ponder . . . (laughs) . . . ponder the text or whatever the idea for the piece is, and then just get going. Coming up with the initial idea for a piece, I think, is always the most difficult part—once you have it, and you know it’s right, things begin to flow. With most commissions usually people have a general idea of what they’re looking for. I received one recently through a church and an arts foundation: they’re going to send me some paintings from local artists to look at and then devise a set of pieces based on probably two or three of these paintings— it will be something totally different; I don’t yet know what I’ll do with that!

DK: It will be your own version of Pictures at an Exhibition.
CP: Very much; that’s the idea they had in mind. So that will be something quite different, at least something I have not done before.

DK: Is there anything that you would communicate to a young crop of organists, given the chance?
CP: I don’t know if many of them are interested in composition or not, but I would say it’s good to stay open—to new organ compositions in general, and to the idea that being an organist and a composer is a long, long tradition. Being a performer and a composer was really the norm until fairly recently in the scheme of things, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t still be that way, in my opinion. Being an organist and a performer and a composer . . . it all works together for me, so . . . (laughs) I think it’s a great combination.

DK: Well, it’s working for a lot of other people, too: they think it’s a good combination for you (laughs) as well!
CP: It’s a good combination for me, but others can do it!

DK: Thanks very much for speaking with me today, and keep up the good work!
CP: Well, thank you very much!

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Craig Phillips Organ and Choral Works, and Recordings
Organized by scoring and title, with publisher and catalog number

Organ Solo
Fanfare (Selah, 160-640)
Fantasia on the tune Finnian (Selah, coming soon)
Fantasia on Sine Nomine (Selah, 160-676)
Fantasy Toccata (Selah, coming soon)
Fantasy: Torah Song (Yisrael V’oraita) (Selah, 160-857)
Fantasy: Terra Beata (Paraclete Press, PPM00431)
Festival Piece (Selah, 160-860)
Glad Praises We Sing (Selah, 160-814). Four Preludes for Organ: Kremser, Hyfrydol, Nettleton, Engelberg
Joy to the World (Selah, 160-815). Three Preludes for Christmas: Divinum Mysterium, Forest Green, Toccata on Antioch
Organ Music for the Seasons, Vol. 4 (Augsburg Fortress, 9780800637507). Prelude on Richmond
Partita on Lobe den Herren (Selah, 160-691)
Partita on Veni Creator Spiritus (Selah, 160-440)
Prelude on Victimae paschali (MorningStar, MSM-10-513), from Three Plainchants for Organ, ed. Lynn Trapp
Psalm Prelude (Selah, 160-875)
Toccata on Hyfrydol (Selah, 160-675)
Tribute (A lullaby for organ) (Selah, 160-682)
Triptych for Organ (MorningStar, MSM-10-941)
Trumpet Tune (MorningStar, MSM-10-926)
Wondrous Love (Fred Bock Music Co., BG0945). 12 Preludes for Organ (includes “Aria”)
25 Harmonizations and Descants (Selah, 160.731). Volume XI of series

Organ and Instruments
A Song Without Words (E. C. Schirmer, #6750), for cello and organ
March for Trumpet & Organ (Selah, 160-970)
Night Song for Oboe and Organ (or harpsichord) (Selah, in preparation)
Pastorale & Dance (Selah, 160-975), for bassoon & organ
Prelude & Exultation for Organ, Brass Quintet, and Percussion (Selah, full score 160-985, organ score 160-986, instrumental parts 160-987)
Serenade for Horn and Organ (Oxford, 0-19-386763-X)
Suite for Organ and Brass Quintet and Percussion (Selah, full score 160-981, organ score 160-982, instrumental parts 160-983)

Unpublished Works for Organ Solo or Organ and Instruments
Concertino for Organ and Chamber Orchestra (1995) c. 13 minutes. 2 flutes, clarinet in A, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn in F, 2 trumpets, trombone, strings. Score and parts available on rental.
Sonata for Cello and Organ (2004). Score available for sale.
Sonata for Organ (1983). Score available for sale.
Second Sonata for Organ (2001). Score available for sale.
Variations on a Kyrie (1995). Concert work for organ duet. Score available for sale.

Choral
A Festival Song (E. C. Schirmer, #5440 & #5441), SATB chorus, soprano and baritone soli, and orchestra
A True Hymn (Selah, 418-624), SATB and organ (text of George Herbert)
And I Saw the Holy City (Oxford, ISBN 0-19-386712-5), SATB and organ
Antiphon: Let All the World in Every Corner Sing (Paraclete, PPM00435), SATB and organ
The Beatitudes (Selah, 410-516), SATB and organ
Benedictus Dominus Deus (A Song of Zechariah) (Selah, 410-887), SATB and organ
Christ, mighty Savior (Paraclete, PPM00538), SATB and organ (alternate version with strings and organ)
Dies Gratiae (Requiem Reflections) (Selah, 440-901), SATB, soprano and baritone soli, and orchestra
Festival Eucharist (Paraclete, PPM00624), choral score with congregational parts, with organ
Festival Eucharist (Paraclete, PPM00624FS), SATB, congregation, descant, brass quintet, timpani and organ
For God So Loved the World (Paraclete, PPM00606), SATB a cappella with solo soprano
Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken (hymn concertato) (Selah, 425-888), SAB, 2 trumpets, timpani and organ
Gracious God (Paraclete, PPM00132), SATB, organ and flute
Great Is the Lord (Paraclete, PPM00813), SATB and organ
Hodie Christus Natus Est (Trinitas, 4502), SATB and organ
The Holly and the Ivy (Paraclete, PPM00018), SATB and organ
The House of Faith Has Many Rooms (Selah, 410-691), SATB and organ
How the Grandeur of Creation (Selah, 410-639), SATB, organ (optional strings)
I Love All Beauteous Things (Trinitas, 4610), SATB and organ
Keep Watch, Dear Lord (Selah, 420-526), SATB and organ
Light’s Glittering Morn (Paraclete, PPM00427), SATB and organ
(A version with brass quintet and timpani is also available from the publisher)
Missa Brevis (Washington National Cathedral) (Trinitas, 4583), SATB and organ
Morning Glory, Starlit Sky (Paraclete, PPM00835), SATB a capella
On This Bright Easter Morn (Trinitas, 4501), SATB, organ, brass quintet
People, Look East! (Selah, 405-103), unison, organ, and optional descant
The Preces and Responses (Paraclete, PPM00211), SATB and organ
Psalm 34 (E. C. Schirmer, 5364), two-part treble and organ
Psalm 84 (Paraclete, PPM09729), SATB and organ
Psalm 103 (Trinitas, 4507), SATB and organ
Ride on in Majesty (Trinitas, 4580), SATB anthem with organ
The Risen Sun (Selah, 420-337)
Rorate Caeli (Trinitas, 4500), SATB a cappella
So Much to Sing About (E. C. Schirmer, #5365), SATB and organ
Teach me, my God and King (Paraclete, PPM00303), SATB motet, unaccompanied
Thee Will I Praise (E. C. Schirmer, #5718), SATB and organ
Version with organ and brass quintet (E. C. Schirmer, #5719 & 5719A)
There’s a Voice in the Wilderness Crying (Selah, 422-903), two-part choir and organ
Transfiguration (Selah, 405-390), SATB and organ
Two Advent Anthems (Selah, 405-146), SATB, organ and oboe
The Unsearchable Riches (Paraclete, PPM00625), SATB and organ
We Walk by Faith (Trinitas, 4611), SATB divisi and organ

Unpublished Choral Works
Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life (2005), SATB motet, unaccompanied
Lord, You now have set your servant free (2006), SATB anthem, with organ, brass quintet and timpani
Magnificat (1993) c. 9 minutes, score and parts available on rental, SATB chorus, string orchestra and organ
Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in D (2003), SATB canticles with organ
Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in D-flat (2002), SATB canticles with organ
O Light Invisible (2003), SATB motet, a cappella
The Preces and Responses (A-flat) (2002), SATB, unaccompanied
Rune of Hospitality (2003), SATB anthem, unaccompanied
Send forth your light (2002), SATB anthem with organ, based on Psalm 43
Sweet Music, Heavenly Rare (2006), SATB motet, unaccompanied
The Passion According to St. John (2008), SATB chorus, three soloists, unaccompanied
Though every tongue shall spend its fire (2003), SATB anthem with organ
You Shall Know the Truth (2005), SATB anthem with organ

Recordings
A Choral Feast (2001) (Gothic, G-49126), The Choir of Men & Boys, Washington National Cathedral, Douglas Major, conductor. “Gloria” from Missa Brevis
A Festival Song: The Music of Craig Phillips (2004) (Gothic, G-49207), The Choir of All Saints’ Beverly Hills; Tom Foster, conductor; Craig Phillips, organist.
Song of Zechariah: Benedictus Dominus Deus
Teach Me, My God and King
Serenade for Horn and Organ
Psalm 34
Pastorale for Bassoon and Organ
The House of Faith Has Many Rooms
And I Saw the Holy City
Ride On in Majesty
Fanfare for Organ
Keep Watch, Dear Lord
A Song Without Words for Cello and Organ
A Festival Song
Be Still My Soul (2006) (Gothic, G-49251), The Choir of All Saints’ Church, Beverly Hills, Dale Adelmann, conductor. The Risen Sun, Transfiguration, We Walk by Faith
Blasts from the Past Century (2006) (Pro Organo, CD 7197), David Heller, organ. Fantasy Toccata
Burnished Bright (2006) (Paraclete, GDCD 040), Gabriel V Brass Quintet, David Chalmers, organ. Suite for Organ, Brass and Percussion
Easter (1997) (Gothic, G-49097), The Choir of All Saints’ Church, Beverly Hills, Thomas Foster, conductor. On this bright Easter morn
On A Sunday Afternoon (2005) (JAV Recordings, JAV 149), Todd Wilson, organ; Yvonne Caruthers, cello. A Song Without Words for Cello and Organ
Organ Americana (2004) (Pro Organo, CD 7196), Tom Trenney, organ. Toccata on “Antioch,” Prelude on “Kremser,” Fantasy on “Torah Song”
Seasons of Festivity (1997) (Arkay Records, AR6162), Marilyn Keiser, organ. Prelude on “Kremser”
Silence & Music (1993) (Gothic, G-49064), The Choir of All Saints’ Church, Beverly Hills, Thomas Foster, conductor. Hodie, Christus natus est
Sinfonia Festiva (2005) (Summit Records, DCD 436), Paul Skevington, organ; Washington Symphonic Brass. Psalm Prelude, Fanfare, Suite for Organ, Brass and Percussion
Small Wonder (2003) (Pro Organo, CD 7190), Christmas at St. Paul’s, K Street, Washington, D. C. The Holly and the Ivy (arr. Phillips)
Spiritual Pairs (1996) (Pro Organo, CD 7067), Marilyn Keiser, organ. If you will only let God guide you