An interview with Olivier Latry

Lorraine S. Brugh

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

This interview took place October 17, 2018, at Westfield House of Theological Studies in Cambridge, England.

Lorraine Brugh: I’m interested in your visits to Cambridge and what your work is here.

Colin Walsh: I teach the two organ scholars at Trinity College. I work with them both on solo repertoire and also the accompaniments. In some ways, the accompaniments are the most important thing at Trinity, as they have to accompany that choir under the direction of Stephen Layton. Of course, the playing has to be right for the choir to be able to perform at a high standard. I teach on the fine Metzler instrument, which doesn’t lend itself to all literature, so there are compromises that have to be made.

Is it a tracker organ?

Yes, it’s built as a classical instrument, so some of the Romantic repertoire needs quite a bit of thinking through. I use my experience to try and influence these youngsters to find the best solution.

Do you spend much time working on registration?

Yes, quite a bit of that. Of course, the organ is very different from King’s College. King’s is one of the finest organs for accompaniment there is. Trinity was really designed for Bach and his contemporaries, so that takes time to adjust. I like to think that I’m not dogmatic in my teaching. These are bright students who have their own ideas. I like to ask them to justify what they are doing. If I think they are playing something in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with, I would ask if they think that is the right approach. If they think it is, then I would try to work with their idea.

I think that’s where American teaching would be somewhat different. We wouldn’t tend to be so kind.

They are Cambridge undergraduates. They have quick brains, so they soak it up quickly. Of course, debate and justification are very much the modus operandi here. One must believe in the way they are playing.

Who were your significant teachers?

Nicholas Danby, who was at the Royal Academy and taught me at Oxford, Jean Langlais, and Simon Preston. I learned the French repertoire from Langlais and, in part, from Danby. Guy Weitz, who had been a student of Widor, taught Nicholas Danby, so there is another connection with France.

So what inspired you to study with Langlais?

It was Nicholas Danby. I’d been to Notre-Dame and heard Pierre Cochereau, and his playing had a dramatic effect on me. Danby knew I liked all this French repertoire and wanted to study it with someone in France, and he suggested Langlais.

I’ve always enjoyed travelling. I’m going to Germany tomorrow. As long as I get to Luton airport in time, I’ll be in Berlin tomorrow night. Then on Friday morning I’ll take a train to Leipzig, then to Zwickau for a recital on Sunday, which is where Schumann was born, a couple hours from Leipzig.

Anything else you’d like to say about Cambridge?

It’s always a joy to hear the Cambridge choirs when I’m here. Yesterday, for example, I went to the first part of Evensong at King’s, then caught part of Trinity, then ended at St. John’s College.

There is such a confluence of people and excellence here.

Indeed.

I know of you most from Lincoln Cathedral. I enjoyed one of your recitals there. Can you talk about the position, and what the organist laureate entails?

I’ve been there for thirty years. I went as organist and master of the choristers. In 2002 I became organist laureate; I’m there as the organist and have the freedom to be an ambassador for the cathedral, to give concerts at home and abroad, make recordings, and teach in Cambridge.

I do have a regular playing schedule. I spend half of my time in Lincoln and half in other places. In Lincoln we have two treasures; the cathedral is one of the finest religious buildings in the world. Every time I get back to it, I realize it is really special. The other treasure is the Father Willis organ, which you heard in all its glory. I never tire of it. It has such a deep and rich quality.

Father Willis knew that building, and it’s interesting, having worked in Salisbury, which is also a Father Willis, how different those two instruments are. I’ve always thought the Salisbury organ has a more vertical sound, much like the building itself. It was also built twenty years earlier than Lincoln. For me it has a lighter and more classical sound.

Lincoln Cathedral is a big, solid mass of stone, very wide with those huge towers. It is a much broader, reed-based organ.

Do you think he had those ideas in mind with the two organs?

Yes, I think he did. Lincoln needs the weight of the reeds and foundations to project the sound into the building.

And also the 16′s and 32′s?

Yes, there are two 32′s. At the concert you attended I had some choir men singing the plainsong in the Dupré pieces. They were hiding away in the triforium. I love accompanying in that building. The choir is good and fun to work with.

You’ve done some recordings at Lincoln. Let’s talk about recordings.

I have been involved in recordings beginning with Simon Preston during my time at Christ Church, Oxford. I noticed this week that the Archive of English Cathedral Music has put up on YouTube a 1977 recording called Romantic Choral Classics. I listened to some of it the other day, and the choir was so good, so virile, so energetic. When the choir went down to pianissimo the intensity was still there. It was something special, and it’s a great joy to see it now available to all again.

I recorded at Salisbury with the wonderful choir there, and that is where I made my first solo organ recordings with Priory Records. I did two recordings of French organ music with them in 1984. I was in Salisbury from 1978 to 1985.

Then at St. Albans I made another recording for Priory, Vierne’s First Symphony and the Duruflé Suite. At Lincoln I’ve done several recordings, some of the organ and some of the choir, and one that came out in August 2018 of J. S. Bach. I wanted to do something that showed that Bach can work well on a cathedral organ. Bach works well on the Trinity Metzler, but it’s very different when played in a cathedral on an electro-pneumatic action.

Last July I recorded at Saint-Ouen, Rouen, a Cavaillé-Coll that I believe is one of the finest organs in the world. I recorded all the Dupré Antiphons, opus 18, part of which you heard in Lincoln.

Do you think there is a future for organ recordings?

Who knows? It’s a different commercial world than it was thirty years ago.

I started working with Priory and they are still releasing new recordings. Recordings have been a big part of my career, and there are others being planned at the moment.

There was one recording I did with Priory that came out by accident four years ago. We make a recording of all recitals at the cathedral, primarily for our archive, and also so that a visiting organist can have a recording of their recital—a sort of souvenir of their time in Lincoln. I played Messiaen, La Nativité du Seigneur, which I do every Christmas, and the 2014 version was recorded and is now available on the Priory catalog.

They took it more or less live?

Yes, we just retook a couple moments to eradicate “noises off.” Overall I think it captures the atmosphere of a live performance.

Isn’t it also a problem for students, who listen to these perfect and edited recordings, and think that’s the level at which they should play.

There are plenty of people who can play all the right notes in all the right order. I don’t always want that. If there are one or two small accidents I don’t think that matters as long as they are making music. One also needs energy, drive, and danger. It’s what I call “letting the dogs off the lead.” There are times in a performance when one can change gear and go with the moment. I do like to light the fire sometimes and let it happen. It’s a wonderful feeling when you get this.

That’s also a way students can use their adrenaline, I believe. They’ve got all this energy, and they can put it into anxiety and nerves, or they can channel it for the performance.

Yes, that’s it, this channeling. Use this tension in a big space for the music. We’ve had some fabulous recitals over the years—Daniel Roth, Olivier Latry, Philippe Lefebvre. It is often the ones who have come from big buildings and know how to project the music a long way. There are others who just play to themselves, and that doesn’t work. Every stop needs its own nurturing, has its own little character. It’s a question of action, space, timing, legato, tempo.

That’s a very sophisticated level of performer and performance.

Those are the great ones. When I play on the reeds on the Great organ, I have to play into the keys so that the tone can develop. That’s what makes them carry into the building. One must see each stop as having a separate character, and above all, listen.

You can know those things when you know the instrument intimately.

It’s interesting. You cannot approach any organ with a pre-conceived idea of what you will do. One has to adapt to it. It’s the building, it’s the organ, it’s the music, and it’s you. These four things need to come together. In many cases an instrument will tell you how to play, and you have to be receptive to this.

That’s hard to teach.

It was Langlais who first said to me, “stop playing the console, play the pipes.”

I don’t remember him saying that to me. I don’t think I was there long enough.

There was a reason he had to say it to me. If you’re dealing with a little 2′ piccolo and you just give it a little of air, it will be alright. But if you’re dealing with the huge lumbering woods up in the roof, the largest and deepest pipes, one needs to give them time. It takes time, in a big building, for the sound to travel, so one often has to play them ahead.

Shall we talk about Langlais? I’m fascinated to hear how the experience was for you.

His apartment was in Rue Duroc, you’ll know where. I always felt it was like entering into a mystical cave where the ghosts of Widor, Vierne, Dupré, and Franck were all in the shadows.

Most of my lessons were in Rue Duroc, on a small mechanical-action organ, which played the wrong notes before you even looked at them. His dog, Scherzo, near your left foot, appeared to be waiting for you to play a wrong pedal note. Langlais, too, was listening. I remember once when using my third finger on an F-sharp in a work by César Franck, he stopped me and said, “No, you must use your fourth finger there.” He obviously heard it wasn’t absolutely legato. I remember his teaching was also interspersed with stories about the composers themselves. That brought a nice humanity, it brought it all alive.

He also had tales from when he was teaching in other places. As I prepared to play the Vierne First Symphony to him, he told me a story. In the USA someone was playing the “Final” from the symphony. His interpretation was too fast and mechanical. Langlais sat there and waited until he finished. He kept silent and finally said to the student, “what was that?’’ The student responded with the title of the piece. Langlais said, “I don’t know this piece. What have you played?” He was quite persistent; he wouldn’t let him get away with it. He said, “That wasn’t Vierne; that was you.”

Langlais was interested in his students beyond their lessons. He was interested in Salisbury Cathedral, where I was at the time, and what I was doing there. He was interested in other places in England, too.

I remember his approach, which I use with my students, that you must justify what you are doing. If he thought I played something too fast, he would say that the composer wrote little notes to be heard. His basic approach to articulation was that things were either staccato or legato. Staccato was half-length, or maybe three-quarter length. That’s really a Dupré thing, isn’t it?

Legato often meant Franck legato with a great emphasis on line and phrase. Yes, Franck was different from Vierne or Duruflé. Langlais would often say, “Insist on that note,” highlighting by holding a tied note or the middle of the phrase as long as possible.

That’s why I wanted to study with Langlais. I would play a different Franck piece every day and would soak up all of his suggestions. He had a way of seeing that music. I wanted to understand the overlapping legato that he could do so well.

Everything had to breathe. Take your time; don’t hurry. But, at the same time, the music must move forwards. He taught me that playing Vierne involves playing a bit more robustly. In the “Adagio” of the Third Symphony, for example, he would want Franck-like legato, with overlapping notes, etc. In the more rhythmic movements, though, something quite different. There is much drama and emotion in his music that must be conveyed.

I remember watching Langlais play a couple of Masses when I was with him, and it was amazing how he knew how and when to play the pedal ahead of the manuals. He knew how to make the music come together, not at the console, but for the congregants downstairs.

Sometimes we went to Sainte-Clothilde to play the famous Cavaillé-Coll organ. I remember comparing notes with Daniel Roth, who went to Langlais as a student. He played the Fantaisie in A for him. Like me he got some instructions from Langlais before he began concerning strict time or rubato and the use of the swell box in Franck. The idea of the crescendi and diminuendi and the swell box were all connected to his use of rubato and the direction of a phrase.

Yes, inside the pulse was the flexibility. One doesn’t lose the pulse; the flexibility comes inside it. That was a good thing to learn.

The pulse is not a metronome. It should change with the tension in the music. If there is a rising sequence, especially with some of those Vierne symphonic movements, the tension needs to be emphasized. Langlais taught that the closer one got to the resolution, the more muscular playing was needed.

Langlais’ criticism of American playing was well taken, I believe, because of the difficulty of understanding these differences. It is easy to err on either side of that flexible pulse idea. So all this happened while you were at Salisbury. Can you talk about that position?

Yes, I went there in 1978 and stayed seven years. It was great working with Richard Seal who was a consummate musician and ran a fine choir. His emphasis was on color, legato, and line. I like to think I learned a lot from him.

Before that was Christ Church, Oxford. How was that?

Christ Church was another special experience. This gave me the opportunity to work with the legendary Simon Preston. I had been listening to his recordings since I was twelve. His commitment to the choir was staggering. His energy seemed limitless.

How old was he at the time?

He was in his mid-thirties, very young. The influences of Boris Ord and David Willcocks, with whom he had worked at King’s College, were evident. At the same time I worked with Preston, I also worked with Christopher Robinson with the Oxford Bach Choir for four years. That was a great experience and privilege, too.

Shall we keep going back and talk about Saint George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle?

I was lucky there. I was eighteen; I went straight from school, so it was a sort of gap year. The man at the keys at the time was Sydney Campbell, who had been previously organist at Canterbury; he was a wonderful organist and inspiring accompanist. In those days the organist had no sight lines to the choir and conductor, so one had to listen and play, which was a real challenge.

It was a great training. I’m glad I did that, not only because I was working with a great musician, but also it prepared me for Christ Church. Sydney Campbell had enormous respect for Simon Preston, and it was mutual. Campbell was great and quite a character. There was never a dull moment!

Have you been to the United States?

Yes, but it was some time ago. I’ve played at The Riverside Church in New York City, Philadelphia, and Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan.

In the United States, many of our organ departments are declining. Fewer young people believe they can find full-time work in the organ and church music field and are choosing other paths. I don’t know if that correlates to the system here, but I’m interested in your views.

Even here in Cambridge there is that correlation. There are so few organ positions at the choral foundations that the chance of really getting a decent job is quite slim. The jobs don’t open up very often, and the pay isn’t that good. Cathedrals are missing potential talent, and the students are going on into a school or other music-related opportunities.

When I was organist and master of the choristers at Lincoln for fourteen years, there were a lot of administration and meetings to deal with. Nowadays I’m very happy to go to the organ loft, close the door, and play.

Do you encourage young people to go into organ and church music?

Yes and no. Yes, if I think they have a future. I don’t think it’s fair to encourage them if they don’t have the musicality or character to pull it off.

That’s a skill we don’t teach much. We sometimes do a little bit about clergy-musician relationships, but it’s not enough.

Yes, there is never enough time to learn all we need to do all the job entails. We keep at it, both teachers and students, doing what we can each day.

Thank you for the delightful conversation today.

Lorraine S. Brugh

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

The interview took place January 31, 2018, in Girton, Cambridge, and preceded a luncheon Mr. Rutter attended, given by Lady Rachel Willcocks, the widow of Sir David Willcocks, at her home in Cambridge. Mr. Rutter also had a publishing deadline that day and had already been at work several hours when he arrived at 10:30 a.m. Mr. Rutter began the interview by explaining the luncheon he would later attend.

John Rutter: This is one of the things that Rachel Willcocks does, bless her heart, since Sir David’s death three years ago. She’s really been born again, as she was his principal caretaker. Did you ever meet him?

Lorraine Brugh: No, I never did.

JR: Oh, what a shame! Many Americans did, as you know, as he loved his trips to America working at summer schools, colleges, universities, and churches. He made quite an impression over the years. It was inspiring that he was active in music until his ninetieth year.

He died peacefully in his sleep and was greatly celebrated by his college, by his many former students, protégés, and admirers. After that she started a new life. She would now be 91 or 92. She is an active member of her garden club, her book club, and is out there. Every so often she hosts luncheons for various of her old friends.

She brings together people who perhaps don’t all know each other, but they all know her. My wife Joanne and I were invited but she can’t do it. She’s ringing a quarter peal. She’s a bell ringer, a change ringer. They’re counting on her; it’s been booked for a while, but I will be meeting Rachel. We do that every few months.

LB: There will be others who join you?

JR: There will. But who they’ll be I’ll find out when I get there. It’s usually about four or five others. It’s nice that she’s still having an active social life. Her daughter, Sarah, who lives in London, comes up to assist her. That’s what’s on the agenda for lunch. She is a dear lady, and, of course, I owe a huge debt to David Willcocks.

LB: That’s actually my first question. I know he gave you the opportunity to edit 100 Carols for Choirs together.

JR: That came later, of course. Our first collaboration was on Carols for Choirs 2, the orange book, that volume 2 of the series that throughout the English-speaking world became pretty standard.

That all came about because I had decided I wanted to study music at Cambridge while I was still in high school. I applied, not to King’s College, where David was a renowned choir director and a member of the university music faculty. I thought at King’s I might just get swallowed up, because it is a college with such a strong musical reputation.

What I did, which I never regretted, is I applied at Clare College, which is their next-door neighbor right along the banks of the Cam. Of course, that didn’t prevent me from going to choral Evensong at King’s College, which I did, and at St. John’s.

Back in those days, the two choirs that counted were King’s and St. John’s, the two that have boy sopranos. That all changed later when the first men’s colleges became mixed, but that’s ahead in the story.

I really met and got to know David Willcocks in my second year as an undergraduate when he took what they used to rather quaintly call “Harmony and Counterpoint” class, all rather academic and old-fashioned in its way. I was one of a class of seven or eight that he took every week. At the end of one of these classes, he took me aside and said, “Mr. Rutter, I understand that you’ve been composing. I hear that you have written some Christmas carols.” I thought “Oh my goodness, me, I’m in trouble.”

He was known really as Mr. Christmas. He transformed our musical celebration of Christmas with the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols as he ran it at King’s College, with his own wonderful descants of some of the standard Christmas hymns, and his radiant arrangements of some of the traditional carols. He was very strongly associated with the celebration of Christmas in peoples’ minds.

I think he might have been a bit annoyed that here was this young upstart who was also presuming to write and arrange Christmas carols himself. That was the exact opposite. What he actually wanted to do was to see what I was up to, and to give me encouragement, which was incredibly generous of him. What he said was, “Look, would you bring a selection of your compositions to my rooms at King’s College at 9 o’clock on Monday morning, and I’d like to look through them?”

So, very nervously, with a sheaf of music under my arm, I went to his elegant rooms at the top of the Gibbs building in King’s College, and without a word he looked through the pile, and at the end of it, said, “Would you be interested in these being published?” Now that’s an offer you don’t refuse when you are a young student.

LB: So, there was more than The Shepherd’s Pipe Carol in there?

JR: Yes, there was. There was my very first Christmas carol, The Nativity Carol, and various arrangements of traditional carols of one sort and another. The next thing I knew he took the manuscripts down to Oxford University Press where he was for many years the editorial advisor for their choral music. Their sacred choral music was really chosen by David Willcocks. It was quite an honor that he was taking my work down to discuss it with the senior editor there.

That was the pattern of his Mondays. He spent the morning doing correspondence and administration at King’s, then he would take the train down to London to spend the afternoon at the editorial offices of Oxford University Press. Then in the evening he would take his weekly rehearsal of the Bach Choir, which was his London choir, a large amateur chorus over 200 voices that was and is of great renown.

Amazingly, I received an offer of publication in the mail the next Wednesday, which was pretty fast work really. Later they refused to believe it at Oxford University Press (OUP) because they say they never move that quickly. We have the dates to prove it, so they actually did.

More than that they said, “Would you be interested in an annual retainer?” which gave them first refusal of anything I might write. The sum was £25 per year, which, even then, would not fry many eggs. It was a gesture. From that day to this, OUP has been my main publisher. So it is thanks to David Willcocks that I made the massive leap from being an aspiring composer to a published composer. That mattered a lot more then than it does now.

Now with website, internet, and sound bites, composers have lots more ways of reaching their audience than they had then. Music notation software allows one to put music on paper so it looks like a printed copy. That also wasn’t possible then. We still worked like medieval monks with pen and ink. Of course, the whole revolution didn’t come until really twenty-five years after that. So I was very fortunate to have a publisher working on my behalf. That’s the story of how my work as a composer began, and how it started to spread worldwide through OUP.

David Willcocks, really having put my leg on the first rung of the ladder, then continued to encourage and support me through the rest of his life. This is mirrored in similar generosity to quite a lot of others who passed through his hands, or came to his notice in one way or another: performers, conductors, other composers, organists, singers. There were many who would say that one of the great influences, mentors, and supporters they had was David Willcocks. He was a great man.

LB: Did he consciously see it as his role to nurture and generate new generations of students and other young musicians?

JR: Yes, I’m sure that he did. He saw his role as a leader, an exemplar. King’s College Cambridge was a role model for choirs around the world. They set standards, higher than had been general in the years before that, which everyone was expected to match if they could, or aspire to.

It wasn’t so much for himself as it was what he wanted to do for his college, for its choir, and for musicians the world over. That’s really what I mean by generosity: his gifts were always put to the service of others. You can’t really say anything better of someone than that.

LB: Your work does a lot of the same thing. (Next I showed him the December 2017 issue of The Diapason. The issue contained the article on Francis Jackson’s centenary.) Do you know the journal?

JR: Yes, I do, although I think when I last saw it wasn’t in such lovely full color. It was a little more austere-looking.

There’s Francis Jackson! He continues to play at a small local church. His dean at York Minster, Viv Faull (the Very Reverend Vivienne Faull, current dean of York Minster), was at one time chaplain of Clare College, and so I remember her from those years. Jackson was very loyal to York Minster. Interestingly, he and David Willcocks were often mistaken for each other because they looked rather alike. Sometimes they were congratulated for the other’s work.

LB: I imagine they were pretty gracious about that.

JR: I think they were.

(I mention my interview with Stephen Cleobury for The Diapason, June 2018, pages 20–23.)

JR: Stephen’s reign at King’s has been even longer than David Willcocks’s. David was the organist/director of music at King’s for seventeen years, I believe. He took office late in 1957 when Boris Ord, his predecessor, became ill and needed help. He had something like a motor-neuron disease. It was a degenerative condition, and first his foot began to slip off the pedal notes. David, who had been organ scholar at King’s, was summoned to assist. When it was clear Ord wasn’t going to recover, Willcocks was given the title director of music and Ord had an emeritus role. David continued until 1974 when he went to the Royal College of Music. Philip Ledger followed for a period of seven years and did a fine job. Stephen Cleobury took over in 1982 and will retire in 2019.

We have had two long reigns with a shorter one in the middle. Now his retirement has been announced, and the advertisement has been placed for the job, which will generate hot competition. A lot of interest will attach to it, and many will apply, I imagine.1

LB: What kind of direction do you believe King’s will go, or would you like to see the direction be?

JR: What has changed is that King’s is no longer in the field by themselves. When David Willcocks took over in 1957 there were only two choirs that the world had heard of in the city of Cambridge. King’s was one of them, St. John’s was the other. They were twin peaks; I would never hold up one over the other. King’s has possibly enjoyed the greater renown because it is traditionally broadcast from the BBC at Christmas time that has gone around the world.

St. John’s does not sing during the immediate period around Christmas, so King’s has slightly had the edge. What a new director now has to accept is that King’s is not alone. There are other peaks in the Cambridge choral world. This is a city of choirs.

Once the men’s colleges began to admit women, and, in the case of Girton, the women’s college began to admit men, the choirs became mixed, made up of very gifted and eager undergraduates who wanted to sing at a high level, and have had the example of King’s and St. John’s to inspire them.

Of course, those mixed choirs are more in line with what is happening in the real world, as men and boys choirs are often becoming difficult to recruit. Adult mixed choirs are becoming pretty standard. My own choir, Clare College, Trinity College Choir, Gonville and Caius, Christ College, Jesus College (they actually have two choirs, as they have both a boys and a girls choir), St. Catherine’s, a lot of choirs are vying for excellence.

What has to continue to happen at Kings, as has already begun successfully, is to accommodate to the thought that they don’t have the field to themselves, and they must remain distinctive. For the foreseeable future I think they will retain a boy’s and men’s choir. They do have a mixed choir that sings on Mondays. They need to maintain their tradition.

They have spread themselves quite widely in the scope of their activities, and that will have to continue. They now have their own record label and webcasts that bring their work day by day to a wide audience.

They give a lot more concerts, recitals, and do a lot more tours than they used to. Whoever runs it will have to have a clear sense of the identity of the choir and its tradition, while being able to successfully swim in a much more crowded pool. In some ways it’s a harder job than it was back in the days of David Willcocks at King’s and George Guest at St. John’s, because it was kind of lonesome up there, and now it isn’t.

When they look back and write the history of what’s happening in choral music in Britain, it will be seen that there was something of a golden age at Oxford and Cambridge, and other universities, where many have seen the value of the fine choir tradition and want to copy it. So Royal Holloway College, London University, and King’s College, London, all now have fine choirs.

One thing about a choir is that it’s useful for drawing attention to the college, because the students tapping away at their laptops doing their degree work isn’t very newsworthy. On the other hand, a choir that gives a recital and wows the audience spreads the awareness of the college, helps with recruitment. There’s no question of that. That’s something that’s been understood for a long time in the United States, where, for example, the St. Olaf Choir has always had a big annual tour. This is something we’re rapidly getting used to here in the UK.

Cambridge has always been an international university, and now it has to compete on a global stage with others. There are Asian students who are so committed and dedicated and they have a choice. They could go to a university in this country or they could go to an American university or Australian one, or wherever they feel there is a center of excellence in their chosen field. Choirs will continue to have an important role in waving the flag for their colleges and universities. That will continue to be an important part of what King’s College does.

LB: Some colleges struggle to get enough resources in the budget to be able to tour.

JR: In the end you may find that you attract more funding than you spend. It’s necessary to spend money in order to recoup the costs. The great thing about a choir is that it is transportable. You can’t send the Clare College cricket team on a United States tour. What would they do when they get there? Whom would they play?

That’s something the new director of King’s College will have to be aware of. You always have to fight your corner in a college that isn’t just about music. There are people who are highly expert in many fields of academic endeavor and question music’s place in the academy.

We have to persuade others over and over again that music is important, and why liturgical music that forms part of the music in the chapel is important. This is not so hard to explain to atheists, but it is to people from a different religious tradition. What’s the point of all this elaborate worship in a university setting?

I heard a senior tutor say, “We’re a degree factory.” The response to that is to ask why we should be the same as every other university. If the college or university has a unique tradition, if the choir is built into the fabric and statutes of the institution that go back centuries, then we should be cherishing and nurturing that.

That’s a point, oddly, that is better understood in the United States than here. I’ve talked to people who are attracting tourists to this country and some British planners have said, “We’re not a museum. We’re a vibrant country that’s doing all sorts of new things, pushing back new frontiers in science and technology.” An American in the meeting said, “What people want is your history.” In a sense it is part of what we should be nurturing.

The atom was split here in Cambridge, new bits of the universe have been discovered. Yet, when we have something rather special and lovely that goes back for centuries, we shouldn’t apologize for what went on, we should celebrate it.

LB: For American choral music, the British choral music tradition is still of great interest and curiosity. Are there other mentors than David Willcocks who influenced you?

JR: I have to go back further than my university days. I was fortunate to attend a boys school where music was a very important part of the curriculum. It was in north London, Highgate School, which had a Christian foundation, dating from 1565. It has a plain red brick chapel up Highgate Hill. At the highest point in London, there it is.

That is where I spent my early years under the really inspirational guidance of Edward Chapman. He had been an organ scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in the 1920s, and was a student of Charles Wood. If you’ve ever sung “Ding Dong Merrily on High,” the chances are you’ve probably sung his harmonization. He was a choral and liturgical musician. He was director of music here at Gonville and Caius College. He was a conservative craftsman of great skill who was rather strict and stern with his students, of whom Edward Chapman was one.

I am the grandson of Charles Wood through music because a lot of his ideas and teachings were passed down to me through Chapman. Oddly, of course, Wood wrote and arranged Christmas carols and compiled collections of them, and I’ve done the same. I can’t explain that connection really. The great thing was that I was encouraged to think that composition was normal, which for a teenage boy is quite unusual. In our school it was OK to write music. We were encouraged to write music for our school orchestra or other instrumental ensembles or the chapel choir occasionally.

One of my slightly older classmates was John Tavener, later Sir John Tavener. He was clearly destined for fame and fortune. We still miss him. He died in 2013, just short of his seventieth birthday, which was very sad.

LB: Did he die rather suddenly? Didn’t he compose until the end?

JR: He had an unusual condition called Marfan syndrome, a congenital malfunction of the body’s connective tissues. Marfan’s people generally grow rather tall and can be double-jointed, which can help if you are a keyboard player, I suppose. Indeed John was a fine pianist and organist. It tends to go with a general malformation of the heart and requires heart surgery, which now has an established technique and outcome. At the time when John and his brother, who also had the disease, had the operation the surgery was pioneering. It did give them thirty years of life they wouldn’t have had. Nevertheless, his health was always precarious.

I remember him mostly as a high school friend. We would show each other our newly written compositions, and I was recruited, among his other colleagues and friends, to take part in whatever was his latest compositional epic. I generally worked on a smaller scale than he did and was rather in awe of him.

There were other musicians there among my contemporaries. I remember in a very different field young David Cullen, who became Andrew Lloyd Webber’s orchestrator and assistant, who worked in the shadows, but whose skill and musicianship were relied on by this renowned musical theater composer. He was at Highgate at the same time, as well as Howard Shelley, the pianist, who has had a fine international career.

There was a whole bunch of us who knew that music was important in our lives. I was not the most obvious among them, really, because I had no outstanding performing talent. I’m afraid your readers wouldn’t enjoy my organ playing.

LB: So I shouldn’t ask about it?

No, well, it ceased at age 18. I felt I owed it to myself to study an instrument to a reasonable standard, and I studied the organ up through the standard exams.

As I worked through the eight levels we have here in the UK, the music gets harder and the scales get faster and more intricate. I managed to put myself through grade 8 on the organ and afterwards, when I got my certificate I thought, “Right, I’m giving up,” because I knew my musical gift, if I had one, was for composing and conducting, not for playing. I can rehearse and accompany music, but I never want to play in public.

Yet, well, oddly, a page of orchestral score paper always felt like home territory to me. I always felt very comfortable with what amounts to the cookery of orchestral writing. The recipe is put together from different ingredients. You have to know what goes with what. If you put too much spice in it masks the flavor of something else.

When writing for orchestra, if one puts too much brass in, it will cover up what is going on in the woodwinds and strings, etc. That was something I learned from the great masters as, in the end, every musician does. I was encouraged to write for all sorts of resources back in high school.

We had an annual musical competition with an instrumental ensemble class. The more instruments you included, the more points you got. So if we had within our house, which was a sub-group of the school, a tuba player who could only play about four notes, you would put him in. So that gave me a taste of instrumental writing, where one had to adapt to the resources you have. None of that music survives, fortunately.

LB: What an environment to live in!

JR: Yes, it really was. Our headmaster always thought I should be an academic. He knew enough of the musical profession to know it was full of pitfalls, disappointments, setbacks, heartbreak, and he was not sure that I would have whatever it took to succeed. Nor was I sure, but I boldly applied to Cambridge, slightly under false pretenses, because I said I wanted to study modern languages, French and German. As soon as I came up for the interviews, I confessed to the senior tutor of Clare, “Well, look, I really want to do music.” And he said, “All right.”

So I was allowed to follow my true vocation. Nobody stopped me, and no one has stopped me ever since. I’m still doing today what I was doing as that little child in my parent’s apartment when I first discovered the out-of-tune upright piano.

There’s a story I’ve told many times, but it’s true. At the age of five or six, as an only child, I spent a lot of time by myself, and I would doodle away in a world of my own, singing along in my little treble voice, and just making up music. In a way, that’s what I’m still doing, all these years later, except, with a bit of luck I get paid for it. And I can write it down, which I couldn’t do then. I only learned to read and write music once I got to school.

LB: Do you think that being able to compose a tune is a gift?

JR: I would always describe myself as 50% composer and 50% songwriter. Really they’re not the same skill. I’ve always been drawn to melody among those twentieth-century composers where I found it. That often meant songwriters. I owe a huge debt to the classic American songwriters, which I would call the golden age of American musical theater, roughly stretching from Jerome Kern to Stephen Sondheim. The thing I learned from them, which I also learned from the song writing of Schubert, Schumann, and others, is that a tune is a great carrier for the sense of a text. It’s like a vector for conveying the text, like shooting an arrow into the heart of the listener.

I would never renounce melody. Of course in twentieth-century concert music and opera, one doesn’t normally go out humming the tunes. The composers of that sort of music are developing music in other ways, discovering new sound worlds, new structures, new interrelationships between music and other worlds of the arts. A lot of contemporary music is inspired by dance, visual arts, poetry, etc. One doesn’t go to it expecting the same thing as attending West Side Story. Although my training is 100% classical, I’ve been influenced by music theater and perhaps, to a smaller extent, pop music.

I have this problem that probably goes with age, but pop music stopped for me somewhere after the Beatles, which is a long time ago. “Here, There, and Everywhere” is a lovely song.

I’m not sure that any one pop musician today has any standing like they did. The world of pop music and media was not so fragmented as today. There were not so many radio and television stations, not as many record labels. If you did attain prominence, it is probably greater than anything you could attain now.

The Beatles were so multi-talented. They were very good: great melodists, inventive poets. Their music retains great freshness. I think that’s where melody fits in to what I do. I’ve allowed myself to be influenced by the fields outside of classical music, but it’s contained within the framework of my classical training, I think.

LB: The Beatles created a new sound world as well. When we studied classical music in the 1970s we came home to our dorm and listened to the Beatles. We didn’t see it as a problem or incongruity to put those musics next to each other.

JR: I don’t think it need be a problem. I must say I’m not too enamored with rock music in church. I think it’s too one-dimensional. I think there is a subtlety about the great tradition of church music, and a depth that is more nourishing. I think so much rock music is loud, and all in 4/4, and thus there isn’t the same potential for responding sensitively to what is probably the greatest body of texts we have. Anybody who is going to set words to music is sooner or later going to come upon religious texts. They have the great quality of vision and poetry. We have the great fortune in this country, and I’m fortunate to be a member of the last generation to experience the King James Bible and the Prayer Book of 1662 on a daily basis. These words are majestic English, written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, when they knew how to turn a good phrase.

It was ousted about the time I went to university, first the New English Bible, then other translations. We absolutely need the new translations, and I use them, but when I’m looking for words to set, I find there is more resonance in the historic English of the King James Bible or the old Prayer Book. Somehow it seems to invite music in a way I don’t find in contemporary religious writing. This is not to say that we shouldn’t persevere with it. I remember the dean of St. Paul’s (London) once said to me, “Yes, the contemporary translations of the Bible are not all that fantastic. The only way they’ll get better, though, is if we keep persevering with them.”

LB: There are good reasons for changing and updating English language.

JR: Oh, yes. With inclusiveness, and those things, which they weren’t worrying about in the 1600s. At the same time, it’s good to have a sense of historical imagination, so that when we hear William Byrd setting the words, “Prevent us, O Lord,” we know that he didn’t mean “stop us, O Lord,” but “go before us, O Lord.” If we just eradicate that from our religious language, we lose a sense of how flexible and ever-changing language can be.

Or again, “when man goeth forth to his labor,” it refers to the German “Mensch.” “Mann” in German means a human being, where man in English means a male. In English the same word, unfortunately, serves for both. We need to be aware that a little mental switch goes on and we say, “ah, this is Mensch, this refers to the whole human race.” It would be a shame if we lost that completely, though I do see where it is important the people understand the words as they are meant today. However, young people also need to read old poetry and experience old literature. Otherwise they won’t be enriched by this changing landscape of the English language, which has been such a wonderfully flexible instrument through the changes of many centuries, and continues to evolve.

LB: I recently heard a Mass by Jonathan Dove sung at the Bath Abbey. Do you know it?

JR: Yes, I do, and I know Jonathan Dove quite well, a fine composer. Their director of music Huw Williams has not been there very long. He had been at St. Paul’s Cathedral, as one of the three organists there. He then moved to be the director of music at the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace in London, and then moved within the last year to Bath Abbey, where they have a glorious acoustic—a stone fan-vaulted roof very much modeled on King’s College. The sound floats around in a particularly beautiful way, I think.

LB: I saw you had done a Singing Day the previous weekend at Bath Abbey. Can you say a bit about what those Singing Days are all about?

JR: That Singing Day was one of about twelve to twenty I do every year. Its purpose is to bring people together to enjoy singing for a day without the pressure of a concert or worship service at the end. I really got the idea from the reading sessions that I was asked to be a part of in the United States, often put on by publishers or universities, denominational summer retreats, where people are handed a pile of music at the door and they sing through it. Generally, the purpose is to acquaint those people with the publishers’ music that they might want to use in their own situation. I couldn’t help realizing that they were getting pleasure out of just being together, singing, and not having to worry about polishing the music to perfection.

So I wondered if that idea could be brought into Britain, where it’s not necessarily all about promoting music as such, but just giving people a chance to sing together. It’s aimed at anybody who wants to come. I accept these engagements if I am free, and if the hosts agree to my simple condition that all are welcome. I have ample opportunity to work with professionals. It’s nice to embrace the whole domain of people who sing for fun. A lot of the people who come do belong to civic or church choirs. It might be a small choir, though, without a sufficient balance of parts. So to be part of a choir of 450, which was the maximum we could fit into Bath Abbey, was rather inspiring because it’s different. I do get people who say they are too shy to audition for a choir. I like it if people bring along youngsters to be introduced, painlessly I hope, to all sorts of choral music. Of course there are those who sight read but are a bit rusty, and it improves their skills just like a muscle that needs exercise. So there are a number of functions.

I try to throw in tips for vocal technique. Particularly the men who come to these events may not have sung recently, or even at all since being a child. They come back to it not knowing how to use their voice properly. A few simple things will often put them back on the track, to be able to control their breath, and make a reasonable sound. So there is some teaching purpose, but really the idea is to spend time singing through a bunch of music. I choose about a 50/50 mix of classical or contemporary composers, perhaps not known to them, and my own works. If I didn’t include some of my own work, people would think it’s a bit strange. So, more than anything else, what I find striking about these events is how people feel they must tell me what pleasure it’s given them at the end of the day. It’s almost a physical thing, really, to just say, “I feel so good.” Of course you might get something similar with a good yoga class or Pilates, but singing can have the same beneficial effect on us—body and soul.

LB: And now, as we know more scientifically about brain theory, we can show that it’s true.

JR: Of course, exactly. Sometimes people have to discover, or rediscover that for themselves. These Singing Days form an enjoyable part of my life, and I hope that they spread a love of singing, or reinforce it among those that have dropped out of choral singing, or put new heart into those who struggle with their little church choir week by week, and need something to power them up a bit.

I have to say that my days of traveling abroad to various universities and churches have come to an end, voluntarily. I decided I had to prioritize my time. I like to be in other places, but I resent the time I spend traveling to and from them. I know it’s quick and easy in comparison to the days before jet travel, but it’s still quite tiring. I value increasingly the time I spend at home recording and composing.

LB: I’d like to hear a bit about what you are thinking about for the future. I saw the recent piece Visions you wrote as a violin concerto with boys choir for the Yehudi Menuhin competition. It seemed like a new area for you.

JR: Yes, I never thought I’d end up writing so much choral music, because I simply compose music. I think we delude ourselves if we imagine we are in control of our lives. I don’t think I ever did, or do, have a grand master plan for my life in music. If I ever had it, it hasn’t turned out the way I thought it would. So many of the paths we take are the result of chance meetings or events we hadn’t predicted. If I hadn’t met David Willcocks, and if he hadn’t been interested in my work, I might never have shown my music to a publisher, and perhaps I might have thought I should teach at a university. If people out there in the world of choral music hadn’t gotten hold of some of my early music and requested more of it, there wouldn’t be as much as there is. More than three-quarters of my total output is choral. I don’t fight that too hard, because, when all is said and done, I love choirs. I grew up singing in them. I feel some sense of coming home to my roots when I write choral music. I love poetry; I love words. Music allied to words is rather special to me.

Sometimes, though, it is nice to go beyond words. That is one of the reasons I thought it would be an interesting challenge to write a work that centers on virtuosic violin writing. It is a twenty-minute work for the winner of the Yehudi Menuhin competition in 2016 and was requested to have a part written for the boys choir of the Temple Church (London), where the concert would be held.

Visions is either the only violin concerto with a part for sopranos or it is the only work for soprano voices that has a violin part quite this elaborate. It’s a hybrid piece, but one which sprang out of the circumstances. I receive many invitations to write things, but the reason I said yes to this one was that it was different and drew inspiration from the history of the Temple Church itself, which, as Dan Brown’s readers will know, has links with the Crusades.

The Knights Templars came back with their plunder from the Holy Land, and given that they thought they had been rather naughty, they should spend it on something worthy. So they founded hospitals, churches, and schools. The round part of the Temple Church was built with money they probably supplied, and it’s modeled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. So it was the London base for one of the Crusades. It’s a little hard to speak of this now in a time when the Crusades have become quite politically incorrect. Nonetheless, there is something inspiring about seeing the tombs of the knights, especially when it’s dark in the round part of the church. The rest of the church was bombed flat in World War II, but the round part was sturdy and withstood; the nave did not.

LB: I’ve visited the Round Church in Cambridge, built in a similar way and time, and find the acoustics are splendid.

JR: The Round Church is very similar. In Cambridge it is sadly no longer used as a church. It is sort of a visitor’s center. Of course Cambridge is ludicrously over-churched, and always was. I don’t think that all of those church buildings that crowd around here were ever full, even when everybody went to church. It was like a style accessory; we’ve got to have one. There’s been quite a lot of imagination applied to find a role for them all in the twenty-first century.

LB: The first time I walked into Michaelhouse, a coffee house in a church with choir stalls, an altar, and stained glass windows, I was quite startled. For an American, it felt strange to me.

JR: Michaelhouse Centre is owned by Great St. Mary’s, our university church, which has a thriving congregation. They’ve always had Michaelhouse there, and they scratched their heads a bit to decide what to do with it. I don’t think it’s been used for worship for many years now. It’s not really needed for that purpose, as the university church is just a one-minute walk away. It’s a little bit of a shock, I’m sure.

LB: Do you have the amateur musician in mind when you compose?

JR: If you write for an opera company or orchestra, you’re writing for professionals. If you write for choirs, you are generally writing for amateurs or students. That’s who make up the majority of the world’s choirs. There are a small number of professional European and British choirs, sometimes associated with broadcasting, and certainly university and cathedral choirs that attain a professional level.

The term “professional singer” means something different in the UK than in the United States. Those singers called professional here earn their living solely by singing in professional choirs or vocal ensembles like Tenebrae, Ora, The Sixteen, to name a few. The same pool of singers will populate those groups. There are something like 200 professional small group singers in London. They accept invitations to be in a tour or recording for a group. There is a lot of fruitful interchange.

Many of those singers are from the Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge) chapel choirs, and they want to earn their living as singers but they don’t necessarily want to be soloists. They are really on a level that is unrealistic for other choirs to match. The best of our collegiate choirs are on a similar level. They can perform music of similar challenge and complexity, not available to your average parish choir or local choral society. As a choral composer you have to know for whom you are writing. I’ve just been writing the liner notes for Trinity College Choir’s CD of Owain Park’s music, which is terrific—it creates a sound world opening up before your ears, but don’t expect it to be replicated by your local church choir anytime soon.

I don’t write primarily for the apex of the choral spectrum. Rather, I’ve been writing mostly for choirs somewhere in the middle. One has to be mindful of the liturgical context. The surprise to me is that some pieces I’ve written like All Things Bright and Beautiful and For the Beauty of the Earth, the little ditties, which were crafted with the needs and tradition of the American choirs who commissioned them, have begun to filter back over here. I remember thinking, I will never hear For the Beauty of the Earth sung by an English cathedral choir. Just yesterday I looked at the YouTube video of it being sung by Winchester Cathedral choristers, and indeed the Queen Mother wanted it sung at her 100th birthday celebration service, which it was. I could have never predicted that. What’s happened is that the Church of England has moved its own goalposts a bit, and there has been a loosening up and embracing of a more relaxed, informal kind of church music.

I’ve been generally aiming at a choir in a specific location. It’s always a surprise when a piece gets performed somewhere quite different. I wrote my Requiem within the Anglican Catholic tradition, and it gets done a lot in Japan, where there really isn’t a strong Christian tradition. One never knows where music will reach, and that’s one of the amazing things about it. I always try to write for the performers who will be involved in the first performance. I feel a strong obligation to whoever is doing the piece first. I don’t usually think long past that.

LB: Isn’t it interesting that when you write for a particular context, it often finds a new home in a quite unrelated place?

JR: I almost never write for a general purpose, and I don’t accept commissions anymore, as I want to use my time for my own projects at my own pace. Things like Visions could have never happened if I had been overwhelmed with commissions. This was what I thought was a brilliant idea that was presented to me, and I was glad I had the time to do it.

I still seem to be as busy as ever. The nice thing about being a composer is that no one forces you to retire. You carry on until there is no longer any demand for your services, and of course, composers sometimes carry on even when there is no demand. I hope that day won’t come. It’s nice to be wanted.

LB: What do you still want to do and write?

JR: Oh, everything I haven’t ever done. I don’t want to repeat myself. That’s why I’m a bit shy of doing more choral pieces, particularly if they are attached to a particular celebration, a centenary or a conductor’s anniversary. I’ve done all that. I look for the things I’ve never done before, and I must be realistic. John Williams isn’t going to phone me and say, “I really don’t want to write the next Star Wars score, will you do it for me?” That’s not going to happen.

LB: Would you like that kind of invitation?

JR: Oh, yes, I’d love it. Nor is the Metropolitan Opera going to say, “How about a big new opera for 2020?” It’s happened to my young composer friend, Nico Muhly. His new opera, Marnie, has been premiered in London. It has also been performed by the Met who actually commissioned it. That happens to someone of his generation, but not to somebody of my generation whose track record is in another field altogether.

Then again, if Cameron Mackintosh, the great theatrical man who backed many a musical, were to say “How about a big Broadway musical?” I wouldn’t say no if I had the right idea and the right collaborator to do the book and lyrics. Those are things I’ve never done before, so if they came my way, I would love them.

But, I should be very grateful for the opportunities that have come my way, the people I’ve met, the kind musicians I’ve worked with, the fine texts I’ve been privileged to set to music. It’s been a rich and varied career so far. I’ll be honest with you: I don’t usually plan much beyond a week, because you never know what may happen that may change all your plans. It’s always a challenge to keep up with the commitments that I have undertaken, which sometimes take longer than I’d planned, or those additional ones that come along that I can’t anticipate.

I was amused last year when Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, died. He was very much the architect of the European Union, and my Requiem was to be used in part at his funeral service in the cathedral in Münster. There was an orchestra already booked when they discovered that his vast bulk and the coffin were so huge, and the pallbearers so many, they weren’t going to be able to squeeze past the orchestra, which was off to one side of the chancel steps. They needed to cut the orchestra right down—twelve players had to go.

They asked if I could rescore the Requiem movement for the reduced forces that would be at their disposal. I think I got the email on Friday, and they needed the parts on Tuesday. So I dropped what I was doing. It was a flagship event, televised all around Europe, and I couldn’t let them down. I hadn’t anticipated that, nor had they.

LB: Did you conduct it?

JR: No, I watched it on television. They did get the coffin past, but only just.

LB: You were holding your breath?

JR: We all were. They were big strong pallbearers.

LB: Do you have guidance or encouragement to American church musicians?

JR: Well, you know, hang in there. I think it’s always the first thing to notice that church music has the complication of not just writing for a concert hall where you’re pretty much in charge. You’re part of a team, which is not primarily about music, but is about worship. One must be sensitive about that. I have been told that one of the most common problems by far is professional-personal relationships between clergy and musicians. It always needs patience and tact and understanding on both sides. When it is achieved, then something rather beautiful can happen.

The problems can be in both directions. Sometimes it’s the musician who wants to introduce change, and it’s the clergy or the congregation who resist. Sometimes it’s the reverse, and it’s the clergy or congregation who want music that’s more pop oriented, and it’s the musician who digs in his/her heels and says, “I don’t want to do that.” How do you meet in the middle? I don’t know.

It can make things difficult. One must be a first-class musician and a first-class diplomat, and to be aware of the winds of change that blow, being able to distinguish between temporary fads that everyone will soon forget, and the changes now that are here for good. It’s impossible really to be a successful prophet 100% of the time, but a sense of discrimination, in an altogether good sense, is probably useful. For example, if there is pressure to scratch singing the psalms in the way you are used to, and the new idea is to do them with three chords to a guitar, one must say, “Hold on one minute. This seems to be catching on and isn’t going to last.”

On the other hand, when there has been a general move to make church music more this or more that, then you must consider whether to go with it or risk being written off as someone who is irrelevant. You should always have as your guiding light the music that is in your heart of hearts. Always be true to that.

Notes

1. On May 23, 2018, the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, announced the appointment of Daniel Hyde as director of music at King’s, to take office on October 1, 2019. Hyde currently serves as organist and director of music at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Fifth Avenue, New York, New York.

Robert McCormick

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When did you first improvise in a concert setting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert McCormick

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When did you first improvise in a concert setting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Learn to play figured bass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lorraine S. Brugh and Richard Webster

Lorraine Brugh is senior research professor of music at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. Richard Webster is interim director of music at Saint Paul’s Choir School and Church, Harvard Square, Boston, Massachusetts, and music director of Chicago’s Bach Week Festival.

The celebration

“These people will be your friends for life,” Karel Paukert pronounced to his organ class at Northwestern University in the mid-1970s. Looking around, we students likely smirked, unable to imagine this motley crew being lifelong friends. Almost exactly fifty years later, on November 17, 2023, many of those former students along with colleagues, family, and church members gathered to celebrate Karel’s life of teaching, leading, and performing.

Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, named Karel Paukert artist-in-residence on August 2, 2023. He has served at Saint Paul’s since 1979, first as organist and choirmaster, and now continues as organist for their Sunday early service. Most days he is there, practicing and working on a memoir he is writing at the request of two colleagues in the Czech Republic.

Kevin Jones, director of music at Saint Paul’s since June 2022 and a former student of Karel’s, organized an evening of celebration and tribute. Attended by more than 200 people, the evening opened with a recital by five of Karel’s former students. The rector, the Reverend Jeanne Leinbach, welcomed everyone to the recital. Performers were former students of Karel’s from Northwestern University—James Higdon, Richard Webster, and Lorraine Brugh—and the Cleveland Institute of Music—Brian Wilson and Kevin Jones. The recital displayed evidence of the wide range of Karel’s teaching and influence with works of Jehan Alain, Paul Hindemith, César Franck, Nicolas de Grigny, Richard Webster, Petr Eben, and Maurice Duruflé.

A gala reception followed the recital. Wine flowed freely, complemented by delicious canapés and desserts. The Reverend Leinbach again greeted and thanked all who came from near and far to attend. Lorraine Brugh, James Higdon, Richard Webster, and Kevin Jones all gave tributes, as well as a bit of roasting to Karel. Karel then closed the evening by recalling his love for Saint Paul’s and the staff and parishioners who continue to be a source of great love and support for him, his family, many of whom were in attendance, as were his former students. It was a grand evening of sharing across many decades and places where Karel continues to inspire with his music and wit. All shared admiration for his humanity. Indeed, we students had remained friends for life.

An interview

On November 17, before the festivities, Lorraine Brugh and Richard Webster interviewed Karel, focusing on his early life in Czechoslovakia (thereafter the Czech Republic and now Czechia), his escape to the West, and passion for lifelong teaching 
and learning.

Lorraine Brugh: You have been a lifelong mentor to so many students, including the two of us. Would you talk about that role and then tell us who your mentors were?

Karel Paukert: This is very interesting, because I never thought of you two as teenagers. I don’t think I treated you that way. You were both seventeen when you came to Northwestern. I simply saw two young people, extremely gifted; it was oozing from you. I was as excited as I used to be as a child when I was cultivating herbs and flowers. As a kid I loved to grow plants. This was fantastic for me.

I was first teaching young students as a young person myself when my teachers J. B. Krajs in Prague and then Gabriel Verschraegen in Ghent asked me to work with certain students while they were absent. I like to deal with people, especially young people. You two were very eager, like sponges. It was just a pleasure from the very beginning.

Richard Webster: It’s significant that you mention your love of people because many teachers don’t have that love as you do.

I really feel strongly about the role love plays in our lives. It surpasses language, racial, and geographical barriers. Also, good will. I felt it in abundance as soon as I left my oppressed native country and began my life in the West. It instantly changed me, and I became more trusting and harmonious within myself.

During my second week in Iceland, I was entrusted with the role of an oboe teacher in the music school. In my own mind I had no business being a teacher of oboe, but as a member of the Radio Orchestra and being one of the very few oboe players on the island, I fulfilled my task. My student Kjartan became the oboist of the Iceland Philharmonic a few years later.

I think that my positive instincts in that field are in my DNA, as most of my forefathers on one side of my family were teachers in the Sudetenland (frontiers drawn after the First World War in 1918–1919 and in 1938 appropriated by Adolf Hitler). Consequently, I have the need to share good things with other people.

LB: Which side of your family was that?

My father’s family. My grandfather just happened to come to my hometown Skuteč as the new postmaster. He married there. The object of his admiration was my grandmother Hedvika. He ate in a restaurant for ten years watching this young woman, the daughter of the owner, before he asked her to marry him. He had a dignity about him and thought we teenagers were rude for welcoming girls without shirts on, even though it was a hot summer. I was twelve, my brother eight, and he considered us loose, with no manners. He gave us an example of a time he was mortified when his teacher in elementary school took his class to the river and requested them to take their shirts off before swimming. His shyness did not allow him to do it. He was tearing up, sharing this episode with us. I would definitely say I got my love of teaching from his side.

LB: Can you talk about some of your mentors outside of your family?

There was a Catholic priest, Monsignor Jiri Sahula, who, though poor as a church mouse, had a great assortment of musical instruments. When I was about ten years old and was his acolyte for morning Mass in the local Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, he lent me books to read. They were way over my head, but I just perused them to please him and then brought them back. For a change he started to talk about the beauty and nobility of the church organ. That was before it began to mesmerize me. In the same context he talked about a composer, František Musil, a priest, who composed a beautiful sonata.

Many years later, when I played the sonata, I was often in tears, recalling Monsignor’s poverty and humility. You could see him from afar. He walked by our house to the next village, probably to visit ailing folks. Walking through the neighborhood, he would carry a huge leather bag, and village folks often offered him goods. “Just baked, Monsignor.” People loved him and took pleasure in feeding him.

Monsignor Sahula was well known as a published historian, rather conservative, but enlightened. It was moving to see him play a variety of instruments, including a musical saw, a zither, and a one-key flute. When I came home for a visit from the conservatory in Prague, he wanted us to make music together—violin and piano. I was pleased to oblige. Often it was painful because he did not practice and his intonation was painful. In the winter, around Christmas, his huge room with a high ceiling was atrociously cold. It was touching to see him tear up playing or talking about music. (I learned from him and others how much music moves people.) I loved those times with the Monsignor, nevertheless.

RW: Would you tell us about your teachers?

My organ teacher at the Prague Conservatory, Jan Bedřich Krajs, was the nephew of the composer and organ virtuoso, Bedřich Antonín Wiedermann. He was like a father to me, in part because he had the same kind of view on present-day government policy and was opposed to the Communists, as my father was.

Our discussions in the organ studio were without boundaries. At a certain point, perhaps in my second year, a recording line was installed, so that we could record our playing. That was a pretext, and what we did not think of was that they also could tape our conversations. We didn’t realize that when we talked politics, even students among ourselves, someone could record us, and they did. It was brought to the attention of the conservatory authorities, and they threatened to close the department if professor Krajs did not dismiss me.

I seemed to have been the chief culprit. My standing was magnified by an anonymous letter from my hometown Skuteč about my class origin: petit bourgeois. This indicated that I was not worthy to be part of the cadre, the working class in the new Socialist state, but should first prove myself in a factory.

Fortunately, the man who installed the telephone was our instructor of acoustics and the son of Comrade Prchal, a leader of the Revolutionary Movement of the Trade Unions (ROH). He was a friend of my teacher, who, among other maintenance tasks, oiled our organ motors. He asked Professor Krajs with urgency to dismiss me, to prevent the closing of the department of organ. On ideological grounds, Krajs said he was not going to do that. What followed was a search of the apartment of the Krajs family. Professor Krajs was a friend of Jan Masaryk, the son of the first president of the Czech Republic, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. He “died” in Czernin Palace [in Prague] in 1948, by suicide or was possibly thrown out of a window. To this day it isn’t certain how he died.

My father listened to Jan Masaryk and other Czech dissidents on regular shortwave radio transmissions from London on the BBC (London Calls) and from New York (Voice of America) during the War. Broadcasts were in the Czech language, received on our Telefunken radio. This was considered to be illegal activity and could be punishable by prison or even death, as the required orange tag on the dial indicated.

Before leaving the country, Masaryk left Professor Krajs his famous hat, books, letters, and other memorabilia. One day the secret police came to check his apartment, probably to look for objects that could compromise him so that they could take action against him. The Krajs family lived in Malá Strana, in a centuries-old house, below the Prague Castle in Thunovská Street. Upon hearing the doorbell, the professor peeked down from the upper floor and saw men in leather coats, a typical attire of the secret police. Before he opened the doors downstairs he took the things that might be compromising and threw them all into an oven, a ceramic stove that went up all the way to the ceiling in the large room, which housed a small two-manual organ. Unfortunately, later in the day when the professor was at the conservatory, Mrs. Krajs came back and lit a fire in the stove, not knowing what all the papers were about. She burned it all up. There were notes, letters, enough incriminating evidence that almost certainly would have resulted in incarceration.

The early 1950s were tough times after a few peaceful years following World War II. It was the “dictatorship of the working class on the way to Socialism and Communism.” In many ways it mirrored the German occupation and their beastly deeds.

RW: What year would this be?

It began after the February 1948 Revolution with the confiscation of properties of the rich and the nationalization of industry, and climaxed in the last years of Stalin. The years 1952 and 1953 were terrible, because any Soviet doctrine would be copied by the Czech Communists. It was the art and culture of social realism; everything had to be optimistic, with positive depictions of the Russians. Whatever it was, it had to be in agreement with the party line. This was the reign of Socialist realism. So we couldn’t play music that wasn’t relatable to the working classes, especially anything with religious titles. Music that named Jesus Christ or mentioned anything religious was prohibited, with a few exceptions. If a piece was called “Meditation” it might have passed the ideological control.

My colleague, Jan Hora, retired professor of the conservatory and the Academy of Musical Arts, often played in the concert halls of the Soviet Union. He said that there were never printed programs in the Soviet Union. The works would be announced from the stage so that any religious connotations would be erased.

Thanks to Jan I got to know Professor Verschraegen. Jan was my best friend from the conservatory years. He was a fine organist and was allowed to travel abroad. While still in school he won several competitions. In fact, Jan met Professor Verschraegen when he was taking part in the J. S. Bach competition in Ghent. He always brought back organ scores of contemporary composers published in the West. This was music that we never had access to in the “Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.” I was able to borrow and copy some of them.

I also told you about Paul Hindemith and copying his Sonata I. When he came to Prague, I asked him if he would be so kind as to sign it. That much I could say in German. He was very upset—I might say furious. I must have been in a tearful disposition, as his kind wife, Frau Gertrud, had mercy on me, took me by my hand, and invited me to sit with her in the loge at Smetana Hall during the second half of his rehearsal with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. After I explained to her in broken German our situation, vis-à-vis new music from the West, she took me after the rehearsal to the green room. I could tell that she was explaining the predicament of music students to Hindemith. He obviously changed his mind, because he did sign the sonata (“With thanks to the copyist”!!). He also requested my address, and during one of the ensuing summer months I got a package from Schott in Vienna, addressed to my parents’ house in Skuteč, with all three of his sonatas.

Back to Professor Verschraegen. It happened that he was allowed to concertize in the Czech Republic. I was in military service between 1957 and 1959 in Pisek and Tabor. It was in 1958 that I met him. Mr. Palasek, who was the minister at the prayer house of the Czech Brethren, had for our circumstances a nice, small two-manual organ, and allowed me to practice there whenever I had permission to leave the barracks. He told me about an upcoming Verschraegen concert there and asked if I could assist him during his recital.

There was a youngish lady named Vera who was translating for him. The two seemed to have been affectionate with each other. She was a Jew and had spent several war years in the concentration camp. I could tell because she had a tattoo on her arm.

Later in Ghent, I realized that her story fascinated Verschraegen from the very beginning, and he was attracted to her. She asked me if I liked his playing; I said, yes, very much, and she asked if I would like to study with him. She talked to Gabriel about me, and the next time he came to Prague I played for him. He came there to premiere his Concerto for Organ and Strings with the Prague Chamber Orchestra in the Rudolfinum.

He loved Prague and stayed for several days. I tried to communicate with him in my elementary German. He spoke his native Flemish, French, and German. Afterwards, Vera convinced me that I had to improve my German to communicate with him. I listened to her and took private German lessons, making fairly rapid progress.

The Pragokoncert housed him in the Hotel Alcron, a hotel for guests from the West. One evening he invited me there for supper. As we spoke a waiter came to us and silently pointed above his head, toward the chandelier. That indicated to me that there was a recording device. Fortunately, I had not said very much. But I was so grateful, so grateful to the waiter for warning us.

The next day, through the help of Vera, I got to play for him. Later when I was in Belgium, he told me I was like some other Czech organists, who were so rhythmically undisciplined. (He had heard them in various competitions as a juror.) He said I had to buy a metronome and reached immediately for his wallet to give me money, but I did have some money. After two lessons with him I did what he asked me to do—to write in all the fingerings and pedaling in Bach’s Toccata in F (BWV 540i). Thereafter, I passed his requirement.

RW: Just like you, he was very generous to his students.

Thank you. Anyway, so then after two or three lessons, he said that he would like me to teach his son, Dirk. “You can play as you want, but I want you to teach him to use the metronome and note the fingerings.” Obviously, he wanted me to instill discipline in him.

After that I didn’t get many lessons from him. He would listen to me and make a few, always helpful comments. We discussed interpretations away from the organ as well. He was a deep thinker and liked to talk a lot about himself and life in general. I lived nearby, and he would often ring my doorbell in the evening and ask if I wanted to have coffee or a beer chat. We might also meet in the square at a brasserie in front of the cathedral where I was playing weekday Masses, Sunday morning Masses, and other important offices. Or we would talk and walk through the old town. He would talk politics, the world, and Vera in Prague, and I would comment here and there. He loved his city and was a proud “Vlamink” (Flemish citizen).

RW: Last year you received an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Musical Arts in Prague, and a week thereafter the Prize of the Ministry of Culture. What was it like for you to be there and to receive the award?

It was like a dream. My entire U.S. family and Czech relatives came to support me. When I legally left Prague in 1961 I had a suitcase containing some music scores and my oboe for a one-year engagement in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. By not returning for the obligatory summer military training and disregarding all the letters from the Czech authorities, the military court issued me a ten-year prison term. I did not think that even a short visit would ever be a possibility.

I never thought I would be going back. But things changed. The Velvet Revolution was a miracle. I told you about my mother. When I took a train to Skuteč to say goodbye before leaving for Iceland and told her I might not be coming back, she was standing in front of the armoire and was so startled she dropped a mirror on the floor. “You cannot do it.” I didn’t even say goodbye to my father because he was working in an ammunition factory and could only come home on the weekend. I didn’t know myself if I could get to the point where I could divorce myself from my past and never be back again.

Playing in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in Reykjavik, existing modestly, I had saved some money, made some more in Oslo with the recording of Czech organ music in the cathedral in Oslo for the Norwegian Radio. I kept my savings in my shoes, believing that with a little bit of luck I could survive two to three months.

In Oslo I put my suitcase into a railway depot before embarking by autostop to the west coast. I splurged on a pair of blue jeans (my first ones), a small backpack, and a navy t-shirt. Then in the harbor I was trying to find work. I did find it on a packet boat servicing Kristiansand and Bergen. I meditated about my future under the starlit sky when the boat moored at night in one of the magic fjords. The sailors would leave me on the boat alone, sleep somewhere on the shore, and would come back in the morning. I was to clean the kitchen and the deck. After I was finished I watched the stars and made my plans. My kingdom was the deck of the smallish boat.

On the way to Prague in 2022 I was again replaying in my mind the circumstances of my leaving in 1961. It took me many months in Reykjavik to tackle the parting step with my past. The final decision, the realization that I had to leave my past in order to at least touch my dreams, was made during my journey in 1962, hitchhiking from Bergen back to Oslo. After a nap in a haystack in the Telemark region of Norway, awakened by the scent of hay and hearing singing from a beautifully carved chalet (there must have been more than a dozen of them, scattered in the valley), I made the decision to stay in the West. I bought a ticket to Ghent, checked my suitcase, boarded the train, and was on my way to Belgium.

In Sweden there was no passport control from Norway. When we reached Denmark, however, there was a casual passport control at the border to Germany. The officer selected me and said I needed a valid visa. I told him I had one. He stated I needed a visa for each country since my passport was from a Communist country. He said I had transgressed Scandinavian rules. I explained what I was contemplating—to ask for asylum. He said he would let me go to Germany, and there I would need to ask for asylum.

The German border police got me off the train. The realization came to me too late that my suitcase, a “Mitgepäck,” was going to Ghent. Out of fear that I could be apprehended, I had left in it the letters from Verschraegen that could prove he had invited me to come to study with him, plus anything else that would reveal my intentions not to return home. This was August, and I didn’t get to Ghent until November. Meanwhile, I had to exist. The Germans said it would be possible to stay in Germany because I was a musician. But I would have to change my name and go to a camp for refugees, because I didn’t want to become a German citizen.

I was sent back to Denmark on the next train. The same officer, Mr. Poulsen, waited for me at the Padborg station and brought me to a small police station directly in the railway station. There he interviewed me and wrote a protocol. I was jailed overnight and taken with two men, obviously criminals, to Copenhagen by rail and boats. Today the bridges make that part of the voyage a delight.

They brought me to the officer for refugees. I deposited my Czech passport and the return airline ticket to Prague. His office would help me apply for a visa to Belgium. In the meantime, I was required to find housing and periodically report to his office. I was terrified that I would not have enough money to stay in the city while I waited for the visa.

I wrote a desperate letter to a friend in Iceland, Didda Gudrum Kristinsdottir. She was a pianist who studied with Bruno Seidlhofer in Vienna and was at that time the best pianist in Iceland. I gave her the address of the rented room where she could write to me.

Instead of receiving a letter, one day a Danish woman came to my door, introduced herself as Hanne Poulsen, a friend of Didda from Vienna, where she had studied broadcasting. She already knew that I needed help here and offered me the use of her apartment. “I am leaving my apartment and going on vacation. I will be with my mother for six weeks. I would like you to use it.” I just couldn’t accept it. She said she would come in the afternoon and would show me Copenhagen. She drove me all around the city in her beautiful Saab. We ended in Nyhavn with a glass of delicious Tuborg beer. During our sightseeing I decided to accept her kind offer. That helped me to survive in Copenhagen because I had no job. For many years thereafter, whenever I would be nearby, I would meet her for dinner.

I would go to the Belgian embassy to check on my visa almost every day, wearing sunglasses so that I would not be recognized. That feeling of being pursued stayed with me for a long time. It finally disappeared in 1964, when I arrived in the United States.

During my waiting time for the visa I was able to take advantage of the musical life in Copenhagen. Tickets were inexpensive. In Tivoli, the famous amusement park, I heard amazing concerts of all sorts, including Danish avant-garde composers, conductor Zubin Mehta with the Tivoli orchestra, even a piano recital by the seventy-five-year-old Arthur Rubinstein.

One day, in a cafeteria, I met a young man who looked at me quizzically and addressed me in English. By that time I could speak some English. He was a Fulbright student from the USA, Raymond Harris, studying with Finn Viderø. I knew the name of his teacher as he was well known as a prophet, specializing in the works of Buxtehude. Mr. Viderø didn’t mind if I came to his lessons. I learned a lot by observing him and listening to the beautiful Marcussen organ on which he taught. I summoned the courage to visit other organ lofts and was received cordially. Many of the organists were also composers. I could not believe the clarity of those instruments!

Then one day at the Belgian embassy, a kind consular officer, a distinguished older Jewish woman told me, “Do not despair. It will happen.” It wasn’t happening fast enough. I was writing desperate letters to Verschraegen, “Please, please, Herr Professor.” I got no answer. He needed to attest that he was inviting me to Belgium. We had made the agreement in 1961 that he would send me a Christmas card with his signature and an asterisk if the invitation was still valid. Shortly thereafter I received it and still have it. It’s a Christmas card, more than half a century old, with a landscape painting of an old Flemish master, and on the reverse, his signature and the asterisk.

After coming to Ghent I found out that Professor Verschraegen traveled during the summer with the whole family in Europe and was also giving concerts. His mail was collected by one of the sextons, Roger Van de Wielle, a musicologist and author, who was also one of the organists.

LB: Tonight you will be honored for another award, artist-in-residence at Saint Paul’s. Share some of your thoughts about this celebration.

The rector, in her generosity, and Kevin Jones, director of music here, made it possible for me to stay on. I treasure the office I have, because I can hopefully finish my memoirs. I also have a resting place here in the columbarium for Noriko [Fujii-Paukert, Karel’s wife] and myself. She agreed to be buried with me.

Look at this beautiful space. I’m often here until 8:00 p.m. working on details of the remembrances, making sure all the details are correct. Sometimes I come to pleasant, even stunning discoveries. Today, for example, I was reading about two musicians who concertized at the Cleveland Museum of Art in their early careers, Christine Brandes and Joshua Bell. Christine, a sought-after soprano in early music, shone in several of our concerts thirty years ago, and Joshua, now a world-class violinist, was scheduled for one of our summer concerts when he was thirteen or fourteen. He was the first winner of the Stulberg International Competition for string players under age twenty.

This competition was founded by the friends of Julius Stulberg, professor of violin in Kalamazoo [Western Michigan University], a year after his death. It was a stroke of luck, and it happened because of my skiing accident. I found out about Joshua from my orthopedist, Dr. Stulberg, whose father was a German immigrant and the famed violinist. The good doctor, who apparently frequented our concerts, raved about Joshua and put me in contact with his mother. I was fortunate in that regard; so many good things happened to me.

LB: How did the invitation to write your memoir come about?

It was the editor of Prague Radio, Eva Ocisková, who recorded a series of talks for her program Pameti (“Memories”). It was a successful program in many installments on Radio Vltava Prague. From that she must have gleaned some inspiration and asked me to consider writing the story of my life. Her husband, my close friend, renowned organist Jaroslav Tůma, supported it.

LB: They are planning a publication in Czech?

Yes, and there is support for the Czech edition from official circles. What happens further, with the English edition, I don’t know as yet.

LB: What accomplishments are you most proud of, or satisfied with, in your long professional arc?

Well, here in the church I am pleased with the acquisition of instruments. We acquired an Italian organ by Gerhard Hradetzky, the Italian harpsichord by Matthias Giewisch, and the positiv of Vladimir Slajch. Of course, we have the iconic Holtkamp organ.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) procurement was one of my chief preoccupations from the very beginning. I wanted to acquire instruments that would enable us to present a variety of musical styles. Those instruments included harpsichord copies for French, Italian, and German repertoire, an organ positiv, an original Broadwood fortepiano, a copy of Mozart’s Walter clavier, and a clavichord. We used them in the auditorium and in various galleries for concerts. This gave the musical arts also a visual artistic presentation. In both instances it required patience and perseverance to obtain the necessary funds from private individuals and foundations.

Unfortunately, the CMA instruments are now in storage and are not played. That situation pains me very much. Even more, the human capital we assembled through the many activities is no longer nourished by the CMA as it was for almost 100 years. You cannot measure such things with a yardstick, but you can see and feel the respect people paid to music over the years. I was not the first one. I simply continued in that trajectory of the first curators, following in the footsteps of my predecessor, Walter Blodgett.

There are many instrumentalists and composers who were studying here at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) and students at other institutions who, even now after many years have passed, acknowledge how much the CMA program enriched their professional lives through the concerts, listening to rehearsals, and meeting with the artists. We wanted it to be precisely that: a supplemental music laboratory for as many as possible. The young professionals who studied with Donald Erb at CIM got to meet William Bolcom, William Albright, Jacob Druckman, Messrs. Carter and Crumb, and dozens of others. Imagine the young organist to be a few steps away from such legends as Jean Langlais, Pierre Cochereau, Madame Duruflé, Olivier Messiaen, or Yvonne Loriod. There is something sacred in meeting great artists.

It was the same with masterclasses. If we had harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt or Edith Picht-Axenfeld playing fortepiano, students would come from CIM, from Case Western, Cleveland State, or the Oberlin Conservatory, just to experience their artistry. It was the education tangent that I valued very much. What is heartwarming to me now are the occasional encounters with folks I meet in the street or a store, or musicians who participated in our endeavors, age-wise all over the spectrum, expressing gratitude for our musical mission.

LB: Was the new music direction your own, or had it been already established?

I was following Walter Blodgett. He was interested in new music. The CMA juried exhibitions of local artists. Walter complemented this with May festivals, mostly performances of new music. He had people like Karlheinz Stockhausen here before I came. I could not believe it.

So I felt very safe in pushing the envelope. Among others in programming music of different nations, I also wanted to promote Czech music. The general manager of CMA, Beverly Barksdale, previously assistant to George Szell, assured me that because Szell presented Czech music often [with the Cleveland Orchestra], programming Czech music would not be objectionable to Clevelanders. On the contrary, we would frequently combine resources from CMA, the choir from Saint Paul’s, as well as local instrumentalists, and present concerts in the CMA, the Bohemian National Hall, and elsewhere in the city. During the oppressive regime, ending with the Velvet Revolution (Prague, November and December 1989), local folks were unable to visit the homeland and enthusiastically supported our programs of Dvořák, Smetana, Janáček, and others.

RW: What are your regrets?

As humans we all sin. Perhaps I sinned more than others. Feeling guilty helped me do good things and helped me, in part, to overcome my guilt. I should have loved more. I should have spent more time with my family. I should have been more understanding of some of my students. I should have worked harder from the beginning.

RW: What advice do you have to young musicians, particularly organists, composers, and church musicians who are at the beginnings of their careers?

I just really think that, in today’s market, it is necessary to be multi-faceted, to be capable of stepping into diverse situations, in order to earn enough for the basic necessities. I am speaking now as the father of a family. The brilliant ones and those who are hard working will most likely make it. [Young musicians] do not need any advice from us. They just need to find a mentor and continue to love music and know what and why they are doing it.

LB: Well, there aren’t even enough church jobs to go around anymore.

I think you have to follow your call, whatever it is. My teacher at the conservatory, Mr. Krajs, said, when he taught me privately,

Darling, you are ready to take the exams at the conservatory. Think it over. You have to be sure you love music enough. You know how the government treats the church, and it may not change in your lifetime. You may have to play for free in the church, if they are even open, and be employed in a radio station as a sound engineer. But you play oboe; you will be okay.

The satisfaction of being a musician is enormous, especially in religious realms. I was fortunate to have a dream position at the museum (CMA), not in terms of financial rewards but in being an unofficial musical missionary in the city. To that end was added another dimension, serving people in the church, first [at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church] in Evanston and now in Cleveland Heights. I was fortunate to work under great rectors—in Evanston, Tom Ray, and in Cleveland Heights, Chave McCracken, Nick White, Alan Gates, Jeanne Leinbach, and a host of wonderful musical colleagues. I learned from all of them, and I am still learning.

RW: It’s a calling.

Yes.

Postscript by Karel Paukert

I wish Frank Cunkle were still alive. Thanks to him I made it all the way to the U.S. In 1963 Gabriel Verschraegen asked me to take care of an American music journalist, Mr. Cunkle, who was planning to visit the Festival of Flanders to see diverse organs and attend as many recitals as possible. I agreed to be his guide, not realizing that this encounter would change my life forever.

Frank was the editor of The Diapason, based in Chicago. As I quickly found out, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the U.S. organ scene. He let me know right away that he disliked certain organists, but did like very much the playing of Catharine Crozier and also Robert Noehren. I proudly told him that I met both in Haarlem and that they recommended me to come to the U.S. Frank did not promise me anything but indicated that he would contact a few acquaintances in churches and schools for a possible recital or a class on Czech organ music. It all became reality when I landed in Chicago on December 19, 1964. I was welcomed by Frank, organ builder John F. Shawhan, and two doctoral students at Northwestern University, Benn Gibson and James Leland. They brought me to Frank’s house (he did not drive) in Oak Park.

The Chicago Chapter of the American Guild of Organists invited me to play a recital for their midwinter conclave, undoubtedly, thanks to Frank’s recommendation. It was announced in the December 1964 issue of The Diapason.

In 1968 I returned to the Chicago area to teach at Northwestern University in Evanston and reconnected with Frank. Upon his retirement in 1970 he moved to our small house on Noyes Street and became a frequent babysitter of our children. He eventually fulfilled his plan to retire in Mexico. After he found the experience disappointing, he returned to the U.S. to live close to his sister in Chula Vista, California.

A child of the Great Depression, he was born in Arkansas and was accustomed to living frugally. In his younger years he earned his living in music as an organist, pianist, composer, and arranger. He possessed absolute pitch. His music education was broad. I am his grateful mentee, for imparting to me the skills of American life I would need for the rest of my life.

Special thanks to my friends, Lorraine and Richard, and also to Stephen Schnurr and The Diapason, for allowing me to share my memories.

 

Karel is currently receiving treatment at the University Hospital’s Seidman Cancer Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

Gavin Black

Thinking about Gene Roan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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