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An Interview with Stephen Dodgson

by Pamela Nash
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From the Harpsichord Editor:

 

Barnes, an area of London just south of the Thames across the Hammersmith Bridge, has been home to a succession of English composers: Gustav Holst lived here from 1909 until 1912, Herbert Howells settled in Barnes in the 1920s and stayed for more than forty years, and the current longtime "resident composer" is Stephen Dodgson.  Since a first meeting at a Bruges Harpsichord Competition more than thirty years ago, I have come to treasure Dodgson both as composer and as friend.  Several of our musical collaborations are noted in Pamela Nash's insightful interview with the composer.  It is my hope that curiosity will be stimulated, and that our readers will proceed to investigate Dodgson's music. As Hugo Cole wrote in The New Grove, "He is one of the few living composers to write with understanding for the guitar, harpsichord and clavichord." For further information concerning Dodgson's compositions for our instruments, consult Frances Bedford's invaluable catalog 20th-Century Harpsichord and Clavichord Music. Inquiries concerning the availability of unpublished scores may be directed via email to

--Larry Palmer

Stephen Dodgson has composed for almost every instrumental genre, his works for the guitar having brought him particular notice. However, Dodgson has also earned a place in 20th-century harpsichord history and he has probably the longest and most productive association with the harpsichord of any living composer. His affinity with the instrument has been nurtured by the developments in the harpsichord world over the last forty years, and his output now comprises 49 works, both solo and ensemble.

 In my capacity as a harpsichordist and performer of contemporary music, I regard Dodgson as a singularly gifted champion of the harpsichord whose works should have wider recognition. His strength of feeling and depth of intuition for the instrument produces writing that is wholly idiomatic; his economy of line, clarity of voicing, control of texture, and dynamic rhythmic treatment are always expressed in ways that bring the harpsichord to life. I asked Dodgson about his work with the instrument, and about his philosophy on contemporary harpsichord matters.

PN: Is your penchant for the harpsichord partly a practical one--an outcome of being exposed to the instrument in your working environment?

SD: I always seem to respond to its rhythmic clarity, and the vividness of texture and spacing. Perhaps "living with harpsichords" quickens this response, but it's certainly not the cause of it.

PN: Can you recall your first encounter with the harpsichord?

SD: I can pinpoint it exactly. It was an afternoon in early summer 1955, when Stanislav Heller introduced me to Thomas Goff and his instruments with the definite aim that I should become interested in composing for him and for them.

PN: How did marriage to harpsichordist and Couperin expert Jane Clark foster your appreciation?

SD: It quickly extended my knowledge of the repertoire and this has subtly infected my perception of the instrument itself.

PN: Are there particular works that have provided the inspiration and impetus to compose for the harpsichord?

SD: At the start, Scarlatti was uppermost. Then it broadened out; the inspirational factor has been a generalised one of character, not so much deriving from one specific work.

PN: With the exception of a few pieces such as the Falla and Martin Concertos [completed in 1926 and 1952], harpsichord music before 1950 was either a sort of adjunct to the piano repertoire and impractical to play, or it was a pastiche of old idioms. You were one of the first to break these molds by writing true and characteristic music for the harpsichord: were you prompted by the burgeoning interest in the harpsichord in the 1950s, and by the new generation of players who were pursuing modern harpsichord repertoire?

SD: I was a lot less aware than your question supposes. I just leapt in excitedly. But it happened to coincide with the explosion of interest among players and makers alike. George Malcolm, Stanislav Heller, Antonio Saffi were very encouraging. They liked what I wrote and played it.

PN: You have been an observer of the harpsichord revival from those early days of your career; has your harpsichord music reflected the changes and developments in the instrument during the past 40 or so years?

SD: I believe the evolution of the instrument is actually reflected in what I've written--with the "classical" instrument steadily in the ascendant. Going back where I began is unthinkable.

PN: Has the harpsichord been a technical factor in your development as a composer? Has it influenced the ways you write for other instruments?

SD: It occupies a place all of its own in my thinking. Which is why I am jealous of being as idiomatic as possible in my approach. But because I value economy of means in everything I write, and an "open space" approach is an essential factor in good harpsichord writing (in any century!) I'm sure there has been some cross-over influence.

PN: Your harpsichord music is very rewarding to play, the main reason being that its style and idiom coincide very logically and happily with the harpsichord's character. This enables the player to make the music speak easily and directly. How does this work; do your ideas originate at the harpsichord? How do you consider technical things like handshifts and fingering in your composing?

SD: I never take something new to the harpsichord until I'm pretty certain of it musically. I then find I may here and there want to move up or down an octave--and leave out still a few more notes than I'd been crossing out the week before. Handshifts and fingerings can actually be exciting things in harpsichord writing, because they are integral to the result in phrasing and attack. Some ideas have actually originated in this way: for example, Invention Set 5, no. 3. (Example 1)

PN: You also have a very strong symbiotic relationship with the guitar. Your harpsichord music seems to demonstrate how close the relationship is between the guitar and the harpsichord, and some of your ideas are found in the repertoires of both instruments. Do they have similar limitations that you can treat in the same ways?

SD: Of course, harpsichord and guitar must both have their limitations. One has heard music on each of them which palpably didn't suit. But there's so much that can be written on each successfully, I've never found it profitable to think about limitations. Rather, I've always preferred going for it positively, trying to develop an instinct for what will succeed and give the performer satisfaction.

PN: Combining harpsichord and guitar in Duo Concertante and Dialogues must have been uniquely difficult.

SD: When asked to write for harpsichord and guitar together, I simply couldn't persuade myself it could work. But Rafael Puyana and John Williams insisted it did, so I took courage in my hands, and as I worked began to believe in it more and more.

PN: Because their timbres are at once similar and different, how did you reconcile them, both in off-setting them soloistically, and in combining them homogeneously?

SD: The fascination is because they are similar yet different. My object was to make them homogeneous here, and by contrast very separated in other places; figuration, spacing are important factors; how to devise dialogues that bring out different facets in the relationship. Then there was the excitement of finding a dramatic structure to give such colorings purpose.

PN: You often end a phrase with an octave unison or an open fifth, which is very idiomatic for plucked instruments where chords can actually sound louder without the third (for example, the ending of the Duo Concertante, where it sounds as though there are several guitars and harpsichords playing!) You also juxtapose thick voiced harmonies of thirds with open fifths or unisons a lot, which seems to have to do with accentuating the pulse, and with rhythmical stress and energy. The notes often seem subservient to the pulse, as in Scarlatti. (Example 2: Invention Set 3, no. 3)

SD: Agreed! This is certainly something I learned from Scarlatti. Rhythmic stress does indeed require additional notes. In cadential situations the big bare intervals appeal through their primary force.

PN: Would you say there are other significant parallels between Scarlatti's harpsichord writing and your own? For example, in the use of harmonic texture: in leaving out the third of the chord and opening out the last chord in a progression to an octave or fifth; the use of an ornament on the off-beat; the tied chord on the last beat or the half-beat, which gives a syncopated weight or accent, significantly on the anacrusis. The use of rhythm and timing to create drama and suspense in the way the music breathes and is sometimes suspended is also similar. Although Scarlatti was specifically concerned with emulating flamencan rhythm on the harpsichord, your music seems to function on the same level as it too explores the harpsichord's ability to dance and "swing." Are these reasonable comparisons?

SD: Yes--to my mind they are very close indeed to my way of going about it, and you're right to point out my penchant for the anacrusis accent, perhaps with an ornament for extra emphasis. (Example 3: Invention Set 3, no. 4)

PN: It is often said that there is an English quality about your music in general. What is it do you think that gives this impression?

SD: I think I'm just very English--full stop!

Dodgson's use of dynamics (before Inventions/Set 4) is very economical for the harpsichord, which adds to the practicality of his music on the classical-type instrument. He has gone from using standard dynamics, to registration dynamics, to no dynamics at all with Set 4 of the Inventions. A decade later in the most recent fifth Set, all expression marks are eschewed to leave "just the notes." The dynamic and expressive feeling in the music has always been intrinsic, in the baroque sense; very often, a marking of 'p' or 'f' is reflected in the notes themselves, in a shift to a different tessitura, or a change of texture, pace or harmonic rhythm. Then to add the registration is merely an accentuation of the inherent musical dynamics. (Example 4: Invention Set 3, no. 1)

PN: Could you explain the evolution of the dynamic treatment in the Inventions? In some of the earlier writing where the registration dynamics cannot be realised on the classical harpsichord, are you happy for the player to revise them?

SD: I may have been reasonably consistent about dynamic markings at any one time, but, overall, I think there's no consistent development. At first I only thought in terms of 2-manual instruments. In general therefore the f & p invite a registration change, or an addition/subtraction of 4-foot or coupler. By the time of Set 5 I'd become concentrated on making all the coloring arise from the music itself, with the ambitious aim that the whole set could succeed on a single register throughout without seeming monochrome. In settling for "just the notes" notation I'd convinced myself anything else would be a distraction. I actually want to appeal to the imagination of the player! And this naturally applies too to those spots where my notated changes cannot be realised on the instrument being used.

PN: Have you also dispensed with the use of accents? In your earlier writing the accent or [-] tenuto dash is often poignant as an indication of the rhythmic intent, or the importance of a note. And although accent in the tonal sense (as on the piano) cannot be realised on the harpsichord, in some ways the spirit of it can be: for example as an agogic accent, or a tenuto or inégale form of accent.

SD: In general I'm a great supplier of accent signs, but more and more I question their relevance for the harpsichord. I'm also a great one for beaming notes according to their accentual grouping, and allowing these to criss-cross with the metrical organisation. This dispenses with most of any remaining need for accent signs. But who can deny the psychological impact of a Sforzando where the intention is dramatic? So I don't promise never to use accent marking in the future.

PN: You seem almost to have phased out the use of mixed meters as well: why is this?

SD: Modern music has often done itself disservice with over-complexity of time-signature and incessant change. The simpler the notational method the better. Constant change tends to result in constant choppiness in performance; OK if that's the purpose, but it's really never my purpose. Therefore I've a preference for the basic 3/4, 4/4, 6/8 standard and let the more capricious rhythmic elements fly about, since this is an inducement to continuity. If I can get the music to look simpler than it actually is, I take a pride in it.

Today's baroque, almost "vocal" approach to playing the harpsichord contrasts strongly with the generic pianistic approach of the early 20th-century school of harpsichord playing, but although piano technique is not desirable for early repertoire, the 20th-century repertoire is a different context. Some modern harpsichord works will sound basically the same regardless of the source of technique used to play them, but there are instances in Dodgson's works where real harpsichord sensibilities in the performer can be important. For example, Invention Set 3, no. 1 (Example 5) is a very expressive piece, improvisatory in feel, and it could be seen in the light of the unmeasured prelude. It is marked "largamente e liberamente" and "sempre sostenuto." This can be expressed on the harpsichord by overholding the notes of the broken chords and by "arpeggiating" between voices. For example, to play the E and the C in bar 1 fractionally broken is an example of harpsichord technique that gives a more expressive and resonant result, as well as a rhythmic emphasis by bringing out the duple time. The use of harpsichord articulations brings out phrasing and pulse, and this can be said for much of Dodgson's music where the voices are exposed, slow and melodic, and where harmonic and rhythmic emphasis are important.

PN: In general, how relevant is it that your music is played by a true harpsichordist? Perhaps the issue of technical style is less important when the right musician is playing it, regardless of their keyboard "persuasion"?

SD: As such, it's not so important; but I'm a bit upset if I find the player isn't as sensitive as I'd like to peculiarities of harpsichord sound. On the other hand, their keyboard persuasion can mean an overweaning devotion to one of the tenets of "performance practice." I remember begging a continental harpsichordist to play a certain passage in my Aulos Trio with the hands together in place of the exaggerated displacement which so appealed to him, after which he was less keen to have my opinions.

PN: The Fantasia movements in Set 5 and in Sonata-Divisions, and the unmeasured prelude style, seem to illuminate further the dichotomy between the piano and the harpsichord in your keyboard writing. (Example 6: Sonata-Divisions)

SD: I've developed an unmeasured style in writing for the piano too--but it's completely different. I love both instruments, but I do not let them meet!

PN: In throwing off the last vestiges of "piano writing" in your most recent harpsichord works, do you feel a greater sensitivity to the whole harpsichordaesthetic?

SD: Yes: it's an important reason why I've gone on writing for it--the search for an elusive ideal--a modern music that is intrinsically harpsichord yet carries resonances of its historic past.

PN: In writing for harpsichord in ensemble, what are the challenges in balancing the sonorities? For instance, how do you work round the predisposition of the harpsichord's treble register to get lost in ensemble?

SD: I agree that the harpsichord changes its nature in ensemble, and each ensemble situation is unlike the others. In nearly every situation its sustaining power is eclipsed by all the naturally sustaining instruments. To obtain a balance, it is the handling of those instruments which is the clue to success. Avoid the register where the harpsichord is to penetrate clearly; similarly avoid duplicating its busier figurations. Open spacing is always good; single notes rather than chords are better for a held background.

Dodgson demonstrates in his Arlington Concertante that harpsichord sound can "behave" very differently in a concerto context; it has a highly dramatic effect, sometimes of menace--particularly when re-entering with a burst of activity after a long rest. Dodgson projects this quality to compelling effect in his fondness for suspense and dramatic shifts of mood. Ornaments and fast arpeggiated movement are also fantastically effective inside a varied instrumental texture. (Examples 7 & 8)

PN: With the denser instrumental texture of the concerto, there is a propensity for the harpsichord to lose its rhythmic power. How did you compensate for this, for example in Arlington Concertante: in particular, writing rhythmic stress into the harpsichord part? In what ways did the orchestration allow the harpsichord to cut through the texture, particularly in tutti passages?

SD: Arlington Concertante was a challenge indeed, being on the face of it an impossible combination. There had to be an illusion of tutti, achieved by leaving "holes" in spacing and rhythm for the soloist. The thematic ideas were shaped by this--a case of making a virtue out of a necessity. I must have a perverse streak, because I really enjoy that sort of situation!

PN: What was the difference in your approach to scoring in Concerto da Camera in 1963? What were the reasons for its revision in 1979?

SD: Concerto da Camera is scored for violas, cellos and double bass only (I was thinking of the 6th Brandenburg); their natural compass is exactly where the harpsichord has its soul. It was a long time before it came to performance, and by 1979 I acted to improve its sonority, its transparency, in ways I knew little of when originally working at it.

Dodgson attended a week-long symposium of his harpsichord music in 1996 run by Southern Methodist University of Dallas. It was led by the organist and harpsichordist Larry Palmer who commissioned Dodgson's Duo alla Fantasia for harp and harpsichord in 1981. It featured masterclasses by the composer, and performances of Inventions, Sonata-Divisions and Carillon for two harpsichords.

PN: What was it like to be studied and performed so intensively and by such a diverse group of keyboard players?

SD: It was a new experience for me. I'd never previously thought of all my harpsichord music all at once, and was anxious about a good many of the earlier Inventions. Would they stand up to an intensive week? Would they fail to hold the attention of the participants? They were a very diverse group, in age and attainment. It was not only a true adventure for them, but it felt like one for me too--and I felt I'd been right to pursue harpsichord composition as long as I have.

PN: As a composer, you must have an ideal in your mind of how a piece should come across in performance. Is it more rewarding to collaborate with the performer, for example in a masterclass format, or is hearing what a performer makes of the piece on their own terms equally valuable?

SD: The most rewarding thing is the discovery that a performer has identified with what you've written, and found meaning and excitement in it. It actually adds to the interest if it's not identical with mine.

PN: You have written for many different media, but you show a predilection for non-mainstream "uncommercial" in-struments and ensemble combinations. The Duo Concertante for guitar and harpsichord, for example, while demonstrating that this is a fascinating medium, is still a relatively uncharted territory. Few players after Rafael Puyana and John Williams have explored the harpsichord and guitar ensemble, not least because of a dearth of major works like the Duo Concertante. Then there are the limitations in distribution and publication, etc.: doesn't it therefore deliver rather a small return on your investment? Or is it more important to you to follow your nose for a particular medium, regardless of its marketability?

SD: Don't forget that the larger part of what I've written for both guitar and harpsichord has been at specific players' request. It's not just my predilection; it's my willingness to be led where the prospect seems interesting. I should probably give more attention to marketability than I do and you are of-course right on the general point!

PN: Although there is a segment of the classical audience which still associates the harpsichord with unflattering antiquated recordings, it seems significant that harpsichord aficionados were often converted to the instrument by these early renditions; was it because one was listening without judgement or criterion, and so the spirit of the music came through regardless?

SD: Yes. The 20th-century history of the harpsichord is every way as fascinating as the original hundred years from circa 1660. Those early renditions from the dawn of the revival will never lose their fascination, and are so illuminating as to all that has happened since.

PN: Although the criteria for judging harpsichord performance style has changed dramatically since the dawn of the revival, there are still anomalies in current opinion when it comes to certain performers. Landowska's style, for example, is at odds with today's widely-held maxims of performance practice, and yet there is an almost universal reluctance to evaluate her style objectively.

SD: To evaluate Landowska's style objectively is hard, not just because she was so strong and individual herself, but almost as much because our standpoint is constantly shifting as to what is or is not a "good style."

PN: Most people, including yourself, now feel that there is nothing of any value the harpsichord with pedals (such as the Pleyel or the Neupert) can do that the classical harpsichord can't. And whilst it must be said that the tone and responsiveness of the classical instrument bears it little comparison, would we do better not to try to relate these two species at all, and simply to preserve the role of the pedal-supplied  harpsichord as it was? The instant registration, and the colorations and combinations therein can add up to 30 or more on some instruments, and there are certain pieces where this can still come into its own. For example, in Elliott Carter's Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord, the treatment of the other instruments' dynamics and phrasing, and indeed the texture and form of the music revolve around the tone color possibilities of a pedal harpsichord.

SD: The pedal harpsichord is part of history. There has to be a preservation order before we lose them all! I heard a claim the other day that only two Pleyels remain in the UK in anything like working condition. Elliott Carter's Sonata is part of history as much as Ligeti's Continuum and Poulenc's Concert Champêtre.

PN: Aside from works where range of volume is a condition of the music, could pedal instruments still play a part, do you think, in championing new music?

SD: The classic, reproduction harpsichord IS the harpsichord of today; I suspect new music itself is out-of-date if it fails to recognise the march of time.

PN: But are there pieces which could be considered equally viable on both instruments?

SD: The Falla Concerto sounds wonderful on the classical harpsichord; but you learn something about its historical place hearing it on a Pleyel. The application of "authenticity" doesn't only apply to olden time.

PN: Players like George Malcolm always seemed to be compensating for the fact that the harpsichord wasn't the piano; perhaps his resultant "hybrid" style is another example of 20th-century "authenticity," particularly on the Thomas Goff harpsichords, since these were hybrid instruments anyway? Specifically, wasn't Malcolm in fact serving Goff's vision of the perfect harpsichord, along with composers like yourself?

SD: The Malcolm/Goff interdependency was unique. An adequate answer to this question needs a chapter to itself! Goff was undoubtedly ambitious with regard to his instruments being in the forefront of public attention--and they were!

PN: Do you think that the harpsichord still remains relatively obscure to the general public?

SD: I think there's complete public awareness of the harpsichord, but little knowledge of why it sounds the way it does, and only a little more of the reason for its existing today.

PN: How should we raise awareness of the harpsichord in the contemporary music field?

SD: A good first step would be for composers of contemporary music to understand better what the contemporary harpsichord is--to regard it as more than merely a timbre.

PN: You have a strong vantage point from which to view today's harpsichord scene, and to reflect on the changes you have witnessed. Do you feel there is a certain directness and simplicity lacking in some of today's harpsichord playing: that the currently received ideas under the banner of performance practice have had an intimidating effect on artistic intuition?

SD: Yes. The currently received ideas on performance practice seem to me largely outmoded. They were too academic in formulation to withstand the onrush of musical curiosity.

PN: There has also resulted a sort of cloning of playing style which appears to be more endemic in the US and in other parts of Europe than in Britain. There seems to be more independence of style and more individuality among British players. It is due partly perhaps to the absence of a "school" of British harpsichord playing, but is it also that we have a greater sang-froid and directness of character--a "no-nonsense" objectivity towards music in general?

SD: Yes, I think we are a little more sceptical, more suspicious of dogma. So, there again, you see how British I am!

PN: 20th-century music is not a medium for demonstrating "performance practice," as the context does not engender the same sorts of freedoms as early music does, and there is no assumed historical agenda other than the composer's own. The performer has to be open to this and technically versatile; in your own harpsichord music, there is a need for great clarity and technical precision and little margin for liberties within the style. Is this part of the question of why contemporary music is ignored by harpsichordists?

SD: Perhaps so. If I take your question aright, the "Performance Practitioner" finds his interpretative role diminished by the exact requirements of a contemporary score, and so retreats to his beloved old masters, who (he believes) give him this freedom. Something in the argument, but a bit simplistic I think.

PN: Do you see it as being rooted politically in the old factions that formed in the harpsichord world: those who endorsed contemporary harpsichord music were "politically incorrect" be-cause their wider musical concern was seen to detract from the cause?

SD: Rather more in this argument. Dabbling in contemporary music is avoided by some players (but only some!) as a dilution of their application to the old masters--that their seriousness as "specialists" is undermined thereby. The low-pitch factor plus meantone tuning also play their part in creating a chasm between old and modern music. A composer may want to write for the harpsichord in ensemble, but may not want the partnering instruments to be baroque.

PN: Has this chasm affected the harpsichord's credibility as a contemporary instrument in your view?

SD: Not too much, for I'm convinced that the contemporary composition that shows strong and idiomatic insight into the harpsichord and its players as they actually are won't need to struggle for its champions. As to the public, that may take a bit longer.

Related Content

A conversation with Stephen Tharp--continued

Joyce Johnson Robinson

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of THE DIAPASON.

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It is so exciting to take a piece of early music and find the rhythmic flexibilities within isolated motives, give and take within a smaller metric framework, good and bad, strong and weak beats.  This is just as challenging as holding together a 15-minute Romantic work like Franck's Prière, or shaping inner phrases with intense subtlety. I would argue that this kind of differentiation IS what communicates the most evocative nature of our instrument, and there is no reason that this cannot be done in an educated way. Mixing things up just for the sake of communication, color, etc., actually has, I believe, the opposite effect of the one intended. I think that playing the organ this way is not more colorful, more expressive, but ultimately less, because it cuts off the true potential of the instrument's diversity--diversity of style and all of the rhetoric implied by speaking different languages with convincing accents. This goes for transcriptions as much as for early music, Romanticism, or modern music. There is a time and place for everything, and if you communicate intelligently, creatively, and artistically, with an esthetic awareness and informed good taste, ALL things have a justified place.

JR: Since you're not part of a church staff anymore, how do you handle the practicing issue? Do you have an instrument where you reside--or how do you get enough practice time in?

ST: That's a tricky question. The answer is, sometimes I don't. Without a regular gig you have to rely on the generosity of your colleagues.

JR:The kindness of strangers!

ST: (chuckles) The kindness of strangers, or sometimes even the kindness but complexity of friends. You know, New York City can be especially quirky that way. I can't always go to a church and say "Can I come and use this organ?" You call someone and say "I'd like to come for two hours and bring a student over to look at some music on your instrument; it has a big acoustic and they'd like to learn from that, could we come over for an afternoon?" They say, "Sure." If you say, "Could I practice two or three days a week?" then it's "Well, you know the schedule. . . ."

There's often some monkey wrench. So I've found a few churches that have been very, very kind to me and I sort of play musical chairs among them. Every now and then I might play a wedding or a little mini-concert or something for them for free as a way of saying thank you, and that way you get a practice organ one place or another, usually 4 to 5 days a week. I've been very lucky that way for the past two years. It's a lot of juggling and a lot of being very creative because it's the one thing you want to be consistent and simple.

On the other hand, it wasn't always better having a big church job--St. Patrick's can be like Grand Central Station. Such a crossroads of tourists and masses and weddings and all that going on. You could never use the organ during regular business hours because of the number of people in the building, and for the longest time you couldn't use the organ at all after dark because they put on the security system--so you couldn't practice during the day when it was open, and you couldn't practice at night when it was closed. St. Bart's was easier, because they couldn't care less when you practiced, as long as nothing else was happening. But as the place got bigger and busier, and more outside groups would come in from rentals and things like that, the schedule became such that I couldn't get in enough time there either. That's one of the first things that made me realize, "Look, this has been a great four years, but the place is getting so big and busy, it's getting in the way of other things." And it was impossible to dance around that much and get the amount of practice and travel time that I needed. So, it's always been that way--it's not walking down the street to the Methodist church and then I can have the organ six hours a day--I think the majority of organists kind of have that luxury--and unfortunately that's not the case, but somehow I'm making it work anyway, moment by moment. (laughter)

JR: Well, I'm curious. Do you have any new commissioned works on the horizon?

ST: I've mentioned that in 2004, I've got a new piece coming from Bruce Neswick which will be a set of variations on the hymn tune Rouen, which is such a strong hymn. I haven't worked out exactly where to premiere it and whatnot yet, but definitely 2004, probably in the spring.

And in 2005 I'm getting a big piece from Samuel Adler, either a big symphonic poem or an organ symphony of some kind, which will probably get premiered in Germany. He's writing a big orchestral piece for the 300th anniversary of the Mannheim Symphony Orchestra that's getting done in March of 2005 and his idea was, well, if you're interested in doing this in Europe, or in Germany, why don't we do that, because I'm there, and another piece is being done the same time anyway. I have some even bigger plans in the works after that, something with organ and orchestra, but I don't want to let the cat out of the bag on that one yet.

But I think it's time that we had something from a major mainstream American composer, something with orchestra, an organ concerto--we really haven't had anything like this in a while. It's certainly something we need.  We have all these wonderful new instruments now, and more symphony halls than ever before have new modern instruments, and it's certainly time to take advantage of it. That's part of the goal too, just always push the envelope and say something fresh, you keep things going, that is so vital. That's sort of what's planned.

JR: Where do you see life going for you? Are you going to continue on this basis for a while? Are you happy with the way things are going for you?

ST: Oh, I think so, in general. I've put my whole life into doing this and it's ended up this way. And sometimes it's stressful but it really is ultimately exactly what I wanted. And as long as there's a way to do that I'm going to stay this course, and that's exactly what I'm doing.

Cambridge Chats #2: Sarah MacDonald

Gordon and Barbara Betenbaugh

Gordon and Barbara Betenbaugh are organists/choirmasters at First Presbyterian Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. They also direct Cantate, the Children's Choir of Central Virginia, and Mrs. Betenbaugh is chapel organist and assistant choral director at Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg. Last summer they completed a 13-week sabbatical in the UK, visiting Cambridge, Oxford, London, and Salisbury. See previous articles from their sabbatical: "London Chats #1: Michael McCarthy," October 2003, p. 18; "John Tavener's The Veil of the Temple," November 2003, p. 17; "Cambridge Chats #1: Timothy Byram-Wigfield," December 2003, pp. 16-19; and "London Chats #2: Patrick Russill," February 2004, pp. 20-22.

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We met with Sarah MacDonald on June 5, 2003, during exam week, in the lovely garden near the chapel of Selwyn College. On the previous day we had attended a rehearsal of the Selwyn choir and Evensong at the college. Sarah is the first woman in the history of any of the Oxbridge college chapels to hold the position of director of music. She greeted us by giving us publications issued by Cambridge University that included a prospectus and other materials given to all potential students. We learned a great deal from Sarah about the system of the Cambridge colleges. Sarah is a friendly young woman with an ever-present smile and bubbly personality.

Sarah was appointed Director of Music in Chapel at Selwyn in January of 1999. She is Canadian, and studied piano, organ and choral conducting at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto before coming to Cambridge as Organ Scholar of Robinson College. She has taught organ and conducting at the Eton Choral Courses, teaches for the University Music Faculty, and is a winner of the Royal College of Organists' Limpus Prize for organ performance.

GB: Thank you for these materials.

SM: You're welcome! This should give you some information on the 17 colleges out of 23 undergraduate colleges that do offer choral scholarships. It certainly should give you an idea about the range of activities of the various choirs. Of course, they are all made out to sound like every choir is fantastic. You can judge that for yourself! (laughter)

BB: How long have you been here?

SM: I've been at Selwyn for four and a half years. I was here in Cambridge at Robinson College as an undergraduate from 1992 until 1995.

GB: As an organ scholar?

SM: Yes.

GB: Did they have a director of music?

SM: No, I was it—just my kind of organ scholarship!

GB: Let me quiz you about the organ scholarships. How are the lessons worked out for the organ scholars?

SM: Most colleges pay for them completely or subsidize the lessons up to a certain point. The amount you can claim depends on which college you're at. They study with a variety of teachers, including David Sanger, Anne Page and Nicholas Kynaston. Most of the organ teachers come up to Cambridge three times a term. Or one could go down to London for lessons if one preferred.

GB: So, basically they are just coaches, then.

SM: Yes, in a sense they are. Most organ scholars only have three lessons a term. That's really all they have time for. The terms are really short (only eight weeks long). That is actually almost a lesson every two weeks. It does come as a bit of a shock to some of them, because they come from schools where they've had lessons every week throughout the year. David Sanger, who teaches most of them, is very much a kind of Conservatoire coach. He's interested in hearing something once, maybe twice if you're going to play it in a big competition or something. I was really fortunate because I'd done this in piano performance in Toronto. I'd had that kind of teaching for three years already, and I understood it completely.

GB: Where is home base for him?

SM: He lives in the Lake District in a converted chapel which is absolutely stunning.

 

BB: We love the Lake District! It's so beautiful.

SM: Occasionally he will invite students up to spend a couple of days and have a couple of lessons. The nave of the old chapel is his living room, and the organ is in there. It's fabulous! It's not easy to get to—you have to take about three trains and three buses. Then he has to pick you up. It's just amazing once you get there!

BB: Tell us about your new organ here at Selwyn.

SM: Oh, it's going to be excellent! It will be a 3-manual with 30 stops, made by Orgues Létourneau. I knew their organs from Canada although they haven't built very many here. There's one in Pembroke College Oxford and one in the Tower of London. We went down and played the London one, and spoke with the organist who told us two things that really sold us on it—first of all it was the finest organ he'd ever accompanied on. The other thing was that it had been in for a year at that point, and they hadn't had a single technical fault with it. For a new organ that's very impressive.

GB: I knew Létourneau when he was working for Casavant, and I put in a new organ in Nebraska. Of course I know of his instruments around the country like the big installation at First Presbyterian in Greensboro, North Carolina.

SM: I've seen that one advertised.

GB: So he will have large-scaled principals here?

SM: Yes.

BB: When's it due?

SM: It comes in July of 2004 and will be installed over the summer. We'll then sort of "play it in" through Michaelmas term of 2004. We're having it dedicated in January of 2005 by Naji Hakim.

GB: Are you going to have French reeds?

SM: Yes, absolutely, French Canadian reeds! They will have Cavaillé-Coll shallots.

BB: How did you end up studying in Canada?

SM: I am Canadian, grew up there and studied there first of all.

GB: Is that when you studied with John Tuttle?

SM: Yes, that's right.

GB: You studied piano first?

SM: The organ was only ever for fun. I primarily wanted to be a conductor anyway, so I knew I would have to learn to play the organ and decided to do that. I do take my playing very seriously, however. I got the top prize for organ playing in my associateship exam for the Royal College of Organists, but I have not yet had the courage to attempt the fellowship. It costs £300 to take it so I can't afford to fail it! Only a very small proportion of candidates pass it the first time. The keyboard tests in particular are notorious. I think I'll wait until the new organ is installed, when I will really want to practice for it.

BB: Tell us about the instrument you have in your chapel at the moment.

SM: It was built in 1994 by a local Cambridgeshire company. It's actually the same builder as the organ in St. Catharine's College for which Peter LeHuray was the consultant. The St. Catharine's instrument is really quite good, especially following its recent cleaning and revoicing by Flentrop. Ours at Selwyn is not a successful organ though, and has a sad history. There's a place in the world for mediocre parish church organs, but a Cambridge College Chapel with a musical tradition is not one of them. We have an organ repair budget of £10,000 a year. Last year was the point at which we knew we would have to do something. You can imagine how excited the College was about the idea of replacing an organ that was only eight years old. They were fantastic about it, but they were not happy.

GB: That's happened in the States with several builders. At least you're going to have pistons!

SM: Yes, we need them really.

BB: It's good that the College is supportive.

SM: Selwyn has one of the most prestigious traditions of the 20th century, and the college knows it needs to be preserved. There's a long list of important 20th-century church musicians who were organ and choral scholars here including Richard Marlow (Trinity College), Sir David Lumsden, John Harper, Grayston (Bill) Ives, Andrew Lawrence King, Percy Young, Frederick Rimmer. Of the past five organ scholars who've come through here, not a single one of them is playing anymore because they found the experience of three years as organ scholar here so disheartening having to play this instrument. Something had to be done.

BB: Do you play the last hymn and the postlude all the time?

SM: No, only about once a term. I do very little playing, but I do play at an Anglo-Catholic church where I am assistant in my spare time. Because it's exam term the external pressure on the choir is at a maximum. Evensong has to be a fun experience, because the exam pressure is horrendous here. Everything is 100% finals. Your entire degree is based upon these three weeks now. They write five or six essays every week all throughout their 3-year degree, and they don't count for anything. That's one of the reasons that this is a good time for the senior organ scholar to conduct. He's a wonderful player, but not an experienced conductor. The music is easy, and finals are mostly finished now. It's just the 6 or 7 first years who have exams right now that are going to be away. The whole atmosphere is more relaxed, but normally the organ scholars don't conduct unless I'm away. I think it's a bit odd that in England the way the tradition works is that they teach you to play the organ. You play the organ and play the organ and then suddenly get thrown in front of a choir, never having had a conducting lesson in your life. They expect you to know what to do. I think that's a bit unfair, actually. Once or twice a term, I let the organ scholars conduct while I'm there, so that we can actually have a chat right afterwards.

GB: None of the schools here teach basic conducting?

SM: There are a couple of new conducting programs at some of the London Conservatoires. There's a new program at the Royal Academy which started up two years ago which is a Master's in Church Music and Choral Conducting. Again, there are only four or five students per year, and they are teaching you professional choral conducting. The difficulty is that they will become accustomed to working with former Oxbridge choral scholars that sing like a recording whether you can beat time or not. Then you get thrown in front of a choral society or parish choir, and you can't even bring them in.

GB: Right. It's different in the States. In the better colleges much emphasis is put on conducting. You are the first woman in 700 years at an Oxbridge College. Tell us about that.

SM: It is a very male-dominated tradition. I'm now chairing the annual meetings after the choral scholarship trials. It is me and this table full of gentlemen. It's fine actually. In fact, an interesting statistic which I just heard the other day concerns The University Church (Great St. Mary's) which is just now advertising for a director of music.

GB: Yes, we saw that.

SM: They have 17 applicants—not a single woman.

BB: I wanted to ask you if other women had applied for positions and not been accepted or if they just didn't apply.

SM: No, they just don't apply.

GB: Do they think they can't break through?

SM: Yes, there's this mythology that women can't train boys' voices, which isn't true. The feeling is that we haven't gone through what boys do at the age of 12, so we can't possibly know what to do with them before they go through it.

GB: Are there any female organ scholars in Cambridge?

SM: A few, actually! There are girls at Sidney Sussex, Emmanuel, Magdalene, Corpus Christi, and Christ's Colleges this year.

GB: There's a woman who's a sub-organist at one of the cathedrals.

SM: There are three or four women sub-organists, and there are also several women in number one spots in major parish churches, where they are training men and boys choirs perfectly well.

BB: Have you had any problems?

SM: I've had no problems at all. I'd like to think it's because I know what I'm doing and not because I'm female. I've had an easy time of it. I expect that's from a kind of "short list" point of view.

GB: Do you think it will be another 50 years before there are females in the top cathedral positions?

SM: As a matter of fact, there are two women in number one cathedral positions already: one is Judy Martin, a former Selwyn organ scholar, who has recently gone to St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, and the other is Arundel Roman Catholic Cathedral in Sussex, where both the "master" of the music, and also the assistant organist are women. I am not sure how long it will take before one of the traditional cathedrals with a medieval choir school will appoint a woman to the top job.

BB: There are the girls choirs now.

SM: One of the main problems with the girls choirs is that they are creating jobs for women, but they shouldn't be. Why is it that a man can conduct a men and boys choir, but a woman has to be appointed to the position of "Assistant Organist and Director of the Girls Choir." I hope it will not become another unbreakable tradition that if you are a woman you must conduct only a girls choir. It's still discrimination.

Part of the problem is that the real training is still being given too much to the boys only, first as cathedral or collegiate choristers, and then at the traditional all-boys private schools which carry on teaching the choral tradition. The girls choirs are still too new for the effects to be felt at university. I've got three or four ex-collegiate/cathedral boy choristers in the choir. When they arrive at university, the men know the repertoire already. The girls are the weak sight readers, and do not know the mixed choral repertoire. The men know all the organ accompaniments by the time they're 18. They come up here, they do three years and they walk into those jobs because they're already qualified.

GB: Right. I've been very impressed with 18- and 19-year-olds handling huge instruments like at King's, the "accompanying machine." There are very few 18-year-olds in the United States that could handle a big instrument like that with complete mastery and artistry.

BB: I think Trinity College must be the silver slipper. It appears that way to us just from the two or three days we were there.

SM: Yes, anywhere with that kind of tradition and that kind of money to uphold it is nice.

GB: What plans do you have for touring with your choir?

SM: We're going to Finland and Estonia in September, and then we will do a brief tour to Scotland next summer, because we're hoping to go to New Zealand (if we can find the money) in 2005. Bishop Selwyn was the first bishop of New Zealand, and we've still never been there.

BB: If you ever come stateside call us, and we'll work something out.

GB: It would be nice to have you. Does the college underwrite the tours?

SM: They subsidize them. Selwyn choir is not well known. International Record Review two years ago reviewed one of our recent CDs and said that we would easily give any of our better-known neighbors a run for their money. Reviewers can say that, but still when it comes down to it, no one has heard of Selwyn, so we can't charge a big fee.

BB: Maybe that will change.

SM: I would hope so, but I don't expect it to change in the next year or two. Domestic invitations are starting to come in now which is great. Two weeks from now we're going to Birmingham, (not terribly exotic, but the invitation is lovely) to St. Augustine's Church in Edgbaston which is the only parish church for which Howells wrote canticles, and they're on our CD. In March we went to Canterbury and sang the premier of a new work by Jonathan Dove. That was really fantastic. Those things are starting to come in, and I can now actually get expenses paid when we're in the country. However, no one's invited us anywhere more exciting than Canterbury or Birmingham at this point. Choir members have to contribute their own money, which is unfortunate. It's well subsidized, though. They're getting ten days in Finland and Estonia for £150 which is a lot cheaper than they could do if they were actually going on holiday.

GB: That's a good deal!

BB: So, do any of these students have jobs outside of the college?

SM: They're not allowed to. It's against University regulations. You cannot have a job while you're a student. You obviously can when you're home in the summer, but not during term.

GB: We were just punting yesterday, and our punter was a student. I guess his exams are over.

SM: Yes. It's very, very intense academically. That's why I have to be really careful about balancing. My choir does really well academically, and that's important from the college's point of view. I don't want it to appear that choir is "getting in the way" of their studies. Also, there's a great deal of pressure from the media firstly, and the government secondly, to open up Cambridge and Oxford. We're trying desperately hard. In this country only about 40% of the population actually goes to university. They are desperately trying to increase that, but there's no tradition of it. In the UK education system, I think it's 7% of school-age children in the population are in private schools (i.e., schools for which they pay fees); 93% are in state-funded public schools. Cambridge and Oxford, which are government funded universities, are still struggling to get 50% of students from state-funded schools, which obviously is not representative given the percentage of children who attend state-funded schools. One of the areas that have had to deal with that over the past ten years is the choral tradition because we can't let people in now just because they can sing (i.e., they probably went to a private choir school and then a private high school where the choral tradition is still taught). If they can sing, good, great, but they need to be absolutely top class academically as well. They've got to fight evenly against everyone else. If you've got two people, both of whom are equal academically, and one of them can sing, great—in comes the singer. If you've got one who's reasonably good who can sing and one who's brilliant academically who's tone deaf, the tone deaf one comes. We have to do that, and we've all had to learn to deal with it.

GB: Your system is so different than in America. How do beginning harmony, theory, counterpoint, dictation and sight singing work with your system here?

SM: All of that gets taught in the first year. They have weekly one-on-one tuition in harmony and counterpoint. At the end of the year for their exam they have to do a 4-part fugal exposition on a given subject, and they have to complete a piece of 3-part Palestrina where one part is given throughout. There's no keyboard aid—it's all pencil on paper.

GB: So, they're taught harmony and counterpoint at the same time?

SM: Yes, and both are examined at the end of the year in three-hour exams. The harmony exam consists of three questions, and they have to answer two of them. One of them is the harmonization of a sort of "Schubertesque" song, and they have to write the piano part. The other is completion of a string quartet. They will be given four bars of the string quartet which they have to complete to a specified rubric (e.g., "write a further 24 bars with a modulation to the dominant at the half-way point"). The other question is to write up to six variations on a ground bass, either for a keyboard instrument or for strings. Aural training is extremely difficult here, because 20 or 25 of approximately 60 undergraduate musicians in each year have perfect pitch. Coming up with an exam that all of them can take is hard work. For the dictation questions, there are two things rather loosely termed "melodies." They are given the first note and 6 to 8 bars, and they get to hear it twice. These are really horrible—they are designed to test the people with perfect pitch. Then there are four rhythms that they have to memorize which are usually shorter, about four bars. Again, they hear them twice, but they can't write until after the second playing.

GB: It's different in the States.

SM: It's quite a clever trick, actually. You really learn to record and play back in your head. It's a skill that all of us have, but they have to learn to use it. They also have to complete a piece of 3-part keyboard counterpoint dictation, like a Baroque 3-part invention. They are given one part all the way through, and have to take the other part down. They hear that a total of four times. Then they have something called orchestral timbres. They are given a piano reduction of an orchestral score, and they then hear the orchestral version played three times. They then have to fill in boxes and say "that was a Cor Anglais or that was a viola with a mute on playing really high." They have to score up eight bars of it towards the end.

GB: That's all first year?

SM: Yes, it's all one three-hour exam.

GB: So orchestration is first year as are harmony and counterpoint?

SM: Yes. Then they have aural analysis. They hear a four- or five-minute piece of music. On this year's exam it was a piece of Couperin's keyboard music. They hear it three times, and the question is to write an account of the movement. The people who don't necessarily write things very well can just say "this happens or that happens." The kids who are really good actually write proper Schenkerian analysis for something they've heard three times and haven't got a score for. That's quite a big one. There's a mistake-spotting test. They are given a score that has mistakes in pitch and duration. They get played the correct version, and then they have to circle and correct the mistakes. Some of those are easy, and some are not. They have a keyboard exam as well in which they have to transpose a chorale, realize a figured bass, score a string quartet, score a Palestrina piece in C clefs and harmonize a melody.

The other written exams include analysis, in which there are two unseen works plus a set work which is a quick study. They'll find out what that is a couple of weeks before the exams. They would be asked to write three analysis essays in the exam, at least one of which must be on the set work. There are also two history papers (we call courses "papers"), the exams for which are also usually three essays to be written in three hours. The first one is the 19th century, and the other is 20th century. During the second year they choose from a selection of topics. This year's options include a Bach course, a course on Handel in London, one on Paris opera in the 19th century, and that sort of thing. They also have to submit a portfolio of tonal compositions. They have a set number of styles they can write in (sonata form or theme and variations or a collection of three songs or a ritornello) and they also must submit a three- or four-voice fugue. They study fugue all the way through the second year. The tripos1 is in the process of changing, and the major change is that the only compulsory paper (I think we are the only remaining university in the world for this paper) is a four-hour fugue exam. Every undergraduate, by the end of their third year, can sit down and write a fugue without a piano in four hours. It's not nearly as difficult as one thinks. I will ever be grateful that I did it. Now it's my favorite course to supervise. I teach about 15 fugue students, and I love it. I especially enjoy the ones who at the beginning of their third year say, "You must be kidding." By the end if they actually work well through the year, it's not a terrifying exam. They've actually learned how to deal with large-scale form, small-scale harmonic movements, etc., and writing good four-part counterpoint. I don't know what will happen next year, because it's not mandatory. They will have a choice. They will either have to write a 10,000-word dissertation on some scholarly topic of their choice which would be submitted obviously, or they can do the fugue paper. There's still a little bit of academic rigor left, but my guess is that 70% or 80% of them will go for the dissertation, which is a shame, because there are a lot of people who actually end up enjoying fugue who would never choose to do it at the beginning of the year.

GB: For the fugue course, for instance, would you use a textbook?

SM: Nothing is textbook-based in this university.

GB: That's what I thought.

SM: By midway through their second year for their history papers, they are reading journals. It's much more research-based. What I do in fugue, with the students who are reasonably comfortable keyboard players, or who at least have played some pieces, they simply have to write for me a complete fugue every week. We'll have a half-hour or 45-minute session on it every week, just the two of us. With those who struggle a bit, I'll do small amounts, say have them write four expositions, and I'll dictate. I'll have them write one using semiquavers modulating from E-flat to B-flat or whatever or write one in three parts using triplet quavers. I'll dictate a little bit, but I'll do that for the first term, and then I'll insist that they write a complete fugue all the way through. Writing a sequence, using the circle of fifths, bearing in mind that they've learned all of the basics of suspensions, etc. during the first year, they can learn that in about two afternoons, even the weak ones. You need them to consider how they are going to use this little bit of material in the whole thing. Occasionally, you'll get them to practice writing endings of fugues. Can you work your way up to a Neapolitan sixth chord? Anyone can write a Neapolitan sixth chord, but it's getting there and escaping from it that's tricky.

In the third year they all study a major set work, usually a choice of one of six big operas, Boris Godunov was one of them and Così fan tutte. There would be a choice of four other papers on various history topics. There's an in-depth editing and notation paper which this year was on Frescobaldi, so one would be dealing with a lot of nasty tempo relationships and that sort of thing. There would be various other random history papers depending on what research any of the lecturers are doing. One of this year's choices is "Music, Politics and Theology in the English Reformation." That would've been a fun paper to take. They can also write a dissertation if they want, 10,000 words on the topic of their choice. There's also the option to take a performance, which many of them do, but it's only one option, only in the third year. Two-thirds of them will do a 23-minute recital in which there's a set work that you have to perform. They also have to write a 3,000-word essay on the performance reception and history of any of the pieces in your program, which is a little bit nebulous, but there has to be something academic since it's not a performing degree. I did it actually, and my essay was on a piece of Bach on the organ. I did a study of all of the published editions of the piece I played. I went down to the National Sound Archive and listened to loads of recording of it and looked up every reference to it in every book ever written about Bach. You can actually come up with an essay, but it's not easy.

GB: Most of our degrees in the States are performance degrees.

SM: Yes, exactly. You can do that at a Conservatory. There's a gap between the Conservatory and the University. Lots of students graduate from here with a degree and then go on and do a Master's at the Royal Academy. There's some fabulous playing and some fabulous singing that gets done here, but there's even better playing and singing at the Conservatories in the undergraduate programs, because the ones who are really top quality performers will often just go there first.

GB: All of this exam talk is exhausting. I know why the students are looking like they are now. (laughter)

SM: Exactly, and that's just in music. The worst one I think is the English course. They don't do exams at the end of the first year, because there's too much to learn. They only take exams at the end of the second year. The first morning of the exam week they get up and write an exam called 900-1100. Then they get up the next morning, and it's 1100-1300, then 1300-1500, etc. Eight days in a row they will write an exam covering two hundred years of English literature. Then they have to take a second language paper as well and something called literary criticism, analysis of unseen texts.

GB: This is all much more difficult than in the States.

SM: I think it's more difficult here than in most places. Certainly the music course is twice as rigorous as anything I've ever seen in North America. In fact, there was a mathematician visiting a week ago who came in for dinner with someone he knows. He had been looking at the first years' math papers. Bearing in mind that Newton was a mathematician at Cambridge, and Stephen Hawking is here, I think it's allowed to be a difficult course. He was looking at the first year math exam, and he said to me that he had had a Ph.D. in mathematics for 20 years, and he thought he could probably get through about 25% of that exam. I'm sure that he is a top scholar in the specific area, but here it is a huge amount of material our students have to get through in a short amount of time. It's not just that they do everything in no detail. They do things in great detail, but they do an awful lot of stuff in a lot of detail. It's really intense, and that's why they get so stressed at this time of the year, because they have to show what they know now.

BB: That's hard, because they don't get graded at any time until the end. What about people that don't test well?

SM: Women always do worse than men. It's very definitely a man who would've thought of it, because it wouldn't occur to a man that it might not be a good day for a woman to write an exam. Many women do extremely well, but in general the overall performances show that the men do better. The other thing is that more men get in. There are three colleges that admit only women, and there's still a 65/35% gender imbalance across the university, even including those three colleges.

GB: Magdalene was the last college to accept women?

SM: Yes, in 1991.

GB: What was the first year?

SM: In 1972 or 1973 there was a wave of 3 or 4 colleges that accepted women. There was a big bunch in 1976 which included Selwyn. The rest of them jumped on board over the next few years, and Magdalene went in 1991.

GB: Well, we've covered a lot of academic ground.

BB: Thank you for explaining all this. We didn't understand all that we knew about the system in Cambridge. Most Americans don't understand the system here at all.

SM: Unless you've come up through it, you don't realize. You can't do anything resembling a liberal arts degree. If you come up here to read for the Music tripos, then you read for the Music tripos full stop. You can go and attend lectures in any of the other subjects if you want to, but you won't be examined on them, and no one will know. Nobody has time to do that anyway. Some people will finish Part I in a particular course, and then change. The sad ones are those who do Part I in a course they love and then panic and do Part II in Law when they realize that History or English or whatever isn't going to give them a job. That does happen, but it's usually only 3 or 4 students per course in each year that would actually change.

GB: The Oxbridge Colleges are still the only places that give an MA three years after the Bachelor's?

SM: Yes, absolutely.

GB: Free of any advanced study?

SM: Yes.

BB: This would then be different from an MA from the Royal Academy?

SM: That's right. You can do a Master's degree here as well—it's called an M.Phil. It's a one-year postgraduate research degree, and then you do your doctorate. Anyone who knows if your degree says MA Cantab (the abbreviation for the Latin form of Cambridge) they know perfectly you haven't worked for it. The other thing is that the undergraduate degree is really heavily research-based and a ridiculous amount of work. I didn't feel in the least guilty about accepting an MA, because I knew that I did so much intense research for my BA.

GB: I've heard that there were discussions about phasing that out.

SM: I don't know. It's fighting against 700 years of tradition. I would be surprised if they phase it out, especially because if you have a degree from Cambridge people know if it says M.Phil that you worked for it. If it says MA, then it just means that you did your undergraduate degree at Cambridge. If I go back to North America and say that I have an MA, they all assume that I've done a three-year research degree, which in a sense I have. It just comes with the undergraduate one.

GB: What is the total for room, board and tuition for a year?

SM: Tuition for a home student (a UK or EU student are the same) with parents that make money is £1,125 per year for any university in the UK. It's subsidized, you see. Tuition fees only came in three years ago. Before that it was free. You can imagine how painful that was. When I was here as an undergraduate tuition was free, and they still received maintenance checks from the government to go to university. That was their desperate attempt to increase the number of people at university. The maintenance checks were means-tested, so if you had wealthy parents you didn't get one. Fees and loans for home students are now means-tested instead, and grants are no longer available.  There is a huge debate in Parliament right now though about raising university tuition fees significantly (to £3000 a year minimum), and some universities, including Cambridge, are fighting for the right to set their own level of fees, rather than having it set by the government as it is now. In terms of living costs, 95% of undergraduates live in college residence, which keeps costs down. Rent in Selwyn, for example, is actually quite low. The rooms are small, because it was originally formed as a college for priests and for children of poor clergy. It doesn't have any of the big sumptuous rooms that some of the wealthy medieval colleges have. Depending on the size of the room they would be paying between £450 and £600 per term (there are three terms a year), which is quite low actually compared to some of the colleges. They also have to pay something called a kitchen fixed charge, which is about £100 a term. This keeps the prices for meals in hall really low, so they can get a full 3- or 4-course meal served in the formal hall three times a week for only £4, and daily lunch can be bought for as little as about £2.

Fees for overseas students, however, are exorbitant. For a science course, which music is classed as because a lot of the teaching is one-on-one, the tuition when I came ten years ago was £9,750 a year. Then I had to find accommodations on top of that. They expect you to have about £15,000 or £20,000 a year, which is fine except if you're paying it in Canadian dollars worth next to nothing.

GB: What kind of stipend do the organ and choral scholars get?

SM: The choral scholarship, as you will see in the materials, is £100 a year plus singing lessons. The organ scholarship is £300 a year plus organ lessons. There is an agreement across the whole university such that every choral scholar, no matter which college they're at, gets paid £100, and every organ scholar gets paid £300. An instrumental award is £75. It does depend on what college you are as to how much is paid for lessons. Selwyn is quite generous, because we had a nice alumnus about 25 years ago who endowed a music fund. The choral scholars claim up to £300 a year or up to £450 for lessons if they're studying music. This actually isn't bad—you can have a lot of lessons for that kind of money. We do get lots of inquiries from North Americans who think that choral scholarship is an equivalent football scholarship (i.e., is actually substantial financially), but it isn't.

GB: Are they big on early fingering here in Cambridge?

SM: Some of them are, yes. Then the musicians among us will think about the early fingering and how it affects articulation, and then do the articulation with normal fingering! (laughter)

GB: That's what I do—it's easier than refingering everything.

SM: Yes.

GB: What one hears is the main thing.

SM: If you're on your way to King's there's a mass there on Thursdays. It's not Evensong.

GB: Yes, they are doing the Howells Collegium Regale. We have heard the Kodály Missa Brevis twice. I don't know what their rotation schedule is. I haven't figured it out.

SM: My guess is that it's probably not particularly methodical. You can't count anything as being in your repertoire until the third term, because a third of the choir is new at the beginning every academic year.

GB: It's been a joy to hear all the Howells settings, particularly. They are our favorites.

SM: You should get our CD in that case!

GB: Yes, we'll pick one up from the porter.

BB: Thank you for giving us your hour and sharing your knowledge.

SM: Certainly. This has been fun.

Author's note: We left Sarah with promises to meet in cyberspace soon.

An Interview with Robert Powell

by Jason Overall

Jason Overall works with the pipe organ builder Goulding & Wood, Inc., in tonal design and project development. He graduated from Furman University of Greenville, South Carolina with a degree in music theory, studying organ with Charles Tompkins and composition with Mark Kilstofte. From there he went on to study composition with John Boda at Florida State University, also studying organ with Michael Corzine. In addition to his work with Goulding & Wood, Mr. Overall is an active church musician in the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis.

 

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Robert J. Powell is one of the most recognized names in contemporary church music. He has a countless number of publications in every genre and has led sessions in conferences across the country. Since 1968, Mr. Powell has been organist-choirmaster at Christ Church, Greenville, one of South Carolina's oldest and largest Episcopal churches. During his nearly thirty-five year tenure, Mr. Powell has taken the program from a single children's choir that led the 9:00 am Morning Prayer service to a comprehensive array of adult and children choirs, instrumental ensembles and a thriving concert series. Prior to his position at Christ Church, Robert Powell served the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York as assistant organist and Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, Meridian, Mississippi as organist-choirmaster. Yet it is his compositions that have done the most to secure his reputation.

 

Mr. Powell has written well over 1,000 anthems and service music for the Episcopal church. His setting of the Gloria in excelsis is thought to be "The One True Gloria" by many people in the pew. Nearly every church musician has come to rely on the dependable, accessible music of Robert Powell, and with such an encyclopedic output, it is easy to find the perfect piece for even the most difficult situations.

If Bob's reputation is earned through his composition, it is his generosity of spirit that most touches those who know him. His warmth and genuine Christian spirit provide the basis of his career, his music-making and his composition. In his music, Bob weaves together a sensitive spirituality, no-nonsense practicality and a liberal dose of good humor.

At the end of 2002, Mr. Powell will retire from Christ Church, leaving behind a flourishing music program. He makes it clear, however, that he isn't retiring. Bob says that he is looking forward to spending even more time composing and the opportunity to try his hand at substitute playing.  In May, I was able to ask Bob about his career and experiences. Following is a portion of our conversation.

Who are some of the composers or teachers that inspired you?

Well, of course Alec Wyton was my mentor and he always encouraged me. He is a wonderful person, and he was always a great inspiration. In fact, when Abingdon Press was first starting their music publishing business, they asked Alec to send them an anthem. He said he didn't want to at that time, but that he had a young student--meaning me--that would send them one, and I did. They took "Ancient of Days" or some anthem that's out of print, so I sent them another. Pretty soon I sent them twelve at once, and they took about ten of them. Finally Earl Copes, who was one of the editors at that time, called up and asked, "How fast does (and he named an anthem) go?" By that time I had written fifteen others, and I didn't even remember it. He had to sing to me over the phone to show me how it goes. I never put [tempo markings] on pieces because speeds don't mean anything to me. I don't play the same speed anyway each time. If you ever see a piece of mine with a metronome indication, it is usually because publishers want it.

Who else besides Alec Wyton?

This will be a surprise: I came up in rural Mississippi playing in what was called a Union church. That is, it was Baptist two Sundays a month and Presbyterian, which I was, one Sunday a month, and Methodist the other Sunday with circuit riding preachers. It was wonderful, and of course all of the congregation came to all of the services, whether it was Baptist or Presbyterian or whatever. So I came up playing the Sunday School piano, like everybody does, it seems. They bought a Hammond organ and said "You can play the thing: it's got a keyboard!" I'd been taking piano lessons, but I said, "I can't play this thing." So I went to a town near us, Greenville, Mississippi, and found an organ teacher. He played at St. James Episcopal on an old two-manual Estey, and I learned how to play on that. He was a wonderful person who was also a band director and a good organist. His name was Walter E. Parks. I would go in for my organ lesson and do the usual things: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues and all of that. Then he'd say, "Now it's time for our composition lesson." And for the same price I'd have another three hours. We did Preston Ware Orem's book and the Prout books, the Percy Goetschius book of composition. It was wonderful fun for me. He was a great influence.

Did you keep up with him?

He died at the keyboard after I left high school. I went to Louisiana State University, and I ended up with Frank Page, the organist at the Catholic student center and a great teacher. He would give us assignments, like harmonize a melody, and I would transpose it and harmonize it six different ways. I was ambitious in those days--you learn not to be after a while, I guess--but it was fun. I studied composition and organ at the school and got degrees in both of them, then I went off to the Army. I went to Atlanta first and was a junior choir director: my first experience with a junior choir. My hometown church didn't have a choir of any kind. In fact, the first choir of any kind that I ever heard was the LSU concert choir. In the army, [I was stationed] first in Atlanta, then in Japan, which was a wonderful experience. The Korean conflict was over then, and I had a choir of Japanese women who worked at the Army base and American soldiers, which sang for chapel services. It was a great experience in choir training. As far as other people who have influenced me? Publishers particularly have encouraged me; I could just go down the line. All of them are encouraging, and of course that doesn't mean they take everything you send them. I'm used to rejections, because obviously everybody can't publish every piece. I understand that. Usually if an anthem is rejected twenty-two times or so, I change it into an organ piece and send it somewhere else. So you get organ pieces out of anthems sometimes. I try to recycle things.

Who are some composers you enjoy listening to?

Amazingly enough, right at the moment I'm on a Dvorak kick. I think Dvorak was a great composer--underrated in a lot of ways. Mahler I have trouble with. Of course there's Bach. My old saying used to be "there are two categories of organ music: all the music that Bach wrote for organ and all the music that everyone else wrote for organ." Bach is always an influence, but you have to be careful with Bach because you can copy him easily and end up sounding like bad Bach. I try to listen to a variety of things, to check out all styles. I try just to sit there and listen and not do too much. I try to keep a balance. You can't do music all the time. I never take music with me on a trip or a vacation. I do not take any manuscript paper. I do not think about it.

When you're not on vacation, do you have set times for composing?

I try to get writing at about 9:00 and I go until about 11:00. Then I go out and have coffee with friends, come back around 2:00 and work a couple of hours, and that's it.

Do you compose four hours every day?

Well, it's like practicing. You lose it if you don't do it. I used to have a good time writing for junior choir when I had a junior choir to work with. Now it's difficult to write for junior choir. I do as well as I can with it, but it was much easier when I actually had one, even though we weren't singing my music, because you know what they can do. It's easy to write for SATB choir when you have one. It's more difficult when you don't. You're in a vacuum writing away.

What criteria do you look for in a text that you want to set?

It has to say something to the people who are going to be singing it and hearing it. If it's a regular anthem, something that rhymes well and makes good sense when it rhymes, and if it's a classical text, something I think I can set, I think that's basic. Also if it has some little dramatic thing in it like They Cast their Nets in Galilee, you can always make a little [motive] out of "nets." "Glory" is always a great word for me to use--"glorious" or something like that--because you can always make it soar out. So the text is very important in writing church music.

Although you have always been involved with the Episcopal Church, you've only done a couple of [settings of the] Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, one Jubilate Deo and of course the things that are in the hymnal. Was it a conscious decision to not write more canticles?

Not a conscious decision. I found that when I first started sending these canticles like "O be joyful" (the Jubilate Deo) or the Benedictus est, there were already many in the catalogs, and most of the publishers simply didn't want another one. How many "O be joyful"s can Concordia have after all?

Have you ever consciously tried to develop a Bob Powell style or a sound?

Heavens, no. I consciously try to make sounds like what the particular publishers publish. Obviously I wouldn't send a Concordia-type piece to a publisher that's used to publishing renewal music. So I have to study other composers' [pieces]--read them through and throw them away so I wouldn't be copying them, but just to get the general style of the music for a particular publisher. Also, I subscribe to a lot of these choral packets so I can see what Augsburg and Concordia or whoever is publishing, and I would write something like that.

With both the texts and with style, it seems like a very practical approach.

Yes, I write for small choirs, as you probably gathered. Choirs of twenty-five because that's what most choirs are. When you come right down to it, most choirs are not of Cathedral ability or size. I just can't write for fifty voices. I don't think in that way.

What about beyond that? Bach and Telemann and composers of their ilk weren't necessarily writing pieces that they thought would last for all eternity. They were writing music for next Sunday. Whereas people like Brahms and Beethoven were writing pieces that they intended to be around for a while.

No, I'm more on the Bach line. I know they're not going to be around forever. They'll be in print five years if you're lucky. If they don't sell, they don't sell. Then the publisher will put them out of print because they have to pay taxes on them whether they sell them or not. My pieces are all practical things and useful for specific occasions. Peace I Give to You, the Paraclete publication, is a Maundy Thursday text. I think the rector [at Christ Church] asked me to write something that we could use on Maundy Thursday, so I wrote that. Of course there are a few commissions here and there, and they want this, that and the other thing. So I say, "Sure, I'll do that." I don't know how to say no. I'm going to learn by the time I'm seventy-five. I might say no, but right now if anybody asks me to do anything I'd be glad to do it. It's fun.

How much lead time do you require to have something ready?

To write a piece? The Suite for American Folk Tunes was written in two weeks for Austin Lovelace. He said he needed something for organ and brass, and would I write him something. That was lucky. Sometimes it takes a month. The organ duet went along about six months.

What about a typical anthem?

A typical anthem is a week. I do like Searle Wright used to suggest. Just put it down quickly: everything that comes into your mind, put it down. You can always go back and fix it later.

How much editing do you do?

Very little. [laughs] Once it's in the ground there is very little revision made. It's not like Mozart where I hear it in my mind. I just keep improvising on the piano until it comes. I think John Ferguson said something like that--that you keep hitting away until it sounds right to you. And when it sounds right to you, then you go on to the next measure.

So you always compose at the piano?

Almost always. Sometimes at the organ. It's more difficult to compose organ pieces at the organ for me. It's easier to do it at the piano. All the choral pieces are done at the piano. Other people go out to the middle of a lake on a boat and write a piece, but I can't do that.

When you write organ pieces, do you ever . . .

Do I ever think of timbres? Not really. I hear a flute maybe once in a while, and maybe a reed here and there. But I never hear a timbre particularly, because it's all the notes. That's the important thing to me: the notes themselves, not the sounds. I leave it to good interpreters to decide what to make it do. They make it sound right. A good interpreter is really re-creating the music. The person that interprets it is like a composer. In fact, Walter Erich pays the same amount of royalty if you arrange a piece as if you write a piece, because an arranger is just as important as a writer and sometimes more important than the writer of the piece.

So in your view, a sensitive performer can be an arranger.

That's exactly right. I don't want them to change the notes, although, my notes are not written in stone. I have no problem with people who change a note here or there. They say, "Did you mean this?" I will usually say, "What do you want? What sounds good to you?" And they'll say whatever it is and I'll say, "That sounds good to me too, so let's just put it down." Everything is flexible in this world. That's because I'm a parish organist, and you've got to make concessions.

What is the typical process you go through in writing an anthem?

The first process is to find some kind of text. That's basic. Richard Rodgers did that, and I feel good about that. Richard Rodgers didn't think of "Oh! What a Beautiful Morning" without having the text in front of him. Then the second thing is how are you going to divide the text--will you divide it into verses, will it be a long piece that you'll have to divide into some kind of sections? You have to have breathing points, and you have to figure out where the poet meant it to come to the end of an idea. Next process is to see if the first line gives you any inspiration. Does that phrase give you a tune in mind? Then you get your tune and you have your first inspiration and then it goes from there. Then bang away, and after a while it begins to sound right and take shape. I usually write the middle part first then add the introduction after I've written everything else, because you have something to draw from then. I try to avoid clichés. It's so easy to get clichés when anthem writing, particularly in concertato writing. You just do the same thing: there's going to be brass playing an introduction and everybody's going to sing unison, then the second verse is going to be different, and the third verse will be a harmonized verse for the choir, and the last verse will be unison-descant-plus-coda. I try to avoid doing that. One great anthem is Harold Darke's Christmas anthem "In the Bleak Midwinter" which is a hymn anthem, but it's very cleverly done because you don't have this four-verses-of-the-same-thing. Each verse is very different from the others. To me it's a very good hymn anthem.

What is the balance between inspiration and craft in your composition?

Inspiration--that's a hard question. I think Rutter said at one of those conferences that once you get the first idea, the rest of it is easy. Which is quite true, but it's a whole lot better if you have a good first idea. The inspiration is the first thing you get--the first idea. If you're going to write a pastorale and you get a little pastorale theme--a measure or so, a motive--then that's the inspiration part. Then the rest of it is craftsmanship. Well, of course, all of it is inspiration, but the rest of it is extension of the idea.

I think it was Schoenberg that said composition is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration.

That's right. Exactly.

But do you feel that the first idea is always inspired? Or do you feel like you can craft a good motive?

Oh, I think it has to be a certain amount of inspiration. It comes from God, I believe. I have no idea where these ideas come from. If I had some great well that I could put my hand in and draw one out, I'd do it. But it just comes. And sometimes you sit down at the keyboard and you say, "Okay, I'm going to be inspired now." And I wait for inspiration to come, and it does not come. I think Austin Lovelace said once that this stuff cycles. Sometimes you can really hit it right off and other times you sit there for a day or two or a week and you have no idea--no ideas. It's funny.

Do you ever receive inspiration unexpectedly? The cliché is waking up in the middle of the night with this great idea that you have to write down, but perhaps also when you are driving around town or,

[interrupting] No. Well, actually that's true. I have driven around town and gotten a good inspiration, with the radio off, of course. Sometimes driving from home to work you can get an idea and then you go in and put it down. Sometimes you play a service, and services are really quite inspiring in more ways than is normally thought. Sometimes you get an idea in the service, and I used to write them down after the service was over, at least a snippet of it. For a while I recorded some of them then tried to transcribe it, which is difficult. I like to play church services because I don't get nervous there. You have to keep going. You can't go backwards. Improvisations often turn into real pieces. I think that happened with lots of composers, not just me.

I remember coming over from Furman [University] to hear your service playing because it's so excellent. As you hear other church musicians play services--and struggle through services--do you have advice to share?

Well, in the first place I would say that relationships should be the first priority. Relationships are so important. After all the staff meetings and all the going to music conferences and all the practicing and all the choir training and all the other things, in the end the most important thing in all are the relationships. There are two ways of presenting God's word. One of them is by what the priest and the liturgy says. But equal to me is what the music says. It is an equal partner in proclaiming the word. It's another way of proclaiming Christ's gospel. Secondly, lots of people play too slowly for the church itself. Obviously if you are in a resonant building you have to play more slowly, but most churches are not resonant buildings. Some don't give the congregation a chance to breathe. Alec Wyton taught me a great thing: he said you must play with the text. So I was taught by him to play by the text itself no matter what the music does. Although I remember bad occasions when I've not done that. At St. John the Divine, when I was assistant there, [I played] 13 verses of "O come, O come Emmanuel" until people started looking at me wondering when I was going to quit. I had lost my place and wasn't playing by the text. So I learned the hard way. The other advice I have is to give the same amount of time between the verses each time. I also never ritard until the end of the last verse. I think if you ritard at the end of the introduction, you confuse the congregation. They don't know what speed it's really supposed to be.

What about larger issues in service playing? What about pacing the service, planning your registrations?

You have to be like you're on television. You have to be right with it right away. There are two [issues] there: you have to be with it when you're supposed to be with it and not have a grand pause while everybody looks for things or while you look for music, and people in general don't understand that silence is a part of music. A quarter rest is a beat of silence for example. And there are times in the services when there should be silence and not music. Silence is music in a sense.

Do you feel like there is a particular liturgical aspect that some weeks could be silent and other weeks could be musical? Or are there some times which should always be silent?

Depending on the service itself, I think there should be some moment of silence. Particularly in preludes that people play for funeral services when they want continual music or in a communion service where they want continual music. I don't want continual music in a communion service. If I were playing four pieces, there wouldn't be a modulation between numbers 1 and 2 or 3 and 4. I play one piece and put it down. You want to give people's ears a chance to breathe even though they're not singing. It comes back to participation. Participation does not always mean that people have to be yelling at the top of their voices. One form of participation is when we are all singing "Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven" and are just having a great time. We are participating--great. But if an organist is playing a great organ piece, like Bach, and we are all into it, we are also participating even though we are just sitting there. That's a form of participation.

That's something that in the liturgical world seems to divide the Roman church, which emphasizes active participation, and the Anglican world, with what you are talking about.

Yes, that's right. With Evensong, the congregation is not singing all the time, but they are involved in all kinds of ways: emotionally, spiritually we hope--every kind of way. And that's the point of these kinds of services to me anyway. That's a very difficult concept for many people. They only feel like if they are singing that they are participating in music making.

Are there ways musicians can foster that sense of visceral participation?

If they have a chance to write a little article in the bulletin or newsletter, that's always helpful. Tell it to the choir; tell it to the clergy.  The clergy listen and if they understand, the whole church ends up understanding.

How do you approach polishing a choir or your own playing but avoid it being a performance?

Automatically when the choir sings it's a performance of a sort. And of course you want the best; we all want the best of every kind of music. Every presentation of a choir or organist is a performance by the very nature of what it is, and you want it as perfect as possible. I'm not sure there is any sort of a thing as perfection in this world in this way, but anyway you want it as perfect as possible. Then you've got a good performance. But does it relate to the what's going on with the rest of the service or is it just a performance? You have to be very careful that it relates textually and that it creates the right ambiance. You must be a team player and not isolated. That's what I mean by relationships. You are related to the people who are in the service, the congregation, the clergy. You are related to proclaiming the gospel, and you are not just doing a little performance somewhere. This isn't something you can just slop around. You have to do it quite well. And hope for the best. Pray a lot.

If it is a performance, it sounds like Søren Kierkegard's idea that in a service the musicians and the clergy are just the prompters, the congregation are really the actors and the audience . . .

The audience is God. God is the audience and so you want to make sure that you do as well as you can to please God. And the congregation is involved in it too. When an anthem is sung or an organ piece is played, everybody in the church building is involved in some way. As long as you think of being involved with them and them being involved with you, then what you're doing is proclaiming God's and Christ's gospel. Then you're not doing performances. You are helping along their spiritual worship. Which is why choosing anthems is so important.

How much of your time throughout the year will be spent choosing anthems?

In my best days, I spent a long time and looked at a lot of pieces. Not only as a composer but to see what we could use--that's what I'm paid for. And it goes throughout the year. I'm kind of like the publishers in that in July I should have my Christmas music ready and at Christmas I should be at least beyond Easter, so you are always ahead of the game. You are never living in the present; you are always sort of living in the future in this business. That way if you're going to have brass you can get it arranged. You don't have to sort it out the last week, and they are out there with their stands open and no music on them.

How would you describe your technique for improvisation, and how do you prepare your improvisations for a Sunday service?

If I'm going to improvise a prelude, now this is a strange technique, I take the hymn book upside down, and the bass becomes a soprano part and improvise on that. Other times I take a part of the tune and change the keys and go into different sequences of that just like every hymn prelude you've ever seen: you do your introduction, you do your tune, you do your tune with echoes in between. There are hundreds of techniques. You just try to keep a little form so you don't keep splatting away. You just have to study books by Gerre Hancock, David Cherwien and others.

Do you consciously have to rein in your counterpoint to make sure your voice leading is good, or do you now find that natural?

I don't think about counterpoint or harmony or any other thing. The notes will lead you to another place. So you go down another path. That's the fun thing about improvisation: where the notes will lead you. As you're going along, you think, "I've got this note," you don't think, "This is B-flat and it's going to go to so and so." The note itself, the chords and the notes just kind of lead you to the next thing so you don't have to. And that's where form becomes very important, because then you don't just go wandering off anywhere. What you actually want to do is get back home sooner or later.

In your longer improvisations, is it common for you to do free improvisation not on a hymn tune?

Of course, I'll do that. You have to be sure in a longer one that you contrast things: soft and loud, fast and slow, high and low. That kind of contrast is very important. I remember I [played a service] once in Columbia, and they had an electronic organ there that only had two sounds: loud and soft. It was a long procession with all the priests in the whole Southeast it seemed like. It went on for about twenty or thirty minutes, dealing with this organ which only had loud and soft. That's all it was. And finally you get to just playing chords because you just run out of . . . [shudders]. It was one of those horrible experiences. I was glad when it was over.

In both improvisation and in composition, do you find it difficult to come up with interesting textures?

For me it is sometimes difficult to come up with interesting textures. Sometimes you have to use things that you would normally not find in a piece written for organ by Franck or somebody. Use the Vox humana not like a Vox humana is usually used, but like a snarly something. I'm pretty conservative, I'm afraid. I use strings and flutes and diapasons in a kind of normal way, but every once in a while I try to break out of it. High and low is important. Most of us play in the middle of the keyboard all of the time. Those Thalben-Ball preludes have a lot in the high register and in the low register. Obviously he was dealing with what I'm struggling with. Of course you want to use the tune in the tenor or in the bass rather than always in the soprano, and have little frills around it.

Is there anything else you want to say?

Well, I just hope we continue to get a bunch of great young organists coming along who are going to go into church music and who work as well as they can in choosing music. When you choose music you want the very best of every kind, whether it is renewal or not renewal or classical or not classical. You don't want to choose second-rate anything. As I said in a 1967 interview I was re-reading the other day, I don't think there is really any one style of church music. I certainly don't think in this day and age that there is any "Episcopal" church music as there was twenty years ago. I think the renewal is here and--I know my colleagues are not with me on this, and that's all right, I'm retiring anyway--I don't have a great objection to blended services--that is to say, [services] with some renewal music in it and classical as well. At Christ Church on Sunday at the big service, it occurs mostly in the communion sung by the choir alternating with classical hymns from the hymn book. A lot of it is played on the piano, and some of it is played on the organ. We almost never use guitars or the string bass or the recorders in the big service. There are two other renewal services in the week, where all renewal music is appearing. I don't have any problems with this because everybody doesn't like Bach. That's just a plain fact. Like all organists, I wish it were otherwise. Everything that I like--Tallis and Byrd and everybody--I wish everybody would like it as much as me, but they don't. Some of them really get a lot out of the different songs, and we think my colleagues here do it here very tastefully so the whole service blends, and I guess the word "blend" is about the right word for it. You have a service where something in it appeals to everybody. In the beginning I was resigned and thought, "Well, that's what it's going to be," but the truth is the whole service becomes an entity, a unity. Without the renewal music, that particular service isn't right. Now at the 11:00 service, which does not have any renewal type music, to put it in there would not be right. We're a big enough church that we can have five services on Sunday, so it's easy. People, like water, seek their own level; they find the service they like and go to it. In these large churches it's necessary that services have their own character--that every service doesn't sound like the last one anymore than every Episcopal church in Greenville should sound like the next one. This [individual character] is its appeal: the spiritual appeal of people. I feel that the renewal music has its place, at a certain time but not all the time. I don't mean just out at the campfire or something. I mean in a church service on a Sunday morning. I think it has an appeal and a place.

You've drawn a clear distinction about doing it tastefully and not using guitars and so on.

That might be a failing. I know of churches which use guitars and flutes and violins and everything and dress it all up very nicely. In a sense we're bringing the secular world into the sacred and in a sense we're not. Music that Vivaldi wrote, the guitar concertos and so forth, was not a lot different than the Vivaldi Gloria. It was the same style in and out of the church. That has always swung back and forth as everybody knows. I think God uses all kinds of music to proclaim His gospel and to draw people to him. So I think that secular music--that gentle secular music--is useful. Songs such as "As the deer" and so on make an appeal that deals with the spiritual side of the person. I think it is important that we acknowledge that. These pendulums swing. A lot of the stuff the Roman Catholics had in the sixties has gone away, and some of the Roman Catholic churches that I know of are now swinging back to Gregorian Chant and to their heritage that they have from that, which I think is wonderful. I think classical music, like the Brahms motets, appeals to me, and if I were going to a service, not as an organist, I would go to Church of the Advent in Boston and hear the music played and sung there. As I said, people seek their own level in music. I know there is a terrible controversy raging about it. People say, "I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to have it." Well, it's not easy to say that. I think we have to deal with it the best way we can. We have to make it useful to God's purpose--not our purposes but God's purpose as we see it.

Given that there does seem to be such controversy about it, are you still optimistic about the church?

I am. Lots of my friends are not optimistic about church or church music, but I am because I know these things cycle. The really fine [examples] of any style of music or any style of worship is going to stay. It has stayed over the years. We still sing "A mighty fortress" for example. Any church should present the classical hymns: "A mighty fortress," "O God, our help in ages past," all the Lutheran chorales, the hymns in the 1982 Hymnal and the 1940 Hymnal. These should always be in the forefront of everything that's done. Then when the other music comes in, you actually have the icing on the cake in a sense. I am optimistic about church music. There are lots of great teachers, and there are lots of great players that really are church organists as opposed to performers. All you have to remember is to work with people--the relationships--that's the main thing. That doesn't just mean the choir members. It means the clergy and the staff, the program staff, the janitorial staff, all of them. And then you find out how things get done easily.

The Insights of a Composer

An Interview with Ned Rorem

Sean Burton

Sean Burton is the Music Director of the Boston University Choral Society, Assistant Conductor of the Marsh Chapel Choir, and is pursuing the MM in Choral Conducting at Boston University. This interview is part of a larger project, in which the author is interviewing several prominent choral composers and conductors in preparation for a book on American composers and conductors of choral music.

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Born on October 23, 1923, in Richmond, Indiana, Ned Rorem began his training in music at an early age. By the age of ten, his piano teacher introduced him to musical luminaries such as Debussy and Ravel. At seventeen he entered the Music School of Northwestern University, and in two years received a scholarship to The Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He went on to study under the supervision of Bernard Wagenaar at The Juilliard School earning his B.A. and M.A. degrees in composition. Privately, he studied orchestration with Virgil Thomson while working as his copyist in New York. During the summers of 1946 and 1947 he continued his education through the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood as a student of Aaron Copland. He then traveled to Europe, where he resided from 1949 to 1958 in post-war Paris, and immersed himself in French culture. Upon returning to the United States, he held academic appointments at the University of Buffalo from 1959-1961; the University of Utah from 1965-1967; and maintained a guest faculty position for a period of years at Yale University. Since his appointment in 1980, he serves as Professor of Composition at The Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. A recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Pulitzer Prize, he has composed music for every genre including the symphony, concerto, chamber music, keyboard music, choral music, opera, and art song. On September 12, 2003, I had the pleasure of interviewing him to discuss various aspects of his work and life experiences.

SB: When and why did you start composing for chorus?

NR: The first choral piece I wrote was at Juilliard. I wrote some madrigals on poems of Sappho. I learned the poems in a literature class taught at Juilliard. That was in 1946. No, earlier than that in 1943, I wrote a piece for William Strickland and the Army Music School at his request. It was on Psalm 70 for men's chorus and about four or five instruments.

SB: How did you choose those poems for the madrigals?

NR: Well, they were in a book of literature, and I was attracted to them. I choose poems according to what I need. Any composer of vocal music has his own taste.

SB: How would you describe your compositional process?

NR: Well, I'll tell you one thing--I never really talk about my own music--I talk about other people's music. I've written five books that contain about 150 essays, none of which is on my own music. I am not interested, really, in what composers say about their own music. I think the music speaks louder than they do. Occasionally, with a class I might analyze a piece, but usually it's a piece by somebody else. There are three ways to talk about music. First, the Women's Club way--the sentimental way, in other words. I was in love . . . and the moonlight . . . and I was sad . . . and somebody died . . . so I was inspired. But that's all nonsense. Everybody is inspired--but not everybody has the control to make inspiration speak to other people. The second way is the technical way--which you do with students. You talk about how a piece is made. But again, there's no one way of saying how a piece is made. There are as many ways as there are people talking. Third, is composers amongst themselves. They talk about, "how much money did you get," to provide a certain kind of piece. When a piece is not exclusively musical, then it's a setting of words. I've set easily 200 different authors to music and I'm a literary person myself. I think whatever my vocal music might be worth, at least the choice of text is pretty high class. That's as much as I can say about my own music.

SB: What do you think are some of the challenges composers in general face when writing for chorus?

NR: Well, you learn how to write music. The challenge is knowing what a chorus is--how high do they go, how low can they go, how good is this chorus as opposed to that chorus. I've written for huge choruses with orchestra. The Gay Men's Choruses, about ten or fifteen years ago, they, each one, commissioned a different composer. There were ten of them and they were all going to sing in New York. They commissioned me to write a piece for all ten. In others words, that was about 1000 male voices. I chose a Walt Whitman text and made eight or ten songs out of it with twelve brass. What I learned from that was a) brass can hold its own against 1000 voices very easily, and b) the effectiveness of 1000 voices--1000 voices is not ten times louder than 100--but it's ten times fuzzier. The most effective things were the very pianissimo sections. I've written for big chorus, and a regular mixed chorus, and orchestra, for Margaret Hillis and the Chicago Symphony, for example. Since I knew it is the best chorus in the world, I wrote, I did, whatever I wanted. I don't think many of my pieces are difficult, at least not difficult to hear, but they take real singers. The challenges, in other words, are generally theatrical as well as technical.

SB: What would you say are some of the trends you've seen in terms of writing for chorus during the 20th century?

NR: You have to be more specific. Ask me about specific pieces.

SB: How about comparing and contrasting Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms and Lukas Foss' The Prairie?

NR: Well, Symphony of Psalms is in Latin isn't it . . . and so is Oedipus Rex. When Stravinsky wrote Oedipus Rex, he said, "it's a Greek story but we'll put it in Latin." Since nobody knows how Latin is pronounced anyway he could do whatever he wanted. He thought almost strictly about music as distinct from vocal music. Although it's very singable, for the men's chorus, the very first three words are Oedipus pronounced in three different ways. Lukas Foss' Prairie on the other hand is of a young European coming to America and trying to be more American than the Pope. He took Carl Sandburg, I think, and took a very, very, very American song and made it as comprehensible as possible. Those were literary considerations rather than musical considerations, which is mostly what choral music is anyways. A composer either knows how to write or he does not. I don't know if you can talk about trends in choral music. On the whole, music goes generally from contrapuntal to--it doesn't get better, it doesn't get worse--but it goes from contrapuntal to harmonic and contrapuntal to harmonic. The harmonic periods are usually a lot more simple than the counterpoint. The Boulezes, and Elliot Carter, and all that, was contrapuntal. That emerged into the extremely diatonic period that we're in now and came out of a diatonic period in France which came out of Wagner, which was very contrapuntal. I think you could name big choral pieces of the past many years by Americans on the fingers of one hand. In England, there are more--and that has to do with the Church in England. I've written, I think, as much choral music as any other American and easily half of that is on so-called "sacred" text; much of it with organ and much of it simple enough for a congregation to sing, or at least for a good church choir to sing. I've written hours worth of that for various reasons. I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God, but I do believe in belief. I respect it and I think a lot of great literature--a lot of lousy literature has been done in the name of the Lord--but so has lot of great literature and great painting. Though I may not believe in the Lord, I do believe in Psalms to the Lord. So many of my texts have been given to me by churches that have commissioned me to write motets and introits. But, for bigger works, I've chosen my own lay texts.

SB: What composers have influenced you?

NR: I don't talk about that. We're all influenced. I'm French and not German. No German composer has ever influenced me at all. All of the music I like is French. I think the whole universe is divided between those two aesthetics--French and German. If that's true, I'm definitely French. It's not for a composer to say that he's been influenced by this or that person. Usually, if he's conscious of it, he tries to hide it. The very act of hiding is what, if he has anything to say, he translates what he has stolen into his own language. Therefore it's for you to say but not for me. To say that, Ned is influenced by Poulenc or Ravel, Debussy and so forth, but certainly not Boulez and that French group, which is essentially German.

SB: In terms of your contemporary composers, do you feel anyone deserves more attention or less attention?

NR: I think I should get more attention. I think Philip Glass should get less attention. I think that the world as we know it, culturally, is getting more and more vulgar--more and more dumbed down. We are the only period in history ever that emphasizes the past at the expense of the present. We are the only one that emphasizes performers at the expense of the composer. The performer of serious classical music who plays mainly Beethoven makes in one night what I make in a year. Even those people with their Beethoven, Brahms--it's almost never French--and Bach, are only one percent of music today--which is generally rock and pop music. Even cultured intellectuals don't know much about "serious" music, for lack of a better term. This is getting worse rather better. I give us another ten years before I think the whole world's going to blow up.

SB: That leads into another question I have. You have spent a significant amount of time teaching at universities. What are some of your thoughts about all the composers and performers we're training now? What do you think the future is going to be like for them?

NR: Well, I don't know, but there have always been about 10,000 people in the world who give a damn. It's always been that way no matter how big the population in the world is, but it's an ever-shrinking minority. On the other hand, at Curtis where I teach, although I'm going to stop at the end of this year, and at Yale where I was and other places, there are people who really care. The thing is, in the whole world there is no teaching of music in grade school and high school any longer in appreciation for the arts. Everything is money. Some of the young composers are never going to make money anyway, distinct from young investment brokers. They shouldn't be in it for the money, they should be in it for the love of it. There's always an outlet. I don't know why a piece has to have an audience of 20,000. A string quartet, if it's played in front of 100 people, what's the matter with that in a hall that seats one hundred. The future will be always aristocratic I suppose, or specialized. I think the future of the world is getting dreary. I think we're going to blow ourselves up, but there are always caring people--at least that you and I are interested in. I do think we could re-encourage the teaching of music appreciation courses as they used to be called, but nobody really can do that, or will do that much anymore.

SB: I know you are also a prolific author. Would you say your writings influence your compositions at all?

NR: No, the two things fulfill completely different needs. I'm a composer who also writes as distinct from a writer who also composes. What I encouraged to get published was the diaries as I was in my forties and already had a reputation as a composer for twenty years. I don't set my own words to music because, as I said before, I think my taste of words to be set to music is pretty high-class. If I were good enough to write my own words for music, I wouldn't need to write music because the words would be sufficient of themselves. I think there's something incredibly self-important about setting my own words to music. The kind of words I write are definitely prose. It's not poetic writing, it's not mellifluous, and it's not vague. I like to get ideas across. My prose has to do with ideas, which a literary writer would write. The two careers are independent of each other.

SB: Is there anything else you would like to share with the general readership of this article?

NR: I think churches have been and are usually very encouraging about contemporary organ music. I've written a great deal of organ music and I don't even particularly like the organ. My late friend, Jim Holmes, was an organist and I wrote a great deal of it for him and for other commissions. I wish that the readers could be encouraged to play more and more contemporary music and not just the same standard 19th century literature--because that's what will keep us alive.                

A conversation with Stephen Tharp

Catching up with a well-traveled recitalist

Joyce Johnson Robinson

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of THE DIAPASON.

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Advocate and proponent of new organ music as well as transcriptions of older works, Stephen Tharp is one of today's most active concert organists, having already made over twenty intercontinental tours throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia since 1987. He has held positions at New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral and St. Bartholomew's Church, but at present forgoes a church position in order to focus exclusively on performing, recording and teaching. As a champion of new music, he commissions and premieres numerous new organ works--many of which are dedicated to him--including compositions by Thierry Escaich, Jean Guillou, Anthony Newman, Martha Sullivan, and Morgan Simmons. Stephen Tharp also promotes the transcription, having adapted, and often recorded, works from a variety of styles and eras, from Bach and Handel to Shostakovich and Stravinsky. The most recent of his six recordings, made at St. Sulpice in Paris, was the first commercially released recording by an American organist on that instrument. Stephen Tharp is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists.

We recently spoke with Stephen as he was preparing for another trip abroad.

JR: How did your interest in the organ begin? What was your early training?

ST: I first "responded to" music at the age of three, playing Christmas carols by ear on the piano from the radio and records. It was finally church music, however, that sparked the interest in the organ. I recall hearing this colorful, powerful instrument and thinking about how I absolutely had to learn to play it. Of course, my first teacher started me on the piano, which I think made me a little unhappy at the time. That was at the age of six. By age eight, the same teacher started me on the organ, and the two of us worked together on both instruments for the next several years, mostly at my home in Chicago.

JR: Age eight is an early start! --I'm thinking of the pedals here.

ST: I spent two years in piano. At age six I couldn't reach the pedals. By age eight, it was still a bit of a challenge, but I could start. My organ playing improved along with the piano playing. The transition time from doing one to doing both was actually kind of short. And at eight years old I was just barely able to reach the pedals too!

JR: So what things were you playing? Were you playing any repertoire, perhaps really easy things where you just had a pedal note here and there?

ST: I think the first real pieces of music were the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues, and not all of them. I've never practiced right hand, then left hand, then pedal, then do right hand and pedal, then left hand and pedal--because then you leave one out. You have to develop all three together. So I never did part practicing. No matter how long it took or how slow I did it, it was always everything at one time. Another thing was that I never went through method books per se, doing scales and things like that. There should be a musically relevant reason to attack any given technical issue. So if you have a particular technical challenge you want to hit, find a piece that targets it so that musically there is relevance to it.

By age eleven, I switched to a teacher named James C. Thunder, the director of music at Christ Church in Des Plaines, Illinois, again studying both organ and piano with him. It was Thunder who introduced me to a great deal of the mainline organ composers and their music, recordings of their music, and so on. After working with him for a few months, he made me a sort of "music assistant" at Christ Church, and in this capacity I learned and played on the organ many major anthem and oratorio accompaniments--Handel's Messiah and the Brahms and Mozart Requiems were among the first.

I stayed with James Thunder and Christ Church through 1985 when, at age fifteen, I became a private organ student of Wolfgang Rübsam at Northwestern University, perhaps to this day the person who, for many reasons, has had the greatest influence on my artistic temperament. It was Rübsam who introduced me to the discipline of intricate fingerings (somewhat ironic now, as I rarely ever write in fingerings at all), stylistic awareness and articulation in Baroque music and, most powerfully, the kinds of phrasing, rhapsodic gestures and rhythmic idiosyncrasies possible in Romantic music. I returned to Rübsam to do my graduate studies at Northwestern University in 1993, after four years at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois for my B.A. in music. There I was very lucky to work with two wonderfully musical, insightful and imaginative teachers: Rudolf Zuiderveld in organ and Garrett Allman in piano, accompaniment and conducting. So many of my thoughts on lyricism, projecting musical structure and balance, etc., come from my time with them, and I must say that at a small liberal arts school I had access to perhaps a wider range of study than might have been the case elsewhere. This proved to be invaluable later, especially as I began traveling more and more to Europe. It was also at Illinois College that my interest in new organ works began. I had many opportunities to play a lot of music that was unpublished at the time. One particular performance at Illinois College of William Albright's 1732: In Memoriam Johannes Albrecht for Organ and Narrator, with Albright himself narrating, stands out. Jean Guillou's Hyperion and William Bolcom's Gospel Preludes Book IV are two further examples. There are many others.

JR: You were based in Chicago and then moved to New York and held positions at both St. Patrick's Cathedral and St. Bartholomew's Church, respectively, over the course of seven years. You then made the decision to "fly solo" as an artist without any church job. What prompted this?

ST: My move to New York City came in 1995, when I was appointed associate organist and director of cathedral concerts at the Cathedral of St. Patrick, where I stayed for two years in a prestigious but very busy position. I decided to leave there when my own career became busier and busier, at that point maybe two or three trips to Europe per season interspersed with U.S. concerts. I can honestly say, however, that much of what really boosted the success I was having already in Europe to another level was the position at St. Patrick's, and the people I met while I was there. Booking all the solo organ recitals was part of my duties as concerts director; there were occasions when organists would reciprocate by extending to me performing invitations overseas, and it was then that perhaps three tours a year began turning into five and six, a schedule that I maintain to this day. In late 1997, I became the associate organist at St. Bartholomew's Church, but only in a part-time capacity, which allowed me to continue my concert schedule. Of course, as the church continued to grow, so did the size of the position, and eventually I became full-time. Altogether, I was at St. Bartholomew's for just over four years. The music program there--everything from Praetorius and Carissimi's Jephthe, to Christmas concerts with The American Boychoir and Jessye Norman, to the U.S. premiere of James MacMillan's Cantos Sagrados and the N.Y. premiere of Howells' Hymnus Paradisi--is truly staggering for a church of its size. Therefore, when I made the decision to leave there in 2002, it was far from an easy one. But my performing schedule became simply too large to manage alongside a full-time position. It came time for me to focus all of my artistic (not to mention physical!) energies in one direction instead of several.

JR: These days it seems your career is based more in Europe than in the United States. Is this by choice? How did it come about?

ST: It is ironic that, as an American organist who plays about 60 concerts a year, the majority of them are elsewhere in the world. This was never really intended, but strangely enough, it has turned out that way. For one thing, I began playing publicly on a large scale much earlier in Europe than I did here. My first European concert was in London in 1989 at The Royal Albert Hall. Subsequent trips to England, then The Netherlands, then Germany, then France, really got things going, and they continued like a domino effect.

There is also what is known as an "association factor." I think that without having something like a major competition prize or a well-known teaching post, you don't necessarily get the same kind of attention for what you do. In an ideal world, this should not be such an important factor, but marketing is never that simple. Thanks to JAV Recordings and the Organ Historical Society, especially their websites, all six of my commercial recordings are very easy to find and obtain. And it goes without saying how wonderful it has been with Karen McFarlane Artists since 1998. Of course, we live in an era when massive amounts of information are bombarding you from all sides.

JR: How much are you on the road? What kind of performing schedule do you keep?

ST: It really depends. There are factors such as how many concerts are a part of any given tour, how many different tours are planned close together, how much travel is happening back and forth from the U.S., and what is going on in between--in other words, is there "down time."

Let me give you an example of how extreme it can become by describing my activities during the fall of 2002. Fall seems to be the heaviest time for traveling and playing. Following late August recording sessions at St. Luke's in Evanston, Illinois, I began in early September (four days after the recording) by playing an organ and orchestra concert in Krakow (Bielsko-Biala), Poland, consisting of the Piston Prelude and Allegro for Organ and Strings, and the Jongen Symphonie Concertante. This was followed by a few concerts in the Czech Republic and Germany with a more "mixed" general program, including Mendelssohn, Handel, and Karg-Elert. Next was a concert at St. Laurent's Church in Diekirch, Luxembourg (the oldest church in Luxembourg) on a beautiful new North German-style instrument by the builder Seifert of Kevelaer, Germany. That concert consisted of Bach, Bruhns, Buxtehude, and Murchhauser. Three days later were two concerts as part of the Merseburg Organ Festival, but with all American music, which they requested. This particular invitation arose at the last minute, while I was in Chicago recording at St. Luke's. Karel Paukert, who had been scheduled to play but had to withdraw at the last moment, graciously recommended me as his replacement for the concerts. I was lucky because these two dates, back-to-back, happened to be within a gap between Luxembourg and the other concerts that followed Merseburg elsewhere in Germany, although it was now necessary to "cram" in music that, in a few cases, I had not actually played in quite a while, and with only two days to prepare before the first of the concerts. Those consisted of Buck, Paine, Parker, Hurd, Newman and Sowerby. The rest of the tour (which spanned three and a half weeks altogether) meant a great deal of train travel and concerts roughly every two days as far north as Norden and as far south as Frankfurt.

During October, I went back to Europe with a second fall tour that began at the Passau Dom, which houses the largest organ in Europe. The highlights there were the premiere of my newest commission at that time, Thierry Escaich's Trois Poèmes, and a superlative work by Jean-Louis Florentz called The Cross of the South. Two days later at the Arcore (Italy) Organ Festival, I played my organ adaptation of Bach's Goldberg Variations. Thereafter came more of the Passau program in Innsbruck, several cities in southern Germany and then Strasbourg. To conclude this trip, I was in residence for a week at the Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen, Germany, at the invitation of organ professor Christoph Bossert, not only teaching his students in masterclasses on Vierne, but then performing as part of a theatrical concert of live improvisational dance with the dance department students, featuring live organ improvisation as the incidental music "in reaction to" the stage improvisation.

In November, I made my second trip to Australia, playing in Sydney and Adelaide, and concluded everything with a December Christmas concert at Spivey Hall in Atlanta, the last of several U.S. performances between the trips to and from Europe and Australia. In addition, I have been "guest teacher" at the Hochschule in Stuttgart when in Europe but not actually playing somewhere, and also at Yale University when in the States for a longer stretch.

This is not always the norm, but when it rains, it pours, and my upcoming calendar already indicates that this kind of agenda will happen more frequently. A lot of that has to do with the freedom with which I can now plan my concerts without a regular church job. Usually, larger tours are put on the calendar as far in advance as two years, and so a festival or organization will say, "Oh, this is your date and concert? Well, this is our theme, so you will play this and this and that." Put enough of those close together for when you are in Europe at one time, and your schedule fills very quickly! But, I love it.

JR: Do you find any differences between American and European audiences? You've said that they are larger in Europe.

ST: Right. In general that's true.

JR: Can you talk about European attitudes and their appreciation of your playing the organ, and how you plan your programs for a European audience versus here?

ST: It's very interesting. Of course, everything you do has to be accessible to your audience, but I don't believe that we're beyond being able to educate someone or at least spark their interest in hearing things that otherwise they wouldn't have considered. You know, when you push envelopes, other people who want to do something similar don't necessarily stretch themselves as far as you might, but they'll stretch themselves farther than they would have otherwise, just because they see a bigger realm of what's possible. I think more of that is ingrained earlier on in European audiences. Consequently, I have found that overseas you can get away with a lot more experimentation, and that allows you to be somewhat more adventurous with new music or transcribing.

Transcribing can mean so many things; I've seen people do transcriptions of Schoenberg on organ. I saw someone--Bernard Haas, from Stuttgart--do a transcription of one of the Five Orchestral Pieces of Schoenberg at St. Eustache the same week I was in Paris doing my St. Sulpice recording, which was October 2001. And he did it from memory, with double pedal, triple pedal playing, all of these things that were so intricate, yet he kept the dynamic level very contained and small, based on the chamber quality of the original piece. And people just ate it up, and in a sense it was the most adventurous thing on the program, and while there were many organists present, there also were a lot of people who came because it said "organ concert"--but it was a very intensive 20th-century program, with some Webern transcriptions, and some of Jean Guillou's pieces, and then the Schoenberg in the middle, and people were just perplexed by it. But there were more comments, questions, and curiosity about that work than anything else on the program, and it certainly was the most envelope-pushing piece.

To try to do something like that over here, it depends on how you present it and how you talk about it first to your audience. But it seems that certain kinds of transcriptions are much more popular here than 20th-century music and yet in some ways 20th-century music, especially in certain circles in Europe, has always been more popular than transcriptions. You hear a lot against transcriptions with these kinds of dogmatic black and white ideas about what a transcription should be: is it necessary, why are we doing this if you have all this music of Bach, is a transcription anything compared to that? I've found that I can introduce a transcription to a skeptical European the way you try to do the same thing with modern music for an American audience, and if you do it the right way, I think you can sell something new or at least get people curious.

JR: Tell us your thoughts on commissioning new organ works.

ST: I had a very special experience while I was still in high school. My earlier studies, both organ and piano, engaged fewer pieces for longer periods of time than would be the case later as my technique advanced. So, when I worked on a piece, I really lived with it for a long time before it went before anyone except my teacher.

At one point, I had spent about a year with James Thunder on Aaron Copland's Piano Variations when, one day, after a lesson, Thunder said to me, "You know, Copland is coming to Chicago to give a lecture at the Cultural Center downtown. I made some arrangements this morning on the telephone--do you think you'd be up to playing this for him next week?" Well, I was not about to be stupid and say NO (which Thunder knew), although the idea scared me to death (which Thunder also knew). Even at that age, I could grasp what it meant to play something important for the composer himself, much less Aaron Copland! After six more days of polishing my memorization, I attended the lecture at the Cultural Center and was introduced to Copland afterwards by my teacher. A half an hour later, I sat down in a private piano studio some blocks away at Roosevelt University and, nervous as a ninny, played the work for Copland. He was extremely kind, complimentary enough that I still enjoy talking about it, especially about the fact that I was, as he put it, "crazy" enough at my age to have memorized it, insightful on tempi, some phrasing, and so on. But, the one major awakening was how incredibly inspiring it is to sit down with the source of a creation and share thoughts on it, the ideas that sparked it, concepts and such related things. That was a turning point for me, as it also spawned a real hunger for more music that was new, different, fresh, and intense, sometimes vehemently intense.

At that age, I found pieces that were off-the-wall, learned them, and played them in recitals because I felt a need to do so. What I began to learn was that, when you present something "dicey" to an audience, even knowing that all or many of them may be hearing it for the first time, you get further with that audience by talking to them about what they will hear and why they would want to hear it, even again and again, than you do by just handing them written program notes. Once you do this, the audience feels that there are good reasons for being curious about something that will be not only unfamiliar, but also likely push a few envelopes too, and that this is a positive and enriching thing! If you play down to your listeners, especially with your choice of programming, like they're dumb, then they will respond that way a lot of the time. If you show them that you trust their minds and ears enough to KNOW that they can be interested in what you are offering them, people tend to be more open-minded for you. Despite a lot of thinking these days to the contrary, when it comes to "modern music," I still find this to be unmistakably true, if you as the presenter handle it the right way.

Put all of this together with the opportunities to meet and work with more and more living composers that really began at Illinois College, and the result is a list of varying and remarkable works that I feel privileged to play as often as I can. There is a very challenging three-movement pedal solo work called Sequentia Pedalia by Chicago composer Morgan Simmons, which he gave me in manuscript just prior to my appointment to St. Patrick's in New York; Anthony Newman, one of my best friends in the world, and one of my most devoted supporters, has written three very large but different works for me of brilliant intricacy (these get played perhaps the most frequently and are always very well received); there is Jean Guillou's massive and intense seven movement symphonic poem called Instants (his second largest solo organ work), improvisational but thematically interwoven, written for my concert at King's College, Cambridge; and a jazzy, witty piece based on Bulgarian folk rhythms for organ, percussion and women's chorus called Slingshot Shivaree, composed for a program at St. Bartholomew's called "Organ Plus" by my friend Martha Sullivan. She is an especially talented composer whose star is on the rise, with her works being performed all over the U.S.; there is the haunting and nostalgic 4-movement Sinfonietta by Philip Moore of York Minster, England; and the most recent to date, the Trois Poèmes by Thierry Escaich, works of pure genius, contained electricity with balance and proportion. There are more to come, the next being in 2004 from Bruce Neswick.

JR: About your championing of transcriptions: You've recorded a number of transcriptions, including a good half-dozen of your own.

ST: Right.

JR: What originally got you on the transcription bandwagon? And how do you prepare these? Do you write them down note for note, or do you just sketch them out for yourself? Would you consider having any of them published?

ST: There are several issues here. I have not actually written down anything per se; there's nothing that exists in any formatted way. Usually the bigger transcriptions are the most complicated ones that would take the most work--things that are orchestral versus piano, like a symphony, the Shostakovich 5, or the Petroushka dances, which are all marked from the full scores. You go through and find the things that are more important in the texture, and then find out by process of elimination what you have to take out, because obviously with two hands and two feet there's only so much you can play. So you must decide what to keep and what has to go--and how to eliminate things in an orchestral score so that you can play it on the organ without changing the piece or leaving out something important.

Through looking at a score that I've marked up, I work it up slowly and memorize it, and then essentially play the transcriptions from memory. So none of them are actually written out; they're just marked-up adapted full scores.

In the end, as crazy a process as that sounds, it ends up being easier come performance time, because there's too much to follow and certainly to have an orchestral score in front of you, to have someone try to page-turn that would be crazy. It's very distracting to try to read ten lines of a score while playing and doing registrations and keeping your focus in front of an audience. Anything that limits other senses is more focused--in other words, by playing from memory, the other senses become more acute, because the visual distraction of looking at a page and reading something takes away from the ear, takes away from things that are tactile. So playing from memory certainly hones in on what you feel under your fingers, what you listen to, in a different way. This is never more important than in a very complicated transcription. That's one reason I've never actually written anything down.

Another reason is that a lot of the repertoire is not really of interest to publishers; they don't think it's mainstream enough to sell. So, no, at this point, nothing is published. I think at some point, if either a publisher decides they would like something specific or if I could get a couple of players who were interested in a certain transcription, then I would take the time to write something down.

JR: Your repertoire is very diverse and you strive to present each piece with a sense of stylistic awareness. What then are your thoughts on organ transcriptions vs. organ repertoire, and on performance practices? As a performer, how do you strike a balance among these?

ST: I have some very specific and passionate thoughts on this. To start with, I think that the art of transcription is very important, and it is ironic that it gets both incredible support and simultaneously a great deal of criticism nowadays.

Realize that when we say transcriptions, we are not just talking about Danny Boy, Ave Maria and Flight of the Bumblebee. We are also talking about large-scale, often mainstream repertoire that demands as much care and subtlety from an organist as it would from a pianist, a singer or an orchestra. Art at a very high level transcends its chosen medium. It is not just a matter of whether or not the organ becomes an orchestra, a piano, or anything else.

A successful transcription should not sound like it is a transcription, but rather be idiomatically adapted to the new medium while preserving the soul and stylistic context of the original in a carefully struck balance, and this is why transcribing is such an art form and anything but trite. I would challenge those who flippantly dismiss transcriptions as circus tricks as not understanding these ideas on a very profound level, nor having experimented with transcriptions enough personally to see what is really possible, and how. Consider the Bach-Vivaldi Concerti, several Liszt works that began on piano or organ and then went the other way, in the composer's own hand nonetheless, or the most obvious example, Mussorgsky's piano work Pictures at an Exhibition (transcribed later by other composers for a medium of immense color possibility, and now part of the standard orchestral repertoire). So, ultimately, we do accept transcriptions--we always have. Moreover, awareness of style must be applied here too--transcription does not always mean swell boxes, string divisions and tubas. Take for instance Bach's Italian Concerto or his Goldberg Variations. I have had as much musical satisfaction from playing these on organs by Fritts, von Beckerath, Gabler, Fisk and so on, as I have had sitting at a great E.M. Skinner with the Liszt B-Minor Sonata or something as monumental as the Shostakovich Symphony No. 5.

For me, all of this leads to a larger issue, and that is how we often see performers "mixing menus," which just confuses everything. I once heard an organist pull out stops at 8', 4'and 2' on a neo-Baroque organ and make his way through Elgar's Nimrod on that one sound, and briskly at that, like it was just this pretty piece to play for the audience, and that was enough. It was evident that the player did not understand anything about the intimacy of this music, or that perhaps this was not the right organ for it. On the flip side, I recently heard a Bach prelude and fugue played with all the swell shades flapping around like window blinds in a storm, with as many pistons as there were notes and Romantic rubato everywhere. Although the result was extremely musical in its own way, the total change of esthetic was so foreign to the score tha

Cambridge Chats #1: Timothy Byram-Wigfield

Gordon and Barbara Betenbaugh

Gordon and Barbara Betenbaugh are organist/choirmasters at First Presbyterian Church in Lynchburg, VA. They have recently returned from a 13-week sabbatical in the UK. They also direct Cantate, the Children's Choir of Central Virginia, and Mrs. Betenbaugh is chapel organist and assistant choral director at Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg.

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Tim Byram-Wigfield has been the music director at Jesus College in Cambridge since 1999. A former chorister at King's College, he was organ scholar at Christ Church Oxford before he moved to Winchester Cathedral to be sub-organist in 1985. For eight years he was Master of the Music at St. Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh before taking up his present appointment. He combines his work at Jesus College with a busy schedule as an organ recitalist, and has played in France, Australia, Belgium, the USA and Canada. He conducts the Northampton Bach Choir, is organist for the Millennium Youth Choir, and regularly gives workshops for amateur choirs. He is also active as a pianist, arranger and composer. He broadcasts frequently on BBC Radio 3, and has recorded on the EMI, Hyperion, Argo, Priory and Herald labels.

The chapel at Jesus College is the most ancient college building in Cambridge, begun in 1140. We had occasion to speak with Tim over tea prior to his afternoon rehearsal on Friday, May 23. We had previously attended a week's rehearsals and Evensongs at Jesus. The program is distinctive in maintaining two choirs. During university term there are five choral services each week. The Chapel Choir sings three and the Mixed Choir sings two. The alto, tenor and bass voices are common to both groups and are sung by the choral scholars, who each receive £100 per term plus a nominal payment for all the services they sing.

Tim Byram-Wigfield has recently been appointed director of music at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. The chapel runs a conventional cathedral-style set-up of boy choristers and twelve professional men, singing daily services. The building is one of the finest examples of English 15th-century architecture, with fan vaulting, fine stained-glass windows, and a marvelous Harrison and Harrison pipe organ.

BB: Your boy choir doesn't have a choir school like King's College or St. John's, do they?

TB-W: That's right.

BB: Do they pay tuition?

TB-W: No, the college provides it. In fact, the college also pays them a small stipend of £35 per term which is put into a savings account for them. It can accumulate until the time that their voice changes. We also provide some instrumental bursaries for them.

BB: How does that work?

TB-W: An instrumental bursary is a small donation that the college would make to the parents directed toward the cost of their instruments.

GB: Suzuki is not taught much over here, is it?

TB-W: It is in some places and certainly at very young ages. It used to be very popular for children who wanted to learn the violin in large classes. I daresay in London it still happens. I don't know of a class in Cambridge, but there might be one.

GB: Actually, from a choral standpoint it only helps the ear. It doesn't help the reading skills which is paramount.

TB-W: Yes, that's true. When I first came here four years ago there were only 13 full-time choristers, and only about half of them were reading on their instruments. Maybe it's just been through luck or because we've been tapping a different vein, the caliber of chorister we've been getting in terms of their musical ability and literacy has appreciated a bit. Going back to what you were saying, ours is a very different set-up from King's and St. John's. We operate on a part-time basis and can only be on that part-time basis, because the activity is essentially taking place after school at the end of the choristers' day.

BB: In the auditioned children's choir we have at home, the parents pay tuition. We've found that when parents pay tuition to the choir just like they do for soccer or other sports and activities, they feel more inclined to insure that their child attends rehearsal.

TB-W: Yes, that's like having lessons. That's less of a problem with us, because in a sense we're asking them to do us a favor by having the boys come and sing the services for us. In return, of course, we're providing them with a certain element of musical education and other aspects of education as well. Commitment being what it is these days, the amount of things the parents want their children to do affects the choir. We had a full house on Wednesday evening, and then we had less than 2/3 yesterday. This morning I got several e-mails that children would be absent for this, that, and the other reason. You get the idea.

GB: Yes, we have the same thing with church volunteer children's choirs at our church.

BB: Do you teach the boys in a separate theory class?

TB-W: No, it has to be done in the context of the music that we teach them. The only time I get the chance to teach them anything in that vein is when they're probationers and come to their probationers' class, which is on Tuesday afternoons. We only have an hour.

GB: Did you start the mixed choir of boys and girls in Edinburgh at St. Mary's Cathedral?

TB-W: No, my predecessor Dennis Townhill did. That works for them very successfully because they operate like a choir school. We had rehearsal in the morning and a service in the evening. Also, because it's in Scotland, where the tradition is not so firmly embedded in the society, it wasn't seen quite so much as a heresy to introduce boys and girls together, although for a while it was not without its difficulties. One of the strongest arguments there was that it was the only choir school in Scotland, and also because the choir school operated like a specialist music school like Wells Cathedral or Manchester. The argument was that this was a golden opportunity for a child to sing in the choir, so boys and girls should have the same opportunity. That's a pretty strong argument, really! It was for those reasons that they introduced the boys and girls. They kept an eye on the balance, which never really got beyond a third, boys to girls. Here it is a different situation, because this is a volunteer boys choir, just a club really. It could be swimming or it could be football.

BB: Do you have auditions?

TB-W: Oh yes, they are auditioned, and they have to pass that audition. They also have to pass an informal audition having done their probationary training before they become full choristers.

BB: Explain that, please. The earliest we take choristers in our auditioned children's choir is third grade, which is age 8. What age do you start the boys?

TB-W: I take them earlier at age 6, because I want them to get the bug early and get them used to using their voices and get them to understand something of the single line of music in front of them. They come and sing with the older boys once or twice a term.

BB: How often do you meet with these boys?

TB-W: Just once a week for a half an hour on Tuesday for singing with a bit of theory thrown in. It's really learning how to use the voice, and they learn some chorus songs and some easy hymns. They have a little test every term, so they have to learn something from memory, and they have to count rhythms. It's predominantly based on the singing rather than on instruments. That gives them the bug. They get their own cassock in the vestry and have something to aspire to. By the time they're 8 or 9 they are old enough to join the big guys.

GB: I understand that the college has done this for about 150 years.

TB-W: Yes, in 1849 when the stalls were put in and that lovely ancient organ case with the angels painted on it. [Author's note: In 1849 the "Sutton Organ" was built by J. C. Bishop and restored by Mander in 1967.] There was a rededication of the chapel, and we still have the manuscript for an anthem which was written by Thomas Walmisley for four boy choristers to sing. The names of the four boys are on the front of the manuscript. It's really very touching. They clearly were one of the porter's sons or one of the cook's sons or that kind of thing. Ever since 1849 there's been this tradition of getting volunteer boys to come sing in the chapel. That is, I daresay, one of the reasons why Jesus College is distinctive among other college chapels, because they've had the boy trebles, and a number of very distinguished church musicians have cut their teeth by being organ scholars here. There's James O'Donnell, Peter Hurford, Richard Lloyd, Malcolm Archer and a whole host of others who've gone on to work in schools as well as cathedrals. I think we've got four, maybe five, ex-Jesus organ scholars who are now assistants in cathedrals, which is very encouraging. It's a pretty worthy record. So, we don't have as long a tradition as King's or St. John's. One of the reasons that it wasn't as developed was because they never had a director of music to develop the program. The organ scholars were responsible for running it. In days gone by when academic pursuits weren't so pressurized, it was probably possible. In these days what with children's protection, the experience of teaching them, never mind the time it takes to go around to the schools and recruit them, the energy and time you need to devote to the program, you can't expect an 18-year old organ scholar to do that and do his degree also. That's why they created this post.

BB: How do you recruit?

TB-W: I go around to the schools where we already have choristers, and ones which I know are sympathetic. I do know some colleagues in other cathedrals where they have a similar situation where the headmasters won't allow them across the threshold because they think that it's peddling Christianity. This is becoming a real issue of political correctness in this country. You get parents who will refuse to allow their children to sing Christmas carols. I hate to say it, but this has emanated from the other side of the Atlantic. It's very sad in a way, because it undermines and makes us question everything about the oral tradition that we have in this country. In that context, it's actually in some places very difficult to sustain any kind of Christian choir at all. In Cambridge we're lucky because a lot of the people we're appealing to are educated enough to understand about the tradition; secondly there is a huge reservoir of parents who are employed by the university and therefore can understand what's being offered and thirdly, although they might send their child to a state school, they still want their child to be a chorister. Those three things give us an extra edge, but I think in other places it's rather different.

GB: We're going to the Southern Choirs Festival in Salisbury on the Saturday that you'll be there accompanying the Millennium Youth Choir. What kind of commitment do you have with them?

TB-W: Two courses, one at Easter and one in the summer.

GB: You don't accompany them each week then?

TB-W: No, because they come from all over the country. It's drawn from parish church choirs. The whole rationale behind the Millennium Youth Choir is that the RSCM designed this for young people between the ages of 16 and 23. It's for "A" level and university singers who wouldn't otherwise get the opportunity if they sing in their parish church choir to sing to that level of excellence.

GB: We have a chorister, a rising senior, who just e-mailed us that she'd been invited to sing at a new RSCM course at Washington National Cathedral this summer. She was delighted.

BB: She had been to two or three RSCM camps.

TB-W: Right. The RSCM has a number of summer courses as you've probably seen. The Millennium Youth Choir is relatively new as its name might indicate. It's only been going for three years. It was first conducted by Martin Neary. He did it for about 18 months to two years. Now Gordon Stewart conducts it.

GB: Where's he from?

TB-W: He hails from Dundee, but he's operating in the North. He was organist at Blackburn Cathedral and taught in Manchester for a long time. He's now the borough organist of Huddersfield Town Hall. There's a very fine Willis organ there. He does a lot of work with the BBC. He conducts both Daily Service and Songs of Praise as well as The Millennium Youth Choir.

BB: The Millennium Choir basically sings only twice a year?

TB-W: Yes, but there are one or two other opportunities that come along. For instance, they sang on the BBC Songs of Praise which is a television program on Sundays. Generally it's just twice a year, but I'm happy to go and play. It's nice to be able to do that.

GB: The 1971 Mander organ in the chapel is certainly eccentric!

TB-W: Oh, yes. It's really on its last legs now.

GB: Are you going to renovate it?

TB-W: Thirty years ago English organ builders were only just discovering or re-discovering about the principles of German Werkprinzip and tracker action. This was their brave first attempt to build something with tracker action and bold German choruses. That's what it is! It's very much a product of its time. It has the eccentric things like the reed en chamade (laughter, and a nasal YYENT). It's a very strident sound. Everything is starting to wear. It's always been very heavy to play. As I say, it's one of these curiosities that is, in many ways, a pioneering experiment. People recognize that now. There are those that say we should keep it because it was pioneering. That's fine if you don't have to play it every day.

GB: I understand.

TB-W: The college recognizes that something's got to be done. In fact, our strategy has been not to replace it with a new organ, but to replace it with a worthy Victorian instrument that needs a home. We found a 3-manual Hill up in a Baptist church in Portsmouth. It didn't start out there. It came from another church in South London. The Baptist church is closing, so we've purchased the organ, and it's being taken down and put in storage. The next stage now is to finalize how it will fit in the Mander space and whether we want to enhance the specifications at all. We'll then put forward proposals to the college. That's been our strategy rather than to build a new tracker action organ. Also we need some liturgical sounds to do the accompaniments. We need an oboe, a harmonic flute, a swell to choir, just those kinds of basic things.

GB: It will be a 3-manual?

TB-W: Yes, at least a 3-manual.

GB: With pistons and memory?

TB-W: It will have pistons, but it won't have a stepper. I'm not into those sequencers. It will have some memory. A lot of the accompaniment skills relied on in this country is being able to use the manual and the pedal pistons together. There's a coupler that I don't think you have very often in the states called the great to pedal pistons coupler. For many years organists would learn to accompany using great pedal pistons. When you press the great thumb piston, it operates the pedals as well. The idea is that you would use the great and the swell. People like Howells, Whitlock and Ireland learned their craft of organ management by using this skill. That's something which is fast disappearing, because everybody uses sequencers these days to change one of the stops.

GB: I have on my instrument Great 1 and 2 pistons which affect the pedal also. I wired it in mainly for the cadential 32's and accompanying. It's easier than a toe stud, of course.

TB-W: Yes, it is. Our organ will be quite a modest specification, probably about 49 stops. We deliberately decided to go down this route, because a lot of the new organs being built at the moment in Cambridge are of a particular type. Selwyn's having a Létourneau built now.

BB: We'll be there week after next. Létourneau does excellent work.

TB-W: Gerton College has a new Swiss organ by St-Martin. It is a very clever 4-manual with about five stops in each manual. It's a particular style of instrument which does lend itself very easily to turn of the century style music. There are very few romantic symphonic organs in Cambridge--King's is a modest example. St. John's is not really one, but it pretends to be. You should go and see the one in Our Lady and the English Martyrs.

GB: We went down there and saw it, but we haven't heard it yet. I understand it is used in Sarah MacDonald's CD of Howells' Evening Canticles with the Selwyn College Choir.

TB-W: Yes, it's a very fine romantic organ, and they restored it very well.

GB: I love the sound of the crescendo "build up" while accompanying at King's.

TB-W: It's fine up to about mezzo-forte I think. 

GB: I was surprised to see that bass flute inside the organ screen in the staircase to the console.

TB-W: Yes.

BB: Do you ever get to play other instruments in town?

TB-W: I played that Harrison on Monday. The King's Voices (mixed voices) sing the services on Mondays.

BB: Did you play last Sunday for Evensong or was it an organ scholar?

TB-W: Yes, I played.

BB: We were there and have been attending rehearsals of the Men and Boys choir and Evensongs for several weeks.

TB-W: What did we do? The Mathias--the Jesus service, and the Hadley My Beloved Spake. Well, it's quite a nice thing to do and no pressure for me. It's nice not to be in charge and to be at the steering end.

GB: It's quite a room.

TB-W: Yes! What kind of church do you work in?

GB: Presbyterian. It's about 1200 members. We have an adult choir of 40 people, a Youth Choir of about 40+, children's choirs of about 50 and three handbell choirs. We have an auditioned choir called Cantate, the Children's Choir of Central Virginia consisting of two choirs from 3rd-7th grade and 8th grade through high school. I direct the younger choristers, and a colleague does the high school singers. Barbara accompanies one choir and directs a third group called the Cantabile Singers, which is an all-girl choir in grades 8 through 12.

TB-W: Both boys and girls together?

BB: Yes. The original concept was just to be children. The girls could stay until age 15 or 16, and the boys were supposed to leave when their voices changed. They wouldn't go away, so we just changed the concept. The older group sings SATB, and the younger ones all treble.

TB-W: In some cathedrals where there are volunteer choristers, like Carlisle and St. Alban's, they occasionally arrange for the ex-choristers whose voices have recently changed to come and sing with the existing choristers, so that they don't feel that they've been thrown out on the scrap heap. Of course, we are desperate for altos, tenors and basses.

GB: Well, are you playing Monday at King's?

TB-W: Yes, I think so. It's extraordinary, isn't it, that there's so much activity in a radius of about three miles. Most churches in this country are gasping for decent resources. The real sadness of this training is that most choral scholars, especially at Trinity where they have girls, unless they want to make a career as a professional singer, they don't tend to carry on singing in church choirs. It's a real shame. Then, of course, we have a dearth of organists.

GB: I was going to ask you if you have problems like we do in the states.

TB-W: It's getting bad now. Early this month we had the open day for prospective organ scholars, those who would like to apply to Cambridge to be organ scholars. We had 24, which if you consider that we have 22 colleges in the scheme isn't very much.

GB: So the university will have to take everyone?

TB-W: That wasn't the actual competition. That happens in September, but it's indicative of how things are. Last year I asked the question of how many of them were expecting to go on to be a professional organist. I think only two were.

GB: Are the organ scholars at King's going to continue in the profession?

TB-W: I think Daniel Hyde is staying on another year as a postgraduate student, because there are hardly any openings at the moment.

BB: What about Ashley Grote?

TB-W: Ashley still has another year, so he's set there. The really high fliers like the idea of going to London perhaps and maybe being an organ scholar or one of the assistants at St. Paul's or Westminster ABBey. They don't like the idea of going somewhere in middle England and subsequently doing scout mastering or something.

GB: Since you have two choirs, do you have a lot of administration work?

TB-W: I spend a lot of my time dealing with administrative things to do with the choristers and the interaction with child protection monitoring procedures. A lot of administrative work is generated just by having the choristers. If we want the choristers to take part in a concert, either we or the person promoting the concert has to be responsible for getting licenses for those children to take part in that concert. Technically, that means filling in 12-page forms, getting passport photographs and doctor's certificates for the kids to take part.

BB: That's just for them to leave the country?

TB-W: Yes.

BB: Do you take your choir on tour every year?

TB-W: Yes, we do, but we don't undertake concerts for which people are charged, so that problem doesn't arise. There was a story I heard about Wells Cathedral. Wells took their choir to the States about three years ago. They had not only to work out a schedule which corresponded to legislation concerning rehearsal time, sufficient bathroom stops and this sort of thing. They then had to keep a diary about how the actual tour went, so they could compare the two. They had to have something written down in case somebody made any allegations, or wanted to pursue litigation or complained about being tired, became ill, etc. They would have a record. Things are going berserk. Of course, most places take the easy way out and don't want to deal with that. It's hard enough to get choristers in the first place and yet, there is still this much trouble.

BB: What about your mixed college choir? Do you tour with them every year?

TB-W: Yes, we do. We try to have each choir have a project of going away once a year. It's sometimes nice to take the mixed choir away to the Continent whereas the boys choir might go to a cathedral. They've done a lot of touring in the last eighteen months or so. We've taken them to Paris and Copenhagen. In the new year we'll be going to Edinburgh to sing services for Epiphany. One thing I'd like to ask you actually is what's your view of church music in this country coming from the States.

GB: Well, we always said that God lives at King's College! (laughter) The first time I heard a recording of the King's choir was in the early 1960s, and it was the most in tune singing I'd ever heard. I didn't know it was possible to sing like that. I got the bug as an undergraduate and through the years we learned to love the wonderful music making at St. John's and other colleges and cathedrals as well.

BB: We think church music here is wonderful with performances to uncompromising standards in many places.

TB-W: The world even in this country has moved on a great deal since 1960 to 2003.

BB: Oh, sure.

TB-W: Have you seen a copy of the magazine Cathedral Music?

GB: Yes, we take it. It is excellent.

TB-W: In there is an article by the organist at Guilford Cathedral trying to defend a very difficult situation. Guilford, as you probably know, is a post-war cathedral. Barry Rose was the first organist, and he recruited the kids. They started from nothing. He managed to get scholarships at the local schools. 40 years ago it was possible to do that. In a changing society and the way that parents run children's lives these days, it isn't possible to do that nowadays. One couldn't start a cathedral choir from nothing in the way that Barry was able to do in the 1960s. In Guilford, his successors have had to cope with and deal with that legacy. It's been very difficult. In that situation they've decided to scrap the Saturday services, so the boys will have one day of the weekend free. I can see that in some cathedrals that will happen more and more. I do think that things are different. In places like King's and Westminster Abbey where the resources are rich you will always have the tradition continued. When you get to places where they operate on a part-time basis you have trouble even getting an alto at all. When I first went to the cathedral organist conference, it was very obvious some people are having difficulty securing lay clerks. However, they wanted to pretend that they were doing as well as their colleagues were. I think now that organists are beginning to be much more vocal and frank about their experiences in recruiting boy choristers and adults. In trying to persuade parents of the commitment involved, I think we are seeing the start of fragmentation. Maybe in King's and Westminster Abbey it will continue for years and years, but I don't think it's going to continue everywhere. Even if you try and take those kinds of things into account. you then throw in the changing liturgical demands and the more informal stances that the clergy likes to take who perhaps question the need for having such regular formal services. Even initiatives like Common Worship dilute what the Book of Common Prayer offers in terms of musical opportunities. They would say otherwise. They point to all the resources that they produce. Actually it's a dilution of a music that used to be so rich. They are encouraging to ditch 400 years of music and use theirs instead. Their music simply isn't in the same division. Then you're caught in a problem because clearly there are questions of whether Evensong is just a time warp and are you just presenting music that was written 400 years ago. But what else is being offered?

GB: Dumbed down rubbish.

TB-W: It is dumbed down. Some people are just taking the position that you just have to go with the flow.

BB: Any difficulties or problems you may face over here are more than doubled in the States.

TB-W: I think you are further down the track than we are. The only thing we've got that saves us really is the tradition and the history of the buildings that we happen to be in.

GB: I was commenting to Barbara as we walked here today that I think that educated people here in the UK are more cognizant of the arts because of the long tradition. Our parish is an unusual congregation in that almost all are professionals and world travelers, well educated and at the top of their profession. We are very fortunate to have much support for all our endeavors and concerts. However, educated people in the states in general are not usually musically cultured or supportive of the arts. I think that the vast majority of professionals in the states still listen to pop music on the radio for entertainment, and a small percentage support the symphony and community concerts, etc.

TB-W: Certainly. One can't talk of a more superior tradition--you can't talk about the western tradition of classical music as being superior to ethnic musicology or even studies in popular music and jazz music which has over 100 years now. It isn't really possible to talk of Beethoven, Brahms and Bach in the same reverential tones we used to and get away with it. So, the times they are a-changing!

BB: It's not as scary for us in our position.

TB-W: Again, you're further down the track. I've been very lucky to have the opportunity both in Edinburgh and before when I was at Winchester to be able to deal in music which I love and was brought up on. I count my lucky stars that I'm still in a job which allows me to do it.  I'm not quite sure that in another ten years time it will still be there. It's only a trust fund that keeps things going and pays for my salary. That's a big part of my fortune, really. For as long as the college wants it to happen, that's fine. I can see a time, even here, where the dean might retire and the college might say, "Oh, do we really want a dean? Do we really want to have Evensong?"

GB: A turnover of ministers in any church could greatly change musical things. The stories are legion.

TB-W: Of course, the decline in churchgoing is becoming very alarmingly rapid in this country. It's slightly higher in Scotland. Perhaps we should leave for rehearsal now.

Author's note: As we left for that day's rehearsal of men and women and walked through the beautiful grounds of Jesus College, the mood of our philosophical discussion greatly changed. Tim is a high energy, easy-going person who smiles a lot and encourages his choristers in the joy of music. He is also an excellent, natural pianist who plays with much ease and joy. His choristers obviously enjoy making music with him. We look forward to visiting Jesus College again and attending Evensong after the Hill organ is installed. We also look forward to meeting up with Tim at Windsor Castle.

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