Olivier Messiaen Competition: Church of St. Pothin and the Auditorium-Orchestre National de Lyon, Lyon, France, June 17–23, 2019

At the Three Choirs Festival, Hereford Cathedral, England

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

The Three Choirs Festival celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2015. With a brief hiatus during each world war, this is the longest-running non-competitive classical music festival in the world. The festival is so named for the three cathedral choirs of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford. For more information, see Lorraine Brugh’s article on the 2018 festival at Hereford Cathedral in the February issue of The Diapason, pages 20–21. The festival included a recital by Olivier Latry on the cathedral organ.

This interview took place in the Hereford Cathedral gardens after Latry’s early morning practice time. His program for July 31, 2018, included: Prelude and Fugue in E-flat, BWV 552, Johann Sebastian Bach; Choral No. 2 in B Minor, César Franck; Clair de lune, Claude Debussy, transcribed Alexandre Cellier; Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, opus 7, number 3, Marcel Dupré; Postlude pour l’office des Complies, Jehan Alain; Evocation, Thierry Escaich; improvisation on a submitted theme.

Lorraine Brugh: I came in this morning to hear you practice a bit. It sounded wonderful. Is the organ tuned above 440?

Olivier Latry: Yes, a bit. It is always the case in summer when the temperature is high.

I am curious about your recital. Is this the first time you played at the Three Choirs Festival?

No, I was here fifteen years ago for the festival, so this is my second time. I have played recitals on all three of the cathedral organs, but only once before at the festival.

Your program tomorrow includes the Franck Choral in B Minor, a favorite of mine.

Yes, it works very well on this organ.

I’m curious about the Debussy transcription. How did that become an organ piece? It is your transcription?

The piece was originally transcribed for the organ by Alexandre Cellier, a contemporary of Debussy’s. In fact it was normal at that time, when a piece was composed, to make transcriptions of these new works to other instruments. It helped the publisher to sell more copies of the music. Many publishers did that. There are other Debussy pieces that were published that way. Vierne did the same thing with Rachmaninov. With transcriptions we often have to adjust the music. I don’t think it’s a problem to transcribe a transcription, since it was already on the way toward that.

I’d like to hear about Gaston Litaize as a teacher, and the way you have followed him in his footsteps.

Let me say first why I went to Litaize because it is important. I grew up in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in the north of France. I began to study the organ in 1974.

The year after, a new organ had just been built for the cathedral there, a very nice instrument by Schwenkedel in the German style. There were a lot of concerts there at that time.

We heard all the great organists. Pierre Cochereau came to play, Philippe Lefebvre, Litaize. Among them it was Litaize who impressed me the most. He had a way of playing the organ that was viril. (He looks up the word in a French dictionary.) In English it is virile, manly. (Latry makes a growl like a lion.)

I was so impressed because the organ sounded like I hadn’t heard it before. We knew that the organ wasn’t the master, he was the master. He played his own music, Franck on this German instrument, the Prelude and Fugue in D Major by Bach, and Clérambault. It was really great. Then I decided I wanted to study with that man at the Academy of Saint-Maur. He was very nervous, much like his playing in fact. Never relaxing, always speaking with a very big voice as well. He was impressive.

For my first lesson at the Academy of Saint-Maur, I was 16 and went on the train with my parents. He was not there that day. He had me play for his assistant. Then the next day he called me and said gruffly, “I heard that you are very good. We will meet next week, and you can play for me.”

So I went there, and he asked me to prepare the first movement of the [Bach] first trio sonata. I said OK, but I thought it wasn’t enough. He didn’t know anything about me so I prepared the whole trio, and then I also played the Bach B-minor Prelude and Fugue.

He first gave me a musicianship test, to see what I could hear, what kinds of chords he played. It wasn’t a problem to do that, it was almost like a game! Then, during the Bach, he made me play an articulation I didn’t like. I didn’t know what to say. I wondered if I should say I don’t like that, or just say yes. I said, “I don’t really like that. Would it be possible to do something else?” He said gruffly, “Ah, very good! Yes, of course, you can do that.” He was so happy because I had my own way.

That was taking a risk.

Of course, especially since it was the first time I played for him. From that day, really, it was very nice, because Litaize could teach his students at different levels. For those who didn’t know anything or have their own musical personality, he would say, “No, do it like this . . . that,” making everything very precise. When someone had enough of their own ideas, then he said they could do it on their own, which was very good. In some ways he taught me many things.

I remember some very nice teaching on the Franck Second Choral. It was just wonderful. The French Classical literature was also very nice. Then we became closer. The second year I went to Paris. I lived with a friend of Litaize who had an organ in his home. Litaize didn’t want to go back home during his two days of teaching in Paris, so he also stayed in that home. He spent all evening speaking about music, listening to music, which for me was very nice. I heard a lot of stories from the 1930s; it was great, great, great. He was also very nice to all of his students. He arranged concerts for his students, and he set up invitations for us to play recitals. The first concert I gave in Holland was because of him. He just gave my name, and that was it. The same thing happened in Germany, and that was very funny.

He said he had accepted an invitation to play in the cathedral in Regensburg, but he didn’t want to go there. He said to me, “Here is my program. You practice my program, and three weeks before the concert I will tell the people that I am ill and I can’t go there. Then I will give your name, and you will play it.”

Can we talk about Notre-Dame? You became one of the titulars early in your life. Can you speak about how the position is for you?

It’s just the center of my life (laughs) although I am not there very often. The three of us titular organists rotate, playing once every three weeks.

I see that you are on to play this weekend.

Yes. We make the schedule at least three or four years in advance; we are currently scheduled until 2022, so we know when we are free. If we need to be away, it is no problem to switch with a colleague.

Notre-Dame is the center of my life for several reasons. First, as you said, I began there early in my life, and it was quite unexpected.

Wasn’t it a competition for that position?

No, there was not a competition for that position. When Cochereau died, Jean-Jacques Grunenwald at St. Sulpice died almost a half year before Cochereau, so that meant that both big instruments had a vacancy for the titular organist at about the same time.

Cardinal Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris, made a rule for hiring the organists for the entire Archdiocese of Paris. We young organists all competed for that, to create a list for the Archdiocese of Paris. This is what the competition was for. I just applied, and was thinking, because I was the second assistant to François-Henri Houbart at La Madeleine, that perhaps there might be another opening there. I played some of the Masses there, and I thought François might move to Notre-Dame. He was one of the best organists in Paris. He first applied and then pulled out. He felt it was better for him to stay at La Madeleine than to be one of four organists at Notre-Dame.

In fact, I didn’t know that, but I suspected that many of the finest organists would apply for Notre-Dame, and that would create vacancies in other parishes. But a few weeks before the competition, I just got a letter saying I was chosen for the competition for Notre-Dame. I was surprised and wondered why. I think it was because I had already been a finalist twice for the Chartres competition, so I was already known by some of the organ world. In addition there was a scandal related to the second competition. In fact I was more known for not winning the prize than had I won the prize. Many people as well as the newspapers were on my side. They all reported that I didn’t win the prize, so everyone was talking about it.

That’s a good way to get famous if it works.

In fact, it was normal, well, not normal, but at least it happened many times in those years that competitions were contested. The Rostropovich competition, the Besançon conductors’ competition, which happened at exactly the same time, also the Chopin Competition, where Martha Argerich left the jury, because Ivo Pogorelich was kicked out.

Was it politics?

We never know. I was also known by the clergy because I was teaching at the Catholic Institute of Paris, so that’s probably why I went on the list for Notre-Dame.

I was so sure that I would not be chosen that I was totally relaxed. I just played. I almost never improvised at that time. The first time I improvised three hours in a row in my life was at Notre-Dame for the rehearsal for the competition. It was very funny. And it worked!

Evidently! That’s a good way to enter something, though, when you don’t think you have a chance.

It was not difficult afterwards, because I was ready technically, but I was only twenty-three. I had a lot of repertoire, but I wasn’t fully mature. With Litaize I played at least thirty to forty minutes of new music every week. I just wanted to spend my time learning repertoire.

Did he require that?

No, I just wanted to spend my time learning repertoire. I could learn pretty fast. It is how I was trained. If you are trained to learn fast, you can learn even faster. I remember, once on a Monday I started the Diptyque by Messiaen, and I spent nine hours that day, and I played it the next day for a lesson. I couldn’t do that now.

Do you think you have some unusual kind of memory or is that just how you were trained?

It is my training. I don’t have a photographic memory; that is actually my weakest kind of memory. Even so, visual memory would be the last kind I would use. When I see someone just use their visual memory it makes me nervous. I would use more tactile memory.

We call that muscle memory.

The best is always intellectual memory. I’ll come back to that.

When I began at Notre-Dame it was difficult because I was not ready for that kind of exposure to the public. When I played a concert before, perhaps forty a year or so, I had between eighty and two hundred people at a concert. Then, from one day to the next, it was never less than two hundred, and usually more. And why? I don’t play better or worse than yesterday, so why is it like this now? That is the first point.

The second point is that I discovered that people can be very tough. Many critics I had for a recording I made early attacked me for no reason. Just because I was there at Notre-Dame, I was the target. That was really difficult for the first two years, and then afterwards I was OK, I just said, ‘let’s go.’ Before that I was on my way to resigning. Some friends had said to me if I didn’t feel comfortable there, if I needed to protect myself more, perhaps I shouldn’t stay there. These were not organists who wanted to be there, they were just friends. Then I realized that I am an organist at Notre-Dame. I can’t leave it now. So I just changed my mind, and that was that. It was very hard.

Can we talk about your teaching and how much you do at the Conservatoire?

In fact, I started at Rheims, and then Saint Maur where I succeeded Litaize, and remained there for five years. Then I was approached by the Conservatoire in 1995. It was very funny because before that, I was assistant to Michel Chapuis. When he was retiring, the director of the Conservatoire asked if I would like to be one of the teachers. He wanted to divide the organ class in three different ways. One teacher would teach ancient music, i.e., the music up to Bach; another would teach Bach and after, including contemporary music; the third position would be for improvisation. He wanted me to be the teacher for Bach and contemporary music.

I said I wasn’t sure I wanted something like this because I like to teach every style of music. I don’t think it’s good to have some sort of specialization like that. One really needs to have a general approach to literature. He said that it was my choice, but think about it, and that if I didn’t want to do that, it was my decision. I was quite depressed about this and called my good friend Michel Bouvard. I said I had to tell him something, I was just asked to teach at the Conservatoire de Paris, and he let me speak.

Bouvard told me that he agreed with my approach not to specialize, and he said what he liked in music is what is common in all music. He let me speak for ten minutes, and then he said that the director had called him also. I didn’t know that! He wanted him to teach the early music part, and he would refuse because he didn’t want to do that. So we both refused. Then, finally, we decided to have an organ class with two teachers teaching all the literature.

The students can go to either teacher. It’s very nice, because it’s a different approach for the students. It is sometimes difficult for them, because Bouvard and I are never in agreement about interpretation. Often we have a student for one year, and then we switch, but it can be less, sometimes months or even one lesson. In fact, when they have the same piece with both teachers it is very funny because I might say, “Why do you do it like this?” and “It’s not right, you should do it like this.” And the same goes for Bouvard. The student wonders what they should do. It can be disturbing for the student in the beginning because they have to find their way, their own way. The only time we ask them to do something really as we want is when we both agree. Then they better do that.

It is very effective because we are friends, and don’t always agree, but we never fight, even over these twenty-three years. It is also a good thing for the students to see that we can disagree about some things. It is also good for the general idea of the organ world. It is not that we are only critical of one another. In fact since we have made these changes at the Conservatoire, other areas, the oboes, for example, have started sharing students. The best would be when the pianists will share students, but, for that, we will probably have to wait another hundred years.

It is nice because Bouvard and I have the same goal with the music but we always take it in different ways. We have a lot of discussion; we write and call each other five or six times a week and discuss and argue about musical points. We have long discussions.

That’s nice for the students, too, that they can see you dealing with each other in mutual respect.

Yes, I agree. Especially in Paris, where there are so many instruments and that long tradition of fine organists, it is important for the students to see and hear as many of the Parisian organists as possible, to meet them, hear their improvisations, like Thierry Escaich, as I did when I was a student. I went to Notre-Dame, to Madeleine, to Trinité. We encourage them to do that, too. Beyond that, though, we set up some exchange for the students to perform concerts, or to be an organist-in-residence. We have an exchange at the castle in Versailles. Not bad, eh?

Not bad at all!

Each student will play once on their weekly concert there in the French Classic tradition. For that they have five hours of rehearsal on the castle organ. The castle is closed, and they have the keys to the castle in their pocket. Can you imagine having that as a student?

It’s like heaven!

Yes, I think that too. This is one of the things that we do. We also have an exchange with the concert hall in Sapporo, Japan. We send a student there every year. They do teaching, playing concerts in the concert hall.

We have an exchange with the Catholic Cathedral in New Orleans, Louisiana. We send a student there the first Sunday in Advent, and they are in residence until the Sunday after Easter. They are playing for the choir there, also for Masses.

So they’re there for Mardi Gras. That’s rather dangerous.

(Laughter)

The Conservatoire makes the arrangements for this, but it is our decision to have this kind of exchange. We could just give our lessons, and that would be it. That is all that is required. We feel that it is so important for the students that we want them to have these experiences.

We also have now at Versailles a student in residence for a year there, and also at Notre-Dame. They play for the choir and other things. It would be like an organ scholar in the UK. They might accompany the choir, work with singers, do improvisations in the Mass, maybe play for Mass on the choir organ, anything that the professional organist would do.

At the Conservatoire we are trying to expand the students’ repertoire for the master’s students. They have to play fifty minutes of ‘virtuoso’ music the first year. This is music of their choice and proof that they can handle that. Then they play twenty minutes of music on the German Baroque organ, twenty minutes on the historical Italian organ from 1702 at the Conservatoire, then twenty minutes of French Classic music on the Versailles organ, to see how they react to different repertoire. Then for the master’s degree program they can choose the organ they want to play in Paris. They could say they’d like to play Vierne, Alain, or Florentz at Notre-Dame, or Messiaen at La Trinité, or Franck Three Chorals at St. Clothilde, or a Mass by Couperin at St. Gervais, and we arrange that.

I studied a few lessons with Chapuis one summer in Paris.

One really needs the instruments to do that.

And the teacher. He was wonderful.

Yes, he was. I also had lessons with him, together with the musicologist, Jean Saint-Arroman. Jean is still alive, in his eighties. He wrote a dictionary for French Classical music from 1651 to 1789. It is really incredible because so much information is there. Each time we have a question we just call him. Even when I would have a fight with Mr. Bouvard, we could call him up, and he would settle it! We will have a great project on the music by Raison next term at the Conservatoire, with all the approaches (old fingerings, story, religious and political context, figured bass, etc.) ending with two concerts.

I know one of the things you are interested in is new music.

Well, yes and no. What I love is music that is expressive, that brings something in an emotional way. So it could be something different for each piece of music. For instance, music can be angry. I don’t play music for that only. (laughs) I think sharing those emotions is important. It is also sharing in a spiritual way. Being an artist and an organist, I think we have that privilege to connect the emotional and the spiritual more than other instruments, even more than a pianist.

I like contemporary music that touches me. I play a lot of this music. Sometimes I just play it once, some I hope to play many times. The French composers like Thierry Escaich and Jean-Louis Florentz are so emotional. I also play a lot of music for organ and orchestra. It is a way to connect the organ to the real world of music. Otherwise the organ is always a satellite, only found in a church.

Those concerti help more people to be connected to the organ. I played a new piece by Michael Gandolfi for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I performed a piece by Gerald Levinson at the 2006 dedication of a new organ in Philadelphia.

In Montreal, we first premiered a piece by Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer. This piece was also performed in London and in Los Angeles under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen. It is important to me to have that kind of relation with orchestras and other musicians. I will play the Third Concerto by Thierry Escaich in Dresden, and then in 2020, I will play the Pascal Dusapin Concerto.

What is your relationship to the Dresden Philharmonie?

I have a position in residence there for two years, ending in June 2019. This allows us to do things we would never do otherwise. We will play a concert with the brass ensemble, Phil Blech of the Vienna Philharmonic, and they play wonderfully. We will also perform the same concert at the Musikverein in Vienna. Concert halls are important because some people don’t want to go into a church. Hearing an organ concert in a concert hall shouldn’t be a problem. In Paris we fight a lot to have organs in the concert halls. I just did a recording of transcriptions on the new organ at the Paris Philharmonie. It is an incredible organ. The CD Voyages is now available.

What would you like to say to American organists? Most of the readers are practicing organists or organ enthusiasts.

It is difficult to know, but what I would say is just hope and try to do our best. We need to convince people that the organ can really add to our life in many ways. I don’t know how it is in the United States with the relation to the clergy, but it can be complicated. I would say, at Notre-Dame, I only play the organ. I don’t have anything to do with the administration, with anything about running the cathedral. The organ is high, far away from everything. We are there, and if we don’t want to see the clergy, we can do that. It is better, though, to have a closer relationship.

The musicians go for an aperitif with the clergy after the Sunday Masses and we are all together. It is rather funny, because we talk about little details, and we can banter back and forth. We have mutual respect for each other, which allows us an easy rapport. It is a sort of communion between the priest, the choir, and the musicians. We rarely play written literature during the ritual action in the service. We cannot make the priest wait for two minutes because our chorale isn’t finished.

You time the organ music to the liturgical action?

Yes, so, for that, we usually improvise, and it is much better. We can improvise in the style of what we heard, in imitation of a motet by the choir, or the sermon. Sometimes the clergy react to what we do. After a prelude or a sermon, the priest might say he heard something from the organ and responds in the moment.

So the priests assume there is a dialogue going on with the music?

Yes, of course. It works both ways. It is not possible to do something against one another. We can do everything. The music isn’t something to just make people quiet; it can make them cry or be angry. Usually after the sermon we do something soft, on the Voix céleste or something similar. However it is not a problem to improvise for two minutes on the full organ, even clusters, if it is a response to what the priest said. We have never heard a priest comment that it is too loud. This can only happen with a kind of relationship that allows everything to be open for discussion.

We have an organ that has a lot of possibilities. We have to exploit all those possibilities rather than follow a prescribed response just because it’s the middle of the Mass. The context is not always the same. It is our job to create the atmosphere for the service.

One of my favorite times is the introit for the 10 a.m. Gregorian Mass. 11:30 is the polyphonic Mass, which is especially for tourists, and the evening Mass is the cardinal Mass, most like a parish Mass. Notre Dame is not a parish, but that is when the local people come. From the introit of the first Mass we have Gregorian texts and their interpretations. I read the texts before the improvisation. The texts will be the source for a ten-minute improvisation. It is like a symphonic poem. We can bring people to the subject of the day.

Let’s talk about memorization, because it is so important how to learn to learn. We try to do this with memorization, especially at the Conservatoire, because people are scared. We say that a memory slip is like playing a wrong note. Don’t be scared if you get lost. If you know how to come back to the music and learn the technique to do so, you won’t have a problem. It is also a question of confidence. If you are confident, there is no problem.

It is like riding a bike. One must know first how to memorize the technical way. For me the best way to memorize is to have all the connections together. Memorization is like a wall. When you see a wall, one sees that the stones are never the same size. In fact, the actual musical notes are one level of the stones. Another level is the harmony, another is the fingerings, and then the movements, the music. All combined makes the big wall. Then, if there is one step missing you are still OK. If you have too many holes, then the wall falls down. So it is important to be sure that everything is in place.

One must know what is the fingering there, without moving the fingers. Be able to copy the music down like it is in the score, to make sure it is the same as the score. What I do for the students, because they are so scared, is I say “stop” while they are playing. I ask if they know where they are, and ask them to pick up the music two bars later.

Then, finally I’d like to finish by talking about memorization with Litaize. We attended each other’s lessons with him because we were all friends. He didn’t require it but we wanted to. We were there at the same time. I listened to the lessons, and it was very nice. When he wanted to make an example to people, he could play, at the right tempo, the place in the music he wanted to demonstrate. It was like he had a film of the music going on in his mind, and he could play anywhere he wished. I do that with the students, and it is so effective. It is even better with a trio sonata. I ask the student to play, and then I turn one manual off and have them continue. This teaches them that they can go anywhere.

They have learned the music deeply.

Yes. Once you have the music in your head, then it is easy to practice all the time. You don’t need an organ to practice. Of course, you have to learn the notes on a piano or organ. Once it’s in your head you can practice while you’re walking, in the shower, sleeping. One can practice twenty-four hours a day.

It’s time we bring this to a close, and I think our readers will be interested in hearing what you have said today. I appreciate the time you have taken today to meet me the day before your recital. I look forward to hearing your recital tomorrow. Best wishes.

Thank you very much.

Editor’s note: On Monday, April 15, the world watched as Notre-Dame Cathedral of Paris suffered a catastrophic fire that has damaged much of the historic building. Some of the edifice and its pipe organs have survived in a state that continues to be assessed for eventual restoration.

Mr. Latry recorded a compact disc on the cathedral organ in January, the last CD recorded before the fire. Released by La Dolce Vita, Bach to the Future features the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. For information, readers may visit: www.ladolcevita.com. The disc is also available from www.amazon.com, and other resources.

Various news media sources of the world have reported that numerous donations have been made already to rebuild the cathedral. However, Mr. Latry has pointed out that a very different and very real problem exists as the 67 employees of the cathedral are now without an income. Those who wish to make a contribution to the rebuilding of the cathedral and to assist those who work at the cathedral may visit: https://www.notredamedeparis.fr/participate-in-the-reconstruction-of-th…

Photo caption: Olivier Latry and Lorraine Brugh (photo credit: Gary Brugh)

Joyce Johnson Robinson is a past editor of The Diapason.

Katelyn Emerson is a member of The Diapason’s inaugural 20 Under 30 (2015) class, an honor bestowed prior to receiving her undergraduate degrees from Oberlin. She had already earned top prizes in numerous competitions in the United States, France, and Russia. She teaches in her private studio and performs nationally and internationally. Katelyn Emerson is represented in North America by Karen McFarlane Artists, Inc.

Katelyn, what were some of the first instruments you played? What led you to prefer the organ?

Growing up, I was drawn to voice, piano, flute, and organ. Singing was integral to my childhood as my whole family sang in a church choir and my older brother, Andrew, and I both sang in the Sandpipers Seacoast Children’s Chorus, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 

When Andrew turned ten, he began piano lessons. Naturally, as a six-year-old enamored with everything he was doing, I began to sightread through his piano music, and my parents sought a piano teacher to spare them from the cacophony coming from the keyboard—and so that I wouldn’t learn bad habits. 

Four years later, all I wanted for my birthday was flute lessons as I had watched my mother play and loved the sound of the instrument. Flute and voice ultimately allowed me to join both local and all-state youth symphonies and choruses. 

Dianne Dean, director of the Sandpipers Chorus, first introduced me to the possibility of playing the organ. I had plunked out a hymn or two at my parents’ church but thought this imposing instrument out of reach for a small girl. However, Dianne had been instrumental in founding the Young Organists’ Collaborative, an organization that introduces young people to the pipe organ and funds their early studies. She encouraged me to audition for a scholarship, and upon receiving it, I studied piano, flute, and organ through high school.

The “lightning bolt” moment was during the Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, opus 78, of Camille Saint-Saëns. I was principal flutist of the Portland (Maine) Youth Symphony Orchestra, playing at the heart of the ensemble while my then organ teacher, Ray Cornils, played the Kotzschmar organ in Merrill Auditorium. There had been no time to rehearse with the organ prior to the concert, so those brilliant C-major chords of the final movement came as a complete shock. I realized the organ could be all the musical instruments I loved—and that it could even keep pace with a full symphony orchestra! This could be my instrument.

Tell us about your experience with the Young Organists’ Collaborative.

The Young Organists’ Collaborative (YOC) was founded in 2001 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when a new Létourneau organ was installed in Saint John’s Episcopal Church. When Bishop Douglas E. Theuner came to bless the instrument, he donated $1,000 seed money with the charge to find a way to bring young people to play the pipe organ. Chosen students received a year’s worth of lessons and a small stipend for shoes or scores. Today, students come from around the seacoast—Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, etc.—and are paired with an approved local teacher who can help find practice spaces. They are required to play at the end-of-year recital and are invited to take part in a masterclass with a professional organist partway through the year. The YOC can fund up to three years of study and offers additional scholarship competitions.

I received one of these scholarships in 2005 and began studies with Abbey Hallberg Siegfried, who worked at Saint John’s. When she went on maternity leave a year later, Abbey connected me with Ray Cornils, municipal organist of Portland, Maine, whose teaching included practice techniques, patience, and good humor that form the foundation of my playing and teaching. 

When and where did you give your first recital? What did you play?

It’s difficult to recall my first recital! I do remember my first organ masterclass vividly, when I had only been studying for about six months. This class, sponsored by the YOC, was with Ray Cornils, whom I was meeting for the first time. I played the “Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Major” from the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues attributed to Bach. After I played through the work in its entirety, Ray quietly asked if I realized which pedal note I had missed in the prelude. While I can’t remember now which note it was, I do remember him guiding me through the process of identifying the reason for the mistake. That detective work set the standard for how I problem-solve in my own practice and how I work with my students to do the same.

You earned your degrees at Oberlin and subsequently studied in France and Germany. How did each of these experiences form you?

During my first semester at Oberlin, my assigned teacher, James David Christie, went on sabbatical. While usually a cause for chagrin, this was an extraordinary stroke of luck: he swapped positions with Olivier Latry. 

I have always learned repertoire quickly, but Professor Latry’s demands put me into high gear. At least one new piece each week was expected, which meant that I had expended the music I had prepared over the summer halfway through the semester. After panic-learning Duruflé’s Prélude et fugue sur le nom d’Alain in five days, I finally mastered “the back burner”; with two dozen or so pieces in progress at once, each at a different stage of learning, a new one would hit the “lesson-ready” point just at the right moment. Professor Latry also expanded my arsenal of practice techniques, and I would credit nearly all of my inherited practice methods to him and Ray Cornils.

Professor Christie’s preferred pedagogical approach was almost perfectly opposite: rather than covering new music every week, he preferred a lengthier study of style, working through a half-dozen pieces over the course of a semester to develop deeper understanding that could be applied to other music of that genre. I have grown to appreciate this more than I did as a teenager and to balance learning notes quickly with understanding and translating the music. 

My love affair with all things French had begun only two years before university, and fortunately additional academic scholarship was available if I pursued the double degree program at Oberlin (a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Music after five years), so French language and literature was the natural choice. I remember asking Professor Latry about studies at the Conservatoire de Paris within our first few lessons together, likely to his amusement!

My first solo trip abroad was in 2011, between my freshman and sophomore years, for the last iteration of the Summer Institute for French Organ Studies, led by Jesse Eschbach and Gene Bedient. Aided by a scholarship, I traveled to Poitiers and then Épernay, wondering if I could handle being alone abroad. Wandering the cobblestones of Poitiers, reveling in that 1787 Clicquot, and then the 1869 Cavaillé-Coll of Église Notre-Dame in Épernay, and getting to know the other students from Indiana, Utah, and Canada, I discovered that I thrived on travel. 

During my sophomore year at Oberlin, Marie-Louise Langlais came to teach. In contrast to Professor Christie’s detail-oriented teaching, Madame Langlais emphasized beautiful broad lines, Wagnerian long phrases, and propelling the music forwards no matter what.

At Oberlin, one of my most impactful teachers was not an organ professor. David Breitman remains head of the historical performance department and teaches fortepiano. After I carelessly ran through a Mozart sonata in one of my first fortepiano lessons, I remember him asking, “Now, this is an opera. Tell me about the first character. What else was Mozart working on while composing this?” Ray Cornils had planted the first seeds of exploring musical character in my mind (“If you met this piece walking down the street, what would it look like? How would she feel? Where would he be going?”), but I hadn’t applied this inquisitive curiosity more broadly. Professor Breitman’s similarly Socratic method of teaching was a continuation of Ray’s. Neither teacher ever dictated interpretation. Instead, they posed questions that led a student to make informed decisions and arrive at possible conclusions themselves through a contextualization and personification of music that has become a cornerstone of my playing and pedagogy. 

The formative experiences and broad education I received from Oberlin continued to feed my curiosity. I took classes in psychology, astronomy, anthropology, rhetoric, French literature, and more. 

Upon graduating, I won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Toulouse. I documented a fraction of that year in France on my blog (katelynemerson.wordpress.com), but spent most of it on road trips to see untouched instruments in the countryside, locked into Saint-Sernin at night, scrambling for practice time, being clapped at because nobody had mentioned a noon Mass, stopping by the marché for bread and a bottle of wine for a picnic, and showing up at the Conservatoire to discover there was another strike and it was closed. Life had a different pace. Concerts were a train ride away, I performed on instruments sometimes wonderful and sometimes frightful, and I met brilliant colleagues and lifelong friends. 

My teachers in Toulouse, Michel Bouvard and Jan Willem Jansen, once again revealed how contrasting teaching styles can enrich study. With Michel Bouvard, I delved into the French Romantic, allowing the instruments to inform how the repertoire can really be played. His relaxed technique and unpretentious approach to this music gave it space to sing. Jan Willem Jansen had extraordinary attention to detail. After hearing me play the “Allein Gott” trio from the Clavierübung, he rightfully informed me that the fourth and fifth sixteenth notes of measure 27 had rushed. I doubt my ears will ever be so attuned to proportion, but I still strive for it nonetheless!

As my year in France concluded and I prepared to pursue further graduate studies, I was offered the associate organist and choirmaster position at the Church of the Advent in Boston, which I simply couldn’t turn down. I had worked with music director Mark Dwyer for several months while at Oberlin and was in awe of the program, liturgy, and choirs. Mark remains a dear friend, colleague, and teacher, and his attention to detail emphasized the importance of every part of music—from note to silence. 

The itch to live abroad is difficult to scratch, so I’m particularly grateful to make a living based on travel! Having heard that Ludger Lohmann would retire in 2020, I applied for a German Academic Exchange Scholarship (DAAD) to pursue the Master Orgel at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart. It broke my heart to leave Boston but I looked forward to two years in Germany.

Navigating life in France had been fairly easy given my comfort with the language. I had enough German to be dangerous—enough so that people assumed I understood. Thankfully, I avoided extreme disaster, realized the meaning of halb zwei in time not to miss my lessons, and discovered the delicacies of southern German cuisine. Lessons with Ludger perfectly balanced churning through new repertoire, exploring historical context, and receiving a list of sources (often primary) to consult. When the pandemic disrupted studies, we met at his beautiful home on the border of Switzerland to indulge in cake and then play and discuss Reger on the three-manual tracker in his living room.

I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have mentors, human and instrumental, that have each shared perspectives and ideas for ways to approach both music and life. This is but a small sample of those who have shaped my understanding, and I hope those not mentioned will still feel my appreciation and forgive the oversight, due solely to lack of space.

How has your knowledge of foreign languages and your living abroad given you insights into the music of those countries’ composers?

Music is inevitably tied to the social, historical, and cultural context in which it was conceived, even while its nature as organized sound allows it to have meaning outside a single context. My understanding of different languages and sensitivity to ways of comportment have helped me to get to know people all over the world, and I continually strive to connect with and understand them better. As an interpreter, I try to delve into the composer’s influences as well as my own, linking both to the present listeners as we undertake the aural tour of emotive depth and structure that is music performance. To do this, I strive to learn as much as I can of the time, place, and people that surrounded the music’s conception to make interpretative decisions that both link and are drawn from the past and present. The more I learn and study, the richer and more complex these relationships become, which results in further exploration and endless excitement!

Tell us about your recordings—those already made, and those planned for the future.

I have released two recordings on the Pro Organo label, working with Fred Hohman. The first of these, part of the prize package from the American Guild of Organists’ 2016 National Young Artists Competition in Organ Performance, was recorded on the glorious 1935–1936 Aeolian-Skinner at the Church of the Advent in Boston where I was working. These winners’ CDs are typically variety programs, so I sought to showcase how this liturgical instrument can play a variety of repertoire brilliantly, with music by Bruhns, J. S. Bach, Mendelssohn, François Couperin, Alain, Vierne, Tournemire, Thierry Escaich, and Howells. The album title, Evocations, comes from Escaich’s Évocation III (this was its first CD recording). Two years later, Andover Organ Company approached me about a new recording on their magnum opus, Opus 114, at Christ Lutheran Church in Baltimore in honor of their company’s seventieth anniversary. For this CD, Inspirations, I played Rachel Laurin’s Finale, opus 78 (this was the first recording), Horatio Parker, Rheinberger, Buxtehude, Bairstow, de Grigny, Langlais, and Duruflé.

Over the last two years, recording has become more essential than ever. I now have my own video and audio recording equipment and, while none of it equals commercial-level recording equipment, I can use it to pre-record recitals for venues that want to “premiere” the recital on YouTube or Vimeo, particularly if they don’t have their own equipment, and I can also make recordings for my channels. I have a huge “dream list” of instruments on which I would like to record CDs and frequently tweak ideas for programs on them. One idea would juxtapose commissions of living composers with previously composed repertoire related by inspirational source or another contextual consideration—an idea that will hopefully come into being in the next few years!

Who are some of your favorite composers?

My favorite composers are those who wrote the music I’m currently playing! Similarly, the best organ in the world is the one on which I will perform next or am currently playing, and the best piece in the world is the one that’s on the music desk right now. While this might seem to be a cop-out, it’s a simple truth: we play music better when we like it—so we must like what we are working on in order to play it well.

When push comes to shove, I am happiest playing a variety of music. My music bag currently contains music by Parry, Bach, Taylor-Coleridge, Dupré, Demessieux, Reger, Sowerby, Alcock, Laurin, Duruflé, Price, Widor, Whitlock, Franck, and Scheidemann, as well as a few others.

Tell us about your teaching.

After beginning at Oberlin, I was asked to help guide incoming students as an academic ambassador, explaining the sometimes-overwhelming collegiate administration and helping them to choose courses that would feed their curiosity. I tutored French, music theory, and organ at Oberlin, and taught music theory at the local community music school.

Since graduating, I have continued teaching, both privately and in masterclass and lecture settings, holding general question-and-answer sessions that follow tangents of interest as well as structuring courses that focus on specific topics. I enjoy connecting sometimes disparate ideas and exploring possibilities, discussing why decisions can be made this way or that, and, above all, searching for the many nuanced ideas that make an individual “tick.” 

My teaching studio is loosely divided into three groups: those working on interpretation, those seeking to improve practice strategies, and those learning about injury prevention or working to recover from injury. Of course, most are tackling all three! 

Interpretation, at its core, requires working with ideas, examining options, and then seeking physical means to translate them convincingly into sound. Since we organists cannot modulate volume with touch as pianists can, nor can we swell or diminish sound via the breath of wind or the bows of string players, much of our playing is about manipulating smoke and mirrors to turn our intention into aural reality. Since we can now so easily record ourselves, I hold even greater admiration for how players listen in the moment to what is going on, and particularly for how each of my students has a different way of perceiving the sounds swirling around them. Couple this with learning about the context of the composer, their influences, the instruments they may have known, and the time and place in which the piece was composed, and we have rich, unique “readings” of the repertoire that can link to the interests of any student, all while we explore techniques to help bring that perspective to reality. 

Time is short for everybody, and practice must be as efficient as possible. Having studied with excellent teachers of practice methods and having experienced fairly limited practice time during study and travel, I continue to explore ways to break down repertoire for efficient practice. I often make a game of turning difficult sections into manageable chunks, isolating them from the context that can distract from them. Sometimes, I encourage a student to leave it in that “practice mode” for days or even weeks, which allows the subconscious mind to digest novel movement. The best part of this technique is the excitement with which a student brings me new ideas for this “game,” ideas that I can then share with others when similar sections come up!

Surveys indicate that somewhere between 60% and 90% of professional musicians in the United States have experienced some kind of performance-related musculoskeletal disorder, most often due to overuse. The enthusiasm with which the work of pedagogues such as Roberta Gary and Barbara Lister-Sink has been received, the many stories shared by colleagues and students, and both the unnatural perch on the organ bench and the similarity in how organists use their hands and upper body to that of pianists all make me suspect that this prevalence is much the same in organists.

At age fourteen, I developed bilateral tendonitis in my wrists and forearms. Giving music up was not an option, so I undertook technical retraining with Arlene Kies, late professor of piano at the University of New Hampshire. Arlene helped me to completely rebuild my technique, as I had had almost no technical training in my six years of study. Through her work and that of my mother, a certified hand therapist and occupational ergonomist, I regained my ability to make music and developed a deep respect for my body. By paying attention to its abilities and limitations, I overcame many flare-ups throughout the next decade (including several during competitions). 

This firsthand experience with how playing and practice techniques can couple with contributing factors for tragic consequences inspired me to deepen my understanding of these complex issues so I can work with musicians, particularly organists, to prevent injury and, when injury happens, collaborate with the individual and their medical specialists to work towards recovery. We discuss healthier practice techniques that utilize mental involvement to balance out physical repetition that can lead to overuse, review postural considerations, and discuss ways to give whatever part of the body that is most at risk a little relief, whether avoiding using force when opening jars or cans or making small changes to computer and office workstations. If a student is experiencing pain or discomfort or is recovering from an injury, I always strongly recommend that they work with a medical professional for treatment in addition to exploring adjustments at their instrument.

Being a teacher and being a student go hand in hand. We teach ourselves while in the practice room, but the added variable of joining another person on their journey of learning means that we are continually exposed to different vantage points and ideas. 

How have things been for you during the time of covid?

In spring of 2020, I was based in Germany, but, when rumors that international borders might close began to proliferate, I was on tour in the United States. Fortunately, I made it back to Baden-Württemberg just a few days before flights were grounded. Despite the restrictions, I was able to complete my final semester of my master’s study, performing a program of Froberger, Messiaen, and Reger to an audience of fourteen (including the jury) in the Stuttgart Musikhochschule’s concert hall. That summer was spent waiting and then moving quickly as restrictions changed, but my husband, David Brown, who then worked for Glatter-Götz Orgelbau while I completed my studies, and I managed to return to the United States in September 2020 so he could resume work at Buzard Pipe Organ Builders.

Many people I have spoken with have described challenging months, yet they have almost always also shared silver linings like cherishing time with family and friends or pursuing new projects. My 2020 and 2021 were the same: over seventy concerts were postponed (incredibly, very few canceled entirely), which broke my heart, but my time was filled with writing articles, teaching in person and over Zoom (which I had been doing while traveling, even before 2020!), and learning new repertoire. I also took a course in occupational ergonomics to support my teaching of injury prevention. The world felt like it was on hold for so long, but hope was always on the horizon with wonderful events scheduled for the future—many of which are taking place now! 

What are some of your hopes and plans for the future?

We live in such an exciting time. No previous generation has had so much information at their fingertips, just a click away. The work of thousands of previous performers and researchers—and the life experiences of millions of human beings—is there for our perusal and for us to build on. 

It is incredibly easy to pour through stacks of music and literature, both physically and online, and I’m constantly noting repertoire that I want to learn and share with people. Including some of this less-familiar music in programs requires that I show why this music matters and why audiences should care about it. Without knowing the context or inspiration of a particular piece, how could a listener attending a concert after a busy workday be expected to respond to it? They often have nothing to hold onto, particularly with a longer or more esoteric work, so why should they come back to hear more? Highly aware of this, I seek to share my passion for each piece, proposing some ways through which to relate to it. Connecting a particular piece of music with the heart of the listener has become one of my highest performance priorities.

I would also like to help to evolve the definitions of success for us musicians and organists. I have spoken with so many who did not experience their “big break” before age thirty and who desperately strive to feel successful. We are so often told what success should look like that we can no longer hear our internal voice showing us how our unique skills could create something quite different. This leads to discouragement, depression, and sometimes a heartbreaking lack of self-compassion. I tackle this with my students and work with musicians in all stages of life to help curate their unique careers and pursue whatever they hope to achieve. My own path has been rather unusual, with several gap years that opened Europe and Asia for performance and study, and with my primary income from performing and teaching. The latter is integral to who I am as a person and a musician, as is writing articles that continue conversations about a diverse range of ideas.

While I don’t yet have the answer to this challenge, I try to work with my students and colleagues to explore ways to find our place in a world large and varied enough for all of us. We all may play the pipe organ, but our unique backgrounds—culture, language, family, and everything else—cause us to approach life and this instrument so vastly differently that each of us have the potential to fill a gap that the field didn’t even know was there.

It just takes listening.

Thank you, Katelyn!

Katelyn Emerson’s website: katelynemerson.com

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

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

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

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

Is it a tracker organ?

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

Do you spend much time working on registration?

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

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

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

Who were your significant teachers?

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

So what inspired you to study with Langlais?

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

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

Anything else you’d like to say about Cambridge?

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

There is such a confluence of people and excellence here.

Indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And also the 16′s and 32′s?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you think there is a future for organ recordings?

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

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

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

They took it more or less live?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s hard to teach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How old was he at the time?

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

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

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

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

Have you been to the United States?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for the delightful conversation today.

Further thoughts about rhythm

In the very late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was first interested in the organ and listening to a lot of organ music, I had an LP recording of late-nineteenth-century French organ selections, pieces and excerpts of pieces by several composers, played by several different organists. It was a miscellany, a real sampler. All of the pieces were new to me then, as were the organs and the performers. The piece that impressed me most was the first movement of Charles-Marie Widor’s Sixth Symphony, played by Xavier Darasse. I should probably say that the passage that impressed me was the opening of that movement (Example 1). I remember quite clearly, fifty years later, that I listened to the opening of that track over and over again. I probably destroyed that part of the LP, but it helped to solidify my love for the organ; thus it was worth it!

Several weeks ago, as I decided to write a column or two focusing on various aspects of rhythm, that passage started going through my head again. It has scarcely been out of my head since, except when I have been listening to something else. Every passage of music has some relationship to the concept of rhythm. In spite of my early love for it, the first movement of that Widor symphony is not one that I have performed or analyzed. But thinking about it now and finally analyzing it a little bit, I think that there are all sorts of interesting things occurring with the rhythm of those first few measures. In particular, there are fascinating relationships between the rhetorical and theoretical aspects of rhythm, and this is part of what I address in this column.

The rhythm of the striking opening chords of the movement is demonstrated in Example 2. The rhythm of those powerful chords, and of the melody that is their treble line, is treated as a motive throughout the movement. But the surface rhythm, the rhythm of new notes, whatever voice or part of the texture they come from, is demonstrated in Example 3. That extra quarter note is a passing note in the pedal part, the bass line.

This is all straightforward, just a description of what is in the score. But it is fascinating to me that I hear two things going on at once, two different ways to describe the rhythm of this passage, both valid and meaningful. This seems to be a wrinkle in the relationship between counterpoint and rhythm. Lines of counterpoint, in the way that we usually conceive of them, are almost always characterized in part by having at least some rhythmic difference one to another. But here we have a passage that is seemingly homophonic. But the fact that the rhythm of that last quarter note of the second measure comes across as being on a lower level of importance rhythmically injects an element of counterpoint. This is subjective, but it is an interesting confirmation that the bass/pedal line is used over the next few measures to open the passage into more and more palpable counterpoint, as shown in Example 4.

If we do not know where notes are coming from rhetorically, then our sense of what the rhythm of a passage is can only be the surface rhythm. Turning that the other way around, if we notice hierarchies of rhythmic importance in different notes within a texture, that may be a clue as to some of what is going on rhetorically and contrapuntally in that passage.

For me, this is a new and slightly different way of looking at the relationship between rhythm and counterpoint. This means that I have not yet worked out how to help students apply it to pieces they are working on. There is a lot of music—from Byrd fantasias through Beatles songs, and including a lot of organ repertoire from all time and places—that is clearly not fully, rigorously contrapuntal, but in which counterpoint keeps breaking through. It is probably true that the vast majority of tonal music falls into this category. But nonetheless I have always had a problem feeling comfortable with it conceptually. Is it counterpoint or is it not? I understand that this is just the imposition of a rigid framework. But still, the concept that I am sketching out here seems to be able to help me get more comfortable with counterpoint flowing in and out of a piece or a passage.

My second answer to why this passage started going through my head has to do with the relationship between rhythm and rhythm as rhetoric. The rhythm of the notes at the beginning of this piece is well-defined and clear. But what is that rhythm doing? In a lot of circumstances, the rhythm of the first measure—just two half notes—would suggest a downbeat and an upbeat. But the way that I hear this first measure is something different and harder to describe. I hear each of those chords as a kind of world in itself, neither coming from anywhere rhythmically nor leading anywhere, but just rather insistently being. It is as if the second chord has so much gravity and weight that it refuses to be in a hierarchical relationship to the first chord or to the downbeat of the next measure. This is subjective, my way of hearing it. Assuming for the moment that this is correct or at least meaningful, is it about rhythm? A plausible and normal answer to that would be no. The rhythm is what it is, and everything else is a different aspect: affect, aesthetic, sonority, the push and pull of the harmony, interpretive choices, and so on. But it strikes me that it might be more interesting to expand the concept of rhythm to include more about what the rhythmic pulses and impulses are doing.

I believe that this concept or image could be interesting and helpful to students. It might provide a way of broadening the comfort zone of some students who are making choices about how to precisely execute rhythms on the page. If so, that would probably be through allowing choices about freedom of rhythm, bending and stretching the notated rhythm to feel more like an essential part of the rhythm itself. It might also provide me or any teacher with a way of helping the student to think about interpretive rhythmic choices without simply suggesting details of those choices to the student. I am now eager to work with a student on this piece!

In a way, I have put the cart before the horse, describing some ideas that occurred to me once I decided to write a column about a certain subject. As a result of one conversation with colleagues and a few interactions with students, I revisited a few of my ideas about rhythm, the relationship between notated rhythm and rhythm in practice, and certain practical matters about teaching rhythm. The latter include metronome use, counting, how to approach counting during slow practice, and a few other matters. The core of what I plan to write about is a concept that intrigues me: the possibility of deriving rhythm fundamentally, though only in part, from something other than the notation. I will talk about this at length in my next column.

I finish this column with a few more circumscribed yet fascinating points. The first is an anecdote from well over thirty years ago that has stayed with me all this time. I was then beginning to look for ways to participate in chamber music, and I connected with various colleagues as best I could. There was one player with whom I had a session or two of running through pieces and with whom I started to talk about giving concerts. As I came out of one such session, another colleague caught sight of me and said concerning my rehearsal partner, “You know, she really can’t count.” I did not know what to say, and I ended up with something like “Umm . . . ok,” and I did not let that comment affect my decision to go ahead and work with this fine and interesting musician. That comment was false in experience. This player had no more tendency to misread a rhythm or waver in rhythm or tempo than anyone else. But she was someone who often played purposely and quite freely. I learned a lot from her in this respect. I was left wondering what the real source of the uncalled-for carping criticism was. Did that other colleague have a bad experience with the person with whom I was working? Or misremembered or mistaken her for someone else? Or had it been a case of mistaking intentional, interpretive rhythmic freedom for an inability to count?

This latter idea always intrigues me and can be confounding. How do we know whether something that we hear (as to rhythm, for the purposes of this discussion) that departs from the most literally accurate is a mistake or a purposeful gesture? What different attitudes do we bring to such an event if it is one or the other? Is there a gray area in between? The attitude that we bring to mistakes that our students make is pretty clear—it is part of our job to point them out and help the student to understand what the problem is, how to correct it or to avoid similar things, and so on.

But what if the student says, “No, I meant to do that?” There is a strong pull to ask why and to accept that any deviation from what seems to be on the page is all right if there is a good reason. The discussions that arise from grappling with situations like this can be very fruitful indeed, but I have always thought that it is too restrictive. I hope that the concepts I will discuss next time can be used to help students understand what is going on rhythmically when they feel the pull to do something other than what seems to be the literal meaning of the notation but cannot express why. Furthermore, I hope that this can also help teachers address this situation with students without simply dictating outcomes.

I am reminded of a review that I read once of Joseph Szigeti’s recording of the Bach sonatas and partitas for violin. I apologize, as I have been unable to find this review, an unusual issue for the internet era. I am certain that it was written by B. H. Haggin. As best I remember, Haggin liked the recording and got a lot out of the playing and the pieces. But he also felt that the pieces themselves were not very interesting, that Szigeti, with his rhythmically free and idiosyncratic approach to Bach interpretation, had made great music out of pieces that were intrinsically dull exercises. I believe that this assessment was not as unexpected at that point in history as it would be now, though I do not agree with it. It seems to cast an interesting light on rhythm in performance. The reviewer’s perspective was that the player’s striking rhythmic choices were what we might call “wrong” in the sense that they were not really based on anything intrinsic to the music. They were imposed upon the music and thereby made the music great when it really was not. Is this a good situation or a bad one? How would we react if we thought we heard this happening with our students?

The last item that I mention here is an observation that I made while driving recently. I rolled down the window and shortly thereafter heard the sound of two cars passing me in quick succession going the other way. There were two whooshing sounds probably about 0.7 seconds apart. There had not been any cars ahead of them for a while, nor were there any following behind. So the two sounds were isolated. Although translated into the terms of musical rhythm this was just two notes out of any context, and it immediately evoked for me a very specific moment, namely the opening of Beethoven’s Sonata in E Minor for piano, opus 90 (Example 5).

The two car sounds seemed to deliver the rhythm of this opening gesture. Why and how? Two notes in a row is so commonplace in music that it is almost silly to evoke a specific instance of it as a thing in itself at all! Even if the two cars sounded clearly like an upbeat and a downbeat, that hardly narrows things down at all. And it cannot be harmony or sonority—what I heard had no pitch or harmony, and the sonority was that of a couple of cars. So what made that passage come into my head? I do not have an answer, but it adds to my sense that there is something more to rhythm than what we see notated on the page or can describe in words.

A special note: I will be playing selections from J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue on harpsichord as part of the New York City concert series Midtown Concerts on Thursday, October 28, at 1:15 p.m. at the Church of the Transfiguration, 1 East 29th Street, New York, New York. I take the liberty of mentioning this since I have written extensively in these pages about my Art of the Fugue project. This will be the first public manifestation of that project and my first public concert in two-and-a-half years. If any readers can make it, I would of course be overjoyed to see you there

Repetition II

During the week after I finished writing my previous column, I had several experiences, each of which had some bearing on what I wrote about, so I will describe these before continuing and expanding the discussion from last month. One of them was a delightfully well-timed refutation of something that I wrote last month, the others more in sync with my thoughts.

First, a student asked me to review some of the music of Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer with him. We started with the Musicalischer Parnassus, a collection of nine suites published in 1738. I was reminded by reading through the collection that the prelude to the first of those suites follows almost exactly the same harmonic progression as the first prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, and it is in triple time. Thus it sounds a lot like my tripled version of that passage from last month: probably more so than the Bruhns excerpt that came to my mind when I contemplated my altered version of the Bach. The relevant measures of the Fischer are found in Example 1.

It is widely accepted that Bach knew Fischer’s music and was influenced by him. Fischer, about whose life not much is known, was probably nearly thirty years Bach’s senior. However, the collection that contains this passage was not published until twenty years or so after Bach wrote the WTC prelude that seems to echo it. Did Bach know this piece in manuscript? Did Fischer know the WTC, which of course was not actually published until decades later? Probably not. This is probably coincidence, and this passage is possibly just another interesting example of the use of repetition to create an aesthetic effect.

Next, I was coaching some musicians on a chamber music project, and I was surprised to be told that they had decided to make cuts to one of the pieces they were to play at an upcoming concert. Specifically, they were going to leave a movement or two out of the very long piece. However, in the longest movement, they were snipping out bits: a few measures here, a few measures there, based on a sense that the movement was too long and repetitive. This caught my attention since I had just written in my February column that, “. . . we essentially never find ourselves wanting to omit any part of a piece that isn’t a repeat. I have never had a student ask me about a through-composed piece ‘should I or should I not play mm. 9–16?’ or anything like that.” And indeed I cannot remember any previous instance of this.

A hypothetical discussion of the ramifications of this choice by these musicians would probably start by invoking respect for the composer and go on to talk about the shape and arc of the piece. It might emphasize “right” and “wrong,” or just attempt to characterize the nature of the changes brought about by this sort of editing. Some people would say that if they didn’t like this piece as is, they should play something else. I did not engage in very much of that discussion with these performers, at least not then. The choices had been made, practiced, and rehearsed. And I am not sure what I would say, beyond just that I was surprised and that I tip my hat to the Fates for delivering this to me at that exact moment.

I have heard debate from time to time about whether or not a performer should take the repeat in the long first movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat Major. Performers and musicologists talk about the length and raise questions about balance. But since there is a fairly long first ending as part of the section that we either do or do not decide to repeat, part of the discussion is about the material in that first ending. I have heard people use it as a reason to take the repeat—so that one does not entirely omit material that the composer wrote. But I have also heard it given as a reason not to take the repeat—on the grounds that the first ending material is boring, not up to the standard of the rest of the piece. This again touches on the question of when we do and when we do not give ourselves permission to second-guess a composer.

Then a student of mine, a former player of a melody instrument, just now getting into keyboard playing, spontaneously asked why so much keyboard music has repeats: is it just because they want to make the pieces longer? I touched on that a bit in the February column as well. It is an idea that we tend to resist, since in a way it could be taken to be disparaging or belittling of the work of composers. That does not mean that it is not true. And whatever the intent, the effect of repeats on length is real. I found it interesting that the question came up naturally for someone whose take on this repertoire was fresh and unspoiled.

The last of these chance occurrences was about the Widor “Toccata” from Symphony V. I wonder how different this piece would seem if the first measure were repeated exactly as is before the (actual) second measure. That second measure starts out as a repeat of the first, but crucially changes on the final beat.

Further questions regarding repetition

One question that I find fascinating in repeat situations is whether the two instances of the same material, one after another, are a statement of something and then a restatement of it, or are a question and an answer. This question itself will not always or often have an answer. However, in some cases for us as players, and for our students, observing our own feelings about this, one case at a time, might be revealing.

It might seem counterintuitive that the exact same notes could be both the question and the answer. However, this is not impossible even with words:

“Really?”

“Really!”

or even more extended:

“Really?”

“Really.”

“For certain?”

“For certain.”

Each of these question and answer groups works. Furthermore, each word or phrase has its own particular feeling. The “really” answer in the second grouping feels different to me from that in the first, because it is not being asked to express finality.

In the realm of music without words, the question and answer attribute is more abstract, more elusive. Attributing this to a passage almost certainly cannot ever be right or wrong or subject to proof, or even perhaps to analysis. But because it cannot ever be wrong, it can always be potentially useful. If thinking of a repetition situation as a question and answer, or as a statement and restatement, perhaps in a different mood or by a different “person,” seems useful or seems to enliven the experience of playing the passage, then it is a fruitful and correct way of looking at it.

With words, the vast majority of attempts to use the same word or phrase as a question and its answer will fail:

“Would you like some toast?”

“Would you like some toast.”

and so on.

The possibility that a repeat will seem like a question and answer can never be subject to failure as such; it can just seem like an interesting idea or not. This brings us to one of the fascinating things about repetition, both signed repeats and the repetition or recurrence of any material, whatever the structure. The fact that we can accept the amount of repetition in music that we do accept invites us to think about the ways in which music resembles or does not resemble those forms of expression that use words or concrete visually based images.

In a work of theater—play, movie, television episode—if a structure in which something happened and then was literally repeated, then something else happened and was also literally repeated, and so on, were to be used, it would be at best some sort of special effect. It is not necessarily the case that this has never been done. But it is not routine or remotely common. It would be possible to go to dozens of plays and movies per year for a lifetime—and watch an almost infinite amount of television—without ever once encountering this form.

But in music it is routine. Why is this so? It should not be that the repetition is inoffensive—acceptable—because it is meaningless. If it were meaningless, then we would not have a vast repertoire in which a substantial amount of repetition has been perceived as valuable by a vast audience over many centuries. (At least that is a fair assumption or a reasonable hope.) But the meaningfulness is abstract, and that seems to be the big difference. The extent to which repetition in music engages our “why are they doing that again?” reflex is limited.

Perhaps because the repetition is abstract, it can also evoke a response to the very idea of repetition itself. That idea is powerful. As much as we like newness, we also like familiarity, and repetition gives a sense of connection to the past and future. It is possible that sometimes, at least when we hear the repeat of a passage, we react as we do when we see an old friend or go back to our favorite restaurant. Repetition may suggest something like resurrection or reincarnation, or hint at some of the things that we wonder about and crave having to do with eternity and infinity. This is especially true of recurrence in composition, as in rondo technique or recapitulation. Certainly these images are overblown and should not be taken too literally or even too seriously. But I am pretty sure that some of these sorts of feelings are there much of the time. It is part of the picture of what repetition can feel like or mean.

In music that has words and is in verses, we expect the music to repeat, but not the words. We can sing any number of verses in a row of a hymn and happily accept that the musical notes will be the same for every verse. However, if the words were exactly the same for each verse it would seem bizarre. A phrase in words might recur. But any sameness of that sort has to be dealt out very differently with words than with music.

The term “repetitive” is, in everyday usage, almost a synonym for “boring.” You never hear someone say “that was a wonderful book: really repetitive” or “that movie was the most repetitive I have seen in a long time. I loved it!” So that suggests that we need to feel a bit of caution about whether repetition, whatever its power, can lead to boredom. This is to some extent the domain of the composer. If we think that a composer’s use of repetition in a particular piece creates boredom, we might just not want to play that piece. But nonetheless as players, we need both to make sure that we do what is necessary to make repeated material interesting and to refrain from overreacting.

I believe that a lot of students tend to overreact to the fear that repeated or recurrent material will be boring. This can manifest itself in wanting to add ornamentation or change stops. There is a kind of fruitful paradox, that if you always change ornaments or change stops on repeats, that in itself becomes repetitive and potentially boring. So everyone should be motivated to limit those sorts of gestures or to think carefully and in an individually tailored manner about when they are the most valuable.

If a repeat—or material that comes back or resembles other material—seems intrinsically boring to you, is there a way of framing it aesthetically, philosophically, or through imagery, that brings it to life? Is there a way of playing it with more energy, or less energy, like a response, like an echo, like a reaffirmation, like something thoughtfully reconsidered? A serious engagement with ideas such as these should probably precede choices about out-and-out changes. Any changes in the notes (ornamentation) or the sound (registration) or performance values (articulation, phrasing, use of timing devices, rubato, and so on) will be based on taking the passage as seriously as it warrants, not on halfway giving up on it in advance.

A very practical though mysterious aspect of playing repeated passages or identical material is that the same exact notes can seem easier or more difficult to play depending on whether you are playing them for the first or second time. Sometimes, in a long piece in which something comes back after a long interval, this can be explained by stamina and concentration issues. This is something that I have to remember to think about consciously when I am playing the Bach Prelude and Fugue in E Minor, BWV 548, for example. In each movement there is an extended true da capo. And when the opening material comes back it manifestly does not feel the same. I need to remember consciously to give it an extra dose of concentration to compensate for the effects of playing non-stop for a long time. Also the return of familiar material in a case like that creates the danger of a letdown: “oh, it’s just that old passage again; I did that fine ten minutes ago.”

One way to avoid that letdown is to focus on the possible rhetorical differences alluded to above. Try to remember, whether it is an instant repeat or a return after a good deal of other musical wandering, that by virtue of its not being the initial statement it is a different thing that is going on and needs attention and interest. On a very practical note, if the fingering and pedaling of two passages that are identical in notes can also be identical, that should save time and work and lead to greater security. This is something that seems like it could go without saying, but that is also worth remembering consciously.As I said last month, a lot of this is speculation or ideas that I find interesting to try on for size. I would encourage students to think for themselves as much as possible about what it means to take an interesting and important musical idea and just plain do it again. The ways in which I have framed some of my thoughts about it might be useful to some people, but all the more so if they invite people to come up with their own.