Performing Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony

Lorraine Brugh

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

The interview took place in Mr. Cleobury’s office in Gibbs Hall at King’s College, Thursday, October 31, 2017. At 5:30 that afternoon he led the choir in an Evensong for the Vigil of All Saints, with music by Byrd, Palestrina, and Tomkins.

Since the time of the interview, King’s College has announced that Stephen Cleobury will retire from King’s at the end of the 2018–2019 academic year.

 

Lorraine Brugh: I want our time to include what you’d like to talk about. I’ve thought of four areas I’d like you to comment on and you can add whatever you would like. Those areas are the recent Howells conference, the choir, worship trends, and personal notes. 

Just last weekend, the Herbert Howells Society met here in Cambridge, at St. John’s and at King’s College. You are its current president. What is its mission and current activity?

Stephen Cleobury: There are two organizations, the Herbert Howells Trust and the Herbert Howells Society. Both are, of course, dedicated to preserving the memory of this great man, and the Society is a collection of people who meet together for events such as we’ve just had this past weekend. The Trust is a particular body that allows us to make grants which help to support recording and performance of Howells’s works. These are funded from the royalties from Howells’s estate.  

 

LB: Would you commend particular organ works to American organists? Some play the Psalm Preludes but most of us don’t go much further.

SC: I think the Psalm Preludes are wonderful. There is a tantalizing aspect to those in my mind. Herbert Howells was acting organist at St. John’s College here in Cambridge during the Second World War. If I understand correctly, he used to come up at weekends and preside over the Sunday services. I imagine he might have improvised on the organ at that time. There may be lots and lots of psalm preludes up in the ether somewhere, but that’s just an idle speculation.

I can only speak of the pieces I know.  There are the rhapsodies, of which the best known is the C-sharp minor, which I played at the end of Evensong. That’s a very forthright piece with a quiet middle section, which is actually the opposite of almost all the psalm preludes that start quietly, rise to a climax and go down again.

The first rhapsody does more what the psalm preludes do: starts quietly and rises to a climax and subsides again, and I think it’s a very beautiful piece, completely different from the third. They are the two better known ones, the first and the third. 

Then there is the Paean which is in the same volume as Master Tallis’s Testament. They are the two pieces I know best from the collection Six Pieces for Organ. The Paean is the nearest thing Howells got to writing a toccata. It is very fast moving, with a lot of sixteenth-note movement. The metronome mark is quite fast. I once asked him if he really expected us to play it that fast and he said he did. I don’t know many people who can. And then Master Tallis’s Testamant, which I think is an outstandingly beautiful piece, in a modal G minor, and again rising, but ending with that little epilogue, that little envoi.  

Everything to do with Howells is about organ management. Organ management, while I wouldn’t say it’s a lost art, is now not always understood. We had a wonderful example of organ management by Nathan Laube who came to play here last year. I don’t think I’ve heard the organ managed better than that very often. By that I mean the ability to grade crescendos and diminuendos perfectly and to treat the organ really orchestrally.

I think that one of the things that has happened is that people have become a lot more interested in authentic performance style for Baroque and Classical music. And that’s absolutely fine; I’m completely signed up for that and do my best to keep up with trends in that regard. But I don’t see that it need also lead to an inability to manage the organ orchestrally.

I think a versatile organist should be able to do both of those things. The challenge for playing Howells is precisely that of managing the sound.

The Partita, which was the big piece I played on Saturday, does have some quite technically demanding writing. However, none of it (Howells’s music) is virtuoso writing in the sense that you’re playing something from the great nineteenth-century French repertoire, or later, Messiaen. It’s not technically that difficult.

It requires one to hold in one’s head the right sort of sound world. Because organ registration, certainly in late nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century English usage, was approached rather differently from the way people naturally approach it now. This can be seen in the organ in the Albert Hall as it used to be. Today we have general combinations and sequencers (steppers), so we can be far too fancy with our registrations, too fussy, because it’s so easy to do, whereas in the old days mostly the pistons were pre-set so that you couldn’t easily change them. If you look at the way they were set, you would find that the crescendo was made by drawing the 8′ stops one by one, then the 4′ stops one by one, whereas now people would add a 4′ to a single 8′, then a 2′, and so on. That would have worked well at the Royal Albert Hall.

The nineteenth-century orchestra sounds different from a classical orchestra playing on period instruments; the duty of the organist is to reflect different sound worlds as best as can be done on any given instrument. So that’s why I say you need to hold in your head the sound world as best as you can that Howells had in his head. Listen to recordings of the old Gloucester organ made by Herbert Sumison.

 

LB: Do you think that the German and the north German organ tradition, which builds the sound vertically, has influenced organists today?

SC: Yes, I do. I think you can hear Howells’s music played with too many mixtures. I was talking to Jonathan Clinch about this on Saturday,¹ and the very interesting views he has on this. He quotes Howells on that subject:

a. Players were not using sufficient amount of foundation tone, and

b. People were too busy fiddling around with the registration that they lost a sense of musical pulse.

Pulse was very important to Howells. When I worked at Westminster Abbey, long ago now, in the second half of the 1970s (1974–1978), Howells used to come to services sometimes when we were performing his music. I recorded some of it on the Abbey organ. Before that I arranged for him to come and hear me play his pieces. Everyone tends to think that Howells’s music is smooth and broad and redolent of English pastoral scenes. In fact, he was rather a dynamic and passionate man, and was certainly very keen on rhythmic pulse and clarity of texture. Those are two things that people don’t think of in connection with Howells but he really did want them. This might be interesting for American organists. One of the big differences a British organist finds when he/she goes to the United States to play is that you don’t have the stop called “Great and Pedal Combinations Coupled.” You have an independent pedal and you have to register the pedal separately, which is a really good discipline. Here we can get lazy because we have Great and Pedal Combinations Coupled. Here you can push Great Piston 3 and you get an appropriate pedal registration as well. In American organs you have to deal with the pedal separately. I think in Howells that is really important, since his pedal lines are often independent and care is needed to make them clear.

I remember one thing he pointed out to me is that when he writes a pedal point, he doesn’t just put down bottom D for two pages. It is always repeated, rhythmicized, or jumps the octave. He always wanted the pedal to be very alive. I take care when I play to register the pedal so that you can hear it clearly.

 

LB: Would you like to comment on the organ’s restoration?

SC: We are all thrilled with it. It is still recognizably the King’s organ, but it speaks with a renewed vigor and clarity. I’m particularly pleased about two new ranks, or actually two ranks that were replaced with different ranks. One is a 4′ flute on the Great, which you heard in the second movement of the Partita. It is very beautiful. We also introduced a proper Principal 8′ in the Pedal, which we didn’t have before. That’s given a whole lot more clarity to the Pedal. Now you can play Bach with a proper principal chorus. Formerly we had a Violoncello, a Geigen, a stringy stop. It wasn’t very good in Bach.

 

LB: The English organ was slow to develop the independent pedal. Is this a carry-over from that?

SC: Yes, I think it is. But David Willcocks in the 1960s had a lot of new upperwork put in the Pedal. We have had flutes at 16′, 8′, 4′, and 2′ and a 4′ Principal and mixture in the Pedal for quite a while now.

I arranged shortly after I came to have the Swell double trumpet (16′) made available on the Pedal, which is very useful for playing Bach. You can have the Great and Swell choruses coupled together, but you can access the 16′ reed in the Pedal independently.

Although classical Baroque organ music on an instrument like this is a compromise, there are lots of things you can do to make it have integrity.

 

LB: Both of these things would help with this integrity.

SC: Yes, indeed.

 

LB: You were also organ scholar at St. John’s. Did you overlap with Howells at all?

SC: No, well not at St. John’s. His service there was in the War, when Robin Orr was away on wartime service, just in the way Harold Darke was here at King’s when Boris Ord was away in the Air Force.

 

LB: And George Guest was there when you were there? 

SC: Yes.

 

LB: This collaboration with St. John’s each year—is that a result your being an organ scholar there?

SC: No, you’re talking about the annual Evensong service sung by both choirs. This had been started before I came here as organ scholar at St. John’s, and has probably been going since the early 60s. Originally it was connected with the Cambridge Music Festival, which took place in the summer.

It used to be described as “Evensong sung by the choirs of King’s and St. John’s to mark the opening of the Cambridge Summer Festival.” That has come and gone so we’ve lost that connection, but we have carried on doing the annual service.

 

LB: I think it’s nice to show that collaboration.

SC: Yes. We choose the repertoire carefully. Each choir is obviously slightly different in its style. We find that if you choose big repertoire like we did this year, like Blest Pair of Sirens by Parry, that sort of piece sounds better with more singers. Some repertoire sounds better sung by one choir or the other.

 

LB: I was here when you sang a Lassus Mass a couple weeks ago. That sounds best with a small choir.

SC: I quite agree.

 

LB: Americans are fascinated with the King’s College men and boys’ choir, and how they get trained.  What do you see for their future?

SC: I used a phrase the other day. I gave a speech at a charity dinner, a fundraiser for the Friends of Cathedral Music. In fact, it wasn’t my phrase, but it was actually given to me in the briefing notes. “We are not dealing with some kind of elite group. We are dealing with ordinary children doing extraordinary things.” And it is extraordinary what they do. They are ordinary kids, and they need to play around and be children. I suppose, if anything, what I try to do is to treat them as if they are ordinary people, not as superstars or anything, because they aren’t. But at the same time, you have to manage what they do here. They wear their Eton suits and walk through the college to the chapel. Visitors are coming in here, photographing them, for example, and we have to deal with and manage the issues that arise from that.

As far as the training of them is concerned, we do our best to offer them as broad a musical spectrum as we can. So each boy plays the piano and an orchestral instrument. We teach them theory, they have aural training and sight-reading. We also have a professional vocal coach who teaches them about singing. With children, I think that’s best done on a relatively straightforward and simple level.

Here I’m slouching in this chair, but I’m basically telling them to stand up straight, get their body alignment and balance in good shape, and then thinking about breathing and the easy production of sound, not forcing, just good basic habits.

 

LB: The older boys model the sound for the younger boys?

SC: Yes, that’s a good point. There are two aspects to the training they get.  You would have seen in the chapel boys in Years 6, 7, and 8. We also have boys in Years 4 and 5 back over the river at King’s College School. They don’t sing in the public services. Some of the Year 5s do. They get one-to-one training, small group training, but they’re also singing along with the older ones. It’s a mixture of specifically targeted instruction on the one hand and modeling, or I call it osmosis, seeping down from one generation to another. One of the things you have to remind the older boys is that they are role models for the younger ones, necessarily.

 

LB: I saw one of the younger boys relying on another older boy for cues during the Evensong last Saturday, I believe.

SC: I try to place them so there is an older boy next to a younger boy through the ranks.

 

LB: Could you speak about what goes into the preparation for Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols?

SC: I remember David Willcocks being asked this question. I heard him on a radio interview when I was very young. He gave a typically clever answer that “in a sense you are preparing all the time because every day you’re trying to make the choir sing as well as possible.” I’m not somebody who believes in suddenly trying to up the ante a week before. I try to do it on the basis that it’s what we’re doing every day. That’s not to say we don’t make obviously very special effort for the big occasions. 

I personally feel that unless you’re trying to make it really good every day, you can’t suddenly click your fingers and expect singers to move into another gear for this or that occasion. Because children, especially young children, thrive on consistent expectation, they like to have the ground rules, whatever they are. It’s best to have ground rules, consistency.

Then from my point of view, the preparation is about planning the repertoire, and in a sense I am thinking about that all the time. I’m looking out for publishers catalogues. I get a lot of material sent to me (looking around the office, “a lot of this stuff has been sent to me”), and I do try my best to look properly at everything, because you just never know when a little gem will turn up. And so I have to get all of that organized and sorted out. And then toward the end of November we start in earnest preparing the actual music. We have a carol service for schools here where we air some of the repertoire. We are often asked to sing Christmas carols for a concert. This enables us to prepare gradually through the month of December.

 

LB: Is it your innovation to commission a new work each year?

SC: Yes, it is. I started that in 1983. When I first started doing it, I got some quite abusive letters from people asking what was I doing degrading this great tradition by introducing horrible, dissonant modern music. 

Now I tend to get the same reaction you are describing. People are keen to hear what it will be. I feel that’s a small achievement.

 

LB: No small achievement! I wonder how you keep the quality of men and boys from one year to the next.

SC: I remember a comment made by one of the choral scholars when he graduated some years ago, ten or twenty years ago, who said, “I really admire how you peg away every day at it.” And I think that’s what I do, I peg away at it.

 

LB: Do you see the boys every day?

SC: Almost every day.

We didn’t talk very much about the choral scholars who, of course, are an essential part of the Choir. They sometimes feel a bit neglected. We go on the concert platform, and everyone will applaud the little boys, and then the volume of the applause dies down when the men walk on.

I occasionally do it the other way around and send the men on first. It’s quite interesting to see what the audience does. It is not a question of a front row sixteen trebles with a backing group. All the men are an absolutely vital part of the whole.  

We do services with the men only once a week, and more than that in half-term. I really enjoy those occasions because it gives me a chance to work in detail, in depth, with the choral scholars in a way one actually can’t do when the children are there. They occupy a higher proportion of one’s attention, naturally.

 

LB: How many of the boys and scholars go on to study music professionally?

SC: Quite a few. It is difficult to put a percentage on it, but a significant number do. Just to mention a few of the organ scholars, there is Sir Andrew Davis in Chicago, Simon Preston, who is, sadly, no longer playing, and Thomas Trotter. That’s just three and there are a lot more.   

 

LB: Churches in the United States have increasing problems supporting church musicians. How does the Friends of Cathedral Music support church music?

 SC: Friends of Cathedral Music exists to help with funding. I think that funding is an issue for everyone. Everyone thinks the Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge) colleges are rich, but they aren’t infinitely rich. We have to make our case for the chapel and the choir within the college as a whole over against educational imperatives, just as you might expect.

In a cathedral, the greatest call on funds is maintenance of the fabric. You can’t have a cathedral choir if the building is falling apart.

It becomes a matter of priorities. In the big London choirs where they are paying a dozen professional singers, it becomes expensive. So there is going to be a continuing need for financial support.

We get no support from central government. The money a cathedral has comes from its endowments if it has any, its lands and assets, if it has any, together with income from visitors.

For instance at Ely, those shops along the High Street, a lot of them belong to the cathedral, and the cathedral derives a rent from them. That’s part of what enables the cathedral to keep going.

Many of them now charge, as we do. I remember in Ely fifteen to twenty years ago, when they introduced charging, there was a lot of heart-searching, shaking of heads. People said it’s awful to charge people to go into a religious building.

One of the clergymen said to me it’s not really about that. It’s a choice. We either charge or we have to close down.

Here, King’s College Chapel is a private college chapel; there is no compulsion upon us to open it to the public. We choose to do so. To make it safe for people to be in there, to heat it, that costs us money.

I don’t subscribe to the argument that it’s a bad thing to charge.

 

LB: I think you do a good job of separating the worship times and the times the visitors can view the chapel.

SC: That’s got to be done.

 

LB: In the United States, each parish has to fund its own musicians, and they don’t have land and other support. There are increasingly fewer full-time musician positions. It’s a big issue in the United States, and our system is different than yours. Do you have any comment about our situation?

SC: I don’t have a solution to the problem. I just note what I see. Sometimes I look rather enviously at the level of funding that some of the churches have in the United States. Of course there is a difference. A given parish in the United States, whatever the denomination, has its parish role. Those loyal parishoners see it as a responsibility to see that it is properly funded.

The Church of England is a very different animal, partly because of the established link with the state. I think that, personally, one of the great things about it is that it’s theoretically there for everyone, of all faiths, or no faith. You can be baptized there, married there, and you could be buried there in the parish in which you live.

But there isn’t quite the same degree of community and of financial responsibility. It’s a rather subtle difference but it does makes a difference.

So I go to some churches in the United States that are fabulously well-funded. They have offices, and the director of music has quite a large staff. 

I do understand what you describe because I read about it. If there are fewer people attending church, you have less money coming in.

It’s different here; it’s different again if you go to Scandinavia or Germany where they have had the church tax, which is gradually being abolished in some of these countries. The church had it rather easy when it had the compulsory tax.

If the church loses this revenue, they’ll have to make it the responsibility of people voluntarily to support it.

 

LB: What you are looking forward to in future projects? How do you nourish your own spiritual life? Does this daily life nourish you?

SC: Goodness . . . . Well, forthcoming events: that’s relatively easy. We have our next United States tour in the spring of 2019, a short tour. I don’t know if we’re allowed to announce yet where we are going. We’re going to Australia in the summer of 2019. We have plans for the UK and Ireland in 2018, and this December we go to Athens.

We have exciting recording plans for a Bruckner Mass, and possibly some more Rutter. And we’ve got a recording coming out of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.

There’s lots of that going on.  

I think as far as a personal spiritual journey is concerned, as with probably the majority of people, that barometer goes up and down.

I know that Cardinal Hume used to say at Westminster Cathedral, even someone like him, “it’s hard to believe all of this sometimes. Some days it’s harder than others.” That’s something I share with a lot of people.

As to how I perform my job here, I see it as an enabling thing. I want to enable particularly the young people in the choir to experience this wonderful music through liturgy well-conducted.  

I don’t seek to influence them in what they should believe about it. I’m simply laying before them the opportunities, and they take from them what they want. 

It’s really the same in terms of the congregation. So I’m saying, here I am. I’m trying to do this music as well as I can today, and you’re coming to our service. You’ll meet lots of different people, from the college, the university, the town, or visitors from Australia, or Papua New Guinea, and, of course, America. Some will be what one might call card-carrying Christians, some will be lapsed Christians, some will have no particular religious belief or knowledge at all. That’s what makes us very different from a community church in America as we’ve been talking about. Some people think that would devalue the experience for me. I actually think the complete opposite of that.

One of the particular problems the church has today is that it’s easily perceived as being exclusive. If you don’t fit a particular pattern . . . we don’t need to go into the question of gender and sexuality, but we know about all that.

Whereas I think, it’s a cliché, of course, that everyone should be made welcome, whatever their religious standpoint or lifestyle. So if someone comes to the service and hears “Like as the Hart” by Howells, for example, and is moved by that and spiritually nourished by that, that’s great. 

It’s not my concern whether they’re going to go to the altar and receive communion the next day or not. Those are separate issues. I’m not intending to sound detached about that, but I genuinely feel that.  

There’s another thing I believe in strongly. There’s another side of that coin. I say to the choral scholars (since it’s not necessary for the children at that stage, as they haven’t developed their views), “well look, if you don’t believe this, or don’t agree with it, you still have to behave in a professional way. There are people in the chapel every day for genuine religious reasons to say their prayers, and they don’t want to see you behaving in a way that distracts from that.”

I do insist on what I call a proper professional decorum. It’s important to me that the choir conducts itself properly.

 

LB: I think that clearly shows. Who have been your own greatest influences?

SC: I was a boy chorister at Worcester. The organist there was Douglas Guest, who’d been an organ scholar here in the late 1930s. The first experience of anything is very formative. Then Christopher Robinson came to be organist there and taught me to play the organ. Harry Bramma was there, a great teacher. Then in Cambridge there was George Guest, of course, whom I worked closely with at St. John’s. I also had good contact with David Willcocks during those years; I played for his rehearsals with the Cambridge University Musical Society. Within the field of church music I would say those are the people.

 

LB: What about your own composition?

SC: I’m not really a composer. I think I can turn in some fairly decent arrangements. I don’t see myself as a composer of original music. I have composed some pieces and people have been nice about them.

One of the privileges I had when I worked with the BBC singers as chief conductor for ten years was to do a lot of contemporary music, a lot of premières. I found it fascinating to be in close contact with composers. I could tell you a lot about composers from that angle.

One thing that is true of the best composers I’ve met is that they are absolutely consumed with a need, almost a physical need, a mental need certainly, to compose music. It’s something they absolutely have to do.

I don’t feel that kind of an urge to compose. I teach students here to do harmony and counterpoint, so I know how to put the notes on the page in order to do an arrangement. I know how not to write parallel fifths.

It’s the same with going into the musical profession. I remember Herbert Sumison at Gloucester used to advise young people, “If you are thinking about entering the music profession, is it something your innermost feelings make an imperative? If not, you’re much better going off and doing something else and keeping music for your leisure and enjoyment.”

 

LB: Thank you for your time this afternoon.

 SC: I look forward to seeing you again in the chapel.

Notes

1. Dr. Clinch presented a lecture on Howells’s piano music at the Howells Society gathering, October 28, 2017.

John Bishop

A Pokémon world

Last week, I visited a church in Brooklyn, New York, to talk with the rector, wardens, and organist about placing a vintage pipe organ in their historic building. After the meeting, I walked the eight blocks up Nostrand Avenue back to the subway. It was 97°, so I stopped at a corner bodega for a bottle of cold water. While I was paying, there was a series of great crashes just up the street, and I was among the crowd that gathered to see what had happened. A white box truck had rear-ended a car stopped at a traffic light and shoved that car into another that was parked at the curb. The truck must have been going pretty fast because there was lots of damage to all three vehicles—broken glass everywhere, hubcaps rolling away, mangled metal. Apparently, no one was hurt, but everyone present was hollering about Pokémon. 

“Innocent until proven guilty” is an important concept in our system of law enforcement, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that the driver of the truck was chasing a virtual-reality fuzzy something-or-other, and didn’t have his eyes on the road. When I told my son Chris about it, he asked, “So . . . , what did he catch?” 

Take away the deadly weapon of the automobile, and you’re left with at least a nuisance. Living in a big city, much of our mobile life is on foot, and we routinely cross streets with dozens of other people. It’s usual for someone to be walking toward me with ear buds pushed in far enough to meet in the middle, their nose buried in their screen. I often shout, “Heads up,” to avoid a collision. I wonder what’s the etiquette in that situation? When there’s a collision on the sidewalk and the phone falls and shatters, whose fault is it?

I know I’ve called home from a grocery store to double-check items on my list, but I’m annoyed by the person who stands in the middle of the aisle, cart askew, talking to some distant admirer. Perhaps worst is the young parent pushing a $1,000 stroller, one of those jobs with pneumatic suspension, talking on the phone and ignoring the child. No, I’m wrong. Worst is that same situation when the child has a pink kiddie-tablet of his own, and no one is paying attention to anyone. Small children are learning billions of bytes every moment—every moment is a teaching moment. It’s a shame to leave them to themselves while talking on the phone. 

The present danger is the possibility of accidents that result from inattention. The future danger is a world run by people who grew up with their noses in their screens, ignoring the world around them.

 

Starry eyes

An archeological site at Chankillo in Peru preserves the remains of a 2,300- year-old solar observatory comprising thirteen towers whose positions track the rising and setting arcs of the sun, their eternal accuracy confirmed by modern research. There are similar sites in ancient Mesopotamia. If I had paid better attention to my middle school Social Studies teacher, Miss Wood, who nattered on about the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers as if she were reading from a phone book, I’d have a better understanding of modern Iraq and the tragedy of the current destruction of ancient sites there. 

Early astronomers like Aristotle (around 350 BC) and Ptolemy (around 150 AD) gave us the understanding of the motions of celestial bodies. I imagine them sitting on hillsides or cliffs by the ocean for thousands of nights, staring at the sky and realizing that it’s not the stars, but we who are on the move. I wonder if there’s anyone alive today with such an attention span.

 

The man from Samos

In April of 2014, Wendy and I and three other couples, all (still) close friends, chartered a 60-foot sailboat for a week of traveling between Greek Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. These islands are within a few miles of Turkey, and many of us are increasingly familiar with that region as the heart of the current refugee crises. The island of Lesbos has a population of 90,000, and 450,000 refugees passed through in 2015. Lesbos was not part of our itinerary, but it’s adjacent to other islands we visited. We visited Patmos, where St. John the Divine, sequestered in a cave, received the inspiration we know as the Book of Revelation, but for me, our visit to Samos was a pilgrimage.

Pythagoras is my hero. He was a native of Samos who lived from 570 BC to 495 BC. He gave us the eponymous theory defining the hypotenuse of the right triangle, and importantly to readers of The Diapason, he defined musical tone and intervals in terms of mathematics that led directly to our modern study of musical theory. He was the direct forebear of the art of music. Approaching the island from the north, we entered the harbor of the main town (also called Samos) to be welcomed by a statue of Pythagoras. It shows the great man posed as one side of a right triangle, a right triangle in his left hand, and right forefinger pointing skyward toward a (compact fluorescent) light bulb. Okay, okay, it’s pretty tacky—even hokey, but you should see the Pythagoras snow-globe I bought there that graces the windowsill in my office.

Pythagoras deduced the overtone series by listening to blacksmiths’ hammers and anvils; he realized overtones are a succession of intervals defined by a mathematical series, and you cannot escape that his genius was the root of music. He noticed that blacksmiths’ hammering produced different pitches, and he first assumed that the size of the hammer accounted for the variety. It’s easy to duplicate his experiment. Find any object that makes a musical tone when struck—a bell, a cooking pot, a drinking glass. Hit it with a pencil, then hit it with a hammer. You’ll get the same pitch both times, unless you break the glass. So the size of the anvil determines the pitch. 

But wait, there’s more. Pythagoras noticed that each tone consisted of many. He must have had wonderful ears, and he certainly was never distracted by his smart phone ringing or pushing notifications, because he was able to start picking out the individual pitches. Creating musical tones using a string under tension (like a guitar or violin), he duplicated the separate tones by stopping the string with his finger, realizing that the first overtone (octave) was reproduced by half the full length (1:2), the second (fifth) resulted from 2:3, the third by 3:4, etc. That numerical procession is known as the Fibonacci Series, named for Leonardo Fibonacci (1175–1250) and looks like this:

1+1=2

1+2=3

2+3=5

3+5=8, etc., ad infinitum.

The Fibonacci Series defines mathematical relationships throughout nature —the kernels of a pinecone, the divisions of a nautilus shell, the arrangements of seeds in a sunflower blossom, rose petals, pineapples, wheat grains, among countless others. And here’s a good one: count out how many entrances of the subject in Bach’s fugues are on Fibonacci numbers. 

 

Blow, ye winds . . . 

If you’ve ever blown on a hollow stem of grass and produced a musical tone, you can imagine the origin of the pipe organ. After you’ve given a hoot, bite an inch off your stem and try again: you’ll get a different pitch. Take a stick of bamboo and carve a simple mouthpiece at one end. Take another of different length, and another, and another. Tie them together and you have a pan-pipe. You’re just a few steps away from the Wanamaker!

I have no idea who was the first to think of making a thin sheet of metal, forming it as a cylinder, making a mouthpiece in it, devising a machine to stabilize wind-pressure, and another machine to choose which notes were speaking, but there’s archeological evidence that people were messing around like that by 79 AD, when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, destroying the city of Pompeii, and preserving a primitive pipe organ. And 350 years earlier, in Alexandria, Egypt, the Hydraulis was created, along with visual depictions accurate enough to support the construction of a modern reproduction.

I’m sure that the artisans who built those instruments were aware of Pythagoras’s innovations, and that they could hear the overtones in the organ pipes they built, because those overtones led directly to the introduction of multiple ranks of pipes, each based on a different harmonic. Having five or six ranks of pipes playing at once produced a bold and rich tone we know as Blockwerk, but it was the next smart guy who thought of complicating the machine to allow single sets of pipes to be played separately­—stop action. They left a few of the highest pitch stops grouped together—mixtures. Then, someone took Pythagorean overtones a step further and had those grouped ranks “break back” a few times, stepping down the harmonic series, so the overtones grew lower as you played up the scale.

Here’s a good one: how about we make two organs, one above the other, and give each a separate keyboard. How about a third organ with a keyboard on the floor you can play with your feet? 

As we got better at casting, forming, and handling that metal, we could start our overtone series an octave lower with 16-foot pipes. Or 32 . . . I don’t know where the first 32-foot stop was built or who built it, but I know this: he was an energetic, ambitious fellow with an ear for grandeur. It’s ferociously difficult and wildly expensive to build 32-foot stops today, but it was a herculean task for seventeenth- or eighteenth-century workers. And those huge shiny pipes were just the start. You also had to trudge out in the forest, cut down trees, tie them to your oxen, drag them back into town, and start sawing out your rough lumber to build the case for those huge pipes.

How long do you suppose it took workers to cut one board long enough to support the tower crown over a 32-foot pipe using a two-man saw? It’s a good thing they didn’t have smart phones because between tweets, texts, e-mails, and telemarketers, they’d never have finished a single cut.

It’s usual for the construction of a monumental new organ to use up 50,000 person hours or more, even with modern shortcuts such as using dimension lumber delivered by truck, industrial power tools, and CNC routers. How many hours did the workshops of Hendrik Niehoff (1495–1561) or Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) put into their masterpieces? And let’s remember that Schnitger ran several workshops concurrently and produced more than 150 organs. Amazing. He must have been paying attention.

 

Pay attention

The pipe organ is a towering human achievement. It’s the result of thousands of years of experimentation, technological evolution, mathematical applications, and the pure emotion of musical sensibilities. Just as different languages evolved in different regions of the world, so did pipe organs achieve regional accents and languages. The experienced ear cannot mistake the differences between a French organ built in 1750 from one built in northern Germany. The musicians who played them exploited their particular characteristics, creating music that complemented the instruments of their region. 

Let’s think for a minute about that French-German comparison. Looking at musical scores, it’s easy to deduce that French organs have simple pedalboards. But let’s go a little deeper. It’s no accident that classic French organ music is built around the Cornet (flue pipes at 8′, 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, 13⁄5′). Those pitches happen to be the fundamental tone and its first four overtones, according to Pythagoras, and they align with the rich overtones that give color and pizzazz to a reed stop. The reeds in those organs are lusty and powerful in the lower and middle octaves, but their tone thins out in the treble. Add that Cornet, and the treble blossoms. Write a dialogue between treble and bass using the Trompette in the left hand and the Cornet in the right. (Can you say Clérambault?) Add the Cornet to the Trumpet as a chorus of stops (Grand Jeu). And while you’re fooling around with the five stops of the Cornet, mix and match them a little. Try a solo on 8′-4′-22⁄3′ (Chant de Nazard). How about 8′-4′-13⁄5′ (Chant de Tierce)? It’s no accident. It’s what those organs do!

History has preserved about 175 hours of the music of J. S. Bach. We can only wonder how much was lost, and certainly a huge amount was never written down. But 175 hours is a ton of music. That’s more than a non-stop seven-day week. I guess Bach’s creativity didn’t get to rest until about 9:00 a.m. on the eighth day! We know he had a busy life, what with bureaucratic responsibilities (he was a city employee), office work, rehearsals, teaching, and all those children. When he sat down to write, he must have worked hard.

Marcel Dupré was the first to play the complete organ works of Bach from memory in a single series of recitals. We know he had a busy life as church musician, professor, mentor, composer, and prolific performer. When he sat down to practice, he must have worked hard.

In 1999, Portugese pianist Maria João Pires was scheduled to perform a Mozart concerto with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly. She checked the orchestra’s schedule to confirm which piece, and prepared her performance. Trouble was, the published schedule was wrong. The first performance was a noontime open rehearsal. Chailly had a towel around his neck, and the hall was full of people. He gave a downbeat and the orchestra started playing. A stricken look appeared on Pires’ face, and she put her face in her hands. She spoke with Chailly over the sound of the orchestra, saying she had prepared the wrong piece. It’s not easy to tell what he said, but I suppose it was something like, “Let’s play this one!” And she did. Perfectly. You can see the video by typing “Wrong Concerto” into the YouTube search bar. Maybe Ms. Pires wasn’t paying attention when she started preparation for that concert, but she sure was paying attention when she learned the D-minor concerto. It was at the tip of her fingers, performance ready, at a panicky moment’s notice.

Often on a Sunday morning, my Facebook page shows posts from organ benches. Giddy organists comment between churches on the content of sermons, flower arrangements, or the woman with the funny hat. Really? Do you have your smart phone turned on at the console during the service? If your phone is on while you’re playing a service, is it also on while you’re practicing? I suppose the excuse is that your metronome is an app? Oh wait, you don’t use a metronome? To paraphrase a famous moment from a 1988 vice-presidential debate, I knew Marcel Dupré. Marcel Dupré was a friend of mine. You’re no Marcel Dupré.¹

 

A time and a place

I love my smart phone. In the words of a colleague and friend, I use it like a crack pipe. I read the news. I order supplies and tools. I look up the tables for drill-bit sizes, for wire gauges, for conversions between metric and “English” measurements. I do banking, send invoices, find subway routes, get directions, buy plane tickets, reserve hotel rooms, and do crossword puzzles. I check tide charts, wind predictions, and nautical charts. I text, tweet, e-mail, telephone, and “go to Facebook.” I listen to music and audio books, check the weather, look for restaurants, pay for groceries, and buy clothes.

The people who invented and developed our smart phones must have been paying attention to their work. It’s a world of information we carry in our pockets, and there must be millions of lines of code behind each touch of the screen. I’m grateful to have such an incredible tool, but I’m worried about its effect on our lives. We know a lot about the stars and orbiting planets, but I’m sure we don’t know everything. I hope there’s some smart guy somewhere, sitting on a remote hillside with no phone, wondering about something wonderful.

I’m not pushing strollers so often anymore, but I keep my phone in my pocket when our grandchildren are visiting. I keep my phone in my pocket when I’m walking the dog because it’s fun to be with him. And I keep my phone in my pocket when I’m walking the streets of the city alone. I wouldn’t want to miss someone doing something stupid because they weren’t paying attention. Hope they don’t drop their phone. ν

 

Notes

1. Poetic license: truth is, I never met Marcel Dupré.

Gavin Black

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Recording Notes II

Last month I recounted some musings that passed through my mind during preparation for my recent Frescobaldi recording sessions, about why one might want to make recordings. Now I offer related musings about what exactly a recording is or should be. This is a pastiche of notes that I took during the weeks before the recording sessions began, blended with some later thoughts arising from perusal of those notes and out of my memories of what I was thinking during that time. 

So, what is a recording or what should a recording be? Should it be a simple record (in the colloquial sense) of something that happened? That is the source of the name that we use for the process of playing music in the presence of machinery that enables someone else later to listen to some other music that is closely derived from what was played in the presence of that machinery. (Notice that it’s hard even to describe the process without actually using the word “record.” I didn’t want to write “that is the source of the name that we use for the process of recording . . .,” so I had to devise something convoluted.) The original concept seems to be simple: this is happening, let’s make a record of it, as we might make a written or photographic record of something. I would think that photography, which existed first, could easily have decided to claim the word “record” to be used as we now use the word “photo.” 

But recording is also something else (as is a photograph). It is the source of artistic experience on the part of a listener. Should that experience be the same as what it would have been for the listener to have been in the room where the recording took place? Or at a similar performance of the same music? Is that possible? Does trying to achieve that lead to a better or a worse potential artistic experience for that listener? Do the answers to any of this tell me anything practical or specific about how to approach this recording? Or anything not too practical or not that specific, but still meaningful?

 

Overhearing the battle

I once listened in on a conversation about the nature of recording that has remained with me for a long time. I have measured and understood some of my own feelings about music by referring back to this conversation. The ways I relate to what I remember was said then have changed. In this conversation, which took place about 1980 and involved two older colleagues of mine, as I remember it, I didn’t have much of my own to say. That was probably just as well: I didn’t have the relevant experience to know what to think. The point was this: two musicians, older and more experienced than I was, both harpsichordists among other things, were discussing Ton Koopman’s recording of harpsichord music of Giovanni Picchi. As it happened, they were both themselves specialists in Picchi. They had studied and performed his music and had various thoughts, feelings, and ideas about it.

The conversation began when one of them commented that the Koopman recording, then quite recent, struck him as too quirky. (At that time there was a lot about Koopman’s approach to rhythm and articulation that was new and seemed startling to many.) Beyond just not liking Koopman’s approach, he asserted that a recording should be objective—that it should present the music “as is” without the imposition of personal whim. The other member of the discussion strongly disagreed. She felt that if a performer were to embrace the idea of recording in an impersonalized way, stripping away whatever that performer would normally add out of his or her own artistic stance and experience, then the result would almost certainly be boring. That approach wouldn’t result in recordings that gave a pure unvarnished version of the music, but with recordings that misrepresented the music as stiff and not alive.

Each of these musicians (both teachers) felt that performers who wanted to approach recording the other way shouldn’t make recordings. “If you are going to make a record of something, show the music as itself without imposing anything on it. If you can’t do that, don’t record,” as opposed to “If you are going to make a record of something, play it the way you really feel it, otherwise there’s no point, so don’t record.” Diametrically opposed ideas. (There was anger involved, something that surprised and disturbed me at the time, especially since each discussant turned to me looking for agreement!) At the time, I tended towards the first view, though with an uncomfortable awareness that it could lead to boring recordings. Now I am only interested in approaching things the second way: a complete reversal for me that has happened gradually over more than thirty years.

There is a concept that people turn to once in a while of a “reference” recording. That phrase can mean a number of things. It probably most often means what the first member of the above-referenced conversation meant: a recording that has an air of objectivity to it, that is trying to stake a claim to be “just the music” and not a performance with any quirkiness to it. As an ideal this has to be based on a feeling that certain ways of playing are more objective than others. That’s complicated. Does objective mean moderate—medium tempi, only a little bit of rubato, and so on—or does it mean specifically true to what the composer wanted? That opens up problems that come with trying to know what the composer wanted.

But there’s another thing: sometimes recordings that are clearly quirky and personal become established as reference recordings because of something about their circumstances. That is true of the Bach recordings of both Glenn Gould and Wanda Landowska. Neither of those performers was striving for a middle of the road objectivity. And although one or the other of them might have wanted to dispute this, it’s clear that neither of them was doing specifically what the composer would have done or would have expected to hear. Nonetheless, many listeners assume that these recordings are somehow “definitive,” and many students assume they should listen to these recordings for the express purpose of learning how they should play the pieces. 

So, either a self-consciously objective or an unapologetically personal recorded performance can come to exercise a substantial influence on how people think about and play a particular repertoire.

 

As the years go by, one’s viewpoint evolves

When I was growing up, I reacted to the Bach recordings of Helmut Walcha as having a quality of objectivity, of being some sort of settled reality, rather than just how one amazingly gifted and thoughtful performer chose to play the music. I got a lot of excitement from basking in the feeling as I listened to his records (drawn from the boxes that I loved so much as physical objects), that I was hearing something as close as would ever be possible to the fingers and feet of Bach himself. Now, as much as I admire Walcha’s extraordinary artistry and skill and still enjoy listening to his recordings, I have moved away from hearing or wanting to hear the for-the-ages objective correctness in his way of playing. 

A little bit later I reacted to Alfred Brendel’s Beethoven recordings in a similar way. I don’t know in retrospect how much any of this came from something intrinsic to those recordings and how much came from something about the circumstances in which I encountered them or about me as a listener at that time.

 

Like it or not, the past influences the present

What does any of this say about how I should approach recording now? I have to remember two things that tug in opposite directions. First, I really don’t want to think of what I am doing as having that “reference” quality. I don’t want any of what I create to have a feeling of objectivity, and I really don’t want it to be used to create a sense that this is how it should be. I understand that the amount of dissemination that any recording of mine will have will be modest enough to limit the damage that could come from anyone’s taking it that way, unlike with Gould, Landowska, Walcha, or Brendel. But (ideally) I don’t want anyone to take it that way. Whether I am right, wrong, or neither, to feel that way I have no idea. But I do feel that way. On the other hand, stemming from the relationship for me between recording and nostalgia, I do feel the tug of trying to create the kind of edifice that I thought I was encountering in those Walcha Bach boxes, even as I avowedly don’t want to do so.

That probably means that when I find myself actually sitting there with the tape rolling (so to speak), I have to remind myself not to tighten up, not to mimic, unconsciously, some sort of image of the magisterial, objective, for-the-ages performer. It’s not that I think that those recording artists whose work I react to as having that objective quality necessarily felt that way during recording sessions. They probably didn’t. It’s that I am aware of a pull to try to feel that way, though I know that I shouldn’t, and don’t want to. If I give in to that pull and sit there playing, thinking, “this is a well-crafted, definitive performance,” that will only lead to stiffness. It would also likely be a distraction.

In concert performance, I want there to be an element of spontaneity, something that at least part of the time leaves people reacting as they would to improvisation. (That’s not only my idea, of course: it’s a common ideal and often a fruitful one.) Sometimes this means being willing to do very specific performance and interpretive things that are unplanned and that the player might not do again. Certainly in the areas of arpeggiation, articulation, some sorts of rubato, shaping of certain ornaments, etc., I might do something in a performance that I hadn’t planned in advance and don’t consciously plan even as I am doing it. Some of these things come out as noticeably quirky. Is it OK for that to happen in a recording session? If I play a piece in concert a dozen times and in each of those performances a particular spot in the piece is discernibly different, is it acceptable if the finished recorded product has one of those and not the others? Of course it has to, but does there have to be some sort of hierarchy of how suitable those interpretive quirks are to be “immortalized?” If there is such a hierarchy, does that feed into the quest to make the recording sound “objective?” 

There’s a spot in one Frescobaldi piece where I really love the effect that I get by eliding a certain repeat, actually omitting the final chord of a particular section the first time through and replacing it with the beginning of the repeat of that section. It is appropriate harmonically and can be made to work rhythmically. In no way does the composer indicate this or suggest it. (It could have been indicated with a “first ending—second ending” setup.) I know of no musicology to back it up. It is hauntingly beautiful to me. I usually do it in concert. Should I do it on the recording?

(Did I? Of course as I sit here writing I know the answer . . .)

There are places where I am convinced that the surviving sources have made a small mistake: that something—a note, an accidental, a rhythm—should be different. (Usually by that I mean that the composer actually intended it to be different and that the “mistake” is an out-and-out typo. Sometimes I mean I believe that on further reflection, the composer probably would have done something a little bit differently.) In concert I usually feel absolutely fine about changing the passage to be what I think it should be. What about in a recording? Again the “for the ages” idea comes into play. Any one concert performance is ephemeral. If I try out something that may be “wrong” (Frescobaldi surely meant C# there—the C-natural sounds odd) there’s a limit to how much artistic damage that can be done if it is in fact I rather than the composer or copyist who was wrong. Is it different in a recording because it will be listened to repeatedly (if I’m lucky!) or because it will still be around many years from now? 

We allotted a whole five-day workweek for this series of recording sessions. That’s rather a long time. There’s a bit more than ninety minutes of music in this project. If I want to play everything five times—which is somewhere between average and safe for getting good takes of it all and for having choices among takes—that is about eight hours. In a pinch one could do eight hours of taping in one day. (My first recording for the PGM label was taped in one day, since we only had the venue for that long, and the producer was very eager to use that particular venue. It was a very grueling day!) But we want to allow for noise, tuning, regulation issues, periods of time when I space out and fail to play adequately for several takes in a row, stretching, relaxing, lunch breaks, and in general for it not to be too grueling—no more so than is necessary.

Next month I will present the fruits of the note-taking that I did during each of those five days and close with some thoughts that stem from where I am now: taping done, a bit of listening done (more by the time I am writing for next month), editing begun, but with a long way to go.

Here, as a sort of appetizer, is a link to a short video from the final day of the sessions. The piece is the second Galliarda from the Second Book of Toccatas and Partitas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxQgs1m5Hls.

Steven Egler

Steven Egler is professor of music at Central Michigan University and a former student of Dr. Ore. He contributed a chapter to the festschrift for Charles Ore.

On June 28, 2016, I met with Charles W. Ore at his home outside of Seward, Nebraska, to interview him on the occasion of his upcoming 80th birthday on December 18. We reflected on his career as an organist, improviser, composer, teacher, and church musician. Many of Charles Ore’s works can be found in the sets of Eleven Compositions for Organ, published by Concordia. 

His reminiscences cover his childhood and musical experiences, family, his career as a teacher and church musician, and reveal his deep conviction to music making, particularly the art of improvisation and its important role in his compositional process. Thanks to Kenneth Wuepper, Saginaw, Michigan, for audio transcription, and to Charles Ore himself for his helpful editorial assistance.

For further insights into Charles Ore’s life, visit www.charleswore.com to see Irene Beethe’s April 2015 video interview of him for the Center for Church Music, Concordia University-Chicago. Beethe is the compiler of the festschrift Charles W. Ore: An American Original, released in October 2016 and available from Concordia Publishing House (www.cph.org).

 

Steven Egler: You were born in Winfield, Kansas, southeast of Wichita?

Charles Ore: Yes, in 1936. 

 

What can you recall about your childhood?

I didn’t live in Winfield at all. I lived on a farm that was 15 miles east of Winfield and a mile and a half from Old Salem School. My mother was a teacher, so the concepts of reading and mathematics were instilled in me at a very young age. Her father, my Grandfather Werling, received his master’s degree in German literature from Columbia University in 1924. So there was a strong academic side to this family. Even though I lived at the farm with my parents, I was with my grandparents in Winfield every weekend. There were nine children in my mother’s family, and I believe that eight of them attended and/or graduated from college. My father’s side of the family was into agriculture, and very few of them attended college. My father attended school only through the eighth grade. 

There was no kindergarten in my school since it was a one-room school, Old Salem School in Cowley County (Kansas). I rode a horse named Colonel to school everyday, put it in the barn, and fed it oats. That was the routine. Later on, when I was a little older, I was responsible for bringing in coal for the stove and lighting it, since there was no central heat or electricity. On cloudy days we sat by the windows. It seems like it should have happened 200 years ago, but not quite so.

 

Tell us about your first piano lessons.

My Grandfather Werling gave me my first piano lessons. This consisted of taping the names of the notes on the keys of his piano. In the hymnal, he wrote the names of the notes that matched what was written on the printed page. So I learned to read notes, and at the same time learned how the hymn sounded. I had a very good tonal memory, so the learning process went fairly quickly.

When I was about 6, my mother took me to a piano teacher, Blanche Brooks, with whom I would study for the next 12 years. Eventually, I became one of her prize students. She was a great teacher, in that she was always demanding, helpful, and was never really satisfied with anything. She always emphasized the importance of practicing and also encouraged me to improvise. At the end of our lessons and even if she was running behind schedule—which she always did—she would ask me to play what “piece” (improvisation) I had brought with me that day. She also would take us to concerts in Wichita and Winfield. Through these trips she helped to open up a world that otherwise I may not have experienced at such an early age.

What I recall particularly about my early years was that, almost without exception, wherever you went, there was a piano in the living room, and people were invited to play. It was so different then, compared to today, in that we produced the music rather than pushed the button to listen to it. Active vs. passive.

 

Did you play other instruments besides the piano?

I played the tenor saxophone in the band, yet I was always jealous of the alto saxophone players, because it seemed as if they had all of the beautiful melodies. I ended up playing the tenor saxophone because the band director said he needed a person to play it, and there I was!

 

What did you experience first: organ, improvising, or composing?

Improvisation was definitely first. Composing came later, and it is a more organized, deliberate process. When improvising you can never be sure how things are going to turn out, you don’t necessarily finish every sentence, and you never go back to correct yourself. When you improvise you never make a mistake: you may bleed internally, but it’s rarely fatal. A composition is much more like an essay, in that you have an opening paragraph, a body of material, and a conclusion or a recap of what’s been going on. It’s a much more formal concept. 

It’s very satisfying with improvising and composing working together, especially after 1986 when Finale came on the scene and computers came into existence. Those two methods merged very well. You can get a lot of notes on the page quickly, and then the real work begins!

Also with improvisation you may have to go back and clarify or sharpen your ideas and continue to process things. Some music by a variety of composers should have been incubated a little longer. I won’t mention any names and maybe they won’t either!

 

When did you start to play the organ for church?

That’s a very good question, and it brings back some fun memories. I was 17 at the time. Pauline Wente played the organ at our church, Trinity Lutheran in Winfield, which had a two-manual Kilgen organ of 12 ranks. She was very predictable, and it seemed as if she played the same prelude every Sunday: a series of big chords and progressions, and then the piece more or less stopped. The Voluntary was always soft and sounded essentially the same, maybe with an occasional tremulant. The postlude always sounded like some type of march. I don’t want to be critical, but I watched this lady play every Sunday and was really fascinated with what she was doing.

My Grandfather Werling was also a pastor, so I had many opportunities to be around churches and play their organs. Pauline’s husband Walter was a choir director and on one occasion she wanted to go with him on a weekend choir tour, so she asked me to play for her that Sunday. 

I hesitated since I didn’t really play the organ, but she said she’d show me how to do it and that it wouldn’t take very long. We went to the church, and she showed me what to do for the prelude. “See these ‘stops’ over here? You pull them out. Any notes in the bass you play with your feet.” (I sort of had that idea.) She then asked me if I had any questions, and, of course, there weren’t any because I didn’t know enough to ask one! 

She demonstrated a bit more as to what the voluntary and postlude should be like. She then showed me some music, all of which I could easily play. 

I told my grandparents that I was going to play for church on Sunday, and I think that they went into shock. After all, they had a reputation to maintain in the community, and I was a member of that congregation. Just to be sure that I really did know what I was doing, my grandfather took me down to the church and I played for him. He approved, so I played for church on Sunday and after that I became a part of the rotation of organists. That first Sunday morning, the pastor asked me if I was sure that I could play the hymns and liturgy. I told him that I had been playing hymns since I was five or six, so there was no problem. He listened and agreed.

I noticed with many of my own beginning students that those who were skilled enough to play one of Bach’s Eight Little Preludes and Fugues or chorale pieces would say, “Oh no!” when asked if they played hymns. I knew from the very beginning of my teaching career that basic hymn playing was the key to being a successful organist. Many members of the congregation aren’t always attuned to what you play as incidental music, but if you can’t play the hymns and the liturgy, you may as well just fold up and go home.

 

Tell us about your organ teachers and the music you studied.

When I graduated from high school, I attended St. John’s College in Winfield, Kansas (closed in 1986), where my Grandfather Werling was on the faculty: he taught German. At St. John’s, I studied with my first real organ teacher, Alma Nommensen, who was a graduate of Northwestern University. She was a character, was fun, and was an artiste, if there ever was one—both in her mannerisms and in her playing. Eventually, she taught me the recital she played at Northwestern University.

I started by playing Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Major, BWV 532—I was probably 18 by then. I also learned Mendelssohn’s First Organ Sonata, and I’m blessed in that there was no recording equipment in the studio. Alma knew how to play the organ, and she introduced me to the basic issues of registration, fingering, and pedaling. Before studying with her, it had been just whatever felt good. 

During the summer, between my sophomore and junior years in college, I studied with Garth Peacock who was teaching at Southwestern College in Winfield. After two years there, he began a long teaching career at Oberlin Conservatory. We worked on pieces that I was already studying with Alma Nommensen plus Bach’s E-flat trio sonata. My next teacher after Alma and Garth was Theodore Beck, who was at Concordia University-Seward and also a graduate of Northwestern University. He taught me his master’s recital, which included the Bach Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 543. From my study with Blanche Brooks, I had already played big piano pieces like Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, Chopin waltzes, and Mozart sonatas. So actually getting the notes was not that difficult: doing it well was something else, and again I’m blessed in that there were no recordings! I learned a sizable portion of Widor’s Fourth Symphony, and of course, I played the Toccata from the Fifth Symphony and worked on the sixth as well. I also studied the Sixth Sonata of Mendelssohn and the A-Minor Concerto by Vivaldi/Bach. 

 

What contemporary music did you learn?

I learned Suite Breve by Langlais, but it wasn’t until I went to Northwestern that I learned Messiaen. Wow! That was a revelation.

How did you come to study with Theodore Beck at Concordia-Seward (now Nebraska)?

Albert Beck, Ted’s father, was one of the principal organists at Concordia-Chicago at the time, and my Grandfather Werling knew him because Albert often played at conventions of the Lutheran Church. My grandfather wrote him a letter and told him that I was very interested in the organ, and that he’d like to send me to Chicago to study with him. Dr. Beck wrote back informing my grandfather that he was about to retire, and that I should attend Concordia-Seward to study with his son, Ted, who was on the faculty there, finishing his Ph.D. in music theory at Northwestern, and that we would get along very well.

At that time in 1956, Seward was a very ethnically closed community, both by tradition and theology and by a lack of ecumenism: for the most part, church professionals rarely socialized with those who were not Lutherans. There was also a strict code of social behavior, and I got into trouble right away when I was seen walking down the street holding my girlfriend’s hand: this was absolutely forbidden! She was told in no uncertain terms that she was not to allow that because boys would take advantage of you, and holding hands in public created the wrong impression. In four years, this girl, Constance Schau, was to become my wife.

 

What did you do after graduation from Concordia-Nebraska?

For two years (1958–60), I taught in an elementary school in Lincoln, Nebraska, and during the winter months I studied with Myron Roberts at the University of Nebraska. I learned quite a bit of contemporary music with him including Sowerby, more Langlais, and, of course, his own music, which I really treasured. 

During the summers of 1959 and 1960, I studied organ with Thomas Matthews and took classes at Northwestern. Tom was a fine improviser, and he helped me to be more organized in my approach. He was organist at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston where I heard horizontal trumpets for the first time. Tom then moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the end of the summer session of 1960. In August of 1960, I married my wife Constance, and that fall we moved to Evanston, where I became a full-time graduate student. 

In the fall quarter of 1960, I became a pupil of Barrett Spach. Barrett was an excellent teacher, and I learned the Dupré Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, the Sowerby Pageant, and Messiaen’s Le Banquet Celeste. 

In early 1961, I played my master’s recital in Lutkin Hall at Northwestern, so it was a long tradition: Alma Nommensen and then Ted Beck, both who were graduates of Northwestern. In the spring of 1961, Barrett had a heart attack and asked me to fill in for him at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago. Many changes were happening very rapidly for me: just three years earlier I had graduated from Concordia-Nebraska where I had my own stein at the local pub called Heumann’s. Now I was living in Evanston, the home of the WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) where you could not buy liquor within the city limits, married to the woman with whom I could not hold hands in Seward, and playing at Fourth Presbyterian Church on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. 

 

How were you hired to teach on the faculty at Concordia-Chicago?

Just to clarify: when I taught there it was Concordia-River Forest. Likewise, Concordia-Seward was changed to Concordia-Nebraska. 

I had finished my master’s degree at the close of the winter quarter of 1961 and started on my doctorate at Northwestern right away. Shortly after that, I got a telephone call from the president of Concordia University in River Forest. Theodore Beck’s father, Albert Beck, was on the faculty at River Forest. Through Ted I became acquainted with Albert who in turn encouraged the president of the university, Martin Koehneke, to interview me for the open position in organ at Concordia-River Forest. 

I wasn’t interested in the job at all! I was in my doctoral program and studying French and German, and getting more acquainted with the wide world of organ playing. Nonetheless, I interviewed with President Koehneke, Paul Bunjes, chair of the music department, and Herbert Gotsch, head of the organ department. We talked in general terms about music and about what their hopes and dreams were and how I might fit into the program there.

At the conclusion of the day, I was back in the president’s office where he offered me the job. I told him that I wasn’t interested because I wanted to continue my doctoral studies at Northwestern. That evening President Koehneke called to tell me that he had my contract on his desk and that it was ready for me to sign the next morning, which included everything that we had discussed during my interview! The classic offer that one could not refuse, I took the job, and it was a great position for five years (1961–66). 

I needed to quit my work at Fourth Presbyterian Church so that I could teach at Concordia-River Forest. There was great angst at Concordia that a Lutheran professor would play the organ in a Presbyterian church! 

I enjoyed teaching at Concordia immensely. Also during that time I bought a tracker-action Möller organ that had been in a church in Grand Island, Nebraska, hauled it back to Chicago, and rebuilt a part of it in my third-floor apartment. Initially, it had consisted of about 30 ranks, but I reduced it to about six. 

Paul Bunjes taught me a great deal about how a mechanical-action organ worked and the names of all the various parts, like “fan frame” and “cut up.” He was a wonderful teacher, and I wanted and needed to learn more about organ building; the knowledge I gained from Paul Bunjes served me well throughout my teaching career. 

 

What courses did you teach at Concordia-River Forest?

I’m sure it’s true today that deans always look at the ratio of how many students you teach, especially with one-on-one teaching of organ students and applied music in general. So I taught large courses, such as Introduction to Music, and perhaps as many as 50–60 students at a time. Actually, after teaching grades 7–9, you can teach anything!

There is one funny story about my first experience teaching at Concordia. I was 23 at that time and walked into the classroom on the first day and sat down in the front row. I blended in with everybody else who was there except that I was wearing a suit and tie. No one knew who I was, so I just waited until a little after the hour. Then I got up and told them that I was their teacher. I can only imagine what they must have thought!

During your tenure at Concordia-River Forest, you were also organist at historic First St. Paul Lutheran Church in downtown Chicago. 

First St. Paul on North LaSalle in Chicago, organized in 1864, is the oldest Lutheran church in Chicago; it has maintained a great tradition in music. I got acquainted with many people with whom I am still in contact to this day. I played the organ (Casavant, designed by Albert Beck) and directed the choir. 

The pastor told me that it was critical that I was liked by Lydia Fleischer, a soprano in the choir. He said if she sits down when you ask the choir to stand, that means she doesn’t like you and your job will be terminated. (She had financial clout in the congregation.) 

When I asked the choir to stand during the rehearsal, I walked over and put my arm around her ample yet well-corseted middle and held her tight during the piece we were singing. We became very good friends! She told the pastor that I was great! 

 

You began to work on your doctorate in 1961 and finished it at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1986. Please tell us about this.

I started to teach at Concordia-Seward in 1966 and had played my first D.M.A. recital at Northwestern in 1967, yet at that point—the late 1960s and early ’70s, the doctorate was becoming less of a priority. My family was growing in size—two children in 1967—and my composing and performing career was expanding.  

In the meantime, George Ritchie and Quentin Faulkner were creating a doctor of musical arts program at the University of Nebraska in the early 1980s. I had heard both of them play and had heard about their approach to early music. I was receptive to their “transformative ideas,” and for me it was a complete revelation. I asked George if he thought that we could work together—I asked because we were already friends—and he felt positive about the concept. 

Nebraska accepted the transfer of my doctoral study at Northwestern into the new program at Nebraska. In fact in the following weeks I became the first D.M.A. organ student at Nebraska (c. 1983) and the first to graduate with that degree in 1986. It was wonderful: the classes were excellent, the scholarship was demanding, and the musical environment was friendly and welcoming. I graduated with an A+ grade average in the same year that I turned 50.  

 

Bravo to you! You’ve mentioned Connie, your late wife. What can you tell us about her and your children?

Connie and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary in 2010, and shortly thereafter, she died of myelodysplastic syndrome and leukemia after having fought the disease for five years. 

She was also a fine musician and served for 22 years as director of music at St. John Lutheran Church, Seward, where she was organist, choir director, and junior high music teacher. She was an amazing woman—great cook, mother, and wife—and she fought for women’s rights and equality in the church. I wish that I could say that she had been successful. 

Heidi, our oldest (b. 1963), lives in Lincoln, has two children, and graduated from the University of Nebraska. Her husband, Jon Taylor, is from Omaha, and they live in Lincoln where Heidi is the office manager for the State of Nebraska Foster Care Review Board. 

Janna (b. 1966) is married to Todd Nugent, has two daughters, and just finished her master’s degree in computer science at the University of Chicago. Both Janna and my son John-Paul graduated from the University of Chicago. Janna is a senior bioinformatics specialist at Northwestern University. We’re all very close, and I get regular messages from them on my Apple watch!

John-Paul (b. 1974) decided to move back home in 2009 because Connie needed a lot of individual care, attention, and I needed help. In Seattle he worked as a digital production assistant and grip. He traveled across much of the planet in this position. He is now finishing his Ph.D. in computer science/robotics at the University of Nebraska and hopes to have one leg in industry and the other in academia. He is currently living with me.

 

Tell us about your 26 years at Pacific Hills Lutheran Church in Omaha.

Someone once said that it must have been like 200 round trips to the moon! It was an amazing experience. 

I drove from my home in Seward to Omaha at least once a week for 26 years. I left Seward by 5:30 a.m. on Sunday morning for the 70-mile, one-way trek. I rehearsed with the cantor or the choir for the 8:00 a.m. service and then rehearsed the large choir at 9:30 for the 11 a.m. service and was usually back to Seward by 2:00/2:30 p.m. They were wonderful people, and I had outstanding musicians to work with.

For example, Grant Peters, a wonderful trumpet player, was in high school when I first started at Pacific Hills. Dr. Grant Peters is now on the faculty of the University of Missouri at Springfield. His father Kermit was a magnificent oboe player who taught at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Both Kermit and Grant’s mother, Sondra, sang in the choir. Both Kermit and Grant played regularly for services at Pacific Hills. There were many other very talented singers and instrumentalists. 

Originally, I conceived The Seventh Trumpet for Grant Peters. He has such a beautiful tone, and he could hit all of the high notes with ease. I also have an unpublished version for organ solo. 

After driving back and forth to Omaha for 26 years and being in an automobile accident in 2001, it was decided, with a lot of insistence from my wife and the medical community, that I should give up my position at Pacific Hills. In the accident my car was totaled, but fortunately, I walked away without a scratch. I think that maybe God was trying to tell me something and that He protected me.

 

Please discuss your composing, hymn festivals, and recordings.

These days, I am more stingy with my time, and I think that it is age related.  Regarding recording, I don’t feel as confident. There is an assuredness that you feel at an earlier age. I don’t feel that way today. 

When I did the CDs (From My Perspective, 4 volumes, and Friendly Amendments) in the late 1990s and 2000s, I never needed to stop and start again because of a mistake. I played everything straight out. I would be reluctant to try that today, not only from the energy standpoint but also from the accuracy point of view. There comes a point when one decides whether to give it up or learn to live with it the way it is. I’m still playing very well—that’s my opinion, of course—but there was a time that if I missed one note, I’d be in a funk the rest of the day. Nowadays, I assume that I will miss at least one, or maybe two, which isn’t all that bad!  

I started playing hymn festivals because I thought it was important to use new music that I had written and also to use these compositions on a regular and ongoing basis. I don’t know if my A Mighty Fortress is a recital piece, but at hymn festivals I play a lot of compositions in that style and also write for specific instruments and occasions. I thought that was the tradition of organ music I wanted to follow. Hymn festivals have provided me with the opportunity to compose new music and to feel comfortable about it. 

I’m not opposed to playing music by European composers. I have tried to be as international as I can be—but I believe that we as Americans have a unique culture and that we should celebrate it. I have always been interested in creating new textures and techniques, and people have sometimes said that my music sounds like popular music or jazz and that they’ve never heard the organ sound quite like that before. I think, “Good! That’s exactly what I am looking for.”

 

Describe your compositional process.

Driving back and forth to Omaha for 26 years provided me with a lot of time to let melodies and ideas run through my head. Oftentimes, they would ferment for a while and then turn into compositions later. For example, What a Friend We Have in Jesus, Set VII, is a work that a lot of people think sounds like a calliope. Around 1996 a man in Texas said, “I really appreciate what you’re doing, but I just don’t think we’re quite ready for you here.” At this point in 2016, What Friend We Have in Jesus seems to be wearing well. 

 

I play it, too, and my students play it as well.

One of the reasons that I’ve called my pieces compositions is that they represent an evolution of ideas—change and growth—throughout Sets I to X. I’ve always been searching for a new language and new ways to use a hymn tune. I prefer not to call them chorales or hymn preludes because to me they are just simply new ways of using the organ.

Something that is missing today is a sense of daring on the part of publishers: they are so careful, maybe because they’re pressured about the bottom line and what’s going to sell. A publisher once asked me, “Can’t you write music that’s easier to play?” My response was, “I’ll take out all of the notes that I can, and what’s left is the essential part.” I’m sure that Max Reger would not have agreed with me, but I think that if Reger could have cleaned up a few scores, we could have played his music without tripling the root of the chord! 

I truly think that I have tried to make my music no more complicated than it has to be, but if you take more out of it, something is missing. Maybe every artist and composer feels that way. 

 

In A Mighty Fortress, Set VIII, and I Love to Tell the Story, Set V (with that one 15/16 measure!), there are unconventional rhythmic twists, but that’s part of the beauty, interest, and challenge in your music. Are your unpredictable rhythms reflective of the rhythmic Lutheran chorales?

Yes. I think rhythmic Lutheran hymns are a part of what made me who I am today, and I think I see more potential in some of those rhythms from that time. It’s exciting material.

 

I recall asking you once about the length of your pieces in Sets I and II as compared with the later sets, and you answered, “I have more to say.”

Not only that, but I think that the technology enables one to write music and to play it back immediately. It is amazing that Bach and Mozart could write music in ink and not rewrite it every other day.

With Finale and my computer, I can write it, print it, and take it to the organ. One of the dangers of this is that you have to be careful that you don’t start writing for that instrument—the “keyboard”—rather than for the organ. I then make corrections, enter them into the computer, and listen to it. 

 

What was your goal with the pieces in Sets I and II, in particular, the unconventional notation? 

Freedom. Freedom of the bar line. I was able to try things that I had not done before. The price of freedom of the bar line is worrying about whether or not one is in 3/4 or 4/4. That’s why my students had trouble: they wanted either 4/4 or 15/16, or they wanted it in 6/8. That’s the freedom I wanted, but I wasn’t sure that it really was as effective as I had originally hoped. Even though they are structured that way, all of the rhythm is there; however, you must have the musicianship and skill that’s solid enough to be able to play this music.

It was an experiment, and I have to compliment the publisher in 1971 for actually publishing it. They still sell many copies of Sets I and II every year.

 

A Mighty Fortress and Komm, Heiliger Geist are now revised and back in print in Sets VIII and IX respectively. How did this come about? Was it difficult?

No. Not at all. Even though A Mighty Fortress was written in 1990, I no longer play it that way. I’ve learned that many composers—Liszt among them—produced several versions of a given composition. The question has always been, “Which is the ‘real’ one?” Truth be known, they all are! Each version at one time was his final word.

With A Mighty Fortress, I was moving on and people would say that I didn’t play it like I had in the past. Just because one puts it on paper doesn’t mean that your brain says that it is finished.

Komm, Heiliger Geist was originally composed without bar lines, and I was beginning to change how it was played. Thus, I entered it into Finale, which meant that I had to “square it up” a bit. At least, Finale accepted the irregular meters.

 

Is there a Set X of Eleven Compositions in progress?

Yes. I sent it to the publisher in April, and it is now available from Concordia, as of October 2016.

 

How did you end up teaching for 36 years at Concordia-Seward/Nebraska, your alma mater?

Jan Bender had been at Concordia for five years (1961–66) as composer, professor of music theory, organ, and improvisation. Those were the parallel five years that I taught at Concordia-River Forest. In 1966, Bender accepted a teaching position at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. The chair of the organ area at Concordia-River Forest was a relatively young man, Herbert Gotsch. As a colleague Dr. Gotsch was good to me, but frankly I needed to break out on my own and try to implement new approaches. That opportunity came from Concordia-Seward, and my wife Constance and I decided it would be a good time for us to move our growing family: two children at this point. We would also be much closer to the grandparents in Kansas and Iowa.

The college in Nebraska had 14 new practice pipe organs—several arrived during my first year of teaching at Seward. On the campus was also a 1960 three-manual, 48-rank Kuhn mechanical-action instrument from Switzerland. 

Concordia-Seward had 180 organ students! I was in charge (fortunately not the only teacher) and a bit overwhelmed!  Shortly after my arrival in Nebraska I had an opportunity to study organ departments across America including such schools as Oberlin, Michigan, Eastman, Juilliard, and to completely redesign the Concordia-Seward organ curriculum using the best of what I had observed. 

Also during the academic year 1971–72, I had my first sabbatical and traveled throughout Western Europe studying methods of organ teaching, which included improvisation. Those were very important years for me. Throughout my teaching career I always tried to stress the need to improvise in addition to playing literature.  

 

Please tell us about the music department at Concordia-Seward.

When I started, there were 19 of us on the faculty. Now there are six full-time faculty with about 22 adjuncts. We bring in a lot more specialists than we were ever able to do. I think it is very unfair: many of the adjunct faculty have earned doctorates, but they receive no benefits and have no idea whether they’re going to have a job the next semester. This is a big change as compared to when I was hired at Concordia-River Forest. During my tenure as chair of the music department (1996–2002), we helped to initiate the basic changes in the curriculum so that we could have the department accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM). It worked: the president of the university, Orville Walz, found the money to make it happen.

 

You retired from Concordia-Seward in 2002, but have a church position and are still quite active.

With retirement, you just retire from one thing to something else. I find that I don’t have time to teach anymore. I have over 200 orchid plants, several of which are right behind you.

 

Besides tending to your orchids and maintaining your green thumbs, what else do you do?

I compose when I have an idea, and I take on a few commissions. One of the reasons that I decided to retire was during a long spring break and working on a commission, I learned that this is really what I wanted to be doing. Not worrying about fingering, pedaling, or playing on the ball of the foot, etc.!

I have several hobbies, one of which is all of the clocks that you see. I also have a Maelzel’s metronome, built in France by the inventor of the inverted metronome, Johann Maelzel (1772–1838).

 

At this point in your life and career, is there anything that you would do differently?

Yes, of course, because there is so much to do. I think that the hardest thing is to stay focused. On the other hand, it’s easy to keep pursuing different paths. I could live in Paris and go wherever I want to in the world.

I also enjoy accompanying the choir in my current position as organist at First Presbyterian Church, Lincoln, rather than having to be the choir director. Taking orders is fun, even though you may say to yourself, “I don’t think I would do it that way.” I’m lucky that I work with really nice people who are highly trained. 

I would do things differently because I’ve already done it this way! I may not have wound up here if had I gone in other directions. 

 

What pearls of wisdom might you impart to the younger generation of organists and church musicians?

Practice. Work. Teach (teaching is a great way to learn). Teach technique rather than pieces. If you teach a student a piece the student will know one piece. If you teach a student the techniques that are required to play the piece, the student can apply those techniques and play many pieces. The moment you think that you have mastered everything, it’s over. 

Things are constantly changing. In my lifetime I have seen the overall music scene continue to develop and expand and become more diverse. I would also suggest that as much as you possibly can, try to get in touch with your inner creative being. Be brave, put your fingers on the keys, and see what happens. See if you can find something that you like to do, and then just keep doing it. 

I first started publishing 11 Compositions for Organ in 1971, and I believe that I’ve kept growing and changing. My goal is to do “11-Eleven,” and I’ve already finished two compositions for that set, Set XI. At that point, I hope to start other projects. Life becomes a series of imagining what it could be, and then working toward it. What would it be like if . . . ? 

One of the exciting things I’ve been doing for several years, every other year now, will be my third European organ seminar next summer. We play original, unaltered instruments associated with famous composers. Our trip next summer will be to France and Switzerland, but primarily to Italy, so I’m getting out my Frescobaldi scores!

It’s a brave and demanding world out there. Don’t be afraid. Go for it! I’m going to have my first electric car soon, and I have my Apple watch. I Google things daily, and I like to do crossword puzzles. I feel energized just talking about these things.

 

What do you believe your legacy to our profession might be?

That is a tough question, yet I suspect that there are two answers. 

1. My students and the influence that they will have on the lives of others. In my years of teaching I have worked with over 900 students. Whatever is meant by legacy will happen with those students and the lives they come in contact with. 

2. My music. Art is very difficult to predict. With luck, possibly a few of my pieces might make it into collections that represent our era. Sometimes this music “shake out” takes generations to come to some resolve. Good luck to all those who place money on this horse race.  

 

Thank you, Charles, for sharing your wisdom and insight, for your inspiring music, and for your wonderful zest for life. Here’s to Charles W. Ore: Prince of the Prairie!

As I drove I thought about various aspects of the world of the church organ

John Bishop

The magic machine, 

The power of Aeolus, 

Combined for worship.

Recently I’ve spent a couple long days in my car traveling to visit churches that are working to acquire pipe organs. It’s fun to talk with people who are excited about the future of their churches, and who are devoted to the power and beauty of great music in worship. I’m energized by those conversations. They are great opportunities to review what led me to spend my life with the organ, and to refresh my own philosophies about the majesty of our instrument, its origins, its purposes, and its uses. I love going into a building for the first time, learning how the local musicians and clergy use their building, and imagining how a new organ could enhance the life of the place. Yesterday I drove more than 600 miles for two of those meetings.  

Yesterday was also the day that Boston and surrounding communities were on alert because of the massive hunt for the surviving suspect in the bombing at the Boston Marathon. This story was personal—thankfully not because anyone I know was directly affected, but because it was our city, our neighborhood. Coverage on television showed the roads we drive, places we shop, places we take recreational and exercise walks, even trees I recognized. My son Mike and his girlfriend Nicole live close to the site of the horrific firefight in which one of the suspects was killed. A dog that’s afraid of thunder sure doesn’t like gunfire, and their household was up in the middle of the night experiencing all that terror first hand.

Being something of a news junkie, as I drove I fired up my iPhone to stream coverage from WBUR—the excellent NPR news station in Boston—whose reporters predictably droned on all day, whether or not they had any new information to share. There may have been fighting in Syria, protests over gun control, even a horrible deadly explosion in Texas, but you would have thought that Boston was the only city in the world for that one day. Having listened to that for the first 300 miles, after my first meeting I changed gears and switched to a great collection of organ music I keep at the iTips of my iFingers, and hurtled through the Poconos savoring the great heritage of our instrument.

The powerful music in my ears combined with reflections on the day’s great conversations and as I drove I thought about various aspects of the world of the church organ. 

 

Is tracker action

Or electro-pneumatic

Better for good sound?

 

I grew up in Boston during the height of the revival of tracker action in pipe organs, and was sure that a good clear tracker-action instrument was the one true form. I was in my twenties and working on renovating an Aeolian-Skinner organ when I started to understand the merits of a first-rate electro-pneumatic action. Later, when I was curator of the mighty Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ at Trinity Church in Boston—a few hundred feet from the finish line of the Boston Marathon—I had the rich experience of hearing a different artist play the same instrument each week on the popular “Fridays at Noon” series. I was amazed to realize how many different ways there are to approach a single instrument, and how different the organ could sound from one week to the next.

Today I’m not able to name a favorite type of organ. I’m interested in good organs that are well chosen and effectively designed to meet the needs of the congregations that buy them, and to enhance the buildings into which they are installed.

 

Good registrations,

Not formulaic, better

Chosen for their sounds.

 

Give the same collection of tubes of paint to a succession of different artists, and you’ll get a succession of approaches to color. Place a succession of musicians on the same organ bench and you’ll get a wide variety of approaches. I’ve written before, and recently, about my dislike of formulaic registrations. Why do so many different people play the same piece with similar registrations? Why does one organist draw the same list of stops for a given piece, no matter what organ he’s playing? “I can’t play that piece here, there’s no two-foot.” Baloney. Learn to listen. And learn to hear. Find stops that sound good. If you have good taste and you listen, you can’t go wrong. The ghost of François Couperin is not going to rattle chains in your bedroom if you add a Principal, an Oboe, or a colorful flute to the Grand Jeu. 

 

Choruses of reeds

Add color, pizzazz, beauty,

Bring music to life.

 

“When they are good, they are very, very good, and when they are bad, they are horrid.” I care for an organ in Boston that has lots of beautiful flutes, terrific well-developed Principal choruses, rich Cornets, and lousy reeds. They are thin and harsh sounding. They resist tuning, and will hold pitch until my car leaves the block. The variety is disappointing—the Oboe sounds like a Trumpet—and to my ears they detract from the effect of the organ. It sounds great until you draw a reed.

A good chorus or two of Trumpets, a powerful Trombone, a contrasting softer sixteen-foot reed, and a couple colorful solo reeds like Oboe, Clarinet, or English Horn can transform an organ from ordinary to magical. Well-made reeds, well maintained, dominate the personality of any great organ.  

The great organbuilder Charles Fisk left us an apocryphal definition for a reed: “An organ stop that still needs three days of work.” Reeds are tricky. They’re expensive. They can be moody. And they’re wildly affected by outside forces like humidity and cleanliness. They’re the Venus Fly Traps of the pipe organ. Because they’re shaped like funnels, hapless flying creatures often their way in and can’t get out. And the leg of a moth or common housefly is more than enough to leave a hole in a melody.

If you love pipe organ reeds and haven’t heard the terrific organ at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, you’re nuts. Get there. Reed tongue magician Manuel Rosales has festooned the instrument with the most exciting and colorful collection of reeds in captivity. Everywhere you look on those stop jambs there’s another cool-sounding Spanish word that translates to “fire.”

Ernest Skinner gave American organists a new vocabulary of reeds. He listened to the symphony orchestra and tinkered in his voicing room to create the Orchestral Oboe, the Flugel Horn, and his signature contribution, the French Horn. Boy, does a Skinner French Horn ever make an instrument special.

Temperature change

Pulls the pitch of the Organ 

Like a rubber band.

 

A rising tide floats all boats, and a rising thermometer hikes all flue pipes. While the flues change pitch with the temperature, the reeds stay still. Because there are fewer reeds than flues, we tune the reeds to follow the pitch of the organ. The more often we tune the reeds, the less stable they become.

The outstanding Trinity Choir at Trinity Church in Boston is renowned for the magnificent Candlelight Carols services they offer each year during the Christmas season; during my time with that organ, Brian Jones and the choir planned to make a recording based on that service that has since become a perennial favorite and best-seller. In order to be able to release the recording in time for the Christmas shopping season, the recording sessions happened in July. In a big center-city location like Copley Square with heavy traffic and the rumble of subway trains, it’s necessary to make recordings in the middle of the night. There was a heat wave. I remember lying on a pew in the wee hours of the morning, wearing shorts and a tee shirt, and sweating while listening to the most glorious of Christmas music. It was surreal. 

It was also a conundrum. Of course, Brian and associate organist Ross Wood wanted the reeds to be right in tune with the organ, but the instrument’s pitch was so high because of the extreme temperature (it was 100 degrees in the Solo box) the poor old reeds just didn’t want to go. The tuning wires were moved down on the reeds so as to reduce the curves of the tongues and stifle the sound of the pipes. What a challenge.

Like a rubber band, the organ’s pitch returns to normal with the temperature. If the organ is tuned at A=440 at 68 degrees, it will always go back to that, no matter how high or how low it has gone. Try not to over-tune your organ. If you can put up with the reeds being below the pitch of the rest of the organ for the summer, leave it be. Stretch a rubber band too many times, and it deforms or snaps.

 

Careful thought, good taste.

Everything in the right place,

Nothing too strident.

 

Perhaps the most famous of all reed stops is the State Trumpet in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. That one set of pipes must have thrilled more people than any other organ stop in the world. The trouble is, it has also influenced some of the most poorly chosen organ stops. When the State Trumpet hit the airways, every organist wanted one, and shrill, tinny, piercing “pea shooters” were installed in some of the most intimate churches.

Seems they forgot that the cathedral holds more than fifteen million cubic feet of air. In New York City, north-south blocks are 260 feet—twenty to a mile. The interior of St. John the Divine is over 600 feet. That’s the distance between the front doors of St. Thomas Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, kiddy-corner between 51st and 53rd Streets.

The sound of that powerful organ voice echoes around in that vast space as if it belongs there. There’s a good reason for that. It does. Take a look at this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUxBzAfmLiM. Listen to the exclamation of the guy holding the camera. But don’t try this at home. Someone might get hurt.

(By the way, I often include links to websites, photos, and videos in my writing to illustrate my points. I don’t know if I’ve ever said directly that I expect you to look them up. I think you’ll enjoy this one. It’s grand. And don’t worry that those singing nearby are not always with the organ. After all, it’s a block away.)

The First Congregational Church in Anytown, USA might hold eighty thousand cubic feet. Think it through, people. There’s such a thing as big-city organ music, and we don’t need to do it in every church. I’ve seen those nasty little en chamades mounted on balcony rails not five feet over the heads of the unsuspecting bridesmaids.

In some churches, a sweet and gentle-sounding organ is a treasure. Loud music is not, by definition, beautiful music. Funny, not everyone knows that.

 

Good craftsmanship sings.

Sloppy work makes sloppy sounds.

Sharpen your tools, please.

 

A dull saw won’t cut straight. A dull drill bit tears at the wood. A dull chisel crushes fine wood grain rather that cutting. And a dull mind produces dull thoughts. When restoring a smashing organ by E. & G.G. Hook I was deeply impressed by the precision of the pencil marks left by the woodworkers. The men in that workshop sure knew how to sharpen a pencil. A pencil line that’s a sixteenth of an inch wide gives a margin of error of an eighth. And if you cut a piece of wood an eighth of an inch too short, you’re fired.

Laypeople visiting a new organ often comment that they didn’t realize that people still have the skills of “old world” craftsmen. They see raised panels mounted in mortise-and-tenon frames, carvings and moldings, checkering and inlays worthy of the finest royal chambers. It’s thrilling to visit an organ shop where keyboards, casework, and wood and metal pipes are made. Great organbuilders have deep affinity for their materials. They choose the finest wood and purest metals, and work the stuff with respect and care. Measurements are precise, tools are sharp, cuts are clean, square, and accurate. It’s a pleasure to watch.

If the interior of an organ looks chaotic, it probably sounds that way.

 

Neatness in public.

Institutional hygiene,

A common shortfall.

 

Servicing pipe organs can be like cleaning other peoples’ bathrooms. Sometimes I think that if all the organists in the world suddenly disappeared, the companies that make and sell Kleenex™, cough drops, dental floss, hairbrushes, nail clippers, and Post-Its™ would instantly go out of business. An organ console in a worship space should not be considered a private office or place of refuge, especially if it’s visible from the pews. Nail clippers, really? Are you using them during worship? Imagine that distant snip–snip–snip during the sermon.

One organist I worked with, now deceased, had very long gray hair. It was routine for notes in the pedalboard to go dead because of being clogged like a bathtub drain.  

Lots of organists keep a special pair of shoes just for playing the organ. Some prefer especially supple petite shoes, some prefer slick soles or raised heels. Besides the pedagogic reasons for organ shoes, think of the guy who tramps through snow, ice, slush, and salt to get from his car to the church door, and sits down at the organ with dripping shoes. You can be sure he’ll be calling the technician to fix dead notes in the pedals.

And coffee cups. A ten-ounce cup of coffee can do a number on a stack of keyboards, especially if there’s sugar in it. I’m not making this stuff up.

The custodian finds that inside the door of the organ chamber is a great place to store a vacuum cleaner and extension cord. And there was the organist who called saying the organ was “sounding funny,” when the custodian had left a bucket of dirty mop-water on the reservoir. Let’s see, a gallon of water weighs about eight pounds, five ounces. A couple of them plus the weight of the bucket is enough to double the wind pressure in a low-pressure organ. And what if it spills . . . 

There was the Saturday morning emergency call from the organist saying that the church was full of people, bagpipes were playing, the bride and groom were ready, and the organ wouldn’t play. The lights came on with the blower switch, but not sound. Now that’s a real emergency because the bagpipes won’t stop until I get there. There was a card table up against the air intake of the blower.

I came up with the phrase institutional hygiene during a consultation trip. I was struck by how orderly everything was. Kitchen cupboards were immaculate, closets were neatly organized. All of the desks in all of the offices were trim and efficient, waste baskets were empty, gardens were cultivated and weeded. There was no huge stash of treasures left from last year’s rummage sale, and the Christmas pageant costumes were nicely hung on hangers. You didn’t have to move a pile of boxes to service the organ blower. I commented on this in the written report that I prepare at the conclusion of each consultation, and the music director wrote back to me that a previous pastor had purposefully established neatness as a feature of the life of the parish.

 

Rambling through thoughts,

Combining memories with

Fresh observations.

 

When I walk by myself for recreation and exercise, I often carry index cards so I can write down my thoughts. It’s so easy to come up with the perfect idea for solving a problem or the perfect phrase for a business letter, promise myself I’ll remember it, and then lose it altogether. That’s something I can’t do when I’m driving. I’ve tried Siri™, the oddball virtual assistant left to us by a cynical Steve Jobs, to record verbal reminders. (You can hold a button on your iPhone, summoning a quirky female voice asking if she can help.) But simple as it is to use, I know it’s bad to do while driving alone. Besides, the noises of the motion of the car seem to confuse her.

The organ is a deep and rich subject.  It has a terrific heritage. I hope I can live up to it.

In perfect harmony

All musicians know what harmony is: chords, voice leading, dissonance, and resolution. We know harmony as one of the persnickety courses you’re required to take in school, in my case taught by a tyrannical and sometimes abusive professor. When you master the craft of harmony, or at least understand it enough to be dangerous, the magic of music is unlocked for you. You may have always known that Bach’s music was special, but dig into its structure and mathematics, and it becomes otherworldly. Paradoxically, the more you know about, the less you can understand it. I think it’s the mystical equivalent of how Rembrandt, Rubens, or Hobbema could mix linseed oil and pigment and make light flow from their paintbrushes.

But harmony is more than a mathematical exercise or an enigmatic code. It’s a way of being. It’s a way of managing the life of a community. Dictionary definitions use words like “pleasing,” “agreement,” and “concord.” 

 

How green is green?

I have vivid memories of two special moments in my childhood when I experienced something “live” for the first time. One was the first time I walked into Fenway Park in Boston with my father to see a Red Sox game. Dad was an avid fan, and I had watched dozens of games on (black and white) television with him. I’ve never seen grass so green as it was at Fenway that day. It was breathtaking, and I’ll always remember it.

The other was the first time I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra live on their “home field.” There was something about the sonority of those double basses that I knew could not exist anywhere else. And the scale of the thing—the sea of black suits, the amber hues of fifty or sixty stringed instruments with their bows moving precisely in parallel, the gleaming polished brass in the back row, the majestic proscenium arch, and of course, the huge display of gold façade pipes of the great organ. 

That impression has evolved over the years to include the idea that a hundred highly trained musicians spread out over a vast stage, playing simultaneously, is one of the great expressions of the human condition. I love witnessing the precision of all those instruments assuming playing positions, the conductor’s downbeat, and the instant expression of sound. It moves me every time. Young and old, men and women, liberals and conservatives, and from all races and backgrounds, baring their souls and their intellects toward a common result. What a world this would be if our politicians worked that way.

Let’s take it a step further. Strip those musicians of their paraphernalia. No violins, no piccolos, no drums, no hardware at all. What have you got? A choir. It’s elemental. The instruments are the human bodies themselves. Isn’t it amazing that you can give a pitch and have them sing it back, out of the blue? And I love the sound of a hundred people drawing breath at the same instant. It gives new meaning to the phrase, corporate inspiration!

 

What sweeter music 

can we bring?

While I know some musicians consider John Rutter’s choral music to be saccharine, or too sentimental, few of us would fail to recognize this opening line from one of his lovely Christmas carols. I think his music is terrific, not necessarily because of its intellectual content, but simply because it’s beautiful. I’ve been rattling on about harmony as if it’s the essence of music, but what about melody? A Mozart piano concerto, a Schubert song, and as far as I am concerned, anything by Mendelssohn draws its beauty first from melody. I think John Rutter is one of the best living melodists. 

Whenever I put a new piece by Rutter in front of a choir, invariably, they loved it. Congregations lit up with smiles, and people went home humming. Beautiful harmonies, catchy rhythms, gorgeous tunes. So what if it’s sweet and sentimental?

Rutter was born in 1945, which makes him eleven years older than me. But when I was fourteen years old, singing in the choir in my home parish, I saw his name in that green Carols for Choirs published by the Oxford University Press. He was in his twenties when he started creating those arrangements and newly composed carols, and a choir member once said to me, “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without John Rutter.” (She was referring to the Shepherd’s Pipe Carol with its snazzy organ licks.)

I’m not thinking about John Rutter because I’m yearning for Christmas. As I write, a late spring is finally beginning to look like summer in Maine, after a long harrowing winter. And besides, he has written plenty of music for other occasions. But the other day, while lurking about Facebook, I came across a brief video, The Importance of Choir, produced by J. W. Pepper, which markets Rutter’s music in the United States. It’s three and a half minutes long, with two basic camera angles, showing Rutter in the obligatory Oxford shirt (unbuttoned at the neck) and sweater, summarizing his long-gestated reasoning of why choirs are important. He says:

 

Choral music is not one of life’s frills. It’s something that goes to the very heart of our humanity, our sense of community, and our souls. You express, when you sing, your soul in song. And when you get together with a group of other singers, it becomes more than the sum of the parts. All of those people are pouring out their hearts and souls in perfect harmony, which is kind of an emblem for what we need in the world, when so much of the world is at odds with itself. That just to express in symbolic terms what it’s like when human beings are in harmony. That’s a lesson for our times, and for all time.

 

It may sound as though he’s describing a perfect choir—one that could hardly exist. But he continues, “Musical excellence is, of course, at the heart of it, but even if a choir is not the greatest in the world, it has a social value, a communal value . . . a church or a school without a choir is like a body without a soul.”

“Not one of life’s frills.” I love that. It’s such a simple statement, and it rings so true. When the human essence of the thing is described so eloquently, the concept is elevated to become essential. You can watch this brief but meaningful video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-Pm1FYZ-U, or type “John Rutter the importance of choir” into the YouTube search field. 

An important foundation of tomorrow’s choristers is the youth choir of the local church. Ideally, it’s a group of kids who dependably attend rehearsals, where they’re taught musical and vocal fundamentals. I remember wonderful experiences with the kids at my last church, when they responded to challenges and took pleasure in mastering complicated music. But it was a short season. That was a community where lots of families had second homes in ski country, and as soon as there was snow, off they went. Oddly, the kids often came to weekday rehearsals, but then missed Sunday mornings. 

And ice time. Holy cow. Peewee hockey teams jockeyed for reserved time at rinks, and since that time was so highly valued, coaches were happy to get a 5 a.m. slot. By the time the kids got to church at 8:30, they were beat up and exhausted. And in the schools, when budget time came around, arts and music (as if they could be separated) got cut long before football and even cheerleading.

And I’m talking about young kids in public schools. Take it to the next level where colleges and universities produce scholarships for athletes with sometimes only cursory academic requirements, and the priorities of an institution can really be questioned.

 

Take one for the team.

I’m not what you’d call an all-around sports fan, but I do love baseball. Our move last year from Boston to New York has made things complicated for me. There’s a precision about baseball—an elegance in the strategies. The application of statistics makes it the closest thing in sports to a Bach fugue. And since that first breathtaking glimpse of the greenest of green grass, I think I’m safe saying I went to hundreds of games with my father, who had the same seats for forty years. I love telling people that the two of us attended twenty-five consecutive opening day games at Fenway Park. That’s many thousands of hours, and I know that an important part of my adult relationship with my father happened in those seats (Section 26, Row 4, Seats 13 and 14—on the third base line).

And when they were playing well, it was a pleasure to watch the carefully choreographed 6-4-3 double play. Or a pitcher and first baseman trying to bluff a base runner. I think I understand the importance of teaching teamwork, which I suppose is the root of why there’s such a strong emphasis on sports in schools. But if choir, or band, or orchestra isn’t teamwork, I guess I’m missing something. 

Later in that video, John Rutter challenges those who are responsible for institutional budgets to acknowledge the central importance of the arts and especially ensemble music in education, saying that it’s “ . . . like a great oak that rises up from the center of the human race, and spreads its branches everywhere.” To carry that thought a little further, as long as the squirrels don’t get there first, that great oak will drop thousands of acorns which, assuming good conditions, will grow to become tomorrow’s great trees.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why cuts in a school’s budget should affect the arts before sports. I know I’m biased, and I surely know that people will disagree with me, but to quote the late Robin Williams, “I’m sorry. If you were right, I’d agree with you.” Football is just a game, while music—learning to play an instrument or singing in a choir—is a centuries-old centerpiece of human expression. And the more we hear in the media about new understanding of the lasting effects of games like football on the human body, the more I wonder how it can be justified. Singing in a choir doesn’t cause concussions or brain damage, and it exposes students to the history of our culture in an important way. I’d say “it’s a no-brainer,” if it wasn’t so very brainy.

 

Tools of the trade

American jazz pianist Benny Green said, “A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.” The development of harmony is a fascinating story of evolution. Pythagoras lived on the Greek island of Samos from about 570 BC to 495 BC. It was he who, listening to the blows of blacksmiths’ hammers on anvils, first noticed and described the overtone series, which is the root of all intervals. He must have had terrific ears, and his deductions about the math that became music are no less spectacular than Galileo and Copernicus sitting on a hilltop at night for long enough to deduce that the earth rotates on its axis while orbiting the sun.

The identification of the overtone series led to organum, where two voices chanted in parallel motion. Then, maybe an inattentive monk made a mistake and went up instead of down, creating a dissonance that demanded resolution. It only took a few hundred years for that brotherly slip to turn into the harmonies of Dunstable, Dufay, Ockeghem, Lassus, Sweelinck, Schiedemann, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and the rest is history.

Our tyrannical music theory teacher helped us understand the tools and the building blocks of music—those rules that define the difference between the music of Josquin des Prez and Felix Mendelssohn. Major and minor, diminished and augmented chords are arranged in sequence—progressions—that lead the listener from start to finish of a piece. They are analogous to the ingredients that are combined to produce a luscious dish.

 

Make it up as you go along.

Last week, I was preparing an organ in New York City for a colleague’s recital. But since it was to be a program of improvisation, we agreed it couldn’t be called a recital. Taken literally, the word implies “reciting” something that has already been written. In the hours before the concert, he received themes submitted on-line and in person, and a program was distributed that listed the compositional styles he would be using: Classic French Suite, Baroque Prelude and Fugue, etc.

Improvisation is the realm of the jazz musician and the organist. There’s something about the organ that lends itself to monumental improvisation, and there’s something about improvisation that propels a musician to a different level.

There’s a parlor-stunt aspect to improvisation. Sometimes the themes are humorous, like that for The Flintstones, which was submitted by the audience the other night. We chuckle as we hear a tux-clad performer using the clichés of classic French organ registration to warble that tune, invoking visual images and lyrics associated with childhood Saturday mornings. Imagine Fred and Wilma wearing powdered wigs. But we marvel at the skill, and the knowledge of harmony, of regional and historical compositional styles, as he conjures up a never-heard-before majestic piece of music right before your eyes, or is it your ears?

It’s easy to figure why the organ, so deeply rooted in the history of the church, would be such a perfect vehicle for improvisation. The musical heritage of the church, of any church, is based on simple melodies such as plainchant and hymn tunes. And how much of the literature of the organ is based on tunes like Veni Creator Spiritus, or Nun danket alle Gott?

While improvisation seems like magic, it’s based on solid knowledge of the tools and building blocks of music. Don’t think for a moment that Fats Waller, Dizzy Gillespie, or Ella Fitzgerald are just doodling. Charles Tournemire or Pierre Cochereau are not doodling. They’re serious, carefully constructed, thoughtful pieces of music.  If they weren’t, they would never survive the relentless scrutiny of recording, or of reconstruction for “re-performance.”

 

It’s not a frill.

Music. There’s something about it. Is that a trite thing to say? How did any of us get involved in music enough to bother with reading this journal? No musician purposely sets an educational course to financial success. It’s the love of it, the caring about it, the need for it. In choirs, we find community without parallel, human cooperation and collaboration that can serve as a model for everything else we do. In improvisation, we create masterpieces for the moment. When the last echo dies away, it’s gone, making space for another.

Hundreds of generations of scientists, philosophers, and artists have collaborated to give us this music, which inspires, thrills, and soothes us. It’s not a frill. It’s not an elective. It’s essential. Don’t waste your vote. ν