Three wonderful organs in Le Marche, Italy

Bill Halsey was born in Seattle, where he studied piano and composition from an early age, and began organ lessons in his teens. While a student at the Sorbonne, he had access to the two-manual unmodified tracker-action Cavaillé-Coll organ at Saint Bernard de la Chapelle, in a northern arrondissement of Paris. This fueled his interest in historic organs, and after spending fifteen years serving in organist positions at St. John Cantius, St. Peter Claver, Church of the Assumption, and the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, all in Brooklyn, New York, he took a permanent leave of absence to explore historic organs, first in France, and later in Italy. For audio and video files of the organs discussed in this article, visit the author’s website: <A HREF="http://www.williamdawsonhalsey.com/altamura.html">www.williamdawsonhals…;.

After we had spent the winter in Le Marche, visiting organs by the Venetian Callido and other builders, my wife and I went south to Puglia, living in a farmhouse 20 kilometers down the coast from Bari, burning piles of cut-up brush and tree wood to keep warm, and watching the wildflowers and the fruit trees in our orchard mark the passing time. The Murge is a limestone plateau that makes up much of the interior of Puglia. Altamura is in the High Murge, about 50 km due south of Bari, rising up unexpectedly out of the scrubby olive groves and odd unexplained declivities marked by free stone fences that the rattle-trap graffiti-clad diesel trains of FAL rumble through on their way to Basilicata from Bari.
I had originally wanted to visit Altamura because it is the birthplace of Saverio Mercadante, who grew up playing the flute for change on the steps of the cathedral, lied his way into the Naples Conservatory, and went on to become an important opera composer of the period after Rossini, and a major influence on Verdi. I had also found out that the cathedral had an important historic organ from 1880, built by Turin organbuilder Giacomo Bossi Vegezzi.
If you follow the Corso Federico II di Svevia through the whole old town you pass Mercadante’s childhood home, a four-story building with a dilapidated Spanish air and wrought iron balustrades, and then the cathedral, built out of native white limestone, with some amazing limestone carvings on the front door that depict the life of Christ from a Marian perspective, until finally coming out onto a cedar-shaded piazza overlooking the road to Matera. There is really no Mercadante site or museum in the city; his birth home has a plaque on the side, but people live there and it’s not possible to visit. The cathedral organ soon became the focus of my frequent visits to Altamura.

The Altamura Cathedral organ
The nameplate on the console indicates that it was built in 1880 by the Turin firm of Giacomo Bossi Vegezzi, organbuilders to the King of Italy. While my wife copied down the stoplist, I squeezed into the narrow space between the bench and the console and began to play, barely able to take in, let alone use, the immense selection of reed, flute, principal, and ripieno stops arrayed in four columns before me.
Most of the other historic organs in Puglia are small 18th-century instruments, much smaller than Callido organs, and somehow much less modern—usually just principals, ripieno, and vox humana. The organ in Altamura Cathedral, however, seems gigantic, the biggest two-manual organ I have ever seen. It is a true symphonic organ, because it has timbres that imitate the sounds of an orchestra, and was perhaps designed to play operatic music as it was adapted to the needs of the liturgy—something that might seem strange until you think that the modern Catholic Church has adopted both Latino music and rock music to its new liturgy.
But it is more than just a symphonic instrument, because the quality of the reeds and flutes is strong enough to play organ literature, and among the huge variety of stops each has a clear personality and function that is not duplicated by any other stop. With an organ that big, it takes time to appreciate all it can do. The Italians call two-manual instruments double organs, because they think of them as two organs played by one organist from two keyboards. Even though one organ is usually smaller than the other, they don’t think of one as subservient to the other, like the Choir to the Great, or the Rückpositiv to the Hauptwerk. It is tempting but mistaken to treat one manual as the accompaniment to the other; one must learn to use each manual as a full organ.
The natural literature for this organ, aside from orchestral accompaniment, would be the Italian Romantics, Padre Davide da Bergamo foremost among them. Padre Davide, one of a group of Bergamo composers that included Gaetano Donizetti, seven years his junior, wrote a large variety of organ music, such as flamboyant symphonies that can seem tastelessly theatrical, more somber and restrained offertories, and imitations of bagpipes and other character pieces. His music works very well for the most part on the Altamura Cathedral organ, although his pieces call for things, in terms of both stops and range (low range in the pedals, for instance), that I have never seen anywhere, even on the Serassi organ he used in Piacenza. It seems likely to me that he supplemented the organ as needed with actual woodwinds and brass, and that his organ scores were outlines that would be changed according to the different circumstances and personnel of the concerts.
But it would be a mistake to think that the Altamura Cathedral organ is only good for Italian Romantic music. The solidity of the principals (two sets of 8′ principals and one of 16′ on the big organ) and abrasiveness of the reed stops make this organ suitable for a wide variety of French music and early Italian moderns like Galiera, who wrote fugues influenced by Bach as seen through an early-twentieth-century prism.
Playing most organ music on Italian organs, even Italian music, calls for a continual process of adjustment. Although there are only two manuals on the cathedral organ, each one is divided at middle C, which allows for some independence, but not as much as if there were four manuals, or even three. The problem with the divided keyboard is that melodies often cross middle C. Even Italian music isn’t written to avoid this problem, partly because different organs break at different points, but the fact that solo reed stops in the treble often play at 16′ and in the bass at 4′ means there is a negotiable zone around middle C—for instance, by playing a bass melody an octave lower or a treble melody an octave higher than written.
Perhaps the challenges of writing music specifically for this organ inspired me to take some music, played by a wonderful brass band in the famous Good Friday procession of Noicattero, a Pugliese village walking distance from our farmhouse, and arrange it specifically for the Altamura Cathedral organ. The procession depicts Mary’s search for her son, and features local women wearing veils who assume the persona of Mary; this is depicted in the third of three “Somber Pieces” arranged from this music (p. 22).
Altamura has a different culture from some other Pugliese cities, where, when you come to visit the organ, people in the church sometimes look askance, as if you were crazy. Here, my wife, who would go downstairs to work the recording equipment, was often met by people telling her where there were other interesting and even better organs.
After our first visit to the cathedral, we went looking for a place to eat, and were directed to the Federico II di Svevia, a trattoria with a menu tipico and a back room where we struck up a conversation with a group of men, from middle age to elderly, who adopted us as members of the pack and with whom we came to lunch regularly when we were in Altamura.

The organ in the Church of St. Dominic
After lunch on our first visit we looked for Mercadante scores in the municipal library, housed along with a secondary school in a former Dominican monastery on one side of the cedar-shaded piazza overlooking the Matera road. I noticed the Church of St. Dominic next to the library. We learned that St. Dominic’s also had a Bossi Vegezzi organ, smaller but in better condition than the one in the cathedral.
The St. Dominic instrument, made in 1882, was restored in 2005 by the firm of Fabbrica Organi Continiello Vincenzo. It struck me at first how different its tone is from the cathedral instrument. Even though the stoplist is similar, the St. Dominic organ sounds much more classic, less symphonic and romantic, and I immediately thought it would work well for the big preludes and fugues of J. S. Bach. The difference can’t be explained as the result of an evolution over years in the organ builder’s taste—the two organs were built within two years of each other. Some of the difference may come from the buildings themselves and the location of each organ. The cathedral is a huge Romanesque Gothic building, full of extensive side chapels, and the organ is placed in a traditional Italian way in a loft at one side of the choir, in cornu evangeli, and obviously the sound is diffused by the space. In St. Dominic, on the other hand, the organ is centered on the back wall in a French-style choir loft, and the church itself is a smaller building, with narrow side chapels, whose only architectural extravagance is a Byzantine dome. This is the classical rectangle of great concert halls, where the sound is hardened and focused by the shape of the space.
The organ at the cathedral, perhaps because it has never been restored, gives more of a sense of place. Squeezing into the bench crammed tight against the console, seeing the blue and red draw knobs, the “pedaletti” that were their version of combination stops, gives a real sense of being an organist in 1880. I even finally figured out what the two metal contraptions on either side of the keyboards were. The one on the right had been broken off, but the one on the left was clearly a candle holder, folding out in three sections like a slide rule, with a little cup with a point in the middle for the candle and underneath a larger metal plate to catch the drips!
The firm of Bossi Vegezzi still exists (as Brondino Vegezzi-Bossi) and has made some information about its history, in particular about Giacomo Bossi Vegezzi, available on the web (www.vegezzi-bossi.com). As is usual with organbuilding firms, he was one of a long family tree of organbuilders. Giacomo died in 1883, not long after these organs were built. The interesting part of the story is that at the time of their building, after being a widower, he had taken a second wife, Annetta Vittino, herself the daughter of an organbuilder. She was not only responsible for much of the large-scale operation of the firm while he did the voicing and detail work, but also bore him a son when she was fifty-four. She died in 1886, and her son went on to start his own organbuilding firm, while Giacomo’s son from his first marriage (Carlo Vegezzi-Bossi) continued the Vegezzi-Bossi firm.
St. Dominic’s is run by a lay confraternity, the Confraternity of the Most Holy Rosary. The president of the confraternity invited me to give a concert on September 5 as part of Altamura’s White Night, when the whole city stays up with various concerts and events until dawn. I had spent August in Sicily, because the farmhouse had already been booked for August, and didn’t really have enough time to prepare, but I put together a program that I felt would be feasible. I also found the organ seemed in less good shape than when I first saw it, with some really annoying ciphers in the bass of the principals, both 16′ and 8′.
But all in all, the concert was a good experience. There were people from the church there, and also a group came from the class my wife and I had been taking in pizzica, a form of Barese dancing related to the Sicilian tarantella. I started with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E minor, played some arrangements of Cuban music I had made in New York, continued with a Bellini organ sonata and the Largo from Mercadante’s flute concerto in E major, then finished with the Boléro de concert and Elevation by Lefébure-Wély, and Gigout’s Toccata, which in fact is a traditional pizzica melody.
When the concert had finished, after 9 pm, the last train had left, but there was an early morning bus at 4:30 back to Bari, and so we walked around, listening to various rock concerts, watching some groups doing Murgian folk dancing as well as line dancing that could have come from an American International horror movie, and preteens doing dirty dancing that would have put Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine to shame.
Our regular trattoria was closed for vacation, so we had a nice dinner of typical Murgian antipasti and primi at a pizzeria-restaurant called Don Saverio, on the Piazza Mercadante, before we collapsed on a bench by the cedar-shaded piazza with its Victorian painted glass carousel and the baroque fountain with dolphins and lions, waiting for the bus to arrive.

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of The Diapason.

In the 1980s I was a graduate student in Rome, doing research on oratorios in the archive adjacent to the sanctuary of the Chiesa Nuova (Santa Maria in Vallicella). That church, established by St. Philip Neri, witnessed the flourishing of the oratorio in the 18th century; more oratorio performances were held there than at any other venue in Rome. Oratorios, performed weekly from November through Lent, were written by the leading opera composers of the day.
Twice weekly (the archive was only open from 5–7 pm on Tuesdays and Fridays; this explains why my research took a while), I entered the large sanctuary and walked toward the altar on my way to the archive. Though the church still revealed its Baroque splendor, there was no splendid—i.e., in playable condition—organ. So I took no note of the instrument; lack of maintenance on an organ was not an uncommon situation in Roman churches.
Fast forward to 2003, to the office of The Diapason, where I was now on the editorial staff. A new CD had arrived,1 featuring organist Francesco Cera playing the Guglielmi organ at Santa Maria in Vallicella, the instrument having been restored by Fratelli Ruffatti.2 I was impressed by the marvelous playing and the incisive sound of the instrument. Even the temperament was revelatory; the meantone tuning gave the dissonances extra pungency and made their resolutions all the more satisfying.
Francesco Cera, born in Bologna, now resident in Rome, studied organ and harpsichord with Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini and Gustav Leonhardt. He has appeared as a soloist in international festivals and has played historic organs in various European countries. His recordings of the complete keyboard works of Michelangelo Rossi, Tarquinio Merula, Bernardo Storace, and Antonio Valente were praised by the international press. He is currently the conductor of the Ensemble Arte Musica, which specializes in Italian vocal repertoire, from the madrigals of Gesualdo to 18th-century cantatas.3 Cera has led masterclasses and seminars at such institutions as the Accademia di Musica Italiana per Organo, Academie d’Orgue de Fribourg, the Royal Academy of Music in London, the University of Illinois, the University of Evansville, and the Eastman School of Music.
I felt it was worth a try to see if I could meet Mr. Cera in person. An e-mail was graciously answered and led to further exchanges, and my husband and I were able to meet Cera on our next trip to Rome. He was most kind and agreed to show and play the organ for us. We met at the church one December day, along with the organist of Santa Maria in Vallicella. After making our way up the curving staircase to the shallow loft, Cera fired up the instrument. He began playing some works by Rossi, but had not played for very long when the competition arrived—another organ was being played, to lead a rehearsal of children singing. We weren’t going to win this one, so we ceased and desisted and headed for the coffee bar across the street.
Time passed. Cera’s CD was given a glowing review in The Diapason.4 In October 2006 he made a tour to the United States to present concerts and masterclasses, to demonstrate Italian organ music of the 17th century. His tour included a stop in Chicago, where he played on the Flentrop organ in Holy Name Cathedral. We were able to meet up with him once again, to discuss the Guglielmi organ and its restoration in further detail.

JR: Was the Guglielmi organ in Santa Maria in Vallicella installed when the church was first built?
FC: The organ that we hear today is the second built by Giovanni Guglielmi for the church, and for centuries it was paired with a second organ, also built by Guglielmi, for the newly built church, in about 1590. The church of Santa Maria in Vallicella (called the Chiesa Nuova) was constructed at the request of St. Filippo Neri, who in the nearby oratory founded the order of the Philippine fathers; thus it is a crucial place in the history of the Catholic Church. The organ we hear was built in 1612, according to archival research.

JR: Is the Guglielmi organ typical of other Roman instruments? How does its design reflect the style of Italian organ building of the 17th century?
FC: Yes, the Guglielmi organ is a traditional type of organ quite frequently found in large Roman churches at the end of the 16th century. I would say that this organ is clearly distinct from those built in northern Italy during the same period, for example those of Antegnati and his followers. It is typically Roman because it exhibits construction characteristics that are very similar to those of organs built in Rome (such as in the 1598 Luca Blasi organ in the basilica of San Giovanni Laterano, in the small organ ca. 1600 by an unknown builder in Santa Barbara ai Librari, and later in the century in the 1673 Testa-Alari at San Giovanni dei Fiorentini). We can note these characteristics in even later instruments that have survived, and through descriptions in old contracts: a short-octave 50-key manual, C–f3 (plus five chromatic split keys for D-sharp/E-flat, and G-sharp/A-flat); a Ripieno based on a 16' Principal, an 8' Trumpet with full-length resonators (called Tromboni)5, and a pair of flutes pitched at 4' and 22⁄3'. The scales of the principals and of the Ripieno ranks are very narrow, giving much transparency to the 16' Ripieno, and a very silvery sound, full of light, to the organ. These narrow scalings produce a very clear and pungent timbre, compared to, say, Tuscan organs of the same period, which have wider scalings and tend towards a rounder sound. The Tromboni, frequently found in Roman organs, add power and color. The sound of the Guglielmi organ seems to reflect the grandeur and luminosity of Rome.

JR: The organ’s case design is something special, too.
FC: Its golden case, redesigned in 1699, is a triumph of the Roman Baroque, clearly inspired by Bernini’s style. Gilded carvings show angels that seem to float across the façade: bas reliefs with putti, garlands of flowers, and a big shell crowning the top just behind the major pipes. Three pipes are embossed with a twisting surface, including the central one, 16' low C. The pipe mouths are also gilded with decorative patterns.

JR: Is the Guglielmi organ similar to any of the masterpieces of Italian organbuilding?
FC: I don’t believe so. For example, the famous organs of San Petronio in Bologna (Lorenzo da Prato, 1475, and Baldassare Malamini, 1596) or the 1545 Antegnati at San Maurizio in Milan have quite a different sonority from the Guglielmi. In fact, the characteristic of Italian organbuilding of every era—from the Renaissance to full-blown Romanticism—is to conceive of nuances of sonority that are distinct in every single region (remember that Italy was divided into many small states until 1860).
At times we have stops typical of a school of organbuilding—for example, in the Venetian school, the 8' Tromboncini (a short-resonator reed); in the Lombardy school, the orchestral stops such as Corno Inglese or Flauto traversiere; or in the Tuscan school, the multi-rank Cornetti. But it is interesting to note how very many old organs having the same stoplist (for example, the most common in various parts of Italy is a Ripieno, a 4' or 22⁄3' Flauto, Voce Umana, and 16' Contrabasso in the pedal) offer quite diverse sonorities, above all in timbre (tone color), due to the scaling and type of voicing. The major organbuilders imparted a personal “character” to their instruments, and it was inevitable that a local “school” resulted. This is the great fascination of the Italian organ—the different nuances of timbre, which still needs to be better understood. The Guglielmi organ is a masterpiece of Roman organbuilding.

JR: The instrument is based on a 16' Principal—is that typical for that time?
FC: Almost all the large Roman churches had instruments whose Ripieno was based on a 16¢ Principal. This was probably felt to be necessary due to the vastness of the churches, but certainly also for the desire for a very solemn sound. At the same time, the narrow scalings provided great luminosity and clarity.

JR: Who played the Guglielmi organ? What documents refer to the organ?
FC: Among the famous organists who played the organ were Bernardo Pasquini, who was the organist at Vallicella from 1657–1664, and also in the 17th century Giovanni Battista Ferrini and Fabrizio Fontana (both of them, along with Pasquini, wrote organ music of high quality). Various documents about the organ and its maintenance through the centuries have been published by Arnaldo Morelli, in the musicological journal Analecta Musicologica.6

JR: When was the organ abandoned and no longer maintained?
FC: At the end of the 19th century, a romantic-style organ was built in the right-side choir loft, and from that point the old Guglielmi, after some mediocre work, was gradually abandoned. Yet most of the 17th-century pipework was not altered—neither the mouths nor the pipe lengths. Thus, notwithstanding the negligence, it was possible to again have the original sound, without having to reinvent it, as it was necessary to do in other cases. This was a very good thing.

JR: How did organ restoration in Italy begin and evolve?
FC: Historic restoration in Italy originated with the pioneering work of the celebrated organist Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini and the great scholar, the late Oscar Mischiati. The first organ “saved” from restorations that had a tendency to alter and “modernize” historic organs was Graziadio Antegnati’s 1581 masterpiece in the church of San Giuseppe in Brescia, restored back in 1956. In subsequent years, following the directives of these two great experts, it became more common to respect the original features of every instrument, including the short-octave manuals and pedalboards, which previously had been “normalized” through the addition of chromatic keys. Then came the practice of reconstructing the pipes of lost ranks, with faithful copies of authentic pipes by the same maker. In the late 70s there was a return to the old temperaments, where there had been some surviving traces (meantone and its variants). All this spread at first in the north, with the help of government financing, and since the 1980s, also in central and south Italy. Today my country can claim at least ten organ builders who have specialized for a long time in restorations of the highest quality—work that is on a par with the best carried out in the rest of Europe, perhaps even characterized by a deeper historic consciousness.

JR: Who provided the funds for restoring the organ? When did this come about?
FC: The Italian government provided funding for the restoration, and the work took place between 1998–2000. The superintendent of historic and artistic works of Rome entrusted the work to Fratelli Ruffatti of Padua, due to their experience in restoring historic organs in various regions of Italy, with the leading expert Oscar Mischiati as consultant.

JR: What work needed to be done on the organ?
FC: The spring windchest that was found in the organ was almost destroyed by rainwater that had leaked in, but although it was probably from the 19th century it seemed inspired by 17th-century building technique—thus it was reconstructed with the same design. Also lacking was the console, but after an accurate analysis of the pipes, it appeared clearly that its compass was of 50 keys (c1 to f5, with the first “short” octave), plus five added “split” keys, for a total of 55 keys, and the stops arranged vertically.7 The keyboard and pedalboard were reconstructed according to models of the period. The surviving group of original pipes was simply put in the best possible playing condition, and the temperament reset to meantone, with the pitch being detected as A=400—quite low, but close to the documented pitch in use in Rome at that time (i.e., around A=390). Ruffatti’s work has produced a very satisfying result.

JR: What are some other important recent restorations?
FC: Italy has the good fortune to possess very many Renaissance organs, which have had only minor modifications. Among these are the two organs at San Petronio in Bologna (to which I referred earlier), whose restoration, done by Tamburini under the supervision of Tagliavini and Mischiati, was completed in 1982. These two organs have been recorded on many CDs and have been visited by many organists from all over the world. Then there is the splendid 1556 Giovanni Cipri instrument at San Martino (also in Bologna), and the 1521 Domenico di Lorenzo at the church of the Annunziata in Florence.
Among the most important recent restorations, I would name the 1509 Pietro da Montefalco in Trevi (Umbria), restored by Pinchi-Ars Organi, the 1852 Tronci with three manuals and two small pedalboards at Gavinana (Tuscany), restored by Riccardo Lorenzini, and the 1775 Gaetano Callido at Fano (the Marches), restored by Francesco Zanin. Lastly, there is the 1565 Graziadio Antegnati organ in the church of Santa Barbara in Mantua, within the Gonzaga palace, an imposing 16¢ instrument with seven split keys for D-sharp and A-flat, restored by Giorgio Carli. I had the honor of playing the inaugural concert.

JR: Has there been much publicity about the Guglielmi organ?
FC: Unfortunately, after the restoration, nothing was published regarding the organ, and few organists played it. Realizing its importance—a great Roman organ from the time of Frescobaldi!—I proposed to Radio France that they do a CD recording for their “Temperaments” series, and Gilles Cantagrel, artistic director and noted Bach and organ scholar, accepted right away.
The CD notably helped develop interest in this important instrument, which restores the authentic sonority of the organs that the great Frescobaldi—and also Rossi, Pasquini, and their German pupils (Froberger, Kerll, Muffat)—would have regularly played, and for which they conceived their organ works.

JR: Francesco, you have toured a few times in the United States. Do you find that American organists know much about Italian organs?
FC: Generally, I think that it’s quite a mystery—people have only a vague idea—but all the organists that I’ve met in America are very interested to know more! For example, someone who heard the Guglielmi organ through my CD was extremely surprised by the very clear, or as they say, “stringy” sound—but also by the presence of the trumpet rank. Both these aspects are not part of their conception of the Italian organ, if their idea of the Italian organ only comes from visits they made to organs in Bologna rather than Florence. In Italy today, the Italian language is spoken with many varied accents (in the past, dialects were spoken more than they are today), and these differences are found in our old organs as well. It seems to me that the interest in Italian organ music, and the desire to explore it in all its vast scope, is growing. I have the impression that lately, after having concentrated on German Baroque works, people are looking for new repertoire, and the Italian repertory is clearly gaining popularity!

JR: Tell us something about your latest trip to the U.S.
FC: I was surprised to be able to play two historic Italian organs! I had heard of the 18th-century organ at the Eastman School in Rochester, inaugurated last year and now at the center of a strong, thorough study of Italian organ music. Its placement within the museum is really splendid; being surrounded by Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings, it is put in a cultural context that is so important for those who are knowledgeable as well as for American students. Equally excellent is the positive organ that I played at Cornell University in Ithaca—an instrument with a strong Neapolitan character, built by Agostino Vicedomini in the 1720s. I think that both these instrument were restored very well.
I was also delighted with the sound of the big Flentrop at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago—faithful to the Dutch Baroque aesthetic—and also the John Brombaugh organ in Springfield, Illinois, a fine balance between historic copy and personality. I hope that soon the United States can have more organs in Italian style, maybe entrusting their construction to Italian builders so that the true Italian sonority—luminous and full of character—can be more widespread. I think that in mid-size churches with good acoustics, such an organ could be successful, or in churches where in addition to a traditional instrument there is a desire for an organ with a different sonority. Why not?

The author wishes to thank Fratelli Ruffatti, and especially Francesco Ruffatti, for their kind assistance. All translations are by the author.

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.

A conversation with Steven Egler

Steven Egler is Professor of Music at Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1976. He was a student of Robert Glasgow from 1969 to 1981, during which time he completed the B.M., M.M., and D.M.A. degrees at The University of Michigan. Egler is also Councillor for Region V of the AGO.

SE: Please comment about the Gleasons, their teaching, and working with both of them.

RG: They’re both gone now. Harold way back [1980] and Catharine more recently [2003].

SE: How did they compare as teachers?

RG: Quite different from one another. She was very exacting. He was, too, but he was older--a generation older. I didn’t study with her except for some special repertoire. He would suggest that I take a particular piece to Mrs. Gleason that she’d been playing, so I could see what she had to say about it. That was interesting. I studied with Catharine for the whole summer after I had already finished the degree.

But Harold was somebody with a certain presence, because there was a wonderful human mind, sense of humor, and many, many years of experience--and not just in organ. In fact, some of his instructions would be to listen to some orchestral piece because it had something to do with what I was working on; so I did exactly as he told me to do. He had studio class every week--small class, five students.

Catharine’s main influence was in her playing. She played through her recitals before every time that she went on a tour, which was three or four times a year. She would play the tour programs for us up there in [Organ Studio] 427. We could watch everything that she did. Technique was all there. Everything was PERFECT. It was a wonderful example. No frothing at the mouth. Very elegant. THAT was most instructive.

SE: And it was always from memory, right.

RG: Yes.

SE: That’s interesting to me, about memorizing. What about extemporization?

RG: I wouldn’t give you a dime for an organist who couldn’t extemporize a little bit, who has to have every note written down on a piece of paper before he can play anything, who can’t even touch the manuals without having the notes down on the page. I-IV-V-I, if nothing more than that.

But they don’t seem to stress that enough everywhere. I don’t see why they can’t do it. Just scared to death. Make music, as it were. You know what I mean? If you leave your scores at home, on Sunday, go make music. Maybe find a hymn tune and just play on your own. But you know, we’re afraid of it, even though we’ve got music in us and enough technique in our fingers--but of course that takes daily practice.

SE: You’re absolutely right!

RG: It’s partly about your early experiences as a child. There was nothing wrong with sitting down and playing on the keyboard without having anything on the music rack.

SE: Your first teaching position was as professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois, from 1951-1962. It must have been very exciting to get a teaching position right after receiving your graduate degree from the Eastman School. Please describe how this appointment came about.

RG: The appointment was in May of that year, and I started teaching in September [1951]. I knew about the place because I knew of at least one student at Eastman from Jacksonville who had been a student of Ruth Melville Bellatti who was the teacher there before I was. There had been Eastman teachers there in the department of music.

The school was about to get a new four-manual Aeolian-Skinner organ in the chapel. It was a beautiful organ, and I was lucky to have it while I was there--the last 10 years that I was there.

I went back to play there, and they gave me an honorary doctorate [Doctor of Music]. [The recital and conferring of the degree took place on October 3, 1975.] It was a high point for me. That concert was the first concert on the Jacksonville/MacMurray Civic Music Series. They had all kinds of things, you know: orchestra, pianists, from all over--not just one area. They had a full house, as I recall. Do you remember Ruth Melville Bellatti?

SE: No. I only recall hearing the name.

RG: She was my predecessor there once removed. She was a classmate of Catharine [Crozier]. She was a superb player, and she was the one that really got the ball rolling on that new organ.

SE: Didn’t Harold Gleason design that organ?

RG: He had a lot to do with it. He made some suggestions.

SE: That would explain the connection to Eastman. 

RG: Many of the teachers had been from Eastman way back into the 1930s. Joe Clelland went there back in the 1930s and brought Ruth to the faculty. That was one of the best things they ever did. Then she got married to Walt Bellatti and started raising a family. That’s when they got Wilbur Sheridan for four years, and then just the time before the organ was to arrive, he left--went to a college in Washington state, and that’s how I got the position. I saw the new organ specification on paper and thought, “You’re leaving this?” Those were wonderful years. Catharine Crozier played the opening recital.

SE: Didn’t you direct the orchestra at MacMurray?

RG: That was the first year that I was there. The director/chairman called me in and asked, “Wouldn’t you like to conduct the orchestra?” “Sure, I can’t wait.” “Well, you’re the only one around here with any orchestral experience.” I said, “What, I haven’t had any orchestral experience.” “Yes, but you’ve PLAYED in one.” That means you are a conductor if you’ve played in an orchestra.

Well, such as it was. They had five violins, clarinet, bassoon, that was it. String bass, cello, and PIANO--fill in, you see. It was kind of pitiful there for a while, but I was game--I had no choice! They had to grab players anywhere you could find them--faculty, local residents, students--and nobody was any good. It was pretty bad, and I wasn’t much better.

We had a concert coming up right away--Christmas Vespers--and we had to get together right away. In the first place, I had to find something that I thought they could play amongst this VAST repertoire in their library. At the first rehearsal, about half of the instruments were there. The next week, it was just be another arrangement of people, sort of like pick-up. I thought that this was hopeless, so I told the pianist to play loud! We’ll have to have something to carry us through. That was my experience with that orchestra. 

I also taught counterpoint, which I wasn’t planning to do, but this other teacher had left. He was the string teacher and taught counterpoint.

SE: How were your organ students there that first year?

RG: The first year, I think that I had six, and I was lucky to have that many. They didn’t know me, and the organ was coming next year. Then I started playing over the radio every Sunday afternoon, and that got a lot of attention for that area. Then the students began piling in, and there were some very good ones.

One of the prides of that school was the chapel building, which is a handsome building, and the organ. In the meantime, they have acquired a new music and arts building.

SE: How did your appointment to The University of Michigan come about?

RG: It was late in the year and I had been out in Los Angeles to play for my first national convention of the AGO. Then I played for Clarence Mader at his church in Los Angeles that summer, Immanuel Presbyterian Church, Wilshire Boulevard.

Marilyn Mason had played in Springfield, Illinois that spring, and I went over to hear her, and I met her afterwards. Then, in a few days’ time, she called and asked if I would like to be considered for a job at The University of Michigan. There were no vacancies then, but that summer--June--it opened up. So they called me up, flew me back. I met with the dean and the executive board, and was offered the position. Just like that!

SE: Who was the dean of the School of Music then?

RG: James Wallace--a grand guy. Just first rate. He was an ideal dean. The door was always open to students and faculty alike. He was not impressed with himself. His trump card: he was very humane. He would never miss a faculty recital. If there were two on the same night, he would go to the first half of one and the second half of the other. It was the same with some of the older students. He’d show up! 

SE: What have been any highlights of your years at Michigan?

RG: There have been many, such as receiving the Harold Haugh Award for Excellence in Teaching; I appreciated getting that award. And the Eastman School of Music Alumni Achievement Award.

In February 2002, Eastman and the Rochester Chapter of the American Guild of Organists (organized by Tom Trenney) invited me back to do a masterclass for their students. They wanted me to do a roundtable discussion with David Craighead (“Conversation with the Masters”), talking about the “old days.”

Right at the end of that, the Director of the School of Music, James Undercofler, surprised me and presented me with [that year’s] award for Distinguished Alumni Achievement. It was like a diploma, and he read off the citation. This was a surprise, a big surprise.

SE: How have organ teaching and playing evolved over the course of your 50-plus years of teaching? Compare your current students to former students.

RG: Students have changed in the 40 years I’ve been here. They’re not as open and natural. They’re more guarded--not all--more so than they used to be. They had more fun then. It’s all very serious now.

SE: How has the Organ Reform Movement affected organ building and performance?

RG: Well, the level of organ building and tonal design has improved somewhat; but I still enjoy a good E. M. Skinner with certain repertoire, and I have some students who feel that way. They are really fascinated with E. M. Skinner’s philosophy (if you want to use that word). I don’t find anything very charming in the neo-Baroque ideal. Cavaillé-Coll built organs according to his own ideal. He didn’t copy something from before. We wouldn’t have the great 19th-century heritage in France if he hadn’t followed his own creative urge.

SE: What advice would you give to young organists entering the profession today?

RG: Try to think of yourself as a musician first and don’t worry about what’s the latest thing. Follow your own musical instincts. I grew up playing on a flat, straight pedalboard in Oklahoma City, on the only mechanical action organ in town at that time, and I think that it’s still there. It never wore out. It was one of those Hinners--workhorse of an organ--and they just didn’t wear out. Like Austin--it doesn’t wear out.

SE: Can you say anything about your long-standing friendship/collegial relationship with Orpha Ochse?

RG: I first met Orpha when she was new at Eastman, as I was. I was sitting there (fourth floor), and she came up and asked me, “Does it make any difference which of these organs we can practice on?” I said, “No, as far as I know.” We just became friends. The organ department had a lot of new students that fall (1949), but of course, I’d been there since late June--taking lessons, practicing, working--and that’s when I got my church job, which was why I was there so early.

Her personality, sense of humor--very droll sense of humor--you’d think that she was dead serious about something, but she wasn’t. And she had this incredible ability to see into things--the phony side of things, which I appreciated very much, at that time especially.

SE: That must be an incredible thing to have a friend like Orpha over such a long period of time.

RG: Well she’s a rare bird, that’s one thing for sure, and she is also an extremely intelligent bird. She has an unbelievably sharp mind, and therefore it is fun, but you don’t fool her for a minute.

And her books are universally regarded and essential in any organist’s libary: The History of the Organ in the United States; Organists and Organ Playing in 19th-Century France and Belgium, a great resource; and more recently her books about the Austin and Murray Harris companies.

SE: What were some of your favorite organs to play throughout your career?

RG: The 1911 Austin at First Presbyterian Church, Oklahoma City.

The 1920 Kimball organ at the Shrine Auditorium, Masonic Temple, Oklahoma City.

The 1918 Kimball at First Church of Christ, Scientist, Oklahoma City.

At the Eastman School of Music, the 1936 G. Donald Harrison Aeolian-Skinner in Strong Auditorium. This was a totally different idea of organ design. I hear they’re going to restore it.

Church of the Advent, Boston, Massachusetts, 1936 Aeolian-Skinner. It has some of the loveliest sounds that you will hear anywhere. It, along with the Groton School instrument (1935), represented Harrison’s new “American Classic” design.

High on this list would be Merner Chapel, MacMurray College, Jacksonville, Illlinois: 4-manual Aeolian-Skinner (1952).

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1934 Aeolian-Skinner. It has been through many transformations/revisions but is now restored (under the supervision of current organist and former student, Peter Stoltzfus).

Bridges Hall, Pomona College, Claremont, California, 2002 C.B. Fisk. I just heard this a few weeks ago, demonstrated beautifully by college organist Bill Peterson--such an organ and such playing!

SE: What various influences led you to devote your efforts to the romantic repertoire?

RG: I like the music! I loved the Franck D-minor Symphony and heard it performed before I actually played it in the high-school orchestra. The Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3--a recording that I had on 78 record--the reeds of that organ were compelling. I identified with the sounds of those instruments right away. I did not know much about Cavaillé-Coll, but I knew that I liked those sounds.

SE: Do you want to say anything about your performing career, Bob?

RG: Well, I enjoyed it while it lasted. I’m not performing any more. I have what is called atrial fibrillation. Have you heard of that? My heart doesn’t have any rhythm: it doesn’t know where the beat is. It goes crazy because you can’t get enough oxygen for it to operate correctly, so I’m taking all of this medication--I have been now for a couple or three years. It keeps me sort of on an even keel.

The last performance that I did, I almost couldn’t play. I’d been out to West Texas. What a trip--nightmare of a trip! Flying out there, changing in Houston, missing the connection, galloping through the terminal, then missing the connection, then pain all over every inch of my body. It was heart failure. The heart was trying to do the best that it could, but it couldn’t keep up. I didn’t know that at that time. 

I got to the church the next morning. The organ man was there and the organ wasn’t ready to play. He said that I’d have to come back later on in a couple of hours and that they needed more time. I never got to the organ until the night before the performance. It didn’t go very well. I was too tired, by the time I got to second half, I thought that the other pieces were ho-hum, ordinary. Then I thought that maybe this was the right time to “turn the corner.”

I then went to North Texas State University, Denton, Texas, which was presenting a conference on Cavaillé-Coll. I did a recital of that repertoire on that organ in the main hall, and that was hard to do, too. I was just exhausted, and I couldn’t get rested. I thought then, “Just cool it. You don’t need to do this the rest of your life.” The more that I thought that way, the more comfortable I felt.

I played Widor Seventh, complete, on the last part of the program. I got into the next-to-last movement (slow movement) and the organ ciphered, so I had to stop, of course. By this time, I was so dizzy that I didn’t know which way was up, so they came up to see about me. I told Jesse Eschbach, my former student, that I couldn’t go on and that he would have to help me out and that I couldn’t finish the recital. Meanwhile, the audience was wondering what was happening since I didn’t return. I was supposed to teach a performance class the next morning. I did get up and do that.

Then I went to Memphis. I got things worked out, but there was trouble with the organ and one of these impossible situations where the console is where you can’t get to it--you needed to be an acrobat! Nice acoustics, though. Nice organ--Schantz. So I didn’t go. I didn’t play. I cancelled out about an hour before curtain time--too dizzy!

They all seemed to understand when I told them what had happened. But that was the last time I attempted to play anywhere, and I thought then, “That’s it. I’ve done this now since I was that high, so that’s fine.” Having made that decision, I felt as if there was a big weight lifted off of my shoulders. But I’m sorry that I didn’t know more about it (my situation) before that performance because people were down there and waiting. So I got on the plane the next morning and flew back here, and that was it.

SE: So, what about retirement and the whole concept of retirement?

RG: The concept of retirement? Well, at The University of Michigan we have what they call a retirement furlough. It’s a nice deal. You have another year to do things that you want to do and get paid full salary. You teach as much as you want to or not at all. And they’ll furnish you with a studio or office.

SE: So, will you do that then?

RG: I’m going to stay right here for the time being--and then, we’ll see. I have no idea what I’m going to do after that. I think I’m going to get together all of my annotated copies of all the scores of Franck, some Widor, and some Sowerby, and get those out. That’ll take me the next 10 years!

SE: What about recording?

RG: The only thing that I regret is that I didn’t go on and record more than I did. I wish I had gone ahead and done all the Franck. I had that in mind, but I didn’t get to it soon enough. And I’m not too happy with what I did, although I’ve been told over and over again how wonderful it is, so I thought, “OK, if you think it’s so wonderful, I’ll shut up.”

That was a wonderful organ (All Saints’ Episcopal, Worcester, Massachusetts) for Franck, rather than packing up and going abroad. I didn’t want to do that. There’s a lot more to a “telling” performance than a particular organ. The particular organ does help, but I don’t think you have to have only THIS organ. If you do, you’re kind of stuck.

SE: Your legacy as a teacher and a performer are legendary, and you have been an inspiration to countless numbers of organists, myself included. What do you feel has been your greatest contribution to the organ world?

RG: Students (without hesitation), and I don’t hesitate a minute to say that, in spite of a few huge disappointments; yet some times I can’t stand them! But that’s more lasting. And maybe, to a certain extent, my performance, because you demonstrate what you’ve been teaching. One should be able to do that: put up or shut up. But I’ve done that over a period of how many years, so I didn’t feel too badly about realizing I couldn’t do it anymore or shouldn’t do it anymore.

RB: It’s like a chain of succession.

RG: Well, we now have the next generation of mine. I’ve been blessed the past 54 years with some extraordinarily talented students--almost too numerous to list here.

Michael Barone is host and producer of American Public Media’s Pipedreams program, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2007. Pipedreams can be heard on radio stations across the country, also on XM Satellite Radio Channel 133 and in Hong Kong on Radio Four. Barone is a native of northeastern Pennsylvania, a music history graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory, and a nearly 39-year employee of Minnesota Public Radio.

John Weaver, one of the America’s finest concert organists, celebrates his 70th birthday on April 27, 2007. The following interview is offered in honor of this milestone.
Dr. Weaver was director of music at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City from 1970–2005, and served as head of the organ department at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia 1971–2003, and also chair of the organ department at the Juilliard School 1987–2004.
His formal musical studies began at the age of six, and at age 15 he began organ study with Richard Ross and George Markey. His undergraduate study was at the Curtis Institute as a student of Alexander McCurdy, and he earned a Master of Sacred Music degree at Union Theological Seminary. In 1989 John Weaver was honored by the Peabody Conservatory with its Distinguished Alumni Award. He has received honorary Doctor of Music degrees from Westminster College, New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, and the Curtis Institute of Music. In 2005 he was named “International Performer of the Year” by the New York City chapter of the American Guild of Organists.
In addition to his work at the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, he has taught at Westminster Choir College, Union Theological Seminary, and the Manhattan School of Music. He has written numerous articles for organ and church music magazines and has served as president of the Presbyterian Association of Musicians.
Dr. Weaver has been active as a concert organist since coming under management in 1959. He has played throughout the USA, Canada, Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. He has performed on national television and radio network programs in the U.S. and Germany, and has made recordings for Aeolian-Skinner, the Wicks Organ Company, Klais Orgelbau of Germany, a CD on Gothic Records for the Schantz Organ Company, and a recording on the Pro Organo label on the new Reuter organ at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle. His most recent recording, “The Organ and Choral Music of John Weaver,” is available on the JAV label and features his own organ and choral compositions. His published compositions for organ, chorus/organ and flute/organ are widely performed.
He currently lives in Vermont and continues to concertize and lead workshops and masterclasses around the world. The Weavers love to climb the New England mountains, and have a tradition of an annual ascent of Mt. Washington. Marianne is an avid gardener, and John’s hobby is a deep fascination with trains, both model and prototype.
This interview took place July 11, 2005, at the Weaver home in the rolling countryside near West Glover, Vermont.

MICHAEL BARONE: How did John Weaver stumble into the world of the organ?
JOHN WEAVER: We moved away from the little town where I spent the first four and a half years of my life. I have very few recollections of that place, except one of them that’s very strong—the organ at the church where my father was the pastor had a wonderful sound on low E. Something about the 16' stop on that organ resonated in the room in a glorious way, and I fell in love with that. As soon as I learned how to play a few notes on the piano, my favorite thing was to hold down the sustaining pedal and play an arpeggio—slowly at first—and just listen to it ring like an organ. Something in me has always been attracted to that sound.
MB: With whom did you study and how would you characterize those years?
JW: My first organ lessons were with a wonderful organist in Baltimore, Richard Ross. He died at age 39 shortly after having given me a lesson on a Saturday afternoon—just failed to show up the next day at church. Ross was becoming one of the best-known and finest organists in the country. When I first went to him, at the age of 15, instead of auditioning me at the organ, he told me to go up onto the stage of the Peabody concert hall and play for him on the piano. Well, there was a big Steinway up there, but the thing that really interested me was the 4-manual E. M. Skinner. I could hear air escaping from it, and I coveted playing that instrument so badly that I can feel it still today.
Nevertheless, Ross told me that he wanted to hear me play something on the piano. So, I stumbled through my Mozart sonata that was not really very good at that point, and afterward he said to me, “I don’t want you to study organ yet. You need to study at least another year of piano and really work at it very hard.” And then he also said something that I’ve always remembered: “If in the meantime you study organ with anybody else, I will never teach you.”
Well, I took his advice, and I went back to my piano teacher and really did work for a year—then came back the next year and played for Ross again. This time I played the Beethoven “Pathétique,” and I played it pretty well. Ross said, “OK, now you can start studying organ, but you must continue to study piano as well.”
Fortunately I had a very good piano teacher, and I studied with Ross for about a year and a half, until his death. The Peabody Conservatory brought in George Markey as an interim to fill out the rest of that academic year. While I was studying with Markey, at this point as a senior in high school, he said “Where are you going to go to school next year?” I just assumed I would go to Peabody because we lived in Baltimore, and Markey said, “Well, have you considered auditioning for the Curtis Institute of Music?” And I remember asking him, “Where is that?” I was soon to find out a lot about Curtis and also about the great teacher there, Alexander McCurdy. I did audition and was accepted, and had four glorious years in Philadelphia.

MB: McCurdy is something of a legend, and the stories about him are numerous. I expect you have more than a few.
JW: I’ve described him on numerous occasions as an Old Testament figure. He was someone you both loved and feared at the same time—certainly, not one to suffer fools. If you went into a lesson unprepared, you were sure to get a dressing down that would do a drill sergeant credit. But when words of praise came, they were so precious and so rewarding that they could light you up for a whole week. He was a very liberal teacher in that he did not insist on playing any piece of music in any certain way. Within that department at that time we had about six students—there was one student who was very much a disciple of E. Power Biggs, and there were others of us who were much more in the Virgil Fox camp. That was sort of the nature of the department, but McCurdy was as enthusiastic about the fellow who was a Neo-Baroquist as he was about the rest of us. That person, by the way, is Temple Painter, who is one of the leading harpsichordists in the city of Philadelphia and still plays organ as well.

MB: What were McCurdy’s techniques to get the best out of students? What did he create in you that might not have been there before? And then how did you take what you learned from McCurdy and shape that with your own personality?
JW: McCurdy had several ways of getting the best from us. I’ll never forget my first lesson: he assigned a chorale prelude from the Orgelbüchlein, which I had not played, and he said, “Mr. Weaver, I’d like you to play this next week from memory in organ class.” Well, right away it was jump-starting; and seven, eight hours a day of practicing became the norm. At my second lesson, he assigned the Vierne Cantabile, from the second symphony, and said, “I’d like you to play that next week in organ class in front of your peers.” Well, that was really a struggle. And he did that for about three weeks at the beginning of the four years. After that, he never assigned a piece again. But he got me into the habit of learning—I knew he expected that kind of production from week to week.
That’s a Curtis tradition that was started by Lynnwood Farnam, continued by Fernando Germani and by McCurdy, and I believe is still the case—each student comes every week with a new piece memorized to play in class. This could be a little one-page chorale prelude for manuals alone, or it could be a major prelude and fugue, a big romantic work, or a modern work—you could repeat something from previous classes, but you always had to have a new piece also. It got us into the habit of assuming when you started to learn a piece that you were eventually going to play it from memory. There are some pieces that I have never been able to play from memory. I’ve memorized a fair amount of Messiaen, but with more atonal pieces, I find that I am just not comfortable playing without the score.

MB: The challenge for the organist, of course, is that each instrument is different from the next and requires its own learning process. The traveling recitalist comes to a church, gets used to the instrument, gets used to the instrument’s response in the room, and then tries to make music with the repertoire that you’ve brought to town. Perhaps it’s no wonder that fewer organists want to memorize these days, but there’s still something about a performer totally connected to and deeply involved in the music that is missing when a score is being read.
JW: There is always the problem of the page-turner—or, if one turns one’s own pages, that has its risks as well. Page-turners can sometimes pull music down off the rack inadvertently, or pull a page right out of the book, or turn two pages—there are lots of risks. Page-turners also have a tendency sometimes to hum or to tap their foot. I’ve even known some who think it’s safe to step on the pedalboard to reach a page that’s far out of the way—that really does produce a catastrophe.
I guess it doesn’t make a lot of difference if the console is completely hidden. I wouldn’t know if someone was playing from memory or not, but pianists, violinists, singers are expected to walk on stage and play from memory. It’s harder for organists, yes. I like to have 12 to 15 hours at an instrument before I’m ready to play a recital on it. If I had 20 hours it would be better still. If I had 25, I would find a few more things to make that instrument come across in the very best possible way and the music to be the best that I could do. That kind of time is rarely available, but 12 to 15 hours is a norm.

MB: I always get the sense watching you that you really enjoy playing. Now is this actually true or are you just a very good actor?
JW: If it looks like I’m having fun, I’m glad for that because in a way, I am. I also am constantly aware of the pitfalls—how many things might happen that you don’t want to happen and sometimes do. But I do enjoy playing. I love playing recitals, though it scares me, and five minutes before the recital I ask myself “Why did I ever agree to do this?” But once I start playing, why, that departs and I really do settle down and enjoy what I love about the music that I play—hoping that people will catch something of what I’m feeling about that music and my devotion to it.

MB: How did you, a former student at the Curtis Institute, come to be the head of the organ department at Curtis?
JW: One fine day Alexander McCurdy called me up and said, “Mr. Weaver, I’m going to retire from the Curtis Institute, and Rudolph Serkin would like to meet with you and see if you might be an appropriate successor.” (Rudolph Serkin at that point being the director of the Curtis Institute.) Needless to say, I went down to Philadelphia and met with Serkin, and he suggested that I play a recital in Curtis Hall—it was never called an audition recital, but I think they wanted me to clear that hurdle before giving me a green light. Curtis Hall is one of the hardest places to play. It is totally dry acoustically, with a 118-rank Aeolian-Skinner in a room that seats about 200 people—probably more pipes per person than any place else in the world. But it’s an instrument that can, if one works with it, do remarkable things. So I did play the recital and did get the job, and was there very happily for many years. I started in 1971 and retired in 2003—32 years.

MB: How would you characterize yourself as a teacher?
JW: I’ve tried to follow the McCurdy mold. When I was at Curtis we continued the tradition of the organ class—memorization and new pieces each week. I also tried to not impose my own interpretation of any given piece upon the students that I was fortunate enough to teach, both at Curtis and at Juilliard. I do believe that everyone should somehow sound like themselves, that there is some part of themselves and their own musical personality that will affect the way that they perform any piece.
I’ve had students who were extremely flamboyant and almost overdone. I’ve tried to curb that a little bit sometimes, but I certainly don’t want to squelch the enthusiasm and the very strong personal interpretations that a student like that can bring. Sometimes I find a student’s playing to be too conservative, just dull note pushing, and then we talk a lot about the music and about its nature—its liveliness or passiveness or serenity or agitation—trying to have the student project something in the music other than just the notes on the page.

MB: Who were some of your outstanding recent students?
JW: Well, without naming any priority, certainly Paul Jacobs, who succeeded me at Juilliard; Alan Morrison, who succeeded me at the Curtis Institute; Diane Meredith Belcher, who’s on the faculty at Westminster Choir College; Ken Cowan, who is on the faculty of Westminster Choir College and is now the head of the organ department there—and a whole host of others. Those are four that are under management, nationally known, and do a great deal of playing—I’m very proud of them indeed.

MB: How did you come to be at Madison Avenue Presbyterian? What are the different demands, delights, and challenges of being a church musician as opposed to being a fancy-free artist in the world of recitals?
JW: For eleven years, I was at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in New York. While there, my wife and I started the Bach cantata series that continues to this day, and we really made that church known for performances of the music of Bach. In 1970, I knew that the position at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church was vacant. It never occurred to me to apply for it. But one day, a gentleman came into the church office unannounced, no appointment, and asked to see me. When we met he said, “We,” meaning the search committee at Madison Avenue, “were hoping that you would apply.”
Well, having the door opened by him at that point, I decided to follow through with it, and I did so with a great deal of doubt because I had grown up in a Presbyterian church, where the din of the congregational chatter before the service completely drowned out anything that could possibly be done on the organ. And I had the impression that Presbyterians generally did not place a very high value on the quality of the worship, the sermon being the centerpiece of the whole Sunday morning experience. But I met with the committee at Madison Avenue and particularly with their pastor David H.C. Reed, in whom I found a Presbyterian with wonderfully high regard for worship and high expectations for the quality of worship. My fears were allayed. I did go to Madison Avenue in the fall of 1970, and immediately we began changing the nature of the worship service there. The congregation began to sing a great deal more—four hymns every Sunday, plus they began to sing the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei.
That progressed until the congregation tended to draw people who liked to sing, and so the congregational singing was strong and is to this day. David Reed was followed by Dr. Fred Anderson, who was a musician—his first degree was as a music major—and a great lover of music and of worship. Now one could go to Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church and the worship experience would be very ecumenical. You would not be certain if you were in a Lutheran or a Roman Catholic or an Episcopal church. It’s very much Presbyterian, but at the same time very ecumenical and very rich liturgically.
MB: Have you considered yourself an organist who composes or have you always thought of yourself as a composer who had to make his way as an organist and a teacher?
JW: Very definitely the former: I’m an organist first and foremost, but I’m an organist who loves to compose. Many composers who try to write for the organ don’t understand the instrument and therefore write pieces that get a premiere performance and are never heard again. In fact, the organ literature that does become mainstream is almost always written by people who play the instrument. One great exception is Paul Hindemith, but he of course was able to write for any instrument, and he always did his research and knew what he was doing—he wrote three wonderful organ sonatas and a concerto.
Years ago, when I was in my early teens, I started going to Vermont in the summer to a music camp for theory. No lessons were taught on piano or clarinet or violin or anything like that. There was no applied music—it was all theory. We had counterpoint classes, form and analysis, and harmony and such, and the result of it was that the students of the camp composed because we had been given the tools of the musical language.
So I’ve gone to Vermont every summer of my life to compose, and now that I live here I hope to do a lot more composing. I’ve also composed primarily things that I myself could use. Although everything I’ve composed for the last 15 years has been on commission, I’ve always written something that I could use in my own work, either in recitals or in church services. I’ve written a lot of choral music and a lot of organ solo pieces and also several pieces for organ and flute because my wife is a very good flutist and we like to be able to play those pieces together.

MB: Do you have any favorites among the pieces that you’ve written? JW: My favorites tend to be the ones that have been performed a great deal. The Passacaglia on a Theme of Dunstable—it may not in fact be by Dunstable, but it was thought to be by him, namely the tune Deo gratias—was composed for the 25th anniversary of the state trumpets at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and I played the premiere performance there. It’s a set of variations in passacaglia form, and one variation is designated for that magnificent state trumpet at the west end of that huge cathedral. Nevertheless, the piece works on instruments that don’t have that particular kind of stop available. The piece has been recorded by a number of people and has been played all over the world—that gives me a lot of satisfaction. It’s also one of my favorite pieces.

MB: How many compositions have you’ve written up to this point?
JW: I’ve probably composed about 20 choral pieces, that is, anthem-length pieces. I’ve also composed all four gospel settings of the Passion story, and probably a dozen solo organ pieces.

MB: And other than the commission that you just received on Friday, the future is an open book at this point?
JW: Yes, actually that’s the only commission I have in hand right now, but I am trusting that others will come in. And if they don’t I’ll write anyhow.

MB: Someone wanting to commission you would do what? Do you have a website?
JW: .

MB: Do you enjoy the process of recording? You’ve made some notable recordings. It ends up sounding as though you’re having a good time, even if you might not be.
JW: No, I hate recording. [laughter] There’s something a little bit antiseptic about it. First of all, one does not get that sense of response from a live audience. You simply do the playing, and then there are people sitting around with scores and dials and they’re wanting to do this over again and that over again—or a siren will go off or there’ll be a clap of thunder; things like that can make it very frustrating. When they listen to a recording, people have no idea about how long it takes to make that, because street noises or other interruptions can destroy what otherwise would have been a perfect take. It’s very hard.

MB: You’ve been performing in Portland on the Kotzschmar organ—well, you must have been a boy in knee pants when you started.
JW: It was in 1956—at the end of my first year as a student at the Curtis Institute of Music—when I first played the instrument that had been given to the city of Portland by Cyrus H. K. Curtis, whose daughter was the founder of the Curtis Institute. So there was a wonderful connection there. And I’ve been back every year since. [Editor’s note: Dr. Weaver played his 50th recital on the Kotzschmar in August 2005.]

MB: The organ is a challenge as a musical instrument—it is this device with so many opportunities for color and dynamics, and yet is an incredibly complex machine, which even at its best seems to be intractable. Is this something that organists don’t think about, they just do? Or is making music on the organ as difficult as it might appear to a layman, seeing all of those controls to be manipulated and the separation between the console and the pipework and all of that?
JW: Michael, I believe every instrument has its challenges. For pianists, the way in which the key is struck is so critical, and a pianist’s hands must cover a large key compass, whereas organs have a shorter keyboard, 61 notes as opposed to 88; and organ music tends to stay in the middle register, so, in a way, that’s much easier. Violinists have tiny strings and a fingerboard, and it amazes me that they can play a C major scale. Violin virtuosos are just astonishing. The challenges of the organ are mastering the pedals, mastering console technique that enables you to draw upon the resources of the instrument—and then also to a very great extent, the imagination that you can bring to bear with so many different colors available. Each person will choose sounds to produce the right color, if I might use that word, for the passage that they’re playing in a way that pianists and violinists couldn’t possibly do.

MB: In the 21st century young organists face not only sustaining the presence of their instrument but actually rebuilding an audience for organ music. I see this as a real challenge.
JW: Yes, it is. Every now and then though, one sees very hopeful signs—one of those being the recent installation within the last five to ten years of a great many organs in the concert halls of this country—something that’s fairly standard in Europe; for instance, the renovation of the wonderful Ernest Skinner organ in Severance Hall in Cleveland, a new organ in Orchestra Hall in Chicago, the restoration of the organ in Boston Symphony Hall, the new Disney Hall instrument in Los Angeles. One could go on and on and name any number of places where new instruments have been installed or old instruments have been restored—to me this suggests that the organ will take, again, its place as a concert instrument and not just a liturgical instrument.
On the other hand, it must be said that concert halls are often not the most perfect, acoustically, for organs. Great organ music was written to sound its best in places with fairly substantial reverberation, such as a large stone church. So concert hall organs are wonderful, and I’m glad they’re being built, and they enable us to do organ concerti and sometimes organ solo recitals. But the church, particularly one that has a long reverberation period, is still where the organ seems most at home.

MB: How would you compare the scene for organs and organists in your day? Was this a peak of energy with that marvelous—some would say divisive, some would say energy producing—polarity between the historicists and E. Power Biggs on one side, and the theatricalists and Virgil Fox on the other? We don’t have quite that type of energy today. I daresay the man in the street, if asked to name a concert organist today, might be hard pressed, whereas back in the ’60s and early ’70s, the names of Biggs and Fox were very much in the public ear.
JW: Biggs and Fox, both of them very talented, extraordinary musicians, had a great advantage of working right at the time that the LP recording was becoming common in the American home. RCA Victor and Columbia were the big producers of LP recordings at the beginning of that time in the early ’50s. And there was Biggs and there was Fox, and these two polarities were represented in the recording industry—that did a great deal for the visibility of the organ and the popularity of organ music.

MB: It could be argued that now is both the best of times and the worst of times—there are far more organ recordings available, representing a much larger panoply of artistry and instruments both new built and historic, marvelously represented—and yet there is so much that the focus is lost to some degree.
JW: Yes, I think that’s right. When it was Biggs and Fox, you could expect to find their names in the crossword puzzle. No organist today has that kind of visibility. Another name that was right up there at the top was Marcel Dupré because of his extraordinary playing and also the fact that he had been the teacher of so many organists in the U.S. through the Fulbright program. There isn’t anyone who has really achieved that kind of star status in the organ world, which is not to say that there aren’t a great many wonderfully talented and brilliant performers. Maybe there are just too many.

MB: Yes, it could be argued that the performance quality of the 21st century is higher than it’s ever been. Do you think that it’s possible with so much talent around for someone to distinguish themselves or do they have to almost jump beyond mere artistry and do something odd in order to be discovered? JW: Perhaps it would be best to think in terms of naming names. The name of Cameron Carpenter who studied with me at Juilliard comes to mind. Cameron is extraordinarily flamboyant, both in dress and personality and in playing. His playing annoys the purists terribly, but certain people are simply mesmerized by his performances. And he is a genius—there’s no question about that. Another name that gets a great deal of visibility these days is the young German organist, Felix Hell, whom I also had the honor to teach. Felix, at first, was famous because he was so very young when he was playing recitals all over the world, literally, as he still does. But now he is taking his place among the more mature artists of the younger generation and plays very well indeed—and has made numerous recordings. So these two are a little bit like Biggs and Fox—Felix tends to be a fairly conservative player, not extremely so but more middle of the road, whereas Cameron is way out there in show biz land.

MB: Presuming it’s something different from that marvelous, resonate low “E” that had you mesmerized as a child, when you play and hear the organ, what sort of thoughts go through your mind? What is it about the instrument that still captures your heart and soul?
JW: Who could not be seduced by the instrument itself? Just the mechanics of it and this great collection of pipes, some of them enormous, much larger than most people realize, and most of them very much smaller. I think when a layman sees the inside of a pipe organ for the first time, they’re always astonished—even if it’s a small instrument, it looks amazingly big and complex. And the large ones, of course, are simply mind-boggling. So there’s something about the instrument: its bigness, its history. When I’m playing an organ, if I’m playing Bach I’m thinking about instruments I’ve played that Bach may have played—there’s this great history and great repertoire, and frankly the sound of the instrument has always seduced me.

MB: How would you characterize your playing style?
JW: Probably other people should do that. I would say that I am in the middle someplace. I probably am a little bit on the extrovert side of dead center, but I also am not one to completely disregard the knowledge that musicologists have brought to us of performance practice, of historic instruments—but sometimes I will just say “this piece that I’m playing on this particular instrument cannot be played in a good, authentic, 18th-century style.” Something must be done to make the music and the organ come together in a way that is satisfying and gratifying. And sometimes that means just throwing the rulebook out the window.

MB: Did you set out with goals? You probably didn’t begin your study imagining you would go to Curtis, and then after having studied at Curtis, you probably hadn’t thought that you might end up teaching there, or at Juilliard for that matter. You’re like a natural surfer who has swum out into the sea and found a fantastic wave and you’ve been able to ride that wave through your career with skill, with accomplishment, certainly with a sense of pride. How do you look back at your career from this point?
JW: I would have to say that as with many careers, a great deal of it has to do with being at the right place at the right time, but also having ability to do the job that is required. I’ve often thought that if I had been five years younger, the Curtis Institute would not have thought me an appropriate age to head that organ department. If I had been five years older, it’s likely that they would have chosen someone else from among Alexander McCurdy’s students.

MB: You have moved on from three prestigious positions and you’ve now settled in what used to be your summer home in rural Vermont, up in the marvelous rolling countryside in the northeast corner of the state. Somehow, I can’t think of you as retiring. What projects have you set for yourself for the future?
JW: The mail recently brought a new commission for a new organ piece—that’ll be one of the things. I do want to continue to compose. I’m playing a number of recitals this year including two that I’m extraordinarily excited about, because I will be reunited with the instruments that I had my first lessons on. One of them, the Peabody concert hall Skinner, was put in storage for about 40 years, and then set up at a big Roman Catholic Church in Princeton, New Jersey. A week later I will be playing a recital on the wonderful Skinner organ at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, where my teacher Richard Ross was the organist, and before him, Virgil Fox—a beautiful, perfectly untouched Ernest Skinner that really is quite a marvelous instrument. And I’m playing some other recitals and some dedications around the country.

MB: So, you keep your organ shoes polished and ready to go?
JW: Indeed so.
[Editor’s note: Dr. Weaver has announced that the 2007–2008 concert season will be his last for regular concert activity.]

MB: Tell me about some of your memories from being “on the road.”
JW: The wonderful occasions that I love to think back upon are two recitals that I played—one in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, for a national convention of the American Guild of Organists, in which everything went the way I wanted it to. I loved the instrument, the audience was wonderful, the acoustic was great. And the other one was the Mormon Tabernacle—a recital I played when the Tabernacle was having a three-day symposium to celebrate the restoration of the organ there. Everything was fun, and the instrument was to die for, and of course the acoustics are world famous.

MB: Tell me about your railroad fascination. Where did you grow up? Mauch Chunk?
JW: Yes, Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, is a little town north of Allentown and Bethlehem, about 20 miles up into the Pocono Mountains—it’s in a ravine cut by the Lehigh River, and there was a railroad on both sides of the river that ran through the town. The town is now called Jim Thore, but its historic name of Mauch Chunk has great importance. Anyhow, it was a railroad town, and being in this mountain ravine, day or night you could hear the sound of a steam locomotive. The bells and the whistles and the smell of coal smoke were a constant feature of that place. I can remember standing by the railroad track and holding my father’s hand and counting the number of cars on a freight train as it rolled through. It became a part of my life—a very strong hobby, and we are seated right now in the midst of a model railroad that I’m creating that is 26 by 36 feet and has 390 feet of track in it. This is my last model railroad—if I live to 150 I might actually finish it.

MB: And you had one in your office at Madison Avenue Presbyterian.
JW: Yes, unfortunately when I retired from Madison Avenue that meant the end of that railroad, but all of those trains and the structures and the little people and the automobiles and all that are now a part of the railroad here.

MB: I’m sure the compositions that you created for Madison Avenue Presbyterian remain in the files there for the choirs to sing. It’s too bad that your railroad installation in the office wasn’t kept by your replacement.
JW: In the search for my replacement, a fondness for railroads had nothing whatsoever to do with their choice. So.

MB: What of your siblings and in what directions did they go?
JW: My older brother took piano lessons from the same teacher that I had, and he could see that I was making faster progress, so he switched to violin and became in his high school years a reasonably good violinist—he played second chair, first violin in what was at that time a very good high school orchestra. My younger brother is a wonderful tenor, does a lot of solo work in the western Massachusetts area, teaches mathematics at Mount Holyoke College, has an abiding passion for music and even does some composing—he has been published.

MB: And your parents’ musical backgrounds?
JW: Both of my parents played the piano, my father better than my mother. My father had also studied organ for a year or two, and could get through a hymn—knew how to use the pedals a little bit for hymn playing. My mother was an artist, did a master’s at Carnegie Tech and then studied for a year at the Sorbonne—the walls of our houses are covered with paintings that she did over the years.

MB: With your family’s church affiliation and your being a church organist, it’s maybe not surprising that some of the most lovely works that you’ve created have been fantasies on or settings of hymn tunes. You certainly do respond to the church’s song in your compositions.
JW: Well, I love playing hymns. I especially love hymns when a congregation is stirred to sing really well—that’s a wonderful experience. Very often the reason for writing pieces based on hymns has to do with the nature of a commission that I have received. In fact, almost always when I have composed a piece based upon a hymn tune, it’s been requested by the person who commissioned the composition.

MB: Did your parents live to see the honor accorded their son who went on to great things?
JW: My father was very gratified to live to see my appointment to Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. It was one year later that I was appointed to Curtis. By that time, my mother had died, and my father was not at all well. My father did not particularly encourage my desire to be a professional organist. He, as a minister of a medium-size church, saw that as being at best a part-time job, which would mean having to do something else on the side, and that’s always a difficult life. I think he was very happy to see that I had the security of a full-time church position that was also in a church of great prominence within the denomination.

Michael Barone adds: When I first heard John Weaver play, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco for the AGO convention in 1984, I was charmed by his physical presence (Mr. Clean in a dinner jacket!), awed by his control of the instrument (and himself), and beguiled by his musicianship. Subsequent convergences have confirmed my first impressions. John is a modest man of major accomplishments, a patrician artist and persuasive virtuoso who has fostered and encouraged the talents and individuality of an inspiring array of youngsters. He is a musician whose own playing leaves a lasting memory, and whose compositions touch the soul. He’s a guy I’ve been both honored and delighted to know. Happy birthday, John!

John Weaver will be the featured guest/topic of a Pipedreams broadcast (#0717) during the week of April 23, 2007, which will remain available 24/7 in an online audio “programs” archive at www.pipedreams.org.

Michael Barone's John Weaver interview

See the interview here.

Other items of interest:

John Weaver honored by Juilliard

John Weaver honored by Union Theological Seminary

Honoring John Weaver's 80th birthday

John Weaver dies at age 83

John Weaver honored by long time representative

The sights and sounds of Italy offer more inspiration than any score or treatise—they provide clues about the spirit of the music, where words and musical notation fall miserably short

What if I told you that there is surviving Italian organ music as splendid as Giovanni Gabrieli’s In Ecclesiis and as ethereal as Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere? A few months ago, I would not have believed it either. In fact, I was under the impression that compared to Italy’s glorious tradition of ensemble music, its organ music was of lesser importance, and its historical organs were pretty but small. On paper, every instrument looked the same—a single manual, one octave of pull-down pedals, and a stoplist consisting of a principal chorus (the Ripieno), a flute or two, and perhaps a Voce Umana.¹ Three months of studying organ in Italy with Francesco Cera radically changed my mind. I went intending to obtain a more complete picture of early organ music, having already spent time in France, Holland, and Germany. I left in love with a magnificent collection of keyboard music.  

My change of heart began not with the music but with the art and architecture of Italy. The entire country is like a giant open-air museum. Visitors can enter and experience the very places where Gabrieli, Frescobaldi, and so many others made music. That they were inspired by their surroundings is impossible to contest. These places are by definition inspiring. They were designed by the world’s greatest architects and filled with art by the greatest sculptors and painters from anonymous Roman masters to Pinturicchio, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Bernini, Tintoretto, and many others. Elaborate organ cases are among the most striking architectural features of many Italian churches and palace chapels. I began to realize that such glorious spaces where the organ had so much visual importance simply must have resounded with impressive organ playing. 

The instruments themselves also provided indisputable proof. They were far from boring. Though their stoplists were similar, their tonal character varied widely from region to region in a way that perfectly complemented the art and architecture of the area. What of the music that survived for these instruments? At first glance, it seemed simple to me, appeared not to require pedals, and certainly seemed an inappropriate choice for performance on modern instruments. Fortunately, all of this was only an illusion created by a style of musical notation that left many crucial interpretive decisions to the discretion of the performer, who would have been familiar with the contemporary musical style and performance practices. I learned why an understanding and appreciation of historical art, architecture, and instruments and a knowledge of the surviving repertoire and treatises are so crucial for today’s performer.  

Early Italian keyboard music is most successful when its interpretation is informed by historical sources and inspired by the conviction that it is the aural representation of Italy’s breathtaking visual splendor. Italy’s art, architecture, and music can be organized into regional schools based in four of Italy’s most historically important cities: Venice and Florence in the north, Rome in central Italy, and Naples in the south. Allow me to share some of the highlights of my journey to discover their art, historical organs, and keyboard music. 

Venetian Splendor 

Today, the city of Venice continues to exist mainly because of the tourists. Many of the locals have moved to the mainland. Nevertheless, the city’s colorful vibrancy and the remnants of its former grandeur are very evident. The reds, oranges, and yellows of the houses and shops, the green of the canals, the aquamarine of the lagoon, and the glistening white of the church façades are a feast for the eyes. Appropriately, Venice’s painters—Titian, Tintoretto and others—are famed for their use of color and the way that light seems to shine from within their paintings. Of the city’s 114 churches, the Basilica Cattedrale di San Marco is the most famous (Figure 1). One of the finest examples of Byzantine architecture, its exterior is covered with inlaid marble and carvings, while its interior glows with gilded mosaics. Besides its breathtaking opulence, the sheer size of the cathedral is impressive. Remarkably, at the time of Claudio Merulo (1533–1604), Andrea Gabrieli (1533–1585), and the rest of the illustrious line of musicians who worked here, San Marco was not a cathedral, but the private chapel of the Doge of Venice, and Venice was one of the richest and most important cities in the world! My impression of Venetian organ music changed completely when I examined it through the lens of Venice’s vibrant color palette and astounding splendor.

Organs of Northern Italy

The organs of northern Italy are characterized by their cantabile tone. Some also have much more colorful stoplists than organs in other parts of Italy. In 2006, Giorgio Carli completed the restoration of the 1565 Graziadio Antegnati organ of the Basilica di Santa Barbara, the private chapel of the duke of Mantua.  The organ’s case is beautiful. Its richly painted doors contrast with the white walls of the chapel. This instrument was built under the direction of organist and composer Girolamo Cavazzoni (1520–1577). Its 16′ plenum is glowing rather than brilliant, perfect for Cavazzoni’s music, which is closely related to choral polyphony. As was the norm in Italy until the 18th century, the organ is tuned in mean-tone temperament, but the keyboard has split keys (Figure 2), allowing the player to choose between D# and Eb and between G# and Ab, thus enabling one to play in many more tonalities and to better imitate the pure intonation that a vocal ensemble is able to achieve. The keyboard and pedalboard both have particularly long compasses, the keyboard from C to F5 and the pedalboard from C to A2. The music of Marc’Antonio Cavazzoni (1485–1550), Girolamo’s father, demands such a compass. This long key compass also permits the organist to play in different octaves, using the 16′ Principale at 8′ pitch, for example. The winding of this organ is a special treat. Rather than supplying an electric blower, Giorgio Carli installed an automatic bellow lifter to pump the bellows. This allows the player to experience the wonderful flexibility of playing on pumped wind without the trouble of hiring a person to pump the bellows.  

Near Mantua, in the Chiesa di San Tommaso Cantuariense in Verona, stands a well-preserved 18th-century organ built by Giuseppe Bonatti in 1716. It is a two-manual instrument with an unusually colorful stoplist and a lavish complement of special effects. The main manual controls the Grand Organo—the usual Ripieno plus a Cornetto (in two parts: 4′-22⁄3′ and 2′-13⁄5′), Trombe reali, and two flutes. An exquisitely crafted Regale with rare original parchment resonators mounted on a separate windchest like a Brustwerk is also playable from the main manual. The second manual controls the Organo Piccolo, a tiny 4′ echo division situated behind the player. Other special effects include a chorus of bird stops (Figure 3) and a Tamburo (a stop played by the lowest pedal note that imitates a drum using a cluster of bass pipes). The pedals are permanently coupled to the main manual, but this organ also includes an independent pedal reed and Contrabassi—octave of 16′ wooden pipes. The tone of the organ is sweet and elegant, thanks in part to its comparatively low wind pressure, a common feature of Italian organs. The wind pressure of this Bonatti organ is set at 53–55 mm. By contrast, the wind pressure of the comparably sized 1704 Schnitger organ in Eenum, the Netherlands, is set at 62.5 mm. The tonal variety and elegance of the Bonatti organ make it perfect for 18th-century music, including the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who, incidentally, played this instrument while on tour in Italy.   

Music of the Venetian and Emilian Schools

The keyboard music of northern Italy reached its peak during the Renaissance. Its focal point was the Basilica di San Marco in Venice. The splendid polychoral tradition of the basilica profoundly influenced the organ music of the Venetian school. Composers of the Venetian school were responsible for some of the most important developments in keyboard composition of both the Renaissance and the Baroque. Marc’Antonio Cavazzoni’s collection, Recerchari, mottetti, canzoni–Libro primo, printed in Venice in 1523, is one of the most important examples of early 16th-century organ music. Cavazzoni was born in Bologna, where he probably received his musical training at the Basilica di San Petronio, and likely knew the famous 1475 Lorenzo da Prato organ there. Later he moved to Venice and was an assistant to Adriano Willaert at San Marco. Cavazzoni’s recerchari are particularly significant, because they are among the earliest free compositions for the organ. These recerchari are majestic pieces written in an improvisatory style. Like later toccatas, they investigate idiomatic keyboard figuration rather than counterpoint. While his father, Marc’Antonio, was a pioneer in developing idiomatic keyboard figuration, Girolamo Cavazzoni, organist at Santa Barbara in Mantua, was a master of imitating vocal polyphony at the keyboard. An understanding of the text of the chants, motets, and chansons on which many of his works are based is absolutely crucial for a successful interpretation.  

Claudio Merulo and Andrea Gabrieli worked together as organists at San Marco. Merulo was renowned and influential during his lifetime. Girolamo Diruta dedicated Il Transilvano, one of the most important treatises on Italian organ music, to him. Merulo’s toccatas were the first to alternate virtuosic and imitative sections, a technique that Frescobaldi and the North German organ school would use later. Also, foreshadowing the Baroque, they often use ornamental figures as motives. Merulo’s music is full of unique written-out trills and diminutions. Studying it is an excellent way to learn how to add ornaments to repertoire of the 16th and early 17th centuries. In comparison, Gabrieli’s music may seem rather subdued, but, in fact, it only lacks the profusion of notated trills. Presumably, Gabrieli would have added these in performance. His Ricercari ariosi are particularly beautiful adaptations of the polychoral style.  

Eighteenth-century Bolognese composer Giovanni Battista Martini (1706–1784) was highly esteemed during his lifetime, and attracted students from around the world. Leopold Mozart even asked his advice concerning the talents of his son. Nevertheless, his surviving compositions do not seem to justify his reputation. They are pleasant but simple pieces in galant style. Consider them in context, however, and the picture changes. The majority of these pieces survive in manuscripts written in Martini’s own hand. They are predominantly written in two-voice structure, but occasional figured bass symbols suggest that they were really sketches, and that the organist was expected to fill out the texture by adding chords. Some of Martini’s Sonate per l’Elevazione survive in both simple and elaborately ornamented forms, exemplifying how he might have actually performed them.² Playing Martini’s music as written is a little like stripping a Baroque church down to bare plaster walls. Far from being easy and uninspiring, these pieces are charming examples of Italian Rococo organ style and exciting vehicles for creativity.

Rome’s Legacy

Rome is sometimes called “the Eternal City.” It displays its long rich history in an abundance of art and architecture (Figure 4). Romans are proud of their heritage. In the past, Rome’s great noble families collected antiquities, displaying them in their palaces. The Farnese collection, now on exhibit in the Naples National Archeological Museum, is particularly impressive evidence that admiration of antiquity dates back at least to the beginning of the 16th century. Many of its more than 300 marble sculptures were unearthed in archeological excavations specifically conducted on behalf of Pope Paul III and other members of the Farnese family. These same noble families and the Roman Catholic Church employed contemporary artists as well, who left masterpieces from every historical era. The poignant perfection of High Renaissance works like Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica, the dramatic lighting and gestures of Baroque treasures like Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of Peter in the Chiesa di Santa Maria del Popolo or Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa in the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Vittoria, and the busy ornamentation of Rococo creations like the organ case of the Werle organ in the Basilica di Sant’Eustachio are all on display. In the churches, clouds of angels surround visitors, while the palaces seek to amaze them with marvels of architecture like Bernini’s and Borromini’s staircases, which compete for attention in the Barberini palace. For me, Rome’s deep appreciation of its long tradition of artistic excellence is the key to understanding the music written there.   

Organs of Central Italy

Only a few of Rome’s Renaissance and Baroque organs survive. As in many large wealthy European cities, pipe organs were replaced as fashions changed. Nevertheless, the smaller towns and villages in central Italy are home to a wealth of unique historical organs. It is far beyond the scope of this article to describe them all—the city of Rieti, where I spent much of my Italian sojourn, alone is home to 14 historical organs in varying states of playability. Let me begin by describing one of the oldest organs in Italy. It was built in 1509 by Paolo di Pietro Paolo da Montefalco, and is located in the Chiesa di San Francesco in Trevi, Umbria (Figure 5). This instrument is priceless for many reasons including its antiquity, its proximity to the birthplace of Girolamo Diruta, the way that it documents the history of organbuilding, and certainly also its beauty. Organbuilder Andrea Pinchi told me how thrilled he was to be given the opportunity to restore this instrument in 2005, having been convinced since he was a teenager that the case in the Chiesa di San Francesco held something very special. When it was first built, the organ consisted of a five-rank Ripieno and a Flauto in ottava.³ In the 17th century, a Flauto in duodecima was added, and in the 18th century the important Umbrian organbuilder Fedeli restored the instrument and added a Voce Umana and Cornetta. Because they reflect the historical development of the organ, these stops were all preserved in the restoration. The sound of this organ is bright and brilliant. The small Ripieno easily fills the sizable Gothic church. Like the Antegnati organ in Mantua, this was an instrument designed to imitate vocal music. Its extremely sensitive key action allows the player to create subtle text-like inflections by varying attacks and releases.

The organs that Frescobaldi played at St. Peter’s have long disappeared, but a splendid 17th-century Roman organ does survive to transport Frescobaldi’s sound world to the present day. The 1612 Giovanni Guglielmi organ in the Chiesa di Santa Maria in Vallicella (Figure 6) was restored by Ruffatti in the year 2000, but it continues to lack the international attention that it deserves. It is a large instrument based on 16′ pitch. The grandeur of the Ripieno is enhanced by many doubled ranks and by a trumpet. I was surprised to learn that a trumpet stop was a common feature of large Roman organs. The 1597 Luca Blasi organ of the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano, for example, also includes a trumpet. Perhaps the most eye-opening aspect of the Guglielmi organ is its narrow pipe scaling. The organ’s sound is bright, almost nasal, but crystal clear. It is simply impossible to cover up passagework even with the densest chordal accompaniment. The spectacular case of this instrument is also noteworthy. It is, as it were, created using ornamentation, including two giant sculptures of angels, and the entire case is sumptuously overlaid with gold.⁴ The matching case in the other transept of the church now contains an 1895 Morettini organ, which also merits a visit.

Music of the Roman School

Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583–1643) grew up in Ferrara, home of the great d’Este family. While Frescobaldi was young, many notable composers—including Claudio Monteverdi, Orlando di Lasso, Claudio Merulo, and Carlo Gesualdo—visited court. As a child prodigy studying with court organist Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Frescobaldi absorbed these diverse influences. In his early twenties, he decided to seek his fortune in Rome, and proceeded to write and publish some of the most important music of the 17th century and to pass on his skill to talented students from all over Europe.  

Frescobaldi’s music is like the city of Rome. It glories in tradition while being unafraid of innovation. Walking in the footsteps of Lasso and Palestrina, Frescobaldi composes masterful counterpoint, but juxtaposes it with flamboyant baroque figuration, skillfully incorporating affect figures. In his performance instructions that preface Il primo libro di capricci of 1624,⁵ he explains that in his music the metrical relationships that were so important in Renaissance music are now governed by the mood of the music. His sacred music, including the three Masses of Fiori musicali and the two extended elevation toccatas from his Secondo libro di toccate, is deeply spiritual. Frescobaldi masterfully communicates the meaning of the Mass liturgy into his settings. His elevation toccatas take the listener on a journey through contemplation, sympathy, and ecstasy. Though at first glance Fiori musicali seems like just another book of short pieces, when these pieces are considered together they form imposing Mass settings, and it becomes clear that this collection shares the monumentality of other early Roman Baroque sacred art like the baldacchino that Bernini designed for St. Peter’s Basilica (Figure 7).

Similarly, Bernardo Pasquini’s (1637–1710) music demonstrates both his admiration for the past as well as contemporary tastes. His output is extensive and varied, ranging from works like the Fantasia la mi fa fa and the Capriccio in G, which recall Frescobaldi’s contrapuntal works, to figured bass sonatas and versets, to variations, toccatas, and suites in a style similar to that of his friend and colleague Arcangelo Corelli, and foreshadowing the keyboard writing of his most famous pupil, Domenico Scarlatti.  

Michelangelo Rossi’s (1601–1656) music shows the other face of the Roman Baroque—the face that seeks to shock and amaze, especially by breaking the rules. During his lifetime, Rossi was best known as a virtuoso violinist. He also composed at least two operas and spent most of his life working as a court rather than a church musician. His ten keyboard toccatas are formally similar to Frescobaldi’s toccatas, but are full of startling effects and chromaticism that borders on the grotesque. In them, extreme virtuosity makes up for contrapuntal simplicity.  

Neapolitan Daring

Drama and audacity are a key part of Neapolitan art. For twenty-five centuries, Naples has brazenly lain in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. It is a city of daring and a city of extremes. Emerging from the strange semi-darkness of the old city’s narrow streets, for example, one finds oneself confronted by the glittering brilliance of the bay. Neapolitan art and architecture express this too. Naples is famous for its seemingly quaint hand-crafted nativity scenes. Take a closer look, and you will find them full of drama enacted by humorous and grotesque characters. Behind a most forbidding fortress-like block façade, soars the opulent Baroque interior of the Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo, with its profusion of colorful frescoes, inlaid marbles, and priceless treasures. Similarly, the famous sculptures of the Cappella Sansevero, including Giuseppe Sanmartino’s The Veiled Christ, combine absolute technical perfection with gestures and facial expressions so full of pathos that they do not just invite an emotional response from their viewer, they force one. 

Organs of Southern Italy

My most memorable experience with southern Italian organs occurred during a trip to the town of Teggiano in the region of Campania. The south of Italy is full of secluded towns and villages and many undiscovered artistic treasures. Teggiano is home to several historical instruments, but the two most interesting were built around the turn of the 17th century—one in 1595 (Figure 8) and one in 1619 (Figure 9), only four years after the publication of Giovanni Maria Trabaci’s Secondo Libro de Ricercate et altri varij Capricci. Neapolitan-style instruments from this time period are extremely rare. Neither instrument is playable at this time.⁶ The restoration of the 1595 instrument is nearly complete, but has been suspended because of a lack of funding. The 1619 instrument, though magnificent, is still a ruin. Nevertheless, they still reveal much about Neapolitan organ music from the late Renaissance time. The pipe scaling used in these instruments is extremely narrow and would produce a sound as brilliant and arresting as the glaring Neapolitan sun. In addition, both instruments have very narrow cases that would act only as soundboards, and would not mix or soften the sound at all (Figure 10). 

The Neapolitan area was also home to talented 18th-century organbuilders, including Silverio Carelli. In 1784, Carelli built a beautiful instrument as a gift for the cathedral of his hometown of Vallo della Lucania. Its tone is sweet and full; several ranks including the Principale 8′ are doubled. Its keyboard and pedalboard are both fully chromatic, also in the lowest octave. The case is magnificent (Figure 11). Carelli spared no expense in building this instrument. He even included bagpipes, which could be used to play pastorali at Christmas time—so fitting in an area famous for its hand-crafted pastoral scenes.         

Music of the Neapolitan School

Like the Venetian school of keyboard music, the Neapolitan school flourished during the late Renaissance. Its leader was the Franco-Flemish composer Giovanni de Macque (1550–1614). He worked for the Gesualdo household and later as maestro di cappella for the Spanish viceroy. Giovanni Maria Trabaci (1575–1647) and Ascanio Mayone (1565–1627) served under De Macque as organists of the royal chapel. Their music is radical. De Macque’s in particular is full of daring harmonies and forbidden intervals. How it must have appalled proponents of strict Renaissance counterpoint! But then, it was written in Naples, not in Rome. As was the Neapolitan tradition, the music of De Macque, Trabaci, and Mayone is suitable for performance on keyboard instruments as well as on harp. It stands to reason that the composers assumed that the performer would make adjustments idiomatic to the instruments on which they chose to perform, adding a pedal part on the organ, arpeggiating chords on the harpsichord, and so on. Unlike Frescobaldi, none of the Neapolitan composers wrote prefaces including detailed performance practice instructions, but Trabaci does include an important word of warning in the preface to his Libro primo (1603).⁷ He writes that his music is carefully composed, but that study is necessary to discern the spirit of the music. Should the performer neglect to do this study, it will be their own fault if they did not succeed in realizing his intentions. Of course, it is impossible to know today exactly what Trabaci meant by this statement, but one thing is sure: in order to perform this Neapolitan music convincingly, it is crucial to study, determine the affect that the composer sought to convey, and then to do everything possible to communicate it as intensely as possible.

Conclusions

In conclusion, allow me to offer a few practical suggestions regarding interpreting the notation of early Italian organ music. Musical notation developed over the centuries to include more and more performance information. At first, however, it was simply a memory aid in a musical tradition that was transmitted orally. Early Italian notation of keyboard music gives no information about dynamics or registration, and little information about tempo or the use of pedal. Some composers, like Merulo, for example, notate trills and other ornaments, while others notate only the minimum of ornaments, and still others like Martini provide only a skeleton of their composition. Both the typesetting of modern editions as well as the moveable type in use in the 16th and early 17th centuries make this music appear rigid. Further, the time signatures and note values common at this time tend to be much larger than we are accustomed to today. Quarter notes in the music, for example, are often the same speed as what we would notate as eighth or even sixteenth notes today. As a result, this music can appear simple and boring at first glance. Performed with a good dose of imagination—and, as Trabaci reminds us, sufficient study—however, this music is completely captivating, and its exuberance is sure to attract music connoisseurs and first-time concertgoers alike.  

Diruta’s Il Transilvano (1593), Antegnati’s L’arte organica (1608), and Adriano Banchieri’s L’organo suonarino (1605), along with a good ear, are the best guides for choosing registration. In Renaissance music, a slow tactus permeates the music, and the relationships among meters help to establish a tempo. In Baroque music, the tempo is more flexible and governed by the affect of the music, as Frescobaldi discusses in the prefaces to his Libro primo di capricci and his two Libri di toccate. Historical Italian organs are the best source of information regarding pedaling. With the exception of some 18th-century organs, Italian organs have pull-down pedals with no independent stops, but they are very effective for reinforcing a cadence, harmonic sequences, or a cantus firmus. As Frescobaldi demonstrates in his two toccate sopra i pedali, the pedals can also be used to sustain pedal points. Most composers did not notate these pedal points, though their toccatas often feature extended passages decorating a single harmony. Adding a pedal point in these passages makes the organ sound much fuller and more impressive. Studying written-out ornaments and examples of diminutions in treatises like Silvestro Ganassi’s Opera intitulata Fontegara (1535) will help a performer to develop a repertory of ornaments. Playing from facsimiles of music that were published using beautiful copper engraving, like the toccatas of Frescobaldi and Rossi, allows one to avoid the uninspiring straightness of modern notation. As Frescobaldi counsels in the preface to his Fiori musicali, contrapuntal music should be studied in its original open score format. This is guaranteed to deliver much more coherent counterpoint.⁸   

Now is the perfect time to restore early Italian organ music from its relative neglect. Much music that was unavailable outside Italy has recently been released in excellent modern or facsimile editions, formerly unplayable instruments are being restored, research has uncovered helpful performance practice information, and new recordings of ancient instruments are allowing people around the world to experience their beauty for the first time.⁹ But, in my opinion, the sights and sounds of Italy offer more inspiration than any score or treatise. They provide clues about the spirit of the music, where words and musical notation fall miserably short.

The author thanks Francesco Cera for his assistance in preparing this article.