In Search of the Secrets of Medieval Organs: The European Summer of 2012—A Report and Some Reflections

Michael McNeil

Michael McNeil has designed, constructed, and researched pipe organs since 1973. He was also a research engineer in the disk drive industry with 27 patents. He has authored four hardbound books, among them The Sound of Pipe Organs, several e-publications, and many journal articles.

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this article was published in the August 2018 issue of The Diapason, pages 16–20.

 

The casework in pictures

The entire casework of Opus 161 is executed in solid black walnut, and in the author’s opinion is among the best of Johnson’s cases with its elegant proportions and understated Gothic ornamentation. The window above the entrance of Eastside Presbyterian Church, its original home, displayed similar, restrained Gothic form and ornamentation. Elsworth’s book illustrates a great many of Johnson’s organs, among them Opus 134, built in 1862 for St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Lanesborough, Massachusetts.¹⁷ Opus 134 has nearly identical stiles and ornamentation, but its proportions do not soar in the elegant manner of Opus 161, perhaps the result of limitations in height. It is ironic that one of Johnson’s best aesthetic creations has languished in anonymity for decades. Many American churches built in the early nineteenth century did not have a provision for a pipe organ, and as a consequence Elsworth noted that most of Johnson’s earlier organs were furnished with sides to the cases of the free-standing organs produced for such churches.¹⁸ As previously noted, Opus 161 originally had such side panels to its casework, and these were found crudely sawn and nailed behind the façade. The Piru church elected to place the façade casework flush with the wall of the church, necessitating the removal of the side panels.

As was typical of nearly all nineteenth century organs, the façade contains no smaller pipes. The side flats contain pipes of the Open Diapason with considerable overlengths. This is the only architectural flaw in this otherwise stunningly designed case. The use of pipes of very different lengths is an important architectural device—it gives a sense of scale, making the larger pipes appear more imposing in contrast. But façades with pipes of extremely different size are more complex and more expensive to make. Compared to the vast majority of nineteenth-century façades, Opus 161 is one of the finest aesthetic designs.

 

The keydesk in pictures

The reader should refer to Part 1 of this series for photographs of the keydesk and stop jambs (August 2018, pages 17–18). Elsworth described the keydesks of Johnson organs from the period of Opus 43, 1855, to Opus 268, 1868:

 

The manual compass was invariably fifty-six notes, from CC to G3. The stop knobs were disposed in vertical rows on each side of the manual keyboards, and always had square shanks with round knobs that had flat faces. Into these faces were set the ivory labels with the stop names. The labels were always engraved in Spencerian script with no pitch indication. The nameplates up to about 1867 or 1868 were of silver, engraved “Wm. A. Johnson, Westfield, Mass.”¹⁹

 

This description provides some evidence that the organ was modified during its installation at Piru. The stop action does indeed have square shanks leading to the bellcranks, but the shafts connecting to the square shanks and leading through the stop jambs are round. The author had initially believed that the stop jambs were original, observing well-worn and professionally installed felt bushings in the openings of the stop jambs. But a more likely explanation is that the round shafts and extant jambs were added at a later date, and this goes a long way to explain the disappearance of the split bass stops, all of which were screwed together to make continuous stops with no splits. And this nicely explains the current specification with 20 controls instead of the 22 controls indicated in the opus list of the Johnson factory.

The organ was initially supplied with a hook-down Swell shoe, normal fare for Johnson’s work of this time. This feature was deleted, and a balanced Swell shoe was installed by crudely re-routing the action of the Great to Pedal coupler rollerboard. Note the added Swell pedal in Figure 7, the missing hook-down pedal in Figure 8, and the damage to the action in Figure 9 and Figure 10. All of this damage was repaired in the 1976 restoration and the original hook-down mechanism refabricated. The figures show the condition of the console prior to the restoration.

 

The key action in pictures

The basic layout of the key action can be seen in Figure 6 in Part 1 of this series (August 2018, page 20). With the exception of the repositioning of the Swell chest and the addition of the balanced Swell pedal, the key and stop action of Opus 161 was well worn but virtually unaltered in 1976. The damage to the trackers on the Pedal couplers from the installation of the balanced Swell pedal was repaired in 1976 with new trackers, wires, felts, and buttons, and basic repairs to the stickers on the Swell to Great coupler were made, but this was a stopgap solution. At this time the console was in need of a complete disassembly and refurbishment of the leather on the couplers, the felts, and the leather buttons. The action was well designed, had served for a period of more than a hundred years, and had survived a move from Stockton to Piru. But the leather facings of the key tails where the coupler stickers made contact and the felts and leather buttons were showing their age. There were no funds for such work in 1976. 

In Johnson’s action we see similarities to Samuel Green. Bicknell writes: 

 

Green introduced or developed numerous refinements to the mechanism. He often arranged pipes from f# up in chromatic order on the soundboards, even in large organs. This reduced the extent to which rollerboards were required. . . . To make the key action readily adjustable the ends of the trackers were fitted with tapped wires and leather buttons. The appearance of Green’s consoles was enhanced by the use of ivory inserts screwed into the heads of the stop knobs, engraved with the name of the stop. . . . Green also usually made keyboards with white naturals and black sharps. . . .²⁰

 

All of these features are found on Opus 161. The photographs of the action were all taken in 1976 prior to the restoration work.

 

The stop action in pictures

The stop action of Opus 161 is conventional, with metal squares and square wooden shanks. The stop action to the Pedal 16′ Double Open Diapason is a ventil valve to the three windchests of that stop, which are placed at the sides (largest pipes, diatonic) and the treble pipes at the back (chromatic). The photographs show the details of the stop action construction.

A description of the stops and general notes on the scaling and voicing

This section provides a detailed description of the stops; two of the Swell stops were not measured (16′ Bourdon and 8′ Stopped Diapason). For the stops which were measured, a table of data in millimeters is shown. The photographs show some details of the construction, although the poor resolution of the camera is regrettable.

As earlier noted, there is a close resemblance between the organs of Samuel Green in late eighteenth century England and the organs of William A. Johnson in nineteenth-century America. Bicknell writes:

 

On the tonal side Green seems to have adopted the trend towards delicacy and developed it still further. . . . Green’s first line of development in securing the effect he desired was to experiment . . . with the scales of the chorus . . . . in 1778 the Open Diapason is larger than the rest of the chorus. . . . The appearance of extra pipes in some ranks, definitely by Green and contemporary with the instruments themselves, together with re-marking of the pipes, suggests that Green took spare pipes with him to the site and rescaled stops during the tonal finishing in the building. This is considerably removed from the standardised scaling and voicing adopted by, for example, Snetzler. The reasons for this become clearer when one understands that Green’s voicing broke new ground in other aspects as well. Delicacy was achieved partly by reduction of the size of the pipe foot and by increasing the amount of nicking. The loss of grandeur in the chorus was made up for by increasing the scales of the extreme basses. . . .²¹

As we will see in the graphical analysis of the data, all of the features mentioned by Bicknell about Samuel Green would apply equally well to Johnson’s Opus 161. Bicknell observes, “Where Snetzler provided a chorus of startling boldness and with all the open metal ranks of equal power, Green introduced refinement and delicacy and modified the power of the off-unison ranks to secure a new kind of blend.”²²

As earlier noted by Elsworth, Johnson’s wind pressure during the period of 1855 to 1868 “was generally between 21⁄2 and 23⁄4 inches (63 and 70 mm), and in rare examples, nearly 3 inches.”²³ The lower wind pressures, narrower scales of the upperwork, and reduced toes produced a sound with restrained brilliance. 

Referring to his conversations with Edwin B. Hedges (1872–1967), a voicer for Johnson organs, Elsworth made some telling observations. In the process of making the pipework, “ . . . the languids were carefully soldered in place, and the flues were properly adjusted.”²⁴ This is a very important comment, because today the flueway is considered a variable for adjusting power in some voicing styles, especially North Germanic voicing. Johnson’s flueways are very open, often the maximum that would produce good speech, even with Johnson’s bold nicking. Power balances, for Johnson as well as Green, were designed into the scales and further adjusted by the voicer at the toe. “The voicing of flue pipes, such as Diapason, Dulcianas, and strings, consists of nicking the languid, cutting up the upper lips to the proper mouth height, and adjusting the positions of the languid and the upper and lower lips. The amount of wind entering the pipe foot must be carefully adjusted by opening or closing the orifice in the pipe toe.”²⁵ There is no direct evidence that William A. Johnson had first-hand knowledge of the 1792 Samuel Green organ delivered to Boston, but the legacy of Green is obvious in Johnson’s work.

A few comments are in order on the nicking and languid treatment. The languids contain a counterface with a negative angle; the more usual angle is vertical, or 90 degrees. The Isnards made a positive-angled counterface at about 75 degrees with a normal bevel at about 45 to 55 degrees. The negative counterface of the Johnson languid is unusual. This languid is nicked at an angle with a knife, cutting a fine nick as deep as halfway into the languid bevel. Long knife cuts were also in evidence inside the lower lip. As a general rule there are the same number of nicks on a languid, regardless of pitch. These languids work well and produce fast speech even when the lower, negative languid bevel shows above the top edge of the lower lip; the upper lip is not pulled out to compensate for this languid position. Ears are generally found up to 1′ in pitch in the principal chorus, but they are very narrow, not extending far in front of the mouth.

Many of the pipes were found in 1976 to be crudely pinched at the top, part of an effort to reduce the pitch to the modern standard. All of this damage was repaired on mandrels, and tuning slides were fitted.

 

Great division

 

8′ Open Diapason 

This is the first stop on the front of the Great windchest. It has zinc resonators from low C to tenor B and planed common metal feet from about tenor E. All pipes from middle C are planed common metal (30% tin, 70% lead). Zinc wind conductors to the façade pipes supply copious wind; the conductor diameters are 38 mm at low C and 25 mm at tenor C. If memory serves, at least one or two of the pipes in the side flats were dummy pipes, implying that the speaking façade pipes extended to tenor D. The façade pipes were tuned with scrolls at the back, which were entirely rolled up as a consequence of the drop in pitch to 440 Hz, where the original pitch was probably closer to 450 Hz. See the earlier notes on the pitch and wind pressure. As with all of the stops in the principal chorus, the ears are very narrow. 

The author feels obligated to point out a grave error he made in the restoration by removing the heavy nicking on the languids of the Open Diapason, and only on this stop. To make the record clear, David Sedlak advised against doing this, and the author regrets that he did not take Sedlak’s advice. These nicks should be renewed in the manner used by Johnson.

8′ Keraulophon

The second stop on the chest, the Keraulophon pipes were found badly pinched at the top along with crudely reduced toe bores in an effort to reduce the pitch. All of the pipes were straightened on mandrels and tuning slides added. Toes that were not damaged were used as a guide for readjusting damaged toes. This stop is voiced with tuning slots and ears, but no beards of any kind. The bass octave is common with the Clarabella, five pipes from tenor C to E have zinc resonators, and the rest have planed common metal resonators. The nicking is bold and often crossed to keep the speech stable. Flueways were often more closed on one side. This is a bolder string than a Dulciana. 

 

8′ Clarabella

This is the third stop on the chest. Bass pipes C to tenor E are stopped wood; the remainder are open wood with lead plates covering the tops for tuning. These lead plates are somewhat closed down to accommodate the lowered pitch. The internal blocks forming the languids are lower than the front plates by 2.0 mm at tenor E, and 1.5 mm at tenor F. The bevel of the upper lip is internal for the open pipes and external for the stopped pipes. The stopped pipes have narrow, slanted strips at the sides of the mouth to form narrow ears; the open pipes have no extra strips functioning as ears. The nicking is deeper and heavier than the pipes of the principal chorus. The scales and voicing of this stop place its power on the same level as the principal chorus foundations. The only concession to power is a greatly reduced mouth width in the bass octave, a concession to its function as a common bass to the Keraulophon. 

The effective inside diameter of a wooden pipe is a calculation of its diagonal, a method proposed by Nolte.²⁶ The potential power of a round pipe is related to the amplitude of the standing wave in the pipe, which is in turn related to its diameter. Following this logic, Nolte has pointed out that the amplitude of a standing wave in a rectangular pipe is related to its widest point, i.e., its diagonal. We often see modern conversions of wood pipe scales by relating their rectangular areas to those of round metal pipes with equivalent areas, but this does not produce balanced power. The consequence is that conventional modern wisdom decrees that wood pipes should be scaled a few half tones narrower than round pipes of equivalent area. This disconnect disappears with Nolte’s observation of the relevance of the diagonal, not equivalent areas. This is not a new idea. Many older organs, e.g., J. A. Silbermann’s organ of 1746 at Marmoutier, show very disjointed scales between the rectangular wood bass of the 16′ Montre and its metal pipes when plotting by equivalent areas. Convert the Silbermann wood bass scales to diagonals and those scales merge seamlessly into the scales of the metal pipes. Diagonal computations of the effective diameters for the Johnson Clarabella can be found in the table, and those calculations are used in the graphical analysis. 

 

4′ Principal

The fourth stop on the chest, the Principal has five zinc resonators from C to E; the rest are all planed common metal. These pipes showed very little damage. The flueway depths are remarkably wide, especially in the treble, and demonstrate that Johnson regulated power entirely at the toe, not the flueway. Such flueway depths are often found in classical French voicing. This data set can be taken as reasonably accurate evidence of Johnson’s unmolested voicing.

 

4′ Flute И CheminОe

 The fifth stop on the chest from tenor C, this is a classically constructed flute in planed common metal with soldered domed tops, chimneys with no tuning mechanism, and very large ears for tuning. Those large ears had been pushed in far enough to virtually touch each other when found in 1976, another effort to reduce the pitch. The cutups were lightly arched. There was considerable handling damage to the flueways. The toes were reasonably intact. The reduction in pressure from 76 mm to 63 mm allowed these pipes to speak much more freely with the ears much more opened (but not completely straightened). The pipe construction becomes open at g#′′, i.e., the last twelve pipes, and they are noticeably wider across the break. The table above shows a calculation of the total resonator length, i.e., the body length plus the chimney, and the percentage of the chimney length to the total length. This gives an idea of the harmonics that Johnson was trying to emphasize with the chimney. At tenor C the chimney is 25% of the total length, emphasizing the fourth harmonic, while at middle C the chimney is 30% of the total length, roughly emphasizing the third harmonic. The chimney progresses to larger percentages of the total length as the pitch rises. The chimney is not a constant percentage of the total length.  The photograph shows the classical construction of this stop. 

 

22Џ3′ Twelfth

The sixth stop on the chest, this stop consists entirely of planed common metal pipes that had minimal damage.

 

2′ Fifteenth

The seventh and last flue stop on the chest, the 2′ Fifteenth continues the trend of extremely deep flueways and closed toes. The flueway depths of this stop are perhaps the largest the author has measured on any organ. Remarkably, this planed, common metal stop has no ears on any pipe, and its sound is exquisite. The toes are very restrained and represent the means of controlling power. The diameter and mouth width scales are considerably narrower than the Open Diapason, continuing the trend of narrower scaling with higher stop pitches, a characteristic introduced by Samuel Green. This progression can be clearly seen in the graphical analysis, in stark contrast to the Hook’s constant scaling of  the principal chorus. By this means Johnson and Green achieved a chorus with more refinement and less impact, but they compensated with very wide scaling of the extreme basses.

 

8′ Trumpet

The extant pipework of this eighth and last stop on the chest was constructed of planed common metal with zinc bottom sections from tenor C to tenor B. The Trumpet has an obscure history. In 1976 only two octaves of pipes were found from tenor C 13 to C 37. These were all in fairly good condition without obvious modifications; some crude slotting of the tops was repaired and the pipes spoke well on 63 mm wind. All of the original pipes were cut to exact length with no tuning slots or scrolls. The bass octave of the Trumpet was originally separated on the slider, but found screwed together in 1976. Interestingly, while the bass topboards were bored and chamfered to receive pipes, the chamfers were not burned in like all other borings on both windchests. With the repositioning of the Swell chest over the Great chest, it was now impossible to reconstruct a full-length bass set of pipes, and a half-length set was fabricated with limited tonal success (a few of the half-length pipes needed mitering to clear the Swell chest). The missing treble pipes were recreated by the firm of Stinkens to scales extrapolated from the original pipework. These were quite successful and a good tonal match. The high treble from c#′′′ to g′′′ were obviously flue pipes, and the rackboard borings provided guidance for their scales. All shallots are brass and are marked “H. T. Levi,” one of the reed voicers for William A. Johnson, according to both Barbara Owen²⁷ and Elsworth.²⁸ This stop bears a strong resemblance to the Trumpet heard in the recording of the Samuel Green organ at Armitage, Staffordshire, England (see the section on Recordings).

The Trumpet was carefully disassembled during the restoration and its measurements carefully tabulated; see the drawings and tables below. Measurements unfortunately omitted were the height of the block and the length and width at the top of the main taper on the tongues.

 

II Mixture

The author added a two-rank mixture in planed common metal to the Great during the 1976 restoration. While the merits of this can be debated, it was added in a manner that did not affect the other stops. A thick oak board was mounted at the back of the key channels, extending backwards and upwards, making this the ninth stop on the Great. The pipework was narrowly scaled in the manner of Johnson, roughly -7 half tones from 2⁄3′ pitch to 1⁄4′ pitch, then widening to about -3 half tones at 1⁄8′ pitch. A great many Johnson organs of this size had mixtures. It should be noted that Johnson mixtures of the time period during which Opus 161 was created were called Sesquialtera, and they included third-sounding ranks. Elsworth states, “ . . . these were composed of 17th, 19th, and 22nd ranks [i.e., 13⁄5′, 11⁄3′, and 1′, the same pitches observed in Samuel Green’s Sesquialteras] with two or three breaks.”²⁹ The mixture added by the author is more typical of later Johnson work in its composition without thirds.

The voicing of the cutups was a fortunate accident, where the pipes were mouth-voiced before realizing that they were left many half tones overlength by the pipemaker. When the cone-tuned pipes were cut to length, it was obvious that the cutups were very high. But this was fortuitous, because it taught the lesson that high cutups can have a superb blend, and this mixture provided a fine sparkling glitter in the plenum with no hint of harshness. There are no ears on any pipes. The toes are relatively more open than what Johnson would have done and the cutups are higher. The mixture composition is as follows:

 

C 2⁄3′ 1⁄2′

c 1′ 2⁄3′

c′ 11⁄3′ 1′

c′′ 2′ 11⁄3′

c′′′ 4′ 2′

 

Barbara Owen noted that William A. Johnson was hired to add a VII Cymbal to the Hook organ.³⁰ This mixture was installed in 1870, and no records indicate how this happened. The political implications invite much speculation, of course. The differences in scaling and voicing of the Johnson mixture relative to the Hook chorus illuminates the different approach to chorus design between Johnson and Hook. We will look at this in detail in the graphical analysis. The Johnson VII Cymbal provides a scintillating crown to the Hook chorus and contains a third-sounding rank. In 1871 William H. Johnson, the son of William A. Johnson, joined his father as a partner in the firm and the mixtures built from that time deleted the third-sounding rank.³¹ ν

Notes and Credits

All photos, drawings, tables, and illustrations are courtesy of the author’s collection if not otherwise noted. Most of the color photos were unfortunately taken by the author with an inferior camera in low resolution. David Sedlak used a high quality camera, lenses, and film to produce the high-resolution color photos of the church and its architectural details; these are all attributed to Sedlak.

17. The Johnson Organs, p. 50.

18. Ibid, p. 22.

19. Ibid, p. 23.

20. The History of the English Organ, p. 186.

21. The History of the English Organ, p. 185.

22. Ibid, p. 207.

23. The Johnson Organs, p. 25.

24. Ibid, p. 45.

25. Ibid, p. 47.

26. John M. Nolte, “Scaling Pipes in Wood,” ISO Journal, No. 36, December 2010, pp. 8–19.

27. Scot L. Huntington, Barbara Owen, Stephen L. Pinel, Martin R. Walsh. Johnson Organs 1844–1898, The Princeton Academy of the Arts, Culture, and Society, 2015, Cranbury, pp. 11, 13, 14, 16.

28. The Johnson Organs, p. 36.

29. Ibid, p. 48.

30. Johnson Organs 1844–1898, pp. 17-18.

31. The Johnson Organs, p. 48.

To be continued.

Larry Palmer

The 2012 inaugural meeting of the new Historical Keyboard Society of North America (HKSNA), formed by the merger of the Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society (SEHKS, founded 1980) and its slightly younger sibling, the Midwestern Historical Keyboard Society (MHKS, organized 1984), was an historic event in itself. The late March gathering in Cincinnati included both the seventh iteration of the Jurow Harpsichord Playing Competition and the eighth occurrence of the International Aliénor Composition Competition, plus scores of scholarly presentations and short recitals, loosely organized into ten sessions, each with a general connecting theme.  

For my contribution to Session Seven (The Old Made New) I attempted to craft a title enigmatic enough that it might pique the curiosity of a few potential auditors, but with the higher goal of providing information about some of the earliest and relatively obscure “new” compositions for harpsichord from the early 20th-century. I hoped, as well, to underscore, at least by implication, the major stimulus for a continuing creation of new repertoire that has been provided by the Aliénor’s prizes, performances, and publications since its inception in 1980. 

 

Woodhouse plays Cecil Sharp

As early as July 1920, Violet Gordon Woodhouse, the most prominent and gifted of early 20th-century British harpsichordists, recorded three of folksong collector Cecil Sharp’s Country Dance Tunes. Thus Sharp’s 1911 piano versions of the tunes Newcastle, Heddon of Fawsley, and Step Back serve as the earliest “contemporary” music for harpsichord committed to disc.¹

These were followed, in 1922, by recorded performances of two more Cecil Sharp transcriptions, Bryhton Camp and the evocatively titled Gathering Peascods.² While the 1920 recordings were already available in digital format, courtesy of Pearl Records’ Violet Gordon Woodhouse compact disc,³ I had never heard the 1922 offerings. Peter Adamson, an avid collector of these earliest discs, assured me that he could provide the eponymous work listed in the title of this article. Both of us were surprised to find that Gathering Peascods was never issued in the United Kingdom, but Peter was able to send me some superior dubs from the original 1920 discs, as well as a few seconds of authentic 78-rpm needle scratching. Combining this acoustic noise with Sharp’s keyboard arrangement, quickly located online via Google search, made possible the restoration of Peascods to the roster of earliest recorded “contemporary” harpsichord literature. It is equally charming, though perhaps less historically informed, when performed without the ambient sound track. 

 

Thomé

New harpsichord music composed for the earliest Revival harpsichords⁴ actually predates any recording of the instrument: Francis Thomé’s Rigodon, opus 97, a pièce de claveçin, was written for the fleet-fingered French pianist Louis Diémer, and published in Paris by Henry Lemoine and Company in 1892.⁵

 

The first 20th-century harpsichord piece?

There are currently two contenders for “first place” in the 20th-century modern harpsichord composition sweepstakes. The first may be Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s English Suite, originally committed to paper in 1909 during his student years in Florence, then recreated in 1939 shortly after the Italian composer’s immigration to the United States. That version, sent to prominent harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick in 1940, seems to have been ignored by the artist, but it was ultimately published by Mills Music in New York in 1962.⁶

A second contender (dare we call it a “co-first”?), which is, thus far, the earliest published 20th-century harpsichord work, is Henri Mulet’s tender and charming miniature Petit Lied. Mulet is most often remembered, if at all, for his ten Byzantine Sketches for Organ, a set that ends with the sometimes-popular toccata Tu es Petrus (Thou art the rock). Comprising a brief seventeen measures, Mulet’s “Little Song” is dedicated to fellow organist Albert Périlhou, who was characterized by his more famous contemporary Louis Vierne, as “a composer of the 18th century.” So perhaps this delicate, nostalgic work, published in 1910 “pour claveçin [ou piano]” was intended to pay homage to Périlhou’s antiquarian tendencies.⁷

 

Busoni

1916 saw the publication of Ferruccio Busoni’s 1915 Sonatina ad usum infantis Madeline M.* Americanae pro Clavicimbalo composita⁸—a strange, but ultimately satisfying keyboard work that, with some imaginative editing, is playable on a two-manual harpsichord, which one assumes the composer did, since he was also the proud owner of such a 1911 Dolmetsch-Chickering instrument.⁹   

 

Delius

Often described as “unplayable,” the very original Dance for Harpsichord (for piano) by Frederick Delius came into being in 1919, inspired by the artistry of Violet Gordon Woodhouse. Kirkpatrick included it in a unique program of 20th-century harpsichord music presented at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961¹⁰ and Igor Kipnis recorded it in 1976.¹¹ I have occasionally enjoyed playing Delius’s purple-plush harmonies in a shortened version arranged by Baltimore harpsichordist Joseph Stephens. Each time I play the work I find fewer notes to be necessary, and decide to omit more and more of them, often an approach that best serves these piano-centric harpsichord refugees from the early Revival years. Since Delius surely ranks among the better-known composers who attempted to write anything at all for the harpsichord, it seems worth the effort to forge an individual version that serves to bring this quite lovely piece to the public.

 

Grainger

Inspired by the recent anniversary year (2011) of the beloved eccentric Percy Grainger (he died in 1961), it seemed fitting to rework another of my own arrangements, that of his “Room-Music Tit-Bits,” the clog dance Handel in the Strand, particularly after coming across Grainger’s own mention of the harpsichord’s influence on his compositional career. In a letter to the pianist Harold Bauer, Grainger wrote:

 

. . . the music [of my] Kipling Settings . . . [is] an outcome of the influence emanating from the vocal-solo numbers-with-accompaniment-of-solo-instruments in Bach’s Matthew-Passion, as I heard it when a boy of 12, 13, or 14 in Frankfurt. These sounds (two flutes and harpsichord . . .) sounded so exquisite to my ears . . . that I became convinced that larger chamber music (from 8-25 performers) was, for me, an ideal background for single voices . . .¹²    

So why not present Grainger’s Handelian romp edited for one player, ten fingers, and two manuals? Grainger’s own arrangement (“dished-up for piano solo, March 25, 1930, [in] Denton, Texas” according to the composer’s annotation in the printed score) provides a good starting place.¹³

 

Persichetti and Powell

Two major solo works from the 1950s composed for the harpsichordist Fernando Valenti deserve more performances than they currently receive: Vincent Persichetti’s Sonata for Harpsichord (now known as that prolific composer’s Sonata No. One), still, to my ears, his most pleasing work for our instrument, and Mel Powell’s Recitative and Toccata Percossa—another wonderful work included on Kirkpatrick’s contemporary music disc.¹⁴

 

Duke Ellington

For aficionados of jazz, the 44 measures of Duke Ellington’s A Single Petal of a Rose comprise three manuscript pages now housed in the Paul Sacher Foundation (Basel, Switzerland), available only as a facsimile in Ule Troxler’s invaluable volume documenting the many commissions bestowed on contemporary composers by the wealthy Swiss harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer.¹⁵ About Ellington’s unique work, Mme. Vischer wrote to the composer late in 1965: 

 

Just on Christmas Eve I received your marvelous piece . . . I am very happy about your composition and I want to assure you of my greatest thanks. . . . could I ask you the favour to give me the manuscript with the dedication to my name as all other composers are doing for me, with a photo from you who always belong to my collection . . .¹⁶  

 

When Igor Kipnis asked whether I had any idea as to where he might find this score, I shared the citation information with him. Some years later he reciprocated by sending an arrangement made in collaboration with jazz great Dave Brubeck. A damper pedal would certainly make playing even this somewhat more idiomatic keyboard arrangement easier, but the gentle beauties of Ellington’s only “harpsichord” work deserve to find their place in our repertoire. In the spirit of jazz improvisation, I suggest adapting the written notes to fit one’s individual finger span, as well as assuming a free approach both to some of the notated rhythms and repeats, and not being afraid to toy with the tessitura by changing the octave of some notes in order to achieve a more lyrical legato line on our pedal-less instrument.

 

Prokofiev (for two)

In 1936 Sergey Prokofiev surprised the western musical world by forsaking Paris and returning to live out the rest of his days in his native Russia. One of his first Soviet musical projects was the composition of incidental music for a centenary production of Pushkin’s play Eugene Onegin. In this dramatic and colorful orchestral score a dream scene is integrated with the house party of the heroine, Tatyana. 

In his recent book, The People’s Artist, music historian Simon Morrison writes,

 

The party scene opens with the strains of a . . . polka emanating from a distant hall. Aberrant dance music represents aberrant events: much like Onegin himself, the dance music offends sensibility. It sounds wrong; it is a breach. Prokofiev scores the dance (No. 25) for two provincial, out-of-tune harpsichords, the invisible performers carelessly barreling through the five-measure phrases at an insane tempo—a comical comment on the hullabaloo that greets the arrival . . . of a pompous regimental commander. There ensues an enigmatic waltz (No. 26), which Prokofiev scores first for string quintet and then, in a jarring contrast, for the two harpsichords . . .¹⁷   

 

One wonders just how many provincial harpsichords there were in mid-1930s Russia, but this Polka from Eugene Onegin, played at a slightly more moderate pace, has served as a delightful encore for performances of Francis Poulenc’s Concert Champêtre when that enchanting work is performed as a duo with piano standing in for the orchestral parts, just as it was presented by Wanda Landowska and Poulenc in the very first, pre-premiere hearing of Poulenc’s outstanding score.¹⁸   

 

The Old Gray Mare, at last

Having fêted a pompous general with Prokofiev’s Polka, it is time to explain the reference to The Old Gray Mare. American composer and academic Douglas Moore composed a short variation set based on the popular folk tune to demonstrate the culminating amicable musical collaboration between the previously antagonistic harpsichord and piano, a duet that concludes the mid-
20th-century recording Said the Piano to the Harpsichord. This educational production has had a somewhat unique cultural significance as the medium through which quite a number of persons first encountered our plucked instrument. While Moore’s variation-finale remains unpublished, it is possible to transcribe the notes from the record, and thus regale live concert audiences with this charming entertainment for listeners “from three to ninety-plus.” 

Other musical examples utilized in this clever skit include a preludial movement, the mournful Le Gemisante from Jean-François Dandrieu’s 1èr Livre de Claveçin [1724]; the violently contrasting Military Polonaise in A Major, opus 40/1 by Fréderic Chopin, in which the piano demonstrates its preferred athletic and happy music and then goads the harpsichord into a ridiculous attempt at playing the same excerpt, sans pedal. That confrontation is followed by Jean-Philippe Rameau’s ever-popular Tambourin, which manages to sound nearly as ridiculous when the piano tries to show that it “can play your music better than you can play mine!”—an attempt heard to be futile when the harpsichord puts that notion to rest by playing it “the way it ought to sound.”

 

The 2012 Aliénor winners chosen by judges Tracy Richardson, David Schrader, and Alex Shapiro from some 70 submitted scores: Solo harpsichord (works required to emulate in some way the Mikrokosmos pieces by Béla Bartók): composers Ivan Božičevič (Microgrooves), Janine Johnson (Night Vision), Kent Holliday (Mikrokosmicals), Thomas Donahue (Four Iota Pieces), Mark Janello (Six Harpsichord Miniatures), and Glenn Spring (Bela Bagatelles). Vocal chamber music with one obbligato instrument and harpsichord: Jeremy Beck (Songs of Love & Remembrance), Ivan Božičevič (Aliénor Courante), and Asako Hirabayashi (Al que ingrate me deja).¹⁹ ν 

 

Notes

1. Jessica Douglas-Home, The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse (London: The Harvill Press, 1996). Discography (by Alan Vicat), p. 329. 

2. Ibid. Matrices issued in France with the catalogue number P484.

  3. Great Virtuosi of the Harpsichord, volume 3. Pearl GEMM CD 9242 (1996).

4. Three newly constructed two-manual harpsichords built by the piano firms Érard and Pleyel, and by the instrument restorer Louis Tomasini, were shown at the Paris Exposition of 1889, and heard in performances at the event. The modern harpsichord revival is often dated from that year.

5. See Larry Palmer, “Revival Relics” in Early Keyboard Journal V (1986–87), pp. 45–52, and Palmer, Harpsichord in America: A 20th-Century Revival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; paperback second edition, 1993), pp. 4–6; page six is a facsimile of the first page of Rigodon.

6. See Larry Palmer, “Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s English Suite for Harpsichord at 100.” The Diapason, December 2009,
pp. 36–37.

7. See these articles in The Diapason: Donna M. Walters, “Henri Mulet: French organist-composer,” December 2008, pp. 26–29; Harpsichord News, August 2010, p. 11; and, for a complete facsimile of the original publication, the issue of January 2011,
p. 12. 

  8. Edition Breitkopf Nr. 4836 “for Piano Solo.”  

9. See Larry Palmer, “The Busoni Sonatina,” in The Diapason, September 1973, pp. 10–11; Palmer, Harpsichord in America: “Busoni and the Harpsichord,” pp. 25–26; the first harpsichord recording of this work is played by Larry Palmer on Musical Heritage Society disc LP 3222 (1975). A fine 2002 digital recording, Revolution for Cembalo (Hänssler Classic CD 98.503) features Japanese harpsichordist Sumina Arihashi playing the Busoni Sonatina, as well as Delius’s Dance, Thomé’s Rigodon, and other early revival works by Ravel, Massenet, Richard Strauss, and Alexandre Tansman.

10. The list of included composers is given in Palmer, Harpsichord in America,
p. 146. Kirkpatrick also recorded this program in 1961. 

11. “Bach Goes to Town,” Angel/EMI S-36095.

12. http://www.percygrainger.org/prog not5.htm (accessed 20 October 2011).

13. Published by G. Schirmer.

14. Persichetti’s ten sonatas for harpsichord are published by Elkan-Vogel, Inc., a subsidiary of the Theodore Presser Company, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010; the First Sonata, opus 52 (1951), was published in 1973. The Powell work remains unpublished.

15. Ule Troxler, Antoinette Vischer: Dokumente zu einem Leben für das Cembalo (Basel: Birkhäuser-Verlag, 1976). Published by Schott & Co. Ltd., London; U.S. reprint by G. Schirmer.

16. Ibid., pp. 99–100. 

17. Simon Morrison, The People’s Artist—Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The quotation is found on page 130. I assembled the two harpsichord parts by cutting and pasting them from the orchestral score of Eugene Onegin (his opus 71).  I am unaware of any other published edition.

18. Personally I find the balances for the Poulenc much better in duo performances than in live harpsichord and orchestra ones. Another interesting possibility, at least as demonstrated by a recording, may be heard on Oehms Classics compact disc OC 637, where harpsichordist Peter Kofler is partnered by organist Hansjörg Albrecht and percussionist Babette Haag in a compelling performance, recorded in 2009 in Munich.

19. For more information about Aliénor and its history, consult www.harpsichord-now.org.

 

2012 marks the 50th anniversary of harpsichord editor Larry Palmer’s first published writing in The Diapason: a brief article about Hugo Distler in the issue for November 1962. Since those graduate student days he has taught at St. Paul’s College and Norfolk State and Southern Methodist Universities, served as President of SEHKS from 2004–2008, and is a continuing member of the advisory board for Aliénor. At the Cincinnati gathering in addition to “Gathering Peascods” he played Glenn Spring’s Bela Bagatelles at the Awards recital and chaired the Sunday session devoted to “Swingtime—The Mitch Miller Showdown.” 

Michael McNeil

Michael McNeil has designed, constructed, and researched pipe organs since 1973. He was also a research engineer in the disk drive industry with 27 patents. He has authored four hardbound books, among them The Sound of Pipe Organs, several e-publications, and many journal articles.

Preface

Good documentation of organs with enough pipe measurements to permit an analysis of both scaling and voicing is extremely rare. Pipe diameters, mouth widths, and mouth heights (cutups) may be sometimes found, but toe diameters and especially flueway depths are rare. Rarer still are wind system data, allowing a full analysis of wind flow and wind dynamics, parameters that have an enormous impact on the sound of an organ. The reader will find all of this in the following essay on William A. Johnson’s Opus 161.

Good documentation is important for several reasons. We can make useful comparisons with other organs to learn how a specific sound is achieved. And perhaps most importantly, we can document the organ for posterity; while organs are consumed in wars and fires, they are most often replaced or modified with the changing tastes of time. They never survive restorations without changes. Comprehensive documentation may also serve to deter future interventions that intend to “modernize” an organ. Lastly, future restorations of important organs will be more historically accurate if they are based on good documentation.

The mid-nineteenth-century scaling and voicing of William A. Johnson is very similar to the late-eighteenth-century work of the English organbuilder Samuel Green, as evidenced by the data from Johnson’s Opus 16 and Opus 161. Stephen Bicknell provides us with detailed descriptions of Green’s work.¹ Johnson’s scaling is utterly unlike the work of E. & G. G. Hook, whose 1843 Opus 50 for the Methodist Church of Westfield, Massachusetts, set Johnson on a career in organbuilding when he helped the Hooks with its installation.² In this essay we will explore Johnson’s Opus 161 in detail and contrast it with the Opus 322 of the Hooks, both of which were constructed within a year of each other.³ While the Hooks used a Germanic constant scale in their pipe construction, Johnson significantly reduced the scale of his upperwork stops, much in the manner of Samuel Green and classical French builders.

The question arises as to whether Johnson came to his design theory by way of a process of convergent evolution (i.e., independently), or whether he was exposed to the organ Samuel Green shipped to the Battle Square Church in Boston in 1792, and which “was played virtually unaltered for a century,” according to Barbara Owen.⁴ The author suggested to Owen that the Green organ may have had a strong influence on Johnson, but she thought it unlikely that Johnson would have made the long trip from Westfield, far to the west of Boston. 

Travel would indeed have been much more difficult in 1843 when Johnson was exposed to the Hook organ at Westfield. But of some significance was the extension of the Western Railroad from Boston to Westfield in 1843. This new railroad may have been the means by which the Hook organ was shipped to Westfield. Elsworth (see endnote 2) clearly makes the case that Johnson was intoxicated by organbuilding with his exposure to the Hook organ. It is easy to imagine that he would have made a pilgrimage to Boston, at the time a mecca of American organbuilding, perhaps invited by the Hooks to accompany them after finishing their installation in Westfield.⁵

The author was engaged in 1976 by Mrs. Gene Davis, the organist of the Piru Community United Methodist Church, to evaluate the organ at that church. The identity of the organ was in question as no nameplate was in evidence on the console, the organ was barely playable, and its sound was greatly muted by the crude placement of panels in front of the Great division to make it expressive by forcing its sound through the shades of the Swell division above it. An inspection showed that nearly all of the pipework was intact, and a contract was signed to restore the organ to playable condition. The organ was cleaned, the pipes repaired, the few missing pipes replaced, and much of the action repaired by Michael McNeil and David Sedlak.

The church office files produced an undated, typed document that stated: 

 

The pipe organ in the Methodist Church of Piru was built by William Johnson, of Westfield, Mass., in the early 1860s, making it probably the oldest operating pipe organ in California. It was a second-hand organ when transported by sailing ship 17,000 miles around Cape Horn before 1900, and installed in a Roman Catholic Church in San Francisco. After the earthquake and fire of 1906, the organ was moved to another church and probably at this time parts damaged in the quake were replaced. After many more years of service it was retired and put into storage until, in 1935, Mr. Hugh Warring was persuaded to purchase it for the Piru church. It was purchased for the storage cost of $280.

Evidence of a different and more likely provenance was discovered during the removal of pipework and the cleaning of the organ. Three labels were found glued to the bottom of the reservoir (perhaps as patches for leaks). Two labels read: “Geo. Putnam ‘Janitor’ Stockton California July 1 ’99.” A third label read: “From the Periodical Department, Presbyterian Board of Publication, and Sabbath = Schoolwork, Witherspoon Bldg, 1319 Walnut St., Phila. PA.” At a much later time Reverend Thomas Carroll, SJ, noticed that the clues of Stockton, California, and the Presbyterian church correlated to an entry in the opus list of Johnson organs, compiled in Elsworth’s 1984 book, The Johnson Organs. Opus 161 was shipped in 1864 to the “Presbyterian Church, Stockton, Cal. The church is Eastside Presbyterian.” The organ was listed as having two manuals and 22 stops.⁶ At this time such features as couplers and tremulants were counted as “stops,” and this roughly fit the description of the Piru organ. The façade of the Piru organ is also consistent with the architecture of organs built by Johnson in the 1864 time frame. Elsworth’s illustrations include a console layout of Opus 200 (1866) virtually identical to the Piru organ layout; Opus 134 (1862) exhibits the impost, stiles, and Gothic ornamentation of the Piru organ; Opus 183 (1865) has similar pipe flats and also the console layout of the Piru organ.⁷ Many other details verified the Johnson pedigree, among them the inscription “H. T. Levi” on the reed pipes. Barbara Owen pointed out that Levi was Johnson’s reed voicer during the time of manufacture of Opus 161.⁸ The pieces of evidence fell together when Jim Lewis discovered a newspaper photo of Opus 161 in the Eastside Presbyterian Church of Stockton that matched the façade of the Piru organ. The most likely scenario is that Johnson shipped Opus 161 directly to that church. The Gothic architecture of the Johnson façade also reflects the architecture of the Eastside Presbyterian Church façade. A handwritten note on the Piru church document stated: “Pipe organ and art glass memorial windows dedication June 2, 1935 per Fillmore Herald May 31, 1935, a gift of Hugh Warring.”

It is possible that the organ went from the Presbyterian church into storage, and was later moved to its present location in the 1934–1935 time frame. Even so, we can say with nearly absolute certainty that this organ is William A. Johnson’s Opus 161.

 

Tonal design overview

It is obvious from even a casual glance at Elsworth’s study of Johnson organs that the Johnson tonal style was based on a classical principal chorus that included mixtures in all but the more modest instruments. But the voicing style is gentle and refined, and bears great similarity to the late-eighteenth-century English work of Samuel Green, whose meantone organ at Armitage in Staffordshire is an excellent surviving example.⁹ Tuned in meantone, Johnson Opus 161 would easily pass muster as the work of Green. The tonal contrast between Green and Hook is stark, and the Hook data serve as an excellent counterpoint to the data from the Johnson organ. Green was the organbuilder favored by the organizers of the Handel Commemoration Festival of 1784, who went so far as to have one of Green’s organs temporarily installed in Westminster Abbey for that occasion. King George III paid Samuel Green to build an organ for Saint George’s Chapel at Windsor.

Stephen Bicknell’s The History of the English Organ relates important details of Samuel Green’s work that we find in Johnson’s Opus 161. “. . . Green’s voicing broke new ground . . . . Delicacy was achieved partly by reducing the size of the pipe foot and by increasing the amount of nicking. The loss of grandeur in the chorus was made up for by increasing the scales of the extreme basses.”¹⁰ And “Where Snetzler provided a chorus of startling boldness and with all the open metal ranks of equal power, Green introduced refinement and delicacy and modified the power of the off-unison ranks to secure a new kind of blend.”¹¹ The Hooks, like Snetzler, used a constant scale where all of the pipes in the principal chorus at a given pitch had about the same scale and power.

The most basic data set for describing power balances and voicing must include, at a minimum, pipe diameters, widths of mouths, heights of mouths (“cutup”), diameters of foot toe holes, and depths of mouth flueways. The data in this essay are presented in normalized scales for inside pipe diameters, mouth widths, and mouth heights. Tables showing how raw data are converted into normalized scales may be found in the article on the E. & G. G. Hook Opus 322 published in The Diapason, July 2017. The full set of Johnson data and the Excel spreadsheet used to analyze them may be obtained at no charge by emailing the author.¹² Also available is the book The Sound of Pipe Organs, which describes in detail the theory and derivation of the models used in this essay.¹³

 

Pitch, wind pressure, and general notes

The current pitch of the Johnson and Hook organs is dissimilar and should be taken into consideration when observing the scaling charts. The Hook organ is now pitched at A=435.3 Hz at 74 degrees Fahrenheit, while the Johnson organ is now pitched at 440 Hz. The original pitch of the Hook organ was 450 Hz; new low C pipes were added when the pitch was changed to 435 Hz, and the original pipework was moved up a halftone, widening its scales by a halftone. The original pitch of the Johnson organ was approximately 450 Hz; the pipes were lengthened to achieve a lower pitch.¹⁴ The Hook and Johnson organs are both tuned in equal temperament. The wind pressure, water column, of the Hook is 76 mm (3 inches); the Johnson organ was measured at 76 mm static and 70 mm under full flow on the Great division. The pressure was reduced during the restoration to 63 mm static. This allowed the pitch of the pipes to drop, making the adjustment to 440 Hz with fewer changes to the pipe lengths; most of the pipes that were originally cut to length had been crudely pinched at the top to lower their pitch. With the reduction in pressure the ears of the 4′ Flute à Cheminée, with its soldered tops, achieved a more normal position. 

The Piru room acoustic was reasonably efficient, and while the Johnson voicing is very restrained, it was adequate to fill this room on the reduced pressure. The Piru church seats 109, has plastered walls, wood and carpet flooring, and a peaked ceiling about 30 feet high; the reverberation, empty, as heard with normal ears, is well under one second (this is not the measurement used by architects that erroneously reports much longer reverberation). Elsworth relates that “the wind pressure which Johnson used during this period was generally between 21⁄2 and 23⁄4 inches [63.5 and 70 mm], and, in rare examples, nearly 3 inches [76 mm].”¹⁵ The photograph of the original Eastside Presbyterian Church for which the Johnson was designed implies a larger acoustical space than that of the Piru church.

The compass of the Johnson organ is 56 notes in the manuals, C to g′′′, and 27 notes in the pedal, C to d′.

 

Stoplist

The Johnson console was found in poor condition, missing the builder’s nameplate and many of its stop knob faces. Correct stop names were derived from the markings on the pipes and the missing faces were replaced. The original stoplist is reconstructed as follows (Johnson did not use pitch designations):

GREAT

8′ Open Diapason

8′ Keraulophon

8′ Clarabella

4′ Principal

4′ Flute à Cheminée (TC)

22⁄3′ Twelfth

2′ Fifteenth

8′ Trumpet

SWELL

16′ Bourdon (TC)

8′ Open Diapason

8′ Stopped Diapason

8′ Viol d’Amour (TF)

4′ Principal

8′ Hautboy (TF)

Tremolo

PEDAL

16′ Double Open Diapason

 

Couplers

Great to Pedal

Swell to Pedal

Swell to Great

 

Blower signal

The above list adds up to 20 controls. The Johnson company opus list describes Opus 161 as having 22 “stops.” This may have reflected the original intention to supply the organ with stops having split basses, which are commonly found in Johnson specifications. The sliders for the Keraulophon and the Trumpet were found with separate bass sections from C to B, professionally screwed together with the sections from tenor C to d′′′. The two additional bass stops would account for a total of 22 “stops.” There are no extra holes in the stop jambs to indicate the deleted split bass stop actions. The extant stopjambs are apparently a later modification from the time of the installation at Piru or before. Elsworth noted that all Johnson organs of this period were constructed with square stop shanks.¹⁶ The current shanks are round where they pass through the stopjambs and are square where they connect to the stop action.

Several stop knobs were switched during the 1935 installation at Piru; e. g., the Viole d’Amour in the pre-restoration photo of the right jamb belongs in the position noted on the left jamb with the black plastic label “Bell Gamba,” which indeed is how this stop was constructed. The Swell Stopped Diapason was operated by a knob labeled “Principal” [sic]. The illustrations of the left stopjamb and right stopjamb diagrams provide the correct nomenclature as restored in the correct positions, with the incorrect 1935 nomenclature in parentheses ( ) and the correct pitches in brackets [ ].

 

The wind system

The wind system can be modeled from two viewpoints: the restriction of flow from the wind trunks, pallets, channels, and pipe toes; and the dynamics of the wind. Wind dynamics are fully explained in The Sound of Pipe Organs and are a very important aspect of an organ’s ability to sustain a fast tempo with stability or conversely to enhance the grand cadences of historic literature. The data set on the Johnson allows us to model all of these characteristics. Figure 1 shows the Johnson wind flow model.

In Figure 1 we see a table of the pipe toe diameters and their calculated areas; values in red font are calculations or interpolations from the data (e.g., wood pipe toes are difficult to measure when they have wooden wedges to restrict flow). These areas are measured for a single note in each octave of the compass.

A model for the total required wind flow of the full plenum of the organ assumes a maximum of ten pallets (a ten-fingered chord), as described in the table, and the flow is multiplied by the number of the pallets played for each octave in the compass. The sum of the toe areas of all ten manual pallets in the tutti is 5,057 mm². The total area of the manual wind trunks is 38,872 mm², and we see that the wind trunks afford 7.7 times more wind than the tutti requires, so much in fact that the trunks do not at all function as an effective resistance in the system.

Interestingly, the Isnard organ at St. Maximin, France, used the main wind trunk as a strong resistor to dampen Helmholtz resonances in the wind system, and that organ has ratios of wind trunk area to a plenum toe area of only 1.07 for the coupled principal chorus of the Grand-Orgue and Positif, but with no reeds, flutes, or mutations. Helmholtz resonances are the source of what is normally called wind shake, and we would expect some mild wind shake with the Johnson’s large wind ducts and low damping resistance. The author’s notes from 1976 state: “Very little sustained shake . . . a considerable fluctuation in pitch when playing moderately fast legato scales, which stabilizes very rapidly . . . this imparts a shimmer . . . .”

In Figure 1 we also see dimensions of the key channels, pallet openings, and the pallet pull length (estimated from the ratios in the action). These allow us to calculate the relative wind flow of the channels and pallets. We find that there are robust margins in wind flow from the channels to the pipe toes (244% at low C to 737% at high C on the Great). This accounts for the small drop in static pressure at 76 mm to a full flow pressure of 70 mm with all stops drawn. Pallet openings are less robust and flow about 100% of the channel area for the first three octaves and 190% in the high treble.

The underlying dynamics of a wind system are the result of the mass of its bellows plate and the volume of air in the system. These factors produce a natural resonance that can enhance the grand cadences of literature with a long surge in the wind, or it can produce a nervous shake if it is too fast. A grand surge in the wind is characterized by a resonant frequency of less than 2 Hz (cycles per second), and it is most often produced by a weighted bellows. A nervous shake results from a sprung bellows. We correct the latter condition with small concussion bellows in modern organs, but the Johnson organ does not have such devices; instead, it features only a large, weighted, double-rise bellows. 

We can model the dynamic response of an organ by using its wind pressure, the area of the bellows plates, and the combined internal volume of its bellows, wind trunks, and pallet boxes. The model in Figure 2 shows the dynamic response of the current Johnson wind system at a relaxed 1.61 Hz. This low resonant frequency drops further to 1.47 Hz when the pressure is raised to its original value of 76 mm. The author’s notes from 1976 state: “Light ‘give’ on full organ; relatively fast buildup to full flow.” That “light give” is the result of the low resonant frequency of the system. The resonant frequency of the Hook organ was modeled at 1.23 Hz, a value lower than the Johnson, and the Hook chorus does indeed exhibit a slower and grander surge on full organ. Figure 3 shows the modeled resonant frequency at the original pressure of 76 mm for the Johnson organ. The equation for modeling the resonant frequency of a wind system along with a worked example on the 1774 Isnard organ at St. Maximin may be found in The Sound of Pipe Organs, pages 99–113.

 

The wind system in pictures

See the accompanying pictures: Notebook sketch 1, Great windchest, Toeboard, Notebook sketch 2, Notebook sketch 3, Notebook sketch 4, Great pallet box, Pallet springs, Notebook sketch 5.

 

The layout in pictures

“Green’s organs stand on an independent building frame with the case erected around it, rather than being supported by the structure of the case itself.”¹⁷ Bicknell’s description of a Samuel Green organ applies equally well to this Johnson organ. The casework is built entirely of black walnut, a wood mentioned by Elsworth in reference to Johnson cases. The organ is situated within the front wall of the church. The original black walnut side panels (typical of early Johnson organs) were found crudely cut up and nailed behind the façade in an effort to make the whole organ expressive through the Swell shades. This had the effect of making the Great division sound like a diminutive Echo division. The typical layout of a Johnson organ is well described by Elsworth: “The framework was arranged to carry the chests of the Great organ and the supporting framework for the Swell, which was usually above the Great organ and slightly to the rear.”¹⁸ Such layouts, shown in Figure 4, are common in nineteenth-century American organbuilding. The walkway behind the Great allowed access to the pipes and pallets placed at the rear of that chest, and the rollerboard to the Swell division was normally placed just behind this walkway, allowing access to the Swell pallets that were placed at the front of the Swell windchest. Opus 161 was installed in an opening in the Piru church that was far too shallow to allow the depth of a rearward placement of the Swell division. 

As a result, there is evidence that the Swell windchest may have been reversed, placing its pallets to the back of the windchest, and the chest brought forward over the Great division. Note the lack of clearance between the 4′ Principal pipe and the bottom of the Swell chest in Figure 5. The internal framework shows signs of crude saw cuts; the order of the notes on the Swell chest is the same as the Great, but it is reversed; the Swell rollerboard appears to have been likewise reversed and now faces toward the walkway where the action and rollers are exposed to damage. 

To say that the Piru layout was cramped would be an understatement; no one weighing over 150 pounds would gain access to the pipes for tuning or to the action for adjustment without damaging the pipework or the key action. The author weighed less (at the time) and was barely able to navigate inside the organ. The current layout is shown in Figure 6. 

It is also possible that the current layout reflects the original layout by Johnson, but that the Swell was simply lowered to fit the height of the Piru church and brought forward to fit the limited depth available, reducing the depth of the walkway.

Notes and credits

All photos, drawings, tables, and illustrations are courtesy of the author’s collection if not otherwise noted. Most of the color photos were unfortunately taken by the author with an inferior camera in low resolution. David Sedlak used a high quality camera, lenses, and film to produce the high-resolution color photos of the church and its architectural details; these are all attributed to Sedlak.

1. Stephen Bicknell, The History of the English Organ, Cambridge University Press, 1996, Cambridge, pp. 185–187, 190–191, 207.

2. John Van Varick Elsworth, The Johnson Organs, The Boston Organ Club, 1984, Harrisville, p. 18.

3. A detailed study of the E. & G. G. Hook Opus 322 may be found in The Diapason, July, August, and September issues, 2017.

4. Barbara Owen, The Organ in New England, The Sunbury Press, 1979, Raleigh, pp. 18–19.

5. see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_and_Albany_Railroad.

6. The Johnson Organs, p. 100.

7. Ibid, pp. 23, 50, 57, respectively.

8. The Organ in New England, p. 275.

9. 5 Organ Concertos, 1984, Archiv D 150066, Simon Preston, Trevor Pinnock, The English Concert.

10. The History of the English Organ, p. 185.

11. Ibid, p. 207.

12. McNeil, Michael. Johnson_161_170807, an Excel file containing all of the raw data and the models used to analyze the Johnson Opus 161, 2017, available by emailing the author at [email protected].

13. McNeil, Michael. The Sound of Pipe Organs, CC&A, Mead, 2012, 191 pp., Amazon.com.

14. The Organ in New England, p. 75.

15. The Johnson Organs, p. 25.

16. Ibid, p. 23.

17. The History of the English Organ, p. 187.

18. The Johnson Organs, p. 23.

 

To be continued.

Jan-Piet Knijff

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

J-PK: How did you meet Ahrend?

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

J-PK: The Genevan psalter, I suppose.

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

GL: I think I know what you mean.

 

J-PK: Fast cars?

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’

Artis Wodehouse

Pianist and harmoniumist Artis Wodehouse has a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from Yale, and a DMA from Stanford. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant led to her producing CDs and publishing transcriptions of recorded performances and piano rolls made by George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton, and Zez Confrey. In 2000, Wodehouse began performing on antique reed organs and harmoniums that she had painstakingly restored and brought to concert condition. She founded the chamber group MELODEON in 2010 to present little-known but valuable music from 19th- and early 20th-century America, using her antique instrument collection as the basis for repertoire choice. 

During its prime in the nineteenth-century, the reed organ was the preferred instrument in American homes and also deemed a fit substitute for the more expensive pipe organ. Large reed organs became common in civic gathering halls and smaller churches. Despite the popularity of reed organs in America,¹ music for them consisted primarily of simplified arrangements of European art music, easy-to-play popular and sentimental ditties, polkas, marches, and waltzes, or hymns and other service music associated with worship or civic gatherings.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century it became apparent that design variation from company to company and from organ to organ, even within a given company’s fleet of models, was preventing composers from writing idiomatic original music for the American reed organ. The limited market for music crafted for one or another of the competing designs was too small to sustain widespread printing and marketing of scores.²

Without its own literature, such as had been created during the nineteenth century for its European counterpart, the harmonium, the American reed organ had an uncertain future. It would continue to be regarded at best as “a sort of weak substitute for the church organ.”³ Then, in the mid-1890s, at essentially the beginning of the end of the reed organ era, Mason & Hamlin⁴ began to address the problem by introducing an action design⁵ whose capabilities would “insure the greatest advantages to the composers, at the same time enable the manufacturer to place his instruments on the market at as low a price as possible.” The new action design was called the “Normal-Harmonium.” This was the action design for which the American composer Arthur Bird (1856–1923) wrote his compelling body of reed organ music. Figure 1 shows the Mason & Hamlin American reed organ, with Normal-Harmonium action design. Two knee levers are above the foot pedals. The right lever controls the internal swell shades; the left lever activates the Grand Jeu.

Mason & Hamlin’s Normal-Harmonium action design and Arthur Bird’s creation of a substantial, idiomatic music for the American reed organ came too late. Piano sales that had roared ahead after the Civil War rapidly displaced the reed organ. In the 1880s, reed organ sales slipped below that of pianos. By World War I, the glory days of the reed organ were over.⁶

 

Two competing
19th-century instruments: 

The American reed organ
and the European harmonium 

In the 1840s, United States inventors and businessmen founded companies that offered distinctive fleets of reed organ models. Reed organs were built in a bewildering variety of brands, sizes, and stoplist configurations. They ranged from diminutive four-octave home models that traveled to the West in covered wagons, to large, expensive instruments with powerful tone, full pedalboards, and many stops. 

The American reed organ used one or more sets of brass “free reeds” in order to generate tone. The performer’s foot pumping activated suction bellows that generated a stream of moving air, much like a vacuum cleaner. When the performer depressed a key, this moving air passed through a small chamber in which the reed was affixed at one end, but free to vibrate on the other end (hence the designation, “free reed”). The reeds varied in length, and the longer the reed, the lower the tone. Air rushing through the chamber caused the reed to vibrate, and tone to be produced. When a reed organ had more than one set of reeds, a set could be brought into play or silenced by allowing or blocking the moving air via stop pulls. As with the pipe organ, a set of shutters or swell shades located within the action facilitated dynamic contrasts. The performer opened or shut them on a gradient via a knee paddle. 

The largest and most prominent reed organ companies were Mason & Hamlin in Boston and Estey in Brattleboro, Vermont, but scores of others proved successful. As the nineteenth century progressed, American reed organs became increasingly complex. Inventors developed voicing techniques that produced a broad range of distinctive and contrasting timbres, named using terms derived from pipe organ nomenclature.⁷ Instruments built with multiple sets of differently voiced reeds featured multiple stops and a divided keyboard⁸ so that the player could choose contrasting timbres in the treble and bass of a single keyboard. Large reed organs were sometimes built with multiple keyboards, like pipe organs. The more reeds in an instrument, the more expensive it would be. 

Another keyboard instrument employing differently voiced sets of free reeds in airtight chambers arose in Europe during the nineteenth century. A Frenchman, Alexandre Debain, patented this instrument in 1842, naming it a “harmonium.” (See Figure 2.) 

Like the American reed organ, the European harmonium came to offer a broad range of distinctive and contrasting timbres controlled by stop pulls, and a divided keyboard that enabled the choice of different timbres in the treble and bass. (See Figure 3.)

Despite some similarity in design to the American reed organ, the European harmonium did not employ the American-style bellows system (suction) that pulled moving air in and through the reed chamber. Instead, in the European system, air was pushed through and out via pressure, producing sound like a trumpet or an oboe. The different airflow systems require different technical skills of the performer and produce distinctly different tonal characteristics. (See Figure 4.)

Foot pumping on the harmonium manages two important functions because of the way harmonium bellows were designed to work: the performer maintains constant airflow while simultaneously adjusting the relative airflow speed responsible for dynamic contrasts.⁹ Manipulating airflow velocity to effect dynamic changes was called “expression,” and this function had its own specially assigned stop pull. An additional European innovation for facilitating dynamic contrast was the invention of the so-called “double expression.” It was installed in the more costly European harmoniums. Double expression, a capability arising no doubt from a desire to mimic the piano’s ability to balance melody and accompaniment, allowed the performer to control not only the overall loudness but also the relative volume of the treble and bass on a gradient. Double expression is controlled by two knee levers installed under the keyboard and above the two foot-pump pedals. The skill required to play smoothly and expressively on the harmonium demands much practice.  

Late-speaking reeds, i.e., those with a time lag between the act of depressing a key and the sounding of its corresponding tone, hampered performers on both the American reed organ and the European harmonium.¹⁰ Although quick airflow delivery to the reeds was a design priority for both reed organ and harmonium builders, the Americans felt that beyond a certain point, slight lags were an acceptable characteristic of the instrument for which the performer was expected to make appropriate adjustments. The Europeans, however, took a different approach. To mitigate the problem of late speech (and to provide an additional tonal effect) they positioned small felt-covered hammers next to each of the reeds of the set most frequently used in performance. These little hammers were controlled by a stop pull, referred to as “percussion.” When the percussion stop is pulled and a key is depressed, the little hammers simultaneously strike the sounding reed, causing it to speak more quickly and incisively, like a crisp piano attack. The harmonium’s percussion makes performance of rapid passagework more predictable when compared to the American reed organ.

The most far-reaching advantage the harmonium held over the American reed organ was the standardization of stops generally agreed upon by the European companies. Standardization had two benefits: it made it possible to print in music scores commonly understood registration that could be used across instruments built by different companies. Secondly, performers could move from one harmonium to another with a minimum of adjustment.¹¹

It should be noted that the terms “harmonium” and “reed organ” were and continue to be used interchangeably. Lack of a clear and consistent terminology must be laid at the door of the overlapping and competing terms originally used. In their heyday, American reed organs were most frequently referred to as simply “organs,” but other names were used as well. These included Organ-Harmonium and Cabinet Organ, two different terms used by the same company, Mason & Hamlin. There were also fanciful names such as Phonorium, used by Estey.¹²

 

Harmonium and American reed organ repertoire

The capabilities of the European harmonium and the move towards standardization¹³ attracted several important nineteenth-century European composers. Elgar, Strauss, Schoenberg, Webern, Mahler, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Rossini made good use of the harmonium in some of their orchestral and/or choral works. Berlioz, Franck, Saint-Saëns, Guilmant, Widor, and many others wrote high quality solo and chamber music for it. Finally, the German composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877–1933) made it his mission to develop a body of repertoire that would exploit the unique sonic and expressive capabilities of the Art Harmonium. During the early twentieth century Karg-Elert wrote what has proved to be the single most significant body of solo and chamber music for the instrument. The popularity of the European harmonium peaked about 1900, slightly later than the American reed organ’s peak of popularity.

Relatively few harmoniums made it across the Atlantic during the nineteenth century. On the other hand, American reed organs were exported and sold in fair numbers throughout Europe, particularly those built by Mason & Hamlin.¹⁴ Also, several European manufacturers such as Lindholm, Mannborg, and Shiedmayer adopted the American suction bellows system for their instruments.¹⁵ Nevertheless, despite significant cross-Atlantic distribution of the American reed organ and the availability of native European instruments with some shared characteristics, the American reed organ never established an artistic foothold through a representative body of high-quality music comparable to that written for the harmonium. This cannot be fully explained by the technical differences between the two as outlined above. Although the American instrument may have lacked the harmonium’s more refined control of dynamics and its useful percussion stop, the best American instruments, such as the Mason & Hamlin Liszt Organ, have a distinctive tonal beauty and a multiplicity of sounds equal to those of their European counterparts. 

The promotional prominence and enlarged, relatively standardized capabilities of Mason & Hamlin’s flagship Liszt Organ may therefore have been the impetus behind Boston-based American publisher Arthur Schmidt to print a few works for it during the 1890s. Schmidt’s publications for the Liszt Organ included both original compositions as well as arrangements of famous European works for organ solo, duets with piano, and chamber pieces. But apart from Eugene Gigout’s excellent Romanza for the Liszt Organ, unfortunately none of the rest rose to a similarly high quality.

 

Arthur Bird, American expatriate composer (1856–1923) 

Around 1896, Mason & Hamlin likely encouraged and may have actually commissioned the American composer Arthur Bird to write idiomatic art music for the standardized action they introduced during the 1890s, called the Normal-Harmonium. 

No documentation has yet surfaced indicating payment to Bird for his work by the firm. Nevertheless, key musical and personal circumstances link Arthur Bird to the most significant people associated with the Mason & Hamlin Company. Central to the connection between Arthur Bird and Mason & Hamlin was Franz Liszt. A canny seer, Liszt bet correctly on the ability of eager young American pianists and composers to hold high the torch of pianism and to carry forward the music of the future. Liszt welcomed them, offering his inspired pedagogy and worldly professional connections free of charge. Liszt’s generosity forged a well-documented bond among his pupils. Liszt’s first American student was the pianist William Mason (1829–1908). Mason studied with Liszt beginning in 1849, and brought back to the United States Liszt’s pedagogic principles through an extensive career of teaching, performing, and publishing. William Mason also happened to be the brother of Henry Mason, who in 1854 co-founded the Mason & Hamlin Company. Henry and William Mason were in turn sons of Lowell Mason, an important American hymn composer and musical educator during the first half of the nineteenth century. 

Liszt owned and wrote music for numerous keyboard instruments provided for him by both European and American companies.¹⁶ Among such instruments in his sizable collection was a Mason & Hamlin cabinet organ that he acquired in the 1870s. Later, Mason & Hamlin’s flagship high-end model came to be named the “Liszt Organ,” a likely outcome of the close connection between Liszt, his pupil William Mason, and the Mason & Hamlin Company.¹⁷ The Mason & Hamlin Liszt Organ was introduced about 1880. Complex, colorful, powerful, and versatile, the Liszt Organ was designed to compete with the best European harmoniums. While the Liszt Organ shared many tonal and functional features with the Normal-Harmonium design, it had a different tessitura (five octaves, C to C, versus the Normal-Harmonium’s F to F) and a different split point (E–F versus B–C for the Normal-Harmonium).

Arthur Bird was also one of Liszt’s American pupils, coming to him during Liszt’s later years.¹⁸ Bird’s musical and personal background strikingly resembled that of William Mason. Born in Belmont, Massachusetts in 1856, Bird’s early musical training came from his father and uncle, who were born-and-bred American church musicians. Arthur’s father, Horace Bird, and his uncle, Joseph Bird, were active in the New England of the 1840s and 1850s as voice teachers, composers of hymns and songs, and editors of singing books written to develop score-reading literacy. Upon the advice of William Mason’s father, Lowell Mason, young Arthur Bird was sent in 1875 to study in Germany at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Returning to North America two years later, he took a church music position in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he began to compose. He returned to Berlin in 1881 to study composition and orchestration. It was during this time that Bird came into the Liszt orbit.  

By his early 30s (in the mid-1880s), Bird had become well established as an organist and pianist. His compositions were published and performed widely in Europe. Bird spent most of his life abroad, mainly in Berlin, where he married a wealthy German widow and apparently lived lavishly. In 1897 Bird returned for some time to the United States in what proved to be a failed attempt to have his comic operetta, Daphne, performed in America. Reading between the lines of William Loring’s biographical work on Arthur Bird, is it possible that Bird wished to forge a closer connection to his native country? Certainly a major production of an opera by a United States-born composer within the United States would be an excellent vehicle for that scenario. During the late 1890s, when the quest for “genuine” American composers was in full swing, Bird may have sensed an opportunity. In any event, in that same year (1897), the first of Bird’s pieces for the Mason & Hamlin “American Harmonium” (op. 37) were published by Breitkopf and Härtel, an important German firm still operating that publishes high-art European music.¹⁹

 

Characteristics of Arthur Bird’s “American Harmonium”

The historic trajectory mating Arthur Bird with the Normal-Harmonium came just at the point when the piano had overtaken reed organ sales. Mason & Hamlin realized that in order to survive in the long term, the reed organ needed some good original music. The publication of Arthur Bird’s music for the “American Harmonium” came at a historic crossroad for the American reed organ, largely due to the rise of the American piano. From the 1850s, pianos, and particularly American pianos, started to benefit from standardization and mechanical manufacturing methods of the industrial revolution. Prior to this time, pianos were mainly handcrafted items. Likewise around 1850, the design of the piano, particularly the American piano, moved rapidly toward increased durability and a greater dynamic and pitch range. Piano types coalesced into three categories: square, grand, and finally, upright. Each of these types served a clear purpose. As a result, consumers began to turn to the piano as a viable keyboard alternative to the reed organ, particularly in the home market, where the reed organ had ruled uncontested.²⁰ Sales of pianos grew steadily through the nineteenth century.

In contrast to the piano industry, American reed organ manufacturers from the 1850s to the 1900s offered consumers instruments of a wide variety of sizes, competing capabilities, nomenclature, and above all, case styles.²¹ After the Civil War, American manufacturers also developed complex instruments of considerable beauty, sophistication, and expense. These large instruments with enhanced performance capabilities were aimed at a smaller “niche” market, for placement in the homes of the wealthy, civic or religious meeting halls, and small churches. But after a sustained growth period lasting about 40 years, sales of the American reed organ began to decline in the 1880s.

The Normal-Harmonium action design of the 1890s for which Bird wrote was conceived to meet these market challenges. Mason & Hamlin worked with and adopted the Normal-Harmonium design in collaboration with two entities associated with the company: their German representative Paul Koeppen and the Bender firm in Leiden, Holland.²² Mason & Hamlin’s goal was to provide a standardized instrument that could compete with the piano and its plentiful repertoire. Their instrument had to be sophisticated enough to attract composers to write good music for it and be of a reasonable cost. 

Mason & Hamlin met both of its goals. First, the cost of an instrument with Normal-Harmonium specifications was indeed lower by half or more than that of the top of the Mason & Hamlin line, the Liszt Organ. The price of the Liszt came in at $700, but instruments with Normal-Harmonium capabilities could be had between $260 and $300.²³ Second, the Normal-Harmonium action provided attractive and useful performance capabilities. These included a pitch range of five octaves from F to F and multiple sets of reeds offering an elaborate stoplist. American reed organs with the Normal-Harmonium action design began to be manufactured in the 1890s and continued to be built until the company ceased reed organ production in the early 1920s.

As mentioned previously, inconsistent nomenclature and lack of a simple explanation for actual performance capability plagued the field. Although Mason & Hamlin offered a standardized action design in the Normal-Harmonium, Bird’s music itself was identified on the score as being intended for the “American Harmonium” and/or the “Normal-Harmonium.” Nomenclature had still not jelled. Therefore it must be stressed that the terms “American Harmonium” and Mason & Hamlin “Normal-Harmonium” do not refer to any one specific instrument, but rather to an action design embodying certain specific capabilities. 

Figure 5 shows the overhead view of interior of the Mason & Hamlin American organ with Normal-Harmonium specs. To the upper right is the paddle that is activated to rotate by the Vox Humana stop. The upper left box houses the very large Sub Bass reeds. The specific capabilities of the Normal-Harmonium are as follows. 

 

Stoplist:

Diapason Dolce 8′—the Diapason, mechanically softened. 

Sub Bass 16′—consists of 13 notes, the chromatic octave upward from low C. This stop uses the largest, longest reeds, producing a deep, rich, and powerful sound.

Eolian Harp 2′—two detuned sets of reeds producing a shimmering, ethereal vibrato.

Diapason 8′—pure, organ-like tone. 

Viola 4′—resembles the sound of the orchestral instrument for which it is named.

Viola Dolce 4′—the Viola, mechanically softened.

Vox Humana—adds a vibrato or tremolo. Can be used in combination with any of the other drawn stops in the treble. Activated by the turning of a windmill-like paddle located inside the action.

Seraphone 8′—differs from the Diapason in timbre. Focused and slightly nasal.

Flute 4′—resembles the sound of the orchestral instrument for which it is named.

Melodia 8′—continuation in the treble of the Diapason reeds.

Vox Celeste 8′—another stop combining two sets of detuned reeds that creates a vibrato effect. 

Octave Coupler—when pulled, mechanically connects a note to that of one an octave higher.

Melodia Dolce 8′—mechanically softened Melodia. 

 

The split point on the keyboard is between B and middle C. Stops from Seraphone 8′ up activate the treble, the stops from Viola Dolce, down, the bass.

 

Mechanical devices:

Grand Jeu—activated by a knee paddle located under the keys above the left foot pump pedal. The Grand Jeu causes all the reeds to sound at once, producing the instrument’s fullest and loudest sound.

Swell—activated by a knee paddle located under the keys above the right foot pump pedal. This device controls the internal shutters responsible for dynamic contrasts. (See Figure 6.)

 

Arthur Bird as composer

During his lifetime, Arthur Bird was recognized as an active, widely published, and well-received composer of some stature, particularly in Europe. Incidentally, his successful European career was launched in no small part because of the positive public and private endorsements Bird received from the influential Franz Liszt. 

Bird’s oeuvre is extensive, including opera and theatre works, orchestral music, songs, piano materials, chamber works (particularly those for wind instruments, for which he is best-remembered today), organ, and many other forms. Bird wrote a sizeable number of short solo piano pieces in well-established standard dance forms and topical styles—march, waltz, minuet, gavotte, lullaby, and mazurka. His extensive experience composing in this genre prepared Bird well to write for the American reed organ. Bird’s music is available in score at the Library of Congress through the generous donation of his widow and has been amply documented through the International Music Score Library Project.²⁴

Relatively little of Bird’s music has been recorded.²⁵ What is available tends to confirm the critical reception his work received during his lifetime. Reviewing a performance of [Bird’s] Serenade for Wind Instruments, op. 40, the Berliner Borsen Courier said: “It is distinguished for the freshness and spontaneity of its invention, as well as the clever craftsmanship and the clear and compact disposition of its different parts . . .” Another critic comments: “Characteristically his music is pleasing and melodious in composition. It is coherent and well developed in form. It lies easily within the range of the instruments, and displays no little knowledge of their resources.” Of him, [Arthur] Farwell wrote: “Arthur Bird is known as the possessor of a fertile and truly musical imagination and a thorough technique . . .
Bird is a musician of German training and French sympathies and calls himself a conditional modernist.” Mentioning that Bird composed in almost all forms, [Louis] Elson says of him: “He is an excellent contrapuntist, yet uses his skill in this direction as a means rather than as an end, seldom making a display of his knowledge. It is a pleasure to find an American composer who is not anxious to out-Wagner and who goes along the peaceful tenor of recognized and classical ways.”26 Bird was even described as “the most promising American composer of the middle and late Eighties” by no less than the important conductor,
Arthur Nikisch.²⁷ 

The amount and dating of Bird’s production seem to confirm Loring’s supposition²⁸ that after 1900, Bird’s work dwindled, though his reed organ works of 1905 (op. 45) maintain his previously held high standard. On the other hand, his simplified arrangements, American Melodies Specially Adapted and Arranged for Normal-Harmonium of 1907, appear to have been written simply for profit and lack the artistic value of his earlier work for the American Harmonium.

 

Arthur Bird’s music for the American Harmonium

Those who either possessed or might  have considered purchasing an instrument with the Normal-Harmonium action design would likely be individuals of some performance ability and/or a level of musical sophistication high enough to appreciate the artistic features of the instrument. They would also likely appreciate piano music of the better salon variety, up to and including Schumann’s, Chopin’s, or Grieg’s short works for solo piano. Finally, they would most likely be of the social class that would appreciate hearing this music, most likely in the home setting. 

Bird’s conservatism—informed by fine craftsmanship, deft handling of instrumental color, and fluency in miniature forms—may not have been enough to place him into the compositional pantheon of his trailblazing European contemporaries (Mahler, Debussy, etc.), but his abilities ideally suited him for writing salon-oriented character pieces of the type popularized by Mason & Hamlin’s Normal-Harmonium. An already accomplished American composer, Bird’s impeccable, media-worthy credentials and network of connections to Mason & Hamlin were a further plus. Bird was a perfect fit.

Bird published six opus numbers for the Normal-Harmonium.²⁹ All contain interesting and beautiful music, but the best of these was his first, the ten pieces of op. 37.³⁰ In the first printing, the op. 37 pieces were identified directly on the score’s front pages as being intended for the “American Harmonium”³¹ or for the Mason & Hamlin “Normal-Harmonium.” A page is devoted to an explanation of the stops required and their manner of notation in the score. Bird used circled letters derived from the stop name. For instance, Diapason is D; Viola, V; Voix Celeste, VC; and so forth. Later print runs of op. 37 contain the same explanatory page, but also indicate standard stop numbers, i.e., 1 for Diapason, 3 for Viola, 5 for Eolian Harp, etc., that would correspond to numbers appearing on European suction instruments of equivalent capability.³²

While no piece in the op. 37 set lasts more than three minutes, each exhibits a mastery of craft: beautifully spun-out melodies, masterful counterpoint, subtly personalized inflections of nineteenth-century harmonic practice, and traditional formal structures handled with deft assurance. Bird’s forms are not unusual (ABA, sonata, rondo). But because the Normal-Harmonium’s unique instrumental colors are an integral component of Bird’s structural designs, the listener experiences an additional dimension of thematic transformation. In his music for Normal-Harmonium, Bird’s assimilation of instrumental color as a component of structural rhetoric relates his music to that of the nascent French impressionists at the turn-of-the-century. The following briefly describes salient features of each of the pieces in Bird’s op. 37:

1. Meditation—a sarabande. In this mini-Wagnerian contrapuntal ramble, Bird employs kaleidoscopic stop changes that underscore the evolving melodic twists and turns.

2. Preludium—brooding and dramatic four-part writing in an ABA structure. Registration is simple, but Bird uses the octave coupler at the recapitulation, reinforcing and underscoring the harmonic excursions introduced as the piece moves toward an impassioned final cadence.

3. Adagio—elegiac four-part mini-sonata. Development section comprises a series of recitative-like meandering arpeggios over sustained chords. Recapitulation re-registers the opening material over low pedal points. With more recitative-like arpeggios at the coda, the piece concludes with a simple fadeout on the ethereal Eolian Harp stop.

4. Reverie—features a long-breathed, haunting, and tentative treble melody on the flute stop set against slithering countermelodies registered on the atmospheric Eolian Harp stop. In ABA form, the melody’s return is entirely recast in a fuller texture with the foundation 8′ and 4′ stops. In partnership with a walking bass line, the melody’s tentative first appearance is thereby transformed into an affirmative point of arrival. The coda brings the listener back to the ethereal Eeolian Harp, rounding the piece off as it began.³³

5. Postlude—hearkens back to Bird’s American past, a spirited march that suggests a full wind band.³⁴ Bird’s registration indicates that the piece must be played in its entirety using only one setting, the circled G indicating “Grand Jeu.” Because Grand Jeu causes all the stops to sound at once, finger strength and vigorous foot pumping are required throughout. 

6. Improvisato—a fierce, somewhat virtuosic piece. Registration involving the basic 8′ and 4′ stops is augmented at the recapitulation by use of the Grand Jeu. Rapid, conjunct passagework in the wild coda comes off surprisingly well, despite the lack of a percussion stop. Bird was a hands-on composer and knew what the Mason & Hamlin organ could do.³⁵ 

7. Offertoire—This piece would be suitable for use in a church setting. It is an atmospheric sweet/sour composition with change of mode. 

8. Scherzo—This is the most technically demanding of the set, an extended rondo. Rapid sixteenth notes scattered throughout the piece when the octave-coupler is drawn or the Grand Jeu is activated require finger strength and precise articulation. Not only the performer’s skill is tested: Bird takes the instrument itself to the edge of its mechanical ability to sound quick notes on the fly. Registration is extraordinarily full and rich, suggesting an orchestra. 

9. Auf dem Lande—a melancholy, minor “folksong” melody is transformed to a grand, affirmative conclusion in major mode.

10. Pastoral—perhaps the most inventive and idiomatic of the entire set. Bird’s motivic ideas have a symbiotic relationship with the instrumental colors he brings to bear. Set above continuously sustained low pedal points, a flowing conjunct melody in the treble twines about an ostinato pattern in the mid range. In order to keep the pedal points depressed while so much action is occurring that requires two hands, lead weights must be used to hold down the pedal-point notes.

 

The American reed organ, Arthur Bird, and the future

The composition of high-quality, original repertoire for the European harmonium during the nineteenth century has proved to have far-reaching consequences. Once thought lost to history, beginning in the 1980s the harmonium has been going through a steady revival, centering in the Netherlands. It seems likely the harmonium will continue to reestablish the place it once held in the classical repertoire. While there continues to be a small but passionate interest in the American reed organ,³⁶ a revival similar in scope and momentum has not yet begun.

As the rise and fall of the American reed organ demonstrates, the key to an instrument’s survival is not its mechanical capabilities, but rather the repertoire written for it. Not just any music will do. What is needed is music that will continue to offer listeners an aesthetic experience independent from the era in which it was created.

In the case of the European harmonium, the point where form and function met occurred when distribution was growing and the instrument’s capability achieved sufficient standardization. This favorable environment attracted a fair number of composers to write significant music for it. Unfortunately for the American reed organ, standardization arrived at the very point when distribution was falling. 

Nevertheless, we are grateful that one composer, Arthur Bird, stepped in during a brief moment of opportunity in the history of the American reed organ. With his ideal combination of skills, commitment, and inspiration, he provided us with music that stands poised to move into the future. ν

 

Special thanks to Carson Cooman and Whitney Slaten

 

Notes

1. American publishers also churned out a deluge of reed organ method books intended for the large market of rank amateurs in the United States. 

2. Paul Hassenstein, “The Normal Harmonium And Its Literature,” The Music Trade Review 41:3, July 1905, 87. 

3. Ibid., 87.

4. Mason & Hamlin began as a reed organ manufacturer, but in 1883 started making pianos as well. About 1920 the company ceased making reed organs, but continued their piano line. 

5. “Action design” refers to a specific set of performance capabilities contained within the mechanism of an instrument. Action design was independent of case style. The same action could be enclosed in a variety of cases.

6. Robert F. Gellerman, The American Reed Organ (Vestal, New York: Vestal Press, 1973), 18.

7. Ibid., 97–99. Gellerman’s list of stop names gives some indication of the diversity and lack of standardization among the American reed organ manufacturers.

8. The point of division between bass and treble was called the “split point.”

9. The harmonium did not employ the swell shade of the American system for dynamic contrast because the pressure system made possible quick changes in air speed. Quick control of air speed permits the execution of sharper accents and faster dynamic changes than is typically possible on the American instrument. Simply put, the American instrument is easier to learn how to play, but lacks the degree of potential interpretive refinement offered by the harmonium.

10. The phenomenon is due to inertia. Lowest reeds speak quite slowly: they are the largest reeds, sometimes several inches in length.

11. Gellerman, American Reed Organ, 107.

12. I have consistently used “American Reed Organ” or simply “reed organ” to refer to the suction bellows action design, and “harmonium” to describe the European pressure instrument.

13. Standardized pitch range, split point, sets of stop pulls, shared nomenclature. Nevertheless, as the 19th century progressed, European harmonium manufacturers (like their American counterparts) succumbed to the lure of increased capability that culminated with the celebrated “Art Harmonium.” The Art Harmonium offered a whole new range of attractive colors and capabilities. Music written for the Art Harmonium could not be played on more basic harmonium models.

14. Casey Pratt, e-mail to the author, July 30, 2013. Casey Pratt is a United States reed organ restorer who specializes in the Mason & Hamlin. Exact numbers are not known to date.

15. Ibid. 

16. For instance, Liszt owned a piano-harmonium specially designed for him by Erard and Alexandre and a Chickering grand that was used in his piano master classes. He also collected then “antique” pianos that belonged to Mozart and Beethoven.

17. The Liszt Organ has a set of uniquely voiced, so-called “Liszt” reeds of great tonal beauty. 

18. The main biographical information to date regarding Arthur Bird was amassed by Dr. William Cushing Loring (1914–2002). Loring was a Harvard graduate and an urban sociologist. After retirement, he focused on American art and music, working with Scarecrow Press to develop a series of more than twenty books on various North American composers. 

19. Available at the International Music Score Library Project website: http://imslp.org.

20. Another likely reason piano sales surged ahead of the reed organ resulted from the installment purchase plans offered by piano companies. Once a luxury item of the upper classes, the piano then became affordable to the burgeoning middle class.

21. The flamboyant case styles of American reed organs clearly indicate a function beyond that of simply a musical instrument. In addition to ornate carvings, some reed organ cases featured a façade of non-functional organ “pipes,” mirrors, candle holders, and the like.

22. This information was communicated by Frans Vandergrijn, a Netherlands-based authority on reed organs and harmoniums in a posting on Yahoo’s Reed Organ Restoration newsgroup, August 9, 2013. 

23. Pratt, e-mail to the author, August 10, 2013. To put these prices in perspective, average United States yearly income in 1900 was $438.

24. http://imslp.org/wiki/10_Pieces_for_Harmonium,_Op.37_(Bird,_Arthur_H.)

25. Modern recordings include music for piano 4-hands, op. 23, Vladimir and Nadia Zaitsev, pianists; Introduction and Fugue, op. 16, Tony and Mary Ann Lenti, pianists; Serenade for Wind Instruments, op. 40, Suite for Double Wind Quintet, op. 29 (Naxos), and Carnival Scenes for Orchestra, op. 5 (Albany).

26. William C. Loring, Jr., “Arthur Bird, American,” The Musical Quarterly 29:1, January 1943, 87. 

27. Ibid., 88.

28. Ibid., 86.

29. Op. 37, 1897; op. 38, 1901; op. 39, 1903; op. 41, 1906; op. 42, 1905; op. 44, 1903; op. 45, 1905. All are available at the Library of Congress.

30. Not all of the op. 37 pieces scanned and available in IMSLP come from the original 1897 printing, several being from later editions. The only difference is that additional equivalent registration intended for European suction instruments was added. 

31. My supposition is that Breitkopf titled them for the “American Harmonium” in order to alert purchasers that the intended instrument would be one of American design. European suction instruments could have been more or less acceptable alternatives, but only the Mason & Hamlin Normal-Harmonium would have had the subtle specificity of timbres and tonal balances characteristic of the Mason & Hamlin sound.

32. On IMSLP: http://javanese.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/2/2d/IMSLP65232-PMLP1327…

33. See performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIC9EwIjmks

34. And Percy Grainger’s later work for the reed organ.

35. See performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi6yjMzjKe.

36. The American Reed Organ Society has been in existence since 1981.

 

References

Archival Sources

Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. Music of Arthur Bird. Includes all his published music for reed organ, plus some manuscript scores.

 

Books and Articles

Brown, Andrea Elizabeth. “A Descriptive Analysis of Arthur Bird’s Suite in D.” DMA diss., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2010.

Elson, Louis C. American Music. New York, NY: MacMillan Co., 1904.

Gellerman, Robert F. The American Reed Organ. Vestal, NY: The Vestal Press, 1973.

———. The American Reed Organ and the Harmonium. Vestal, NY: The Vestal Press, 1996.

Good, Edwin M. Giraffes, Black Dragons, and Other Pianos. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Hendron, Michael, ed. Manufacturers Music Album Reed Organ Society Anthology Series. Palmer, Massachusetts: The Reed Organ Society Publications Office, 2001.

Hiles, John. A Catechism for the Harmonium. London: Brewer and Company, 1877.

Loring, William C., Jr. “Arthur Bird, American.” Musical Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1943): 78–91.

———. Arthur Bird: His Life and Music. Newton Centre, MA: n.p., 1941.

———. The Music of Arthur Bird: An Explanation of American Composers of the Eighties and Nineties for Bicentenial Americana Programming. Atlanta: n.p., 1974.

Milne, H. F. The Reed Organ: Its Design and Construction. Chancery Lane, England: Office of Musical Opinion, 1930.

 

Recordings

Bird, Arthur. Suite in D. On Bird Songs: Romantic Chamber Music of Arthur Bird, North Texas Chamber Players. Eugene Corporon, conductor. CD (digital disc). Klavier, KCD-11071, 1995.

———. Suite in D. On Collage: A Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Peabody Institute, 1857–2007. Peabody Conservatory Wind Ensemble. Harlan Parker, conductor. CD (digital disc). Naxos, 8.570403, 2008.

———. Suite in D. University of Cincinnati Chamber Players. Rodney Winther, conductor. CD (digital disc). Mark Records, 7212, 2007.

———. Amerikanische Weisen, op. 23, Three Characteristic Marches, op. 11,  American Souvenirs Piano Music for Four Hands, Nadia and Vladimir Zaitsev, pianists, CD (digital disc), Gleur De Son-Qualiton/The Orchard, 57928, 2004.

Bird, Arthur; Dussek, Jan Ladislav; Liszt, Franz; Grieg, Edvard; and Onslow, George; Forgotten Piano Duets, Vol. 2, Tony and Mary Ann Lenti, pianists, CD (digital  disc), ACA Digital Recording, B004QEZC2, 2011.

Jonathan B. Hall

Jonathan B. Hall, FAGO, ChM, is the author of Calvin Hampton: A Musician Without Borders and of many articles on the organ and sacred music. He is past dean of the Brooklyn AGO chapter, director of music at Central Presbyterian Church, Montclair, New Jersey, and teaches music theory at the Steinhardt School of New York University.

The debate over the authenticity of BWV 565, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, has continued for thirty years. This article summarizes and critiques key points of that debate, taking the position that J. S. Bach is not the composer. A candidate composer is presented, Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel of Nuremberg (1697–1775). A stylistic comparison of his Divertimento Armonico to BWV565 reveals a very high level of congruity, arguing for his authorship.

 

The problem

For about thirty years, the question of the authorship of BWV 565—the famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, long attributed to J. S. Bach—has been raised civilly but persistently. Broached in 1981 by Peter Williams,¹ the question has spawned a variety of imaginative answers: that the piece is definitely by Bach, from his earliest youth;² that it is possibly a transcribed violin work;³ that it is certainly a transcribed violin work;⁴ that it may have been intended for five-string ‘cello;⁵ or even better, for lute;⁶ or that it may have been written for harpsichord;⁷ that it may have been written by Kellner;⁸ that we may, one day, figure out who wrote it;⁹ and so forth. Everyone agrees that the piece is wonderful. While all of these are interesting, none is convincing, save the last, which admits no argument.

The young-Bach or pre-Weimar theory is based, in essence, upon the multipartite nature of the piece, its extensive use of passagework, and its perceived emotionalism; yet the open-ended, improvisatory structure is not clearly akin to the five-part präludia of Buxtehude or his ilk. It is also too distinctive, too fluently assured, to be the early effort of a student, even a brilliant one. One also notes the clear Italian influence in harmony and style, the absence of internal sectional cadences, and the simplicity of the counterpoint: all atypical of North German practice. (Surely, given the work’s famous final cadence, a young Bach would have noticed opportunities for internal cadences as well.)

Also, we have a specimen of Bach’s youthful writing, his Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo, BWV 992; the keyboard idiom and harmonic language are both dissimilar to those of 565, the fugal writing in particular. We possess as well a number of chromatic, high-strung, ‘Arnstadt’ chorale settings, such as BWV 715; very possibly the infamous variationes so displeasing to the Arnstadt consistory in 1706.¹⁰ One cannot realistically imagine their composition after a very early stage, certainly not as teaching pieces. In any case, they are a far cry from the fluid idiom and transparent harmonies of 565, even if they display a predilection for fully diminished harmonies. Their harmonic language and keyboard idiom are too opaque, and for all their off-putting audacity lack anything like the genuine dramatic import of 565.

It would seem, in any case, that Bach’s formation as an organist is more the work of north German composers such as Böhm and Buxtehude, not to mention the transplanted Bohemian Johann Kuhnau, his predecessor in Leipzig. Bach’s early fascination with (and perhaps moonlight copying of) works like the Fiori Musicali would not have exposed him to the seconda prattica represented in 565. The Toccata and Fugue is assigned to Bach’s teenage years, ultimately, because it is least out of place there. 

Christoph Wolff states firmly that 565 is indeed an early work of Bach; he relates it to Forkel’s description of the undisciplined enthusiasm of Bach’s earliest work.¹¹ However, for this writer, Forkel’s description does not suit the Toccata and Fugue, though it applies well to the chorales just mentioned. One notes again the economy of the toccata and the fluency of the fugue, which strikes one as the work not of immature genius but of mature ingenuity—neither undisciplined nor early. Like Gandalf, it arrives (complete with magical fireworks!) neither early nor late, but precisely when it means to.

As to the work’s purported violinistic roots, due note is taken of the bariolage technique that is emulated in much of the work, including the fugue subject; but no candidate composer comes forth, nor any evidence for the conjectured A-minor original. Williams’s seminal article rests, at least in part, on a reversal of the burden of proof: the work cannot be proven to be for the organ.¹² The balance of his argument relies on the work’s evocation of string idiom, and thus the comparative ease with which the work may be paraphrased on violin—albeit transposed and thinned out!

Johann Paul von Westhoff is mentioned, even though his music bears no trenchant similarity to the work in question. He is chiefly useful as an example of ending a violin piece with an open fifth, a common enough occurrence and one which, here, helps beg the question of the inconvenient final minor chord. (Also avoided in this violin ‘reconstruction’ is the poor 4–1 resolution in the bass line in the final cadence in the organ work—it simply disappears, replaced by a leading tone that resolves quite properly.) Meanwhile, a touchier question—why a pedal solo in the middle of a violin piece?—is not raised, because it cannot be answered. What else could that passage be? What other raison d’être can it have, how can it even avoid risibility, if it is not there to display pedaliter pyrotechnics?

In several recent studies, Williams is willing to leave the question open. In the earlier, he mentions in particular the cello theory; in the later, he hews to agnosticism.¹³ Here and elsewhere, he remains undecided whether the work is a transcription, or by someone else.¹⁴

In another article, Bruce Fox-Lefriche states with finality that 565 was written for violin solo.¹⁵ No choice is offered: the essay asserts that there is “no doubt” that the piece cannot have been written either by Bach or for the organ, because it is “unidiomatic” and “far too clumsy.”¹⁶ (In fact, it is neither; it is thoroughly idiomatic to the organ, and quite fluid throughout.) It would seem evident that any attempt to ‘reconstruct’ a violin ‘original’ is a prima facie impossibility, because there is nothing to reconstruct it from. Yet the magazine offers two excerpts from his violin arrangement, the editor (not the author) claiming outrageously that it was “reconstructed” from “an 18th-century manuscript that is also the basis of the organ work”¹⁷ (emphasis mine). This “basis” is, of course, Ringk’s manuscript of the organ work.

To his credit, Fox-Lefriche recognizes the problems with the early-Bach theory, for some of the same stylistic reasons I shall mention below. He rightly notes the unisons and solos, the odd abruptness of the arpeggio in bar 3, the long stretches of unvaried harmony, and the apparent disregard of basic rules—all signally foreign to Bach’s style.¹⁸ I believe he is certainly correct when he says that “Bach had nothing whatsoever to do with the piece, either for violin or for organ,”¹⁹ at least insofar as authorship is concerned.

Similar problems accrue to the ‘cello and lute theories. Both take note of idioms familiar to their instruments of choice, and wish to claim the work as their own. However, neither of these theories is presented dogmatically. (Mark Argent, in particular, advances the ‘cello hypothesis with welcome caution.) Certainly, this writer has no trouble whatsoever with transcriptions or arrangements of the work: nay, the more the merrier: come fiddle, come xylophone. But they must be acknowledged as transcriptions or arrangements, and never as paths to an imagined Urtext.

The harpsichord theory cannot explain the sustained chords over a prolonged tonic pedal in bar 3 of the toccata; or the sustained and untrillable dominant pedal tone in the left hand during the fugue (bars 105 and following); or the adagissimo section towards the end. All of these depend on the unique sustaining power of the organ; I cannot imagine any application of style brisé that could do them justice. (And again: why a pedal solo? The piece is equally unsuited to a pedal harpsichord.)

I find that the piece is conceived in and saturated in organ idiom, so that no degree of arrangement or copyist intervention can be conjured to account for the received text. This idiom does not demonstrate anything more than stylish feints at string technique. Its antinomian pretensions, such as the long unisons, “trivial” part writing, ambient plagality and final chords, must be dealt with; they cannot be solved by subtracting the pipe organ from the equation. In fact, the organ is not the source of discomfort, but rather Bach himself.

As far as a different organ composer is concerned, 565 is closer to Kellner’s style than to Bach’s, but it is also not Kellner’s style. This conjecture, advanced by David Humphreys, cites two examples of Kellner’s organ writing.²⁰ They are striking, displaying both facility and drama. Still, they do not altogether convince, because the style, though facile and dramatic, is not convincingly similar to that of 565. Still, it is easy to see the attraction of this hypothesis, especially if a closer match is not forthcoming. Meanwhile, a computer-based, quantitative study by van Kranenburg (2007) is fittingly inconclusive; he will not award the piece to either Kellner or Bach.²¹

The exhaustive study on the authenticity of 565, by Rolf Dietrich Claus, concludes that the piece is not by Bach. This conclusion comes after considering the transmission of sources, the style and form of the work, and in short every aspect of the problem imaginable. It is a fascinating book, even though Claus does not propose a likely composer. He does, however, conclude that the chances of finding one are “not bad.”²²

The question thus remains open. On the one hand, serious doubt has been growing regarding Bach’s authorship, and there are strong reasons both to share it and to decide in the negative. The structural and stylistic reasons are many: the extensive use of octaves is unheard of in the free works, as are the harmonies of the final cadence; the counterpoint in the fugue is light and the voice-leading inconsistent. The subdominant answer, though logical and necessary, is atypical, and Bach nowhere (else) uses a theme of this nature. The work is also not found in autograph, but only in the hand of Johannes Ringk, via Kellner (would he really not claim authorship?); and so on. But on the other hand, if the question has gained traction, a proposed answer has not.

 

Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel

Recently, in studying some of the re-attributed keyboard works in the Bach catalogue, I encountered BWV 897, a Prelude and Fugue in A Minor. The prelude is now attributed to Cornelius
Heinrich Dretzel (1697–1775), an organist highly respected in his native Nuremberg and a student of Bach.²³ I was forcefully struck by clear parallels to 565, in particular the Toccata, and investigated the piece more closely. 

Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel came from a long line of musicians in his native city of Nuremberg. The most famous member of the family was his forebear Valentin (1578–1658). He almost certainly studied with J. S. Bach around the end of the latter’s time in Weimar, probably in 1716–1717. He is mentioned twice in the Bach-Dokumente as a student of Bach. In one of these passages, C. D. F. Schubart writes:

 

In Nuremberg . . . in the churches I heard students of the German Arion, the immortal Sebastian Bach, which made me feel in the first place how rare a good organist is. The names of Drezel, Bachhelbel, Löffeloth, Agrell, assuredly deserve more thanks and fame than the annals of music history have accorded them.²⁴

Dretzel’s career was discussed at length by Georg A. Will in 1802, who ended with this impassioned tribute:

 

[He is] recognized as one of the greatest virtuosos of his time in performance and composition, so that his name and fame are very great even outside his fatherland. His compositions, especially in church music, will forever be accounted as treasures.²⁵

The article in MGG (which calls him Georg) also quotes Schubart’s commentary on him:

 

. . . Drexel, a student of the great Sebastian Bach and indeed one of his best. He played the organ with great force, and especially understood registration, and composed with spirit for his instrument . . . he chose fugue themes for their songfulness, and handled them gracefully throughout . . . he understood counterpoint thoroughly . . . ²⁶

 

Dretzel served in the most famous churches of his native city, his career culminating in the prime position, that of St. Sebald. In two churches, St. Egidius and St. Sebald, he followed Wilhelm Hieronymous Pachelbel, scion of another family of Nuremberg musicians and prime representatives of the so-called Nuremberg School of organists. Nuremberg itself needs no introduction as a city devoted, not only to music, but to the arts of rhetoric and singing as well. Known for centuries as a cultural and commercial crossroads, its culture remains cosmopolitan, with an Italian influence, and its churches are both Lutheran and Catholic. Dretzel worked for churches of both confessions during his long career.

C. H. Dretzel died on May 7, 1775, and it is needless to add that his name and fame have not endured, even within his fatherland. Biographical entries shorten in every successive encyclopedia. In 1883, Fétis called him an ‘organiste habile,’ but had little else to say, even approximating his birth year.²⁷ Dretzel is forgotten today, probably because he published so little music. For years, he was remembered chiefly as the editor of a large collection of hymns, Des evangelischen Zions musicalische Harmonie.²⁸ Another composition, a brief alla breve, was published in Christoph Gottlieb von Murr’s magazine Der Zufriedene in March, 1763.²⁹ (Murr was also a collector of Bach manuscripts.) A divertimento for keyboard was sometimes mentioned but believed lost.

Then, in 1969, the harpsichordist and scholar Isolde Ahlgrimm published an article dealing with a unique score in the National Széchényi Library in Budapest.³⁰ The work turned out to be Dretzel’s lost keyboard work, titled both Divertimento Armonico and Harmonische Ergözung³¹ [sic]. Its catalog number is Z 41.618; the score once belonged to Franz Joseph Haydn, and came to the library through the Esterházy family. The bilingual title page, and use of the word Concerto/Concert, led Ahlgrimm to suspect publication after Bach’s Italian Concerto in 1735. (The title page may, if anything, refer to the Musikalische Ergötzung, published in 1695 by the most famous Nuremberger organist, Johann Pachelbel.) The work is only certainly datable to between 1719 and 1743, when Dretzel (as he states on the title page) was organist of St. Egidius.³²

The second of the Divertimento’s three movements, titled adagiosissimo in the original and molto adagio in Schmieder, was the same piece as BWV 897.1. Ahlgrimm’s conclusion is that Dretzel did not appropriate the prelude from Bach, but composed it himself; and she ascribes “glory” to Dretzel for having written a work worthy of being attributed to Bach. The reader is advised to make a mental note of this last point: Dretzel has fooled us before.

On examining this readily available Dretzel piece, BWV 897.1, I was struck by features I associate with BWV 565, and with no other piece ascribed to Bach, or to anyone else. The feeling grew swiftly that this unlikely composer is the likeliest, by far, to have composed the famous work in question. Certainly, he offers us a far closer stylistic match than those previously suggested. Ahlgrimm is right in deducting this prelude from the Bach corpus. I suggest that, once deducted, it takes 565 with it.

The feeling continued to grow upon examining the balance of the Divertimento; first, the excerpts in the Ahlgrimm article, and then a digital scan of the entire composition, provided by the staff of the National Széchényi Library. If there is any influence at all from Bach’s Italian Concerto, it is limited to the linguistic affectations of the title page—which are matched by a bilingual preface to the Cortesissimo Lettore/Geneigter Leser.³³ (Bach uses the phrase Gemüths-Ergötzung in his subtitle as well.) This preface refers to the score as “this first attempt” in publication (questa prima prova/dieser erste Versuch). Turning to the score, which is elegantly engraved, one notices first that the right-hand part is written in soprano clef throughout—like Ringk’s manuscript of 565 and, according to Russell Stinson, interesting although not a definitive indicator of date of composition.³⁴ The suggested time frame would include the year of Dretzel’s study in Weimar, and is also consistent with his identification of the Divertimento as his “prima prova.” Perhaps it also argues for an earlier, rather than later, date for the composition of 565; Wolff notes other “archaic” features in Ringk’s manuscript.³⁵

The Divertimento Armonico consists of three movements: allegro, adagiosissimo [sic], and fuga. All three display significant stylistic congruence and closely parallel passages—one might say intertextuality—with 565. The most compelling resemblances come in the second and third movements, which form an adagio-fuga pair quite like 565 itself. Meanwhile, the difference in medium—organ versus harpsichord—is not particularly important in this context, as certain elements of keyboard idiom and many of style easily cross over.

 

Points of similarity 

I believe that noting points of similarity between the two pieces—making concrete comparisons—is an appropriate method of demonstration. After all, it is the basis of Humphrey’s article, cited above; and it is a straightforward way to synthesize a view both of the unfamiliar Divertimento, and the perhaps too-familiar 565.

I cannot offer a theory of provenance; I do not know how the manuscript came to Kellner, an indefatigable collector and traveler. Possibly von Murr, also a collector, was involved. Possibly the work was an early thunderbolt. Perhaps it postdates the Divertimento (on stylistic grounds, I believe this is likelier). We know we have no autograph of 565, but only a copied text that has engendered perplexity. The evidence for my thesis is drawn from the two works in question; with the additional notandum that all other known circumstances of time and place are, at least, not opposed to my thesis. In other words, I am aware of no specific evidence to the contrary of my idea, no adverse circumstances to account for; frankly, this is an advantage over the other arguments heretofore adduced. I believe that the composer of the Divertimento Armonico is also the composer of 565.

1. The opening of the Divertimento is quite unlike anything Bach ever wrote, in that the first phrase is repeated verbatim. Bach always varies his antecedent and consequent phrases, either harmonically or melodically. Never—even once, as far as I can see—does he simply say the same thing twice. It is still odder to find the second of three repetitions varied by diminution. [Example 1] It is needless to adduce examples of Bach’s own practice. I might mention the opening of the Italian Concerto, the aforementioned Capriccio, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, among many others for examples of balanced, but not simply reiterated, phrase structure.

2. Throughout this first movement Dretzel shows a strong predilection for simple harmonizations in thirds and sixths; he will also do this in the fugue. Also, he often makes use of solo passages, including one that is virtually identical to an episode in the fugue of 565. [Examples 2, 3, and 4] Commentators have long used words like “trivial” to describe the similar harmonizations found in 565/ii.

3. The second movement, remarkably, is marked adagiosissimo. This peculiar word is best known to organists from the conclusion of BWV 622, “O Mensch, bewein,” in Orgelbüchlein. The term is also found at the third movement of Bach’s early Capriccio. MGG takes note of this occurrence by following it with an exclamation point in parentheses.³⁶ This strange tempo designation occurs in early Bach, somewhat less-early Bach,
C. H. Dretzel, and (to my knowledge) nowhere else.

4. Triple gestures: three mordents in 565, three large, full chords in adagiosissimo. In both cases, the commanding opening triplicate is followed by repetitious passagework and arpeggiation; and tension is introduced with a dominant harmony over a tonic bass. Basic to the style of both is a penchant for nearly obsessive, non-sequential, naive repetitions of a simple idea: compare bars 4 ff. in 565, toccata. [Example 5]

5. Frequent use of large chords of a widely varying number of notes. In Dretzel, up to ten notes in a chord (adagiosissimo, measure 16). In the Toccata, chordal structures of five through nine notes. Where else does Bach simply “lay on” in the manner found in the Toccata—regardless of instrument? (He certainly minds his voice-leading in the Toccata in F, in the French Overture, and in the Italian Concerto.) In Bach, a particularly thick sonority generally signals a beginning or ending, like the gong in a gamelan; in general, one can account for all voice parts. Both the Divertimento and 565 demur from the principle that neatness counts. The allegro and fuga have passages where, for dramatic purposes, handfuls of notes are called for—frequently set off with fermate. A prominent feature of the Divertimento is its frequent use of these, both as prolongations of chords and rests, and to mark the end of movements. Williams notes the presence of these in the Ringk ms. as raising questions of authenticity.³⁷

It is true that thick sonorities of different size are found in the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. However, that is virtually the sole similarity between the two pieces (see previous heading), and an uncommonly thick texture is more justifiable in harpsichord than in organ performance.

In these two examples, the “drama” chord is also in the third inversion. Compare the Toccata, bar 21. (This device occurs quite a bit more frequently in the Divertimento than it does in 565.) [Examples 6 and 7]

6. In both the Divertimento and 565, there is a marked preference for diminished harmonies; for diminished harmonies followed by their simple dominant-seventh versions; for third-inversion dominant harmonies, presented emphatically for rhetorical purposes; and for dominant harmonies over a tonic pedal or bass note.

7. There is a very strong resemblance between a run of diminished triplets in adagiosissimo, measure 6–7, and those in the Toccata, measure 22 ff. The figuration is for all practical purposes identical; in the Toccata, it is “harmonized” in two voices, but the pattern is virtually the same, including the occasional reversing of direction. [Example 8]

8. Several of the above examples also show Dretzel’s pervasive use of bariolage: string idiom as a basic style feature. In both works, the fugue subject is nothing but bariolage (but see also Toccata, 12 ff.) The bariolage style is never quite so expressly invoked in the Bach canon (nor the public quite so overtly courted.)

The theme of the fugue, and its extremely simple handling (Example 3), may well strike the reader as reminiscent of the famous theme in D minor. Ahlgrimm’s commentary on the Divertimento fugue is resonant:

 

One sees . . . that Dretzel’s music is composed after the taste of his day, aimed chiefly at the amateur; Italian influence is clearly discernible . . . It seems that Dretzel strove to show that a fugue can be accessible and joyous, so that it is not just for the amusement of the connoisseur.³⁸

Note that the Divertimento fugue begins with an upward arpeggio, tonic to tonic. This device, though not particularly interesting in itself, allows for a real answer in the dominant. This is essential in order to preserve the punchiness of the repetitions of the fifth scale degree. In 565, however, the fugue subject begins directly on 5, a dramatic and effective choice, which also requires an unusual solution if it is to be maintained. Hence, the highly unusual subdominant solution. (This subdominant argument is appropriately echoed in the final plagal cadence.)

On the grounds that the fugue of 565 dramatically dispenses with the setup needed for a real answer, I incline to the theory that Dretzel composed it later than his Divertimento. I might adduce other stylistic grounds for my inclination, including the tightness of the Toccata versus the diffuse nature of the adagiosissimo; as well as the greater variety of treatment in the D-minor Fugue. Of course, the piece could have been a “bolt from the blue,” composed in a fit of inspiration conferred by the ambience of Weimar and the proximity of Bach.

9. The use of a surprising cadence to set up a virtuosic passage or especially a coda: Dretzel, 21; Fugue, aforementioned recitativo, and the link from adagiosissimo to presto, 132–133. In both situations—one following immediately after another—an unexpected resolution hangs in the air, then dissolves into a shower of notes. [Example 9]

10. Final cadences. The cadence ending the adagiosissimo cannot simply be called a Phrygian or “Corelli” cadence, because the leading tone occurs, and there is a strong tritonic resolution in context of a “French Sixth” sonority. Nothing in the literature, of course, is quite comparable to the cadence of the fugue of 565. [Example 10]

One could, of course, continue to argue that 565 is a very unusual work by Bach, or accept (as I do) that it is a characteristic specimen of Dretzel. I do not think it is an immature work by a great composer, but rather a mature work by a very good composer.

There are some specific issues with 565 that raise further doubt. One is the troubling first episode in the fugue—measures 34–39—uniquely atypical of Bach in its strangely-approached unisons and fifths, and the frequent noticeable fourths, fifths, and octaves. [Example 11]

Dretzel is similarly unconcerned when an empty unison or fifth, or a perfect fourth, falls on a strong beat. Refer to Example 3 for an example. There is also the following passage in the allegro. [Example 12]

Also, there are rules concerning resolution of a tritone, and these are egregiously broken by the C–G movement in the pedal in measure 140–141. This is the problem alluded to earlier that “disappears” in the Williams violin arrangement. Note also the inconsistent number of voices and the questionable movement in the alto from B-flat to C-sharp. [Example 13]

These minor solecisms are unlikely to trouble the modern ear, but they are telling. I believe we are dealing with a composer to whom the grand gesture matters more than the fine points. Bach never trades one of these off for the other; he need not.

The Fugue of 565 is of tighter construction than its Toccata, but its peculiarities have also long been noted. Among these are a theme that prominently features the fifth scale degree; a solo annunciation of the theme in the pedal in the middle of the piece; a statement of the theme in the subtonic minor key; and in general the driven, almost monomaniacal character found throughout. Meanwhile, there are no signs of advanced counterpoint, such as stretto, augmentation, or the like. Where Bach is inclined to pile on artifice as he reaches a conclusion, this piece devolves into passagework, linking it back to the toccata.³⁹ (The work, overall, seems to bear the hallmark of the classic threefold rhetorical plan of introitus, centrum, and exitus.) All of these features—save the pedal solo!—are to be found in the third movement of the Divertimento. The theme is always harmonized in thirds and sixths; the counterpoint is minimal; the episodes are either a solo line or a simple harmonic sequence. As to strange keys, the fuga of the Divertimento wanders (albeit very briefly) into B-flat minor.

 

Conclusion, performance notes

I alluded earlier to Williams’ recent
J. S. Bach: A Life in Music. His comments on 565 hit a double bull’s-eye with the Divertimento: he points to “a few rhetorical gestures, thin harmonies, simple shape, much repetition and virtually no counterpoint.”⁴⁰ This “thin” work also evokes universal delight; people who know nothing else about the organ know and thoroughly enjoy that piece. It must be admitted that this is not the usual reaction to the magnificently intelligent and often arcane Bach.

In a review of Williams’s The Life of Bach, Jan-Piet Knijff speaks for many when he asks “ . . . who on earth could have been the composer?”⁴¹ It is precisely because this question is daunting—who on earth could have been the composer?—that an answer is delayed. We have had to choose: to remain faithful to an unhappy marriage, or to start all over again in the treacherous world of dating. Finding a likely candidate is as much a matter of good luck as anything else.

Still, we knew what we were looking for. We sought a German composer with some Italian blood, strong technique, and a recognizable, facile voice; someone from a rhetorical community other than the North German. We sought someone who composed to a popular, gentlemanly taste; no fatiguing artifice of counterpoint, please, and arresting cadences are a plus. We needed someone who is not Bach: early Bach, late Bach, or Bach with a few bits left over. We needed someone who was a lesser and different composer, and probably younger; possessing an audience, an organ bench of note, and a finished identity in his own right. The work is neither early nor late; it is right on schedule. Whose schedule is the only question.

Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel fills these criteria remarkably neatly, and what we possess of his music is cut from the very same cloth as 565. Once we see the possibility that a now-forgotten organist from Nuremberg is the likely composer, the pieces show a striking inclination to fall into place. Perhaps all that stands in the way is our own surprise.

A note on performance. If 565 is southern German in origin, as I believe it is, it may best be realized with less grandeur and Angst than has been typical. One might seek smaller and lighter South-German organs; not a “little village church in Saxony” per Williams,⁴² but an exquisite city church in Bavaria, with a silver-toned organ, few reeds, and an Italian inflection. Playing the Toccata and Fugue in a dignified, lyrical, and fluent way lightens and clarifies the piece in a way that works for this writer.⁴³ Fox-Lafriche is on the right track when he argues for the piece’s “brilliance, lightness, intimacy, and grace.”⁴⁴

It may help to visualize some of the more remarkable organ cases from this region: gleaming in white rococo splendor, toothsome as a dessert; but offering a modest, simple, clear, tonal design. Like 565, these organs make a magnificent show but contain surprisingly few ingredients—the equivalent of egg whites and sugar. Dessert, in fact, is probably the perfect gustatory metaphor for the composition in question.

If one is prepared to entertain the idea that a once-famous and now-forgotten composer wrote the greatest “hit” the organ has ever known, a door opens to a more egalitarian, less Bach-centric view of German organ culture. We might examine a successful popular approach to the instrument and the musical public that is not entirely attributable to a learned Bach, or to the Bach of hagiography. Pierre Boulez reminds us: “History is not a well-oiled machine that advances smoothly along rails composed of masterpieces . . . ”⁴⁵ The masterpieces themselves, and the posthumous careers of their creators, do not always advance smoothly on rails of due attribution.

Perhaps C. H. Dretzel was, in popular terms, a “one-hit wonder.” Perhaps more of his compositions await rediscovery. I am left wondering about what we may have lost. In any case, it could well be that Nuremberg is home to another, and marvelously unanticipated, Preislied. ν

 

*The author thanks the Germanisches National Museum, Nuremberg, as well as the Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, Budapest, for their prompt and professional assistance. Otto Krämer of Straelen and Leonardo Ciampa of Boston assisted with German and Italian languages. Bill Powers assisted with research.

 

Notes

1. Peter Williams, “BWV 565: A Toccata in D Minor for Organ by J. S. Bach?” Early Music (July 1981), 330–337.

2. Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2000), 169. “Bach’s Toccata in D Minor and the Issue of Its Authenticity,” Perspectives in Organ Playing and Musical Interpretation (New Ulm, MN: Heinrich Fleischer Festschrift Committee, Martin Luther College, for the Gesellschaft der Orgelfreunde, 2002), 85–107.

3. Williams, “BWV 565.”

4. Bruce Fox-Lefriche, “The Greatest Violin Sonata that J. S. Bach Never Wrote,” Strings (October 2004), 44–55.

5. Mark Argent, “Stringing Along,” The Musical Times, 141/1872 (Autumn 2000), 16–20, 22–23. (Also available as “J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565) Revisited,” from www.markargent.com.)

6. Eric Lewin Altschuler, “Were Bach’s Toccata and Fugue BWV 565 and the Ciacona from BWV 1004 Lute Pieces?” The Musical Times (Winter 2005), 77–86.

7. Bernhard Billeter, “Bachs Toccata und Fuge d-moll für Orgel BWV 565: ein Cembalowerk?” Die Musikforschung 50/1 (1997), 77–80.

8. David Humphreys, “The D Minor Toccata BWV 565,” Early Music 10/2 (April 1982), 216–217.

9. Rolf Dietrich Claus, Zur Echtheit von Toccata und Fugue d-moll BWV 565 (Cologne: Verlag Dohr, 1998), 123.

10. Peter Williams, The Organ Music of J. S. Bach (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 454.

11. Wolff, Learned Musician and Perspectives on Organ Playing.

12. Williams, “BWV 565,” 332.

13. Peter Williams, The Life of Bach, “Musical Lives” series (Cambridge, 2004), footnote 11, 161. J. S. Bach: A Life in Music (Cambridge, 2007), 82.

14. William, Organ Music of Bach, 155 ff.

15. Fox-Lefriche, “Greatest Violin Sonata,” 53.

16. Ibid., 53.

17. Note by Elisa M. Welch, Fox-Lefriche, “Greatest Violin Sonata,” 54.

18. Fox-Lafriche, “Greatest Violin Sonata,” 50.

19. Ibid., 53.

20. Humphreys, “D Minor Toccata.”

21. Peter van Kranenburg, “On Measuring Musical Style: The Case of Some Disputed Organ Fugues in the J. S. Bach (BWV) Catalog.” Online, author-preferred version via author’s website, http://www.lodebar.nl/pvk/. Originally published as “Assessing Disputed Attributions for Organ Fugues in the J. S. Bach (BWV) Catalog,” Computing in Musicology 15 (2007–9).

22. Claus, Zur Echtheit.

23. There are several references to Dretzel in connection with Bach in Bach-Dokumente (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1972), volume 3, and in other sources, albeit displaying variants of his name. Dretzel is also usually included in lists of Bach’s students during the latter’s final year at Weimar.

24. Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, “Bach-Schüler in Nürnberg,” Bach-Dokumente, vol. 3, article 837, 330.

25. Georg Andreas Will, Nürnbergisches Gelehrte-Lexicon, ed. Christian C. Nopitsch (Altdorf, 1802), 251–252.

26. Schubart, Ideen zu einer Ästhetik, 1806, quoted in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001), Personenteil 5, 1411. See also Bach-Dokumente (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1972), volume 3, article 903a, 411. Schubart refers to Dretzel as ‘Drexel,’ leading some to confuse him with the Drexel who was organist in Augsburg–even though this man was born in 1758.

27. F-J Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens (Paris, 1883), 58. He can only give Dretzel’s birth as “au commencement du dix-huitième siècle.”

28. See, inter alia, Johann Georg Meusel, Lexicon der vom Jahr 1750 bis 1800 verstorbenen teutschen Schriftsteller (Leipzig, 1803), 426–427.

29. The final page of the March 17, 1763 issue of this little magazine contains a short piece called “Alla Breve dal S^re. D.” It is a light, forgettable work in two voices; even here, though, elements of style such as facile dialogue and perfect intervals on strong beats can be seen.

30. Isolde Ahlgrimm, “Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel, der Autor des J. S. Bach
zugeschribenen Klavierwerkes BWV 897,” Bach-Jahrbuch 1969, 67–77.

31. Ergötzung: from ergötzen, to regale or feast (someone).

32. I am grateful to the eminent Bach scholar Daniel Melamed of Indiana University for his feedback on my research. In particular, he has pointed out a number of occurrences of the word Ergötzung in musical publications of this period. Its use seems to be linked to the Liebhaber side of the Kenner/Liebhaber divide: indicating a piece written for general enjoyment, rather than for the delectation of the connoisseur.

33. It is also true that the allegro movement uses a ritornello form, and thus is to that extent superficially similar to the first movement of the Italian Concerto.

34. Russell Stinson, “Toward a Chronology of Bach’s Instrumental Music: Observations on Three Keyboard Works,” Journal of Musicology, Volume 7, Number 4 (Autumn 1989), 443.

35. Christoph Wolff, “Bach’s Toccata in D Minor and the Issue of Its Authenticity,” Perspectives in Organ Playing and Musical Interpretation (New Ulm, MN: Heinrich Fleischer Festschrift Committee, Martin Luther College, for the Gesellschaft der Orgelfreunde, 2002), 90.

36. Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG), Personenteil 5, 1411.

37. Williams, Organ Music of Bach, 155.

38. Ahlgrimm, Bach-Jahrbuch, 72, 73, translated by the author.

39. It is true that Bach’s youthful work often places passagework at the end of a fugue; those works, however, invariably display hallmarks of North German style and less polish.

40. Williams, J. S. Bach: A Life in Music, 82. 

41. Jan-Piet Knijff, review of The Life of Bach, Bach Notes, number 3 (spring 2005), 8. 

42. Williams, “BWV 565,” 330.

43. In this connection, it is useful to mention that the issue of short bottom octaves (without low C-sharp) would not have come up, in particular at the Egidienkirche, which was rebuilt around the time Dretzel took up his post there, succeeding the younger Pachelbel.

44. Fox-Lafriche, “Greatest Violin Sonata,” 53.

45. Pierre Boulez, “Aesthetics and the Fetishists,” Orientations, tr. Martin Cooper (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 35.