Mamusia: Paul Wolfe Remembers Wanda Landowska

Leonardo Ciampa

Leonardo Ciampa is Maestro di Cappella Onorario of the Basilica di Sant’Ubaldo in Gubbio, Italy, and organist of St. John the Evangelist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it. And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.

—Yuko Hayashi

 

Yuko Hayashi is gone.

I feel unworthy of eulogizing her. I do not presume to rank among her greatest students—a very long list that includes James David Christie, Carolyn Shuster Fournier, Mamiko Iwasaki, Peter Sykes, Christa Rakich, Gregory Crowell, Mark Dwyer, Kevin Birch, Kyler Brown, Barbara Bruns, Ray Cornils, Nancy Granert, Hatsumi Miura, Tomoko Akatsu Miyamoto, Dana Robinson, Naomi Shiga, Paul Tegels, and others too numerous to name. 

I cannot describe, or comprehend, the fortune of being her student between the ages of 15 and 18—at the time, her only high school student. She was in her late 50s—still at the height of her powers, still performing internationally and recording. She brought a constant parade of heavy-hitters to Old West Church in Boston for recitals and masterclasses. During those three years alone (1986–1989), there were José Manuel Azkue, Guy Bovet, Fenner Douglass, Susan Ferré, Roberta Gary, Mireille Lagacé, Joan Lippincott, Karel Paukert, Umberto Pineschi, Peter Planyavsky, Michael Radulescu, Montserrat Torrent, Harald Vogel, and the list goes on. Yuko was something of an impresario. In the 70s, when Harald Vogel was completely unknown in America, she brought him to Old West to play his very first concert here—for $100, which she paid out of her own pocket! Guy Boet, same story—his first concert in America, for $100. In 1972, at the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, Yuko organized the very first organ academy ever held in Japan, bringing both Anton Heiller and Marie-Claire Alain. In 1985, Yuko, Umberto Pineschi, and Masakata Kanazawa started the Academy of Italian Organ Music in Shirakawa. A list of her accomplishments would be long, indeed.

At the time, I knew virtually nothing about Yuko’s life or career. Meeting her was truly random. It was September of 1985 (Bach’s 300th birthday year). I was skimming the concert listings in The Boston Globe, and I happened to see that there was going to be an all-Bach organ and harpsichord concert at Old West Church, given by Peter Williams. I had never heard a “real pipe organ,” and I had never set foot in a Protestant church before. I had no idea who Peter Williams was, and I had no particular interest in the organ or harpsichord. I was a 14-year-old piano student in the New England Conservatory prep school. The craziest part of all? I had not the faintest idea that the New England Conservatory organ department held their lessons, classes, and concerts at Old West, or that the church’s organist happened to be department chair. Attending the concert was nothing more than a whim.

I was immediately grabbed, both by the sound of the Fisk’s ravishing plenum, and by Williams’s exquisite selections, all from Bach’s youth. I still remember every piece on the program, which opened with Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739. After the concert, a short but elegant Japanese woman introduced herself to me and shook my hand. I had no idea she had any affiliation with NEC. I’m not sure I even understood that she was the church’s organist.

Who could have predicted that, one year later, September 1986, I would quit the piano and become an organ student of Yuko, taking lessons on that same instrument? But even that was random. In the NEC prep school catalogue, under “Organ,” Yuko’s was the name listed. That’s the one and only reason I contacted her.

 

Early years in Japan

(1929–1953)

Yuko Hayashi was born in 1929 in Hiratsuka, a coastal town 24 miles from Yokohama. She was born on November 2. (She used to joke about having been born on All Souls’ Day, having missed All Saints’ Day by only one day!) Many of Yuko’s students would come to notice her unusual perceptiveness. A couple of us thought it bordered on ESP. She had the ability to reach for things even when she couldn’t see them. Case in point: why did a woman who was born in 1929, in a country that was only one percent Christian, decide that she wanted to become an organist, when she didn’t even know what an organ was?

Yuko’s father was a Japanese Anglican priest. He was the pastor of St. Andrew’s Church in Yokohama. At age five, Yuko started playing the reed organ at St. Andrew’s. (Soon enough, she became sufficiently proficient to play an entire Anglican service.) In sixth grade, her music teacher suggested she learn the piano. “Hanon: hated it. Czerny: a little better. Burgmüller: not as bad. But then, Bach Inventions! I became hooked on this music. I practiced all hours; I didn’t want to quit.”¹ She reasoned, “If Bach wrote pieces for the organ, then the organ must be a wonderful instrument.”² She knew that she wanted to play the organ, even before she had ever seen one! The only instruments she knew were the reed organ at church and a Hammond. In 2007 I asked her, “When you were young, how did you know you wanted to play the organ if you didn’t even know what an organ was?” She replied, “I knew when I met J. S. Bach.”³ In a 2009 email she wrote, “If I was not exposed to the two-part Inventions by Bach just by chance in my youth, I am positively sure that I [would] not [have been] drawn into music for so many decades since. Certainly, I would not have chosen organ as my main instrument.”⁴

Finally at age 15 she saw a pipe organ for the first time, in Tokyo. It was important to practice on a pipe organ, for she was preparing to audition for the Tokyo Ueno Conservatory (now named Tokyo University of the Arts). Imagine this 15-year-old girl, in 1944, with bombs falling around her, traveling two and a half hours to Tokyo to practice for two hours on this organ, then making the two and a half hour return trip home. (I recall that, in the 1980s, she told me that this organ was an Estey.⁵ However, other students remember her saying it was a Casavant.⁶)

She passed the audition and enrolled in the conservatory. Eight students had to share “a Yamaha and an electric-action pipe organ with a hideous sound. We each practiced for 50 minutes and then let the motor rest for ten minutes in between because it was old and cranky.”⁷ 

 

Study in America (1953–1960)

In the early 1950s, Yuko’s father urged her to visit America. She accepted a scholarship to attend Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. The port of entry was faraway Seattle. The sea voyage from Yokohama to Seattle took 12 days. She arrived in Seattle on July 23, 1953. Tuition, room, and board were covered, but she had only thirty dollars in her pocket (which was all she was allowed). She stretched the thirty dollars as far as she could, though at least she had an Amtrak pass that enabled her to travel by train anywhere in the country.  

 

My father arranged a train trip for me around half of the country, visiting some of his friends. When I arrived in Seattle on July 23 [1953], his friend’s daughter, who was the secretary of St. Mark’s Cathedral, came to pick me up. Within two hours of setting foot on American soil, I played the organ at St. Mark’s. I think it was a Kilgen.⁸ I met Peter Hallock, and he gave me some of his compositions. From Seattle I went to San Francisco and stayed with my father’s friend there. I heard Richard Purvis play a recital in a museum, and I remember I kept looking around for the pipes, which were not visible. That was my second American organ experience. Next I stayed in Los Angeles for a few days. I didn’t see any organs there, but what I remember most was my first American picnic, a culturally foreign experience for me. Then I went to Salt Lake City, found the Mormon Tabernacle organ and went to two concerts in one day. Alexander Schreiner was there. Can you imagine? Next I visited my father’s friends in Minneapolis, and then the remainder of the summer stayed in a guesthouse at the University of Chicago. Finally, I arrived at Cottey College, and do you know what I found there? A Baldwin organ!⁹

 

After a year she was no longer able to stay at the school; however, she received a scholarship to go to any other school of her choice in America. Where would she go? She knew nothing about Oberlin or Eastman. Ultimately, her decision was influenced by having grown up by the sea.

 

At that school in Missouri, every Friday you know what we had to eat? Fish. That fish must have been dead for ten days by the time we had it. The fish was so fresh in Japan. So I knew I wanted to live near the sea. New York was too big. Washington, D.C., was too political. But Boston . . . .¹⁰

And so in 1954 she entered the New England Conservatory and studied organ with the legendary George Faxon.  

 

I spoke almost no English, and he didn’t say very much. So our lessons were filled with music but had long silences! One week he asked me to bring in the Vivaldi[/Bach] A-minor concerto. And I memorized it. I’d never memorized anything before. He didn’t say much. But you know what he did? He wrote on a piece of paper “Sowerby Pageant” and told me to go to Carl Fischer [Music Company] to pick up the music. When I got to the store and showed the man the piece of paper, he said, “Oh, you’re playing this?” I said, “Yes.” I had no idea what it was. Then when I opened the music! Incredibly difficult. At my next lesson Faxon wrote in the pedalings, very quickly, from beginning to end. What a technique he had. And you knew where he got it? Fernando Germani. Once Faxon took me to Brown University to see his teacher, Germani, play the Sowerby. I got to sit very close to him, so I could see Germani playing. And there he was, five-foot-three, his feet flying all over the pedalboard.¹¹

 

On February 6, 1956, Yuko played her bachelor’s recital in Jordan Hall, her first recital ever. In only three weeks Yuko memorized the daunting program, which included Vivaldi/Bach A-minor concerto (first movement), D’Aquin Noël X, Schumann Canon (probably B minor, op. 56, no. 5), Bach Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue, Liszt “Ad Nos” (second half), Sowerby Pageant, Titcomb Regina Caeli, Dupré Second Symphony (Intermezzo), and Messiaen L’Ascension (third movement).

In 1956, Faxon told Yuko, “This is still a secret, so you can’t tell anybody. But I’m leaving NEC and going to teach at B.U. [Boston University]” Yuko was disappointed at the news. “I wanted to follow him to B.U. I didn’t know anybody else. But he said, ‘No, don’t follow me. You studied with me two years—that’s enough. Stay at NEC.’ And then he said, ‘You must make Boston your home.’”¹²

Yuko was disheartened and considered returning to Japan. But Chester (“Chet”) Williams, beloved dean of NEC, would have none of it. Faxon’s imminent departure was still a secret. But Chet had another secret for Yuko: “There is another man coming, someone with great ideas.” That man was Donald Willing. On Chet’s advice, Yuko stayed at NEC.

Willing had been to Europe and was galvanized by the new tracker instruments being built. He immediately arranged for NEC to purchase new practice organs by Metzler and Rieger. The 1957 Metzler was voiced by Oscar Metzler himself.

 

As soon as I touched the instrument, I had an immediate reaction: “This is it! This is a living organism!” My teacher did not persuade me to have this reaction—I had it on my own, from touching the instrument myself. That was 1957. The next year, 1958, I got my M. M. from the conservatory. And that same year, the Flentrop was put in at Busch-Reisinger [now Adolphus Busch Hall]. That was Biggs’s instrument. He let all the students play it. We had to practice at night, when the museum was closed. And we were poor; we couldn’t afford to pay a security guard. So Peggy [Mrs. Biggs] would act as the guard. The Biggs’s were so generous to organ students.¹³

 

Not all the organ students were taken by these new instruments. “They would say, ‘Are you going backwards?’”¹⁴ Yuko was undeterred. She played her Artist Diploma recital on the Flentrop in 1960.

 

Leonhardt and Heiller (1960–1966)

In 1960, Yuko joined the faculty of the organ department of New England Conservatory. At this point she had not yet heard of Gustav Leonhardt.  

 

I first heard of Leonhardt from John
Fesperman. Before John went to the Smithsonian, he taught at the Conservatory. The organ faculty was Donald Willing, John
Fesperman, and I, who had just been hired. I don’t know why, but John had been to Holland already, and he said, “Leonhardt is coming; you should go study with him.” So I did. I used to go to Waltham [Massachusetts] to practice cembalo at the Harvard Shop, and once a week I went to New York to study with Leonhardt. He was young, late 20s. A whole summer [1960] I studied with him.¹⁵

 

Yuko so enjoyed her study with Leonhardt that she considered switching to harpsichord. Indirectly it was Leonhardt who dissuaded her.

 

Finally [Leonhardt] said, “You really should study organ with Anton Heiller.” And I thought, “Who is that?” So I bought records of Heiller. You know, the old LP records. [. . .] [I]t was grand playing. Already I noticed something.¹⁶

 

1962 marked Heiller’s first visit to America and his first ever trip on an airplane! He gave two all-Bach performances on the Flentrop at Harvard University. Yuko attended the first performance and was so impressed that she attended the second one as well.  

 

And you know the most wonderful thing he played? O Mensch . . . with the melody on the Principal . . . . The whole program swept me away. And I immediately said, “This is the man I want to study with.” But I was shy, so I didn’t go to him right away. [. . .] He used to come to America every three years. He had come in ’62, so in ’65 he came back, and he returned again in ’68, ’71, etc. So in ’65 he was teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. I went down there, and for the first time, I met him. [The course was] six-and-a-half weeks. Every morning, he gave four hours of classes. Bach, David, Reger, and Hindemith—on a Möller! Then, in the afternoon, private lessons on a 10-stop Walcker organ in a private studio.¹⁷

 

Heiller urged Yuko to enroll in the summer academy in Haarlem the following year (1961). This marked her very first visit to Europe. She went on to study with Heiller sporadically, following him wherever he happened to be playing. (She was the only Heiller student who didn’t study with him in Vienna.)

 

Maybe [Heiller] taught differently with other people, but with me, most of what I learned was from his playing, not from his words. [H]e played a lot [during lessons]. But I would move and he would sit on the bench. He didn’t just play over my shoulder. With him, nothing was halfway. [. . .] Funny thing: when he was just standing there, without doing anything, I played better. He felt the music inside him, and it came out. It was a weird thing. [. . .] I performed his organ concerto. Of course he wanted to hear it at a lesson. But I wasn’t ready. He only told me about it three weeks before. But again, he was standing right there. And it’s funny, I was able to play it. You see, he was so perfect, he made me feel I could play. [. . .] You know, I was so little—I’m still little. (laughter) And he was much bigger than me. But he said to me, “Don’t be afraid of the piece.”¹⁸

 

In 1969, Yuko became chair of the organ department of NEC. She remained until 2001, a total of 41 years on the faculty, 30 of which as chair.

First European tours (1968)

Yuko’s first concert in Europe was at the 1968 International Organ Festival in Haarlem. From there she went on to play many concerts on historic instruments in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. “The wife of Hiroshi Tsuji, the Japanese organbuilder, arranged my first concert tour in Europe. [. . .] I soon discovered that I loved going to places where I didn’t know the people or the organs. I like to explore things I don’t know.”¹⁹ Here again we see Yuko’s fearlessness in reaching for things she could not see. As Nancy Granert reminisced, 

 

One time, Yuko and I were talking about traveling alone through Europe. I was saying that I always had a map in my purse, and that I really didn’t like being lost. She replied that she loved being lost and to find new places. She, after all, always knew where she was, right?²⁰

Old West Church (1974)

Charles Fisk built one of his most beautiful instruments, Opus 55, for Old West Church in Boston.²¹ It went on to become the main teaching instrument for the New England Conservatory organ department for decades. The organ was dedicated on Easter Sunday 1971 by Max Miller and Marian Ruhl Metson.

In 1973, Old West was conducting a search for a new organist. The organ committee consisted of the Rev. Dr. Richard Eslinger (pastor of Old West), Charles Fisk, Max Miller, and Jeanne Crowgey.²² Sneakily, but fortuitously, Eslinger and Fisk invited Yuko to attend a committee meeting in December 1973. After this meeting, they took Yuko across the street for a beer or two at a Chinese restaurant and lounge. Yuko enjoyed telling this story.

Charlie said, “Yuko, have you ever thought of becoming the organist for Old West Church?” These were absolutely unexpected words, and my answer was simply, “No.” Charlie kept a smile on his face and went on to tell me how convinced he was for me to be the organist of his organ at Old West, and that it was the right thing for me to do.

I was overwhelmed by his totally positive thoughts, and by the end of the conversation that evening I was convinced that Charlie was right and said “Yes” to him without knowing what the future would hold. [. . .] In February of 1974 I began to play for worship services (as a non-salaried organist), organized organ recitals for the season as well as the weekly lunchtime concerts that, after a decade, evolved into the Summer Evening Concerts.

As I look back [. . .] I say to myself, “How on the earth did Charlie know that I would be the appropriate one?” [. . . .] Charlie then knew that if I were caught by [the] beautiful sonorities that I could not leave them, would enjoy them, would maintain the instrument, and would let it be heard and played by all. [. . .] 

As I listened to organ students of the New England Conservatory day by day, year after year, and, of course, through my own practice, I became convinced that the 1971 Charles Fisk organ at Old West is a living organism and not just an organ with extraordinary beauty. This organ responds to the high demands of an artist as if a lively dialogue between two humans is being exchanged. I even dare say that the spirit of Charlie, an artist/organbuilder, is present when the organ is played by any organist who wishes to engage in conversation.²³

 

Yuko remained organist of Old West for 36 years. I was so fortunate to hear so many of her recitals there during the 1980s. I remember matchless performances of Bach’s Passacaglia, Franck’s Grand Pièce, and the Italian Baroque repertoire for which she had an incredible knack. (In fact, I never in my life heard a non-Italian play this music as well as she.²⁴) As late as 2008 (her last recital was in 2010), she gave a performance of Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue that to me remains the benchmark for all others. Few organists can play the middle gravement section without it sounding too long and too heavy. In Yuko’s hands, I was astonished by the articulation of each entrance of each of the five voices. I say without exaggeration that it sounded like a quintet of breathing musicians. I was so gripped by it that, when she got to the final section, I couldn’t believe how short the gravement had seemed.

 

As a teacher

Yuko made good use of her ESP. As a teacher, not only did she adapt to each individual student, but she adapted to each individual lesson with each student. Each lesson with her was a brand new experience—based solely on what she was sensing in the room at that moment. Besides her perceptiveness, she had something else: a regard for the value of each student. I can never forget something she told me many years later: “When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it.”²⁵ Her next sentence was even more unforgettable: “And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.” It would be hard to find a famous teacher with that level of regard for even the least talented among of her students.

Yuko’s ear was astonishing. She could have used that ear to be a critic or an adjudicator towards her students. Instead, she worked tirelessly to get them to use their own ear, to make their own decisions and judgments. In her gentle, quiet way (her voice never rose above a mezzo piano), she was relentless in making her students listen to the sound coming from the organ, in particular to be aware of the air going through the pipes. Most of all, she wanted her students to learn directly from the composer.

I will never forget playing Bach’s Allein Gott, BWV 664. The moment I stopped listening to one of the three voices, within milliseconds she started singing it. Then I would get back on track. Then, the millisecond that I stopped listening to another part, she would sing that one. That was how perceptive she was—which was both comforting and frightening! Another astonishing moment in our lessons that is worth mentioning is the one and only time I played Frescobaldi for her. In modern parlance, you could say that I was “schooled.” I was playing the Kyrie della Domenica from Fiori Musicali, which is in four voices. I played it and could tell from her facial expression that she was not pleased. She said one sentence: “You know, this music was originally written on four staves.” I played it again. This time, her face was even more displeased, and she said nothing at all. She sat down on the bench next to me and said, “OK, you play the alto and the bass, and I’ll play the soprano and the tenor.” I was floored. Her two voices breathed. They sang. She got up from the bench, without saying a word. Her point was made, and powerfully.

 

Later years

Yuko and I exchanged many emails in 2009. Many of them concerned administrative details of the Old West Organ Society (of which I was then a board member). However, more often the emails were simply about music.  

 

I remember when I first heard Mozart, in a castle outside Vienna, in [the] early 1970s. It was a big shock to me. While they were performing Mozart’s chamber music, I started to have the image about the leaves of the tree which show the front of the leaf and the back of the leaf, back and forth. Their colors are very different from each other, yet [the] only differences are front or back of the same leaf. It influenced the dynamic control as well in their performance at the castle.²⁶

 

During this era she always wrote to me as a friend and colleague, never as a “student.” Only once did she give something resembling “advice:”

 

I believe, there are only two emotions that stand out, “Love” and “Fear.” You have plenty of both, which in [an] actual sense make [a] great artist. Your potentiality is enormous! Don’t waste it, please! After all, it is the gift from God.²⁷

 

She was pleased, then, when not long after that email I became artistic director of organ concerts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (home of two historic Holtkamps from 1955). In October, Yuko called me to congratulate me. She reminisced about Walter Holtkamp, Sr., whom she met in Cleveland.

 

He was a strong character, and rather difficult to get along with. Yet, we liked each other. Walter took me for dinner, and to his organ in the Episcopal Church in Cleveland, and I played the organ for him. He liked my playing because I played exactly as I believed.

That led to reminiscing about Melville Smith, who dedicated the larger Holtkamp in Kresge Auditorium. She even knew about Saarinen, the architect who designed both Kresge and the MIT Chapel. One thing led to another. She ended up telling me practically her whole life story. We spoke for four (!)
hours. She did almost all of the talking. There wasn’t a single dull moment. Every sentence was imbued with energy. She talked about growing up in Japan during the war, doing forced labor even as a teenager. She talked about her earliest musical experiences and about more recent organbuilding trends in Japan. She spoke at length about Marc Garnier, who built the monumental organ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Center. She told story after story about Guy Bovet, Harald Vogel, Peter Williams, and Karel Paukert (in whose presence she set foot in Old West Church for the very first time). She told me about the time she was in France with Michel Chapuis, and she was playing a three-voice work, and Chapuis reached over and improvised a fourth voice over what she was playing. She spoke of Heiller (which she did in most every conversation I ever had with her). She even spoke of events and feelings in her personal life. It is safe to say that it was one of the most extraordinary phone conversations that I have ever had, with anyone. The next time I saw her, in 2010, she showed signs of memory loss. Clearly this was Yuko’s instinct at work, once again: she knew that in that phone conversation in 2009, she needed to tell me her life’s story.

At the 2014 AGO national convention in Boston, there was a workshop entitled “The Organ as Teacher: The Legacy of Performance Pedagogy at Old West Church,” moderated by Margaret Angelini, with Barbara Bruns, Susan Ferré, and Anne Labounsky. Indirectly it was an event honoring Yuko. (Had it been entitled “An Event in Honor of Yuko Hayashi,” she would have strongly objected.) It was hard for Yuko’s friends to see her in this state of diminished powers—at times aware of what was going on, at other times not so much. But then came a moment, after the workshop, when Yuko was standing, chatting with Ferré and Labounsky. All of a sudden she looked at them, pointed to me, and told them, “He’s a wonderful musician.” For me, that was the equivalent of a New York Times review. I have sought no other musical validation since that moment.

Last summer Yuko’s health declined. In September I learned that her condition was so grave that her family in Japan were contacted. Her 88th birthday was to be on November 2, followed eight days later by a celebratory concert at Old West, featuring some of her greatest former students. None of us thought she was going to live until the concert—we expected it to be a memorial service. Each day I checked my iPhone compulsively, not wanting to miss the terrible news. But the news didn’t come. Now it was November 10, the night of the gala concert. Apparently she was still with us—I had not heard otherwise. I arrived at Old West on that bitter cold night. I walked out of the cold into the warm church, and I heard people saying that Yuko was there! At Old West! I didn’t fully believe it. I looked around, and then I saw it: the back of a wheelchair. I raced over, and there she was. Her eyes were as alert as I had ever seen them. This isn’t possible! How did they even get her there, on that bitter cold evening? But Barbara Bruns made it happen. Yuko took my hand in hers and kept rubbing it, looking me straight in the eye the whole time. Not a word was said.  

The entire evening Yuko had that same alertness in her eyes, start to finish. Being at Old West, among her students and friends, hearing Charles Fisk’s beloved Opus 55—the energy from all of it must have thrilled her.

A few months passed. For Epiphany weekend, January 6 and 7, 2018, as a prelude at all of my Masses, I played Bach’s Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739—the very first piece at Peter Williams’s life-changing recital at Old West so many years ago, the night I met Yuko Hayashi. Eerily, but not surprisingly, only three and a half hours after my last Mass, Yuko Hayashi left this world.

 

Notes

1. Phone conversation with the author,  July 25, 2007.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid. 

4. Email to the author, October 19, 2009.

5. 1918 Estey (Opus 1598) at Rikkyo (St. Paul’s) University, Tokyo. Replaced by Beckerath in 1984.

6. 1927 Casavant (Opus 1208) at Holy Trinity Church, Tokyo. Church and organ were destroyed by a firebomb in 1945.

7. Diane Luchese, “A conversation with Yuko Hayashi,” The American Organist, September 2010, p. 57. 

8. It was a ca. 1902 Kimball (not Kilgen), with tubular-pneumatic action.

9. Luchese, op. cit., p. 57f.

10. Phone conversation with the author, July 25, 2007.

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. From an unpublished interview between Yuko and the author, which took place in Boston on February 17, 2004. 

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Luchese, op. cit., p. 60. 

20. Conversation with Nancy Granert, January 11, 2018.

21. Seven years previous, and 500 meters down the road, Fisk had installed his Opus 44 at King’s Chapel, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ built in the second half of the twentieth century. The organ was a gift of Amelia Peabody. Thanks to the friendship between the pastors of Old West (Dr. Wilbur C. Ziegler) and King’s Chapel (Dr. Joseph Barth), Amelia Peabody gave a grant to Old West for their new organ. The choice of Fisk was endorsed by the organists of both King’s Chapel (Daniel Pinkham) and Old West (James Busby), as well as E. Power Biggs.

22. Jeanne Crowgey was a member of Old West from 1972 to 1980. She was also an organist, who served unofficially as an interim before the selection of Yuko Hayashi. Crowgey went on to be Yuko’s invaluable assistant during the first six years of the Old West Organ Society. Crowgey did a large amount of the administrative work for the international series, the summer series, and the weekly noontime concert series. She was one of the last friends to visit Yuko before her passing.

23. From a reminiscence written by Yuko in 2004 and posted on the C. B. Fisk website (edited by L. C.).

24. Once in the 1960s she played a recital at the Piaristenkirche in Vienna, which included a piece by Frescobaldi. Heiller was in attendance and raved about how she played the Frescobaldi, a composer she had never studied with him (phone conversation with the author, year unknown).

25. Phone conversation with the author, year unknown.

26. Email to the author, June 10, 2009.

27. Email to the author, September 2, 2009.

David Wagner

David Wagner holds a DMA in organ from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Marilyn Mason. He has had a career as a performer, a university professor of organ, and as a classical music broadcaster in Detroit, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and in Miami. 

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra is the author of Bach and the Art of Improvisation, published by CHI Press of Ann Arbor, Michigan. (See Figure 1.) She earned degrees in organ performance and pedagogy, choral music education, and music theory, sacred music, and conducting at Dordt College (BA) and the University of Iowa (MFA, DMA). From 1996–2002, Ruiter-Feenstra served as senior researcher at the Göteborg (Sweden) Organ Art Center, taught improvisation courses at Göteborg University, and launched research on Bach and improvisation. While serving as professor of music at Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas (1989–1996) and Eastern Michigan University (1996–2008), she taught organ, harpsichord, theory, improvisation, and sacred music and directed the Collegium Musicum. 

In Volume One of Bach and the Art of Improvisation (Volume Two will be available in early 2016), she explains the importance of improvisation and how musicians would be well served to study and practice the art to improve their ability as players of repertoire. Ruiter-Feenstra meticulously details how Bach learned and taught improvisation. Using historic documents, she reconstructs an improvisation pedagogy method that has passed the test of time. For musicians today who were never taught how to improvise, Ruiter-Feenstra offers a sound and effective improvisation pedagogy that students and professional musicians alike can learn and own. The following conversation explores Ruiter-Feenstra’s development of this pedagogy.

 

David Wagner: Everyone has a story on how they first fell in love with music and then with the instrument that they play. What is the narrative that will give insight into where you are today?

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra: When I was six years old, I started to play the piano. After I was able to play a few tunes, I was asked to play hymns. In my ancestors’ Dutch schools, everyone sang metrical Psalms and hymns. The Dutch immigrants had their own schools, their own churches, and their own traditions. I was born in Michigan into the Dutch Christian Reformed tradition and grew up in various Dutch immigrant villages in Michigan, Illinois, and Iowa. (From this tradition, by the way, comes Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and Dordt College in Iowa.) I remember learning Dutch words in which there was no equivalent in English and just thinking that these were English words.

Were your parents musicians?

No, they were teachers. My dad was passionate about what is now called special education and then worked in retirement homes. My mother served as an elementary school teacher and also worked with ESL (English as a Second Language) programs.

 

So, you were interested in music, they recognized that, and they said, “Let’s make sure that Pamela has music lessons.”

Yes. My mother was taking piano lessons when I was in the womb, and I always thought that had some role in developing my ear (she laughs). I started piano lessons at age six, played the violin all the way through elementary school, learned classical guitar, and then I started to play the organ when I was in eighth grade. I played the organ at first because our church needed more organists, and they said to me, “You play the piano, so why not take organ lessons?” I had played hymns in the classroom since third grade, so it felt pretty easy to transfer that to the organ. I had to figure out the pedals, and away we went. My first organ piece was the Karg-Elert Now Thank We All Our God.

 

How interesting—you learned, very early on, proper four-part chorale writing and doubling by playing hymns, and in some ways, you learned thoroughbass by example. Was this pretty much traditional music? 

Oh, yes, the Dutch congregations were singing from the Genevan Psalm tradition when I grew up, and those Psalms have fabulous sixteenth-century harmonies. Sixteenth-century harmonies feature primarily root position and first inversion harmonies, so this is a great way to begin learning harmony. Genevan Psalms have only two note values, which was also important for improvisation. If you are going to improvise and “decorate” something, it’s much easier to work with one or two note values than with many different rhythms. That’s what I would do: I would learn the Psalms and then go home and make variations on them. I practiced my piano repertoire first and then made my own pieces, my variations on hymns. 

 

You really started to improvise at a young age! Did you know at that time, as a youngster, that there was this great tradition of organists and improvisation? 

I had no idea. I just thought it was fun to do. I couldn’t leave my hands off the piano, and I would run out of pieces to play, so then I would start improvising. My parents had their stereo right next to the piano, and I would play their old LP records and later their 8-track tapes of mostly sacred choral music or hymns. I would play a track of a recording, and then go to the piano and try to play the same thing “by ear.” I would go back and forth until I figured out the harmony and the melody. Then, I would start embellishing on it. 

 

So early on it seems that you had decided, “This is for me.” When did you decide to do this for a living and become a professional musician?

Dave, this is the funny thing. I practiced my improvisation just for fun throughout elementary school, middle and high school, but I never played it for my teachers. They always, of course, asked for repertoire, and the discussion of improvisation never came up. When I got to college, I took piano, organ, and voice lessons, and thus, I had a lot to practice. Again, all of these teachers expected repertoire. No one assigned improvisation. 

 

This was not the time for improvisation, was it?

Right. The teachers hadn’t learned it, it wasn’t in the music curriculum, and so no one was teaching it and no one was learning it. I was at Dordt College in Sioux City, Iowa, and my organ teacher was Joan Ringerwole. She selected terrific repertoire and offered me many opportunities to play in chapel and with the Concert Choir. Thankfully, my organ playing with its heart and soul of congregational singing continued. I arrived at Dordt just after the installation of a three-manual Casavant organ designed and voiced by Gerhard Brunzema. Prior to joining Casavant, Brunzema had partnered with German organ builder Jürgen Ahrend, and together they restored many Arp Schnitger instruments. Brunzema, therefore, had a strong historic-instrument basis, and he built and voiced essentially a Dutch-sounding organ with a modern case at Dordt: it has beautiful Dutch vocally inspired principals and a Dutch Vox Humana that sounded reedy. I had heard adults who had this quality of reedy voices. At one of the Dutch churches I had played at, I remember a male member of the congregation who had such a reedy voice that he could cut through the entire congregation with his voice. He was a POW survivor of World War II, and he sang Genevan Psalms as if his life depended on them. His voice was in the tenor range, singing the Genevan Psalm cantus firmus, and other men would sing bass. Hearing that type of singing helped me to understand the Goudimel harmonies (often with cantus firmus in the tenor), as well as how many Dutch reed stops really had vocal models. (See Figure 2.)

 

I have heard people comment on what a wonderful instrument the Dordt College Casavant is, and I hope to be able to hear it in person some day. In growing up, you probably played electro-pneumatic and not mechanical action organs.

At my home church, we had an electronic organ. Sitting down and beginning to play this mechanical action organ was nothing less than a revelation. I became an organist for life because of this instrument.

 

It was that profound of an impact? 

It’s why I pursued organ and church music foremost. I had started out as a piano and choral education major, and I soon thought, “Wow, this organ has such beautiful, human sounds.” It was immediate, it was present, it was alive, and it breathed because it had flexible winding, just like the congregation. Those Dutch people used to sing with gusto. They had passion, and it was exciting to hear them sing. This organ sang in the same way, full of personality and color. 

 

So, what happened next?

Well, as in most universities and conservatories, at that time at Dordt College, no one was teaching improvisation. I worked a lot with choral music and still improvised in the practice room for the first few weeks that I was there. I spent a lot of time in the practice corridors, as I had so much to practice while studying three instruments. When I’d step out of my practice room to get a drink of water, I’d hear other people practicing, and it gradually dawned on me that no one else was improvising. 

 

How interesting! You were a “secret improviser.”

Exactly! I thought to myself, uh-oh, maybe professional musicians don’t improvise. I guess I had better stop. Since no one else was doing it, I thought that if I improvised, maybe people would think that I’m not a serious musician. I wondered if this improvisation “stuff” was akin to just fooling around at the keyboard when I should have been practicing “real music.” So, I stopped improvising for the first two years I was at Dordt. I was hungry for it, so I still was a closet improviser on the piano when I went home on breaks.

So what changed?

During my junior year, Joan Ringerwole invited Klaas Bolt, the famous Dutch organist who improvised at St. Bavo Church at Haarlem in the Netherlands, to come and give a concert.

Bolt wanted to have a “Psalmfest” at the concert, where people were invited to sing with the organ. He featured Genevan Psalms, and he improvised on them with great expression and keen understanding of the colors of the organ and how to use his articulation and registrations to make the organ sing the texts. His organ playing was so alive that I thought, “This is the kind of life I heard in the great Dutch singing of my childhood.” His playing had that level of affect and passion and breathing that I missed hearing in a lot of organ playing when it was just repertoire. Hearing Klaas Bolt improvise was a life-altering revelation to me. Here was a professional musician, and to my ears, his playing was more alive than almost any playing I had heard on the organ. Then I realized every musician has to learn to improvise. Even if musicians never improvise in public, they will play their repertoire in a more profound and musical manner from having practiced improvisation. They are going to breathe; they are going to know the music from the inside rather from the outside. If we just learn music with our eyes and our fingers, we know it a little bit from the outside. We don’t know it from the inside the way an improviser does.

 

Why do you think that is so?

An improviser has to know what makes music work, and what doesn’t make it work. Sometimes you learn most from what doesn’t work. You can’t just say that it didn’t work; you have to ask the question why it didn’t work. How can I fix it, and how can I avoid doing what doesn’t work the next time?

 

After hearing Klaas Bolt, what was the next step for you?

The first thing I did was to begin to improvise again. 

 

In other words, it was like saying “Hello, my name is Pamela, and I’m an improviser!” You became a member of Improvisers Anonymous!

[She laughs] Wholeheartedly! 

 

What did your teachers think of your revelation?

They still wanted to hear repertoire. So, I was still improvising privately in the practice room, but I was improvising and not thinking any longer that it was something I should not be doing. It was really quite the opposite. I no longer felt that I cared if anyone heard me improvising outside the practice room. I started decorating hymns when I played for chapel services at Dordt. When I went to graduate school at the University of Iowa, Delbert Disselhorst and Delores Bruch offered a strong sacred music program. They encouraged me to make variations on hymns, and I was able to practice improvisation within a liturgical context. It was OK to make variations on hymns. 

 

Improvisation and the art of improvisation was something that never really died out in Europe, correct? 

Oh, yes, until recently, it was still required in France and the Netherlands and some parts of Germany. My European colleagues, mentors, and friends were also teaching improvisation, which was so important. That entire pedagogy of teaching improvisation side-by-side with theory, history, and repertoire, however, never really caught on in the United States. 

 

It is starting to be taught here now, isn’t it?

Yes, that is true, although we don’t have a long “apprenticeship” tradition here in the States the way they did in France and in the Netherlands. What is needed is an integrated improvisation pedagogy from which teachers can learn it first, and then learn how to teach it. That’s why it is essential to have a pedagogy that anyone can own. Initially, I think it is great to have a teacher for improvisation, but ultimately it is important to have a pedagogy with steps that you can take and apply on your own. Once you understand those steps, then anyone can become her own improvisation teacher. I had to figure that out for myself, because I didn’t have an improvisation teacher, and I wanted to improvise. 

 

Did you find your improvisation teacher?

I did study improvisation briefly with Klaas Bolt. I also studied with Harald Vogel in Germany and worked a few times with William Porter. 

 

Both Klaas Bolt and Harald Vogel had their European methodology that grew out of a long tradition.

That is why I wrote Bach and the Art of Improvisation. What I wanted to get at in the book was this premise: Johann Sebastian Bach was probably the greatest organ improviser the instrument has ever known and will ever know. So, what was his methodology, and how did he teach his students? I was fortunate to work in Sweden with the GOArt project. GOArt gathered an international group of scientists, musicologists, performers, acousticians, physicists, organbuilders, woodworkers, artisans, and historic preservationists together. We had an entire team of amazing experts studying the tradition of the antique organs and trying to decipher why so many of the antique organs sounded so much better than modern organs. Hans Davidsson started asking these types of questions, and we all joined in with various ideas for figuring out how the instruments were made, how they sounded, and how and in which contexts they were played.

 

So it started from the standpoint of the sound of this musical instrument.

Yes, and then it branched out into how was that sound used, and what did that sound inspire? One of the things that inspired me to keep improvising was that I loved to test out historic organs with improvisation. With improvisation, I have “nothing between my fingers and my ears and the instrument,” so I can more keenly assess the soundscape. This way, you spend more time listening. If you start out with repertoire you are thinking, “Did I hit the right note?” and then you forget to listen sometimes. Improvisation is a great way to test an organ. I do this every time I encounter a new instrument, even if I am playing a concert on it and I will be playing mostly learned repertoire. I begin by improvising through the stops, because I want to hear what is the character of the sounds and in which soundscapes do they coexist most naturally and happily? What does the organ tell me about touch and technique, what does it want to say, and why? 

 

How many years were you involved in this project?

I was in Sweden with GOArt for six years, and it was a fabulously stimulating collaborative project. GOArt is the acrostic for the Göteborg (Sweden) Organ Art Project, which Hans Davidsson initiated and led. The stunning, colorful North German organ built with antique techniques by Munetaka Yokota, Mats Arvidsson, and a highly skilled team represents the apex of the GOArt research in the late ’90s into the new millenium. Those of us who were among the interdisciplinary team of researchers followed the organ building stages of hand-planed wood, sandbed-cast metal, fire-forged iron rollerboards, the physics of wind flow, and we tested sounds, wind pressure, and key action along the way. When the organ was completed, it was thrilling to hear the range of strong, yet vulnerable, transparent, singing sounds of the organ. In my double CD recording of Tunder’s organ works (see Figure 3), I savored the colorful palette of soundscapes by exploring in turn the various families of stops represented on each of the four manuals of the organ. Selecting like stops side-by-side reveals the infinite variation in aural nuance that one can hear in the best instruments, strong congregational singing, and in historic improvisation.

 

Goodness! You really immersed yourself in this project!

I truly did. We had regular symposia. The organists would learn what the physicists were discovering, and they in turn were listening to what performers, pedagogues, and improvisers were discovering. That is how I was able to dig so deeply into the archival material on how Bach and all of his predecessors learned improvisation, and then how Bach and his pupils and successors and other traditions built on this basic methodology. This is an ongoing story of evolution on how musicians learned and taught improvisation. I’ve spent years and years discerning how improvisation pedagogy works. I’m grateful for many opportunities over the years to test out those ideas with wonderful students in the States and in Europe.

 

In Volume One of Bach and the Art of Improvisation, you write, “Improvisation is really extemporaneous composition.” I really love that idea. 

You have to be able, to some degree, to think out the music in your head away from a keyboard before you even play your first note. Here is an example. We have our presidential State of the Union address. The President is reading his speech from a teleprompter for his State of the Union address, but he has a hard copy of the address on paper in front of him. This idea of oration, or the art of giving speeches, goes way back before the days of teleprompters, before the Common Era, to the time of Greek orators. Greek orators had to have a memory that worked in a way different from what we think about when we memorize music. In memorizing music, many people memorize every note. The Greek orator’s memory was much more like a blueprint or an outline for a speech, because they didn’t have computers, or printers or teleprompters. They had to memorize the outline of their speech, and then they decorated the interior lines of that speech. Johann Sebastian Bach was still using that art of memory when he was improvising, and that is what I do also when I improvise. 

 

So you improvise from a mental outline?

Yes, I have a blueprint in my brain; I want to know the beginning, the middle, and the end of what I am doing before I even begin, even though I don’t know specific notes, or even sometimes where the improvisation is going to take me. Within that mental/aural blueprint, there is an “introduction” (Exordium) where you want to grab the listener’s attention. The Greeks did this too. You want to play something “flashy” to say, “OK, this is going to be the mood and the character of the piece, and the key of the piece,” and after that, you launch into something of a narration (Narratio). In the narration, you “tell” the listener what you are going to do, just like the orator is saying, “This is what I plan to discuss.” You are staying in your home key at this time, as you are telling the story at the beginning. Then you have a proposition (Propositio), a new idea that you want somebody to know about. Then, scientifically, to show people that your idea or ideas hold some weight and truth, you have to argue your point (Confutatio). Again, this is what the Greeks would do, they would argue against their proposal, but brilliantly, they would turn the argument on its head to confirm (Confirmatio) the truth of their original proposition. So, in these “confutatios” in music, you can explore other ideas or other snippets of ideas, or take those ideas to new keys; this is what we would call the development section in what is known as sonata-allegro form. However, you come back and confirm it with your recapitulation and return to your home key. After you have confirmed your main proposition, then you end with a conclusion (Peroratio) that has a “bang” and some sort of bookend effect that hearkens back to your original opening attention-grabbing statement.

 

I have heard that composers don’t have to be good improvisers, but good improvisers have to be good composers. 

That is true. Yes. C. P. E. Bach said that. Improvisers learn a great deal from investigating existing compositions and asking questions about specific works in the manner a curious child or tenacious archaeologist might keep asking, “Why?” 

Here’s an example. Knowing that Georg Böhm taught the young Bach made me wonder what influences Böhm’s compositions had on Bach. Böhm’s keyboard works provide excellent material for improvisers, as they are fairly easy to analyze. With a strong thoroughbass foundation, one can emulate some works of Böhm in improvisation. I explored this approach to improvisation pedagogy in Bach and the Art of Improvisation and in my harpsichord CD, Bach’s Teacher Böhm & Improvisation. (See Figure 4.)

I selected a præludium, partita, dance suite, and fughetta of Böhm to perform and then chose specific chorales that would work well with those genres. On the second half of the CD, you can hear my improvisations on those chorales in the style of Böhm, recycling the same genres in new ways. In my Bach, Improvisations and the Liturgical Year CD, I took inspiration from Bach works to improvise on chorales on the Pasi organ at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lynnwood, Washington. (See Figure 5.) Improvisers make their nests from snippets of material and enduring designs from the
finest composers.

 

Getting back to what you said earlier about copying what you had heard, it makes me think of Mozart. One of the great composers was an improviser at a very young age.

It is said that Mozart had many things worked out in his head before he ever put a note down a paper—very much like a great improviser. 

 

I always figured that people were born with some sort of “improvisation gene” and you either had it or you didn’t.

No, it is like any other skill. It takes work. You cannot become an Olympic ice skater the first time you put on a pair of skates and venture out onto the ice! Just like Olympic athletes, accomplished improvisers have invested thousands and thousands of hours of practice, studying, and coaching. Even as an improviser, “going down the wrong path” can be very instructive. Like any skill, it doesn’t drop from the sky, it is a matter of giving the skill deep, regular focus and attention, sprinkled heavily with perseverance.

 

Can you speak to the benefit of actually copying out a piece of music instead of just making a photocopy?

In Bach’s time, everyone had to copy music. I have my students copy music, for instance, copying out one of Bach’s Inventions from his own hand. They can see that in Bach’s handwriting, there is gesture; it isn’t just some sort of robotic computer-generated notation. You can learn from how notes are written and beamed together. You also learn different clefs like the C clef, so you learn relationships; you are not reading by note names, but rather by intervals and relationships of distance on the page and how that translates to the keyboard. It is as if you are reading words and phrases instead of looking at individual letters. (See Figure 6.) Remember how it was when you first began to learn typing? You first have to think of each key individually, and after a while your fingers know where the keys are, and you can type a word and then later a phrase. It is the same thing with improvisation. No matter how proficient someone is as a player of repertoire, one has to start from the very beginning as an improviser. 

 

This really is very humbling. 

Yes, it is, but it is also very much worth it!

 

It was interesting to learn from your book Bach and the Art of Improvisation that Bach was very demanding of his students, and yet also was extremely practical in what he taught.

Oh, yes, Bach was genuinely interested in getting right to the work of experiential learning. Bach usually took a chorale melody and a thoroughbass. That was the blueprint; the chorales had a soprano and a bass line, and students would have to fill in the alto and tenor part. Wouldn’t it be great if theory could now be taught in conjunction with improvisation? If students had their hands on the keyboard, they would learn theory much better and as an integrated part of musicianship, because they would store information in various memory sources—the tactile, the visual, the aural, and the analytical. The more synapses you have firing, the more aspects of music will make sense on multiple levels. 

 

Also with Bach as a teacher, wasn’t it true that you could not move on “to the next step” without mastering what had been assigned to you?

Ah, yes, Bach’s students weren’t allowed to proceed to repertoire and improvisation before they had their fingering in place!

 

Did Bach know about different fingering traditions, or what today we would call “early fingering”?

Yes, he most certainly did. In fact,
C. P. E. Bach was still documenting it after Bach’s death. This type of fingering was still being used during the time of Bach’s son.

 

Didn’t J. S. have a profound effect on what we consider today as “modern fingering?” 

Bach was one of the first to use the thumb to the same extent as the fingers, which astonished other musicians at the time. Some of Bach’s music doesn’t work exclusively with early fingering described in 16th- and 17th-century treatises. Because of this, the so-called modern scale fingerings used today were already chronicled by C. P. E. Bach as one of several options. Significantly, though, this was not the one and only option. The performer was offered different fingerings for the same passage, and could select the most appropriate fingering to the style and tempo of the piece, to the note values and function of particular passages, to the size of the musician’s hand, and for the articulation desired. Using a palette of fingering choices offers much more sophisticated playing results that can imitate bowing, tonguing, and most importantly, singing.

The clavichord is the instrument Bach advocated most for keyboard practice, as the instrument itself is the finest technique pedagogue. The clavichord offers its best blooming sound when the player plays with relaxed arm weight, with the hand and arm lined up above the key to be played. (See Figure 7.) If the player uses less than ideal fingering and arm weight, the sound will be weak and dull, instead of rich and colorful. The clavichord tangents press up on the strings, allowing for infinite light and shadows in the dynamic range, as well as Bebung, an ornamental vibrato accomplished by pressing weight in and out of the string. Practicing on the clavichord translates to an ideal organ technique and organ playing that sounds much cleaner (clarity of touch and articulation) and more expressive. 

 

You suggest that it is helpful to learn to improvise in the Baroque style. Why?

Most students learn theory from a Baroque perspective first, culminating in analyzing Bach chorales. My vision is to have theory and practice, history and performance integrated as one art. Already, students start with Baroque harmonies in Bach chorales. From there, it is relatively easy to stretch out those tertiary harmonies vertically as well as stretching the harmonic rhythms horizontally to take more space as melodies develop, which is what happens in much nineteenth-century music. The improvisation pedagogy developed in Bach and the Art of Improvisation is a series of steps derived from the repertoire. This pedagogy can easily be transferred to any pattern-based music improvisation (music organized in modes and scales) from medieval music to Messiaen.

 

In your pedagogy, what is the first step? 

I always begin where the student is at and build appropriate steps from there. If the student needs a better foundation in relaxed technique, fingering, hymn playing, note reading, and analysis, we work with those aspects immediately and introduce improvisations such as musettes, ostinatos, and two-voice counterpoint. My students, other professional musician friends, and I have had great fun in developing “improvisation societies” in which we improvise for and with one another on various themes. This puts the improvisation psychology into a friendly environment and allows participants to inspire each other by becoming a “counting choir” to help the improviser keep track of the meter and tempo, by playing rondos, in which each person can try out a small phrase at a time, by offering constructive feedback, fresh ideas, and accountability for practicing.

 

Where do you then proceed from there? 

I use chorales with soprano and thoroughbass and cadences so that each improviser can hear and sing the cantus firmus as well as the harmonic basis, and know with each sense how to fill in inner voices. Gradually, improvisers can work to harmonize a given soprano and to create upper voices from a given thoroughbass. From thoroughbass and chorales, I introduce how to decorate one line at a time using appropriate figures to fit proper voice leading and harmonic function, both with two-part counterpoint and with four-part harmonies. This leads to chorale preludes and dance suites, which get into exciting meter and rhythmic variations. 

 

Bach and the Art of Improvisation, Volume Two is ready to go to press. What is the focus of the second volume?

In volume two, I offer free works, but still within a thoroughbass and chorale framework: interludes and cadenzas, preludes, fantasias, continuo playing, partimento, and fugue.

 

I’d like to hear more about those last three. What about continuo playing?

Many modern continuo-playing realizations simply designate block chords for the thoroughbass harmonies indicated. Some of these are not even careful with appropriate ranges to fit with the soloists, voice leading, or doubling. In contrast, Bach’s continuo playing was described as creating a quartet out of a trio. Instead of resorting to block chord-type continuo, he would most often play the left-hand bass line given and improvise a right-hand part that would fit ideally in dialogue and duet with the other solo voices. When I started improvising in this way in continuo with ensembles, I was astonished at how much more sophisticated it sounds, as well as how much more it enhances what the other instrumentalists are doing.

 

What is partimento?

Partimento is an improvisation pedagogy practiced by many Italians, notably Adriano Banchieri, Bernardo Pasquini, and Girolamo Frescobaldi, as well as several German musicians in the 17th and 18th centuries. Italian composers influenced the art of improvisatory flourishes in keyboard free works. Froberger is a wonderful example of that Italianate influence from his teacher Frescobaldi, as I demonstrate in my Froberger on the 1658 De Zentis CD played on an original 17th-century Italian harpsichord. (See Figure 8.) In his toccatas, Froberger introduced cosmopolitan influences: Italianate improvisatory virtuosic passagework, French dance and overture rhythms, and strict imitative counterpoint practiced by German composers and the Palestrina lineage of contrapuntalists.

The cross-pollination between Italy and Germany was evident in partimento works, including fugue. After Bach taught his students how to work with thoroughbass in chorales, free works, and continuo playing, he introduced partimento fugues in his early fugal pedagogy. (See Figure 9.) In partimento fugues, the subject and answer are introduced. After the initial entrances, the partimento features thoroughbass only. The improviser’s role was to solve the puzzle by placing additional subject entrances in the fugue according to where they fit with the harmony indicated by the thoroughbass. For example, with a four-voice fugue, the improviser fills in the missing voices and remaining harmony in four-voice counterpoint. Most improvisers enjoy puzzles, riddles, or Sudoku. Partimento is a similar musical game and valuable improvisation pedagogy tool. 

So you can use partimento for fugues?

Yes, Bach did, as did Handel. In Volume Two of Bach and the Art of Improvisation, I show examples of partimento fugue as a starting point for fugal improvisation. Bach certainly moved beyond that in teaching, composing, and improvising fugues, and in my final chapter, I offer applications for how to create increasingly professional fugues. 

 

I think most people would feel daunted by the thought of improvising fugues.

Yes, and they did in Bach’s day, too. It is truly possible for anyone who is willing to practice with great attention and perseverance. The results are exhilarating.

But the solution is, as Bach did, to build up each of the improvisation pedagogy steps so incrementally, that fugue becomes simply the next rung of the ladder. 

 

And that’s exactly what you do in Bach and the Art of Improvisation!

Douglas Reed

Robert Clark taught at the University of Michigan from 1964 to 1981, and at Arizona State University, Tempe, from 1981 until his retirement in 1998. One of his most noted achievements as a performer was his recording, Bach at Naumburg, on the newly restored organ built by Zacharias Hildebrandt in 1747, an organ tested and approved by J. S. Bach and Gottfried Silbermann.  

In the United States Clark served as a consultant to many churches, and was directly responsible for the building of the first two modern mechanical action organs in Arizona: Victory Lutheran Church in Mesa and Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale. He was also advisor for the Richards & Fowkes organ at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Knoxville, Tennessee.

Clark has served on many juries for organ competitions, including St. Albans and the Grand Prix de Chartres. In 1992, he received a plaque from the Central Arizona Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, inscribed “Master Teacher.” Clark recently moved from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Houston, where his daughter, Barbara, will continue her career as a teacher of voice at Rice University beginning in fall 2013.

On May 19 and 20, 2012, the author spoke with Professor Clark at his home in Cincinnati.

Douglas Reed: Thank you for this opportunity to talk. Please tell about some of your early musical experiences that shaped you as a musician.

Robert Clark: It began in kindergarten. In the classroom there was a mockup of a pipe organ that fascinated me. I spent the entire playtime pretending I was an organist. When I was about six years old, I went behind the stage where things were going on at church [First Methodist Church, Fremont, Nebraska] and saw for the first time a Universal Air Chest of an Austin organ. I pushed the flap that opens the door, and, of course, I noticed a great change in pressure. I was totally fascinated.  

 

You’ve mentioned motion or movement training in school.

Yes. The term was not used, but it was pure Dalcroze eurhythmics involving step-bend, step-step-bend, making phrases with your arms, going in circular motion and in advanced cases, walking two steps against three bounces of the ball or vice versa. Dalcroze eurhythmics was part of my training as early as fourth grade, as was moveable-Do solfège. My claim to fame was being able to hear and sing descending major sixth and ascending minor third intervals.

It was a very unusual public school system in Kansas City. I don’t know whether the name Mabelle Glenn means anything to you, but she edited several volumes of Art Songs for School and Studio. In the 1930s, she conducted the Bach St. Matthew Passion at Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kansas City. During her long career, she was renowned in music education and, surprisingly, convinced the administration to include music in the daily curriculum of the grade schools in Kansas City.

 

What other things influenced you as a youngster? Did you study piano?

Oh, yes. From the fourth grade until I finished high school, my teacher was Margaret Dietrich, who had been a pupil of Josef Lhévinne at Juilliard. Much of the elegance and detail in his playing was transmitted from her to her students. Believe me, she was a strong personality and pushed me very hard at a time when I was quite lazy.

Miss Dietrich would probably be 105 years old now, although I did see her when she was in her nineties after she and her husband had moved to Flagstaff, Arizona. It was very good to see her again. She even told me I could call her Margaret! 

 

Did you study the organ during that time?

Yes, much to my piano teacher’s dissatisfaction (laughter), I did take organ lessons. My first piece was Song of the Basket Weaver, one of the St. Lawrence Sketches by Alexander Russell. I had my first church job when I was 14, playing a two-manual and pedal Estey reed organ. That’s when I became fascinated with playing the famous Toccata by Widor.  

 

Then you majored in organ in college. What led to that?

That’s what I wanted to do! I went to a small school, Central Methodist College, in Fayette, Missouri, and from there to Union Theological Seminary, where I did my graduate study in the School of Sacred Music. Orpha Ochse was one of my teachers at Central. I alternated organ lessons between Orpha and Luther Spayde, who was a strict Dupré advocate. Orpha suggested many subtleties not otherwise available. She was also my first-year theory teacher. 

 

Did you study with N. Louise Wright and Opal Hayes at Central Methodist College?

I certainly did. Miss Wright was one of those very colorful, flamboyant people who made you think you were better than you were. Miss Hayes taught Bach and technique, and Miss Wright taught interpretation.

 

Then you went from Central to New York City?

I did. My first teacher was Clarence Dickinson. I was much too immature and opinionated to understand his breadth of knowledge and approach to teaching. He knew the tradition of Widor and other European masters of his era. Lessons were at Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City, where there was an E. M. Skinner organ, recently replaced.

That was 1953. Interestingly, I went to the other extreme with Ernest White, who was known for playing as if the keys were hot! He did not force his theories upon me and respected my individuality. I played a debut recital in his studio at St. Mary the Virgin, and that’s probably the only recital I played from memory without dropping a single note.

 

Ernest White had a series of studio organs, right? 

Yes, this was the largest. It was up on the second floor of St. Mary the Virgin. It was quite the thing; it was very controversial and very well should have been!

 

Tell us about other experiences that you had in New York.

While a student at Union Seminary, I had many meaningful experiences. For example, I heard the New York debut of Jeanne Demessieux at Central Presbyterian Church, the “Carnegie Hall” for organists in those days. Quite a number of us went to hear Demessieux, and we all fell in love with her. She played with very high spike heels, the type that would pull up a grate from the sidewalk! Her pedal technique was built around that. I heard her play her repeated-note etude for the pedals—with the spike heels. Indeed!

 

One time, you mentioned the Langlais Suite Médiévale in association with your time in New York.

Yes. I was possibly the first student organist to play that work in the United States. Messiaen was even more controversial. The first piece I learned was the Apparition de l’église éternelle. I wrote my master’s thesis on Messiaen and also translated his Technique de mon langage musical before the “official” translation became available.

  

Let’s talk more about your teachers. You’ve mentioned studying with Gustav Leonhardt.

I knew him when he was not yet 30, on his first trip to the United States. He taught a course on performance practice at a Union Seminary summer session. I had a few lessons on an organ that he disliked and some harpsichord instruction. All of a sudden it wasn’t a case of limiting but of greatly enhancing the possibilities of what a performer could do. He had an incredible stash of information about early sources. Being typically Dutch, he could speak four different languages. So in the class he would read something off in the original language, and finally it occurred to him that no one could understand what he was saying, so he began translating. 

We had many good experiences, including a chance encounter one Sunday afternoon as I was taking the uptown subway. We ran into each other on the way up to see the famous medieval complex, The Cloisters. We had a very good time doing that. He had a great deal of knowledge about medieval art. I simply admired his whole approach to music making, which was very elaborate.

 

When you say he opened up all kinds of possibilities rather than limiting them, what exactly do you mean? 

He spoke about different ways ornaments could be played, places where you would or would not play notes inégales—all of the options open to the musician. Would you play over-dotted, double-dotted, neither, or something in between?  

I remember a subsequent class he did at the University of Michigan. He spent an entire session on about three measures of music. It was the sarabande from the C-minor French Suite. He talked very much about the expressive nature of this: if we over-hold this, such would happen, but if we don’t overhold, something else will happen. I remember something he told me in the early 1950s and which I strongly believe: dynamics are achieved by variations in touch and articulation and by rhythmic adjustment.   

 

Did Leonhardt perform at that time?

Oh, yes! I heard him perform many times. I heard him perform the one and only time on an electro-pneumatic organ at St. Thomas Church in New York City, and he said, “Never again!” And he didn’t. He commented on what a nice place this would be to have a fine mechanical action organ, and finally Taylor & Boody fulfilled that dream. Leonhardt was also a very fine fortepianist, incidentally.  

 

Are there other teachers or musical experiences you would like to mention?

One of my good experiences was being a fellow judge at the Fort Wayne competition with Arthur Poister. He was very insightful and was usually right in his perceptions of the musical personality and even gender of the competitors. 

 

Let’s talk about Bach. I’m curious about how your perspective on Bach has changed over the years. You mentioned learning with the Dupré edition. What has happened?

We have reached a new level of understanding of articulation in terms of listening. After all, a pure legato or even over-legato are types of articulation, but if one reads treatises like J. J. Quantz’s On Playing the Flute, one learns how wind players rehearsed. It was tonguing that made a difference, and of course listening to string playing makes a difference. Where does one change a bow? These are all deviations from a pure legato. Even a seamless legato is a form of articulation and, in fact, harpsichordists deal with over-legato. 

 

How has the revival of mechanical action influenced your thinking?

It has influenced my thinking entirely. My first European trip came quite late, in 1977. I played many of the great organs in Europe. The organ at Kampen, the Netherlands, was the last organ I heard in Europe before returning to the United States. The next day, I heard a chiffy Positiv Gedeckt on the organ at Hill Auditorium and thought, “This will not do.” So, I found a way of getting to a tracker-action organ even though it wasn’t a very good instrument. Students would have lessons in an unheated church in the winter simply for this experience. And then I took many groups of students and others down to the Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Toledo, where the important Brombaugh organ, now in Rochester, used to be. We learned a great deal from this opportunity.

What did you learn?

I learned about the sensitive interplay between winding and touch, and realized I could find detail in the music that could not be found any other way. Indeed, the fastest key action is not electro-pneumatic. With a good mechanical action, the response is immediate, providing complete contact with the instrument. Contrary to conventional wisdom, many of the great European instruments are not hard to play. Of course, as the pallets become larger, the action becomes heavier. For example, with a typical basse de trompette, the touch and speech of the lower notes affect timing and interpretation. This is as it should be! It shouldn’t be all the same. I tell my students that the only “perfect” action that does everything consistently is the electronic organ! 

 

And when you’re playing with manuals coupled and a huge sound, you tend to play differently.

Of course. If you listen to my Naumburg recording, the last variation of Sei gegrüsset was played with all three manuals coupled, and it becomes very grand. One plays quite broadly when the action is heavier, whereas the other variations call for a lighter registration and touch. In the partitas, particularly in Sei gegrüsset, there are also many things that relate directly to the playing of string instruments. 

Think of the difference between playing a violin and playing a cello or a gamba. I’m always very happy with students who have played a wind instrument or string instrument or have had experience singing. Anyone wanting to be an organist should learn another instrument. 

 

Can you speak more about singing?

Articulation involves attack as well as release. If you were singing all legato, there would be no consonants, no words. It would be just one stream of sound, which is vocally impossible.

 

You’ve said, “Put a D or a T on that note.”

Yes, but only on a good organ with suspended mechanical action is that possible, because it has to do with the speed of attack and release. I recommend A Guide to Duo and Trio Playing by Jacques van Oortmerssen for comprehensive understanding of early fingerings and their impact on articulation.

 

Let’s talk more about teaching and learning. What are the three most important things to consider when learning and performing a piece?

Traditionally, we say “rhythm, rhythm, and rhythm.”

  

How do you start an organ student? Do you have a teaching method?  

Some of the older teaching methods are outdated. So many deal with absolute silence and space, up and down, no give and take. Music doesn’t work that way. I don’t agree with the idea that we delay learning Bach until we understand historic fingerings. There’s one method that starts with some rather uninteresting music of the Romantic era, but the student is not ready for Bach until he or she knows how to use historic fingerings. Who knows what is “historic” anyway?! Nobody has the same hand. Finger lengths are different. The balance of the hand is different. I think just simple things that are good music are the best way to start: Renaissance pieces, easier Bach, some pieces in the Orgelbüchlein. It is not necessary to delay learning Bach. Early and modern fingering should be included within modern teaching approaches, not as separate entities.

 

In recent decades, there has been a great deal of emphasis on early fingerings.

You may be surprised, but since I came back from Europe, I’ve been almost exclusively into historic fingerings for early music. That doesn’t mean always doing the same thing the same way, but there are times when paired fingerings—3-4-3-4 ascending and 3-2-3-2 descending in the right hand—work on a good sensitive instrument. The trio sonatas include marked articulations that are very much related to wind and string playing. For me, usually the marked articulation determines the fingering anyway. I tend to write slurs rather than numbers in my music.

Do you have any particular memory techniques? You mentioned using solfège.

Yes, I use solfège, but memory, like doing anything else well, simply takes time and practice. I have no gimmicks whatsoever in memorization. It is an extension of the learning process. The ultimate test is to be in a quiet room without scores, and being able to hear every note in a performance the way you want to hear it. And that’s the most secure way to memorize. Without this ability, one tends to rely entirely on a mechanical approach.

 

You have a nice selection of artwork in your apartment. How important is study of the other arts—the visual arts, even film—for a musician?

A good example of Baroque performance practice that few people mention lies in the art of Peter Paul Rubens, whose works are among the finest Baroque paintings. They are full of motion, huge sweeps of the brush, and great detail within those. A good place for any musician to visit would be the Rubens gallery at the Louvre. 

 

Please talk about the sense of motion as it relates to rhythm. Many performances are very speedy and metronomic, but without a sense of movement. 

Well, Duke Ellington once said, “Man, if it don’t got that swing, it ain’t music.” (laughter)

 

You have mentioned the term “lilt.” How does one achieve that?

The harpsichordist Isolde Ahlgrimm had her students learn the steps for the dances used in Bach’s keyboard suites. They would learn the choreography of the allemande, sarabande, the courante, and gigue in their various forms, bourrée, gavotte. This is a very good idea. The more we can see things moving, the better! 

 

What about conducting and singing a line? You’ve recommended the Kirkpatrick edition of Scarlatti sonatas. He recommends walking.

Oh, yes. That’s very good basic reading. It’s an essay on rhythm in the first volume of the Schirmer edition of the Scarlatti Sixty Sonatas edited by Kirkpatrick. That’s very good information. It’s in a question/answer format. Question: “How do I sense the shape of a phrase?” Answer: “By dancing it.” Learn the difference between rhythm and meter: meter is regular; rhythm is essentially irregular. Rubato does exist in Baroque music but not exactly as in Chopin. Kirkpatrick said, “Rhythm is the superimposition of irregularity upon regularity.”

 

Dare we talk about the metronome?

What you should do if you have a metronome is to throw it in the dumpster. It creates arithmetic, not rhythm. 

 

You’ve often mentioned continuo and the value of accompanying, working with other instrumentalists and vocalists. 

Working with other musicians, one discovers many of the subtleties of articulation derived from bowing and tonguing. I learned the hard way not to jump ahead of one’s fellow musicians; you have to listen to the breathing of the musician. I would often jump ahead of the wind instrument player, and I’d be playing before he completed taking a breath! Many organists have this panicky thing: “If I don’t get moving, it’s not going to go!” You must leave space for breathing. Not every instrument is like the organ, where you can have a continuous supply of wind.

 

There has been a great resurgence of interest in improvisation in the American organ world. Can you speak about your views on improvisation and how it relates to performance in general?

In our country we used to have maybe an annual “be nice to improvisation day” and that was the beginning and the end of it. But in France, where the study of improvisation is obligatory, this begins in childhood and continues throughout a musician’s entire career. It’s not a thing acquired quickly or easily.  

Particularly in music before the Romantic era, improvisation was par for the course. But if Liszt and other Romantic virtuosos were to play in a modern-day academic setting, matters would be quite different.

 

These are some fairly major changes from the Dupré method at Central Methodist!

Well, I studied with Dr. Dickinson in 1952. How many years has it been? We’re not doing anything the way we did 60 years ago. Airplanes are not the same. Cars are not the same. The way we dress and the way we think are not the same.  

 

You taught at the University of Michigan for 17 years. Who were some of your closest colleagues at Michigan?

My closest friend in the organ department was Bob Glasgow, who was an inspiration even though we were occasionally different in our approach. Another very dear friend was Ellwood Derr, who was really a historian but taught music theory. He knew an incredible amount about music in general, and you could go to him with almost any question. Another colleague, John Wiley, was very much an expert on Russian music. 

At Arizona State University, Frank Koonce, the classical guitar teacher, and I became good friends. The late Bill Magers, the viola teacher, taught my daughter and was recognized as one of the great viola teachers in the country. There are many other former colleagues including Robert Hamilton, a noted pianist.   

 

You have mentioned Louise Cuyler a number of times.

Yes. There are many stories about her. One time she brought to class a 78 recording of a Beethoven string quartet, which did not meet her standards. She grabbed the shellac record off the turntable, tossed it into the waste basket, and then went apologetically to the library.

 

And what about Eugene Bossart?

Oh, he died recently at the age of 94. He helped so many people. His few detractors were poor musicians, as he demanded only the very best. And 99% of the time, he got it. Yet, he was the kindest person! I remember him calling me once after I had played harpsichord continuo for the St. Matthew Passion. He yelled on the phone, “Hello! Is this Marcel Dupré??” What he really liked was the recitative regarding “The Veil of the Temple.” Yet, he could be super critical and get away with it.

 

Let’s talk about your recordings, particularly your experience at Naumburg.

Jonathan Wearn, the British recording producer, was very particular in recording. After the initial tapes were made, I spent several days with him editing at his home in England. Many of my recordings have some editing, although my Clavierübung III recording has almost none.

 

Had you made any recordings earlier in your career?

No. The Naumburg recording got good notices, I thought, so I went back home to one of my favorite organs, built by Paul Fritts, one that I’d had a voice in designing, and made “Bach on the Fritts.” And then “Bach and Friends on the Fritts.” There are seven recordings in all. I really had wanted to record on the Treutmann organ in Grauhof, but this was not possible because of the illness of my wife. 

 

Speaking of the Fritts—after teaching at Michigan, you moved to Arizona State and taught for 17 more years. It was during this time that you led the creation of the new performance hall and the Fritts organ. Could you speak about
that process?

That was a battle. In the first place, nobody trusted that type of acoustic. It was not designed for piano recitals. The harpsichordists usually like it, but everybody was concerned, “We’ve got to deaden that some way or the other!” I don’t know how many suggestions were offered. We finally made sort of a dual system where drapes could be drawn manually, and I used that very often in teaching when the room was empty.  

 

What led you to start that project? Was there no good concert hall or teaching instrument at Arizona State?

All we had was an Aeolian-Skinner in Gammage Auditorium. It was one of the late, very thinly voiced Aeolian-Skinners. But since the scalings were surprisingly large, it was revoiced and opened up quite a bit by Manuel Rosales. There was no substantial tracker organ available, except for a few old ones that were quite good up in the northern part of Arizona. There is now a second Fritts in Tucson.

During our first year of recitals, we had overflow audiences. Performances had to be played twice every Sunday, one at 2 pm and the other at 5 pm. There was great appeal among the musical public!

 

Can you give some background on the Orgelbüchlein edition that you and John David Peterson prepared?

I visited the Stadtsbibliothek in East Berlin, and the librarian there was very American-friendly. In fact, he had travelled in the United States. I was allowed to pick up the original manuscript of the St. Matthew Passion. It was like touching the Holy Grail! Luckily, the librarian mailed me a microfilm of the Orgelbüchlein. I shared it with John, who was working on the same project. I might say that the Orgelbüchlein that we prepared goes back to 1984, and it is an edition that needs to be revised—not a great deal, though, because we were dealing with the autograph, and there are simply variants of the autograph that need to be acknowledged.

 

Were the Stasi after you in East Germany?

Oh, yes! They were after any American. It was the typical situation where one saw a face in public and then two days later that same face appeared again. One time I was trapped inside the Wenzelskirche in Naumburg because I didn’t know how to work the key, and a man came, speaking perfect English, to explain how to turn the key. As a matter of fact, the tower of that church is the highest point in the town, and the chief spy looked out from there. She knew everything that went on in that city, including my presence!

After the big change I went to what’s called the Runde Ecke. This museum showed many of  their methods of interrogation, uniforms, and obscene paintings. Every phone in the country was wired. 

 

What were some of the musical experiences you had in East Germany?

I had wanted to go to Stralsund to hear the organ there. The organist was Dietrich Prost, and we hit it off very well. His English was probably as deficient as my German, but we understood each other; we got to the organ and without saying a word we agreed that there was something important there. And he said, “You play like a German!” “Du bist Deutsch!” We had coffee and cake. Many of the musicians in local churches were eager to meet with Americans. Often we went for conversation, coffee, and cake. I remember being in one of the towns near the border and the local organist was complaining, “Here we are only a few kilometers from West Germany, and we cannot see our closest friends and relatives!”

 

Did you play any of the Silbermann organs?

I think I played every one in existence except one that wasn’t playing. In Crostau, they said, “The organist is sick, and the organ is sick.” Strangely enough, one of the finest Silbermanns is the least known, in Pfaffrode. There is some speculation that it might have been the original Rückpositiv for the organ in Freiberg.

 

What about Hildebrandt organs?  You mentioned Naumburg. 

Oh, yes. That was before the restoration and there was enough there that I could get an idea of what the original was like. Of course, the organ had been provided with electric action in the early 1930s, but there were enough original pipes left that I got a pretty good idea of the sound. Another colleague, Thomas Harmon, did quite a bit of research on that. The restoration didn’t take place until after the reunification of Germany. Christian Mahrenholz was one of the leaders in promoting the restoration as early as the 1930s.

 

Did you go to Dresden on that trip?

I went to the Katholische Hofkirche, now Holy Trinity Cathedral. We were told by the tourist guides, “Don’t go in there. Nobody’s there.” But we went in, and we met the organist, Dietrich Wagner, who had lived through the infamous fire in Dresden and told us all about that. He was very friendly and made suggestions on my playing—that I deal with the acoustic because I was playing too legato. I sent him some editions of things not available in East Germany. So, that
was good.

 

We’ve been talking about all kinds of professional stuff. Would you like to talk about your family and their part in your life?

I have four children and three grandchildren. My son, Robert, lives in Los Angeles and does technical work with pathologists. My daughter Susan lives in Oxford, Michigan. She is Mrs. Music through the entire area and manages the Rochester Michigan Symphony Orchestra. She’s a fine cellist and plays the piano. She sings and teaches maybe twenty or
thirty students.

The twin of my son is Jill, who is very focused and controlled with everything she does. At the beginning of her career in New York, she won a grant from the Bosch Foundation. Then her husband was moved back to Deutsche Telekom in Germany, and she now works in an executive role in the famous tower in Bonn.

 

What about Barbara?

I could write a book about her. She’s a singer, very gifted and very devoted to teaching at the Cincinnati Conservatory. I wish she would perform more, because she is at the prime of her career vocally. She knows how to communicate a song in an ever-positive stage presence. That would include eye contact, gesture, and movement.   

 

And your wife, Evelyn?

Evelyn was a singer. She studied at Westminster Choir College and was a good organist in her own right and also had a beautiful soprano voice. She was busy raising the children, but made a point of keeping a voice studio for many years. 

 

What do you think of the combination of organ and piano?

We performed William Albright’s Stipendium peccati for piano, organ, and percussion.

 

Did you participate in one of the Seven Deadly Sins before that?

The preface of the score encourages all the performers to experience each of the seven deadly sins—but not necessarily together. So, we imagined walking out on stage pretending to be angry, hamming it up, growling at each other, shaking fists, and that sort of thing. We had a lot of fun imagining that, and then we settled down and went out to perform. I also did a work for organ and brass conducted by William Revelli, the only person I know who used the moveable-Do system as I do. 

 

That was in Hill Auditorium?

Yes. John David Peterson was at the piano, and Bill Moersh, a graduate of the Berklee School in Boston, was
the percussionist. 

 

You’ve often mentioned Catharine Crozier. 

The first time I heard her, I think I was 14 years old, and I was so moved by that. She played the Roger-Ducasse Pastorale. But I could not figure out what she did with the Brahms
Schmücke dich, because it was not what was on the page, and of course, she played the chorale tune in the pedal. I revered Catharine. She was a perfectionist and had incredibly high standards. Some of her interpretive ideas might be out of fashion today, but I love every inch of ground she walked on!

 

Are there other fine performers you admire?

Any of the fine violinists—Zino Francescatti, Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern. Rachel Podger and Andrew Manze, both fine Baroque violinists. Pablo Casals. Fine pianists of any stripe. I like to hear good musicians of any type. I like to hear good oboe players and good flute players. And of course, singers!

 

Finally, please give your perspective on the current state of the organ profession, especially regarding teaching and learning.

David Craighead advised even his most gifted students to be able to do something else if necessary. Considering the realities of today’s organ world, is this anything but being honest, especially to students who dream about being on the back page of the organ journals?

There are teachers who attempt to transfer their own prejudices to their students. It is our duty to deal with gifted students who are free to ask questions. I can say that some of my best students are ones who disagreed with me or others. In fact, at least two of my students have a background playing the accordion! Sometimes these people can be very annoying or irritating, but they can be brilliant musicians.

Too much teaching is, “Me teach. You do.” Or with some students, it is, “You play. I copy.” The most important thing is to TEACH IMAGINATION!

 

Recordings by Robert Clark

Bach and Friends on the Fritts. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 018.

Bach at Naumburg. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 041.

Orgelbüchlein & More Works by J.S. Bach. Robert Clark & John David Peterson at the Fritts Op. 12 in Organ Hall, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 019.

Robert Clark Plays the Brombaugh Organ, Op. 35 at First Presbyterian Church, Springfield, Illinois. ARSIS SACD 405.

Robert Clark Plays Organ Works from the Land of Bach. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 034.

Bach Clavierübung III. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 042. 

 

 

Douglas Reed

Robert Clark taught at the University of Michigan from 1964 to 1981, and at Arizona State University, Tempe, from 1981 until his retirement in 1998. One of his most noted achievements as a performer was his recording, Bach at Naumburg, on the newly restored organ built by Zacharias Hildebrandt in 1747, an organ tested and approved by J. S. Bach and Gottfried Silbermann.  

In the United States Clark served as a consultant to many churches, and was directly responsible for the building of the first two modern mechanical action organs in Arizona: Victory Lutheran Church in Mesa and Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale. He was also advisor for the Richards & Fowkes organ at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Knoxville, Tennessee.

Clark has served on many juries for organ competitions, including St. Albans and the Grand Prix de Chartres. In 1992, he received a plaque from the Central Arizona Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, inscribed “Master Teacher.” Clark recently moved from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Houston, where his daughter, Barbara, will continue her career as a teacher of voice at Rice University beginning in fall 2013.

On May 19 and 20, 2012, the author spoke with Professor Clark at his home in Cincinnati.

 

Douglas Reed: Thank you for this opportunity to talk. Please tell about some of your early musical experiences that shaped you as a musician.

Robert Clark: It began in kindergarten. In the classroom there was a mockup of a pipe organ that fascinated me. I spent the entire playtime pretending I was an organist. When I was about six years old, I went behind the stage where things were going on at church [First Methodist Church, Fremont, Nebraska] and saw for the first time a Universal Air Chest of an Austin organ. I pushed the flap that opens the door, and, of course, I noticed a great change in pressure. I was totally fascinated.  

 

You’ve mentioned motion or movement training in school.

Yes. The term was not used, but it was pure Dalcroze eurhythmics involving step-bend, step-step-bend, making phrases with your arms, going in circular motion and in advanced cases, walking two steps against three bounces of the ball or vice versa. Dalcroze eurhythmics was part of my training as early as fourth grade, as was moveable-Do solfège. My claim to fame was being able to hear and sing descending major sixth and ascending minor third intervals.

It was a very unusual public school system in Kansas City. I don’t know whether the name Mabelle Glenn means anything to you, but she edited several volumes of Art Songs for School and Studio. In the 1930s, she conducted the Bach St. Matthew Passion at Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kansas City. During her long career, she was renowned in music education and, surprisingly, convinced the administration to include music in the daily curriculum of the grade schools in Kansas City.

 

What other things influenced you as a youngster? Did you study piano?

Oh, yes. From the fourth grade until I finished high school, my teacher was Margaret Dietrich, who had been a pupil of Josef Lhévinne at Juilliard. Much of the elegance and detail in his playing was transmitted from her to her students. Believe me, she was a strong personality and pushed me very hard at a time when I was quite lazy.

Miss Dietrich would probably be 105 years old now, although I did see her when she was in her nineties after she and her husband had moved to Flagstaff, Arizona. It was very good to see her again. She even told me I could call her Margaret! 

 

Did you study the organ during that time?

Yes, much to my piano teacher’s dissatisfaction (laughter), I did take organ lessons. My first piece was Song of the Basket Weaver, one of the St. Lawrence Sketches by Alexander Russell. I had my first church job when I was 14, playing a two-manual and pedal Estey reed organ. That’s when I became fascinated with playing the famous Toccata by Widor.  

 

Then you majored in organ in college. What led to that?

That’s what I wanted to do! I went to a small school, Central Methodist College, in Fayette, Missouri, and from there to Union Theological Seminary, where I did my graduate study in the School of Sacred Music. Orpha Ochse was one of my teachers at Central. I alternated organ lessons between Orpha and Luther Spayde, who was a strict Dupré advocate. Orpha suggested many subtleties not otherwise available. She was also my first-year theory teacher. 

 

Did you study with N. Louise Wright and Opal Hayes at Central Methodist College?

I certainly did. Miss Wright was one of those very colorful, flamboyant people who made you think you were better than you were. Miss Hayes taught Bach and technique, and Miss Wright taught interpretation.

 

Then you went from Central to New York City?

I did. My first teacher was Clarence Dickinson. I was much too immature and opinionated to understand his breadth of knowledge and approach to teaching. He knew the tradition of Widor and other European masters of his era. Lessons were at Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City, where there was an E. M. Skinner organ, recently replaced.

That was 1953. Interestingly, I went to the other extreme with Ernest White, who was known for playing as if the keys were hot! He did not force his theories upon me and respected my individuality. I played a debut recital in his studio at St. Mary the Virgin, and that’s probably the only recital I played from memory without dropping a single note.

 

Ernest White had a series of studio organs, right? 

Yes, this was the largest. It was up on the second floor of St. Mary the Virgin. It was quite the thing; it was very controversial and very well should have been!

 

Tell us about other experiences that you had in New York.

While a student at Union Seminary, I had many meaningful experiences. For example, I heard the New York debut of Jeanne Demessieux at Central Presbyterian Church, the “Carnegie Hall” for organists in those days. Quite a number of us went to hear Demessieux, and we all fell in love with her. She played with very high spike heels, the type that would pull up a grate from the sidewalk! Her pedal technique was built around that. I heard her play her repeated-note etude for the pedals—with the spike heels. Indeed!

 

One time, you mentioned the Langlais Suite Médiévale in association with your time in New York.

Yes. I was possibly the first student organist to play that work in the United States. Messiaen was even more controversial. The first piece I learned was the Apparition de l’église éternelle. I wrote my master’s thesis on Messiaen and also translated his Technique de mon langage musical before the “official” translation became available.

  

Let’s talk more about your teachers. You’ve mentioned studying with Gustav Leonhardt.

I knew him when he was not yet 30, on his first trip to the United States. He taught a course on performance practice at a Union Seminary summer session. I had a few lessons on an organ that he disliked and some harpsichord instruction. All of a sudden it wasn’t a case of limiting but of greatly enhancing the possibilities of what a performer could do. He had an incredible stash of information about early sources. Being typically Dutch, he could speak four different languages. So in the class he would read something off in the original language, and finally it occurred to him that no one could understand what he was saying, so he began translating. 

We had many good experiences, including a chance encounter one Sunday afternoon as I was taking the uptown subway. We ran into each other on the way up to see the famous medieval complex, The Cloisters. We had a very good time doing that. He had a great deal of knowledge about medieval art. I simply admired his whole approach to music making, which was very elaborate.

 

When you say he opened up all kinds of possibilities rather than limiting them, what exactly do you mean? 

He spoke about different ways ornaments could be played, places where you would or would not play notes inégales—all of the options open to the musician. Would you play over-dotted, double-dotted, neither, or something in between?  

I remember a subsequent class he did at the University of Michigan. He spent an entire session on about three measures of music. It was the sarabande from the C-minor French Suite. He talked very much about the expressive nature of this: if we over-hold this, such would happen, but if we don’t overhold, something else will happen. I remember something he told me in the early 1950s and which I strongly believe: dynamics are achieved by variations in touch and articulation and by rhythmic adjustment.   

 

Did Leonhardt perform at that time?

Oh, yes! I heard him perform many times. I heard him perform the one and only time on an electro-pneumatic organ at St. Thomas Church in New York City, and he said, “Never again!” And he didn’t. He commented on what a nice place this would be to have a fine mechanical action organ, and finally Taylor & Boody fulfilled that dream. Leonhardt was also a very fine fortepianist, incidentally.  

 

Are there other teachers or musical experiences you would like to mention?

One of my good experiences was being a fellow judge at the Fort Wayne competition with Arthur Poister. He was very insightful and was usually right in his perceptions of the musical personality and even gender of the competitors. 

 

Let’s talk about Bach. I’m curious about how your perspective on Bach has changed over the years. You mentioned learning with the Dupré edition. What has happened?

We have reached a new level of understanding of articulation in terms of listening. After all, a pure legato or even over-legato are types of articulation, but if one reads treatises like J. J. Quantz’s On Playing the Flute, one learns how wind players rehearsed. It was tonguing that made a difference, and of course listening to string playing makes a difference. Where does one change a bow? These are all deviations from a pure legato. Even a seamless legato is a form of articulation and, in fact, harpsichordists deal with over-legato. 

 

How has the revival of mechanical action influenced your thinking?

It has influenced my thinking entirely. My first European trip came quite late, in 1977. I played many of the great organs in Europe. The organ at Kampen, the Netherlands, was the last organ I heard in Europe before returning to the United States. The next day, I heard a chiffy Positiv Gedeckt on the organ at Hill Auditorium and thought, “This will not do.” So, I found a way of getting to a tracker-action organ even though it wasn’t a very good instrument. Students would have lessons in an unheated church in the winter simply for this experience. And then I took many groups of students and others down to the Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Toledo, where the important Brombaugh organ, now in Rochester, used to be. We learned a great deal from this opportunity.

What did you learn?

I learned about the sensitive interplay between winding and touch, and realized I could find detail in the music that could not be found any other way. Indeed, the fastest key action is not electro-pneumatic. With a good mechanical action, the response is immediate, providing complete contact with the instrument. Contrary to conventional wisdom, many of the great European instruments are not hard to play. Of course, as the pallets become larger, the action becomes heavier. For example, with a typical basse de trompette, the touch and speech of the lower notes affect timing and interpretation. This is as it should be! It shouldn’t be all the same. I tell my students that the only “perfect” action that does everything consistently is the electronic organ! 

 

And when you’re playing with manuals coupled and a huge sound, you tend to play differently.

Of course. If you listen to my Naumburg recording, the last variation of Sei gegrüsset was played with all three manuals coupled, and it becomes very grand. One plays quite broadly when the action is heavier, whereas the other variations call for a lighter registration and touch. In the partitas, particularly in Sei gegrüsset, there are also many things that relate directly to the playing of string instruments. 

Think of the difference between playing a violin and playing a cello or a gamba. I’m always very happy with students who have played a wind instrument or string instrument or have had experience singing. Anyone wanting to be an organist should learn another instrument. 

 

Can you speak more about singing?

Articulation involves attack as well as release. If you were singing all legato, there would be no consonants, no words. It would be just one stream of sound, which is vocally impossible.

 

You’ve said, “Put a D or a T on that note.”

Yes, but only on a good organ with suspended mechanical action is that possible, because it has to do with the speed of attack and release. I recommend A Guide to Duo and Trio Playing by Jacques van Oortmerssen for comprehensive understanding of early fingerings and their impact on articulation.

 

Let’s talk more about teaching and learning. What are the three most important things to consider when learning and performing a piece?

Traditionally, we say “rhythm, rhythm, and rhythm.”

  

How do you start an organ student? Do you have a teaching method?  

Some of the older teaching methods are outdated. So many deal with absolute silence and space, up and down, no give and take. Music doesn’t work that way. I don’t agree with the idea that we delay learning Bach until we understand historic fingerings. There’s one method that starts with some rather uninteresting music of the Romantic era, but the student is not ready for Bach until he or she knows how to use historic fingerings. Who knows what is “historic” anyway?! Nobody has the same hand. Finger lengths are different. The balance of the hand is different. I think just simple things that are good music are the best way to start: Renaissance pieces, easier Bach, some pieces in the Orgelbüchlein. It is not necessary to delay learning Bach. Early and modern fingering should be included within modern teaching approaches, not as separate entities.

 

In recent decades, there has been a great deal of emphasis on early fingerings.

You may be surprised, but since I came back from Europe, I’ve been almost exclusively into historic fingerings for early music. That doesn’t mean always doing the same thing the same way, but there are times when paired fingerings—3-4-3-4 ascending and 3-2-3-2 descending in the right hand—work on a good sensitive instrument. The trio sonatas include marked articulations that are very much related to wind and string playing. For me, usually the marked articulation determines the fingering anyway. I tend to write slurs rather than numbers in my music.

Do you have any particular memory techniques? You mentioned using solfège.

Yes, I use solfège, but memory, like doing anything else well, simply takes time and practice. I have no gimmicks whatsoever in memorization. It is an extension of the learning process. The ultimate test is to be in a quiet room without scores, and being able to hear every note in a performance the way you want to hear it. And that’s the most secure way to memorize. Without this ability, one tends to rely entirely on a mechanical approach.

 

You have a nice selection of artwork in your apartment. How important is study of the other arts—the visual arts, even film—for a musician?

A good example of Baroque performance practice that few people mention lies in the art of Peter Paul Rubens, whose works are among the finest Baroque paintings. They are full of motion, huge sweeps of the brush, and great detail within those. A good place for any musician to visit would be the Rubens gallery at the Louvre. 

 

Please talk about the sense of motion as it relates to rhythm. Many performances are very speedy and metronomic, but without a sense of movement. 

Well, Duke Ellington once said, “Man, if it don’t got that swing, it ain’t music.” (laughter)

 

You have mentioned the term “lilt.” How does one achieve that?

The harpsichordist Isolde Ahlgrimm had her students learn the steps for the dances used in Bach’s keyboard suites. They would learn the choreography of the allemande, sarabande, the courante, and gigue in their various forms, bourrée, gavotte. This is a very good idea. The more we can see things moving, the better! 

What about conducting and singing a line? You’ve recommended the Kirkpatrick edition of Scarlatti sonatas. He recommends walking.

Oh, yes. That’s very good basic reading. It’s an essay on rhythm in the first volume of the Schirmer edition of the Scarlatti Sixty Sonatas edited by Kirkpatrick. That’s very good information. It’s in a question/answer format. Question: “How do I sense the shape of a phrase?” Answer: “By dancing it.” Learn the difference between rhythm and meter: meter is regular; rhythm is essentially irregular. Rubato does exist in Baroque music but not exactly as in Chopin. Kirkpatrick said, “Rhythm is the superimposition of irregularity upon regularity.”

 

Dare we talk about the metronome?

What you should do if you have a metronome is to throw it in the dumpster. It creates arithmetic, not rhythm. 

 

You’ve often mentioned continuo and the value of accompanying, working with other instrumentalists and vocalists. 

Working with other musicians, one discovers many of the subtleties of articulation derived from bowing and tonguing. I learned the hard way not to jump ahead of one’s fellow musicians; you have to listen to the breathing of the musician. I would often jump ahead of the wind instrument player, and I’d be playing before he completed taking a breath! Many organists have this panicky thing: “If I don’t get moving, it’s not going to go!” You must leave space for breathing. Not every instrument is like the organ, where you can have a continuous supply of wind.

 

There has been a great resurgence of interest in improvisation in the American organ world. Can you speak about your views on improvisation and how it relates to performance in general?

In our country we used to have maybe an annual “be nice to improvisation day” and that was the beginning and the end of it. But in France, where the study of improvisation is obligatory, this begins in childhood and continues throughout a musician’s entire career. It’s not a thing acquired quickly or easily.  

Particularly in music before the Romantic era, improvisation was par for the course. But if Liszt and other Romantic virtuosos were to play in a modern-day academic setting, matters would be quite different.

 

These are some fairly major changes from the Dupré method at Central Methodist!

Well, I studied with Dr. Dickinson in 1952. How many years has it been? We’re not doing anything the way we did 60 years ago. Airplanes are not the same. Cars are not the same. The way we dress and the way we think are not the same.  

 

You taught at the University of Michigan for 17 years. Who were some of your closest colleagues at Michigan?

My closest friend in the organ department was Bob Glasgow, who was an inspiration even though we were occasionally different in our approach. Another very dear friend was Ellwood Derr, who was really a historian but taught music theory. He knew an incredible amount about music in general, and you could go to him with almost any question. Another colleague, John Wiley, was very much an expert on Russian music. 

At Arizona State University, Frank Koonce, the classical guitar teacher, and I became good friends. The late Bill Magers, the viola teacher, taught my daughter and was recognized as one of the great viola teachers in the country. There are many other former colleagues including Robert Hamilton, a noted pianist.   

 

You have mentioned Louise Cuyler a number of times.

Yes. There are many stories about her. One time she brought to class a 78 recording of a Beethoven string quartet, which did not meet her standards. She grabbed the shellac record off the turntable, tossed it into the waste basket, and then went apologetically to the library.

 

And what about Eugene Bossart?

Oh, he died recently at the age of 94. He helped so many people. His few detractors were poor musicians, as he demanded only the very best. And 99% of the time, he got it. Yet, he was the kindest person! I remember him calling me once after I had played harpsichord continuo for the St. Matthew Passion. He yelled on the phone, “Hello! Is this Marcel Dupré??” What he really liked was the recitative regarding “The Veil of the Temple.” Yet, he could be super critical and get away with it.

 

Let’s talk about your recordings, particularly your experience at Naumburg.

Jonathan Wearn, the British recording producer, was very particular in recording. After the initial tapes were made, I spent several days with him editing at his home in England. Many of my recordings have some editing, although my Clavierübung III recording has almost none.

 

Had you made any recordings earlier in your career?

No. The Naumburg recording got good notices, I thought, so I went back home to one of my favorite organs, built by Paul Fritts, one that I’d had a voice in designing, and made “Bach on the Fritts.” And then “Bach and Friends on the Fritts.” There are seven recordings in all. I really had wanted to record on the Treutmann organ in Grauhof, but this was not possible because of the illness of my wife. 

 

Speaking of the Fritts—after teaching at Michigan, you moved to Arizona State and taught for 17 more years. It was during this time that you led the creation of the new performance hall and the Fritts organ. Could you speak about
that process?

That was a battle. In the first place, nobody trusted that type of acoustic. It was not designed for piano recitals. The harpsichordists usually like it, but everybody was concerned, “We’ve got to deaden that some way or the other!” I don’t know how many suggestions were offered. We finally made sort of a dual system where drapes could be drawn manually, and I used that very often in teaching when the room was empty.  

 

What led you to start that project? Was there no good concert hall or teaching instrument at Arizona State?

All we had was an Aeolian-Skinner in Gammage Auditorium. It was one of the late, very thinly voiced Aeolian-Skinners. But since the scalings were surprisingly large, it was revoiced and opened up quite a bit by Manuel Rosales. There was no substantial tracker organ available, except for a few old ones that were quite good up in the northern part of Arizona. There is now a second Fritts in Tucson.

During our first year of recitals, we had overflow audiences. Performances had to be played twice every Sunday, one at 2 pm and the other at 5 pm. There was great appeal among the musical public!

 

Can you give some background on the Orgelbüchlein edition that you and John David Peterson prepared?

I visited the Stadtsbibliothek in East Berlin, and the librarian there was very American-friendly. In fact, he had travelled in the United States. I was allowed to pick up the original manuscript of the St. Matthew Passion. It was like touching the Holy Grail! Luckily, the librarian mailed me a microfilm of the Orgelbüchlein. I shared it with John, who was working on the same project. I might say that the Orgelbüchlein that we prepared goes back to 1984, and it is an edition that needs to be revised—not a great deal, though, because we were dealing with the autograph, and there are simply variants of the autograph that need to be acknowledged.

 

Were the Stasi after you in East Germany?

Oh, yes! They were after any American. It was the typical situation where one saw a face in public and then two days later that same face appeared again. One time I was trapped inside the Wenzelskirche in Naumburg because I didn’t know how to work the key, and a man came, speaking perfect English, to explain how to turn the key. As a matter of fact, the tower of that church is the highest point in the town, and the chief spy looked out from there. She knew everything that went on in that city, including my presence!

After the big change I went to what’s called the Runde Ecke. This museum showed many of  their methods of interrogation, uniforms, and obscene paintings. Every phone in the country was wired. 

 

What were some of the musical experiences you had in East Germany?

I had wanted to go to Stralsund to hear the organ there. The organist was Dietrich Prost, and we hit it off very well. His English was probably as deficient as my German, but we understood each other; we got to the organ and without saying a word we agreed that there was something important there. And he said, “You play like a German!” “Du bist Deutsch!” We had coffee and cake. Many of the musicians in local churches were eager to meet with Americans. Often we went for conversation, coffee, and cake. I remember being in one of the towns near the border and the local organist was complaining, “Here we are only a few kilometers from West Germany, and we cannot see our closest friends and relatives!”

 

Did you play any of the Silbermann organs?

I think I played every one in existence except one that wasn’t playing. In Crostau, they said, “The organist is sick, and the organ is sick.” Strangely enough, one of the finest Silbermanns is the least known, in Pfaffrode. There is some speculation that it might have been the original Rückpositiv for the organ in Freiberg.

 

What about Hildebrandt organs?  You mentioned Naumburg. 

Oh, yes. That was before the restoration and there was enough there that I could get an idea of what the original was like. Of course, the organ had been provided with electric action in the early 1930s, but there were enough original pipes left that I got a pretty good idea of the sound. Another colleague, Thomas Harmon, did quite a bit of research on that. The restoration didn’t take place until after the reunification of Germany. Christian Mahrenholz was one of the leaders in promoting the restoration as early as the 1930s.

 

Did you go to Dresden on that trip?

I went to the Katholische Hofkirche, now Holy Trinity Cathedral. We were told by the tourist guides, “Don’t go in there. Nobody’s there.” But we went in, and we met the organist, Dietrich Wagner, who had lived through the infamous fire in Dresden and told us all about that. He was very friendly and made suggestions on my playing—that I deal with the acoustic because I was playing too legato. I sent him some editions of things not available in East Germany. So, that
was good.

 

We’ve been talking about all kinds of professional stuff. Would you like to talk about your family and their part in your life?

I have four children and three grandchildren. My son, Robert, lives in Los Angeles and does technical work with pathologists. My daughter Susan lives in Oxford, Michigan. She is Mrs. Music through the entire area and manages the Rochester Michigan Symphony Orchestra. She’s a fine cellist and plays the piano. She sings and teaches maybe twenty or
thirty students.

The twin of my son is Jill, who is very focused and controlled with everything she does. At the beginning of her career in New York, she won a grant from the Bosch Foundation. Then her husband was moved back to Deutsche Telekom in Germany, and she now works in an executive role in the famous tower in Bonn.

 

What about Barbara?

I could write a book about her. She’s a singer, very gifted and very devoted to teaching at the Cincinnati Conservatory. I wish she would perform more, because she is at the prime of her career vocally. She knows how to communicate a song in an ever-positive stage presence. That would include eye contact, gesture, and movement.   

 

And your wife, Evelyn?

Evelyn was a singer. She studied at Westminster Choir College and was a good organist in her own right and also had a beautiful soprano voice. She was busy raising the children, but made a point of keeping a voice studio for many years. 

 

What do you think of the combination of organ and piano?

We performed William Albright’s Stipendium peccati for piano, organ, and percussion.

 

Did you participate in one of the Seven Deadly Sins before that?

The preface of the score encourages all the performers to experience each of the seven deadly sins—but not necessarily together. So, we imagined walking out on stage pretending to be angry, hamming it up, growling at each other, shaking fists, and that sort of thing. We had a lot of fun imagining that, and then we settled down and went out to perform. I also did a work for organ and brass conducted by William Revelli, the only person I know who used the moveable-Do system as I do. 

 

That was in Hill Auditorium?

Yes. John David Peterson was at the piano, and Bill Moersh, a graduate of the Berklee School in Boston, was
the percussionist. 

 

You’ve often mentioned Catharine Crozier. 

The first time I heard her, I think I was 14 years old, and I was so moved by that. She played the Roger-Ducasse Pastorale. But I could not figure out what she did with the Brahms
Schmücke dich, because it was not what was on the page, and of course, she played the chorale tune in the pedal. I revered Catharine. She was a perfectionist and had incredibly high standards. Some of her interpretive ideas might be out of fashion today, but I love every inch of ground she walked on!

 

Are there other fine performers you admire?

Any of the fine violinists—Zino Francescatti, Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern. Rachel Podger and Andrew Manze, both fine Baroque violinists. Pablo Casals. Fine pianists of any stripe. I like to hear good musicians of any type. I like to hear good oboe players and good flute players. And of course, singers!

 

Finally, please give your perspective on the current state of the organ profession, especially regarding teaching and learning.

David Craighead advised even his most gifted students to be able to do something else if necessary. Considering the realities of today’s organ world, is this anything but being honest, especially to students who dream about being on the back page of the organ journals?

There are teachers who attempt to transfer their own prejudices to their students. It is our duty to deal with gifted students who are free to ask questions. I can say that some of my best students are ones who disagreed with me or others. In fact, at least two of my students have a background playing the accordion! Sometimes these people can be very annoying or irritating, but they can be brilliant musicians.

Too much teaching is, “Me teach. You do.” Or with some students, it is, “You play. I copy.” The most important thing is to TEACH IMAGINATION! ν

 

Recordings by Robert Clark

Bach and Friends on the Fritts. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 018.

Bach at Naumburg. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 041.

Orgelbüchlein & More Works by J.S. Bach. Robert Clark & John David Peterson at the Fritts Op. 12 in Organ Hall, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 019.

Robert Clark Plays the Brombaugh Organ, Op. 35 at First Presbyterian Church, Springfield, Illinois. ARSIS SACD 405.

Robert Clark Plays Organ Works from the Land of Bach. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 034.

Bach Clavierübung III. Calcante Recordings CAL CD 042. 

 

 

Jan-Piet Knijff

This interview was first published in Dutch in Het Orgel 96 (2000), no. 5. Leonhardt had been made an honorary member (Lid van Verdienste) of the Royal Dutch Society of Organists in the previous year. Apart from small adaptations in the first few paragraphs, an occasional correction, and explanations, no attempt has been made to update the content of the article for this translation. The interview on which the article was based took place during the 2000 Leipzig Bach Festival. Leonhardt read the article before it went to the editor and was very pleased with it. I am grateful to the Royal Dutch Society of Organists and the editor of Het Orgel, Jan Smelik, for permission for its republication.*    

 

Gustav Leonhardt (1928–2012) was perhaps after Wanda Landowska—the most influential harpsichordist of the twentieth century. As Professor of Harpsichord at the Amsterdam Conservatory he introduced countless young musicians from all over the world to the interpretation of early music, especially the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. From his work with the Leonhardt Consort—with his wife Marie as first violinist—grew a limited but no less significant career as a conductor: Leonhardt’s contribution to the complete recording of Bach cantatas for Telefunken and his renditions of operas by Monteverdi and Rameau are milestones in the history of recorded music.

As an organist, Leonhardt has not become nearly as famous—perhaps because organists in general don’t tend to become famous in the way other musicians do, perhaps also because he limited himself to early music. Even among Dutch organists, Leonhardt remained an outsider. Therefore, his being made an honorary member of the Royal Dutch Society of organists in 1999 was an important recognition of a man who has helped define the way we have listened to and performed early music for more than half a century.

I spoke with Leonhardt in the summer of 2000 in Leipzig. He was chairman of the jury of the prestigious Bach competition for harpsichord; ironically, Leonhardt’s former student Ton Koopman held the same position at that year’s organ competition. I met the master after one of the competition rounds and we walked together to our hotels. Leonhardt is often said to have been formal; it is well known how he used to address his Dutch students with the formal pronoun u (pronounced [ü]; the equivalent of the German Sie); this must have come across as utterly prehistoric in the 1970s. But in fact, Leonhardt was extremely friendly; he conversed easily and openly about a host of topics. As we passed by the Thomaskirche, Leonhardt volunteered his opinion of the new Bach organ by Gerhard Woehl.¹ The conversation quickly moved from Woehl to Silbermann, and Leonhardt mentioned the organ at Großhartmannsdorf, which he played in the film The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach: “You know, that Posaune 16 . . . ” His face and gestures spoke louder than a thousand words. I asked why no organbuilder today seemed to be able to make such a Posaune. “Look,” he said dryly yet firmly, “first of all, you have to want it.”

In 2000, at 72, Leonhardt was very much alive and well, still playing some 100 concerts a year. For a concert in Göteborg that year, he didn’t even have a hotel: he arrived in the morning, played a concert in the afternoon, and flew on to Portugal in the evening for a concert the next day. I asked whether he enjoyed traveling; he shrugged: “I mean, it’s simply part of it.” Leonhardt was happy to have the interview on his ‘free’ Friday, when there were no competition rounds. “But if you don’t mind, could we do it early?” What is early, 9 am? “Well, earlier would be fine too.” 8:30, 8 am? “Just fine.” It sounded as if 6:30 would have been OK too.

 

Jan-Piet Knijff: How did you become interested in organ and harpsichord?

Gustav Leonhardt: Through my parents, I think. They weren’t professional musicians—my father was a businessman—but they were enthusiastic amateurs. What was rather unusual was that, even before the Second World War, we had a harpsichord at home, a Neupert, a small one.² My parents played Beethoven and Brahms for pleasure, but from time to time also Bach and Telemann. Apparently they thought they had to buy a harpsichord for that. I had to learn how to play the piano as a boy; I mean, had to, it was simply a part of life. I don’t remember liking it very much. When the harpsichord came, they let me play written-out figured-bass parts. I didn’t care much for it, but of course, it must have shaped my musicality. During the last few years of the war there was no school, no water, no electricity. Marvelous, of course—especially that there was no school! Moreover, I turned sixteen that year, so I more or less had to hide from the Germans. My brother and I took turns being on the lookout. It was all very exciting. During that time, I was so attracted to the harpsichord. And since there was little else to do, I simply played all the time. And of course, there was the enormous love of Bach. Dad was on the Board of the [Dutch] Bach Society, where Anthon van der Horst conducted.³ At fifteen, I started studying music theory privately with van der Horst. Yes, that I enjoyed very much. I often pulled stops for him at concerts. That’s really where my love of organs comes from.

 

J-PK: You went to study in Basel. Would it not have been logical to study in Amsterdam with van
der Horst?

GL: Maybe, but harpsichord was high on my wish list too. And the Schola Cantorum in Basel was at the time the only place in the world where one could study early music in all its facets, including chamber music and theory. It pulled like a magnet: I had to go there.

That was in 1947, only a few years after the war, and Holland was really still a poor country at the time. There was very little foreign currency, so studying in Switzerland was not all that easy. Thankfully, my father had business contacts, so from time to time, I went on bicycle from Basel to Schaffhausen to pick up an envelope with Swiss francs . . .⁴ I studied both organ and harpsichord with Eduard Müller, for whom I still have the greatest admiration and respect.

 

J-PK: Can you tell me more about him?

GL: He was first and foremost an excellent organist, who in addition was asked to teach harpsichord, I think. He was the organist at a terrible organ, but whenever a new tracker was built—Kuhn or Metzler in those days—we went to try it out, right away, you know.

The way people played Bach on the organ was still pretty dreadful at the time, with many registration changes, swell box, that kind of thing. But even then, Müller played completely differently. For example, he would tell you that it was common to change manuals in this-or-that bar, but that that was simply impossible, because you would break the tenor line in two! So I learned from him to analyze very ‘cleanly’ and to use that as the basis for my performance.

Harpsichord playing was still very primitive in those days. The instruments I played on in Basel were simply awful. It wasn’t until later that I came to know historic instruments. The idea that you used different types of harpsichords—French, Italian—didn’t play a role at all. I did collect pictures of historic instruments, but really without wondering what they might sound like.

Strangely enough, Müller was not at all interested in historic instruments as far as harpsichords went. On the other hand, he was very precise with articulation. You had to play exactly the way Bach wrote. Bach was the order of the day. A little piece by Froberger or Couperin every now and then, but mostly Bach, really. August Wenzinger,⁵ with whom I studied chamber music, was much broader in that regard. He played the whole repertoire: French, Italian, and the seventeenth century as well. We also had to sing in the choir, Senfl and Josquin, but also monody. That was a revelation. We had Ina Lohr,⁶ who was the first to use the old solmisation system again as the basis of her theory classes. Everything was incredibly interesting.

Look, things were kind of black-and-white at the time. On the one hand there was Romanticism, and that was horrible, so you wanted something different. The Neue Sachlichkeit played an important role. I think I actually played very dryly in those days.

 

J-PK: Many people would argue that you still played dryly many years later.

GL: Everyone is free to think whatever they want, but I personally think I have allowed much more emotion in my performances over the years.

 

J-PK: Were there still others who influenced you as a young musician?

GL: [Immediately] Hans Brandts Buys.⁷ We lived in Laren, near Hilversum [between Amsterdam and Utrecht—JPK]. I played cello as well, and I sometimes played the cello in cantata performances he directed. I never studied with him, but he had an enormous library, most of all about Bach. In one word: a dream. I used to spend hours there, browsing, making notes. Brandts Buys also had a two-manual harpsichord, something quite unusual at the time. He had an enormous respect for what the composer had written. I learned that from him.

After my studies I got to know Alfred Deller, the famous countertenor.⁸ I had heard a tiny gramophone record of his and was incredibly impressed. It showed that singing could be more than a dead tone with tons of vibrato. Diction: that was what it was all about. The tone helps the diction. Deller was a master in this regard. That is incredibly important to me. We organists and harpsichordists have to think dynamically too. We have to shape the tone.

 

J-PK: After your studies you became Professor of Harpsichord in Vienna.

GL: Well, I mean, I taught there and yes, it was called ‘Professor.’ I actually went to Vienna to study conducting, even though it did not interest me very much. I don’t even remember now why I did it. It may have been at the urging of my parents. Organ and harpsichord, how was one ever going to make a living that way? With conducting one could at least pay the bills, that kind of thing.

But the most important thing in Vienna was the library. I’d sit there all day, from opening till close, copying music—by hand of course—and making notes from treatises. I still use that material today. Much has been published since, but not nearly everything.

 

J-PK: What kind of things did
you copy?

GL: Oh, everything. Froberger, Kuhnau, Fischer . . . Tablature too, I could read that easily back then—I’m completely out of practice now. I also copied lute tablatures, just out of interest.

In Vienna I got to know Harnoncourt.⁹ We were just about the only people interested in early music and played an awful lot together, viol consort also. That was relatively easy for me because of my cello background.

 

But after three years Leonhardt had had enough of the Austrian capital and returned to the Netherlands, where he was appointed Professor of Harpsichord at the Amsterdam Conservatory. At the end of the 1950s he became organist of the Christiaan Müller organ of the Eglise Wallonne, the French Protestant Church of Amsterdam.

 

GL: My wife is francophone and we both belong to the Reformed Church, so we went to the French church as a matter of course. I knew the organ already, but it was in very poor condition at the time. The action was terrible and it played very heavily. So when the position became vacant, I said that I was willing to do it on the condition that the organ would be restored properly. That was fine. I knew Ahrend already, so he restored the organ, with Cor Edskes as consultant.¹⁰ 

 

J-PK: How did you meet Ahrend?

GL: I don’t remember exactly. In any case, I had seen an organ they had built in Veldhausen.¹¹ That was a revelation back then, but I have recently played the organ again and it was still a revelation. That doesn’t happen very often, that one thinks the same way about an organ so many years later.

 

J-PK: What made Ahrend & Brunzema so special?

GL: I don’t know. They just understood organs somehow. They had ears and just knew how to get the sound they wanted.

 

J-PK: Ahrend has often been criticized for imposing too much of his own personality on an instrument when restoring it, for example
in Groningen.

GL: Well, I mean, he does have a strong personality, and in the Martini [the Martinikerk at Groningen—JPK], a great deal had to be reconstructed. In such a situation one can hardly blame anybody for putting his mark on a restoration.

 

J-PK: Was that also the case in Amsterdam?

GL: No. A lot of Müller pipes had survived in excellent condition and the new pipes Ahrend provided matched the old pipes very well indeed. Yes, the Waalse [Eglise Wallonne—JPK] is definitely the best-preserved Müller in my opinion—not that there is a lot of choice, unfortunately.¹² 

 

J-PK: You made a whole series of recordings on the organ, including composers such as Froberger, Couperin, and de Grigny . . . 

GL: . . . who really don’t belong there at all. You are totally right about that and I really don’t remember why we did it. Perhaps Telefunken wanted some diversity in the repertoire. On the other hand [he continues almost triumphantly], what should I have played on the Amsterdam Müller instead?

 

J-PK: The Genevan psalter, I suppose.

GL: [He laughs, covering his mouth with his hand.] Precisely—or Quirinus van Blankenburg.¹³

 

J-PK: As a harpsichord teacher, you have had a tremendous influence on a whole generation of harpsichordists from all over the world.

GL: Oh, come on . . . For a long time, I was simply the only one.

 

J-PK: Have you never wanted to teach organ?

GL: I’ve never really thought about that. But even for harpsichord I never had more than five students at the same time. That was more than enough. The rest of the time I was so busy with concerts and recordings.

[The conversation moves in a different direction; Leonhardt clearly wants to discuss something else.]

I don’t know if it’s on your list, but the difference between organ and harpsichord, I wouldn’t mind saying something about that. Look, the harpsichord has in a way stopped at some point in time. The organ went on, but changed completely. In my view, organ and harpsichord are intimately connected. To a large extent, the instruments shared the same literature and performers played both instruments. That stops at the end of the eighteenth century and in my mind it’s only because of its function in church that the organ has continued to exist. In other words, without the church, the organ would have died out as well. Interest in the organ at the beginning of the nineteenth century was practically zero, really.

All right, so the organ continued to exist. But over time, it changed so much that, really, it became a different instrument, at least in my view. That is a problem for the present-day organist that really does not exist for harpsichordists. How can a man serve so many masters? I don’t believe that is possible; at least, I can’t.

The problem is, we aren’t theorists. Musicologists can study different styles—that’s not a problem. But we musicians have to take the work of art in our hands . . . [an expressive gesture] . . .
and present it. That is something completely different; it demands much more ability to empathize. I have to say, when all is said and done, the colleagues whom I admire the most tend to be those who specialize at least to some extent.

[I mention an early-music specialist who at the same time is a jack-of-all-trades. Yes, Leonhardt agrees: a great musician.] But even so, you can hear that he plays so much other music as well.¹⁴ It’s a problem, of course. Take the flute: How much literature is there from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Three Bach sonatas! We harpsichordists can bathe in a wealth of early music. One can easily spend a lifetime with it.

 

J-PK: Don’t you think the old composers are so far away from us that it is more difficult to empathize with them?

GL: No, I don’t. If you really study the time and the art of the period in all its facets—painting, architecture, and so forth—a composer like Froberger can come just as close as, say, Widor. And look, Widor has become early music too by now. One has to study that just as well. It’s no longer our own time; it’s not self-evident.

 

J-PK: You had to practically put yourself in Bach’s shoes when you played the lead role in Jean-Marie Straub’s film, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.

GL: It wasn’t acting, you know. Performing in costume, that’s all. Just because I happened to do the same things as Bach did: playing organ and harpsichord, and conducting. Well, except for composing, of course. [A gesture of profound awe.] I found it a very respectful film, it was made with a lot of integrity, and I enjoyed contributing to it, also because Bach has determined my whole career.

 

J-PK: I think Frans Brüggen once said in an interview, ‘Leonhardt is Bach.’¹⁵ 

GL: [A gesture makes clear that he couldn’t disagree more.] I consider Bach the greatest composer who ever lived. But I also see him as a composer in his time, not just as some remarkable phenomenon. In that sense, I’m not a Bach man.

 

J-PK: Your career has mostly focused on harpsichord playing and conducting.

GL: Well, no, not conducting, that has always been a side path; I don’t do it more often than once or twice a year. The Bach cantata project, too, was really only one or two weeks a year. Conducting to me is in a way the same as playing chamber music, except I happen not to be playing.

J-PK: My point is that as an organist you have been relatively free to do whatever you wanted.

GL: That is true. The harpsichord is my livelihood; the organ is in a sense a luxury. It’s also a different kind of instrument. [Enthusiastically:] One can be crazy about an organ, I think. Harpsichords don’t really have that. That is because an organ usually has a much stronger personality than a harpsichord; that is part of what makes it such a fantastic instrument. On harpsichord, one has to work much harder to get a beautiful sound. A good organ does half the job for you if not more. A good organ dictates—in the best sense of the word—much more than a harpsichord.

 

J-PK: With all your interest in past centuries it seems that there is one aspect of our time that interests you in particular.

GL: I think I know what you mean.

 

J-PK: Fast cars?

GL: [Big smile—for a moment he looks almost boyish.] As the Germans say, Wenn schon, denn schon.¹⁶ If one needs a car at all, surely a beautiful one is better than an ugly one. I just got a new Alfa 166, three liters, and it really is a great pleasure. It’s a rather fiery one, you know, the kind that just wants to go out for a ride. In the city, he has to stay on the leash, but out of town . . . Yes, a real pleasure. ν

 

* I am also grateful to Hans Fidom, the former editor of Het Orgel who suggested that I interview Leonhardt. Finally, I thank my wife Brigitte Pohl-Knijff and the following colleagues, students, and friends for their comments on earlier drafts of this translation: Margaret Barger, Robert Brown, Jim Nicholls, Jodie Ostenfeld, and Paul Thwaites. For any dutchisms that remain I take sole responsibility.  

1. Gerhard Woehl built the new Bach organ (IV/61) for the Thomaskirche in the Bach year 2000.

2. The founder of the firm, Johann Christoph Neupert (who was apprenticed to Johann Baptist Streicher in Vienna) and his descendants were avid collectors of historic keyboard instruments. Still in business today, the firm built its first harpsichord in 1906.

3. Dutch organist, conductor, and composer Anthon van der Horst (1899–1965) was conductor of the Dutch Bach Society from 1931. He taught organ at the Amsterdam Conservatory, where his students included Albert de Klerk, Piet Kee, Bernard Bartelink, Wim van Beek, and Charles de Wolff. 

4. Schaffhausen, on the Swiss-German border, is some 60 miles from Basel.

5. August Wenzinger (1905–1996) was a cellist, viol player, conductor, and a pioneer of historically informed performance practice. He taught both cello and viol at the Schola Cantorum from 1933, where his most famous student (apart from Leonhardt) was no doubt viol player Jordi Savall, who succeeded him in 1974.    

6. Ina Lohr (1903–1983) studied violin in Amsterdam and theory and composition in Basel. One of the founders of the Schola Cantorum, she taught theory there on the basis of solmisation. She was also assistant conductor to Paul Sacher with the Basel Chamber Choir.

7. Johann Sebastian (Hans) Brandts Buys (1905–1959) came from a large Dutch family of musicians, which included some fine composers. A pioneer of harpsichord playing in the Netherlands, Brandts Buys was also active as a conductor. As a performer and musicologist he specialized in the music of his namesake, J.S. Bach. Brandts Buys had an unusually strong interest in historically informed performance and was the first in the Netherlands to conduct the St. Matthew Passion with a small choir and orchestra (1947). Leonhardt presumably took part in performances with the Hilversumse Cantate Vereniging (Hilversum Cantata Society), which Brandts Buys led during the war years 1943–1945.

8. The countertenor Alfred Deller (1912–1979) was central in reviving and popularizing the countertenor in the twentieth century. He founded the Deller Consort in 1948. Benjamin Britten famously wrote the role of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Deller (1960), who recorded it with the composer conducting.  

9. Nikolaus Harnoncourt (b. 1929), cellist, later conductor, founder of the period-instrument ensemble Concentus Musicus Wien (1953, first public performance 1957). Harnoncourt’s Concentus and the Leonhardt Consort collaborated for a recording of Bach’s St. John Passion (1965) and shared the complete recording of Bach’s sacred cantatas for Telefunken’s Das alte Werk. 

10. Jürgen Ahrend (b. 1930), German organ builder, active 1954–2005. In the 1950s and ’60s Ahrend and his then-associate Gerhard Brunzema (1927–1992) were perhaps the most serious, consistent, and successful in reviving the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North-German organ style.  

11. In Bentheim county, Germany, near the Dutch border. The organ was built by Ahrend & Brunzema in 1957, and enlarged with a Rückpositiv by the Dutch firm Mense Ruiter in 1997.

12. Other surviving Müller organs include those in Haarlem, Leeuwarden, Beverwijk, and the Kapelkerk at Alkmaar. 

13. Apart from more imaginative works such as the cantata L’Apologie des femmes (The Women’s Apology, 1715), Quirinus van Blankenburg (1654–1739) published a Harpsichord and Organ Book of Reformed Psalms and Church Hymns (The Hague 1732).

14. Fortunately, I no longer recall whom I mentioned to Leonhardt.

15. The Dutch recorder player, flautist, and conductor Frans Brüggen (b. 1934) performed extensively with Leonhardt in such groups as Quadro Amsterdam and the trio with cellist Anner Bijlsma.

16. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’

Gavin Black

August interlude

I have decided to take a partial break from my sequence of columns about helping students to develop fingerings and instead write about a few miscellaneous matters that have been on my mind. These are all small but interesting things that are hard to fit into columns that are about something well defined. So this month’s column is a grab bag or smorgasbord. I am influenced to construct this sort of column right now by the following confluence: it happens that I am writing this during a real heat wave (early summer mid-90s temperatures, with lots of sun and little wind), and this column will be distributed in August, when, around where I live, this sort of weather would be more typical. So it feels like time for a bit of summer relaxation and catching up.

A couple of things that I am writing about this month tie in with the business of teaching fingering. That may not be too surprising, since, as I wrote a few months ago, there is no such thing as keyboard playing without fingering. I will note these connections, but not go into them at great length, and then pick up those threads as well in the coming months.

As I looked over my notes about some of these points and thought about a few more things that have passed through my mind recently, I noticed that some of what I want to discuss is even more personal than usual: my playing, my own reactions to things, some of what I think has gone well in my work, and some of what has gone not so well. I believe most of us find it challenging to say openly: “Yes, I did this well. This was a success.” or “That didn’t work out. I am not (yet?) good at that.” Grappling with framing certain things in one of those ways is a reminder that everything that we do performing and teaching is a result and a reflection of our makeup and experiences. It is extraordinarily important that we remember that this is true of our students as well.

 

Forced into sight-reading . . .

I recently played a harpsichord recital for which I forgot to bring some of my music. (Is this going to be a trend? Do I have to do something about it? Not sure yet.) In particular, I simply didn’t have any way of obtaining a copy of a Froberger toccata that I had programmed. This is a piece that I have played in recital a dozen times or more over the last couple of years, more on harpsichord than on organ. It is also a piece that I know extremely well. I could probably write out at least chunks of it, and write in what I know to be my fingerings for those bits.

But that doesn’t mean I could play the piece from memory. (This is my first experience of bumping up against this particular practical disadvantage to my preferred approach of not performing from memory.) I noticed that in a Froberger volume that I had with me, from which I was going to play a suite, there was another toccata in the same key as my missing one. That meant that I could play it instead of the programmed one without making the printed program inaccurate or misleading. 

The only problem was that I had never learned this piece. I have probably read through it at some point in the past, since I have specialized in Froberger for decades and have read through all or close to all of his music. But if so, I didn’t remember that, and it would have been years ago. But I read through the piece once during my tuning and warming-up session and decided I could go ahead and play it in the concert. I did so, and it went fine: basically accurate, a wrong note or two, but not necessarily more than I or another performer might make in any piece; rhythms certainly accurate; tempos in the faster bits perhaps slower than I would want them following a normal amount of preparation, but not by much. It was a successful performance, though I hope that it was not as effective as it would have been if I had worked on it. If it was, then that casts some doubt upon my whole normal learning and preparation strategy!

So, what did I get out of this? I am certainly not recounting this to suggest that I am a particularly great sight-reader. Really I am not. I figure that by the standards of professional keyboard performers, I am probably about a “B-plus” sight-reader, and if not exactly that, then more likely “B” than “A-minus.” And I suspect that the several other toccatas in the volume would have been a stretch for me to sight-read in performance. They looked more intricate. It was a lucky coincidence for me that the one in the correct key was the simplest-looking one. But it is also important not to remain trapped in a sense of what we cannot do or what we are not good at. When I was in college, it would have been utterly out of the question for me to perform this piece without having practiced it for weeks. Could I have performed it after one read-through fifteen years ago? Five? I am not sure. But I was correct to intuit that I could do so now. 

We should also never remain trapped in a sense of what our students cannot do. What they (and we) can and cannot do should be changing all the time. While I was actually performing this piece, the feeling of playing it was more comfortable and serene than what I often experience while performing a piece that I know well, that I have prepared obsessively, that I feel ready to perform or record, that I consider part of my identity as a player. Why? How is this even possible? There has to be something to learn there about concentration, expectation, and anxiety. I do not yet know exactly what that is. It must start from the awareness that I had to pay close attention all of the time, every fraction of a second, like driving on a slippery road. But what about that would be good to import into the act of playing a well-prepared piece? Would there be a down side to doing so? Less spontaneity? My thinking about this is new and evolving, especially since this was the most recent concert that I have played as I sit here writing.

This also reminds me that there is such a thing as sight-reading fingering, or even a sight-reading approach to fingering. Fingering will be a different sort of phenomenon depending on whether you do or don’t know what is coming up next. To some extent this has to tie in with patterns and templates for how to play what sort of passage. How does this, or doesn’t this, have the potential to inform work on carefully planned fingerings?

 

 . . . and improvisation.

I am not much of an improviser. Long ago I was intimidated by improvisation and never even considered studying it systematically. That may or may not be a loss or a problem for me—after all, nobody does everything. However, I can play rather meandering chord progressions that often sound perfectly pleasing and that serve to enable me to explore the sounds of instruments without needing to put music in front of me. This very limited improvisation, or noodling around, is really derived from my continuo-playing experience. I am in effect generating bass lines, more or less at random, and then realizing them as continuo parts. I recently noticed that when I do this with a pedal line as the bass line, I find it almost impossible to involve my left hand. The influence of the feel of ordinary continuo playing is so strong that I can’t get any intuition going as to how to add chords and notes other than in the right hand. I find this interesting, just as a kind of archeological dig into my modest history of improvisation. But it also makes me think that I should try to make myself sit on my right hand when playing this sort of thing and force my left hand to get involved. Furthermore, I should urge any student doing this sort of thing to emphasize the left hand, or at least to be sure to give it equal weight.

 

Learning a magnum opus

I have played Bach’s French Overture, BWV 831, in three recitals over the last several months. This is a piece that I have loved for many years. I initially tried playing it when I first had regular access to a harpsichord on which to practice, about 40 years ago. It was beyond challenging for me at that point, so it pleases me that I can work on it, learn it, and perform it now. In order to do so, I have had to get past a little bit of the trap mentioned above: getting stuck in a sense of what I cannot do. But what has been most interesting to me about actually playing this piece in concert is that it is long, about 40 minutes, and quite intricate, dense, and varied. Since I have played many concerts that are a lot longer than that, even those that have halves longer than that sometimes, it never occurred to me that stamina might be an issue. However, in each of the three performances, my playing of the last movement, a sprightly and excited piece with the non-traditional title of “Echo,” has been influenced (really I should say undermined) by stamina issues. I believe that what happens is that as I get through the end of the previous movement, the Gigue, I feel my energy and/or concentration lessen, and, in trying to boost it back up, I start the Echo too fast. It is then hectic, helter-skelter, and more prone to note inaccuracy than I would like. Although I identified this concern after the first time I played the piece in recital, I was not able to prevent it from happening each of the next two times as well, though it has been progressively less severe. 

I have learned from this that the little opportunities to regroup in a concert that are afforded by breaks between pieces are significant and useful. Also, regardless of how well learned the various sections and movements of a program are, and no matter how tempting (and genuinely important) it is to focus on practicing hard passages, it is a good idea not to neglect playing through the whole thing. (Not that I have neglected that completely in preparing for these concerts, but I think that I underestimated how much of it I should do.) This reminds me to review my approach to any similar issues with my students.

 

The familiar and the unfamiliar

A few months ago I played a short lunchtime recital at the Princeton University Chapel. This is an extraordinary venue, for music or for anything else, and home to a justly famous and wonderful organ. But for me it is something more: a place where I spent thousands of hours playing the organ during the years when I was an undergraduate at the university. In the years since then, I have mostly pursued performance on mechanical-action organs and on harpsichord and clavichord, and the large Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner/Mander organ is not the most familiar sort of beast to me nowadays. On the other hand, this particular organ, rebuilt though it has been, and most especially this setting, evoke as much feeling of familiarity and as much deep nostalgia as any place or any instrument could. I was playing, in part, music of Moondog that day. Moondog is my second specialty along with music of the Baroque. I first encountered all of his pieces that I played this recent day during or shortly before my time as a student at Princeton, and I played them all frequently in the chapel back then. This was a powerful reminder to me that individual experience is what most informs our feelings about music, as about everything else, and that no two people—teachers, students, listeners, players—ever bring the same set of experiences to the way that they take in music.

I was also reminded that everything about technique, as well as about interpretation, is in part about the instrument. (That is, the instrument as a separate entity alongside the music, the interpretive stance of the player, the player’s habits and preferences, and so on.) Of course I know this, and have written about it. But this was a vivid real-life experience of it, with interesting twists because of the unusual blend of familiar and unfamiliar.

 

Hearing wrong notes 

I recently heard about a (not particularly recent) study that showed quite systematically that most listeners don’t consciously hear or notice most wrong notes. The study involved asking several talented graduate student pianists to record several piano pieces. These were pieces that they had not studied before, and that they were given a fairly short time to learn. This was to try to secure enough wrong notes to make the study meaningful. The listeners were undergraduate pianists, some of whom were and some of whom weren’t familiar with the pieces. The gist of the result was that the listeners reported only a very small fraction of the wrong notes. (Here is the link to the article about this study to which someone directed my attention: http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/how-many-of-our-mistakes-do-audience….) 

This study tended to confirm my feeling that we as players exaggerate the importance of wrong notes. Of course there are questions. Does what this study found about piano apply equally well to organ, to harpsichord, or to instruments outside of our specific concern here, or to singing? Should we actually embrace for ourselves or for our students, caring less about accuracy than we might feel required to do? Is that a slippery slope? Preparation and practicing, and planning fingering, are in part about striving for accuracy. In fact it is easy to fall into thinking that that is all that they are about. Is there a way to juggle successfully both motivating ourselves and our students to try with all our might to prepare for extraordinary accuracy and wearing the need for that accuracy very lightly? Does a clear-cut study like this add to our intuitive sense? All of that planning, to the extent that it is not just about reliable accuracy, is about gaining enough control to do what we want to do expressively. Can we separate out those two goals and emphasize one more than the other? Are there differences in fingering choices that might arise out of this distinction? Or different ways of approaching the whole matter of fingering choices? How can we best help students sort this out?

 

The next generation

A short while ago I was visited in my harpsichord studio by a few students of a fine local piano teacher. These students were second- and third-graders. After they had played around a bit on several instruments, one of them commented to me that she liked the antique Italian harpsichord the best. That made sense to me, as a lot of people have that reaction. She then said, in explanation, “it has an intelligent sound.” I was really taken with that way of putting it or that way of hearing the sound. I had never encountered that particular image before. It resonated with one of my ways of experiencing instrument sound, especially that of organs and harpsichords.

I want to have the subjective experience, if I listen closely and without distraction, that the sonority seems to me to come directly from, or in a sense to be, a sentient being. Although this young girl had no prior experience with harpsichords, it reminded me of the description by the very experienced Keith Hill of clavichord sound, which I quoted in last April’s column. It includes the statement that “clavichords should have the sound of thought.”

Next month I will buckle down, so to speak, and get back to work on our extended look at fingering.