Searle Wright as a Teacher

Lorenz Maycher

Lorenz Maycher has recently been appointed director of music at First-Trinity Presbyterian Church, Laurel, Mississippi, and is producer of the compact disc series, “The Aeolian-Skinner Legacy,” found at . His interviews with Thomas Richner, William Teague, and Nora Williams have been published in The Diapason.

Among his many admiring colleagues, Albert Russell is considered not only a prince of the organists’ realm, but as a gentleman’s gentleman. These attributes are rare enough in this day, but they are uniquely combined with great humility, affability and graciousness.
Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know him for years know also of his dry wit and wonderful good taste. His recently released Aeolian-Skinner Legacy recording [See p. 20–Ed.] enables his outstanding musicianship to be shared with a new following of fans, all of whom will be delighted that he has generously given this fascinating interview.
—Charles Callahan
Orwell, Vermont
July 2007

Lorenz Maycher: Tell me about your early years, and how you got interested in the organ.
Albert Russell: I was born in Marlin, Texas, which is near Waco. Later, we moved to Stamford, near Abilene, out in the Panhandle. I was interested in the organ from early childhood and used to go to choir practice with my mother and drive the organist crazy, reaching up and playing the keys while they rehearsed. I started piano lessons at the age of six, and organ at twelve, taking lessons on a two-manual Estey at the Methodist Church, where the highest pitch was 4′. My teacher would put on the sub-coupler and say she was “searching for depth.” She gave me mostly transcriptions. Rachmaninoff Prelude in G Minor, Caprice Viennois of Fritz Kreisler, and Dreams of Hugh McAmis were some of my pieces. I went to my first lesson wearing tennis shoes, but she got rid of those. Her students were not allowed to use the tremolo while we were practicing, because she was afraid it would break and she wouldn’t be able to use it on Sunday. She kept a clothespin on the tremolo stop so we wouldn’t use it. There was a ceiling fan above the console in the choir loft where birds would build nests that would fall into the choir loft. Dick Bouchett was one of her students, and later we were good friends.
I left Stamford when I graduated high school and went to study with Robert Markham at Baylor, where I had a full scholarship. Baylor had a good music department, and Markham had built the organ in the main auditorium there; it was installed beneath the stage and had some theatre organ stops in it. He was organist at First Baptist in Waco, where he played a large Pilcher. He was very good to me and brought me back after I had left Baylor to accompany Messiah. I was also chapel organist at Baylor, and was organist at First Lutheran Church in Waco, and, later, First Methodist Church in Marlin.
Then I was in the Air Force, stationed in Bryan, Texas, and was fortunate to get to play in the civilian churches. I would play the chapel service using a field pump organ at first and then we got a Hammond, which made me feel like I was playing a five-manual Skinner. After the service I would then go into town and play at First Presbyterian. When I got out of the Air Force, I went to the University of Texas in Austin, and auditioned for and got the job at University Methodist Church, which was a nice position. Archie Jones, who taught in the music department at the university, was the choir director. It was great fun to try to play the organ loudly enough to support a congregation of 1200 Methodists singing “the good ole hymns!” I would have been an organ major, had we not been required to play from memory. I can memorize, but have never felt I played as well from memory. I don’t make music as well—too busy worrying about the notes. Gerre Hancock, Joyce Jones, and Kathleen Thomerson were some of my classmates at UT. Gerre played at University Baptist Church. The organ at UT was the first Aeolian-Skinner I had any contact with, and it was such an eye opener. I studied organ with John Boe and Earl Copes and learned from both of them. Earl Copes now lives in Sarasota, Florida and is still playing recitals. We are still in contact.
The summer of 1953, I came to Washington, D.C. I had heard William Watkins play a recital at Baylor and vowed then that I’d like to study with him. And sure enough, I did in the summer of 1953. He was so wonderful to me, and got me jobs playing the organ all over town. When I got to Washington, I had $50 in my pocket, so had to get a job in a hurry.

LM: You came to Washington just to study with him?
AR: Yes. Studying with him that summer was such a great experience that I decided to come back to Washington in January 1954 to work with him some more at the Washington Musical Institute, where I completed my bachelor’s degree.
I had gone to a fortune-teller in San Antonio, and she had said I would find a job not related to music in Washington within three days of my arrival. Sure enough, the third day I was hired as a flunky in the office of Senator Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the current president. And again, thanks to Bill Watkins, I was busy playing in churches all over town. He opened up a whole new world for me and presented me in recitals at his own church, New York Avenue Presbyterian. I got to know many of the Washington musicians through him and vowed then that, if I were ever offered a job, I would move here. And, sure enough, here I am.
In the fall of ’54, I enrolled in the master’s program at Union Theological Seminary in New York, studying organ with Hugh Porter. He taught his lessons on the E. M. Skinner at the Academy of Arts and Letters. That first year I had a little church job in Cloister, New Jersey, and took the bus out there. The second year, I played at West End Collegiate Church on an old Roosevelt that had been redone by Austin. Donald McDonald had been there, and he turned over the reins to me. We had eight professionals for the choir. It was a fun job.
That year, I decided to study organ with Searle Wright just to get a different perspective on things. I got to play a number of noonday recitals at St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia, where he taught his lessons. Searle’s accompaniments of oratorios at St. Paul’s were superb. He would always laugh and say if he didn’t have such good acoustics, he’d be fired. He didn’t have time to practice a lot, but he always played wonderfully.
I learned about being a good musician from Searle. He always taught such interesting repertoire, like Robert Russell Bennett’s Trio, where all three voices are in different keys. I chided him about that piece for years afterwards for giving me something so difficult. It is a good piece, but is disconcerting!

LM: Every time I run across a recital program of yours, the repertoire is completely different. How did you acquire such a large and varied repertoire, with so much new and challenging music?
AR: I am a fast reader, so can learn quickly. I’ve always had a craving to learn new music, and enjoyed going to Patelson’s to buy music that other organists did not know or weren’t playing. Searle was awfully good about introducing me to music that was not being played a lot.
I also studied composition with Searle. He was never a morning person, and that class was at 9:00 a.m. He was ALWAYS late and just did not want to be there at all! He said I always wrote music that sounded like Delius, which I took as a compliment.
Through Searle, I got to know John Huston quite well, and Robert Crandell, who was at First Presbyterian in Brooklyn. John Huston was at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn with that wonderful Skinner that Virgil’s teacher put in. Charlotte Garden loved that organ. Through the faculty at Union, I made many connections in New York City, and as a result, got to play one of the opening recitals on the new Aeolian-Skinner at St. Thomas in 1956. It was an absolutely thrilling organ. Ed Wallace was the assistant at that time. George Faxon, Henry Hokans, and Clarence Watters were three of the other recitalists on the inaugural series.
During my second year at Union, I was chapel organist and got to accompany the choir’s Christmas concert, with Ifor Jones conducting. I once made the mistake of giving him a pitch with the celestes on. Well, I never did that again!

LM: Was Ifor Jones just a terror?
AR: He could be very hard on people in choral conducting class, and some were reduced to tears. He would say, “You should be a butcher, rather than a musician.” But it certainly separated the men from the boys. He would never allow anyone to conduct a straight four-beat pattern, which he thought was square, but insisted on a flowing, musical pattern. I think I learned as much from him, musically, as anybody.
However, years later, George Faxon and I often combined choirs. Once, we were rehearsing the In Ecclesiis of Gabrieli at Trinity, Boston. I was conducting and George was at the organ. Roger Voisin, the first trumpet in the Boston Symphony, was also playing. He said, “George, I cannot follow Mr. Russell. Would you please conduct?” So, we traded places. It was not funny at the time, but is now that I look back on it. I had always used Ifor Jones’s flowing style of conducting and, of course, orchestral people never knew where I was.
At Union, I also learned an awful lot from Robert Shaw’s mentor, Julius Herford. We all laughed at him at the time for what we thought was his overly romantic interpretation of Bach. Actually, he was making music. We were too young to appreciate that.
Charlotte Garden taught oratorio accompaniment. She was a terrific teacher and organist—and was fun. She was so tiny that she looked like a peanut sitting at that huge Möller console at her church, Crescent Avenue Presbyterian Church in Plainfield, New Jersey. She and Virgil were always vying for who could play the large Reger works the fastest.
I studied improvisation with Harold Friedell, and got to play one of the Lenten recitals at St. Bartholomew’s. He was also good to me and had a wonderfully dry wit. He taught at the church, and I would think of what I was going to improvise on while on the subway on the way to the church. As you know, his music is very modal. He improvised in the same style and taught this style for improvisation in service playing. Thank goodness we did not have to improvise fugues or strict form, because I would not have been good at it. Friedell’s service playing was smooth, and he used the organ beautifully—including the dome organ and all those goodies up there.
I remember Virgil came to the Lenten recital I played at St. Bart’s. I did the “Sicilienne” from the Duruflé Suite, and used the dome Vox Humana—shouldn’t have been using it, but Virgil thought it was the highlight. Bobby Hebble and Ted Worth were there with Virgil—we were good friends. I had gotten to know Virgil through a friend of mine who was a tenor in the choir at Riverside. He thought I should play for Virgil once. So I did, and that is how I got started substituting for him whenever he was away, and playing oratorio accompaniments, which was a good experience for me. Dick Weagly conducted the choir and he was a good musician.

LM: When you played for Virgil Fox, what were his comments?
AR: He said, “I like the way you pull stops.” That’s all I remember. But, I learned so much from him just by observing. I had first heard him in recital at Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas in 1948. It was electrifying. I also heard Marcel Dupré that same year at McFarlin Auditorium at Southern Methodist University. I’ll never forget Dupré’s recital. It was the first time I heard the Widor Toccata. The Hillgreen-Lane organ was in such poor condition that they had to work on it for a solid week to get it ready for the recital.

LM: Did Virgil Fox practice for hours on end?
AR: Yes, at night. I practiced at night, too. Also, at Riverside, I had to do anything I could to make money, so I ran the elevator, sang in the afternoon choir for oratorios, and ran the switchboard. I probably got $5 for singing, but did learn a lot of repertoire. Virgil loved ice cream, so a lot of the time after practice, we would get in his convertible and go downtown to Rumplemyers on Central Park South. He was not a drinker, so we would have ice cream instead.

LM: Was his playing always prepared?
AR: Sometimes he simply did not have the time to practice, and would come in fresh from a solo recital tour to accompany an oratorio. But his monumental talent always carried him through in great style. Dick Weagly would complain that the organ was too loud, and he and Virgil had many altercations about this. One thing I always admired about Virgil was he stood up for what he believed in, and never changed, whether others thought he was right or wrong. William Watkins was the same way. I got to travel with Virgil some and we had wonderful conversations. He had a lot of personal depth and was a very kind person to many people.

LM: You must have heard some great recitals at Riverside.
AR: Yes. Charlotte Garden, Claire Coci and Searle were some outstanding ones. I remember Claire Coci broke the crescendo pedal.
The summer of ’56, I played for Virgil while he was away. Then, after graduating from Union, I went to Hartford to be organist-choirmaster at Asylum Hill Congregational Church. Soon afterwards, I also got the jobs teaching at Hartt College and as university organist at Wesleyan University.

LM: What was Asylum Hill like when you arrived?
AR: It was very disappointing. I arrived there in August, and people did not go to church in the summer because they were at the shore. There was no air conditioning, so people would not go to church even if they were in town.
We had the services in the chapel, so I had my debut there on a concert Hammond with not many people present. They had gotten rid of the all-professional choir and only had four paid singers. So, in September I really had to start from scratch with volunteers. Later on, we went to eight paid people and started the oratorio choir, which got up to about sixty people. We did all the major works, which I conducted and played. People came from as far away as Boston, Worcester, and Springfield to sing in the choir.
The organ was an old E. M. Skinner, with a very beautiful case, up in the gallery. The Swell reeds were terribly loud, completely obliterating the choir. I was told when I went there to not even think about mentioning a new organ, as the E. M. had just been restored (they had taken out the Swell Mixture and replaced it with a flute celeste). It did have some nice sounds, but soon began ciphering, and finally ciphered on the Tuba on a Sunday morning, which got things going nicely for a new organ.
We formed an organ committee and took them to visit Symphony Hall, Boston, and several other good Aeolian-Skinners. We listened to other builders, but Aeolian-Skinner was by far the preference.

LM: Did Joseph Whiteford design the new organ?
AR: Yes. We drew up the stoplist together. I had met Joe through Virgil, and then later met Paul Callaway through Joe. Both were so good to me, and that started my association with Aeolian-Skinner.

LM: I know a lot of organists who look down their noses at Joseph Whiteford’s instruments, but don’t you think they were beautiful?
AR: Absolutely. Some of Joe’s organs from the early ’60s are among the best instruments Aeolian-Skinner ever built. Philharmonic Hall in New York, for example, was certainly one of the finest. I always enjoyed hearing Joe talk about organs, because he did it from a musician’s viewpoint. Joe had wonderful ears and good taste, but was also a good musician. For my money, that is the reason his organs turned out so well—because they were musical. We spent many hours together at the piano, talking about music and listening to singers. He was exposed to a lot of good musicians, too, and was friends with Samuel Barber, Gian Carlo Menotti, Thomas Schippers, and Earl Wild.
Donald Gillett was also a great artist, and I fully back his work. Both Joe and Gillett did use smaller scales and higher-pitched mixtures than Harrison, but it was beautiful work. You have to remember that we all grew up with organs that sounded like black smoke, where the highest pitch on the entire organ was a 4′ flute. Their organs were a reaction to those. They craved clarity and brilliance, and their organs were suave, beautiful creations.

LM: What were Joseph Whiteford’s goals when he designed the Asylum Hill organ?
AR: One thing he said was, “Let’s build an organ where you can use a lot of it all the time, and not have to save it for Easter Sunday.” It filled the church, but was not a bombastic instrument. I loved it and it played the literature beautifully. In the Ruckpositv, he took the old E. M. English Horn and made a Regal out of it, which was very effective. I used that in the slow movement of the Handel G Minor Suite in the Aeolian-Skinner “King of Instruments” series.
For the opening concert, we did a program for organ and orchestra with the Hartt College orchestra, and did the Seth Bingham Concerto for Organ and Brass, the Poulenc Concerto, and the Handel Sixth—no solo organ repertoire. For the second concert, we did the Duruflé Requiem and I played the Suite.

LM: You made two recordings on the Asylum Hill organ for Aeolian-Skinner.
AR: Yes, the organ solo LP at Asylum Hill included the Healey Willan Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue. We sent the recording to Willan, and he liked some things, and some he didn’t. He thought the organ was too thin for this piece (not having three diapasons on the Great!). The recording also included the organ at Philharmonic Hall in New York City, which I believe was the first recording made on the new organ. Joe Whiteford had been talking to me for a while about recording those two organs, and then he mentioned having the choir do the Duruflé Requiem.
We did the Philharmonic Hall recording first. When we got there, I was supposed to have practice time, but there was something going on in the hall. I had played enough Aeolian-Skinners that I knew what to expect, so I just looked over the organ and set some pistons. When the hall finally emptied, I was able to try out my combinations. We could not start recording until the subway had stopped, which was around midnight, so, I had from 11:00 to midnight to set up the organ and practice. That was it. I practiced and recorded in the same night! When we finally got started recording, we went well into the night. I would stop every hour and take a shower. Joe was present for the session, and the recording engineer for the New York Philharmonic recorded it.
When we made the recordings in Hartford, John Kellner from Aeolian-Skinner did the recording. He was awfully good. We did the Duruflé in a separate session, and as far as I know, it was the first commercial recording of it made in the United States. We sent it to Duruflé, and like Willan, there were things he liked and things he did not like. I hear things now in the recording that I cannot stand—some things that are non-legato that should have been legato, and the choir did not do its best singing—completely my own fault. Ultimately, I did get to coach this with Duruflé when the Asylum Hill choir sang the Requiem at St Paul’s Chapel in New York in about 1964. Duruflé conducted and Madame Duruflé played.

LM: Did you enjoy life in Connecticut?
AR: Living in New York had prepared me for the rough winters. I had always been told that New Englanders were cold people. But I found them to be some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met. From day one, it was a happy experience, and introduced me to many people who have become lifelong friends—Barry Wood, at First Baptist, Worcester; Hank Hokans, at All Saints, Worcester; Dick Westenberg. We all played in each other’s churches often. Dick was kind enough to invite the Asylum Hill choir to join his at Central Presbyterian in New York for a concert. George Faxon I got to know through Joe Whiteford, and that was a long, long collaboration. We combined choirs often at Trinity, Boston, and I played for his Evensongs when he was away. Later, when I moved to Washington, he had me come up and accompany the Brahms Requiem during Lent, and the next night I played a Lenten recital. That was a busy time, because I practiced there the week of, got back to Washington Saturday night to play for church Sunday morning, then went back to play the Brahms that night and the recital the next day. The organ at Trinity, Boston was splendid for accompanying. The whole front organ was enclosed, and the console was of George’s special design—low, so you could see over it. That was one of the happiest musical relationships and friendships, with George and Nancy Faxon, I have ever had. We had the best times together and I always stayed at their house. Many late night sessions were spent in their wonderful kitchen over glasses that always seemed empty.

LM: In Hartford, was Asylum Hill the only thriving music program in town?
AR: No. Sumter Brawley did wonderful things with orchestra and chorus, like the B Minor Mass. He was at Trinity Church right around the corner. Can you believe he has now retired and is living in this very building here in Washington? He still conducts marvelous concerts, having done one just recently at the Cosmos Club.

LM: Tell me something about your teaching career.
AR: Hartt College was my first teaching job. I had a lot of good students, and it was a learning experience for me, too. I did the organ and church music courses. Later the college joined the University of Hartford as the music department. We got an Austin in the concert hall. John Holtz, also on the faculty, took over the organ department when I moved to Washington. He was a marvelous teacher—brilliant—a much better teacher than I. He really lit a fire under his students. I was always better at coaching graduate students, rather than starting beginners, which just did not interest me.

LM: Did you start the contemporary organ series at Hartt?
AR: No. John Holtz did, and it really put Hartt on the map. John asked me to review the concerts one summer, and I was so unlikely to do it because I’ve never been a fan of extremely contemporary music. But I had to admit that after a week of listening, it was almost like hearing an old friend.
I was also university organist at Wesleyan. On Sunday nights, I’d go down there to play for chapel then teach the next day. There was a new Schlicker in the chapel. That was an interesting experience, again accompanying oratorios, although most of the time we used instruments with the organ. The Smith College choir would come down and join us. Iva Dee Hyatt was their conductor. She was fabulous.

LM: Were you working seven days a week?
AR: Yes, and I did up until my later years in Washington.

LM: Are you a workaholic?
AR: No. I simply needed the money, and, if I wasn’t teaching, needed to practice for recitals. Here in Washington, even on my day off, I would spend it practicing over at National Presbyterian, rather than going downtown.

LM: When did you come under management?
AR: I got to know Roberta Bailey very well at Riverside, when she was managing Virgil. He was her first client. Then she took on Karl Richter, Hank Hokans, Pierre Cochereau, and Anthony Newman. She and I were friends, and she knew I was already doing quite a bit of recital work, so she invited me to join her. She got me a lot of dates for which I was very grateful.

LM: When did you move to Washington?
AR: 1966. I had been in Hartford ten years. One day I received a letter from the rector at St. John’s, Lafayette Square, asking me if I would be interested in the job. Paul Callaway and George Faxon had recommended me to him. At the time, I had not been thinking of leaving Hartford. But I had always liked Washington a great deal, so was interested. On my way to play a recital in the Midwest, I stopped off here in the middle of a big snowstorm to audition. I was hired in the spring of 1966, and remember weeping bitterly my last Sunday at Asylum Hill, and I cried all the way to Washington. John Harper was the rector who hired me at St. John’s, and was there for my entire tenure as organist. He left me to do my work and was always totally supportive.
Coming here was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Phil Steinhaus was my predecessor. He had been here for two years before leaving to work in Boston at Aeolian-Skinner and the Advent. The organ at St. John’s was a late E. M. Skinner and Son, although Aeolian-Skinner had redone the Great. The choir was a small, professional group of 13, which I had always wanted. The organ was just a mess, and it didn’t take long to convince the rector we needed a new one, which we got in 1969.
I had become interested in Gress-Miles, and thought, in that situation, with the organ stuck in a hole, that an aggressive instrument was the best way to go. There was not enough room to enclose two divisions, which was unfortunate. We had wanted to put the organ in the gallery, but, because St. John’s is a historic structure, we were not allowed to change the room in any way. So, we had to plunk it back in the hole. I worked with Ed Gress on the design of the organ, and he was wonderful. He was a theatre organist, but also knew the classical literature very well and knew its demands. We both drew up individual stoplists, then collaborated on the final one.

LM: How was it for accompanying?
AR: It did as well as it could do under the circumstances, with only one enclosed division. But, if we had gotten a milder organ, it wouldn’t have been successful. The former Skinner there just didn’t get out at all. Paul Hume reviewed the opening recital of the Gress-Miles, and one of the first things he commented on was how much better the new organ got out. I played a solo recital for the opening, and Bob Noehren played another. He was a great mentor of mine. We had met through John Holtz in Hartford. We also did the Duruflé Requiem and the opus 5 Suite on a program. Paul Callaway played the other one—there were four inaugural concerts.

LM: Was the reverberation system in place at St. John’s when you arrived there?
AR: Yes. The church had one of Aeolian-Skinner’s reverberation systems, which allowed one to make music in that practice room situation. The system was very convincing, particularly in the middle of the nave. If you were by the speakers, under the balcony, it was less convincing, although it helped tremendously with hymn singing. There were fifteen speakers, each with delayed sound, and each with its own timing. It was a heck of a lot better than not having it. Christ Church, Cambridge was, I believe, their first one. Joe Whiteford set one up at Christ Church Cathedral, Houston for the 1958 AGO convention. I played the Mozart K. 608 Fantasy, first without, then with, reverberation, and Joe gave a lecture.
At St. John’s, we had several Sunday mornings a year that were all music, so we would do an oratorio. We had excellent singers in the choir, especially after the Kennedy Center opened, which attracted even better singers to town. One time we were doing the Mozart Requiem, and, soon after we began, the alto doing the quartets became ill and had to leave. So, I looked at one of the other altos. She nodded, and sang the quartets without a flaw. Another time we were doing Messiah, and I played the introduction to “And the Glory,” and when it was time for the altos to enter on the opening C-sharp not one alto peeped. So I played it again and, this time, it worked. Explain it.
We hosted several regional conventions in Washington, and the choir either sang programs or services for these. We had the AGO national convention in 1982. I was program chairman for that, and we did the Duruflé Requiem the opening night of the convention to a full house. I’ll never forget the choir processing in to Hyfrydol. Later, they told me, “We just stopped singing so we could hear that enormous, thrilling sound coming from all the organists in the congregation.” You couldn’t put on enough organ. I conducted and played the Requiem, and Donald Sutherland played the Widor Fifth Symphony before the service.

LM: Did you play for a lot of dignitaries at St. John’s?
AR: Yes. Before every presidential inauguration we had an early service. And, every president worshiped there. Once in a while the rector would say, “Let Helen play the last hymn, and you can come out and meet the president.” He was very nice about that. The only ones who were there regularly were the Fords. It sounds glamorous to say the president was there, but security was such an issue that it made life difficult. The Secret Service men would put dogs in the organ chambers. There was one Sunday where we had a bomb scare while the choir was practicing, so we had to finish the rehearsal out on the sidewalk, using a pitch pipe.

LM: You did quite a bit of teaching in Washington, too, didn’t you?
AR: Yes. I got Peabody at the same time as St. John’s, because Phil Steinhaus had been at both, and just turned the reins over to me. Arthur Howes was teaching there at the time. I taught all day on Mondays for $10 an hour. The concert hall had an Aeolian-Skinner, but I taught on a Walcker practice organ with a mixture that could be heard all the way to Washington. I needed my martinis after eight hours of that.
Leo Sowerby also asked me to teach at the College of Musicians. I taught people who came to the college just for organ lessons and who were not college students themselves (there were only eight college students, whom I did not teach). I called my students the “out-patient department,” and they had their lessons at St. John’s. In fact, I met my future assistant at St. John’s teaching her there—Helen Penn. I got to know Leo quite well and learned a great deal from him. I was particularly fortunate to coach Forsaken of Man with him when we did it at St. John’s. He lived on Wisconsin Avenue across from the National Cathedral. We watched the 1968 fires on 14th Street from his apartment. I remember a party where Leo sang “I can’t give you anything but love, baby,” accompanied by Garnell Copeland, organist at Church of The Epiphany. It was something. Speaking of Garnell, I judged the Ft. Wayne competition one year and thought I recognized Garnell Copeland’s style of playing, and sure enough, it was he. We flew back to DC together.
Preston Rockholt was my boss at the College of Musicians. He and Paul Callaway were the organ teachers there. Paul was so much fun. He was tiny, but was a musical giant. He always parked his big Buick convertible car by sound!
I also taught organ at American University and Catholic University. I never enjoyed teaching as much as playing recitals or doing church work. Perhaps I was a good teacher for some people, but I knew I wasn’t for others. Maybe all teachers feel that way. The lovely thing is, some of my former students keep in touch, and we have become good friends over the years.
In the early ’80s, I noticed I had a problem with my right hand. I thought it was carpal tunnel syndrome—something that could be fixed. I would warm up every morning by playing Hanon on the piano for 30 minutes before going to the organ, and noticed it there first. Then, at the organ, I noticed it on the Widor Toccata. One finger, on my right hand, would just lock. So, I went to every doctor in town and in Baltimore, and was not diagnosed. Leon Fleisher had had the same problem, and had been diagnosed at Mass. General, so that’s where I went, to the doctor who had diagnosed him. Sure enough, I had the same thing—focal dystonia—a neurological problem that cannot be cured. I decided to give up the church. I know St. John’s did not understand why I left, and why I have continued to play elsewhere since I left in 1985. But, I had to follow my conscience. I did not want tourists coming from all over the world to a church where the organist could not play major literature. Of course, people were asking right and left for the Widor Toccata for weddings, which was out of the question.

LM: Has your hand problem improved now, twenty years later?
AR: No. It is worse. I have tried everything and have had injections, but they did not work.

LM: Do you play at all now?
AR: Yes. I have done a lot of playing. I have just had to learn which pieces to stay away from—no Widor—and to use bizarre fingering. Fortunately, I have received a number of invitations to play the Duruflé Requiem, which I am still able to do because the most difficult part of the work is in the left hand. Also, I have switched the right hand part in the “Introit” to the left hand. I played it most recently at St. Paul’s, K Street, where I’ve played it several times for Jeffrey Smith, and at National Presbyterian Church. I was fortunate to get to perform it frequently early in my career, too. I also do little recitals for a group of people here in my building and am playing a program for them just this next week at National Presbyterian Church, where I am fortunate enough to practice each week. My good friend, Bill Neil, is the organist there and he is so kind to give me the time. These little demo recitals are very informal—we talk about the organ and I play for them. We just have a good time, like family.
I cannot imagine being more fortunate than I have been all through my school years, career, and now in retirement to have had the teachers, colleagues, friends and bosses who have given me an enormous amount of support and affection.What else is there that matters in life?

 

Andrew Scanlon

The following conversation, conducted both in person and by telephone in March 2013, explores the career of one of America’s most eminent musicians and teachers, Ann Labounsky. Dr. Labounsky was my undergraduate organ teacher at Duquesne University, and she is now in her 44th year as professor and chair of sacred music and organ at that same institution. Some years after completing graduate study and working in church music, I had the privilege of returning to Duquesne as a faculty member, teaching alongside Dr. Labounsky for four years. We maintain a close collaboration, and therefore, I have been in the unique situation of knowing Dr. Labounsky on several levels since we first met in New York City at the 1996 American Guild of Organists Centennial Convention. As a teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend, Ann has challenged, encouraged, and supported me in many ways. In this interview, we discuss Ann’s life and career. Several life chapters particularly dominate our discussion: Ann’s student days at Eastman as a pupil of the young David Craighead, and the full circle of Ann and David’s long friendship; Ann’s time as a Fulbright scholar in Paris, studying organ under André Marchal, Jean Langlais, and Marcel Dupré; and finally, Ann’s inimitable teaching career in Pittsburgh. 

 

 

Andrew Scanlon: When people ask me why I decided to learn to play the organ, I most often reply, “Actually, the organ chose me!” Most of your life has been devoted to the organ. What was your first encounter with the organ, and when did the organ first “choose you?”

Ann Labounsky: As a young girl, our family was living in Port Washington, Long Island, and my mother used to take me to a Methodist church across the street from our home. This was before I could read; and I must have heard the pipe organ, but I don’t have much of a memory of it.

Later, we attended Christ Church (Episcopal) in Oyster Bay, where Paul Sifler (also a composer) was the organist-choirmaster. My mother, my brother, and I all sang in the choir, and it was then that I became interested. I was fascinated by the way Paul played. I would come early for choir rehearsals or lessons to watch him practice. I began studying the organ with Sifler at age 15. He was a very good teacher for me, and I loved his compositions. One summer, I went away to a camp, where I couldn’t play the organ for about two weeks, and I missed it so much. I think at that stage, I knew I would be an organist.

 

The conventional wisdom seems to be that before learning the organ, a strong piano background is useful, even essential. Were you already accomplished on the piano? 

My piano teacher in high school was John LaMontaine, Paul Sifler’s partner. He was also a wonderful composer and had a great command of technique. He followed the Tobias Matthay school of relaxation. I would take the train to go to their apartment on 57th Street in New York to take the lessons. It was he who encouraged me to go to Eastman. 

 

Since your piano teacher encouraged you to apply to the Eastman School of Music, did you audition on both piano and organ? What was required for the audition?

Yes, we were required to perform on both instruments. For the organ portion, I remember playing Mendelssohn’s Sonata No. 6, but can’t remember which Bach I played. I do recall that I played a recital my senior year of high school and had played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and Wir glauben all an einen Gott on that recital, so I must have played one of those works. For the piano portion, they required that you know all scales and arpeggios, as well as the performance of a work by Bach and a Beethoven sonata. I was very nervous for the audition.

 

Before you went to Eastman, what, if anything, did you know of David Craighead? Did you want to study with him, or were you taking the advice of your teachers?

Well, no; actually, I didn’t know anything about David Craighead. But John LaMontaine had studied at Eastman, and he thought it was a very good school. He wanted me to study with Eastman’s piano teacher, George MacNabb. (It was from MacNabb that I learned the Brahms Fifty-one Exercises, which I still use.) Paul Sifler thought that Catharine Crozier would have been a good organ teacher for me, and I looked into studying with her. However, by the time I entered Eastman as a freshman, Crozier had already left the Eastman faculty for Rollins College in Florida. 

 

Did you audition anywhere else besides Eastman?

No. It always makes me laugh now, because these days, students audition at several schools. But for some reason, I didn’t.

 

Had you given any thought to what might happen if you didn’t get in?

No, that didn’t occur to me! 

 

In 1957, you moved upstate from Long Island and began your new life in Rochester. What are your memories of those undergraduate years? 

Eastman was a wonderful school. For many years, I stayed in close touch with the friends that I made there because we all struggled together. It was very demanding; in fact, I had nightmares. I was so afraid that I wouldn’t do well enough and that David Craighead would make me study with Norman Peterson, the secondary teacher! 

 

Can you recall your close friends and colleagues from that time?

Some dear colleagues included Bill Stokes, Joanna Tousey, Bill Haller, Maggie Brooks, Bruce Lederhouse, Jim Johnson, Gretchen Frauenberger, and Robert Town. Roberta Gary was working on her doctorate and David Mulberry was a senior, but they were beyond me. They were the great legends at the time!

 

How many students were studying organ then?

I think there may have been about ten—smaller compared to what it is now. 

 

Can you recall periods of particular growth in your playing during the Eastman days, or conversely, any precise struggles?

I don’t recall any struggles specifically; everything was difficult. We had to have all our repertoire memorized. I would get very nervous before performances. I wish that I would have found a way to get over that more easily, as I look back now. But all of this contributed to my growth as a musician. 

 

When you arrived at Eastman, in the studio of David Craighead, he was still fairly new to Eastman’s faculty, correct?

Yes, he had arrived in 1955, and I entered in 1957. He always told me this funny story about when I first arrived. Evidently I went up to his office and knocked on his door and introduced myself. I said, “I’m Ann Labounsky: Ann without the ‘E’!” David said he always remembered that.

 

What was Craighead like as a teacher in 1957? What aspects of learning did he emphasize as a young teacher?

He was always very precise. At that time in his life, he was rather nervous, quite inhibited. He would tell you all the things that were not right, but you always wanted to strive to do better in the next lesson. We spent a lot of time on the registration. He used the Bonnet Historical Anthology of Music, which was highly edited, and not a good edition. He used the Seth Bingham edition of Couperin’s music and I hated that music back then; it wasn’t until I went to Paris to study with [André] Marchal that I knew what it all meant!

 

That anecdote reminds us of how David Craighead evolved tremendously, over the years, both as teacher and a performer.

He did. I remember seeing him some years later, perhaps in the early 1970s. He had come to perform in Pittsburgh, and we attended the Pittsburgh Symphony together. He spoke of the Offertoire from Couperin’s Mass for the Parishes, and how he had learned about the notes inégales. For Bach, we changed registration frequently and each change was well marked in the score. Also, phrasing was carefully marked. Craighead was meticulous about every detail, but was patient in working with us until we got it right. He was most effective when he would quickly slide onto the bench to demonstrate a passage.

 

Can you remember your degree recitals?

They were all in Kilbourne Hall on the Skinner organ. For my senior recital, I played the Bach Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 543, and of course, a lot of American music. David Craighead loved the music of Sowerby. I played Sowerby’s famous Arioso, which was gorgeous on that organ. At Eastman, there was a kind of “shopping list” of music that we all had to work on. Ironically, when we got to Langlais’ music, I hated it! I had performed some of the Hommage à Frescobaldi, and I didn’t like it at all! I also remember playing in the weekly performance class in preparation for my senior recital. At one such class, having completed a play-through of the Bach “A Minor,” I remember David Craighead saying, “That was bloody but unbowed!” 

 

When you were wrapping up your days at Eastman, did David Craighead advise you about what you should do in terms of furthering your education?

David Craighead was very different from Russell Saunders, who told the students exactly what they should do. David took a far more hands-off approach. He gave his students the confidence to make their own decisions. I thought about staying at Eastman for my master’s degree, but decided to go to the University of Michigan. It turned out to be a very good thing to do that, as I would meet my future husband, Lewis Steele, at Michigan.

 

After four years at the Eastman School, I imagine that you had a much broader sense of the organ world, and you knew what you wanted?

I certainly knew that I wanted to go on to earn a master’s degree, but at that time, I didn’t know much about church music or improvisation. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, except that I wanted to learn music.

 

In few words, can you summarize the church music curriculum at Eastman in those days?

It didn’t exist! 

 

Your next move was from Rochester to Ann Arbor. Tell us about what life was like at the University of Michigan in 1961.

In those days, the president of the AGO was Roberta Bitgood. She did a wonderful thing for the new students at U. of M. When we got off the train in Detroit, she met all the students. She had gathered members of the clergy from churches in the area that were looking for organists. She introduced all of us, and as a result, I began a church job right away in Dearborn, Michigan, about an hour from Ann Arbor. 

U. of M. was a very different school than ESM. My teacher there was Marilyn Mason. Mason was less of a teacher for me, but more of a coach. David Craighead had really formed my technique—so she didn’t have to work on that. We worked on musical details and interpretation. We always had our lessons on the organ in Hill Auditorium.

 

Were there other organ teachers?

Yes. Ray Ferguson and Robert Noehren were on the faculty at that time. 

 

Besides organ playing, were there any other memorable aspects of the Michigan graduate degree program that helped you grow?

The courses at Michigan were wonderful! I especially recall Hans David the musicologist, and Louise Cuyler, and I learned a great deal from both of them.

 

You mentioned that you also met your husband while at Michigan?

Yes, I earned the degree in one year and two summers, and I was getting ready to play my recital. I met Lewis Steele on the steps of Marilyn Mason’s studio. I needed soloists to sing in my church every Sunday since we didn’t have a summer choir. I heard his resonant voice, and asked him to sing a solo. That’s how our romance started! 

 

Would you care to elaborate?

Well, three children and four grandchildren later, we are very happy together. 

I could never have done the things I have done without Lewis’s support. He always said that in a marriage, it’s not a 50/50 partnership, rather it’s 100/100. You have to give all of yourself, all the time. He did so much in raising the children. I had no idea even how to change diapers. He taught me. So many of the things I didn’t have (for example, expertise in theology, scripture, choral directing), Lewis did have. It has been a wonderful partnership over the years. I always remember what Marilyn Mason said: “I’d marry him for his laugh!”

 

Can you sum up the church music curriculum at U. of M. in those days?

They had two tracks. You could earn the MM in organ, which I did, or the MM in church music. However, it seemed to me that the only difference was you didn’t have to memorize the recital if you were in the church music track. All students took Robert Noehren’s course in organ building, which I almost failed! You had to know the composition of mixtures, which was too much for me! He was a very good teacher, though. He had a significant influence in the organ department there at that time. 

 

As your time wound up in Michigan, the next big step would be the Fulbright process. What were you doing in Michigan to prepare for the program in France?

By the time I got to Michigan, I knew I wanted to go to France for additional study. In fact, I had applied for a Fulbright while still an Eastman student, but I didn’t get it. I applied a second time while at U. of M. I had been passionate about the French language and was determined that I would go to France one way or another. Every week, I would get together with Deedee Wotring, one of André Marchal’s former students. We would meet for coffee, and she would force me to speak French! 

 

But your love of France and the French language had begun long before Michigan, through your beloved Aunt Julia, correct?

I’m glad you mentioned Julia. You knew her and played at her funeral. She had studied art in Paris after the war, and following her arrival back home in New York, she spent every weekend with us in Long Island. Julia was determined to teach me how to speak French! My father (a geologist and engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project) was Russian, his second language being English. I was determined I was going to Paris to study, even if I had to be an au pair. 

In April, having applied for a Fulbright, saying I wanted to study with Marchal, but not yet knowing my fate, I went to a recital at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, performed by Jean Langlais, whom I met for the first time. I told him I had played his Miniature on my graduate recital at the University of Michigan, and that I hoped to soon be in Paris studying. He replied that he hoped he would see me! When I returned home to Long Island from that recital, I found out I had gotten the Fulbright grant! That was such a great blessing to be able to go, with everything paid for; it was just a marvelous thing. 

I should speak a little bit about how we got to France. The first time we went over was on the “Queen Mary,” and on the “France” a number of times. It took five days, and there was no jet lag, because each day you changed the clocks only one hour. It was a wonderful way to travel. Ruth Woods (Harris) and I went together, both studying with Marchal on a Fulbright grant. We remain close friends.

 

Though you are perhaps best known as the leading American disciple of Jean Langlais, when you set off for France, your initial intent was to study with André Marchal, and you did. Tell us about studying with Marchal.

When I heard Marchal play for the first time, it was at Oberlin. He played in a way I had never heard anyone else play. Each line breathed. I heard music differently when he played, and I wanted to learn what he knew. Fortunately, my French was good enough that I didn’t need a translator, but his daughter Jacqueline often translated for the other students. Lessons were in his home at 22 Rue Duroc. I also wanted to study improvisation. Even though Marchal improvised very well, at that time he no longer taught improvisation. He said: “Well, you may study improvisation with Langlais.”

You must understand about the teachers all over Europe at that time: they were very possessive of their students. You were not able to simply study with anyone you wanted; definitely not several teachers! You went abroad to study with ONE teacher. I studied organ repertoire with Marchal, but Marchal gave me his permission to study with Langlais. After that time, while continuing to study with Marchal, I would then go to Ste. Clotilde in the evenings for my lessons with Langlais, which was wonderful. Playing on the organ that Franck, Tournemire, and Langlais knew so well, and hearing their music on that instrument, made all the difference in learning that music.

 

What musical facet did Marchal underscore the most in how to play the organ?

The touch. He had a way of phrasing each line independently. And he had such a concept of the whole piece. I remember working on Bach’s great Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor (BWV 542) with him. He had the whole piece completely engraved in his mind—every voice. It was amazing to me that this blind man knew music so well. For example, if you used a fingering that was not effective, he could tell!

 

You mentioned having studied Couperin as an undergraduate at Eastman. I know that with his interest in early music, Marchal would make the classical French school an essential part of what you studied. How did your point of view evolve with respect to this music?

Marchal just knew that music. I don’t know how—because he had studied with Gigout, and of course, everyone was playing completely legato then. Marchal attributed his style of playing to studying the harpsichord, saying that as a result, he had learned a different way of playing. And in the 1960s, no one else was playing like that. We usually associate Marie-Claire Alain as a leader in the early music revival for the organ—but even in the 1940s when Marie Claire Alain was very young, it was Marchal who was the first great leader in this movement. There was something about the way he played that helped me understand that “this is how you play!” With Marchal, I studied all Couperin, as well as all the music of de Grigny, Clérambault, Daquin, etc.

 

I recall from other conversations over the years that you recall practicing constantly during the time you were in France. You learned a great deal of music—how much repertoire did you absorb in two years?

In addition to all I mentioned just above, with Marchal, I studied all the Bach trio sonatas, all the big preludes and fugues—tons of repertoire! With Langlais I studied all of Franck’s music, much of Tournemire, and other pieces, too. In terms of how lessons worked, with Marchal (and Donald Wilkins said it was the same with Duruflé), you brought in a piece to a lesson, one of these big pieces, and they told you everything you needed to know. If you brought in the same piece again to another lesson, they said, “Well, I already told you everything I know about it last week!” We knew that we wouldn’t be there forever with those brilliant musicians. Our goal was to cover as much repertoire as possible in the shortest amount of time.

 

Do you still play the pieces you studied with Marchal or Langlais the same way as when you learned them? Or do you perform them differently now?

Wonderful question. I think that the spirit is the same; some things changed a little. I’m constantly trying to think in a fresh way, but the spirit of what I learned from Langlais and Marchal has stayed with me.

 

Concerning Marchal’s teaching, did he have any idiosyncrasies?

Many have said of Marchal that if a student was not gifted, he would be very lenient with that student; but the more diligent a student was, he would be much more strict. And that certainly was true. One funny story was about phrasing in one of the trio sonatas. I had asked why he played it that particular way, and he thought for a long time. After quite a long period of silence, finally he answered: “Because it pleases me!”

 

Many people are very well acquainted with your work and expertise on the music and the life of Jean Langlais. Much of this information can be learned from your book, Jean Langlais: The Man and His Music (Amadeus Press, 2000), as well as from the liner notes on your CD recordings. Would you share with us, in a broad sense, what it was like to be Langlais’ pupil, and how that relationship developed over many years?

Langlais was extremely supportive. He always made you feel that you could do anything! If you made a mistake, he knew, but he was just thinking about the music. Always so encouraging and supportive, he was continually trying to find places for his students to play, and to help them in whatever way he could. As I learned his music, I became more and more interested, and I wanted to learn as much as I could. 

 

Over the years, how much cumulative time did you study with Langlais?

I have no idea. I usually had a weekly lesson on Wednesday evenings, when the church was closed. In addition to that, on Saturday afternoons, we were at the Schola Cantorum, and that’s where we worked on improvisation. Over the years, I returned many more times to study.

 

After remaining in France for an extra year, what path did your career take upon returning to the States?

Langlais asked me to be his guide for his fall 1964 American tour, and I did that. Shortly thereafter, I took a job in a very large Roman Catholic church in New Hyde Park, Long Island. I had a choir of men and boys that I had to develop and direct. That was hard work. 

 

How did you end up in Pittsburgh? Did you move there to take up your position as organ teacher at Duquesne University?

In 1967, Lewis and I moved to Pittsburgh to take up a joint church position at Brentwood Presbyterian Church. Lewis was the choir director, and I was the organist. We had only one child, six months old. Two years later, in 1969, the head of graduate studies at Duquesne University called and asked if I would like to teach organ at Duquesne—but I had never heard of Duquesne! Honestly, I was not thinking about teaching in a college and university. I had done some private teaching, but had not thought beyond that. I wanted to be a church musician and recitalist. Looking back on it, I don’t know why I hadn’t considered university teaching. I was busy at the church and raising our kids. So, in 1969, I began teaching part-time, and it initially cost our family money for me to teach at Duquesne, because I had to pay for child care! At that time, there was a degree program in organ, but no sacred music program or sacred music courses. 

In 1972, around the time of the birth of our third child, the dean of Duquesne’s school of music at the time, Gerald Keenan, called me into his office and said they wanted to hire me full-time. After that time, I was the only organ teacher.

 

What was your strategy for building up the sacred music degree programs at Duquesne? 

I didn’t really have a strategy. I worked slowly, adding courses as it made sense. Even before I was full-time, I had brought Jeanne Joulain to Pittsburgh for a recital and workshop—in that way, I was already developing a tradition of guest artists. The first class that I started was the “Service Playing” course. I was always interested in improvisation, having studied it with Langlais, and I had won the very first AGO improvisation competition in 1966 in Atlanta. I began an improvisation course, focusing on rather simple aspects of improvisation. 

For a few years, we moved along slowly, trying to figure out the curriculum and course requirements. In 1976, the 25th year of the Duquesne School of Music, I decided that Langlais should come to Duquesne. This coincided with the official establishment of the sacred music degree programs. While Langlais was in residence, we awarded him an honorary doctorate, and we had a whole week of concerts featuring premieres of his music. This started things off in a huge way, attracting a lot of national attention. Gradually, more and more students wanted to come to Duquesne, continuing over the years. I couldn’t say in what specific year things really blossomed. Another aspect of our program’s emphasis in church music came after I realized there had been a huge void in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council—no choirs, no hymnals, a very low level of music. I saw that Duquesne had a responsibility and an opportunity to take a lead in this area. The dean, Robert Egan, agreed with me, and we worked for several years on strengthening the program. I called many people at different universities to see what other programs were offering. In those early days, I taught all the courses myself, as we didn’t have that many students. 

 

For many years, you have been a serious campaigner for the cause of the AGO certification program. From where did your advocacy of this program emerge?

Initially from Walter Hilse. I met Walter while we were both students in Paris. Walter, also from New York, was studying composition with Nadia Boulanger and organ with Maurice Duruflé. On Wednesday afternoons, Boulanger taught an analysis class for foreigners at her apartment, for which she had a huge following. She had a small house organ, having been a student of Vierne. Students would play pieces (Fauré, for example), and then she would pull the pieces apart and ask questions. She was a huge personality. I still have the scores. (We had to buy the ones she was going to discuss.) At these classes, Walter Hilse encouraged me to become certified. I distinctly remember him saying “You really should take the AAGO [Associate of the AGO] exam.” He has always been a huge promoter of the exams and has had many private students. Anne Wilson and Todd Wilson, for example, prepared for the exams with Walter. While my husband and I were still living on Long Island, I decided to do this. Once I began teaching at Duquesne University, it occurred to me that those skills were so vital to all students, that they should be learning these skills while studying for university degrees. 

 

Did the desire to help students become fluent with keyboard skills such as those tested on the AGO exams prompt you to require the AGO exams as part of the sacred music degrees at Duquesne?

In the early 1980s, I was on the National Committee on Professional Certification. Only one other school in the country was making it a requirement to take the exams. So, I decided to initiate the exams at Duquesne. When you tell people they have to do it, then they just do! Not everyone passed, and people took different exams, depending on their level of expertise. I met many wonderful people on that committee, including Max Miller, Sister Theophane Hytrek, John Walker, and David Schuler, for example. Different years, various others rotated on and off that committee, such as Todd Wilson. 

 

When did you ultimately attempt the Fellowship exam? 

Since I had already made the exams a degree requirement at DU, and I was the National Councillor for Education, I decided that it was time. You can’t just say to someone, “you should do this!”—you need to set an example. During a very busy time, when I had three children, was teaching full time, playing recitals, and was on the national board, I worked with two former students in Pittsburgh, John Miller and Robert Kardasz, to prepare together for the FAGO. Eventually, we all passed! It gave Pittsburgh more people with the FAGO diploma, where previously only Charles Heaton and Don Wilkins had earned it. We needed more highly certified people for a city our size.

 

Why do you consider it so important to take the certification exams?

There are a number of reasons:

1) In order to keep growing you need both long-term and short-term goals. As a student, it’s a short-term goal. Before earning a degree, it helps you have a point of arrival.

2) After my student, John Henninger, graduated from Duquesne, he went on to Westminster Choir College for graduate school and had applied for a church job in Princeton. He had passed the CAGO while at Duquesne, and he was appointed to the job because of having the Colleague Certificate. 

3) The exams represent a very structured way of testing both theoretical and practical skill. You can work at your own pace, and everybody I know who has done this, whether or not they have passed, has profited by it. It seems like a natural thing to do this, when you consider that so many other professions offer certification.

4) Earning an AGO certificate is a way that we show we’re at a certain level in our profession.

5) Earning certification does level the playing field and sets a high standard.

Our professional organization is extremely important. I get upset with people who complain about aspects of degree programs, churches, even the AGO—when the only thing you can do is to get right in the trenches to make things better!

 

Several graduates of Duquesne have gone on to earn the highest AGO certification. How has that made
you feel?

Very proud. You [Andrew Scanlon] being one of them, and now even serving on the national exam committee—that has made me especially proud. My current colleague, Ben Cornelius-Bates, has recently earned the FAGO also. 

 

Reflecting on your almost 45 years of teaching at Duquesne, how would you say your teaching and playing has evolved?

On teaching, David Craighead always said that you learn so much from your students, and I really have. In the beginning, I felt I didn’t know much, but I learned along the way. I found some things that worked well, and I fought the scars of things that didn’t work well. I have found it important to document what each student does. Recently, I got a computer in my studio, and using the “Blackboard” tool has been transformative. I have begun taking notes for each lesson and posting them for each student to view.

In the early days of my teaching, I was still very much in the mode of the teachers I learned from in Paris—Langlais, Marchal, and Dupré. They were very directive. They told you exactly what they wanted you to do. Initially, I taught the way they taught, because it was so fresh in my mind. As things have evolved, I have wanted to help each student find his own voice. I might not always agree with the student, but feel strongly that it’s in the best interest of each student to let them develop their own musical instincts. 

Ironically, when I performed all the recitals that Langlais had organized for me, I still felt I was his student. Langlais said, “You have to do this the way you want to do it.” But he had not taught that way. For example, he was known for saying so emphatically in his teaching that “Franck is tremendously free—just like this!” In improvisation, he taught the Thème libre, which, of course, is not free at all!

As you grow older, you grow in wisdom. You learn a lot from your children, also. They keep you humble, and they really tell you when you mess up! 

When I look at David Craighead, I keep thinking of how he was when I first studied with him at Eastman. Then, he was a new teacher. I had the joy of knowing him so well for the last 14 years of his life, and he had changed so much. He started by telling the students when they had made mistakes, but ended up changing lives. I try to do that too. I try to be a mentor, to do everything I possibly can to encourage my pupils, and help them get along well together. Music school can be almost like a monastery, when you’re all working together, and it’s so important to have a good rapport with your colleagues, to show great compassion for one another. 

Secondly, in answer to your question about my own playing, several things have contributed to the way I have played over the years. One of these was earning my Ph.D. in musicology, and beginning my biography of Langlais as the dissertation. All my years of teaching, the wisdom I gained from colleagues such as Robert Sutherland Lord and Don Franklin, making all the Langlais recordings—all of that contributed to the evolution of my playing. Other factors include the 1985 Bach Year, when I was asked to play an all-Bach recital on the Beckerath organ at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Pittsburgh. I changed my approach to Bach playing, using all toes, and different fingering. Change was in the air at that time. 

 

Have there been still more recent developments?

Yes. I have been working with Don Franklin on the tempo relationships in Bach preludes and fugues. We have been looking back to Kirnberger’s tempo relationships. I am constantly trying to learn more. If you have everything figured out, you may as well just retire, and I’m certainly not ready to retire!

In addition, after being asked a few years ago to do a peer review of a string methods class, I became fascinated with the violin. I realized that I had always wanted to play the violin, but I was afraid to try! I started taking violin lessons with David Gillis, a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and I’m still studying! I’m working on the Vivaldi sonatas, Opus 2, which I love! It’s a whole other world. 

The most recent development is the establishment of Duquesne’s chant schola under the direction of faculty member Sister Marie Agatha Ozah, HHCJ. We study the St. Gall notation to incorporate those interpretive elements into our singing. In May 2013, I led a study trip to Paris to play the important organs there and gave a short concert at the Benedictine Abbey in Solesmes. 

 

How do you know what to say when a student plays? What not to say? 

Always, I do it by intuition, and I think David Craighead did too. I’m careful not to say too much, and not say too little. 

 

How do you decide not only what to say, but how to say it? How do you break through?

Teaching is so dynamic, because you have to figure out where the student is and how the student will perceive what you say. You always have to be honest, but you need to be helpful—not damaging. You can’t say something is good when it’s not. Some teachers are more didactic, but I find that I do almost everything by intuition.

 

Realizing that you could retire, what keeps you going?

I love what I’m doing. I’m finally at a point when I can do it more easily.

I still have a lot to give to the students. I can still make a difference in their lives, and I still enjoy it. When we look around the country, and see the teachers who have retired, only to see their programs eliminated, that is always a danger. 

 

What are your hopes for the future of Duquesne’s sacred music and organ programs?

We are working very hard to get a world-class organ on campus! We have plans, and hope to be able to do this in the near future. The last piece of the puzzle is to put a doctoral program in place. That has been in discussion for many years, and it has been very challenging because there are many hoops to jump through. Our library holdings have been critical, but we now have many sacred music collections (the Langlais Collection, the Craighead Collection, the Boys Town Collection, the Richard Proulx Collection, to name a few). We have the faculty, and the quality of teaching, but we need more financial support. 

 

What else would you like to say?

Duquesne University has always been a religious institution. Our mission is to train church musicians. There are other schools whose main issue is getting students ready for competitions, which is wonderful, and I admire them very much. But even David Craighead agreed that he wished the Eastman School had done more with church music and preparation for the AGO exams. I want to prepare students to be musicians in churches of all denominations. We are trying to evolve, as the church continues to evolve. Students have to learn both pastoral skills and musical skills. These are difficult to teach. Our internship, for example, is a requirement partially because of NASM accreditation, but it’s also a critical area that we use to help each student in that very way. 

 

Ann, thank you for sharing these details of your life in teaching and performing. Albert Einstein said, “I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” My experience of you as a teacher and mentor has been just so. You always gave the students exactly the right amount of guidance, and offered the right words precisely when they were needed; and yet you always allowed each student to discover his own path. You have led the way gracefully, setting a high bar and leading by example. Most importantly you have shown me the importance of constant, ongoing learning. I look forward to many more years of collaboration and friendship and wish you many blessings for continued joy in your work. 

Compiled by Marilyn Biery

Alisa Kasmir was a student of vocal performance at Northwestern and member of its Chapel Choir under the direction of Grigg Fountain from 1978–1984. She now resides in Holland but maintains frequent phone contact with Grigg. Last year they planned the music together for the Maundy Thursday service at St. Mary’s Anglican and Episcopal Church in Rotterdam, where Alisa still sings an occasional solo and knows where the on/off switch on the organ is! Margie Verhulst began working at Alice Millar Chapel in 1963, the start of what would be 40 years working in the chapel office. She met her husband, Walter Bradford, who was learning the ropes as an organ builder, at the chapel. Now retired, she can simply enjoy the continuing fine music at Millar without typing choir notes or scheduling organ practice. She also has the luxury of looking back on those days with great joy and gratitude. This is a brief glimpse of Marge Verhulst Bradford, a.k.a. Margaret-at-the-desk. David Evan Thomas was a member of the Alice Millar Chapel Choir as an undergraduate at Northwestern, from 1979–1981. He studied subsequently at Eastman and the University of Minnesota. From 2003–2005, he was composer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. Paul, working with James and Marilyn Biery. Thomas’s music has been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra and the Westminster Cathedral Choir, and has been recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Thomas lives in Minneapolis, where he is still singing. Kurt Hansen first met Grigg in the fall of his freshman year, 1964, at his Chapel Choir audition. Kurt was in the Chapel Choir from 1964 to 1968, and after a four-year “vacation” in the Air Force band program, rejoined the Chapel Choir in the fall of 1972 when he returned to grad school; he stayed until Grigg’s retirement in 1986. Kurt started as choir librarian, turned pages for Grigg’s preludes and postludes, became a conducting student, participated in “Wizards,” was a grad assistant, assistant conductor, and vocal/language coach. Kurt is delighted to call Grigg his mentor and friend. James Hopkins, AAGO, taught music composition at Northwestern 1962–66, after receiving his M.M. degree from Yale, and returned in 1968–71 after completing the PhD at Princeton. He composed and arranged music for various instrumental and choral ensembles for use in services at Alice Millar Chapel while the organ was being installed. He is now Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Southern California, where he taught from 1971–2005. His catalog includes many works for choral ensembles, organ solo, organ duet, and many other combinations. His Concierto de los Angeles was the first organ work to be heard in a public concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. James Biery received a B.Mus. in organ from Northwestern in 1978, successfully managing to play enough complete pieces to finish a senior recital under Grigg’s tutelage. He ate donuts with the Millar Chapel Choir every Sunday morning of his four undergraduate years, and did some singing, conducting, and organ playing, too. After receiving another Northwestern organ degree, he went on to play the organ and teach choirs to “bum” and “nah” at a parish church and two cathedrals. He and Marilyn Biery now ply their trade at the Cathedral of Saint Paul in St. Paul, Minnesota. Marilyn Perkins Biery received B.M. and M.M. degrees in organ performance from Northwestern, where her graduate study was with Grigg, for whom she was also graduate assistant at the Alice Millar Chapel in 1981–82. Marilyn spent four undergraduate years in the well-behaved Richard Enright studio, watching the Grigg students have fun running out for ice cream during studio class, sit askew in the chapel pews, and behave like the fun-loving, eccentric organ students they were, so she decided to become one herself (and marry one). Marilyn is now at the Cathedral of Saint Paul, in St. Paul, MN, where she and James Biery carry on as many Grigg traditions as possible.

Grigg Fountain was born in October,
1918, in Bishopville, South Carolina. He attended Wake Forest College for a year and received a B.A. in music from Furman University (1939). He continued his training in music, earning both B.M. and M.M. degrees in church music and organ from Yale University (1943), studying with Luther Noss. He also had private organ studies with Arthur Poister (1945) and Marcel Dupré (1946). He studied Baroque organ literature with Helmut Walcha in Frankfurt-Am-Main, Germany, on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1953–54. From 1946–1961 he was on the faculty at Oberlin Conservatory of Music. In 1961 he was appointed professor of organ and church music in the School of Music at Northwestern University, from which he retired as Emeritus in August 1986. During that time he was also organist and choirmaster at Alice Millar Chapel, on the Northwestern campus. Grigg and Helen Erday Fountain celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary on April 2, 2009, a union that produced four children—Bruce, John, Drew, and Suzanne—and eight grandchildren. Helen passed away on October 12, 2009. They maintained homes in Port Isabel, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It’s difficult to believe that Grigg Fountain could actually, finally, be 90 years old. He told everyone that he was 115, and had been married for 70 years. And, of course, those of us who were tender students, thinking he was terribly old already, had little trouble (almost) believing him. But now that he has nearly reached the age that he joked about, those of us who know and love and admire him have taken a moment to stop and write about the man who inspired in us such fierce loyalty, passionate music-making, dedicated yet loving eye-rolling, and complete admiration—a musician whose life and career was spent in joyful and hell-bent exploration of all that makes music vital and compelling.
Grigg was known for unusual techniques both as an organ teacher and a choral conductor. Some of them were adapted from skills he learned from working with Robert Shaw at the First Unitarian Church in Shaker Heights, Ohio. It is not possible to touch upon more than a few of them, since he was continually experimenting with techniques and musical ideas, but here are some that recurred with regularity:
• Rehearsing choirs on syllables (noo, nah, bum, bim, too, etc.) to acquire evenness of tone, precise rhythm, and beauty of vowels
• Rehearsing choirs on subdivisions either by having them count (one-and, two-and, three-and, four-and) or by using the above syllables and breaking down the rhythm to the smallest division in order to “get inside” the notes and phrases
• Constantly insisting on musical phrases that had direction
• Rehearsing choirs totally without piano assistance all the time, at every rehearsal, with any choir he was conducting, from the 60-voice Chapel Choir to the 15-voice Bahá’í Choir
• Teaching organists to play hymns by having them play three parts and sing the fourth, by having them put the melody in the pedals and bass line in the left hand, and STILL play the other two parts (or perhaps sing the alto and play the tenor in the right hand), so that you knew what was going on with every single note of the hymn
• Teaching organists to play hymns, and then all literature, by leading with the pedals, which creates a powerful propulsion of the manual technique
• Spending an entire lesson, or sometimes an entire quarter, on the first phrase of a piece, with the expectation that the student or choir would then apply the lesson learned to the rest of the piece
• Having students practice with the metronome on the off-beats, which creates a dance-like step, particularly in Baroque music, and enables precise and infectious rhythm (Richard Enright did this too—I’m not sure who influenced whom on this one)
• Teaching a student to perfect a difficult, lyric pedal solo by first having them play the pedal solo with the right hand, then with the pedal (silent) playing with the right hand, then dropping out the right hand and repeating these steps until the student could play the pedal solo as well with the feet as they could with the fingers (try this with the Messiaen Serene Alleluias).
Grigg also had at least two regular, non-credit classes: the hymn-playing class of his studio that met weekly to play hymns in the ways mentioned above, plus as many ways as Grigg could imagine, and probably with a hymnal on their heads, and the “Wizards,” comprising aspiring conductors, who were given instruction in conducting hymns as well as the opportunity to conduct the Chapel Choir during services.
It’s Grigg’s voice that I heard in my ear for years after studying with him in the early 1980s. “Now, now, now Marilyn, is THAT how you wanted that phrase to sound?” “Marilyn, is the choir doing EXACTLY what you want them to do?” I couldn’t practice the organ without hearing his voice, challenging and encouraging, and I took that voice with me from Illinois to Connecticut to Minnesota. From Grigg I learned how to make my feet play phrases on the pedals to rival phrases I could sing or play with my hands, how to play hymns that sang, and how to pay attention to every single note I play, sing, conduct, or write. He was the teacher whose presence and style was so vivid and compelling, most of us who experienced it have never forgotten it, nor ceased to be grateful. So, to you, Grigg Fountain, organist, choir-director, mentor, professor, church musician, friend, here are a few tributes from those who know you well, and love you anyway:

•

Dear Grigg,
What better occasion than your 90th birthday to pay tribute to a professor who consistently went beyond his duties to become a true mentor, advisor, and friend? You are a remarkable man. Others may write about the mark you have made in your field. I write about the one you have left on my heart.
Church music should uplift and edify, you said. Words to cherish. Your knowledge of it was unrivalled, your enthusiasm contagious. You conveyed your passion so convincingly that it became mine, too. It is impossible to sing a hymn in church today without thinking of you.
Your ‘forgettery’ is legendary. It is striking that you still recall the smallest details about former choir members, how you cite sources for the vast, varied store of information you so readily share. I love your insatiable curiosity.
In the years since NU, I have been fortunate to get to know not only the mentor, but the man. The persona of those days seems only a veneer of the man you are: the sense of humor, the eccentricity perhaps exaggerated then to give you room in an environment that otherwise might have restricted you. The depth of your generosity, decency, and formidable intellect were sometimes obscured by irrepressible charm, affability, and an inexhaustible supply of intricately detailed stories in true southern tradition.
The greatest lesson you taught me was not musical, but human. When you learned that I was unable to finance further studies, you took me by the hand. You did not let it go until we arrived at the dean’s office, where you arranged everything. You showed me what kindness, grace, and mercy were about. What better example could you wish to live? What better legacy could you wish to leave?
With thanks and love,
Alisa

•

Dear Grigg,
Are you sure? How many times have you stopped unsuspecting students, faculty or even passersby to query, “Are you sure?” My answer is, yes, I am sure; you are truly part of Alice Millar Chapel and Northwestern University lore. And now you head into your 90s, and one wonders if you are still quite the character we knew you to be.
You spoke in a word order that led one to believe your native tongue had been German instead of South Carolinian. And after working with you for some twenty-three years, I heard myself saying one day that “the clouds in the sky look ominious.”
You spoke to your students and sometimes to co-workers in illustrations. To the organ student, “You have to treat a memory slip as you would a skidding car—go with the skid, bring yourself back and move on.”
I shall always think of you as an educator at heart. You so wanted us to understand why a hymn’s phrasing was important—a hallmark of your congregational organ playing. And to this day some hymns shall always be “right” only when played in a Fountainesque manner.
And, of course, we all remember you taught playing with a minimum of extraneous movement; no dramatic swooping over the keys for you. Your students learned to play while balancing a hymnal on the head. (I, in turn, tried typing and using the Dictaphone pedal while balancing a hymnal on my head.)
Ah, the memories and tales are endless. Thanks to you, I have a store of wonderful Fountain memories that will always make me smile.
Affectionately,
Margaret-at-the-desk

•

Most esteemed and honored Herr Kapellmeister,
As you may remember, we met in the spring of my junior year at Northwestern, when you played my Carol Suite with flutist Darlene Drew at a Millar service. You promptly rechristened me “Evangelical,” and I found myself in the Chapel Choir the following fall.
Through you, Northwestern opened to me in a new way. You suggested that I use the Chapel Oratory—the “Prophet’s Chamber,” as you called it—as a composition studio a few times a week. And you provided an introduction to Alan Stout, who became my Kompositionslehrer. Two years in Chapel Choir transformed choral singing for me; all subsequent choral experiences seemed tame and dull. Music-making at Millar was dynamic, as you collaborated with staff, organists, and singers on a new worship experience each week. It was a community, not just an ensemble. From you I learned to think about the Why of singing, not just the How, and to think creatively about how music serves a larger purpose. Your conducting technique was inimitable—though many of us did our honest best to imitate you; I even tried to apply it to Gilbert & Sullivan—but the music you pulled from us transcended technique. At its best, it was prayer, pure laughter, hallelujah.
For all the opportunities you gave me to sing, conduct, arrange, play the trumpet or the organ, perhaps your greatest gift to me, Grigg, was the seriousness with which you treated me as a composer, young as I was. For one December Sunday in 1979, you requested brass settings for “St. Denio.” On short notice, I cranked out a noisy, festive arrangement, which went off with aplomb. As I walked around campus later that day, I felt newly born as a composer. Later that year, I gave an unconventional senior recital in the chapel, with you graciously playing the organ, and members of the Chapel Choir on loan. You helped set me on a path I haven’t strayed from since.
I’ve been going through old Millar recordings, and I have memorable dubs of Brahms’s “Lass dich,” Britten’s Te Deum, and the Lutkin “Benediction,” as well as the big pieces from my years: Rachmaninoff, Schönberg, Bruckner. Thank you for all those experiences, now memories that haven’t lost any of their sweetness or power. But there is one little recording I prize, because it documents our work together: Krebs’s setting of “Wachet auf.” I’m playing the tune serenely on the trumpet; you’re playing a giggling trio on the Millar organ.
Let Krebs’s ditty be a toast to you in your 90s: a gently carbonated spiritual cocktail, a happy mixture of humor and gravity, shaken lightly.

David Evan Thomas

(a.k.a. David Evangelical Thomas)

•

Dear Grigg,
In your ninetieth year, although I am sure you will insist that you are at least 115, it is a good and proper exercise to reflect on all that you have given me—given all of us, who have had the good fortune to work with you. You shared your knowledge, also your craft, and most of all your passion for making music not just notes. You are teacher, colleague, and friend all at the same time, because I am still learning and sharing, while always enjoying your company.
There are three hallmarks of your teaching that constantly inspire me. You have a keen sense of hearing and listening. This seems so basic, but you heard both where the “sound” was, whether in choir or on the organ, and you knew how to get it to where it would transcend the bounds of the page. I will never forget you saying about one of your graduate students after a performance he did, “Well, that is not the way I would have done it, BUT it had complete validity.” You wanted us to become our own artists and not just clones. And I watched you agonize from week to week about seating plans for the choir and how to make small ensembles that utilized everyone, not just the strongest voices or musicians. “Maybe if I put her next to him, her musicianship will rub off on his voice, and his tone will improve her singing.” You made each of us feel that we were important as individuals and to the entire ensemble. Finally, I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard you say, “Now ladies and gentlemen, that is in tune and in time, BUT IT DOESN’T MAKE THE HAIR ON THE BACK OF MY NECK STAND UP!” You refused to let us get away with cold music-making and phrasing—ever.
Thanks for all the inspiration and joy you have given and still give to all of us.

Kooort (Kurt R. Hansen)

•

Dear Grigg,
When I was appointed as a full-time faculty member of the Northwestern University School of Music in 1962, I was absolutely elated. This was my first teaching position, and of course Northwestern was the “plum” of the appointments that year. I was already well aware of the excellent reputation of the school in general, and was particularly happy to be working in a university with such a strong organ and church music program. Shortly before my move to Evanston, a friend talked about the remarkable talents and virtues of another recent appointment, Grigg Fountain. I was encouraged to seek you out, as you were “a truly unique” individual.
Soon after my arrival, I investigated the various church programs in the vicinity of the university. I decided that the most interesting was in fact the university church service, led by the university chaplain, with choral and organ music under your direction. At that time, the services were held in Lutkin Hall, a music auditorium named after famed musician Peter Christian Lutkin of ‘benediction’ fame. At my first visit to these services, my reaction was mixed: the organ music was very good in spite of the old, very ordinary Casavant organ, an instrument whose only claim to fame was that, at some earlier time, André Marchal had given a recital on it. The choir and the sermon were also good, but the surroundings—theater seating, a stage, very little Christian art or decor—made the experience less than totally satisfactory. In talking with you afterward, you expressed your great frustration with having to produce music on such an inadequate, poorly maintained organ.
I continued attending church in Lutkin, feeling more at home each time and more in tune with the ethos as I got to know more students, faculty, and you. My attendance was soon rewarded by what I can only describe as “the most extraordinary virtuoso performance” I have ever witnessed.
For most people, a “virtuoso” musical performance is one in which a very difficult work is performed. Usually, such a work involves an incredible number of notes (usually very fast notes), advanced techniques, a dazzling display of physical or musical prowess or endurance, etc. At the service in question, you did indeed give a dazzling performance at the organ. You had carefully investigated each and every problem, defect or weakness of the instrument. You knew which keys stuck, which pipes spoke slowly, which valves shut slowly, which specific notes were painfully out of tune, which pistons were unreliable, and so forth.
At the organ offertory, you played a piece during which you were able to feature each and every one of these problems! You had worked out special fingering so that getting to each sticky key, out-of-tune note or other unfortunate musical situation was treated in a rather flamboyant way. “Let the worshipper see just what I have to endure with this terrible instrument” must have been your guiding incentive. Even the non-musicians had to have realized that what they were hearing was just plain awful. Immediately afterward, you stepped to the podium to ask for forgiveness, explaining rather sheepishly that you had done the best you could under such trying circumstances. You then expressed your profound desire that the university get a new, adequate instrument for your good, and the good of all humanity.
One was hard-pressed to know whether to cry or laugh, whether to applaud or boo. Whatever one’s reaction, the performance was memorable—and totally VIRTUOSO.

James Hopkins

•

Dear Grigg,
I have so many vivid memories of my four years with you at Northwestern, but I can’t help but focus on those first few weeks as a timid and frightened freshman. I knew that studying organ with you was going to be an unusual experience when, in the course of determining bench height and position at the console, you asked me “What kind of underwear do you wear, boxers or briefs?” I don’t think many organ professors ask that question of new students. (Apparently boxer shorts offer a convenient way to gauge one’s front-to-back position on the bench.)
You may not remember, but my freshman year was the year that you doggedly attempted to teach us that all music—and particularly Baroque music—relates to dance. (This was part of your pedagogical genius: there was always some sort of overarching concept or theme that held together a lesson, rehearsal, or often, as in this case, an entire year.) I still chuckle when I recall our organ class one day, singly and in groups, in the Millar Chapel gallery, gamely attempting to dance “Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich” from the Orgelbüchlein.
As I look back upon my career as a church musician, I am particularly grateful for the complete musical education I received from you at Northwestern. For centuries, the art of the organist, and the church musician, was set apart from other musical disciplines by the expectation that the organist would master all the facets of music-making: performance, improvisation, score-reading, transposition, composition, conducting, voice training, diplomacy, and so on. You provided a remarkable environment at Millar Chapel that offered constant opportunities to learn and practice all these skills. And we were allowed, yes encouraged, to experiment in so many different ways. Those vocal improvisations, with flute-celeste clusters sustained by pencils in the keys, are not something I have ever found a practical use for, but they planted the seeds for me to develop organ improvisational skills on my own after leaving Northwestern. Thank you for encouraging all of us to sing, to conduct, to prepare hymn settings, and above all to value the skills and talents of others.
I am also grateful for your unique ability to teach students to teach themselves. Yes, we would spend an entire hour at the organ picking apart the first measure of a Bach toccata. But the real learning occurred in the seven days following, when we were expected to apply that knowledge, in the practice room, to the rest of the piece—and then, in subsequent years, to apply it to other works in the same genre. In a very real sense, you continue to teach me to play the organ every day.
Best wishes, and thanks for everything, as you sail into your tenth decade.
--James Russell Lowell Biery

 

Neal Campbell

Neal Campbell holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Manhattan School of Music, is a former member of the AGO National Council, and is the Director of Music and Organist of St. Luke’s Parish, Darien, Connecticut.

Charles Dodsley Walker turns 90 years old on March 16. In his long and varied career, he has collaborated with many of the legendary figures in the organ and choral music world and is himself one of the key players in the golden era of New York church music. His career began when he entered the Choir School at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine at age ten. His education continued at Trinity School in New York, Trinity College in Hartford, and—following service in the United States Navy—at Harvard University.
He held positions at the American Cathedral in Paris, St. Thomas Chapel and the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York, Lake Delaware Boys Camp, the Berkshire Choral Institute, Trinity School and the Chapin School in New York, Union Theological Seminary School of Sacred Music, Manhattan School of Music, and New York University. He is a Fellow of the American Guild of Organists and is the founding director of the Canterbury Choral Society, which he began in 1952 at the Church of Heavenly Rest—a position he still holds, preparing and conducting three concerts per season.
In what others would call their retirement years, Charlie Walker has served at Trinity Church in Southport, Connecticut, and since 2007 he has worked alongside me at St. Luke’s Parish in Darien, Connecticut. In the summer of 2009, Charlie and I sat down in my office over several days and began a series of conversations, not unlike those that are typical between us on any given day—only this time the digital recorder was on. They were conversations between friendly colleagues, and I have tried to keep the conversational tone in the edited transcript that follows.

Neal Campbell: I first knew your name as president of the American Guild of Organists; when were you president of the AGO?
Charles Dodsley Walker: 1971–75.

NC: And you were active in the Guild before that?
CDW: I joined the Guild [Hartford Chapter, 1937] in order to take the Associateship exam while I was at Trinity College. I was pleased when the Headquarters Chapter had a dinner in 1939 honoring the recipients of the certificates, and they sat me next to Ernest M. Skinner, who proceeded to regale me with limericks. He used to come around the Cathedral quite often when I was a little boy chorister just to see how his organ was doing.

NC: What other offices did you hold in the Guild?
CDW: When I came back from France in January 1951 to be the organist at the Church of the Heavenly Rest, I immediately connected up with the Headquarters Chapter of the Guild, and that’s where S. Lewis Elmer comes into the picture. He lived near the church and he was most interested in me as the new 31-year-old organist of the church. He was very friendly and seemed to want to get me into the leadership of the Guild. When the national librarian, Harold Fitter, resigned, there was a vacancy, so he appointed me National Librarian. And then another vacancy occurred, and I was appointed National Registrar. The next thing I knew I was National Secretary—for ten years.

NC: What were the biggest things you had to work on immediately when you were elected, do you recall?
CDW: At the time I was elected, there were two important groups in the Guild wanting to secede. One was a tri-cities chapter in California. They had been so upset about the perceived (and actual) running of the Guild from New York City, that they had managed to get a Californian, Gene Driskill, elected to the council—this was during Alec [Wyton]’s regime—and his chapter paid his travel expenses so he could come and be a member of the council.

NC: Up to that time the council was all New York organists, wasn’t it?
CDW: Almost, yes. And then the Twin Cities Chapter wanted to secede too. So I felt that it was our job to address this issue by really revolutionizing the setup of the whole organization as regards the board of directors, which is the National Council. At the time there were fifteen regional chairmen who were simply appointed by S. Lewis Elmer. We reduced that to nine regions, which it still is, and figured out a way for each region to elect its own representatives. That’s been amended and changed since then, of course, but it’s basically the same system we have in place now.

NC: You’re a native New Yorker, aren’t you?
CDW: Yes. Born right in the city . . .

NC: But your folks moved to New Jersey shortly after that?
CDW: Yes, Glen Ridge.

NC: And you and I share that connection with Christ Church in Glen Ridge, where you were baptized.
CDW: Right. I also have a musical connection with it, because as a child I sang for a couple of summers in the choir there. And, just last night I came across two 3 x 5 cards signed by the organist at the time, Herbert Kellner.

NC: This is before Buck Coursen, my predecessor? [The Rev. Wallace M. Coursen, Jr., F.A.G.O., organist of the church 1936–80]
CDW: Yes. Anyway, it was Mr. Kellner authorizing this Master Charles Walker to play the organ on Fridays for one hour and a half . . . and the other 3 x 5 card allowed me to play there for one hour on Tuesday and one hour on Friday . . . or something like that, during the summer. That was around 1934 or 1935.

NC: Was this likely the first organ you heard, at Christ Church?
CDW: Yes, it was. My first memory of it is that the swell shades were visible to the entire congregation. They were sort of dark brown, but you could see them opening and closing, and Mr. Kellner liked to use them, and they were opening and closing a lot. So I was quite fascinated with that. [Laughing]

NC: What was the organ, do you remember? The present organ is a Möller from about 1953.
CDW: I have no idea, but by 1934, when I had practice privileges, they had obviously bought a used four-manual console—they didn’t have anywhere near a four-manual organ there, but I just loved it! It had the reed stops lettered in red, and I thought that was very impressive, and it did have a Tuba! [More laughter]

NC: What led you to seek application to the Cathedral Choir School?
CDW: My next elder brother, Marriott . . .

NC: You were the youngest of three brothers?
CDW: Yes. Marriott liked music a lot and played the trumpet. We had friends in Montclair who had a boy in the school. So Marriott went over to see about entering the school, but he was already twelve or thirteen, and they just said, “you’re too old.” So then along came Charles, and I was very interested in going to that school. It’s hard to answer exactly why my parents were interested in sending me to the school, except they thought I was musical and that I would enjoy it.

NC: It was a boarding school?
CDW: Yes. People did ask “why do you want to send your boy to boarding school?” I suppose they still ask that today, for example at St. Thomas. You have to take a boy away from his Mama!

NC: At the Choir School, it was Miles Farrow who admitted you. What sort of musician was he?
CDW: I don’t know. I was only ten, and I admired him very much. I can still distinctly remember the way he harmonized the descending major scale when we warmed up. There are different ways of harmonizing it—or not harmonizing it! He did a I chord, then a V chord, then a vi chord, then a iii chord, then a ii-6 chord, and a I-6/4, then a V and then a I. That’s the way he did it, every time! I happen to like to do it different ways rather than always the same way, but that’s the way he did it.

NC: So it wasn’t too long after that that Norman Coke-Jephcott came along?
CDW: Right. But then there was an interim when, among others, Channing Lefebvre was the chief substitute. He was at Trinity Wall Street, but I seem to remember him coming up for Evensong.

NC: When you look back on your career as a choirboy, do you think of Coke-Jephcott as your teacher?
CDW: Oh, yes! Cokey came in 1932, and almost immediately I started lessons with him.

NC: Organ lessons?
CDW: Yes, organ, and harmony and counterpoint. He required that you have a weekly lesson in harmony and counterpoint as well as an organ lesson. John Baldwin was his student about this time.

NC: What were the daily rehearsals like? Were they just learning music?
CDW: Yes, but with quite a bit of emphasis on tone quality.

NC: Did they sing Evensong everyday, or most days?
CDW: Not all 40 boys—maybe half a dozen or so would sing in St. James Chapel as I recall, and I’m not sure it was everyday.

NC: On Sunday mornings, was it Eucharist or Morning Prayer?
CDW: I think they did Morning Prayer followed by the Eucharist. I remember that they intoned the entire prayer of consecration and the pitch would go up and down. And I had extremely good sense of pitch in those days and could tell if the celebrant was flatting or sharping.

NC: But the choir sang morning and evening service on Sundays?
CDW: Oh, yeah!

NC: Did you ever join with any of the other boy choirs in New York?
CDW: Aside from our basketball league with St. Thomas and Grace Church, the only other time we were on the same program was Wednesdays in Holy Week for the Bach St. Matthew Passion with the choir of St. Bartholomew’s Church and the boys of St. Thomas Choir. The Cathedral Choir—the whole choir—sang second chorus. As you know, there are double choruses. And that was the first time I ever saw T. Tertius Noble in action.

NC: What was he like in those days?
CDW: I would say “avuncular” would be the word. He seemed (at least on those occasions) a nice fatherly presence.

NC: And these were at the cathedral?
CDW: Oh, no—at St. Bartholomew’s, played by David McK. Williams, astonishingly! I was bowled over by his accompaniment. The thing I remember most vividly is the movement toward the end of Part I—where you have the soprano and alto duet and the chorus interjects fortissimo “Leave him, leave him, bind him not” and he socked the crescendo pedal and then, boom, he would close it. It just seemed to me to be flawless. He was amazing.

NC: They did this every year, didn’t they?
CDW: Every single year. In fact, after my voice changed I did it a couple of times as an alto, just because I wanted to participate in it.

NC: Did Dr. Williams direct you all? What was his personality like?
CDW: He was magisterial, he was definitely in command. Everybody paid close attention.

NC: Was the idea of doing all these organ accompaniments what inspired you to start the Canterbury Choral Society?
CDW: Well, when I was only 15 or 16, I thought that’s just the way it is in church—you do it with the organ. I realized what I had been missing (it must have been in 1939 or 1940) when I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra do Brahms’ Requiem not in a church, but in a concert hall. With all due respect for the organ, that music as orchestrated by Brahms was a wonderful musical experience! I thought to myself “boy, I would like to have a big chorus and do that kind of stuff!”

NC: So after the cathedral you went to Trinity School. Did they have an organ there?
CDW: They had one of Ernest Skinner’s early organs. It was built, I believe, before 1910, a two-manual. [Opus 141, 1907]

NC: In the school auditorium or in the chapel?
CDW: The chapel. I also went to the Cathedral Choir School and to Trinity College—all of these were Episcopal schools! They all had compulsory chapel services, which none of them have any more.

NC: Your parents were obviously Episcopalians.
CDW: Both my parents were cradle Episcopalians. In fact, my grandmother taught Sunday School in Dakota Territory before North and South Dakota were separated. And I have the melodeon that she played when she was teaching Sunday School.

NC: Did you continue to study organ through high school at Trinity?
CDW: Yes. When I went to Trinity School, I continued organ and I practiced all the time after school. Trinity is exactly one mile south of the cathedral, in the same block. I would go to school and then I’d practice at the cathedral, and then go and do my homework.

NC: Did Cokey prepare you for the AGO exams specifically?
CDW: No, [Clarence] Watters did. You see, I had four years with Cokey and four years with Watters. That’s what my organ instruction was—two years in the choir school and two years at Trinity School. Then I went to college. It was Channing Lefebvre who sent me to Trinity College in Hartford. My father said, “You know the organist at Trinity Church. Let’s go ask for his advice.” And I’m glad he did. We wanted a liberal arts college with strong organ, not a conservatory, and Trinity was perfect.

NC: You must have seen the cathedral nave being built.
CDW: Yes, we sang for the dedication of the Pilgrim Pavement—the great slabs of stone with the medallions in it. We also sang at the dedication of the great bronze doors, which are very impressive portals for the cathedral.
The nave was being constructed when I was a choirboy. There were elevators outside going up and down the scaffolding. The nave actually opened several years later—around 1940, I believe.

NC: Did you have a church job at this time?
CDW: No, just Trinity School with its daily chapel.

NC: Did you list preludes and postludes?
CDW: Just preludes, I think. Still, a lot of repertoire for a high school kid.

NC: So when was your first church job, in college?
CDW: Yes. That was a wonderful thing. In my freshman year, the adjunct professor of German at Trinity College, named Kendrick Grobel, who also had a doctorate in theology from Marburg, asked Clarence Watters to recommend someone to be organist of the church of which he was the pastor. He also had a bachelor of music degree, and was a tenor—and Clarence recommended me. I went out there and played a recital in the spring of 1937 at the age of 17 for this church—Stafford Springs Congregational Church, Stafford Springs, Connecticut—halfway between Hartford and Worcester. This was the first time I ever played for money. They took up a collection and I got $14—quite a lot of money! So they offered me the job at $10 a Sunday, and that, too, was a lot of money. That was the most felicitous thing that could happen to a 17-year-old. I also made some money in a dance band on Saturday night, so I was doing OK. And I was able without any trouble at all to convince my father to buy me a car. As soon as I was 17, I had a Ford convertible, a seven-year-old Model A.

NC: What kind of background did you already have under your belt when you went to Trinity College?
CDW: Well, Cokey was very thorough; I was really lucky. First of all, he was on the exam committee of the AGO forever. He was a Fellow of the AGO and of the Royal College of Organists, and all that. He played accurately and well, but I was also lucky to study with Clarence Watters—which was very different. Clarence was really a brilliant virtuoso. And this is not to play down Coke-Jephcott, who was a wonderful improviser, very fine. And he played Bach very accurately—he just didn’t have the sort of brilliance that Clarence had. Cokey was a very colorful service player and used the organ wonderfully.

NC: Did he do most of the playing, or did he have an assistant?
CDW: Soon after Coke-Jephcott came to the cathedral, Thomas Matthews came to be his assistant. Cokey had been organist at Grace Church in Utica, taught Tom there, and brought Tom to the cathedral when I was 12 and he was 17. He was a very good organist, and I admired him and I loved to turn pages for him—we were really close considering I was 12 and he was 17.

NC: How did they divide up the service? With the vast spaces, did one play and the other conduct as is the style now, or did Cokey play and conduct from the console?
CDW: There was a little of each. Cokey probably played about half the time. I do remember distinctly Tommy playing Brahms’s How lovely, so I guess Coke wanted to get out front and conduct that. I have a funny feeling they used the vox and strings liberally! He had been a bandmaster in the army in England, so I guess he knew how to conduct, although I never saw him conduct an orchestra.

NC: Did they ever use brass in the cathedral services?
CDW: I don’t recall that they did. They used the Tuba Mirabilis though, by golly! You don’t need brass instruments with that! [Hearty laughter]
Anyway . . . getting back to Coke’s teaching . . . he wasn’t a stolid Englishman, but he was solid and he was punctilious about fingering Bach correctly and not allowing me to get away with anything. I remember playing the Bach Toccata in C for Paul Callaway when I was 15 and I had that well under my fingers. Paul was at St. Mark’s in Grand Rapids about that time, and my uncle was in his choir in Grand Rapids. My father was from Grand Rapids.

NC: Had you known of Clarence Watters prior to your study with him?
CDW: I hadn’t known of him until my father and I visited Channing Lefebvre to consult about college.
They had a wonderful Skinner organ in the chapel at Trinity College, one of the first on which Donald Harrison and Ernest Skinner collaborated. It might amuse you to know that at this time I didn’t know what a mixture stop was! There was one on the cathedral organ—it was there on the stop knob, along with Stentorphone and some other interesting stop names! But it wasn’t until I got up to Hartford and worked with Watters that I learned what mixtures were all about. It was a whole different experience.
It was a fine organ. It had a wonderful 32′ Open Wood, the low twelve pipes of which were lined up in a straight row against the back wall of the chapel. I was in heaven there; I was one of the assistant chapel organists, along with two others. At the cathedral, it had been a very rare privilege to play the big organ, as I had my lessons on one of the chapel organs. But here at Trinity College, I could just go in and play the big four-manual organ whenever I wanted to.

NC: What possessed Watters to get the present organ?
CDW: I’m not sure, but Don Harrison had died and Clarence admired Dick Piper, the tonal director of the Austin firm, which was right there in Hartford. I think he got a donor and was able to create the exact organ he wanted. It is very French, and wonderful!

NC: Did you keep up with Clarence over the years?
CDW: Oh, yes! Very much so. In fact I had him play at Heavenly Rest a lot.

NC: Didn’t you say that he was also a candidate at Heavenly Rest when you got it?
CDW: Yes. [Laughing] I had written him from Paris asking him to write a letter of recommendation for me when I applied for the position. You see, I had some pretty good connections by then, like Frank Sayre [the Very Rev. Francis B. Sayre, Jr.] from my Cambridge days and Canon West at the cathedral, and Clarence, too. So I asked him to write, and he wrote back saying “Charlie, I’d be glad to, except that I, too, have applied for the position.” That’s absolutely true.

NC: Tell me more about Watters as a teacher.
CDW: Ah, yes. Well, first of all, it was a revelation to find out about the whole idea of mixtures and mutations. Somehow or another I had not learned this from Cokey. Cokey was absolutely wonderful, but . . . I didn’t learn anything about French Trompettes and that sort of sound. I was used to Cornopeans, and so on. Watters, a pupil of Marcel Dupré, acquainted me with the French tonal qualities of an organ. In a word, Clarence was like a French organist as a teacher.

NC: He was already recognized as a master organist by that time wasn’t he, and he was pretty young?
CDW: Yes. He was in his 30s . . . [pausing to calculate] . . . and of course he had studied with Dupré and lived in Paris. Repertoire: again, very French oriented. And I think this is good. I am glad to have had the English orientation of Coke-Jephcott. And his improvisations reeked of Elgar! You know, the pomp and circumstance aspect of cathedral improvisation was his specialty. Whereas, of course, Watters reeked of the French school.

NC: Was Clarence a good improviser?
CDW: Yes, very! I remember once Dr. Ogilby [the Trinity College president] put a sign up on the bulletin board in his own hand saying that “this Sunday there will be an improvisation for three organs: CW, RBO, CW”—meaning Clarence Watters, Remsen B. Ogilby, and the other CW referring to me. Dr. Ogilby had been a chaplain in World War II and he had a portable organ—you know one of those things that unfold, a harmonium—and he set that up in the middle of the chapel. There is a small two-manual practice organ in the crypt that was for me to play, and Clarence of course played the big organ. Ogilby played a hymn, which he could manage—he actually played the organ and carillon pretty well—and I would do a little improvisation on it from the chapel, which would come rolling up the stone staircase from the crypt, and then Clarence would play something more elaborate on the Aeolian-Skinner organ. Then, we repeated the sequence, and finally Clarence would play an improvisation on both of the hymns together! It was really very clever.
The thing about that story is that this was Ogilby’s idea! He said “let’s do it” and he wrote the notice about it. Not many college presidents I know of would have that kind of imagination!

NC: Did Clarence improvise in the formal style?
CDW: Yes, he could improvise a fugue. And he played all the extant works of Dupré including the preludes and fugues, the Variations sur un Noël, and the Symphonie-Passion; the Stations of the Cross was a specialty of his. He played them extraordinarily well. He played everything from memory, and he insisted that I play from memory. I wasn’t disciplined enough to apply that to everything I learned, but what I played for him I played from memory.

NC: Did Cokey play from memory?
CDW: I don’t believe so. But Clarence had a huge and amazing memorized repertoire.

NC: Who had he studied with? We associate him with Dupré, but he must have started somewhere else.
CDW: He grew up in East Orange, part of that New Jersey tradition we were talking about. [Looking up Watters biography1] He was born in 1902 and studied with Mark Andrews. He was also the organist of Christ’s Church in Rye, New York, and Church of the Ascension in Pittsburgh. And from 1952–76 he was at St. John’s in West Hartford, while he was at Trinity College 1932–67 as head of the music department.

NC: You told me that he was the whole music department at Trinity, and he directed the Glee Club?
CDW: Yes. And this was good, because prior to that I just knew what we had done at the cathedral, but Clarence taught a lot of the choral and orchestral repertoire, which I didn’t know at all before that. In the Glee Club, he did very good repertoire. I knew for the first time Monteverdi—something from Orfeo, which we sang in Italian. And good folk-song arrangements, and Brahms songs. The college was all men at the time, so we did TTBB arrangements.
When I went there at age 16, he immediately appointed me accompanist of the Glee Club: this was good for me musically and socially. At Trinity, the Glee Club went off to all the girls’ schools and did joint concerts so we could do SATB music—and we had dances—that sort of thing, which I liked. And after I got my car for the Stafford Springs job, I had a friend who was adept at chasing girls, so he took me on as an apprentice. [Much laughter] That was also something I gave thanks for . . . all the way through high school I was so busy learning to be an organist that I was sheltered.

NC: Were there any other organ students in your class at Trinity?
CDW: Yes, my fellow assistant organist at the college was Ralph Grover, and he had been in the choir at St. Paul’s in Flatbush, Brooklyn, under Ralph Harris, who was a well-known and respected organist of that era.

NC: What did you study during your first year with Clarence? Did he give you Dupré to begin with?
CDW: Well, the first thing he did, which sort of annoyed me to be honest with you—and I don’t advise this—he decided to re-teach me some Bach works I had learned with Cokey, such as the Toccata in C and trio sonatas.
That reminds me of an interesting story. There was a Miss Kostikyan, who taught piano to boys in the Cathedral Choir School. (This was during the Depression, and I didn’t think to ask my father for lessons, and it wasn’t until Cokey suggested it to my father that he sprang for organ lessons.) One day I was practicing on the two-manual organ in St. Ansgarius’ Chapel, and Miss Kostikyan came in with this young man, and she said, “Charles, I want you to meet Virgil Fox,” and I said, “Oh, glad to meet you, Virgil.” He was maybe 20 or 21. I got off the bench (Miss Kostikyan had told me he was an organist) and asked if he wanted to play. And he said “I want to play the big organ.” I told him I couldn’t authorize him to play the big organ, so he deigned to play the chapel organ saying “you can’t make music on a little thing like this.” But he played very well and that was my introduction to Virgil Fox.
Of course I met him many times later. After he left Riverside, I allowed him to give lessons at Heavenly Rest. And he was on the AGO national council during part of the time I was—he was not notable for his regularity of attendance at meetings! Nor was Biggs. I also have a letter from Biggs apologizing for having problems attending council meetings!
When the Lincoln Center Philharmonic Hall organ was dedicated, Biggs, Fox, and Crozier played the opening. And Biggs, I swear, he played like an automaton. There was no feeling, or brilliance, or anything else. Virgil . . . well he played it damn well, or course, but tastelessly. Crozier, to me, was perfection, and far beyond these other two in musicianship, and technique, too. I just thought she was wonderful. This was in the early 60s.

NC: Anything else about Watters before we go on? He was really instrumental in introducing the music of Dupré to this country.
CDW: Well he would talk for hours about Dupré, not only music, but about marvelous dinners with seven different kinds of wine, and that sort of thing. He and his wife Midge socialized with Marcel and Jeanette Dupré and were really good friends.
He was also a bug on fingering—my impression is that Dupré taught Clarence his approach, and then Watters taught me Dupré’s approach. During lessons, Clarence would write out for me, in detail, all of the fingerings of the complicated stuff.

NC: Did he insist that you play things his way?
CDW: I don’t know—I just didn’t have any reason to challenge anything he taught. He was very confident of his gifts. There is a picture of him sitting at the organ in one of the college yearbooks, with the caption Optimus Sum, so everyone got the idea! [Huge amounts of laughter]
You know he played the dedicatory recital on the big Skinner at the Memorial Church at Harvard. That gives you an idea of his renown at the time.

NC: Well, that’s a nice introduction into your Harvard years. You must have known that organ?
CDW: I only know it because I remember Archibald T. Davison. He was the organist and choirmaster as well as the director of the famous Harvard Glee Club. I had met him previously, so I went up to him at the chapel and he was playing this big organ, but I never played it. I wasn’t an organ student at Harvard.

NC: It’s while you were at Harvard that you were assistant organist at Christ Church in Harvard Square?
CDW: Yes, under Bill Rand [W. Judson Rand] whose first name was actually Wilberforce, and I occasionally called him that! Incidentally, E. Power Biggs had previously been organist of the church.

NC: What was Frank Sayre’s connection in the chronology?
CDW: He had just graduated from Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge and was an assistant at Christ Church, was learning to chant the service, and our paths just crossed. His brother Woodrow Wilson Sayre was also around. They were each grandsons of Woodrow Wilson. Frank and I corresponded throughout the war when he was a Navy chaplain. He later invited me to play at Washington Cathedral after he became dean.
The organ in Christ Church was a new four-manual Aeolian-Skinner [Opus 1007], although the fourth manual was prepared for. The church had terrible acoustics, but the organ was good and was used as the first of Aeolian-Skinner’s demonstration recordings, before the King of Instruments series.

NC: Yes, it’s recently been re-released by JAV, I think. That’s where you met G. Donald Harrison?
CDW: Yes. Don seemed sort of lonely—his wife lived in New York—and he and Bill Rand were great friends and I tagged along, all the time. They each loved to drink and talk, and I was just a kid, but he was so nice to me. There were all these bawdy limericks! And I’ve got lots of letters from him.
After the war, I got appointed to St. Thomas Chapel (during the war my father bought a nice piece of land on Ridgewood Avenue in Glen Ridge), and I conceived the idea that I would like to have an organ studio and be a big fat organ teacher in Glen Ridge together with my New York job. And I talked to Don about this—how to get an organ for this studio. Gosh, I learned a lot about organs from hanging out with Bill and Don putting the organ in Christ Church.
I invited Don to dinner to show him my ideas, with the idea of building an organ along the lines of his specification in the Harvard Dictionary.2 I suggested a couple of changes and he was always willing to consider my ideas.

NC: What was Don like in these social settings?
CDW: It was mostly he and Bill, who was a real extrovert, bantering back and forth. What I remember most was that it was limerick after limerick, and usually pretty bawdy!

NC: Did you get to any of the Boston churches?
CDW: Oh yes, Carl McKinley, Everett Titcomb, Francis Snow . . . and I was active in the Guild.

NC: Was George Faxon around in those days?
CDW: Yes. And Bill Zeuch,3 who had been one of the interim organists at St. John the Divine, along with Channing before Cokey. I’d known him as a choirboy, called him Mr. Zeuch, but had no idea he was involved with Aeolian-Skinner until I met him during these Harvard years.

NC: Biggs?
CDW: Yes. Bill Rand for some reason had a key to the Busch-Reisinger Museum, his choir sang there from time to time, and Bill and I went in one night. The organ was playing, and it was Biggs practicing for his CBS Sunday morning broadcast. (I later played a recital there, and Don Harrison praised my playing, which was a huge compliment.)
Anyway, we came in to use the organ late one night, and found Jimmy Biggs practicing, and his first wife, Colette—who was French and had a very fiery temperament—was yelling at him about his playing “non, non Jeemee, not like zeehs!” She was really letting him have it. As you know, that marriage did not last, and he later married this nice lady, Peggy.

NC: Daniel Pinkham must have been around then.
CDW: Yes, he was an undergraduate. We became friendly. He had a harpsichord in his room in Harvard yard. He pronounced it hopsycawd! We actually played a duet recital at Christ Church, including the Soler that you and I played recently. Anyway, later, when I lived in Paris, I found out that Janet [Janet Hayes, later Mrs. CDW] had been his soloist when she was at New England Conservatory.

NC: Let’s talk about the Lake Delaware Boys Camp, since they just celebrated their 100th anniversary, which was written up in the New York Times [Sunday, July 26, 2009]. You applied once and were turned down because you were too young?
CDW: That’s right. The director of the camp asked Channing [Lefebvre] if he knew of an organist, and he recommended me. I went and saw the director, and he said that I appeared to be qualified, but that they couldn’t possibly use someone who was the same age as the campers. At that time the campers’ age range went up to 17. So I tucked my tail between my legs and went off to college. After I graduated from college, I came back and proclaimed, “I am now twenty years old and how about putting me on your staff.” So they did and therein hangs the tale. That was 1940 and I played my last service there in 1990!

NC: You were there for 50 years!?
CDW: Not every year of the 50. I was in the war and in Europe, but I was there for most of it.

NC: That’s an unusual combination—camp and church.
CDW: The unique quality of the camp is that it’s designed as a military organization, and they have military drills and carry little fake rifles and do all sorts of military maneuvers. Then on top of that they have this very elaborate, Anglo-Catholic ritual. And the campers were taken from the strain of society that needs help, although the majority are born and brought up Episcopalian. My son and my nephew went there. Quite a few of them are clergy children. They all are taught to genuflect at the Incarnatus of the creed. Now they may be Baptist, or Pentecostal—God knows what, but boy, you genuflect at the Incarnatus! And they have the Angelus three times a day—whatever anyone is doing, the chapel bell starts going morning, noon and night and everything stops and everybody stands very quiet. Some of them recite the “Hail Mary.”

NC: They had chapel, or Mass everyday?
CDW: Mass everyday.

NC: What was the organ?
CDW: Well, that was one of the most interesting things about it. It was an 1877 two-manual tracker by Hilborne L. Roosevelt that had been ordered by Commodore Elbridge T. Gerry to be installed in his mansion on the estate. He also had a mansion on Fifth Avenue, the land of which is still owned by the Gerrys, on top of which stands the Pierre Hotel. It was Commodore Gerry’s son, Robert Livingston Gerry and his wife Cornelia Harriman Gerry, who founded the camp.
Gerry was the commodore of the New York Yacht Club and had the biggest yacht in the city—it was 190 feet long. Incidentally, I just found out an interesting thing about his yacht—it had a full set of Eucharistic vestments as part of its equipment. He was a very devoted high churchman!

NC: What parish did he attend?
CDW: They were closely connected with the Church of the Resurrection, and he actually built the Church of St. Edward the Martyr on East 109th Street, which is where the camp’s New York headquarters was for many decades. In fact that is where I was interviewed for the job.
In 1886 it was decided that the organ wasn’t big enough, so he had Roosevelt add a choir organ, which had among other things a 16-foot reed on it. It was a Bassoon (I think), a free reed. What is most notable about the organ is that it has never in the slightest way been electrified.

NC: Even to this day?
CDW: Yes, even to this day, oh yeah! It has three large bellows that are attached to a crankshaft with a very large wheel, the rim of which has a handle that is eighteen inches long. You could put two boys alongside it. The effort required depends on how loudly the organist is playing—if the organist is playing loudly, the thing has to be pumped quite vigorously; if it’s being played for meditative music during communion, the kids found that they could sit right on the window sill right by this big flywheel and put their feet on the handle and just rock it back and forth. There’s an air gauge, which has a green light at the end of it, and an amber light part way down, and a red one further down, and the bottom of it has a huge skull and bones!

NC: For when it’s empty?
CDW: That means the organist has no air at all and you are in trouble! Anyway, it’s a wonderful organ. I made a recording in 1960 that has a lot of solos in it . . . at least three or four different boys sang, one of whom was nine years old and later killed in Vietnam. Really sad.
And there have been a lot of good organists associated with the camp. Clement Campbell, who was also organist at Resurrection [in New York] back in the 20s and 30s, was organist and choir director at the camp. One of the things that pleases me about the camp was that—even though I did not usually give organ lessons up there—I in one case gave the first organ lessons to this young 16-year-old who was quite a good pianist who went on to become organist of Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago: Eddie Mondello. He was a marvelous soprano for me and was interested in the organ, and I started him off.
Back to my musical duties at the camp. I trained the kids and played. But I didn’t select the music, because they are still doing the music they did back in 1909: Caleb Simper’s Mass and Will C. McFarlane’s Magnificat.

NC: You were into your first year at Harvard when the war intervened. What about your Harvard years after the war,4 and your teachers there?
CDW: Walter Piston, whom I had for most of my courses—harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and orchestration—was great at all those things. And Archibald T. Davidson, with whom I studied choral conducting, and choral composition. My other teacher was Tillman Merritt, who is not terribly well known now. He taught 16th-century harmony, as well as a course on Stravinsky and Hindemith, who were the latest things at that time—really cutting edge.

NC: What was Piston like? He’s probably the most famous.
CDW: He was wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. He had a very quiet way about him and he would come up with funny things. When a student would be up at the blackboard writing something, he would use some phrase like “that’s a somewhat infelicitous situation there, we have a parallel octaves between the alto and the bass in that progression.” He was very quiet about it. We all loved him. He was a very fine teacher. When I went there before the war, I don’t believe his book was out, which is now a standard textbook at colleges all over the place.5 But, we learned harmony according to that.
And in fugue, he was always quoting André Gedalge. I believe Gedalge’s book is now available.6 In those days, I think he was the only one in the country who knew about Gedalge. I remember what little fugal study I had previous to Piston was with Coke-Jephcott, using a textbook by James Higg.

NC: Any memorable fellow students with whom you went to Harvard?
CDW: Yes, Robert Middleton, who later taught at Vassar. Dan Pinkham was way behind me because he was a freshman when I was a graduate student.

NC: Then you went to the war and came back and finished your Harvard master’s degree; did you then go back to New York for a couple of years?
CDW: Yes, the same month I got my master’s from Harvard I got the F.A.G.O. too! Boy, what a sigh of relief I had!

NC: Did you continue to coach with Clarence Watters on the organ tests as part of the scheme?
CDW: Yes, I think the main piece was the Dupré G-minor Prelude and Fugue, so I went down to Hartford and took a few lessons with Clarence.

NC: Do you recall where the F.A.G.O. exam was held, what organ you played?
CDW: Yes, I came down and took it in New York. It was on the old Synod Hall organ at St. John the Divine. [Skinner Opus 204, 1913]

NC: Who were the examiners?
CDW: Harold Friedell, who was chairman of the examination committee, Seth Bingham, J. Lawrence Erb from Connecticut College, Philip James, and Norman Coke-Jephcott.

NC: So you got your master’s degree and F.A.G.O., and then you took the job in New York. Where was this?
CDW: St. Thomas Chapel. The vicar at St. Thomas Chapel had gone to Trinity College and he knew Watters. He came up to Cambridge and auditioned the service I played unbeknownst to me.

NC: Was it a boys’ choir at St. Thomas Chapel in those days?
CDW: Yes, it was. But it had a few women helping them out. I think I increased the size of the boys’ choir at least 300%, maybe more. I was an eager beaver back then. I would chauffeur the kids around town. Thomas Beveridge and Charles Wuorinen were each choirboys of mine, and they were both very bright and very good musicians.
They had an E. M. Skinner organ [Opus 598, 1926], and the console was in the chancel and the organ was up in the rear balcony, with a small accompaniment division up front. It was still a chapel of St. Thomas Church in those days. Now it’s All Saints Church on East 60th Street.
Anyway, I was in the Harvard Club (I was single, just out of Harvard and the dues were then quite low), taking my ease one day, when a man walked in who had been a tenor in my choir at Christ Church in Cambridge when he was at Harvard. While I was off at the war, he was off at seminary.
He walked into the club, his collar was on backward . . . it was the Rev. Richard R. P. Coombs. He later became the dean at the cathedral in Spokane. We sat down and talked and he said, “I was just offered the job of Canon of the American Cathedral in Paris,” and I said “You took it, of course,” and he said, “No, I like it where I am, but the dean is looking for an organist.” He told me that the dean was in New York at the moment, and I went to see him that very night at his hotel. I told the dean I majored in French and was crazy about French organs and French organ music. And by golly, I got the job. What a piece of luck!

NC: Sounds like you were pretty well set in New York, with a church and the school, but this lured you away?
CDW: Yes, I was well set. I was making more than the vicar of the St. Thomas Chapel and he couldn’t stand it!

NC: How did that happen?
CDW: Well, as a matter of fact, this will be amusing to anybody living in 2010. When I landed this wonderful job at St. Thomas Chapel, the salary was $2,000 a year, and when I landed this wonderful job at Trinity School as the director of music, the salary was $2,500 a year. So I was getting $4,500 a year, and the vicar of the St. Thomas Chapel told me somewhat ruefully that he was getting $4,000 a year.

NC: So, your combined salary . . .
CDW: Yes, combined salary. That’s what we musicians do, you know—we take these teaching jobs . . .

NC: But even so, you wanted to go to Paris?
CDW: Oh, yes! And of course the salary there was less.

NC: So, you took a cut to go there.
CDW: Oh yes. I never regretted that, though.

NC: Tell the story of how you went to Paris traveling first class!
CDW: The dean, Dean Beekman, who was a large man and just a slight bit pompous, said after hiring me, “You know, you must come by boat and you must come on the United States Line. I have a friend who is important in that company. Just give him my name and he’ll take care of you.” So I called up this man whose name was Commander de Riesthal, and I said, “Dean Beekman told me to call you because I want to reserve passage on the SS America to leave New York on September 8.” And he asked, “What class do you want to travel?” And I answered, “What class does the dean travel?” “Why, first class, of course,” came the reply. And I said, “Well, I’ll go first class.”

NC: Did anybody question you about this? Was it okay with Dean Beekman?
CDW: I don’t know. But I thought to myself, gee, I don’t know how long I’m going to be away in Europe, and here I’ve got this wonderful cabin . . . I’ll just invite all my friends and have a party for my departure. So I did, and one of the people invited was Ellen Faull, a soprano, whose debut at the City Opera I had heard. Incidentally, since then she became the head voice teacher at Juilliard, a very good singer, and she sang a whole lot for me when I started the Canterbury Choral Society.
Anyway, she pranced into the party and said, “Oh Charlie, I just met the most wonderful girl whom I knew at Tanglewood this summer. I was walking down 57th Street and she was walking down 57th Street.” Ellen said, “I’m going to a party; a friend of mine is going off to Paris. You’re going to Paris, too, aren’t you, Janet? You should look this guy up because he’s going to be organist at the cathedral over there and you might get a job as soloist.” So when Ellen got to the party on the boat she gave me Janet’s number in Paris. I looked her up and the story is that I took her out, we went to Versailles in my new French Simca, and we got married a few months later in the American Cathedral.

To be continued.

Steven Egler

On October 13, 2012, Robert Powell was interviewed as part of a weekend celebration of his music and in honor of his 80th birthday (July 22, 2012). Special thanks to First Congregational Church, Saginaw, Michigan, where the interview was conducted; recording technician Kenneth Wuepper of Saginaw; Dr. Richard Featheringham, Professor Emeritus in the School of Business, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, who transcribed the interview; Robert Barker, photographer; and Nicholas Schmelter, director of music at First Congregational Church.

The weekend included a recital October 13 at First Congregational Church, Saginaw, featuring Nicholas Schmelter  performing the first portion of the concert on the church’s chapel organ, Aeolian-Skinner Op. 1327 (1956), and the second portion on piano with flutist Katie Welnetz and soprano Rayechel Nieman.

A concert of choral and organ music on October 14 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Bay City, Michigan, featured the Exultate Deo Choral Ensemble, conducted by Robert Sabourin of Midland, Michigan. Steven Egler and Nicholas Schmelter were the organists, and flutists Robert Hart and Lauren Rongo performed on several compositions.

These events were co-sponsored by First Congregational Church, Saginaw; Trinity Episcopal Church, Bay City; and the Saginaw Valley Chapter of the American Guild of Organists.

Robert Powell, born July 22, 1932, in Benoit, Mississippi, has approximately 300 compositions in print for organ, instrumental ensembles, handbells, choir, and flute and organ. He earned a Bachelor of Music degree from Louisiana State University and later a Master of Sacred Music degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York as a student of Alec Wyton. From 1958–1960 he was Wyton’s assistant organist at St. John the Divine in upper Manhattan, and from 1960–1965 was organist-choirmaster at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Meridian, Mississippi. For three years (1965–1968), he served as director of music at St. Paul’s School, Concord, New Hampshire, and then from 1968–2003 served as organist-choirmaster at Christ Episcopal Church, Greenville, South Carolina, until his retirement in 2003.

A longtime member of the Association of Anglican Musicians, Powell holds the Fellow and Choirmaster certificates of the American Guild of Organists, and is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), from which he has received the Standard Award for the past twenty years. His well-known and popular service for the Episcopal Eucharistic liturgy appears in The Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church.

He and his wife Nancy recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary and are the parents of three, grandparents of four, and great-grandparents of one. Robert Powell was interviewed by Jason Overall shortly before his retirement (see The Diapason, November 2002).

Steven Egler: We are happy to have you with us this weekend for a late celebration of your 80th birthday and to enjoy your music.

Thank you. It’s a wonderful celebration for me.

You retired as organist-choirmaster at Christ Episcopal Church, Greenville, South Carolina, in 2003, but you are still playing. Is that correct?

That’s right. I’m playing in a small Methodist church. I started out to retire, and I managed three weeks. The first week I played for the Presbyterian church, and the second week I played for the Episcopal church I now attend. The third week I stayed home and wrote songs on Mary Baker Eddy texts for a lady who came later to Greenville as one of the actors in the Phantom of the Opera. She came over and we played through some songs. She gave us free tickets to Phantom of the Opera and took us backstage to show us how they made the boats go around and how the mechanics worked. That was enough retirement for me.

So it may be moot to ask if you miss being in church work, whether it’s full time or part time.

It’s different being in full-time church work. When I went to Christ Church, membership was about 1,500; when I left it was 4,000. There were lots of staff meetings and such. I felt like I never worked a day in my life, except at staff meetings. (laughter) Otherwise, I was writing, directing the choirs, and all that. I don’t miss it, but at the same time I do. I went straight into a small position where I don’t worry about choir members coming or going, and just play the organ—that is great fun. We have a good choir director, too; she and I are great friends. It’s five minutes from home, and they keep the church at 72 degrees all day and all night year round. 

We discussed that you were going to learn how to say “no” by the time you were 75. Have you learned how?

I have NOT learned how to say “no,” but it’s led to some interesting things. One time someone wanted me to write a setting of “Abide with Me” and to include the Agnus Dei. I didn’t think that the Agnus Dei had any relationship to “Abide with Me,” but I wrote it anyway and it was published.

Another instance was at the library snack shop. A man came over with a stack of papers. On the music paper he had written down a tune by Louis Bourgeois, and on the other stack a French poem he had translated and wanted me to set to the tune. This would have been a wonderful opportunity to say “no,” and I said “Ah,” but I did think that it would be a challenge. I set the text and it worked out because the poem was good. 

He told me exactly what to do. He wanted an introduction, a soprano solo in French, and then the choir—a tenor/bass choir—would sing in English; there would be an organ interlude, and the second verse would be sung by the choir in unison, and then the oboe and the organ would play. So I did all of those things and filled in the blanks. It was great fun.

If you had said “no,” it wouldn’t have happened.

No. On the other hand, people have come up with ideas for years, and I haven’t always agreed; but many projects have turned out to be blessings in disguise.

You just go forward and never stop composing.

Oh, yes. I go to the church in the morning and always write at the keyboard. I just write notes, so writing at the keyboard of an organ is the same as writing at the piano keyboard. I am not thinking that this will use a 16-foot stop here, a cromhorne or flute. I just push General 3 and hope for the best. (laughter)

You are still very prolific.

Some people don’t know when to put the pencil down! 

Austin Lovelace told me one time that this writing thing cycles. There are times when you are writing things and it is going really well. Sometimes you get to some part and you can’t do it; you go to sleep at night and the next day it’s already done because the subconscious takes care of it. 

Are you writing more music now?

That’s right. I have more time to write. I just go down to the church; I spend less time at it but write more. I am not as careful as Duruflé or someone like that would be. My teacher, Searle Wright, would say, “Write it down as fast as you possibly can and go back and correct it later.”

So I do it as fast as I possibly can and then I go back and correct my work. I have six publishers to submit music to. If they don’t want an anthem, I turn it into an organ piece and send it somewhere else. Sometimes that is accepted, so this recycling continues.

What are your current projects?

For the AGO Region IV Convention in Columbia, South Carolina, in 2013, I wrote a set of variations on “On This Day” (tune: Personent hodie). It’s a wild tune and was a challenge, but I managed to get six variations on the theme. It’s going to be played by Charles Tompkins: he suggested me for the commission. I’m also working on some pieces for GIA for brass and organ. 

How much does improvisation play into your composing?

A lot. John Ferguson told me one time what he does—I don’t know if he composes at the piano, but he must because he improvises and he writes his improvisations down. The hard thing about writing is getting an initial idea. John Rutter said that. Get the initial idea—a little motive—and improvise on a theme to get the initial idea and fill in the blanks. 

Improvisation has become more important both in organ playing in general and also in academia, where a certain amount of improvisation is expected.

Organists must improvise sooner or later. The wedding is going to start late and you have played all your music twice, the second time with different registrations, and the bride still hasn’t arrived, so you have to play something. You will feel better if you add something besides a C major chord, an F major chord, or a G major chord. In Searle Wright’s course, we had to learn how to improvise in different situations. It was fun and he was such a great teacher. He would use students’ names at graduations at Columbia at the cathedral [St. John the Divine] and he improvised on the names of three boys who had gotten doctorates: Cline, Davis, and Harrison. He would improvise on the syllables in their names. It was so clever, and then he’d throw in a fugue at the end. It was wonderful and so good. We were all pleased to be in his class.

Did those people know that was happening?

No, of course not. Only he knew it. It was so clever. I was fortunate to have such teachers in New York. I had Seth Bingham, too, after Harold Friedell died. Friedell played at St. Bartholomew’s Church and taught us all to improvise. Improvising is so important not just for weddings and funerals and things, but there are people who must have music to move from one place to another in the service—they must have some kind of walking music. You can just flop around or you can make some kind of form out of it. When the little kids come down for a kids’ sermon, then you can really have fun with that. It is always fun to create something on the spot.

I was very curious about your comment in The Diapason’s 2002 article concerning relationships.

If you have a good relationship with your choir, they will sing for you no matter what. Alec Wyton said that the choir director is 90 percent personality and 10 percent musical ability. So I have been fortunate in that I like the choir and the choir seems to like me, and we get along very well.

I was watching Bob Sabourin rehearse this morning—he is mentoring the entire choir, and thus they want to sing for him. He works them hard, which they should do; they don’t just chatter and carry on. They work hard because they want to, and come back because they like to. That’s the relationship that we organists and choir directors need with our choirs.

Now, in regard to the clergy, I have always had collegial relationships; I have always been able to say let’s have a cup of coffee and talk about something. I have always worked with good clergy who were very supportive. 

The church secretary/administrative assistant is absolutely wonderful. She’s from Mississippi like me and she will do things outside of her job description. In the Methodist church right now the minister, of course, and the secretary are Methodists, and the two Episcopalians are the choir director and the organist. We have a great relationship—all four of us—and we don’t have staff meetings.

That makes it even better.

You’re absolutely right. Sometimes the pastor, the choir, and organist can be very distant from everyone else. In the church where I am serving now, before the service starts we go down in the congregation and “play the crowd.” Then the minister gets up and says the announcements, the call to worship, and then I play the prelude, which means they have to listen.

That is a wonderful way to establish rapport with your church members. 

It works better in a small church. Going out into a church with 600 in the congregation—it’s hard to do that. But you can do it in small churches, where everybody knows each other. I am as fortunate as anybody could be. My advice to church musicians is to get to know everybody you can, work as hard as you can, and be cognizant of relationships with everybody in the parish—not just the choir.

I love the story about your playing too many verses of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

Bishop Pike was at St. John the Divine before he became a bishop. I played “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and played and played and lost my place and wasn’t looking, and I played 13 verses before I finally decided maybe I had better end. But I was forgiven. Then one time I played a hymn in the wrong place, and the clergyman whose name was Howard Johnson—a wonderful fellow—said when I told him this sad story, “The heavens didn’t fall.” 

And yet playing the text is important. I have students who come in and all the notes are just right, but they haven’t read any of the text and don’t know where to punctuate or breathe.

They’ll do something like “Thy kingdom come! On bended knee” (author: Frederick Hosmer). I don’t want the kingdom to come on bended knee particularly. My mentor told me to breathe with the congregation and to make them breathe and leave the same time between verses. I found the trick to that is to hold onto the last chord. When I let it go they know that I am trying to start. 

Tell us about your time with Alec Wyton.

We had Evensong every day except Monday, so I played the Evensong along with Morning Prayer. He wanted to make sure I knew how to play Anglican chant, so he didn’t play every service.  Of course, he conducted many services and I played a lot of them when he was conducting and that was a difficult task:  but he was down on the floor, and I was up in the loft. 

Let’s discuss teaching and mentoring.

I was fortunate to have people who saw something in me that I didn’t see.  The first one I had in high school was an organist named Walter Park. He was a wonderful fellow. He became the band director to just keep eating, but it didn’t suit him very well. He played in a small Episcopal church and I had a one-hour organ lesson every week. After the organ lesson, we would then have a three-hour composition lesson—all for the same price. I finally learned to write a little march like a Sousa march, and I used these ancient books that taught you voice leading. It was wonderful. Preston Ware Orem was the author of the book, Harmony Book for Beginners (1919). 

Mr. Park was a great person and encouraged me to write things, and I would bring them and we would look at them and talk about them. He made me feel that what I was doing was worthwhile. That is what mentors do. Later, of course, I studied with Alec Wyton who thought that I could be an assistant without falling completely to pieces. I told him at one time that I was scared of that place—blocks of stone! You know it scares you to death. There were other people who over the years were kind and helpful. But those two are the main ones.

So a teacher isn’t always a mentor?

These people and I were working together—we were learning the pieces together, writing the pieces together. I wrote the pieces and we would go over them. You might have done something here entirely different, let’s try that and see what happens—it was as if we were learning them together. That is true mentoring. It is difficult to be a mentor. I’m not that. It is probably easier for people who are full-time teachers.

I use the term “psyching out” the choir for a Sunday morning: that is mentoring. You are doing something that might be more difficult, and they’re hesitant about it.

They have the full confidence in you as the choir director. They will do their best, but they are not confident. One terrible thing happened during the Bach cantata “Praise Our God.” We were singing it in English and the choir got lost—completely lost in the final movement. Somewhere along the line a soprano came in and had the right place, and they all picked it up. I didn’t stop, I just kept on going. That kind of thing is challenging. Another time we did the St. John Passion with half the orchestra on this side and half the orchestra on the other side. Half the orchestra had gotten one-half beat behind the other half, and so we got through the first 26 pages and they had this extra beat. We started in for the da capo and we did it right the second time. I wasn’t going to stop!

What would you say afterward to your choir members when things didn’t go well?

I told them that it’s ok to make a mistake; I don’t dwell on it. “The heavens didn’t fall.” We have something else to do next week anyway. Don’t say too much about the mistakes. Think about the good things and move on.

What are your thoughts on the status of things in the church today?

I try to keep up with what is going on. There is some good writing among the church composers today, and I could name ten of them. One publisher told me a long time ago that they had put the music submissions in three piles: some of them they certainly don’t want, and the middle one could go either way. So much of that stuff is ok, and those tend to be both boring and exciting; and so choosing music is very difficult. 

What are their criteria for selecting music for publication?

I would say how they set the text, where the accents fall, and what kind of voicing they have. I can write for college choirs sometimes and make it interesting, but I don’t have a college choir to experiment with, and I never really had. I have always had between 15 and 20 people, so you write for what you have. Is the range bad or good, does it have an independent organ accompaniment?  

Publishers respond to various trends, and they are watching what happens.  Right now it seems that organ composers are writing music based upon gospel hymns. I have recently published three of my favorite gospel song arrangements. I enjoyed doing the gospel settings—I had fun with them.

It’s great to have them, and particularly the churches where they sing these hymns. To play “Sleepers Awake” is one thing, but not if they don’t know the hymn. They DO know “Fairest Lord Jesus,” “Open My Eyes That I May See,” and “Standing on the Promises,” and they can relate to these old favorites. Publishers may choose these arrangements in particular.

When you were in the Bronx, you had two anthems in the choir library.

On-the-job training. That’s what we would do, and Everett Hilty was the on-the-job supervisor [at Union Theological Seminary]. All I had was just one tenor, a few women, and a couple of basses. And the tenor anthem was “Seek Ye the Lord” by J. Rollins—one of the two anthems that I had. The other one was Wallingford Rieger’s “Easter Passacaglia,” which was for 16 parts. If they had had two sets of choirs, they couldn’t have sung that one. So in the end, I wrote two parts real quick. You know what sounds good and what doesn’t. You don’t have to make a canon of it, but you have to make the sound good.  

In the 2002 interview, you mentioned that a balance between “renewal” and “classical” music is more desirable. Can you elaborate?

We had that at Christ Church. They had everything—classical, Anglican; but the other service—the bigger one—had plenty of guitars, basses, flutes that would play during the communion or special occasions, offertory or something, and the rest of it would be traditional. We used Hyfrydol or some of the traditional hymns. I didn’t play for it since they didn’t use organ; they had a piano player. It worked out very well. 

That parish was large enough to accommodate different services.

A small parish would probably end up going one way or the other. We attended a service in a nearby city, and we expected it to be a traditional Episcopal service and it wasn’t. It was the guitars and a singer with a microphone up front. I think they had a string of eight guitars, too. Flashed the words on the screen. Some classical person might be turned off, but it didn’t turn me it off. It was a very devotional service, and there was nothing wrong with it. It was just unusual—going in expecting something and coming out having experienced something else.

I tried different things when I was a choir director. If I had to advise anybody, it would be to try different things. One time we had handbells, and we were going to do “Of the Father’s Love Begotten.” The handbells and singers were going to come in and play something, and on the other side of the church they would come in from the other transept singing and playing the handbells. We were supposed to have been together all the time. Well, it didn’t work. Nobody was together. Handbells were playing, the people were singing, and there wasn’t much happening!

Then another time we had 40 in the choir and were going to do the Schütz Psalm 100. We had three choirs that were echoes—one choir and two echoes. The piece is wonderful, but I did it wrong. I put the main choir down front facing each other, and I put the first echo choir in the back, facing the congregation, and I put the third echo choir in the anteroom. We had loud, moderately loud, and soft, but we did it anyway.   

We experimented with Richard Felciano’s pieces, and they went very well. We had gospel choirs come in and sing with us, and we did all of this wonderful community stuff. It is good fun to try these different experiments and see what might happen. I had a brass group come in to play—half downstairs and half in the balcony and it did work. All these experiments worked out. Doing the same anthem six times a year: that’s not good fun.

Right now we’re in a situation where the congregation likes a wide variety of anthems—and sometimes you use the junior choir. We have a choir of 12 when they are all there—no tenors, and four good basses, and the sopranos are great. For a junior choir, you take an SATB anthem and make an SAB anthem out of it. You have to experiment; it is good training—you have eight people here in the choir and none of them tenors; what do you do? You can do all kinds of things.

One has to have an eye [and ear] for what will work.

You have to compose FOR them. Same thing as playing a descant in something; for instance, everybody knows Fairest Lord Jesus and it has a descant floating above, just for organ—that makes you sort of a minor composer compared to a major composer.

Regarding hymnals—you worked with the 1982 book for the Episcopal Church.

I thought The Hymnal 1940 was a treasure; Leo Sowerby was the general editor. The Hymnal 1982—my good friend Ray Glover was general editor—is very good. Other good influences upon the 1982 book were James Litton, David Hurd, and Marilyn Keiser, among others. Most of the hymns I find are very fine, including some of the hymns by Calvin Hampton. Some of the other denominational hymnals have included more Spanish hymns in their hymnals.

What do you have to say about that in terms of the future of hymnbooks?

We just don’t know what’s going to happen with the hymnbooks. It depends on how big your congregation is and if you have people from different cultures. I think there should be hymns for everybody—American hymns, Spanish hymns and Mexican hymns, Scandinavian hymns—because you never know when some enterprising organist will want to make them better known in their parish. I think they should be there.

Tell us about your involvement with organizations.

Oh, yes. I was with the Choristers Guild board for six years and that was a wonderful thing. I was on the AGO certification committee for four years and that was fun, too. There were some wonderful people there—Joyce Shupe Kull and Kathleen Thomerson—and I enjoyed meeting in New York at the AGO headquarters. I was involved with the orchestration portion of the exam.

I was on the National Council for six years (Councillor for Region V), and there were so many very good people who conducted the examinations. We divided the responsibilities according to our areas of expertise and discussed the questions/answers. 

You have been involved with the Association of Anglican Musicians.

They met in Greenville last year. I wrote them two anthems (published by Selah), and I was very pleased and excited. Some other people wrote music and then there was talk about professional concerns: problems that we all have, such as getting fired without due notice—to know what the people are doing about it; and they usually have very good sermons. Jeffrey Smith, the late Gerre Hancock, Marilyn Keiser, and others—always concerned with preserving good Episcopal church music. It is a great organization.

Tell me about your ASCAP award.

Alec Wyton asked if I wanted to be in ASCAP. They have a list of approved pieces for each composer—I have 170 pieces approved by ASCAP. When so many of my pieces are performed each year, I receive an award. They have given me the same award for the last 20 years.

Your biography mentions restoring a link to St. James. 

St. James, the oldest Episcopal church in the country, is in New London, Connecticut. They asked me to write a Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis 35 years ago. As far as I know they never performed it. Then about five years ago a group of people called me up there, and they performed my music. It was great, but it has taken them 35 years. It was discovered in the church basement—when they were cleaning out the church basement, which they clean out once every 35 years! But they were kind enough to perform it, and they asked me to write another piece for them, so I ended up writing the Benedictus es, Domine. I set the text in English, and they said they took it to Bristol Cathedral in England. They are wonderful people out there and very good group of singers.

Tell us a little about your family.

I’m going to be a great-grandfather. Yes, we have three kids—one of them is still going to school, and he is about 50. The oldest one is married and has two children. She is a nurse practitioner in San Diego. My wife was a nurse, and my mother was a nurse. The granddaughter works in a hospital. You can’t be sick in our family with all those nurses. Of the three children, the youngest works for the patent office. They have sent him to Tokyo five times and to St. Petersburg and Moscow. He’s had a happy career. His wife works for a defense contractor, and they have two kids.

Would you change anything?

I would do it all over again. I can’t think of anything I would want to change. I would not go to staff meetings, if I didn’t have to.

How do you see your legacy as a church musician and as a composer? 

I don’t know what to say. I don’t think people should copy what I do specifically, because everybody has his/her own style—they should focus on what they are doing and hope that what they do will be memorable or useful to their generation and to following generations. You just don’t know what you have done that is going to be appreciated, such as with my communion service. I am pleased and flattered, and nothing can be better than to have your music sung. 

I hope that people who continue after me will write for real people. Craftsmanship is important, but music should be easy for real people to sing, not so complicated that only the collegiate choir can sing it. 

Erik Routley commented that he knew that there would be other hymnbooks and yet hoped they will keep a lot of the traditional material.

Traditional is good, and it fills that criteria—to be singable by real people, not just choirs. 

Congregations do not know how to read music that is going to jump a ninth or a seventh—not unless they are really lucky. You do want to make the congregation happy—they DO pay the salaries. Yet you don’t want to go overboard and dumb down to them; you want to meet them at their same level. You don’t want to take something like “Open My Eyes” and make a caricature of it. That is not a good thing. 

This has been a huge pleasure. I will look forward to the next major birthday.

That’s right. At 90 we’ll do this all over again! 

Ralph Kneeream

Ralph Kneeream served as assistant organist and choirmaster at St. Paul’s Chapel for eight years, from 1958 until 1966.

M. Searle Wright died on June 3 at the age of 86. See the “Nunc Dimittis” column on page 8 of the August 2004 issue of The Diapason.

The New York Years

 

“Let us now praise famous men . . . those who composed musical tunes . . .”

Searle Wright’s days on earth began in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania on April 4, 1918. His family moved to Binghamton, New York while Searle was quite young, and he always considered Binghamton his “hometown.” From his father Clarence he inherited the traditional, quiet, and introspective aspects of his personality. From his mother Josephine he gained not only a name--she was a Searle whose father served in Congress during the McKinley Administration--but also a great sense of humor, an entertaining and insightful manner of talking, and especially a joie de vivre. Searle was an only child and both parents lovingly sought to give him the very best education, certainly in the field of music.

From an early age Searle, along with his parents, began an association with “Phoebe Snow,” the famous Erie-Lackawanna “choo-choo” train. At first the trips were to Buffalo--the city that gave birth to the “mighty Wurlitzer” and to the Schlicker Organ Company--to study with the city’s leading organist, William Gomph. Mr. Gomph was well-known for his abilities, as well as for his “role” in the McKinley assassination which took place in The Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition: Mr. Gomph “. . . had reached the highest notes on the great organ, and as he stopped at the height to let the strains reverberate in the auditorium, two shots rang out.” Years later “Phoebe” would carry Searle from Binghamton to Hoboken, with a ferryboat link to Manhattan, for lessons with T. Tertius Noble, the famous organist and choirmaster of New York’s prestigious St. Thomas Church. Then, after Searle became a New Yorker, about 1938, there were many trips on “Phoebe Snow,” returning frequently to Binghamton to conduct the Binghamton Choral Society and to visit his parents and his friends.

Soon after arriving in Manhattan he took some classes at Columbia University, an institution he would serve so well for two decades. He studied improvisation with Frederick Schleider at the School of Sacred Music, Union Theological Seminary, another institution he would join as a faculty member. Another individual who had a profound influence on him in these early New York years was David McK. Williams, the colorful organist and choirmaster of St. Bartholomew’s Church. I could not possibly remember all the interesting stories Searle told me of this man--some relating to his use of striking effects in service playing, others relating to his well-known wit in dealing with events and with people.

In addition to becoming immersed in the New York church music scene, he earned the AAGO certificate in 1939 and the FAGO certificate in 1941, and at the time, I believe, he was the youngest recipient of the latter. So we might say that as Searle moved into his early twenties, he was one of the most promising young New York church musicians.

At an early age, while still living at home in Binghamton, he discovered the theatre organ. It was love at first sight. In his teens he earned pocket money playing the “mighty Wurlitzer” at Binghamton’s Capitol Theatre just as he would do again, years later in semi-retirement, playing half-hour programs prior to Binghamton Pops concerts. Many Friday evenings, Searle, Louise (see below), and other friends and I would have dinner together, sometimes at Schrafft’s on Broadway at 43rd Street (“Mother Schrafft’s” to Searle), or at Longchamps on Madison Avenue at 59th Street. What wonderful evenings they were, much talk of music, the Broadway theatre, the New York scene, and yes, even “shop.” Why were the sopranos having so much trouble with this or that phrase, where can we find a few more tenors, etc.? There was always much laughter, as the most recent jokes would circulate throughout the evening. A well-made cocktail and/or a glass of wine always helped to liven things up. But, the pièce de résistance, on a few occasions, following dessert and much coffee, was a short taxi ride to Radio City Music Hall where we were admitted to one of the rehearsal studios high above the main auditorium. It was there that Searle, or perhaps another theatre organist friend, would “wow” the rest of us with the very best in theatre organ performance. What a treat! Unforgettable!

Armed with his Fellowship certificate, with great talent, and solid training in choral directing, organ playing, improvisation, and composing, he set about establishing himself. His first positions were a small parish in the Bronx and then one in Queens. In 1944 he was appointed organist and choirmaster at the Chapel of the Incarnation (the present Church of the Good Shepherd) on East 31st Street, near Second Avenue. There he began to establish himself as one of New York’s leading church musicians. The building has wonderful acoustics. With a small volunteer choir, and just a handful of paid singers, he prepared ambitious programs of service music, using both standard and new works in the Anglo-American tradition. He presented, as well, more extensive works to be sung at frequent Evensongs. In short, his music program at this small Manhattan parish attracted the interest of many leading New York musicians, and his reputation both as an expert and an innovator grew quickly.

When Columbia University was seeking a director of chapel music at St. Paul’s Chapel in 1952, Searle received this prestigious appointment. He remained in this position for nineteen years, until 1971. Concurrently, he was a member of the music faculty of Columbia and The School of Sacred Music, Union Theological Seminary. 

In addition to his full schedule of services, concerts, and rehearsals at St. Paul’s Chapel, he presented recitals and workshops throughout the United States. He served the American Guild of Organists as a member of the examination board, as national secretary, then from 1969 until 1971 as national president. He was instrumental in starting the AGO Young Organist Competition (1952). He was the first American organist to give a recital in Westminster Abbey (1954). He was co-chair of the program committee for the 1956 AGO Convention in New York City. He was chairman of the American “wing” at the 1957 International Congress of Organists, and for this effort, as well as his accomplishments in the field of church music, he was awarded the FTCL, honoris causa from Trinity College of Music, London. He was a member of the committee that designed Lincoln Center’s new Aeolian-Skinner organ (1963).

As a teacher in organ playing, composition and improvisation, he influenced an entire generation of American church musicians. He was an impeccable service player and a fine choir director. As a composer, he left a corpus of organ, chamber, choral, and instrumental works, both sacred and secular, that will remain a significant part of twentieth-century music.

It was a family tradition to spend time every summer on the St. Lawrence River near Clayton in the Thousand Islands region (and did Searle love Longchamps’ Thousand Island dressing on his salads!). After moving to New York City, he would join his parents for several days at their vacation spot on the river. Some of his compositions were first sketched there; he would also plan his upcoming music schedules. Beginning in the 1950s it was to England where Searle would return each summer, putting his assistant in charge of the chapel music program during those months. Based at the fashionable Park Lane Hotel on Piccadilly, he investigated every nook and cranny in the British capital and traveled to every corner of the English countryside. The summer would culminate with trips to Worcester, Hereford, or Gloucester to attend the Three Choirs Festival, an event that attracted him every year from the mid-1950s into the late 1990s. He was honored several years ago when the festival committee programmed some of his compositions. Each year Searle would return from England laden with a ton of new choral and/or orchestral scores, many of which were premiered by him in America at St. Paul’s Chapel concerts.

Searle was admired by legions of colleagues, students, and friends the world over, including many of the outstanding church musicians of the twentieth century. My generation and younger generations looked and will look to this man for guidance and inspiration. Through his compositions, his improvisations, through his innovative program building, and through his students and disciples,  the world of music was and is a far richer place.

I would not be able to end this tribute without speaking of Louise Meyer, the wonderful individual mentioned above. As music secretary during Searle’s tenure at both the Chapel of the Incarnation and St. Paul’s Chapel, she freed him from many tasks--preparing choir schedules, preparing payrolls and service music lists, preparing recital and concert programs for the printer, answering telephone calls, correspondence, etc.--in short, keeping him free to do all the musical things. Louise loved to sing in the choir, and she was a fine second soprano!

What final tribute can we offer this dignified, impeccably dressed, remarkable, good-hearted soul, this special human being? Perhaps an ancient text, a Rabbinic commentary from a Midrash, would be helpful.

Two ships were once seen to be sailing near land. One of them was going forth from the harbor, and the other was coming into the harbor. Everyone was cheering the outgoing ship, everyone was giving it a hearty send-off. But the incoming ship was scarcely noticed.

A wise man was looking at the two ships, and he said: “I see here a paradox; for surely, people should not rejoice at the ship leaving the harbor, since they know not what destiny awaits it, what storms it may encounter, what dangers it may have to undergo. Rejoice rather over the ship that has reached port safely and brought back all of its passengers in peace.”

By the same token, it is the way of the world that when a human being is born, all rejoice; but when the person dies, all sorrow. Rather, the opposite ought to be considered. No one can tell what troubles await the child on its journey into adulthood. But when a person dies after living well, all should give thanks, for he has completed his journey successfully and is departing from this world with an imperishable crown of a good name.

Searle Wright earned the crown of a good name. Our loss of him is great--but the gain of those who knew him is far greater still. He lived well, for himself, for others, and for his God. Requiescat in pace.