Organ Historical Society 2018 Convention, Rochester, New York

Larry Palmer

Program planning

I write this column just as July is about to give way to August; even as a retired academic, this autumnal month nurtures my urge to begin making plans for musical programs of the fast-approaching fall semester! It was my custom through all fifty-two years of university employment to present my faculty recital on the second Monday of September—one week after Labor Day. Sometimes I played both organ and harpsichord, occasionally only one or the other.

This past summer has been especially full of planning (and playing) organ recitals on two very special instruments. One is the 1762 Caetano-Oldovini single-manual organ housed in the Meadows Museum of Art, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, an instrument originally in Portugal’s Evora Cathedral, and, just incidentally, the oldest playable pipe organ in Texas. My two demonstration concerts for the Organ Historical Society during its first conference to be held in the Lone Star State and my tenth annual organ recital program in the TGIF Concert Series of Santa Fe’s First Presbyterian Church, a program and lecture that concluded the tenth anniversary celebration of the Fisk pipe organ, Opus 133, were two separate events that required differing repertoire to show the capabilities of these two very different instruments.

The choices that were made from the organ repertoire are no different than those I usually make when developing programs for harpsichord concerts. Thus, I hope that my thoughts on planning and audience reactions may be of some interest and use to our readers, no matter which instruments they may utilize.

First and foremost, I would suggest that lengthy programming of music by only one composer is generally best reserved for recordings (which allow the listener to choose from the selected repertoire and use the on/off switch if necessary). It seems to me that only a very few composers (such as J. S. Bach) are able to fill an entire program’s span and keep the audience’s attention without a danger of ensuing boredom. A lengthy work such as Bach’s Goldberg Variations is usually accepted with sincere affection and continued interest, especially if it can be done in my favorite form of performance for this monumental work: dividing the playing with another player, each of the two alternating variations on two different harpsichords. While I have only done this once with a brilliant graduate student, it seemed to me that the somewhat contrasting timbres of the two instruments and the respite it gave to each of us as players was beneficial in many ways.

As I was attempting to decide what I would want to play in Santa Fe this past July, I was inspired by an art exhibit that had been mounted earlier this year by the Meadows Museum, entitled Dali—Poetics of the Small, 1929–1936. It comprised a generous collection of works small in format that surveyed the great artist’s output during those early years of his career. The exhibition did not travel to any other venue, but an illustrated catalog is available from the museum, should one wish to investigate the visual stimulation that I tried to emulate with similarly shorter musical compositions from a wide variety of composers.

Thus Poetics of the Small did provide a program of short pieces in many styles and genres. Variety of this sort and careful attention includes choosing pieces both in major and minor keys (plus, perhaps, an occasional piece that detours to yet another idiom—maybe utilizing a mode), the variety of which may keep the ears free from boredom, open, and listening. Thus my Santa Fe program lasted about forty-five minutes (with the rubric that applause was to be withheld until the final chord was sounded), and it consisted of works by composers Healey Willan, César Franck (the program’s one lengthy piece, Fantaisie in C, which is made up of short sections), J. S. Bach, Herbert Howells, Dame Ethel Smythe, Germaine Tailleferre, Calvin Hampton’s Consonance for Larry (1957)—my first commission to the Oberlin classmate, for whom it was also his first commission—and Maurice Duruflé’s Fugue on the Bells of Soissons Cathedral, which I dared to end with a triumphant final major chord, rather than the repeated minor one.

The demonstrations of the 1762 organ were also presented within stringent time limits and with the necessity of including an audience-sung hymn, a requirement for every OHS convention program. Fortunately fulfilling my expressed desire for variety, it was possible to devise a twenty-five-minute program that did just that: a Tiento by Cabanilles was followed by my SMU colleague Simon Sargon’s Dos Prados (From the Meadows) composed at my suggestion in 1997—a stately pavane with variations that utilized every stop on the organ and showed, with particular beauty, the treble half-stop Sesquialtera that allows a melody to be played using the keys from middle C-sharp to the organ’s top C while playing an accompaniment using the notes from middle C down to the lowest C in a bass short octave. Also included were sonatas by Scarlatti and Seixas, the hymn Pange Lingua, and a rousing frolic by Lidon, using the full organ to give all the volume that one could possibly want.

So, I suggest that a wide-ranging variety of musical ideas can keep an audience interested in our historic instruments (or in the modern replicas thereof).

Another idea that I have been pursuing during my long career is the occasional introduction of quite unexpected works from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century repertoires. I have mentioned some of these previously in various Diapason articles, but has anyone followed through with this idea? I would be interested in hearing from readers who may have done just that. Do not forget that Chopin composed a short Fugue in A Minor, found in his keyboard works; Schuman’s Fugue III on BACH from the organ works requires only a few pedal passages, all of which may be negotiated with the left hand on the harpsichord. Works by Herbert Howells, particularly his Lambert’s Clavichord, contain a selection of delightful pieces that may be played on any keyboard instrument (as I can attest to words that came directly from the composer’s mouth when I first queried him in his Royal College of Music studio in London), plus two volumes of Howells’s Clavichord that comprise many pages of beautiful music to be explored.

Of the Revivalist works, do not eschew Ferruccio Busoni’s Sonatina for Cembalo—not the easiest piece to adapt to the harpsichord, even though he mentions our instrument in the title, he manages to write as least several notes that do not exist on any harpsichord in my collection of instruments . . . . So rewrite a measure or two if needed, but enjoy the piquant harmonies and the very idea that this well-known musician felt compelled to write for our instrument. Francis Thomé’s Rigodon still ranks as one of the earliest pieces to be designated for harpsichord, as does Mulet’s Petite Lied, which has been published in all its small-format glory in an issue of this very journal.

For more recent works I return often to Duke Ellington’s A Single Petal of a Rose (dedicated to Antoinette Vischer, although it had been written earlier for Queen Elizabeth II). It is a piece that is, to my knowledge, unpublished except for the facsimile in a book about the Swiss patroness. I base my own performance copy on an arrangement sent to me in 1985 by Igor Kipnis, who credited jazz great Dave Brubeck as co-arranger. I make many adjustments to cope with wide hand stretches and to keep the feeling of a jazz improvisation, and I can report that it is always an audience toe-tapping favorite.

Among a host of contemporary composers I have my favorites such as Vincent Persichetti, Gerald Near, Neely Bruce, Glenn Spring, Rudy Davenport, Knight Vernon, Timothy Broege, and William Bolcom—all of whom write beautifully and knowledgeably for the harpsichord. To peruse the literally hundreds of possible twentieth-century works, see Frances Bedford’s magisterial catalog, Harpsichord and Clavichord Music of the Twentieth Century  (Fallen Leaf Press, Berkeley, California, 1993).

Andrew Schaeffer

Andrew Schaeffer holds degrees from St. Olaf College, Yale University, where he was a student of Thomas Murray, and University of Oklahoma. He currently serves as the director of music at Luther Memorial Church in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, and as editor-at-large of The Diapason.

Andrew Schaeffer: Let’s begin by hearing a little bit about your formative years in California.

Thomas Murray: I must begin with the single most important thing, which is that my mother and father were unsparingly supportive of my musical interests. I had piano lessons early and was fortunate to be a member of the Pasadena Boy Choristers when it was still directed by its founder, Dr. John Henry Lyons.

When it came time to think about a career, my parents were fully aware of the risk of trying to make a living in classical music. American culture doesn’t support that at all well! I was a keen organ student during high school years with a dream of being a performer both in concerts and in the church. My family wanted me to have a liberal arts education, in part to act as a safety net in case my passion for playing burned out! Very wise! Fortunately I was admitted to Occidental College in Los Angeles—a perfect choice, because that’s where Clarence Mader taught organ! He was one of the very finest teachers of his time, especially in the West. It’s important to note that, as a liberal arts institution, Occidental was not a place where you had the option of living in a practice room ten hours a day. But I was inseparable from music, and to be honest, I’m not sure if my aptitudes would have led me successfully down any other path. 

Where did you land after your years at Occidental?

When I was preparing to graduate, Mader asked me where I hoped to go to graduate school. I didn’t want to move on directly to graduate study, at least not right away. I yearned to be active in the profession, have a church and develop my ability in choral conducting. I have a feeling he privately shook his head with dismay, because the prevailing thought back in 1965 was that graduate degrees acted as secure passports to great jobs. What we didn’t know at the time was just how saturated the church music field would become with people who had advanced degrees.

The single most important thing was that my parents did not try to prevent me from pursuing my dream. As far as events are concerned, a pivotal one occurred in 1966, when I was awarded first place in what is now referred to as NYACOP. The judges that year were Mildred Andrews of the University of Oklahoma, Vernon de Tar of Julliard, and my future senior teaching colleague at Yale, Dr. Robert Baker. A small world!

Tell me a bit about Clarence Mader as a teacher. Is there any contemporary pedagogue that you know of who embodies his style today?

I studied with him prior to the rise of performance practice as a dominant orthodoxy. Mader stressed making the best musical use of whatever instrument one was playing for those there “in the present” to listen. He was deeply influenced by his teacher, Lynnwood Farnam, but was also “tuned in” to many of the contemporary composers of that time. I am certain he was disappointed in me because I had an aversion to much contemporary music of that period. I can embrace dissonance when it has an expressive purpose, but too much music of the late twentieth century I found acerbic and irritating. Dissonance is wonderful as a “spice,” but not when it becomes the “main course.”

When I studied with Mader he was not performing much, except on Sunday mornings at Immanuel Presbyterian Church. He had discovered that he loved teaching—just loved it—once telling me he had taught ten lessons in a day without a break! He was a gifted and avid composer, and I regret that the 2004 American Guild of Organists national convention in Los Angeles did not make a special effort to feature his music, because that year was the centennial of his birth.

What instruments were available to you during your time at Occidental? Did they make an impact on you?

The Schlicker in Herrick Chapel was installed after I graduated, so my time was spent on the 1930 Skinner organ in Thorne Hall. It was built for a Methodist Church in San Francisco that was forced into bankruptcy during the Great Depression. Occidental acquired it in 1938, installing it with the pipes in the back in a space probably intended for balcony seating and a projection booth. The console was located in an orchestra pit at the front. As you can imagine, it was not a comfortable arrangement, and additionally, reverberation was, and still is, non-existent. That organ, Skinner’s Opus 819, fell into disuse but has now been removed and will be restored for the Episcopal High School in Belaire (Houston), Texas.

Occidental had a fine reputation for high caliber organ instruction. Not many remember now that David Craighead taught there for several years before his appointment at Eastman in about 1955. It was Craighead who encouraged Occidental to hire Mader to succeed him. When the administration noted Mader’s lack of any college degree, Craighead, to his everlasting credit, told them “that doesn’t matter!”

Speaking of organs, what were some of the first ones you were exposed to in Los Angeles, and did any of them cultivate your love of the symphonic style of building?

O yes! When I was growing up in Los Angeles, there were still fine pre-World War I instruments built by Murray M. Harris, and there were E. M. Skinners, Kimballs, and pre-World War II Casavants as well. Harris’s organs were characterized by English-type ensembles and a few had imported Tuba stops from England. All Saints Church, Pasadena, and Second Church of Christ, Scientist, Los Angeles, are two that I was familiar with.

And there were some romantically trained organists who were really inspiring to watch and hear. I had the pleasure of knowing Anita Priest who played at First Methodist in Pasadena on their four-manual 1923 Skinner. Like many Skinners of his early period, it only had three general pistons, but Anita magically coaxed twelve out of the instrument! How? When she played a service, she could start with three generals for the prelude. (No one in those days would waste a general for the hymns!) During the invocation she reset them to accompany the professional quartet or the choir. Following that, she would reset them during the scripture readings in preparation for the offering, and finally reset them once more for the postlude. Presto! Twelve generals!

The choir occasionally did major choral works, one of which was an abridged version of Elijah. There was no orchestra involved, but Anita manipulated the organ so creatively that the music sounded thoroughly satisfying and natural. In the 1950s and 1960s, I witnessed the tail end of that style of accompanying, and in later years her style nearly became a lost art.

Now back to your career trajectory. After Occidental, where did you go?

Clarence Mader, who had been at Immanuel Presbyterian for nearly forty years, felt increasingly that he wanted to have his Sunday mornings free. I was enormously fortunate that he recommended me to follow him, and fortunate that the church acted on his suggestion. This led to my playing my first service there in January of 1966.

After some years, however, there appeared new incentives to think of a move from California. The first was the discovery—through the Organ Historical Society—of the old nineteenth-century Boston-built organs, especially those of E. & G. G. Hook. I was determined to experience New England first hand and was discouraged by the overdevelopment, congestion, and smog in Los Angeles. The idea of being surrounded with so much history and living in a brisk four-season climate was irresistible.

During my first trip to Boston, I became acquainted with the Hook organs at Immaculate Conception on Harrison Avenue, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, and others, and I also met Barbara Owen, one of the great advocates of saving these amazing instruments. After that trip, I was convinced that New England, with its four seasons and historical riches, was where I wanted to live.

You recorded on the organ at Immaculate Conception shortly after that trip, correct?

Yes—in 1971, before leaving California. The first was a recording of Franck’s Grand Pièce Symphonique and the Fantaisie in A. Immaculate Conception, which had originally stood in a very Irish neighborhood, was run by the Jesuits who founded Boston College adjoining the church. That organ was so fantastic—almost French in nature, with bright chorus reeds, singing Diapasons, and delicious flutes, all in sumptuous acoustics! It’s in storage now, but all of us who knew it pray it will be heard again in a noble building like the one it left. 

As a complete beginner in the recording field, there was no assurance whatsoever of releasing any recording on a commercial label, so I hired recording engineers Stephen Fassett and David Griesinger, paid for the editing, and afterward marketed it myself to Sheffield Records in California. They had previously released a disc of Anthony Newman’s (it may have been his first), so I figured they were not averse to organ music! Thanks to great good fortune, they liked it and released it to a favorable reception. By the way, I’ve always been grateful to Robert Schuneman, then editor of The Diapason, for a very favorable review of that first disc. One other thing to note—E. Power Biggs had produced a disc on Columbia called The Organ in America with various light pieces by early American composers. But I believe our Franck recording made at Immaculate Conception can claim to be the first commercial recording of any major works on a significant nineteenth-century American organ, and a magnificent instrument it was, too.

So, when did you finally “bite the bullet” and make the move to Boston?

I left Immanuel Presbyterian in 1973 and was appointed interim organist-choirmaster at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Boston. The Dean, the Very Reverend Charles Henry Buck, had re-established a choir of boys and men a few years before. I was appointed interim because the choirmaster was suffering from poor health and recruitment for the choir had lapsed. Developing and maintaining a choir of men and boys with only after-school rehearsal time is work, as anyone who has done it will tell you! But the dean supported the work of rebuilding the choir, and in due time I was appointed to the permanent position. 

Things then changed considerably in the year after Dean Buck retired in 1978, because the new clergy “management” did not want to continue the choir and yet was unwilling to spend money on starting a choir for girls. But during my years there, before conditions became unfavorable, it was a really exhilarating time for us all!

We managed to take the choir on tour in 1978 to England. I wanted them to hear the best English choirs, so we went the last week of July, which afforded the opportunity to hear some fine London choirs for a week before beginning our own residency at Saint Alban’s Cathedral. We also sang services at Saint Paul’s, London, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and, because we were from Boston, we traveled by coach to Boston in Lincolnshire to sing choral Evensong in the splendid medieval parish church there.

We shouldn’t leave this subject without noting that one of the boy trebles in that choir was Jonathan Ambrosino, now very well-known as an organ consultant and writer on all things organistical, and that Jonathan was influenced by the 1952 Aeolian-Skinner organ at Saint Paul’s, Opus 1207, another organ that has now been removed to make room for an elevator. One of the men of the choir on that trip was Stephen Kowalyshyn, inventor of the “Kowalyshyn Servo-Pneumatic Lever” used on large mechanical-action instruments, and another notable name from the organ world is Robert Newton, for decades the head of Andover Organ Company’s restoration department—he was a fine bass with us at Saint Paul’s.

I know that you were making recordings during your time at Saint Paul’s. Tell us about some of those projects.

Soon after moving in the summer of 1973, I made the first of two LPs of Mendelssohn sonatas on the 1854 E. & G. G. Hook organ at the Unitarian Church in Jamaica Plain. Because of the enormous frequency range of organ sound and the power of organ bass, one disc allowed only about twenty-four distortion-free minutes per side in those days. Sonatas 1, 3, and 4 were on that first disc. The acoustics in the church were so dry that we carried out the pew cushions and stacked them in the narthex. I also brought two blankets from home and built a tent on a 2 x 4 framework so they could be draped behind and above the console to keep the clatter of the worn key action out of the recording. It is a fascinating instrument that has recently received fine conservative restoration work by Scot Huntington. 

To complete all six of the sonatas, we recorded a companion album with numbers 2, 5, and 6 on the 1857 William B. D. Simmons organ at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in East Boston, another rare survival among our pre-Civil War organs. The adventure there was dodging the noise from the Boston airport!

So, how were these instruments perceived when the recordings were released? Were they in fashion? Out of fashion? Or simply forgotten?

Most of them had been forgotten except among Organ Historical Society people. And as I said before, the only comparable record had been made by E. Power Biggs with his album of early American keyboard pieces. For that reason, I am confident these early discs of ours broke entirely new ground in establishing the integrity of our American instruments.

Through your recordings and work at St. Paul’s, you were firmly establishing yourself in the New England organ scene. How did your association with Yale come about?

Charles Krigbaum invited me to do a program in Woolsey Hall in about 1976. Not long before, Robert Baker had left the Union Seminary School of Sacred Music to be the first director of the newly established Yale Institute of Sacred Music. I remember devoting that first program to three sonatas, one each by Rheinberger, Hindemith, and Elgar. It must have left a favorable impression with both Charles and Robert, because late in 1980, Charles called me to say that Yale was creating a junior instructor position in organ and that the search committee would welcome an application! 

So I applied and was interviewed for that in the spring of 1981, playing a lecture-recital on the Beckerath organ in Dwight Chapel. I was enormously fortunate, yet again, that the audition was well received, resulting in the invitation to teach at Yale in the fall of that year. In retrospect, I suspect the new junior position was planned in preparation for Robert Baker’s retirement, because he taught only a few years after that.

When I started, my job consisted of teaching a few organ students, directing the Marquand Chapel Choir at the Divinity School and playing some weekday services there. A little later on Charles Krigbaum stepped away from playing at the University Church (Battell Chapel), and I assumed those responsibilities as well. Around the same time, Fenno Heath, the revered long-time director of the Yale Glee Club decided to give up the Battell Choir so I took that on for about five years. When Charles Krigbaum decided to retire from Yale in 1995, I left all choral commitments to focus on the organ department.

I remain enormously grateful, not only to Charles Krigbaum and Robert Baker, but to Martin Jean, who came to join me on the faculty in 1997. Martin, now director of the Institute of Sacred Music, though under great pressure in his administrative role, has been a cherished colleague, an outstanding coach for his students, an excellent advocate for the organ here, and a dear friend. 

When you arrived in 1981, the Romantic School of organbuilding and playing was still largely out of fashion, and I recall hearing that the organ in Woolsey Hall was not universally appreciated. Could you provide some insight into that? 

That’s true. For several decades, especially after the arrival of the Holtkamp organ in Battell Chapel in 1951, the organ in Woolsey, properly known as the Newberry Memorial Organ, was dismissed by many as a decadent, categorically flawed instrument from a “bad period.” Some give me credit for raising awareness of the worth of this wonderful instrument, but it was really Charles Krigbaum who laid the groundwork for its return to favor. Though he played a wide variety of literature and believed in being a “universalist” about repertoire, Charles had a particular fondness for Widor and the music of Messiaen. He recognized the organ in Woolsey as a persuasive vehicle for that music, and he recorded much of it there—including all ten Widor symphonies!

So, interest was already brewing by the time I arrived. We should all be thankful that during the “dark years” when there was a lack of interest among the students, the organ was conserved in its original form by Aubrey Thompson-Allen, the Yale Curator of Organs. Our current senior curators Nick Thompson-Allen and Joseph Dzeda, and now the younger members of their staff, Nate and Zach Ventrella, keep that legacy alive. Interestingly, as a student at Kent State University, Joe Dzeda had a framed photo of the Woolsey instrument in his dorm room!

Little did he know that his name would eventually be synonymous with its care!

Exactly! He’s admitted that during college, he wondered if he’d ever get the opportunity to see the instrument in person! Not only has he spent his career in it, but upon his demise, he will rest in the Grove Street Cemetery across the street, as he says, “to keep an eye on ‘The Newberry’!”

Speaking of Woolsey’s care, it must be gratifying, at the end of your time at Yale, to see the organ completely restored. Tell us about that process.

Yes, over many decades, the curators made timely repairs to the instrument to keep it in reliable working condition. But as years passed by repairs became more frequent and more urgent. In 2006, Martin Jean and I decided that the time was right to press for the first-ever comprehensive restoration, to be funded entirely by the Institute of Sacred Music. Readers may be surprised to learn that, until recent years, many of the 1915 Steere chests and 1928 Skinner chests were still operating on original leather! Due to the magnitude of the project, it was decided to undertake the work in stages over seven years, a division at a time during the summer months, to keep the organ in use during the academic year. The result is magnificent, and we are greatly relieved now that Skinner Opus 722 is poised for another century of service.

Back to recordings. So far, we’ve focused on your early work, recording historic instruments in Boston. I’d like to hear more about your recordings of orchestral transcriptions. I think its safe to say that you were one of the first to champion transcription playing.

Well yes—and you could say I took risks in doing that, but I don’t think I could have resisted the temptation! There are responsibilities we can’t ignore when playing original literature, particularly where composers are specific about registration. With transcriptions, it’s not that way. The philosophical question a player faces is whether to be faithful to arrangements as devised and published by a transcriber or to be as faithful as possible in translating the original score. I take the second approach, in part because the organs we have now offer flexibility and versatility not dreamed of in Edwin H. Lemare’s day. So I don’t take published transcriptions, even those written by Lemare, to be “holy writ,” though existing arrangements can often be useful as a “working score.”

Over the years, I’ve adapted several piano pieces for the organ. I really enjoy trying to get into the mind of the composer and posing the question: if I were Liszt, how would I orchestrate this piece? Do the figurations on the keyboard suggest an orchestral color? There may be no single right or wrong answer, but we must make a piece sound as convincing as possible in the new medium, the organ. There are two CD anthologies of transcriptions from Woolsey Hall: The Symphonic Organist and The Transcriber’s Art. One is on the Gothic label and the other on Priory. It’s the style of playing that I love, more than the fact that such pieces are transcribed ones. Of course, there is original organ music that invites the same approach as well.

Do you generally write your own transcriptions?

I’ve done only one transcription “from scratch” worth mentioning. Elgar wrote a major piece in the late 1920s, commissioned as a band competition piece called Severn Suite. No surprise that it’s in B-flat major! He must have sanctioned a proposed organ version by Ivor Atkins, his friend and Worcester Cathedral organist. That was published as the Second Sonata but, regrettably, Atkins eliminated a whole movement—the “Minuet”—adding an entire page of his own music in its place! 

Later on Elgar rewrote the piece for full orchestra and transposed it to C major. I decided that I wanted to play this version—the definitive one—in the worst way! It is a superb multi-movement work and every bit as wonderful as Elgar’s original Organ Sonata, opus 28. It was released by Joe Vitacco on JAV Recordings, no longer available on a “physical” CD, but can be downloaded from i-Tunes. Just look for Elgar’s Severn Suite, and you can have it for 99 cents per movement!

In addition to your work as an educator and recording artist, you’ve been a prolific recitalist all across the globe. Care to share some highlights?

I’ve been grateful for many invitations to play programs over the years, many for American Guild of Organists and Organ Historical Society conventions. In fact, there was a time when I was receiving an OHS invitation nearly every year, which led me to worry about folks becoming weary of me! There is such a thing as “too much of a good thing!”

I’ve been fortunate to do many performances in North America and Western Europe. An especially memorable tour was to Buenos Aires, organized by my former student Ezequiel Menéndez. From Australia came an invitation to play one recital in Sydney and two in Melbourne, and there was a recital at Suntory Hall in Tokyo when their Rieger organ was new.

My recital activity has been far from all consuming, though, and entering retirement, I’m happy to retreat a bit from that aspect of my activity. There are so many talented students I’ve had the pleasure of coaching. Not all have their heart set on concert playing, but for those who do I’d like to see them getting opportunities I had earlier.

Though you’ve stepped away somewhat from your recital career, you continue to serve as a church musician. Tell us about your responsibilities at Christ Church, New Haven.

For twelve years now I have been artist in residence and principal organist there, enjoying the spacious acoustics and playing a very satisfying English-sounding instrument. I’ve also mentored organ students from the Institute of Sacred Music who serve as organ scholars. Christ Church adjoins Yale’s campus and is one of America’s finest examples of Gothic Revival architecture anywhere. In my time we have had two fine rectors and a very appreciative congregation. It is a very happy association.

One final question. As you look at the profession, what are the challenges, concerns, and opportunities you see moving forward.

While there is certainly reason to be pessimistic about many trends we see in church music, I remain hopeful for a future that continues to support the music we love, music that nourishes because it is enduring! Churches supporting organ and choral music will not disappear, but they are becoming fewer and resources are diminishing. Too many think of “traditional” music and ceremonial as something stuck in the past. “Museum Church” they sometimes call it. People need to see that it really means being in the tradition—being a part of an ever-continuing creation of music and art that enriches the human spirit. My advice to students is to make sure they spare no effort to become as fine a musician as possible. If you’re among the best, you will have a far greater chance for success. 

Also, if you’re an Episcopalian or Roman Catholic, don’t be lured into thinking that the best jobs are in cathedrals! Good parishes are often better motivated and better equipped to support robust music programs.

Beyond that, we must learn to be far more effective at being advocates for what we do, for its enormous worth in society. I wish more academic professional programs would provide students with the strategies—the tools for advocacy! Every branch of music education, especially the “classical” branch, must rise to meet this need in our time.

Thank you so much for your time, and best wishes for a tranquil retirement!

Hearty thanks to you for this opportunity—my pleasure! But “tranquil?” I don’t anticipate that! It’s more a transition from employment to “self-employment,” happily with more freedom to enjoy many things, extra-musical and musical alike.

Photo: Thomas Murray, Luther Noss, and Charles Krigbaum in front of Woolsey Hall, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Brooks Grantier

Brooks Grantier, FAGO, is music director emeritus of the Battle Creek (Michigan) Boychoir, and was for thirty-eight years director of music at Trinity Episcopal Church in Marshall, Michigan.

The 59th annual University of Michigan conference on organ music took place on the Ann Arbor campus September 29 through October 1, 2019, with important pre-conference events on the Friday and Saturday preceding. The theme for 2019 was “Building Bach: His Foundations and Futures.” In view of (and din of) construction equipment all over the campus, the theme seemed exceptionally apt.

Pre-conference event: Isabelle Demers

In an impressive memorized program, Isabelle Demers set a high bar in her recital at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Detroit on Friday, September 27. Alongside a few familiar works, Ms. Demers offered colorful, varied fare from Swedish composer Oskar Lindberg and Australian-American composer Jason Roberts. Transcriptions included movements from Handel’s Fireworks Music, and a bracing reading of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, bringing out all of the composer’s intent—tempo, rhythm, texture, and formal shape. The recital was brought to a bravura conclusion with Thalben-Ball’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini.

The Eighth Annual Improvisation Competition

On Saturday, September 28, three finalists played the very fine three-manual, fifty-seven-rank Wilhelm organ at Ann Arbor’s First Congregational Church, site of a number of conference events. With no combination action nor the assistance of registrants, the three competitors were on their own in impressive displays of contrapuntal prowess and formal tautness. Competing were Christopher Ganza (first prize), David McCarthy (second prize) and Héctor Salcedo (third prize). All three players showed themselves at the top of today’s outstanding class of improvisers.

Sunday, September 29

Julia Brown (Mayflower Congregational Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan) opened the conference proper with a recital on the two-manual, thirty-five-rank Silbermann-styled Fisk organ in the Blanche Anderson Moore (BAM for short) Recital Hall at the School of Music on the University’s North Campus. Serving up a meat-and-potatoes menu of Buxtehude, Scheidemann, Müthel, W. F. and J. S. Bach, Ms. Brown’s playing was marked by a gracious flexibility in rhythm, sensitive to the organ’s flexible winding and the intimate acoustics of the BAM recital hall.

Returning to the Wilhelm organ at First Congregational Church, Kola Owolabi’s faculty recital considered “Bach’s Circle: Musical Influences and Missed Connections.” Playing with astute finesse and a seasoned musical intelligence, Dr. Owolabi gave us music of Weckmann, Frescobaldi, Kerll, Corea de Arauxo, Buxtehude (the superb Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein), and Bach (the “Dorian” Toccata and Fugue).

Monday, September 30

The morning opened at the BAM Fisk organ with a lecture-recital by Kevin Bylsma (Mariner’s Church, Detroit) and Randall Engle (North Hills Christian Reformed Church, Troy, Michigan) on “Bach, the Teacher.” Mr. Bylsma gave the context of several pieces in Bach’s Orgelbüchlein. After each brief essay, the audience rose to sing a stanza of the chorale, followed by Dr. Engle’s performance of the Orgelbüchlein setting.

A recital by U of M organ students followed. Joseph Mutone, Arthur Greenlee, Samuel Ronning, Michael Mishler, and Sarah Simko (a member of The Diapason’s 20 Under 30 Class of 2017) played works by Bach and by Grand Rapids composer Larry Visser. The students were candidates for various degrees in organ and church music, and in some cases also for degrees in computer science and engineering—a sign of the times for organists in our age. All were players of fine attainment, carefully prepared, and confident in performance.

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra displayed her many-sided musical interests in a lecture-recital called “Bach’s Nest.” Just as a bird gathers material from many places to build the nest, so Dr. Ruiter-Feenstra has borrowed from many sources to put together improvisations modeled on the works of Bach. After playing various works of Bach to demonstrate her own Bach-inspired improvisations, she concluded with an improvised French suite on the American tune, “We shall overcome.”

Accompanied by a box lunch (a “Bach’s lunch”) outdoors, we were treated to the first of two carillon recitals, this one by U of M carillonneur Tiffany Ng, playing the sixty-bell instrument located near the School of Music. Always an adventuresome programmer, Dr. Ng chose newly composed works written with some reference to Bach. The euphoniously tuned Dutch carillon was in contrast to its English companion on the U-M central campus, which we heard later that day.

Returning to the School of Music, Michael Barone (of Pipedreams renown) gave us generous samplings of recorded works commissioned and/or played by the late Marilyn Mason. Founder of the U of M organ conference and the longest serving faculty member in the history of the university (sixty-seven years), Dr. Mason enriched the organ repertoire with some ninety commissioned works.

Then, using the BAM Fisk, George Stauffer and Renée Anne Louprette (Rutgers University) gave a tandem lecture recital entitled “Bach Under the Influence.” Dr. Stauffer identified several compositional strands that came together in Bach’s organ music and in later works that flowed from his inspiration. Ms. Louprette then played works by Bach and later composers that strongly correlated Dr. Stauffer’s insightful points. Both artists deserve much credit for this thoughtfully devised, elegantly presented program.

Moving to the U of M central campus, we heard a second carillon recital, by Roy Kroezen (carillonneur of the Centralia, Illinois, carillon), on the fifty-three-bell Baird Carillon, given to the university in 1936 by athletic director (!) Charles Baird. This carillon is much in the English style, with the unusual harmonics of the bells given clangorous free play. Mr. Kroezen’s program included music by Bach, Buxtehude, and Kirnberger. Thus we were treated to two very distinct styles of carillon, two highly varied approaches to repertoire, and a pair of most artistic players. Who could ask for anything more?

Our day finished in the legendary Hill Auditorium, whose organ is an amalgam of Farrand & Votey, Hutchings, Skinner, and Aeolian-Skinner. A mongrel? Of course, but in this case a friendly beast, very much at home in the spacious acoustics and parabolic interior of Hill Auditorium. Steven Egler (Central Michigan University) played a one-composer program entitled “Organ Music of Gerald Near: Futurist Building on the Foundations of Bach.” Dr. Egler’s selection proved a strong case for bringing the essence of Bach’s style into our time in music of contrapuntal ingenuity and polished sonority. In the music of Bach, a composer can find no finer mentor, and in the playing of Dr. Egler, a composer can commend no finer advocate.

Tuesday, October 1

We began the day with three discussion programs back-to-back. First, a group of researchers in such arcana as “mathematics and computational medicine and bioinformatics” gave a presentation on mapping brain activity during performance of Bach’s trio sonatas. While the research is in its infancy—stay tuned. When linked with findings in neuroscience, the work will provide fascinating insights into how the brain processes information on several planes simultaneously, as in the trio sonatas. Isabelle Demers returned us to the organ as an expression of musical communication, with observations of the continuing persistence of Marcel Dupré’s articulation of Bach’s G Minor Fugue, through recorded performances spanning several decades.

The final discussion, led by Dr. Tiffany Ng, was on “Women and Organ Improvisation.” Three women from the conference roster plus jazz studies professor Ellen H. Rowe related how they came to the practice of musical improvisation. The panel noted that nearly all improvisation prizes are awarded to male performers, speculated on reasons for this, and highlighted improvisation among women players.

Matthew Bengston of the U of M keyboard faculty and Mark Kroll (professor emeritus, Boston University)presented lectures on the suites of Bach and Dieupart, and on Bach and Couperin, both using the harpsichord in superb illustration of Bach’s French style. Another recital by U of M students followed, using the Wilhelm organ. Performers Jenna Moon, Allison Barone, Kaelan Hansson, and Emily Solomon (a member of The Diapason’s 20 Under 30 Class of 2019) played music of Scheidt, Böhm, Müthel, and Tunder respectively. As in the first recital, all were carefully prepared, and all played with style and confidence.

The conference closed with Bach and Handel, played by U of M’s Baroque Chamber Orchestra in the spacious acoustics of Saint Francis Catholic Church, with its excellent Létourneau organ. The centerpiece was Bach’s Cantata 146, Wir müssen durch viel Trubsal in das Reich Gottes, featuring a quartet of singers and Dr. Owolabi playing the important organ part. Directors Joseph Gascho and Aaron Berofsky gave all that we could ask for in an edge-of-the-seat compelling performance.

As a welcome interlude, before the final performance, organ department chair James Kibbie invited everyone to gather at Ann Arbor’s Cottage Inn restaurant, a favorite haunt of the
U of M community, in a toast in memory of Marilyn Mason. As we raised our glasses, Dr. Kibbie offered his own brief salute, and then invited all in attendance to share their own “Marilyn” stories with those around us. It was meet and right so to do. And a fitting close to a memorable conference.

Photo credit: Colin Knapp

John Bishop

Giants among favorites

I am often asked if I have a favorite organ, a single instrument that stands out among the multitude as the best, the most expressive, the most impressive, among the hundreds I have visited, played on, or worked on. I am never able to answer clearly by citing a single instrument. There are organs that have been important in my life, but great life experiences do not necessarily focus on superb organs. I am very proud of some of the projects I have done on simple organs that I was able to expand and improve so the congregations that own them were thrilled with the result.

I have heard some of our finest musicians play thrilling programs on magnificent instruments and come away from those experiences with gratitude for a life surrounded by great musicians and great organs. I have been moved by beautiful playing on exquisite smaller instruments and amazed by the relationships of beautiful organs with the acoustics and architecture of their buildings.

I have fond memories of the organs I knew when I was a teenager first learning to play, some of which I still see regularly, and memories of rich evenings with beloved colleagues—sitting with an organ, listening to its tones, experimenting with its mechanics, marveling at its design, historical importance, heritage—and then retiring to a restaurant for a great meal. I have visited many organs nearing completion in colleagues’ workshops and then heard them as finished instruments in their “forever homes.” And as director of the Organ Clearing House, I have learned that what seemed like a forever home for an organ can vanish, leaving the organ homeless. I am especially proud of some of those when we were able to find new homes for them and see them restored for a second century of use.

There are dozens, hundreds of organs I can think of that I love and respect as great technical, musical, artistic achievements, but there is not one that I can point to as the best or as my favorite. I will cite a few standouts.

Warner Concert Hall

I was an eighteen-year-old incoming freshman at Oberlin in November 1974, my third month as a grown-up organ major, when the grand Flentrop organ was dedicated in Warner Concert Hall. I was fortunate to have grown up in Boston where I heard many wonderful new mechanical-action organs, but the Flentrop dazzled me. Painted red and blue and wearing gold negligee, it looks fantastic in the mostly whitish room. I did the hard work of practice, lessons, studio classes, and required performances including my senior recital on that organ. After a long absence I had a chance to visit it again last summer, and as you read this, I will have attended the fiftieth anniversary celebration of that organ over the weekend of November 15, reuniting with dozens of friends, classmates, and colleagues.

Basilica of Saint Martin

I visited Stefan Stürzer at Glatter-Götz Orgelbau in Pfullendorf, Germany, in September of 2019. Manuel Rosales was there working on the earliest stages of the monumental organ they are building together for Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York City. Stefan, Manuel, Glatter-Götz’s then-new employee Felix Müller, and I had a chance to visit the Josef Gabler organ (completed in 1750) in the Basilica of Saint Martin in Weingarten, Germany. The only time we could schedule our visit was during a Mass on a Friday afternoon, but since the organ gallery is very high in the rear of the building, we were able to walk around chatting. In between leading hymns, psalms, and incidental music, the organist opened panels to show us inner workings, and he made a point of demonstrating some of the unique sounds of that remarkable organ, especially the haunting Vox Humana in the Brüstungspositiv (Rückpositiv).

There is a fascinating legend regarding that Vox Humana that had Gabler struggling to recreate the human voice exactly, and one attempt after many others fell short. The devil offered a deal: consign your soul to the devil, meet in a prescribed lonely place in the forest, and you will receive the secret for the perfect human voice, which turned out to be a piece of metal to be used to build the rank. It is not clear how Gabler got out of that pickle, but the organ was successful enough that the abbot presented him with enough wine to fill the organ’s largest pipe. (If the pipe was twenty-four inches in diameter and thirty-two feet long, that would be around seven-hundred-fifty gallons.) The name of the city and abbey gives away the source of such a plentiful supply. I remember that as a remarkable encounter with a spectacular organ in the company of admired colleagues, pretty heady stuff. That night, Felix took the photo of me that shows every month at the top of the right-hand page of this column.

Saint-Sulpice

The Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France, is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential organs in the world. Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré filled that organ bench for a hundred years as they taught generations of students. Imagine hearing Widor’s “Toccata” from the Fifth Symphony in that church for the first time. “Oh Maître, I hope you’ll play it again.” I attended a recital there played by Gillian Weir and could do nothing but weep. Putting my fingers on the keys played by Widor and Dupré for thousands of Masses and countless hours of practice was both humbling and thrilling.

Saint James

When I was working for John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, around 1980, we renovated a large Wicks organ in Saint James Catholic Church in Lakewood, Ohio, with three manuals and twenty-eight ranks. It was located in an ample and high loft at the rear of the church with a small two-division sanctuary organ burrowed into the reredos, an unremarkable organ except that it was in a huge, resonant church and was a product of the period when Vincent Willis III of the great eponymous British firm was working at Wicks influencing their tonal schemes.

There was a lot of unification in the organ, so there was a lot of wiring to do, much of which I did alone in a Zen state, sorting and soldering row after row of wires while listening to a gaggle of women with an occasional added man reciting the Rosary for an hour after the end of the 8:00 a.m. Mass. By the time the project was finished, that sequence of prayers was forever etched in my brain, and when I hear it today, I can smell the soldering iron.

I mention this organ because it opened my twenty-something, tracker-action, early music eyes and ears to a new understanding of Romantic music. One afternoon I was playing the ubiquitous Widor “Toccata” (he sure did play it again, and so has almost every organist since), reveling in the effect of the piece in that vast rolling acoustic. I was used to playing it on smallish tracker organs that made it sound like pelting marbles on a metal roof. So that’s what it’s supposed to sound like. Maybe there is something to this music.

“The Busch”

E. Power Biggs lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was neighbor to great thinkers like Arthur Schlesinger, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Julia Child. After working with G. Donald Harrison of Aeolian-Skinner to create an “experimental organ” in Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum (now known as Busch Hall), Biggs commissioned a three-manual, mechanical-action organ by Flentrop Orgelbouw of Zaandam, the Netherlands, which was installed in the gallery of the resonant hall in 1957. That instrument quickly became world-famous as Biggs recorded there his brilliant and influential series of LPs, E. Power Biggs: Bach Great Organ Favorites. I was deeply influenced by those recordings, and I have met countless other organists “of a certain age” whose life paths were set by those recordings. As a teenager I heard Biggs play several recitals there, memories that have stayed with me for over fifty years, and I have visited the organ several times since. It is impossible to overstate the impact of the Flentrop organ on American organ building at that time, as the renaissance that was the revival of the classic craft was gaining traction.

Trinity on Copley

I worked at Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, between 1984 and 1987 until Daniel Angerstein closed the workshop to become tonal director for M. P. Möller in Hagerstown, Maryland. Dan and I worked out that I would assume the many service clients that led to the founding of the Bishop Organ Company. Jason McKown was a legendary old organ technician in the Boston area who had worked directly and personally with Ernest Skinner and told endless stories about Mr. Skinner and many famous organists and organbuilders. He was over eighty years old and eager to retire as curator of the marvelous double organ at Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston, where there is a four-manual instrument by the Skinner Organ Company in the rear gallery and a three-manual Aeolian-Skinner in a chancel chamber. Jason had been caring for the organ for over fifty years. The building is a heavy, dense, grand place with interior decoration by John La Farge, and the organs sound spectacular there. Brian Jones, the organist there and an old friend, introduced me to Jason, and I became curator of the organs.

Trinity Church has long been famous for noontime recitals every Friday, and I was there early every Friday morning for two hours of tuning. It was my habit to listen to Red Barber and Bob Edwards after the 7:30 a.m. headlines on National Public Radio in my car with a cup of coffee before going inside to tune.

Those Friday noon recitals meant I heard different organists play the organ every week. Some players were swallowed up by the complexity and sophistication of the big double organ with myriad controls and combinations. Others managed to tame the beast, and it sometimes seemed that the organ somehow knew when the person who slid onto the bench was going to give it a great ride. Over a period of about ten years, I heard more than 200 recitals there. Of course, there were many repeats, but hearing so many different approaches to a single organ was an important part of my learning.

A couple doozies

Once I was established at Trinity, Jason walked me the half mile up Huntington Avenue to The First Church of Christ, Scientist, known familiarly as the Mother Church, home to Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203, built in 1952. He had been caring for the organ since it was installed, and what an organ it is with over 150 stops and 237 ranks. Jason recommended me to the church as his successor, and I had a rollicking ten years learning the mysteries of taking care of a truly massive organ.

Many of the world’s largest organs, say those with more than 200 ranks, were originally built as more modest instruments and evolved into their present glory under a string of opus numbers. One of the many remarkable things about Opus 1203 is that it was built all at once under one giant contract. Also remarkable is that it was built under the tonal direction of Lawrence Phelps, who was only thirty years old at the time. I know I thought I was quite something when I was thirty, but I am sure I could not have produced such a massive organ with such a sophisticated tonal scheme.

This amazing organ was at the center of my professional life for around ten years, and I had many important experiences and lessons there. I have written about it in these pages many times because pretty much any time I start writing about organs, it is there lurking—no, looming in the background.

I had a conversation the other day with Bryan Ashley, who has been the organist there since 2009. He revels in the organ’s majesty and subtlety and told me that it is the honor of his life to play it each week. The church has supported the organ with meticulous care since it was installed. Foley-Baker, Inc., of Tolland, Connecticut, has been working there since I left nearly thirty years ago, doing usual tuning and service calls as well as a comprehensive renovation under the direction of Phelps in the 1990s. The brilliant concert organist Stephen Tharp played a landmark recital on the Mother Church organ on June 28, 2014, the closing recital for the national convention of the American Guild of Organists. He premiered his transcription of Igor Stravinsky’s world-changing Rite of Spring in a riveting performance that I thought changed the world of organ recitals forever. His fierce rhythmic drive and dynamic, fiery registrations had the huge audience spellbound. In testament to the quality and condition of that massive organ built in 1952, Stephen told me that he practiced energetically for dozens of hours in preparation for his recital and never had to call on the technicians to correct anything.

The Mother Church organ came to mind, as it does frequently, when I was in Salt Lake City this past August for the convention of the American Institute of Organbuilders, where the famous Aeolian-Skinner organ in the Mormon Tabernacle was featured in several programs. The Tabernacle organ (Opus 1075) was built in 1945, just seven years and 128 opus numbers earlier than the Mother Church organ. It originally had 187 ranks and has been gradually expanded to today’s 206 ranks by Schoenstein & Company. It was built under the directorship of G. Donald Harrison who considered it his masterpiece, and rightly so. A quick look at the encyclopedic stoplist shows its vast variety of tone colors and combinations.

There is a fundamental difference between these two extraordinary organs. While both can be considered “American Classic” instruments, the Mother Church organ has lower wind pressures. The Positiv division is on less than two inches of wind; it is amazing that the eleven-stop pitman windchest can function on such low pressure. Along with lower wind pressures, the organ has what could be considered Baroque choruses with German nomenclature. Along with the Great, Swell, and Choir you would expect to find the Hauptwerk and Positiv with distinctly lighter tone.

Both organs are rich with multiple pairs of “celesting” stops, mutations at every pitch imaginable, and many mixtures of varying character. It is important to note that both organs are scrupulously maintained in terrific condition, reflecting the dedication of those two institutions.

Look it up.

I have been rattling from one organ to another, and I imagine some readers would be interested to see the stoplists. You are in luck. The Organ Historical Society has a broad and valuable database of organs across the United States. Visit pipeorgandatabase.com, click on “Instruments” in the upper left corner, then click on “View/Search Instruments.” That will open a form with blanks to fill in: Location (Church, Institution, etc.), City, State, Builder, Opus Number, etc. You usually only need to fill in a few blanks before the organ you are looking for pops up.

The database is a fantastic resource with photos and information about thousands of organs. The website is open on my browser whenever I am sitting at my desk, and I routinely search for information about dozens of organs. A little hint: if an organ has been rebuilt, it is likely you will find it under that company rather than the original builder. For example, you will find the Mother Church organ under Foley-Baker, not Aeolian-Skinner. Three cheers to the OHS for conceiving and continuing with that valuable project, essential to those who work with and research organs, and fascinating to all of us who are just plain interested.

If you visit the database and do not see an organ you play regularly or just know and love, go back to the original menu, click “Instruments,” and then click “Submit New Instrument Entry.” Your submission will be reviewed, someone may ask you a question or two, and then you will have contributed to a unique and valuable resource.

Next time we meet, ask me what’s my favorite organ. I’m thinking about that all the time; you may get a sassy answer.

David Herman

It was the only paying job I’d ever had.

So said Ralph Vaughan Williams, speaking on the biographical DVD, O Thou Transcendent, as he talked about his first—and only—church organist position.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), arguably the most imaginative, prolific, and engaging British composer of the first half of the twentieth century, wrote so relatively few works for solo organ.¹ Why was this? Other twentieth-century British composers (such as Matthias, Leighton, Wills, Jackson, and, especially, Howells) contributed to the organ’s literature in major ways. Some say Vaughan Williams did not like the organ. It is more accurate, I believe, to suggest he did not enjoy playing the organ. It might have been difficult for him; he was, after all, a large man and had (as noted by relatives speaking on the DVD) long fingers and “enormous” feet! Others suggest his personal brand of Christian agnosticism got in the way of composing solo organ music.² But there are, of course, British organs in not only churches and cathedrals but also in many town halls and other non-religious concert venues. There was even an organ set up in his childhood home in Surrey so that he could practice.

Perhaps Vaughan Williams could not quite sort out how to translate some musical thoughts into organistic musical thoughts. In one of his many profoundly important observations on playing the organ, the late Erik Routley once wrote, “The organist must translate the [hymn] score into organ language [author’s emphasis] when he or she plays.”³

It is true that while many places in Vaughan Williams’s organ works have the ingredients for great musical expression, they are not entirely easy to bring off at the organ, due to matters of fingering, pedaling, and especially of texture. The same could be said of organ music by some other composers (Jehan Alain comes to mind), for which the player’s creative imagination must be called upon to combine with the composer’s notes.

It is the goal of this short work to consider Vaughan Williams’s views about and experiences with the organ and to examine the organ works that he left us. In so doing we will note some of the important influences on his compositional life, including his friendship with Gustav Holst, and especially his long and admiring relationship with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. And, we will see that the organ had an important role in Vaughan Williams’s life from his early teens through his funeral in Westminster Abbey in August 1958.

A final theory offered by some in explaining Vaughan Williams’s relatively small output for the organ is that he simply couldn’t play the organ well.

I cannot tell that I think he is justified in going in for an organist’s career which is his pet idea. He seems to me so hopelessly ‘unhandy’ . . . . I can never trust him to play a simple service for me without some dread at what he may do.

So wrote Alan Gray, Vaughan Williams’s organ teacher at Trinity College.⁴ Vaughan Williams himself, likely with a degree of false modesty, was critical of his own playing. We should take care, however, in believing that he was not a competent organist, as many factors suggest otherwise. To begin with a significant milestone, he studied for and passed (in 1898) the demanding Fellowship exams for the Royal College of Organists (only to resign his membership a few years later). John Francis, Vaughan Williams scholar, author, and vice president/treasurer of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, suggests that the situation above that Alan Gray complained of was due to the fact that Vaughan Williams was “unpredictable rather than technically incompetent.”⁵ Francis continues:

Self-deprecatory remarks by Vaughan Williams in later years have perhaps been taken too often at face value. We have no account of his [organ] playing by anybody who heard him play.

Further, Gray himself followed his lament by adding,

And this he combines with considerable knowledge & taste on organ and musical matters generally.⁶

This essay is not a biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams; fortunately, there are many excellent volumes available, some issued quite recently. Nevertheless, many events in his childhood, youth, and university days are intertwined with a study of his organ music. The reader will note at the end a list of some twenty-four sources consulted. Also particularly useful is the Timeline found on the website of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society: www.rvwsociety.com.

Vaughan Williams’s father was the vicar of Down Ampney (which Vaughan Williams pronounced “Amney”)⁷ in Gloucestershire. He died when his son was only two years old. His mother came from families of means: she was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood (of pottery fame) and the niece of Charles Darwin.⁸ Let Vaughan Williams’s own words summarize the next few years, as spoken in Tony Palmer’s video, O Thou Transcendent:⁹

At age 11 [1883] I was sent to a horrid school at Rottingdean. Three years later I arrived at Charterhouse [1887]. They still sing my hymns there to this day. From Charterhouse I was sent off to the RCM [1890], and there I met a fellow pupil called Gustav Holst.

In his youth Holst had also secured a church position involving considerable responsibility. Vaughan Williams’s niece, recalling these early days with Vaughan Williams, remarked,

We used to laugh about Uncle Ralph but he wasn’t very good at the organ, and yet he was always playing for funerals or weddings or things.¹⁰

While at Charterhouse he was once greatly impressed by a schoolmate’s playing of Bach’s “St. Anne” fugue—a work that would remain a favorite throughout his life and which he himself designated as the postlude for his memorial service in Westminster Abbey.¹¹

During school holidays he practiced diligently, and the family even arranged for an organ to be installed at Leith Hill Place near Dorking, the seventeenth-century house in Surrey, wherein lived Wedgwoods and Darwins and which had become Vaughan Williams’s childhood home. (He later remarked that Dorking was “my home for nearly 40 years.”¹²) He inherited the house from his brother in 1944, whereupon he gave it to Britain’s National Trust.¹³ Breakfast at Leith Hill was at 7:30, and “Mr. Ralph” normally practiced beforehand. “The trouble about the early morning was finding a blower for the organ.”¹⁴ The butler, housemaids, groom, and gardener all avoided him!¹⁵ On Sundays he would practice long after the rest of the household had started to walk the two miles to church, usually arriving just as the service was starting. While a student at Charterhouse he was allowed to practice on the chapel organ. (One wonders what pieces he was working on!) In any case, from an early age Vaughan Williams seemed committed to the organ.

Throughout his childhood Vaughan Williams was steadfast in declaring his desire to be a professional musician. His family agreed, with the provision that he became an organist. (Thoughts were different in the late nineteenth century!) He later wrote:

I believe I should have made quite a decent fiddler but the authorities [!] decided that if I was to take up music at all the violin was too ‘doubtful’ a career and I must seek the safety of the organ stool, a trade for which I was entirely unsuited.¹⁶

It should be noted that when he subsequently left his only church position after only four or so years, it would seem that, although he disliked being an organist, there is no evidence that he disliked the organ.

The Royal College of Music

Vaughan Williams entered the Royal College of Music in 1890, just prior to his eighteenth birthday, and there became a pupil of Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. His family wanted him to commute, which he usually did by rail but occasionally on foot! (Really? London to Leith Hill in Surrey—some thirty miles! Far from the 200 miles Bach supposedly walked from Arnstadt to Lübeck, but . . . ). He often announced his arrival at Leith Hill Place by first having a go at the organ.¹⁷

While studying at the Royal College of Music he also entered Trinity College, Cambridge (1892), and there experienced a “spiritual awakening.”

As my mother insisted that I had a ‘proper’ education, I was sent to Cambridge . . .
what an awakening that was! You might almost say a spiritual awakening. The sense that even if you didn’t believe in God, there was something beyond. Something mysterious.¹⁸

Vaughan Williams would have heard many organ recitals and services at Cambridge and in nearby Ely Cathedral (whose organist then was T. Tertius Nobel, later to become organist at Saint Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, New York City). Undergraduates at Trinity College were obliged to attend chapel services, and Vaughan Williams sometimes avoided this duty by retreating to the organ loft. At Cambridge he studied the organ with Alan Gray¹⁹ (organist of Trinity College) and left the university with a B.Mus degree in 1894, returning to the Royal College of Music in 1895. There Vaughan Williams began composition study with Charles Villiers Stanford, with whom he had a famously difficult relationship; Stanford’s comment on Vaughan Williams’s music often consisted only of “All rot, me boy.” Vaughan Williams, however, was in later years to speak warmly of him.

The Church of Saint Barnabas, South Lambeth

Vaughan Williams was appointed organist here in 1895. Since this was to be his first and only church position it seems appropriate to include here some details of the place and his duties. It seems that he held this post until 1899. Vaughan Williams describes his work there, again with some false modesty:

I was appointed to my first and last organ post, at St. Barnabas, South Lambeth. As I already said, I never could play the organ, but this appointment gave me an insight into good and bad church music which stood me in good stead later on. I also had to train the choir and give organ recitals and accompany the services, which gave me some knowledge of music from the performer’s point of view.²¹

This was a large church (originally seating 1,500 people) on Guildford Road in South Lambeth. The parish, as confirmed by the Diocese of Southwark office, exists no more.

The building, however, is still there, having been gutted and refitted as a series of “council flats” (low-income housing). Interestingly, when I visited there, the building manager was astonished to learn that a very famous composer had once served as organist of the church! Vaughan Williams presided over a largish instrument built by Hill and rebuilt by Bishop.²² At the time of his tenure the church supported an ambitious music program with a sizeable budget. The duties, for which Vaughan Williams was paid a salary of £50 per year, were demanding and time consuming.²³ His wife Adeline reported that he worked very hard and practiced on the organ up to five hours per day. For Vaughan Williams the salary was probably incidental to the experience.

He did not need to earn a living, having a healthy but not excessive private income. His work as an organist was for his continuing education, not to keep body and soul together.²⁴

His time at Saint Barnabas was not easy. He told his friend Holst that his choristers were “louts” and the vicar “quite mad.” The vicar insisted on the organist’s taking communion; Vaughan Williams felt that he, as a principled atheist, could not. So he resigned, without any apparent regret.²⁵ First, however, resolving to go abroad to study (with Max Bruch), he requested from the church, and was granted, a leave of absence. It is here that his friend Gustav Holst enters the picture.

Vaughan Williams and Holst

Vaughan Williams met Holst (1874–1934) at the Royal College of Music in 1895, and they remained fast friends for forty years until Holst’s death, going for extended hikes in the countryside and critiquing each other’s compositions. These “field days,” when they played and dissected their respective works were to prove invaluable to them both. Although in his youth Holst also had various tries at being a church organist, he was instead to become a professional trombonist (recommended as a treatment for his asthma).

He [Holst] left the College of Music to abandon the eminently respectable career of an organist . . . and to get at music from the inside as a trombonist in an orchestra. The very worst that a trombonist has to put up with is as nothing compared to what a church organist has to endure.²⁶

In taking leave of the organ bench at Saint Barnabas it was natural for Vaughan Williams to think of his friend Holst. There are somewhat differing accounts of the manner in which he broached the subject with Holst. Heirs and Rebels,²⁷ the collection of letters exchanged between the two composers, establishes some clarity. First, in a letter from Vaughan Williams to Holst, probably July 1897:

I am leaving this damned place [Saint Barnabas] in October and going abroad.

And then, contrary to some accounts in which he offered Holst the job, he in fact inquired about the latter’s interest:

Suppose you were offered it would you consider the matter? The screw [sic!] is £50 [per annum] and the minimum duties . . .

And here he lays out what sounds like a demanding list of tasks, working on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, as well as running the choral society and giving occasional organ recitals. Vaughan Williams later states:

Mind I AM NOT OFFERING IT YOU [VW’s caps] only [sic] if you would like it I will do my best to Back you.

He concludes by asking Holst to deputize for him while he is gone and provides many specific instructions on getting through the service (pitches, cues, etc.). He suggests beginning the morning service with a “short and easy voluntary” and concluding with a “long and difficult voluntary.” He notes about the choir:

Those louts of men will slope in about 8.45 and make you mad—the only ones who can sing will be away.

As a postscript VW adds, “The vicar is quite mad.” (Does any of this sound familiar to us today?) In any event, the position was not taken by Holst but probably by William H. Harris (later a faculty member at the Royal College of Music and organist at Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor).²⁸

Vaughan Williams and Bach

Vaughan Williams showed nearly life-long fondness and admiration for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whom he placed above all musicians. He regarded the Saint Matthew Passion, a work that he would conduct many times, to be Bach’s greatest achievement. Vaughan Williams had clear and strongly held thoughts on performing Bach’s music. First, he insisted that, for his audiences, the choral works, including the Matthew Passion, be sung in English (a preference shared by the late David Willcocks when he was director of the Bach Choir). He did not have patience with so-called “authentic performance practices” of early music.

Bach, though superficially he may speak the eighteenth-century language, belongs to no school or period.²⁹

Vaughan Williams had a clear and oft-stated aversion to the harpsichord! He used the grand piano as the continuo instrument in his many Bach performances.

The harpsichord, however it may sound in a small room—and to my mind it never [author’s emphasis] has a pleasant sound—in a large concert room sounds just like the ticking of a sewing machine.³⁰

He had similar thoughts about the so-called Baroque organ, which in the 1950s put him distinctly at odds with those planning the new organ for London’s Royal Festival Hall.

By the way, I see there is a movement afoot to substitute the bubble-and-squeak type of instrument for the noble diapason and soft mixtures of our cathedral organs.³¹

It is interesting to note that the opening recital on the Royal Festival Hall organ included Vaughan Williams’s Three Preludes Founded on Welsh Hymn Tunes.

These views on instruments and performing practices may now be considered old-fashioned and out-of-date. They are, nonetheless, the beliefs of a great musician whose musical thoughts and ideas, planted in the mid-Victorian era, grew through more than a half-century of music making. “Vaughan Williams paid tribute to Bach practically, in his non-authentic but deeply moving performances of the major choral works at Dorking.”³² [For the Leith Hill Festivals, founded in 1905, which he conducted from 1905 to 1953.]

The Great War

The effect of war on musicians has been a topic of lengthy and interesting studies. In addition to the English composers who did not return from the First World War, the Second World War took the lives of many composers, including Jehan Alain and Hugo Distler, and affected the lives of countless others. Although space does not permit an excursion on this topic, it seems relative to touch on Vaughan Williams’s army service, which relates to his work as organist and church musician.

Vaughan Williams volunteered for military service in the Royal Army Medical Corps (in 1914, at age 42!) and from May 1915 was stationed at Saffron Walden where he spent considerable time at the organ of the parish church,³³ finding refuge from the horrors of war through playing Bach. At the outbreak of war he was for a time stationed with his unit in Dorking. When there was a death in the company and no organist could be found for the service at Saint Martin’s Church, Vaughan Williams offered to play, providing he could have some volunteers to form a choir. In the same year he was posted to a field ambulance brigade. The following year he was sent to France (at the rank of lieutenant) and was involved in the Battle of the Somme.

Vaughan Williams’s patriotic spirit was evident during the Second World War through his composing of film music to aid the war effort and in many types of volunteer work. For example, he regularly gathered scrap metal. His Thanksgiving for Victory was written and performed in 1945 in celebration of the war’s end.

Vaughan Williams and church music

We have seen that, with the one exception of four or so years at the end of the nineteenth century, Vaughan Williams never functioned as a parish musician. Nonetheless, his many choral works, large (Hodie) and small (O Taste and See), enrich the repertory of all manner of choral organizations, ranging from parish singers to concert choirs. His choral music was written not so much for places (as with Howells’s many settings of the services for various cathedrals and collegiate chapels) but for occasions (coronations, victories, and more).

One of Vaughan Williams’s most monumentally important works in the field of church music was as editor of The English Hymnal. In 1904 a committee headed by the Reverend Percy Dearmer³⁴ set about creating a new hymnbook, in succession to the venerable Hymns Ancient and Modern.³⁵ Vaughan Williams was invited to be the musical editor and, by his own testimony, in the process learned a great deal about music—the good and the bad. He introduced several new tunes of his own creation as well as folk melodies, making it a thoroughly “English” book. He succeeded in purging the new hymnal of many poor Victorian hymn tunes (while retaining the better ones), and those which he was forced to keep he banned to the back of the book in a section he called “The Chamber of Horrors.”

Songs of Praise followed in 1925, once more with Dearmer as general editor and Vaughan Williams, assisted by Martin Shaw, the musical editor. It is said that Vaughan Williams was thrilled by the sound of an enthusiastic congregation singing a great hymn. The same trio of Dearmer, Vaughan Williams, and Martin Shaw worked together again to produce The Oxford Book of Carols in 1928.

Organist friends of Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams loved the typical cathedral organs of the first half of the twentieth century and liked hearing them played. In return, many cathedral organists enjoyed playing for him—often at night when the building was closed, often playing works of Bach. Such special playings took place often—by Walter Alcock at Salisbury; Herbert Sumsion in Gloucester; William McKie in Westminster Abbey, as they worked together preparing for the 1953 coronation. After Vaughan Williams’s death in 1958, it was decided to place his ashes next to those of Stanford and Purcell in the Abbey.

Other prominent organists who were friends and colleagues, and from whom he no doubt learned much about the instrument: Thomas Armstrong, Ivor Atkins, Harold Darke, Walford Davies, John Dykes Bower, Alan Gray, Herbert Howells, John Ireland, Henry Ley, Christopher Morris, Boris Ord, Cyril Rootham, Martin Shaw, R. R. Terry, and George Thalban-Ball.³⁶

In considering Vaughan Williams and the organ, Relf Clark suggests an interesting comparison with Elgar:³⁷

Early in their careers, both were briefly the organist of a parish church. Neither of them appears to have enjoyed the experience very much. Both wrote for the instrument a handful of not entirely characteristic works. Both made notable use of the organ in a few orchestral scores. And both enjoyed the friendship and support of professional organists.

In a famous letter to The Daily Telegraph, January 14, 1951, Vaughan Williams makes some views clear, beginning with his thoughts on the “bubble and squeak” tones of continental organs.

Is it really proposed that we should abandon in favour of this unpleasant sound the noble diapasons and rich soft ‘mixtures’ of our best church organs?

He particularly admired the organ at Saint Michael’s Church, Cornhill (Hill; Rushworth & Dreaper), presided over by his friend Harold Darke, and believed it possessed the ideal English organ tone.

The works for organ

This essay offers not so much analyses but comments on Vaughan Williams’s music. For structural and thematic analyses of the organ works see the excellent articles by Hugh Benham [See “Sources and further reading,” B/2] and Relf Clark [See “Sources and further reading,” C]. It would seem that Vaughan Williams’s major organ works were conceived or written at Saint Mary’s Church, Saffron Walden, where he spent a great deal of time practicing while stationed there in 1915. The late Michael Kennedy, the chief authority on the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, cites the following as “The Organ Works:”

• Three Preludes Founded On Welsh Hymn Tunes, published in 1920 by Stainer & Bell. The second prelude of the set, Rhosymedre, was played at Vaughan Williams’s funeral in 1958. Clark observes that the registrations in the score likely reflected the organ at Trinity College. He further suggests that Vaughan Williams first encountered these tunes when editing The English Hymnal (1906). The preludes are likely among the first works completed after his leaving the army in 1919.³⁸

Bryn Calfaria is at once the most interesting musically and, although fun to play, nonetheless the most challenging to bring off at the organ. It is dramatic and improvisatory; fragments of the tune are given out through a thick and tangled texture. Like many other fine organ works (some of Alain’s come to mind) the piece involves the player as interpreter: adding musical imagination to the text.

Rhosymedre is the most well liked and often played of the three. Simple, quiet, and gently dance-like, it states the tune twice, in a straightforward manner.

Hyfrydol makes a bit of an odd conclusion to the set: a very thick-textured setting of the tune (difficult to play, especially for those with small hands) above a constantly moving pedal part that romps over two octaves (get out your Gleason book to help your feet prepare).

• Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, composed in 1921 for orchestra and first performed in that year at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford. The orchestral version was performed first (conducted by the composer). The piece was then arranged for organ between 1921 and 1930 (completed in 1921, revised in 1923, published in 1930). Vaughan Williams told the dedicatee Henry Ley that the work was modeled on Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 546.³⁹ Ley (pronounced “Lee”), then organist at Christ Church, Oxford, commented on the piece’s difficulty. According to Ley, Vaughan Williams said that the work was written in 1915 while he was stationed at Saffron Walden using the organ at Saint Mary’s Church.⁴⁰ The prelude and fugue together occupy some ten minutes.

The Prelude is very well written for the organ. Vaughan Williams was attentive to details of registration (including frequent use of manual 16′s) and manual divisions. The piece has quite a lot of bitonal dissonance. Ley was right: it is not easy play, due to the constantly changing chord colors, large amount of chromaticism, and fast contrapuntal passages. Vaughan Williams employed chords in parallel sweeping lines, often in contrary motion. Thick homophonic passages alternate with longer sections of thinner, busy counterpoint, generating an ABABA design. The quick B sections are terrifically fast at the specified tempo of quarter = 120 beats per minute. Thinking I could not play it that fast, I initially suspected a case of “composer tempo overreach.” David Briggs, however, manages these brilliantly on the two-CD set of the complete organ music (original and transcriptions) of Vaughan Williams, Bursts of Acclamation. (Albion ALBCD021/2, available from the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, https://
rvwsociety.com).

The prelude is somewhat impressionistic in sound, using parallelism, tonal vagueness (often resulting from mixed modes), the use of ninth and major-seventh chords, as well as tetra- and pentatonic scales. The result: the prelude clearly sounds like Vaughan Williams. It ends suddenly in C major, a somewhat astonishing tonality not really heard before in the piece.

For someone who was a master at contrapuntal writing and an ardent admirer of Bach, Vaughan Williams seems not to have written very many fugues. This fugue is a good one, a double fugue in fact, whose two subjects are first treated separately and then combined at the climax. It begins not so much in C minor but C Aeolian. The omnipresent triplets against duplets, which get a bit wearing (to this player, at least), is an element in both fugue subjects. Parallel chords in contrary motion, drawn from the prelude, occasionally interrupt the rather dissonant fugal entries.

• Two Organ Preludes, founded on Welsh Folk Songs, published in 1956. These are Romanza (“The White Rock”) and Toccata (“St. David’s Day”). These works are generally regarded as being less than indicative of the composer’s skill and imagination and not very “organistic.”

• In 1964 Oxford University Press published A Vaughan Williams Organ Album (still in print) consisting of transcriptions as well as the two organ preludes of 1956. Various composers, including Henry Ley, have made organ transcriptions of several of Vaughan Williams’s orchestral works.⁴¹

• Kennedy mentions an Organ Overture, from 1890 (the manuscript of which is in the British Library).⁴²

• A Wedding Tune for Anne, 1943 (contained in A Vaughan Williams Organ Album).

• Various incomplete sketches left at the time of his death.

Returning to the opening question

There are two Vaughan Williams organ works of relatively major stature, dating from during and just after the time of the First World War: the preludes on Welsh hymns and the Prelude and Fugue in C Minor. A generation later would come Benjamin Britten’s comparable opus, Prelude and Fugue on a Theme of Vittoria (1946). They have not much in common, save being one of few examples of their masters’ contributions to the canon of organ music. Both composers wrote for situations or performances: Vaughan Williams for the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford, for example; Britten’s was a commission from Saint Matthew’s, Northampton (for which he had earlier written the cantata Rejoice in the Lamb, containing some of the most original and dramatic writing for organ in any choral work). These preludes and fugues, valued for their singular stature, are nonetheless not entirely representative of their composers’ genius, language, invention, and musical imaginations.

Douglas Fairhurst suggests that Vaughan Williams, as a great artist, was more at ease and naturally expressive having a larger canvass for his music. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams commented that, while it was unorthodox to consider canonization for a non-believer, the Christian church owed a great deal to him for his contributions.⁴³ In any case, after his death in 1958 Vaughan Williams’s ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey, appropriately near those of Stanford and Purcell. Of special note: his was the first funeral service held in the Abbey for a commoner since that of Purcell, nearly 300 years earlier.⁴⁴

Supplement I: some other works in which the organ is prominent

The organ has played a central role in many centuries of choral music. Vaughan Williams realized the expressive and dramatic powers of the organ and used them to good effect in some of his orchestral works as well.

• Job, A Masque for Dancing. In Scene VI (the Dance of Job’s Comforters) we see/hear a vivid representation of Satan and his retinue in Hell. Included is a part for “Full Organ with Solo Reeds Coupled,” supplementing the full orchestra.

• A Vision of Aeroplanes⁴⁵ is a substantial late work (1956) for chorus and organ, setting familiar words from the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel. It opens with a dramatic, dissonant organ solo that, as with subsequent organ interludes, reminds one of the organ’s use in Howells’s A Sequence for St. Michael, to be written some five years later.

• A Sea Symphony includes passages for organ, more for support, as a member of the orchestra, than for effect.

• However, the dramatic blast of chords occurring about 3/4th through the “Landscape” (Lento) movement in Sinfonia Antarctica, shows the organ as hair-raising, important, and soloistic.

Supplement II: selected choral works in which the organ has a prominent role

[These lists extracted from Neil Butterworth: Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Guide To Research. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1990.]

Vexilla Regis (for the Cambridge B.Mus), 1894

Mass (for the Cambridge D.Mus), 1899

Toward the Unknown Region, 1907

Fantasia on Christmas Carols, 1912

Sancta Civitas, 1923–1925

Three Choral Hymns, 1929

Flourish for a Coronation, 1937

Six Choral Songs: To be sung in time of war, 1940

England, My England, 1941

Thanksgiving for Victory (later A Song of Thanksgiving), 1945

Folk Songs of the Four Seasons, 1949

Fantasia (Quasi Variazione) on the “Old 104th Psalm Tune,” 1949

Hodie, 1953–1954

Supplement III: some choral music for the church

O Clap Your Hands, 1920

Lord, Thou Hast Been Our Refuge, 1921

Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis (The Village Service), 1925

The Pilgrim Pavement, 1934

O How Amiable, 1934

Festival Te Deum in F, 1937

All Hail the Power (Miles Lane), 1938

Services in D Minor, 1939

Hymn for St. Margaret, 1948

The Old Hundredth Psalm, 1953

Te Deum and Benedictus, 1954

A Vision of Aeroplanes, 1956

Notes

1. In this he does not stand alone, of course. The same could be said of RVW’s best friend, Gustav Holst (who around 1930 started what he hoped would be an organ concerto). We wish Alain and Distler could have had longer lives in which to continue their composing for organ. And, although the organ parts in many of Benjamin Britten’s choral works are tour de forces of rhythm, texture, and organ color, Britten, too, left us a regrettably small number of organ works (which reveal relatively little of his musical genius).

2. Many have pondered this seeming contradiction between belief and the creative settings of sacred texts. One factor: he had, of course, a life-long love affair with Elizabethan English.

3. Church Music and the Christian Faith, by Erik Routley. Carol Stream, Illinois: Agape, 1978, p. 105.

4. Quoted in Aldritt, p. 55.

5. Francis/2. [The booklet pages are not numbered.]

6. RVW/3, p. 42.

7. Palmer.

8. Reference to the famous remark about Darwin is irresistible. As a child, VW asked his mother what was all the fuss about Great-Uncle Charles? She replied that the Bible says the earth was created in six days; Great-Uncle Charles believes it took somewhat longer.

9. Palmer.

10. Ibid.

11. Aldritt, p.30.

12. Palmer.

13. VW/3, p.258.

14. Ibid., p. 28.

15. As stated by J. Ellis Cook, son of the gardener at Leith Hill Place; quoted in Tributes, p. 25.

16. VW1, p. 134.

17. Aldritt, p. 37.

18. Palmer.

19. “Our friendship survived his despair at my playing and I became quite expert at managing the stops at his voluntaries and organ recitals.” And then wrote Alan Gray: “I cannot tell him that I think he is justified in going in for an organist’s career which is his pet idea. He seems to me so hopelessly ‘unhandy.’ I can never trust him to play a simple service for me without some dread as to what he may do.” Aldritt, p. 55. VW clearly achieved significant improvement by 1898, when he passed the F.R.C.O. exams!

20. The British title “organist” usually implies “organist and choirmaster.”

21. VW/1, p. 146.

22. Clark, p. 9.

23. In addition to services, these included four choral rehearsals each week as well as giving occasional organ recitals. Kennedy, p. 41.

24. Heffer, p. 18.

25. Ibid., p. 19.

26. VW/1, p. 71.

27. VW/4, pp. 5–6.

28. F/5, p. 9.

29. VW/1, p. 122.

30. Ibid., p. 123.

31. Ibid.

32. Mellers, p. 158.

33. F/2 (pages unnumbered).

34. Vicar of Saint Mary’s, Primrose Hill, where his organist was Martin Shaw.

35. Hymns Ancient & Modern, first published in 1861, continues to be found, in subsequent editions, in some British church pews today, often next to The English Hymnal.

36. All listed in B/3, Personalia, pp. 315–345.

37. Clark, p. 7.

38. Ibid., p. 10.

39. F/4, p. 8.

40. F/3. p. 16.

41. For details of these, see Randy L. Neighbarger’s, “Organ Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Descriptive List of Original Works and Transcriptions,” The Diapason, October 1991, p. 10.

42. K/2, p. 3.

43. Palmer.

44. Ibid.

33. Written for RVW’s good friend Harold Drake, organist at the Church of Saint Michael’s, Cornhill, the work sets the dramatic account of the whirlwind, cloud, and fire from the book of Ezekiel.

Sources and further reading

A: Aldritt, Keith. Vaughan Williams: Composer, Radical, Patriot—A Biography. Ramsbury, Wiltshire: Robert Hale Books, 2015.

B/1: Barber, Robin. “Vaughan Williams in Hamburg, 1938: A Brush with Nazi Germany.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue 66, June 2016.

B/2: Benham, Hugh. “Music for Solo Organ by Ralph Vaughan Williams.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue 55, October 2012, 3–8.

B/3: Butterworth, Neil. Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Guide to Research. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990.

C: Clark, Relf. “Vaughan Williams and the Organ: An Anniversary Review.” Organists’ Review, August 2008, 7-15.

F/1: Francis, John. Vice-Chairman of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society (UK) in correspondence with the author.

F/2: Francis, John. Notes in the booklet accompanying Bursts of Acclamation, two CD recordings of organ works by RVW published by Albion Records.

F/3: Francis, John. “Composers of the Great War Revisited.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue 65, February 2016, 15–16.

F/4: Francis, John. “Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Organ.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue 63, June 2015, 3–11.

F/5: Francis, John. “A Question of Chronology.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue No. 74, February 2019, 9.

H/1: Heffer, Simon. Vaughan Williams. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000.

H/2: Holmes, Paul. Holst; Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers. London: Omnibus Press, 1997.

K/1: Kennedy, Michael. The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964; 2nd edition,1996.

K/2: Kennedy, Michael. A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

M/3: Manning, David, ed. Vaughan Williams on Music. Oxford University Press, 2008.

M: Marshall, Em. Music in the Landscape. London: Robert Hale, 2011.

M/2: Mellers, Wilfrid. Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989.

N: Neighbarger, Randy L. “Organ Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Descriptive List of Original Works and Transcriptions,” The Diapason, October 1991, 10–11.

T: Tributes to Vaughan Williams: 50 Years On. A reprint of The RCM Magazine, Vol. LV, No. 1, Easter Term 1959.

P: Palmer, Tony. O Thou Transcendent (a video commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s death). Isolde Films, 2007.

VW/1: Some Thoughts on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, With Writings on Other Musical Subjects. London: Oxford University Press, 1953.

VW/2: National Music and Other Essays. London: Oxford University Press, 1987.

VW/3: Vaughan Williams, Ursula. R. V. W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964.

VW/4: Heirs and Rebels: Letters written to each other and occasional writings on music by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Edited by Ursula Vaughan Williams and Imogen Holst. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Photograph of Ralph Vaughan Williams by Frank Chappelow (used with permission)

Cicely Winter

Cicely Winter grew up in Michigan and studied piano and harpsichord at Smith College and the University of Michigan, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in music and a Master of Arts in European history; she later studied piano performance at Indiana University. Her principal teachers were Fritz Steinegger and Leonard Hokanson (piano), and Lory Wallfisch and Elisabeth Wright (harpsichord). Winter has lived in Oaxaca since 1972 and has presented numerous piano, harpsichord, and organ concerts over the years, many of which have benefitted community service projects in Oaxaca. In 2000, with the support of philanthropist Alfredo Harp Helú, she and organist Edward Pepe co-founded the Instituto de Órganos Históricos de Oaxaca A.C. (IOHIO), for which she serves as its director. Her professional performances have increasingly focused on historic organs, presenting a broad repertoire of classical, sacred, and folkloric music.

Each IOHIO (Instituto de Órganos Históricos de Oaxaca, A.C.) Festival builds on the success of its predecessors, making this one the best ever. It was also the most extensive, since the restored organ in Jalatlaco could be included in the concert programming.

• More than 120 people from eight countries and seven Mexican states participated in all or part of the scheduled activities. Of these, nearly a third were returnees.

• Eighteen Oaxacan, Mexican, and foreign musicians collaborated in nine concerts on nine restored organs over the course of six days.

• Six young Mexican organ students and one organbuilder received scholarships to participate in the festival, and our own five organists and students were delighted to be their guides.

• The churches were always full for the concerts and hundreds of local people were able to hear the Oaxacan organs in all their glory.

February 14 (Wednesday)

Around twenty organists and organ students met in the San Matías Jalatlaco church for the first event of the festival, a talk by Andres Cea Galán, president of the “Instituto del Órgano Hispano,” entitled “Spanish music: Organs and organists during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.”

That evening Cicely Winter and Valentín Hernandez presented the first concert of the Festival of Oaxacan Folk Music with music transcribed for organ and percussion in the Basilica de la Soledad. This program always serves as an introduction for the events to come, and people sang along exuberantly to some of the best-known Oaxacan regional songs. Videos of this and all succeeding concerts were projected onto a screen in the church, so that the audience could have a better view of the artists and see the action in the choir loft, particularly how pulling the stops changed the organ’s sound. The magnificent decorated case of this monumental 8′ organ bears the earliest date of any Oaxacan organ: 1686. It was restored in 2000 and is played regularly at Mass.

February 15 (Thursday)

Registration took place throughout the day in the Oaxaca Philatelic Museum (MUFI), giving us a chance to finally meet the people we had been corresponding with and greet old friends from past festivals. The inauguration of the festival that afternoon began with a presentation by Cicely Winter, director of the IOHIO, about the activities and goals of the festival. Joel Vásquez, project coordinator of the IOHIO, spoke about our teaching project and our success in having organs played at Mass every Sunday in five Oaxacan churches by our students or by him. In addition, it is most gratifying that people increasingly request that their private Masses for baptisms, Quinceañeras, weddings, etc., be accompanied by the pipe organs rather than an electronic organ or keyboard. We were honored by the presence of Ignacio Toscano, Secretary of Culture for the State of Oaxaca, and Omar Vásquez, director of the Oaxaca Regional Center of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), who commented on the shared goals of their respective institutions and the IOHIO and offered their congratulations for the festival. Winter also expressed special appreciation to Alfredo Harp Helú for his indispensable support of seven organ restoration projects in Oaxaca over the past twenty years, including most recently the organs in Tlacolula and Jalatlaco.

After the welcoming reception, we walked a few blocks to the church of San Matías Jalatlaco. The second concert of the festival was presented by the Dutch organist Jan Willem Jansen. His program had a theme, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” and included father and son pairs: Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti, and Johann Sebastian Bach and three of his sons. The last piece “Ah, vous dirai-je Maman,” familiar to everyone as the theme of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” elicited a chuckle of recognition from the audience. The mainly eighteenth-century repertoire was perfect for this organ built in 1866.

This year marked the festival debut of the Jalatlaco organ as a playable instrument. One of our regular attendees commented on the evolution of this organ during his last three visits: first as an unrestored instrument (2002–2014) when we discussed our hopes for its restoration, then as a restoration in process by the Gerhard Grenzing firm (2016), and finally as a concert instrument (2018). This elegantly proportioned 8′ organ was built by the Oaxacan organbuilder Pedro Nibra and has a 56-note chromatic keyboard and “almost equal” temperament, unlike the other organs heard during the festival with their 45-note keyboards, short octaves, and meantone tuning. It was painted blue around 1880 when Nibra oversaw various modifications to the organ.

Afterwards in the atrium of the church under a clear night sky, we enjoyed bread and chocolate offered by Chocolate Mayordomo and tamales de frijol prepared by Jalatlaco’s favorite tamalera.

February 16 (Friday)

The day started with a bilingual presentation by Cicely Winter in the Francisco de Burgoa Library within the Santo Domingo Cultural Center titled “The Historic Organs of Oaxaca and the Work of the IOHIO.” Although the title of the talk has not changed over the years, the content is updated every year to publicize the advances of our various projects: protection, conservation, restoration, concerts, archive and manuscript discoveries, recordings, teaching, and publications. This was followed by a tour of the splendid church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán, seat of the Dominican order in the Valley of Oaxaca since the sixteenth century, and the Museum of the Cultures of Oaxaca in the former convent, led by guides Pablo Gonzalez and Gabriel Sanchez.

Our next stop has always been San Andrés Huayapam, located on the outskirts of Oaxaca City. This year the plan was complicated by the closing of the church after the tragic earthquakes in September 2017. Luckily it was not severely affected, but religious activities have been celebrated under a temporary roof beside the church until the roof can be repaired. We did not know if the INAH would grant us access, but fortunately the provisional permission came through just days before the visit.

We were received with a customary drink of tejate, traditionally served in colorful painted half gourds. A local specialty of pre-Hispanic origin, this delicious foamy drink is made with ground cacao, corn meal, the seed of the mamey fruit, and the flower of a tree (rosita de cacao), which grows only in or near Huayapam.

This charming church has one of the most beautiful Baroque altarpieces in Oaxaca, whose intricately carved golden columns are referred to as “gilded lace.” Also famous is the collection of antique ex-votos, petitions usually to the Virgin Mary that are painted on small tin plaques. The 4′ organ (1772), large for a table organ, is nearly intact with its original keyboard and pipes. It is simply carved, a style we refer to as a “country organ,” and was probably originally unpainted, then painted bright red, still seen backing the keyboard, and eventually repainted sober maroon in the twentieth century. In Huayapam we savored the first of many local meals, this time mole amarillo, in the atrium of the church.

During free time between the Huayapam comida and the evening concert, some went to see the famous tree in Santa María del Tule, while visiting organists and students had a chance to play a meantone tracker organ with divided registers in the Oaxaca Cathedral.

That night we proceeded to the Oaxaca Cathedral for the third concert of the festival, offered by the eminent Spanish organist and musicologist Andrés Cea Galán with the participation of the Mexican baritone Felipe Espinosa. This is our only concert with a modest admission fee, and the proceeds helped cover the expenses of the Mexican organ students. This monumental instrument was built in 1712 and reconstructed in 1996, having suffered alterations over the centuries that had completely erased its eighteenth-century character. It retains its opulently carved and gilded upper case, although its lower case has been rebuilt several times. Unfortunately no evidence remains of its original appearance, but we know from the contract for its construction that it was once one of the most lavishly decorated organs in Oaxaca.

February 17 (Saturday)

This year more than a hundred people participated in the all-day excursion to the Mixteca Alta. We crossed a river to arrive at the little stone church in Santa María Tinú, and it seemed as though the entire adult population of the town, now reduced to 152 people, was there to greet us. The authorities welcomed us with great ceremony at the entrance of the church, their canes (bastones) of office in hand. During our reconnaissance visit some weeks before, we had suggested that the local women display their handicrafts, which in the Mixteca region means palm weaving (hats, baskets, sleeping mats). But palm has given way to colorful raffia, and what a sight greeted us! Multi-colored woven baskets hung from the trees and lined up atop the walls of the atrium, while the stone cross in the atrium was decorated cucharillas, the white base of maguey leaves. Nearly everyone bought something from the women as we sipped sweet atole.

The Tinú church houses a disproportionately large organ. The date of construction, 1828, and the name of the organbuilder are written inside the case—such luck! Perhaps the organ was originally commissioned for a larger church, then sold to Tinú, or the community simply wanted something grand. The organ, which has not been fully playable in fifty years, is completely intact and still grunts and wheezes when one of the bellows located in the loft above is pumped. Unfortunately because of the reduced population and remote location of the town, a restoration would not be practical.

Our next stop was in the lovely Baroque church of San Andrés Sinaxtla. The case of the organ built in 1791 combines both Baroque and neo-Classic case design elements. The construction is idiosyncratic, since it is the only instrument of this size with direct suspended mechanical action, i.e., no rollerboard. Of particular interest is the inscription across the façade including the name of the donor, the date of construction, and the cost of the organ, but, as is typical, omitting the name of the organbuilder.

Just down the road from Sinaxtla sitting on a promontory overlooking the Yanhuitlán Valley is the church of San Mateo Yucucuí (population 142). This organ built in 1743 is the least altered of all the 8′ eighteenth-century Oaxacan organs and when last played (1930s?), it is said that its sound could be heard for miles around. The organ was never painted or gilded like its counterpart in Teotongo, probably not by choice during that opulent Baroque era, but rather because of the cost. It is richly carved and largely intact, and it is tempting to imagine the pipes and mechanism of the Yucucuí organ inserted into the stunning Teotongo case to make one amazing organ! The floor of the high balcony on which the organ sits is much deteriorated and access to the façade is dangerous, so our efforts to clean and document the organ have been restricted.

The fourth concert of the festival took place in Santo Domingo Yanhuitlán, the sixteenth-century Dominican stronghold in the Mixteca Alta region. With its soaring stone vault supported by lateral flying buttresses and its magnificent altarpieces, it is one of Mexico’s most majestic complexes of Baroque art. Organist David Soteno and clarinetist Lorenzo Meza, both from near Mexico City, thrilled the audience with a program that reverberated throughout the immense nave. This organ, located on a side balcony, was built around 1690–1700 and restored/rebuilt in France in 1998. Its case is one of the most elaborately decorated of all Mexican organs, with Dominican symbols and fantastic swirling imagery, similar to the Soledad organ case, and fierce faces on the façade pipes. Because of earthquake damage to the main altarpiece (retablo), we could sit only in the front half of the church.

The day culminated with the traditional pre-concert festivities in San Andrés Zautla. We were received in the atrium of the church by the local band with fireworks, plenty of mezcal, necklaces of bugambilia, dancing, and finally a delicious meal of estofado de pollo (chicken stewed in almond sauce) served in the municipal library across the street from the church. After dinner, we crowded into the church where many people from the community were already waiting for the fifth concert of the festival. This was the first of three collective concerts, whose goal has been to offer the opportunity to play the organs to as many organists and students as possible. Roberto Ramirez, André Lash, Andres Cea, Willem Jansen, Laura Carrasco, and Christoph Hammer presented wonderfully contrasting pieces to top off such a busy and exciting day. We were honored to have with us José Miguel Quintana from Mexico City whose association “Órganos Históricos de México” financed the restoration of the Zautla organ in 1996.

The case of this 4′ table organ (1726) is exquisitely carved, gilded, and painted with images of saints and angels. A blower was installed in 2017 by Oaxacan organbuilder David Antonio Reyes, and the organ was moved to the other side of the loft away from the stairway. No longer do we have to worry about those startling moments of silence when the bellows pumpers were distracted and lost their rhythm. The registers of table organs are controlled by tabs protruding from the sides of the case, and thanks to the screen projection the audience could appreciate the teamwork involved. Joel Vasquez and David Reyes had to make a detachable music rack to prevent the pages resting against the façade pipes from being blown away. Clearly the organists of past centuries played by memory or improvised, and the position of the keyboard indicates that they stood to play. Thanks to the ongoing support of the Federal Road and Bridge Commission (CAPUFE), a special entrance was opened from the superhighway, allowing us direct access to and from Zautla.

February 18 (Sunday)

In San Jerónimo, Tlacochahuaya, Jan Willem Jansen presented the sixth concert of the festival, “Four European Countries,” featuring repertoire from Italy, Holland, Germany, and Spain. In February 2017 the organ was cleaned, tuned, and voiced by the Grenzing firm and was in perfect condition until the September 7 earthquake jiggled the pipes. Luckily organbuilder Hal Gober was on hand to make the necessary adjustments. The church is one of the loveliest in Mexico with its exuberant interior floral decoration and splendid Baroque altarpieces, all restored in the past twenty years. The 4′ organ was built sometime before 1735 and restored in 1991. The case and pipes are decorated with floral motifs, and the organ harmonizes beautifully, both visually and acoustically, with the architecture of the church.

After a buffet lunch of Oaxacan specialties in the “Donají” Restaurant in Mitla, we ventured on to the small Baroque church with painted ceramic bowls embedded into the bell towers in San Miguel del Valle at the foothills of the Sierra Juarez. The 4′ table organ is unfortunately in poor condition, more typical than not of the unrestored instruments and not such a bad thing for our participants to see. The case is painted blue with neo-Classic decoration; it has only four registers and no accessory (toy) stops. It seems to date from around 1800, making it the last of the Oaxacan table organs. An added attraction of this Zapotec-speaking community is the elaborately embroidered aprons, and once again we were able to support women’s handicrafts with our purchases.

Our friends from “Chocolate Mayordomo” received us with bread and chocolate upon arrival in Santa María de la Asunción Tlacolula. We admired the little 2′ organ, which appears to date from around 1700 as indicated by the style of its remaining painted decoration. Originally located in the choir loft of the Baroque side chapel, it is the smallest Oaxacan organ and has only two registers. Those who needed a break from churches could roam around one of the most famous indigenous markets in Oaxaca and admire the women’s costumes and the stalls piled high with local produce.

The seventh concert of the festival was presented by Andrés Cea Galán featuring sixteenth- and seventeenth-century repertoire that highlighted the beautiful sound of this organ. It was built in Oaxaca in 1792 by Manuel Neri y Carmona, restored by the Gerhard Grenzing firm, and inaugurated during the Tenth IOHIO Festival in 2014. The visual impression of the Baroque-style case, painted red and black and opulently gilded, is striking, and it has the most elaborately painted façade pipes in all of Mexico. Local people began to arrive for Mass following the concert, so by the end the church was packed. It is likely that many were hearing and viewing the organ (on the screen) for the first time, and they must have been amazed by the rich, full sound of the organ.

February 19 (Monday)

Our two-day excursion to the Mixteca Alta began with a stop in Santa María de la Natividad Tamazulapan where we heard the eighth concert of the festival. This second collective event was presented by organ students Greta Baltazar, Alejandro Lemus, Mario Moya, and Zeltzin Perez, who study in university programs in Mexico City, along with Joel Vasquez from the IOHIO. Arnoldo Perez, a young organbuilder apprentice, pumped the bellows. This church had been closed after the second September earthquake, which particularly affected the Mixteca region. Ongoing negotiations with the priest and the INAH allowed us access to the first half of the church and the organ balcony where fortunately no plaster had fallen from the ceiling.

The 2′ table organ dating from approximately 1720–1730 is situated in a high balcony overlooking the soaring nave of the church and is exquisitely decorated with images of saints and angel musicians. The case and bellows are original, but the pipes, keyboard, and interior components were reconstructed in 1996. The church has one of the most magnificent Baroque altarpieces in all Mexico and includes paintings by the renowned sixteenth-century Spanish painter Andrés de Concha. The second organ in this church, an imposing 8′ instrument, faces the small organ from the left balcony. Built in Oaxaca in 1840 by a member of the renowned Martinez Bonavides organbuilding family, it was once a magnificent instrument and is largely intact except for the loss of nearly all its pipes; only the five largest remain in the façade.

We then proceeded to the neighboring church of Santiago Teotongo, rich enough in eighteenth-century Baroque art to stand as a museum in its own right. The magnificent case of this 8′ organ, though empty, is integrated stylistically with the opulent altarpieces, and statues of angels once stood atop its towers, singing through their O-shaped mouths via pipes passing through their bodies. The organ was stripped of its pipes, keyboard, and more during the Mexican Revolution, and its date is unknown, but the organ’s profile closely resembles that of San Mateo Yucucuí (1743). An added attraction was the eighteenth-century painted armoire in the sacristy, decorated with period figures engaged in their daily activities.

The tour continued with a visit to the sixteenth-century church of Santiago Tejupan, which could also stand as a museum of colonial religious art in this culturally rich area of the Mixteca Alta. The luxuriously painted organ case (1776) was the last Oaxacan organ with religious imagery. Portraits of the donor and his wife being blessed by his patron saint, Saint Nicholas, are depicted on one side and Santiago on horseback on the other, both unfortunately obscured by layers of grime. Another special feature is the information painted on two decorative medallions on the façade, which include the name of the donor, the cost of the organ, and the date of construction, although as in Sinaxtla, omitting the name of the organbuilder. Afterward we were treated to a talk about the Mixtec ball game (pelota mixteca).

After lunch in our favorite restaurant “Eunice,” we walked over to the Dominican architectural complex of San Pedro y San Pablo Teposcolula with its church dwarfed by the enormous sixteenth-century open chapel and atrium. The 8′ organ (ca. 1730–1740) has a similar profile to that of Yanhuitlán. The case was painted white with light green touches sometime after the original construction and, with its delicate carvings, had a graceful look. However, now we refer to it as the King Midas organ, because in 2010 a well-connected architect took the liberty of gilding at great cost all the decorative carvings and moldings, even though it had only been minimally gilded historically, and, in fact, the organ’s overall manufacture is not of the highest quality.

We drove up through the pine forest to Santa María Tlaxiaco. The imposing “fortress church” was the Dominican outpost for this strategic area of the high sierra in the sixteenth century. For the final ninth concert of the festival, Ricardo Ramírez, Laura Carrasco Curintzita, Andrés Cea Galán, Michael Barone, Jan Willem Jansen, and David Furniss offered an eclectic program to close the concert cycle. This monumental 8′ instrument, built around 1800 and restored in 2000, is decorated with typical neo-Classic design elements, painted white and richly gilded; it synchronizes with the altarpieces of the church, all in homogeneous neo-Classic style. We spent the night in the Hotel del Portal on the main plaza and had a chance to wander around the market.

February 20 (Tuesday)

Participants divided into two groups. Many chose to visit the late pre-Classic and Classic (400 BC–800 AD) Mixtec archeological site and the community museum of San Martín Huamelulpan with Marcus Winter of the INAH. Most of the organists and students opted to stay behind to play the Tlaxiaco organ and had great fun trying out their pieces and helping each other with the registers.

Both groups met up in Huamelulpan, then proceeded to the village of San Pedro Mártir Yucuxaco where we were once again formally received by the municipal authorities. The organ here (1740) is complete and in excellent condition, missing only its bellows. It is the least altered of the Oaxacan 4′ table organs, parallel to Yucucui for the 8′ stationary group, and closely resembles the organ in Zautla, although without the painted decoration. The carved pipeshades show two faces in profile, a unique decorative detail, and the keyboard is exquisite.

Our final church and organ visit was in Santa María Tiltepec, for some the crowning visual experience of the field trips. Located in the Dominican sphere of Yanhuitlan and built atop a pre-Hispanic temple, this sixteenth-century church has long been appreciated by art historians for its richly carved asymmetrical façade and stone interior arches. The unrestored 4′ organ, situated on a side balcony, is one of Oaxaca’s oldest (1703) and often elicits a gasp of astonishment when seen for the first time. Unfortunately nothing is known about its history to explain its idiosyncrasies of construction and decoration, and if it did not have the characteristic Oaxacan hips on the sides of the case, we might wonder if it were imported.

We proceeded to the Hacienda Santa Marta in San Sebastian Etla on the outskirts of Oaxaca City for our farewell dinner. A scrumptious buffet awaited us with plenty of mezcal, and a guitar duo serenaded us with numerous Oaxacan folk songs. Toasts and sentimental reminiscences created a special connection with old and new friends who had shared this unique Oaxaca organ adventure.

February 21 (Wednesday)

Around thirty people made the trek up to the archeological site of Monte Albán to enjoy an optional guided three-hour tour with Marcus Winter from the Oaxaca Regional Office of the INAH.