Gregory Crowell is university organist of Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, where he also teaches harpsichord, music theory, and music history. He also serves as director of music at Trinity United Methodist Church in Grand Rapids and is secretary of the Midwestern Historical Keyboard Society. Crowell holds degrees from the New England Conservatory and the University of Cincinnati, and has studied with Yuko Hayashi, Bernard Lagacé, Mireille Lagacé, Harald Vogel, and Roberta Gary. He has performed as organist, harpsichordist and clavichordist in Europe, Japan, Canada, and the United States. In 1994 he was invited to speak on the music of Bach for the AGO national convention in Dallas, and in 2000 he was the only non-Japanese invited to lecture and perform at St. Luke’s Bach Week in Tokyo.

One defining characteristic of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century musical culture has certainly been a devotion to the reconstruction of the performance traditions of the past.1 Defunct instruments like the viola pomposa have been eagerly researched, and their historical playing technique scrupulously recreated.2 Everything from the proportions of Bach's fingers3 to the cost of his candles4 has been examined in an attempt to understand the atmosphere and circumstances in which his music was made. While many such pursuits have taught us much about the music's genesis and relevance, sometimes the result has been an enthusiasm-induced myopia that has kept us from seeing the true possibilities. For example, a generation of harpsichordists played Bach on their copies of late eighteenth-century French harpsichords before recognizing that the eighteenth-century German harpsichord was a different animal altogether--indeed, one that has yet to be fully revived. And it has only been in very recent years that the not unimportant role played by the early German piano in Bach's late life has come to be appreciated and explored. This state has largely been caused by a simple deflection: the mere recognition of a larger truth (e.g., Bach played the harpsichord and not the modern piano) has sometimes been sufficient distraction to urge us down a side-winding path toward the most convenient solutions.

The same can be said of the situation with Bach's keyboard continuo instruments. Early on in the revival of historical performance practices, it was recognized that a keyboard instrument was needed to reinforce the bass and fill out the harmony in Bach's music. Yet the full extent to which the chosen keyboard instrument can influence the total sonority of a work was given little attention. In fact the debate quickly degenerated into the essentially unimportant and uninteresting argument of whether to use organ or harpsichord in Bach's vocal works.5 Once the dust settled over this question however, few musicians felt compelled to look much further into the matter. Among the groups that are currently recording Bach under the umbrella of historically informed performance, not one can claim to be truly faithful to the total body of historical literature on the sonority of Bach's keyboard continuo.

The first question to ask, then, is: what instruments were being used for continuo playing in Bach's time? It might surprise many to learn that there is very little evidence of box-shaped portable organs6 resembling our continuo organs in use in Central Germany in the eighteenth century. Bach certainly knew very small organs. There was a four-stop organ as well as a regal at St. Michael's in Lüneburg, where Bach went to study in 1700.7 In Leipzig there was a harpsichord and a small organ in an auditorium adjacent to the Cantor's office in the Thomasschule,8 and Bach used a small organ built in 1628 and tuned to choir pitch at St. Paul's in Leipzig when he accompanied the eight-part motet Der Geist hilft unsre Schwachheit auf (BWV 226) in 1729.9

None of these organs still exists, but we do have some idea of what was considered an average small organ at the time.  Positiv organs were sometimes found in a private house or a palace chamber, but also in churches and church rehearsal rooms. Standing anywhere from seven to ten feet tall, and containing anywhere from four to eleven stops, these instruments were distinguished from larger organs by two outstanding features: they had only one manual, and they lacked a Pedal division. Such organs may or may not have had an 8' Principal.

A few organs of this size by Bach's friend Gottfried Silbermann still exist. The organ presently in the undercroft of the Cathedral in Bremen, Germany,  was originally conceived for a small church in Etzdorf bei Roßwein in 1745. (See Illustration page 20; the Pedal in the photograph is a later addition.) The instrument contains eight stops and numerous registration possibilities:

                  8'             Rohrflöte

                  4'             Principal

                  4'             Flöte

                  3'             Nasat (treble only)

                  2'             Octava

                  11/2'      Quinta

                  1'             Sifflöt

                                    Sesquialtera (treble only)

A positiv organ by Silbermann from 1728 still survives in Tiefenau. It contains nine stops, including an 8' Principal.

                  8'             Principal

                  8'             Gedackt

                  4'             Octav

                  4'             Rohrflöte

                  3'             Nasat

                  2'             Octav

                  11/3'      Quinte 

                  1'             Sifflöte

                                    Zimbel II

There is still one small organ in existence definitely used by Bach for continuo: the small Zacharias Hildebrandt organ in the village church of Störmthal.  On November 2, 1723 Bach dedicated this organ with a performance of his cantata Höchsterwünschtes Freudenfest (BWV 194). The original specification was:10

Manual

                  8'             Principal

                  8'             Gedackt

                  8'             Quintadena

                  4'             Praestant

                  4'             Rohrflöte

                  3'             Nasat

                  2'             Octave

                  13/5'      Terz 

                  11/2'      Quinte

                  1'             Sifflöte

                                    Mixtur III

                                    Cornet IV

Pedal

                  16'          Subbaß

                  16'          Posaune

For the most part, however, organ continuo accompaniments would have been played on a large instrument. During his time in Weimar, Bach had at his disposal an organ of twenty-four stops in a gallery high above the altar in the castle chapel. When desired, a sliding unit could be engaged to close off the gallery's opening into the main body of the chapel, thus creating a separate music rehearsal chamber containing (besides the organ) a harpsichord, a spinet, and other musical instruments. In St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, the organ Bach used would have been most likely the three-manual, thirty-six stop organ in the rear gallery, or, for special effects (such as in the St. Matthew Passion), the two-manual, twenty-one stop swallow's nest organ that was situated high above the crossing.

With all of these resources at the continuo player's fingertips"organs small, medium, and large"it is no surprise that continuo players were creative in their continuo realizations. Before delving into some of the more impressive registrations, it is would be worthwhile to consider the stop most commonly heard in continuo realizations today, the Gedackt 8'. It is true that the Gedackt 8' was often regarded as the basic continuo stop. Indeed, Bach's colleague in Leipzig, Johann Adolph Scheibe, specified that one should use a Gedackt 8' in soft arias and recitatives,11 and Bach himself asked for a Stillgedackt 8' for his organ in Mühlhausen for playing concerted music.12 Nevertheless, an 8' Gedackt on Bach's instruments in Weimar or Leipzig would have had a substantially more supportive voice than the very small-scaled stops found on the average trunk organ.

With all of this in mind"the size of the instruments used by Bach and the presence their larger-scaled stops must have made"it is surprising that virtually no modern conductors have ventured beyond the now-traditional use of the four-to-six-stop trunk organ. One Dutch musician who is currently traversing the Bach cantatas in the recording studio acknowledges that the effect of the trunk organ used in his performances is remarkably different than that of the organs used by Bach.13 Yet he justifies his decision by explaining that the trunk organ offers greater convenience in tuning and logistics"advantages, he says, that must outweigh the loss in sonority. What is bothersome about this argument is that it admits to purchasing convenience at the cost of musical effect. Indeed, where else does an historically conscientious approach to performance begin than with an attempt to use the right instrument?

The present preference for the trunk organ may be no more than a symptom of a lingering neo-baroque reticence to trust the evidence that has come down to us. A simple example will explain. In his proposal for the rebuilding of the organ in Mühlhausen in 1708 Bach proposed a manual Fagotto (Bassoon) 16' "that sounds delicate in concerted music."14 Ton Koopman confessed that he has tried using a 16-foot reed as a continuo support, but that it so seriously compromised the dynamic flexibility of the continuo group that he found it impractical. The truth is, however, that evidence of the use of a Bassoon 16' in continuo among Bach and his contemporaries is simply too great to ignore, no matter how puzzling it may seem, at least initially. For example, the organ builder Heinrich Gottfried Trost, whose organ in Altenburg Bach played and admired in 1739, stated that the Bassoon 16' "can be well used in concerted music."15 As with all historical registrations, however, the effectiveness of the use of a Bassoon 16' as a continuo stop will largely depend on the texture and character of the music in which it is used. Bach gives us no clue as to his intentions, but his contemporary Johann Friedrich Walther stipulated that the Bassoon 16' in a 1732 Joachim Wagner organ in Berlin was useful specifically for playing running basses in continuo.16 The experience of using such a stop in faster-moving basses might teach us a great deal about what sort of instrumental playing and ensemble that continuo stop supported. The result could well be revelatory, prompting a reevaluation of how we expect Bach's music to sound. This sort of evidence confronts us once again with the chicken-and-egg question that has been part of the performance practice argument from the very beginning: Were the tools at Bach's disposal an inspiration or a limitation?  A deeper look at the evidence will convince us to view these tools as not only an inspiration, but an invitation as well.

Let us examine some alternatives to the trunk organ's small-scaled 8-foot Gedackt. Jacob Adlung recommends accompanying a soft voice with a single flute, such as a Gedackt 8' or a Quintatön 8'. According to Adlung, one can also use a Principal 8' or a Gemshorn 8' for difficult recitatives, or if the singer is insecure. Running passages on the manuals, however, can be played with Violdigamba 8' with or without a Principal. Ideally, the organist should have one or two flute stops drawn on one manual, and a Principal on another manual, in order to facilitate quick dynamic changes.17 Unlike the trunk organ, which relies on upperwork for color, sources such as Adlung clearly called for great color flexibility at the eight-foot level.

Adlung then adds that the organ must play out in chorales, especially since chorales usually involve full choir and congregation. For chorales he recommends Principal 8', Oktave [4'?], or Quinte 3'.

The Principal 8' seems to have been a valued continuo stop altogether. Among other sources close to Bach that mention the importance of the Principal 8' as a continuo stop are Walther,18 Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel,19 Christoph Gottlieb Schröter,20 and Johann Samuel Petri.21 Supported by a fuller-sounding continuo, even small ensembles will be encouraged to play with the sort of full-throated, forceful sound that we know so well from German Baroque organs like those of Arp Schnitger and Gottfried Silbermann.

With only a handful of stops, the skilled organist at an organ of some size then had the resources to play a wide variety of dynamics, at the same time making a substantial contribution to the overall color of the ensemble. For example, in 1738 Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel required the following stops for concerted music at the large two-manual Trost organ in Altenberg:

Principal choir with mixtures

Quintaden 16' and 8'

Bordun and Gedackt 8'

Gemshorn 4'

Nasat 22/3'

Subbaß, Violonbaß22

While Stölzel used a Principal chorus, the use of higher and more powerful Principal stops is not always sanctioned. Adlung notes the habit in village churches of accompanying the choir at the end of pieces with full organ, adding that one does not hear the singers or instrumentalists well.23 Petri warned against using reeds, mixtures, or mutations in continuo.24

Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel named the stops Subbaß and Violonbaß among his continuo stops, and this fact reminds us of an important function of the continuo, and one that is completely unfulfilled by the use of a trunk organ. The continuo player is not just to fill out the harmony, but should make a substantial contribution to the overall sonority of the bass line itself. A number of sources mention the use of 16-foot manual stops to strengthen the bass. These include:

1. Jacob Adlung, who recommends Quintatön 16' or Bordun 16', even strengthened by an Oktav and a quiet 8-foot, especially if one is playing staccato.25

2. Heinrich Gottfried Trost, who recommended Flute traverse 16' und Spitzflöte 8' (as found on the organ at Altenburg).26

3. Daniel Gottlob Türk, who stipulated that "one can still lend to the bass the needed depth and emphasis by means of one or two [!] 16-foot registers in the Hauptwerk. . . ."27

4. Johann Gottfried Walther, who stated that Gedackt 16, 8, 4 "are the most accommodating for the general bass."28

While many of these sixteen-foot stops are manual stops, clearly organists were called upon to double the bass line in the Pedal as well, another practice virtually ignored in modern performances. The number of contemporary sources that describe playing the bass line on the Pedal is simply overwhelming. Petri writes:

. . .Im Pedale ein 16füßiges [ziehen], oder wenn sie nicht stark sind, zwey: und höchstens noch ein 8füßiges Principal zum forte, und zum äußersten forte noch ein 4füßiges Principal, welches jedoch besser wegbleibt, es wäre denn, daß gar keine Violons, Violoncelli und Fagotts mitspielten, und der Organist den Baß allein machen müßte, wie auf dem Lande. . . .

. . .In the Pedal, [draw] a 16', or, if the [Pedal stops] are not strong, two, and at least an 8-foot Principal for the forte, and for extreme forte a 4-foot Principal as well, which is better left out if there are no violones, cellos, and bassoons playing along, and the organist must play the bass alone, as is done in the country. . . 29

Türk states the case clearly:

Daß aber die ganz tiefen Register, z. B. Posaune 32 und 16 Fuß im Pedale nicht einmal geschwind ansprechen, und noch überdies mehr ein Getöse machen, als einen deutlichen Ton angeben, lehrt die Erfahrung. Außerdem muß man freylich, ohne einen hinlänglichen Grund, das Pedal nicht weglassen. . .

Experience teaches that the very low stops such as Posaune 32' and 16' in the Pedal do not speak quickly, and furthermore [they] produce more of a racket than a clear tone. Otherwise one must certainly not leave the Pedal out without sufficient reason. . . . 30

Sufficient reasons to leave the Pedal out are explained in a footnote: when the violone (i.e., an instrument playing at sixteen-foot pitch) drops out, when there is a senza basso indication in the score, when a short passage is repeated an octave higher, and when the bass pauses in fugues. In these cases the bass should be played only on the manuals without a 16-foot stop.

Sources closer to Bach include Johann Friedrich Walther (Pedal Principal 16 "gravitaetisch," used in large ensembles; Pedal Violon 16 "sehr tief und kräftig"),31 Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel32, and Friedrich Eberhardt Niedt (who recommends Pedal 16', even a reed 16', to make the Pedal clearer).33

Indeed, many sources state that Pedal stops need not be restricted to Principals and Flutes. In 1719 E. Lindner ordered a reworking of the Pedal Posaune at the famous Silbermann organ in Freiberg to make it more suitable for use in concerted music.34 Just how such a stop could be used in continuo is difficult to imagine, at least until one considers a work like Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott (BWV 80). The manuscript of the Leipzig version (a copy by J. C. Altnickol from 1744) specifies a double continuo: Violoncello e cembalo for the first bass (i.e., 8-foot), and organ and violone for the cantus firmus bass (i.e., 16-foot).35 The manuscript specifies "Pedal Posaune 16 Fuß." What performers today would seek to find an instrumental, choral, and acoustical solution to justify such an overwhelming registration?

Perhaps all that has been discussed here can be summed up and amplified best by a remarkable source of information on continuo practice that is very little known in the English literature on the subject. That it is so little known is lamentable especially because it may well be the most telling witness to the continuo registrations practiced by Bach and his associates in Leipzig.

The registrations by Christoph Gottlieb Schröter (1699-1782)36 summarized at the end of this article provide a glimpse of the sort of continuo registrations used on Saxon organs in Bach's immediate circle. Schröter and Bach knew each other well. Like Bach, Schröter was a member of Lorenz Christoph Mizler's Society of Musical Science in Leipzig. When Bach's music came under attack 1749 by the critic Scheibe, Bach turned to Schröter, a friend of some thirty years,37 to muster a counterattack in the musical press. Undoubtedly, Schröter was intimately familiar with Bach's music as well as with Bach's performance style. Though these registrations were not published until the 1770s, they were recorded in the early 1750s, at which time Schröter was organist in Nordhausen,38 a city about halfway between Leipzig and Göttingen, where he played a sizable organ built in 1729 by Johann Georg Papenius.39

There are several extraordinary things to note about these registrations, including:

1. The frequent use of more than one 8-foot stop together.

2. The tendency to avoid stops higher than 4-foot for chordal, i.e., non-solo accompaniments.

3. The practice of combining quick-speaking stops (such as a Flute) with slow-speaking stops (such as a String).

4. Dynamic flexibility, largely achiev-ed by manual changes.

5. The general size of the registrations, including those suggested for recitatives and ariosi (with the left hand on the Hauptwerk).

6. Color extended even to recitatives, where four-foot stops are included.

7. Varied registrational color according to the obbligato instrument used (oboe, flutes, muted strings).

8. The simply fantastic registrations for organ obbligato.

There is still a lot to investigate in the matter of continuo sonority in Bach's music. For example, there is the question of pitch. While many organs were tuned to choir pitch (Chorton A = 460-490), many had certain stops tuned to the lower chamber pitch Kammerton A = 390-415)40, giving them a handful of stops suitable for accompanying instruments tuned to chamber pitch.41 Some organs even had entire keyboards tuned to different pitches, or a manual division that was playable at either Chor- or Kammerton.42 And then there is the entire question of harpsichord sonority, including the use of a 16-foot register in continuo accompaniment. And then there are fortepianos, Lautenwerke, Geigen-Claviere, keyed pantaleons, and any number of other instruments awaiting a willing and wondering ear to explore how rich and how varied the sonority of Bach's continuo realizations must have been.43

It has not been the intention of this article to vilify completely the use of trunk organs today; indeed, their usefulness and often their beauty are undeniable. Nor is there any desire to throw verbal cold water on the vital music making of great musicians like Ton Koopman, Philippe Herreweghe, Masaaki Suzuki, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, or Gustav Leonhardt. It is not the trunk organ's existence, but its pervasiveness that is so limiting, serving as an ever-present reminder of our anti-baroque insistence that the continuo must somehow live in the shadow of the real music. Perhaps it is time for us as continuo players to step forward from behind the little box and become a full voice in the total sonority of Bach's music.

After playing a prelude, the organist takes off all stops except the following:

Hauptwerk: Principal 8', Gemshorn 8', Viola di Gamba 8', Octava 4'

Rückpositiv: Quintadena 8', Gedackt 8', Flöte 4', Rohrflöte 4'

Brustpositiv: Gedackt 8', Gedackt 4', Violetto 4'

Pedal: Principal 16', Principal 8', Violon 16'

Couple Hauptwerk to Pedal

Accompany full chorus and orchestra on the Hauptwerk. For passages with orchestra alone, play with the right hand on the Rückpositiv.

For echo passages, leave out the Pedal and play with the right hand on the Rückpositiv.

For various kinds of recitatives:

1. Use the same registration above, removing the Pedal coupler and the Hauptwerk Octava 4'.

2. Use the registration above, playing on the Hauptwerk with the left hand, and on the Rückpositiv with the right hand.

Aria with oboe obbligato accompanied by violins:

Hauptwerk (left hand): Principal 8', Gemshorn 8', Viola di Gamba 8'

Rückpositiv (right hand): Quintadena 8', Gedackt 8', Rohrflöte 4'

Pedal: Principal 16', Violon 16', Hauptwerk to Pedal

Aria with one or two flutes and muted strings:

Hauptwerk (right hand): Flauto traverso [8'], Gemshorn 8'

Rückpositiv (left hand): Quintadena 8', Gedackt 8'

Pedal, uncoupled: Violon 16', Principal 8'

Mournful aria with a single solo instrument (e.g., oboe) and organo concertato, without other accompanying instruments:

Hauptwerk (left hand): Viola di Gamba 8', Gemshorn 8'

Rückpositiv (right hand): Vox humana 8', Quintadena 8'

Pedal, uncoupled: Violon 16', Principal 8'

Aria with more than one solo instrument, organo concertato, and other accompanying instruments:

Hauptwerk (left hand): Principal 8', Gemshorn 8', Viola di Gamba 8'

Rückpositiv (right hand): Quintadena 8', Gedackt 8', Rohrflöte 4', Principal 4', Octava 2'

Pedal, coupled: Principal 16', Violon 16', Principal 8'

Notes

                  1.              This article began as a lecture delivered at the Improvisation Symposium held at Eastern Michigan University in November 2000, and was sponsored by the Ann Arbor Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. I am grateful to Dr. Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra, Professor of Organ at EMU, and the Ann Arbor Chapter of the AGO for affording me the opportunity to delve into these matters.

                  2.              Ulrich Drüner, "Violoncello piccolo und Viola pomposa bei Johann Sebastian Bach: Zu Fragen von Identität und Spielweise dieser Instrumente" Bach Jahrbuch (1987), pp. 85-112.

                  3.              Quentin Faulkner, J. S. Bach's Keyboard Technique: A Historical Approach (St. Louis: Concordia, 1984), p. 18.

                  4.              Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 540.

                  5.              These arguments were finally given a rest by Lawrence Dreyfus, Bach's Continuo Group: Players and Practices in His Vocal Works (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

                  6.              Also referred to as trunk organs, positive organs, continuo organs, Kastenorgeln, or Truhenorgeln.

                  7.              Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach, p. 477.

                  8.              Ibid, p. 250.

                  9.              Ibid, p. 316.

                  10.           As the organ survives today, only the specification of the Pedal has been slightly altered.

                  11.           " . . .da man hingegen bey schwachen Arien und bey Recitativen allein des Gedackt acht Fuß gebrauchen darf." See J. A. Scheibe, Critischer Musicus (Leipzig: 1745), p. 415.

                  12.           "Stillgedockt 8f., so da vollkommen zur Music accordieret". See Frans Brouwer, Reinoud Egberts, Hans Jansen, Paul Peeters, Maurice Pirenne, editors, Bach's Orgelbüchlein in nieuw perspectief (Utrecht: Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, 1988), p. 172ff. The term Music as used in this context most certainly refers to concert music. Gott-fried Silbermann, in his proposal for the organ in Freiberg, described his Gedackt 8 as being gently voiced for concerted music ("Gedacktes 8 Fuß zur music liebl. intoniert"). See Frank Harald Greß, Die Klanggestalt der Orgeln Gottfried Silbermanns (Frankfurt and Wiesbaden: Bochinsky and Breitkopf und Härtel, 1989), p. 132.

                  13.           Ton Koopman, "Aspekte der Aufführungspraxis" in Christoph Wolff and Ton Koopman, Die Welt der Bach Kantaten (Stuttgart and Weimar: Bärenreiter and Metzler, 1996), vol. 1, p. 222.

                  14.           ". . .in der music delicat klinget." See Brouwer, et. al., Bach's Orgelbüchlein, p. 172ff.

                  15.           Quoted in Ewald Kooiman, Gerhard Weinberger, and Hermann J. Busch, Zur Interpretation der Orgelmusik Johann Sebastian Bachs (Kassel: Merseburger, 1995), p. 163.

                 16.           See Brouwer, et. al., Bach's Orgelbüchlein, p. 181. The organ was in the Garnisonskirche. Jacob Adlung also mentions the Bassoon's usefulness as a continuo stop. See J. Adlung, Anleitung zur musikalischen Gelahrtheit, Erfurt, 1758, p. 386.

                  17.           Adlung, Gelahrtheit, p. 386ff.

                  18.           Principal 8 "unter dem Tutti einer Music." See Brouwer, et. al., Bach's Orgelbüchlein, pp. 181-82.

                  19.           Specifically on the Trost organ in Altenburg. See Greß, Klanggestalt, p. 132.

                  20.           Christoph Gottlieb Schröter, Deutliche Anweisung zum General-Baß, Halberstadt 1772, pp. 187-90.

                  21.           Johann Samuel Petri, Anleitung zur praktischen Musik, 2. Auflage (Leipzig, 1782), p. 169ff.

                  22.           Greß, Klanggestalt, pp. 132-33.

                  23.           Adlung, Musica mechanica organoedi (Berlin, 1768), p. 171ff.

                  24.           Petri, Anleitung, p. 169.

                  25.           Adlung, Anleitung, p. 386. Elsewhere Adlung even suggests using a Principal 16'. See Musica mechanica organoedi, p. 171ff. One assumes the staccato reference is because 16-foot stops alone generally do not speak quickly enough to perform staccato notes successfully.

                  26.           Kooiman et. al., Interpretation der Orgelmusik, p. 163.

                  27.           Daniel Gottlob Türk, Von den wichtigsten Pflichten, (Halle, 1787), p. 156.

                  28.           ". . .so zum G[eneral B[aß] am bequehmsten ist." See Johann Gottfried Walther Musikalisches Lexicon (Leipzig, 1732), p. 275.

                  29.           See Petri, Anleitung, p. 169ff.

                  30.           Türk, Pflichten, pp. 156-57.

                  31.           Brouwer, et. al., Orgelbüchlein, p. 183.

                  32.           Greß, Klanggestalt, pp. 132-33.

                  33.           Friedrich Eberhardt Niedt, Musikalische Handleitung (Hamburg: 1710-12).

                  34.           Greß, Klanggestalt, p. 132.

                  35.           Dreyfus, Bach's Contiuo Group, pp. 15-16.

                  36.           Christoph Gottlieb Schröter, Deutliche Anweisung zum General-Baß, Halberstadt 1772, pp. 187-90.

                  37.           Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach, p. 423.

                  38.           Julie Ann Sadie, Companion to Baroque Music, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, p. 192.

                  39.           See Johannes Schäfer, Nordhäuser Orgelchronik (Berlin: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1939), pp. 54-56.

                  40.           See Daniel R. Melamed and Michael Marissen, An Introduction to Bach Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 142-45, for an introduction to this thorny issue.

                  41.           Adlung stipulates just which stops are to be tuned to Kammerton: In the Pedal at least the Subbaß and in large churches an 8-foot and a 16-foot flute as well.  In the Positiv the Musikgedackt, in the Hauptmanuale "as much as is needed for an obligato bass" ("so viel, als ein obligater Baß nöthig hat"). He then goes on to say that the castle organ in Merseburg has the following stops in Kammerton: Gedackt 4', Principal 4', Grobgedackt 8', Pedal Subbaß 16' and Octav 8'. See Adlung, Gelahrtheit, p. 386. The Wagner organ in the Cathedral in Brandenburg had a Gedecktes 8 Fuß Cammer Thon in the Obermanual. See Andreas Kitschke, Die historische Wagner-Orgel im Dom zu Brandenburg/ Havel (Passau: Kunstverlag-Peda, 1998), p. 15.

                  42.           The Johann Michael Röder organ built 1722-1725 for St. Magdalena in Breslau had a Pedal Kammerbass 16' and Kammerbass 8' (tuned to Kammerton), and Chorbass 16', tuned to Chorton. The entire Unterclavier could be played in either Chorton or Kammerton.

                  43.           See John Koster, "The Quest for Bach's Clavier: An Historiographical Interpretation," Early Keyboard Journal 14 (1996), pp. 65-84.

Letter to the harpsichord editor

Dear Mr. Palmer,

I don't often comment on articles in The Diapason, that is,
in a positive manner, but I don't know when I have enjoyed any writing as much
as yours on Momo Aldrich ["Momo!" in the August 1997 issue]. I assume
it was because I knew both Mr. And Mrs. Aldrich in the mid-50s. I worked in a music store in Palo Alto and met Mr. Aldrich when he watched me hang a picture of Landowska seated at a Pleyel. Mr. Aldrich asked me if I knew who the
"Lady" was; I said it was Wanda Landowska. He was surprised that I
knew.

At this point in time I knew Mr. Aldrich was on the faculty
at Stanford, but not much more. Shortly after that a friend also on the faculty
at Stanford saw me talking to Mr. Aldrich and later told me who he was, and
that he had studied with Landowska in France. Still later I read an article
about Landowska and it talked about Momo, but it took an organ recital at the
Stanford Chapel for me to meet Mrs. Aldrich, who he introduced to me as Momo.
Then the wheels started to turn.

I rebuilt several harpsichords in the next few years and after I completed the first one, and I might add that I was very proud of it, I asked Mr. Aldrich if he would play it and tell me what was right and what was
wrong.  This he did and he found
very little that was right. He made a list for me to follow and he came a
couple times a week to check on my work. Finally it suited him and he brought
in a student who wanted to buy a harpsichord. She liked it and it was sold.
Later he asked me to call on a friend in Palo Alto with a Neupert harpsichord.
It had all sorts of problems.  Mr.
Aldrich made a few suggestions, but it was Mrs. A. who came up with answers.
She told me that Landowska regularly rubbed a bar of soap on the sides of any
jack that seemed sluggish to her. And that she also trimmed plectra that she
thought were digging too much with a pair of fingernail clippers. I ended up
using both on the Neupert.

I have always felt that I learned much from both of the
Aldrichs, both in working on the harpsichord and in learning to hear it
"sing" as Landowska called it.

Some years later I was working for a company building
automated commercial broadcasting equipment. We were dubbing classical music
from records to tape and inserting tones and so on for it to control the
equipment. We had hired a recording engineer who had done much work in the
eastern part of the States and one day he happened to mention recording
Landowska. I asked him about it as she recorded at home.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  He said that in one session they
detected an "extraneous" note that didn't sound like anything even a
Pleyel might have made. When they played it back for Landowska, she listened
carefully, and finally shrugged her shoulders and said, "I broke
wind," and walked off.

Anyway, again thanks for bringing back a lot of deeply
seated and very fond memories of two people who left many impressions on me
that still guide my thoughts in my work today . . .

Richard Warburton

Skykomish, WA

English early music losses

Carl Dolmetsch (23 August 1911-11 July 1997)

Carl Frederick Dolmetsch was the second son of early music
pioneer Arnold Dolmetsch.  His
mother, Mabel, a leading writer about early dance, was Arnold's third wife.
After his father's death in 1940 Carl succeeded him as director of the
Haslemere Festival. Carl Dolmetsch was best known as a player of the recorder.
Wartime production of plastics in the Dolmetsch workshop led to his creation,
after World War II, of the Dolmetsch plastic recorder, an instrument used by
millions of school children. Carl Dolmetsch also expanded the modern repertoire
for recorder by commissioning more than fifty new works from composers such as
Lennox Berkeley, Edmund Rubbra, and Jean Françaix.

Ruth Dyson (28 March 1917-16 August 1997)

Professor of Harpsichord and Piano at the Royal College of
Music from 1964, Dyson, of Dorking, had a long association with fellow townsman
Vaughan Williams (who was a patient of her doctor father). As Leith Hill Music
Festival Librarian in the 1930s Dyson had the duty of erasing pencil marks from
orchestral parts, and she particularly treasured the telephone call from
Vaughan Williams in which he queried, "Now, my dear, you haven't
forgotten, have you, that we're meeting on Monday at 10 to rub out the whole of
Creation?"

Dyson recorded the clavichord works of Herbert Howells, the
principal keyboard duets before Mozart, and particularly loved the music of the
English Virginalists and English Baroque composers Purcell, Arne, Chilcot, and
Blow.  Her long association with
the Dolmetsch family is documented on the compact disc, The Dolmetsch Years,
Programme Six (Allegro PCD 1018), although not all of her selections played on
the clavichord are correctly identified. (She plays C. P. E. Bach's Variations
on Les Folies, Howells' Dyson's Delight 
and Hughes' Ballet, and, as track 9, C. P. E. Bach's Fantasia in C
minor  from the 18 Probestücke
of 1753, not Lambert's Fireside [Howells].)

Ruth Dyson died of a heart attack following a particularly
happy week of teaching at the Dolmetsch Summer School.

George Malcolm (28 February 1917-10 October 1997)

Well-known as a harpsichordist of brilliant technique, whose
repertoire included the English Virginalists and the major 18th-century
composers, Malcolm was also Master of Music (1947-59) at Westminster Cathedral,
where his work with the choir of men and boys was highly regarded.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  He was named CBE in 1965 and, in 1966,
an honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, from which he held degrees in
classics and music.

International Competitions in Bruges

The 12th Harpsichord and 6th Fortepiano Competitions (with a
first prize of 150,000/100,000 Belgian Francs) will be held this summer in
Bruges, Belgium from July 24 through August 1.  The competition, open to players born after December 31,
1965, will be judged by Francoise Lengellé, Wolfgang Brunner, Jesper
Christensen, Johan Huys, Gustav Leonhardt, Davitt Moroney, and Ludger
Rémy.  Information and
application forms (due by April 15), Festival van Vlaanderen-Brugge, C.
Mansionstraat 30, B-8000 Brugge/Belgium. 
Telephone 00.32.50/33 22 83; fax 34 52 04.

Clavichord Symposium in Magnano

The third biennial International Clavichord Symposium (24-28
September) co-chaired by Bernard Brauchli and Christopher Hogwood, was held in
its unique setting of Magnano in northern Italy. Special interest centered on
the pedal clavichord built by John Barnes and Joel Speerstra and expertly
demonstrated by Mr. Speerstra. Another unusual instrument was the
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  copy of a rare octave clavichord after
Praetorius, presented in a program of 15th- and 16th-century music. Many fine
copies of more familiar clavichords, particularly of the 18th century, were
displayed and demonstrated in a series of recitals, illustrated papers, and
discussion sessions.

The reawakening of interest in the clavichord is most
heartening and more than ably promoted by this influential international
conference.

--(Virginia Pleasants, London)

Features and news items for these columns are always
welcome. Address them to Dr. Larry Palmer, Division of Music, Meadows School of
the Arts, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275. E-mail:
[email protected]

March 16-17, Charlottesville, Virginia

The main site of this year's Southeastern Historical
Keyboard Society Conclave was the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Appropriately, then, many presentations were centered around the musical and
intellectual life of our third President, Thomas Jefferson.

The first session, Thursday, March 15, opened with James
Holyer's presentation of "A Survey of the Literature on Thomas
Jefferson and Music" in the University of Virginia's Alderman
Li-brary. Representing a new generation of scholars, Holyer is pursuing a
master's degree in sacred music at Southern Methodist University where he
studies organ with Larry Palmer. He provided us with a complete bibliography of
publications on Jefferson and music, and guided us through a review of this literature,
describing the extent to which individual biographers discussed
Jefferson's musical life.

Following this session, University of Virginia librarians
Jane Penner and Heather Moore showed items from the Special Collections
Department. The ninth edition of the Bay Psalm Book, published in the
seventeenth century, was of particular interest since it represents the
"earliest printed music in Colonial America." We were also able to
view portions of the Jefferson family's Monticello Music Collection.
Unfortunately, the music composed by Thomas Jefferson has been lost. On
Thursday evening, the conferees enjoyed a private tour of Monticello.

The Friday morning sessions on March 16 opened with a
presentation by Karen Hite Jacob--"Thomas Jefferson: Finding
Inspiration Beyond Our Borders." In her paper and accompanying handout,
Dr. Jacob focused upon Jefferson's lifelong interest in learning. While
he always took an active part in his family's and friends'
education, Jefferson became interested in public education only later in his
life.

It was great to see harpsichordist and musicologist David
Chung again; we missed him at the SEHKS Conclave 2000 in Greensboro, North
Carolina. Having completed his doctoral work at Cambridge University a couple
of years ago, David returned home to Hong Kong where he is currently assistant
professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University. "The Development of French
Overtures in French Keyboard Music c. 1670-1730" was the topic of
his paper. Composers such as d'Anglebert made transcriptions for
harpsichord of Lully's overtures, including the "Ouverture
d'Isis" and the "Ouverture de Cadmus." An extensive
handout showed the progression of d'Anglebert's various methods of
arranging a Lully overture. Chung also discussed post-Lully (original)
overtures for harpsichord by Dieupart, Siret, Dandrieu and François
Couperin. In summary, he noted several important elements in the French
overtures for keyboard: the union of French ornamentation and Italian harmonic
progressions and counterpoint; the art of accompaniment from a figured bass;
and composers' incorporation of virtuosic writing.

Joyce Lindorff, associate professor of keyboard studies at
Temple University, presented a lecture-recital: "Perfect Vibrations:
Pasquali's 'Art of Fingering' and the New Keyboard Aesthetic."
Pasquali's compact treatise (Edinburgh, 1758), published after the
composer's death in 1740, dealt with fingering, ornamentation, technique
and tuning; it reflected the newly emerging keyboard aesthetic--namely,
the preference for legato performance.

The ideas of Domenico Alberti (1710-1746), one of the
first composers of keyboard music to adopt the new Classical texture, impressed
Pasquali. He agreed that, in order to produce a full tone on the harpsichord,
one must not release the key too soon; further, the harpsichordist must play
with legato fingering. While C. P. E. Bach still re-ferred to the detached
style as the usual one, Pasquali insisted that it should be used rarely. Dr.
Lindorff rounded out her lecture-recital with selected passages from Handel's
Concerto, op. 4, no. 1, and Alberti's Sonata I; she played each example
twice, first in a more detached style--secondly, in the newer legato
style. Most of the audience concurred with Pasquali that the harpsichord gains
power of sound when played with more legato.

Friday morning's second session started with Sarah
Mahler Hughes (associate professor of music at Ripon College in Ripon,
Wisconsin) who presented a paper on "Two 18th-Century Keyboard Settings
of 'Adeste Fideles' from London and Philadelphia." After
tracing the origin of the tune "Adeste Fideles," which turned up in
Portugal, France, and later in London, Dr. Hughes contrasted two settings by
Veronika Dussek Cianchettini (1769-1833) and Rayner Taylor
(1747-1825). The former, a Bohemian pianist/composer, was the younger
sister of well-known pianist/composer Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812).
Both Dusseks moved to London where they taught and performed; Veronika
eventually married the publisher Cianchettini. Rayner Taylor (1747-1825)
emigrated from London to America in 1793. Taking the post of organist and music
director at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, he was also a
composer and teacher and one of the founders of The Musical Fund Society. Dr.
Hughes found both Cianchettini and Taylor's settings of "Adeste
Fideles" "pleasing and diverting," but noted important
differences between them. While Cian-chettini's version, composed for a
pianoforte with an expanded range, is more technically demanding than Taylor's,
the latter's setting was meant to be played in church, on the organ with
a limited compass.

Once again, Dr. Larry Palmer (Southern Methodist University)
amused, entertained and educated his audience by taking a fresh new ap-proach
to historical material. Assuming the role of French organist and composer
Balbastre (1727-1799), he sent us an E-mail message in the form of a
memoir --"Claude-Benigne Balbastre: From Dijon to Citoyen."  In keeping with
the Jeffersonian theme of this SEHKS Conclave, Palmer à la Balbastre
recounted his meeting Jefferson's wife Martha and daughters Patsy and
Polly during their stay in Paris. In fact, Balbastre owes his fame not only to
Charles Burney, who also met him in Paris, but largely to Polly Jefferson, an
accomplished harpsichord pupil. And Mrs. Jefferson, also a devotée of
the harpsichord, copied out the composer's pieces "La Canonade" and "War March," as well as Rameau's "Les Sauvages." Dr. Palmer informed us that these pieces by
Balbastre can be seen on microfilm at the University of Virginia Library.

Balbastre reminisced about the turbulent cultural, political
and musical changes he witnessed in the late eighteenth century, including the
waning and subsequent eclipse of the clavecin by the new pianoforte. The
composer endured the worst insult--seeing his Pascal Taskin
clavecin's innards re-moved and replaced by a pianoforte mechanism! Dr.
Palmer's lecture was enhanced by tape recordings of his performance of
several of Balbastre's clavecin pieces.

On Friday afternoon the conferees enjoyed an excursion to the
Hebron Lutheran Church in Madison, Virginia, for more presentations and
concerts. Judy Ann Fray, docent of the historic church, told us about the
historical background of the building and the organ. The original organ, made
by David Tannenberg in Lititz, Pennsylvania, was hauled by ox cart to Madison
and installed in 1802; it has been in use ever since. In 1970, when the organ
was refurbished by George Taylor and Norman Ryan, all parts were documented.

MANUAL (54 notes) (Stop names perhaps not original.)

                  8'
style='mso-tab-count:1'>            Principal
dulci (#1-12 quintadena                                                                basses)

                  8'
style='mso-tab-count:1'>            Gedackt
(All stopped wood)

                  4'
style='mso-tab-count:1'>            Octave
(All open metal)

                  4'
style='mso-tab-count:1'>            Flute
(All open wood)

                  22⁄3'
style='mso-tab-count:1'>     Quinte (All open metal)

                  2'
style='mso-tab-count:1'>            Octave
(All open metal)

                  13⁄5'
style='mso-tab-count:1'>     Terzian (breaking to
31⁄5' at middle c)

                                    Mixture
II (#1-24: 19-22; #25-54: 8-12)

We were then treated to a recital on the Tannenberg organ by
Joseph Butler (associate professor and associate dean of the College of Fine
Arts, Texas Christian University). His program included works by Froberger,
Pelham, Handel, J. S. Bach, Böhm, Brahms and Muffat.

Andrew Willis, immediate past president and current
secretary of SEHKS, then introduced George Lucktenberg, founder of SEHKS almost
21 years ago. In his address, entitled "The Southeastern Historical
Keyboard Society--An Idea Whose Time Had Come," he looked back over
his career as a harpsichordist and founder of SEHKS and pondered the future of
our organization. "We're at another turning point," stated
Lucktenberg. Now that the specialty of early music has established itself, he
cautioned against undermining its progress with an "earlier than
Thou" attitude. He shared his many thoughts about how SEHKS can continue
to be a significant force in the musical world. SEHKS President Peter Dewitt
then presented an award to Dr. Lucktenberg.

After the group was treated to a wonderful catered buffet in
the Hebron Lutheran Church Parish Hall, Peter Dewitt presented awards to Karyl
Louwenaar Lueck and Karen Hite Jacob, past presidents, for their many years of
significant contributions to the organization. The evening's concert of
German Vespers was provided by Zephyrus, a Charlottesville-based vocal ensemble
directed by Dr. Paul Walker, professor of organ and harpsichord at the
University of Virginia. Joined by Brad Lehman at the Tannenberg organ, Jennifer
Myer and Eva Lundell, violins, and Sarah Glosson, viola da gamba, Zephyrus
performed music by Böhm, Schütz, Buxtehude, Scheidt, and Praetorius.

The Saturday morning session opened with John Watson,
conservator of instruments at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, whose paper
ad-dressed "America's Only Surviving Harpsichord and Other Glimpses
of Jefferson's Keyboard Milieu." Although Jefferson was neither a
harpsichordist nor a composer, he sought the best available keyboard instruments
for his wife and two daughters throughout his life.

Vera Kochanowsky and Thomas MacCracken, duo harpsichordists
and forte-pianists from Washington, D.C., then performed Mozart's only
sonata for two fortepianos, K. 448 in D Major. MacCracken played an instrument
made by John Lyon in 1986, modeled on a Walther; and Steve Dibbern made
available a fortepiano he constructed from a Zuckerman kit (Stein replica) for
Kochanowsky.

The next presentation, "Once Again: Expressive Devices
on Eighteenth-Century Harpsichords," was given by Edward Kottick,
musicologist and retired professor from the University of Iowa. He challenged
the widely-held opinion that the devices added to harpsichords by late
eighteenth-century French and English builders, in order to accommodate the
growing desire for dynamic gradations, were "accretions or
encrustations." Builders created devices such as machine stops, swells
and the peau de buffle, not to compete with fortepiano makers, but rather to
meet the needs of a changing aestshetic. 
Perhaps it is only the twentieth-century
viewpoint--"anti-pedal and anti-dy-namic," even with regards
to late eighteenth-century keyboard music--which misunderstands the raison
d'etre of these "improvements."

Judith Conrad, an active keyboard performer and technician
from Fall River, Massachusetts, evoked "Tranquility at Home" in the
late eighteenth century with "A Bit of Musick upon the Fretted
Clavichord." She performed music by Handel, Balbastre, Alexander
Reinagle, John Snow and William Boyce on a clavichord made by Steve Barrell
(Amsterdam, 1990).

Stan Pelkey, an assistant professor of music at Gordon
College in Wenham, Massachusetts, presented a paper on "Approaches to
Sonata Procedures in British Keyboard Music from 1760-1820." He
focused mainly upon the contributions of Samuel Wesley and Charles Wesley.

Conferees were able to rotate among three
"No-fear" instrument repair workshops Saturday afternoon: Edward
Kottick, changing a plectrum; Ted Robertson, changing a string; Ed Swenson,
leathering a hammer. At the annual Builder's Instrument Showcase,
conferees had a final opportunity to view and hear instruments exhibited by
Steve Dibbern, Ted Robertson, Ed Swenson, Steven Barrell, Richard Abel, and
Willard Martin. Joyce Lindorff's demonstrations were all the more
effective because she selected repertoire appropriate for each instrument.

The afternoon session concluded with a performance of Madame
Brillon's "Trio en Ut Mineur a Trois Clavecins" (1780) by
Virginia Pleasants, David Chung and Joyce Lindorff. Intended for one English
fortepiano, one German fortepiano and one harpsichord, Brillon's Trio was
played in 2001 on a fortepiano made by Steve Dibbern from a Zuckerman kit, a
harpsichord built by Willard Martin, and an 1855 Erard grand pianoforte restored
by Ed Swenson.

The beautiful Dome Room of the Rotunda at the University of
Virginia was the site of the Conclave's final event. This building, like
many others on the campus, was designed by Thomas Jefferson. Harpsichordist
Charlotte Mattax Moersch played an unmeasured prelude by Jean-Henry
d'Anglebert and three pieces by Lully arranged by d'Anglebert.
Karyl Louwenaar Lueck performed harpsichord pieces by An-toine Forqueray, four
of which were arranged by his son Jean-Baptiste Forqueray. Andrew Willis, fortepianist,
played works by J.G. Albrechtsberger, C.P.E. Bach and Georg Benda. After
enjoying J.S. Bach's Concerto in C Major for Two Harpsichords (BWV 1061),
played by Mattax and Louwenaar, the audience was treated to a hilarious
performance of "Das Dreyblatt" by Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, a
grandson of J.S. Bach. All six hands negotiated, or attempted to negotiate,
their way around a single fortepiano!

The SEHKS Conclave 2001 was successful in all respects, from
excellent presentations and recitals to terrific hospitality; the experience
was enhanced by the rich historical setting of the Charlottesville, Virginia
area. Thanks to Vicki Dibbern for making all the local arrangements, to builder
liaison Steve Dibbern, to the program committee (Ardyth Lohuis, Ed Kottick and
Andrew Willis), to Karen Hite Jacob for the program book, and to Dr. Paul
Walker for making arrangements at the University of Virginia.

Dana Ragsdale is professor of harpsichord and piano and
director of Southern Arts Pro Musica at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Having played her New York debut harpsichord recital in 1977 in Weil Recital
Hall, she has also been a guest artist on the Winterfest Concerts and with the
Fiati Chamber Players in New York City. A participant in the Performing Arts
Touring Program, Dr. Ragsdale has also made numerous appearances at Piccolo
Spoleto USA in Charleston, South Carolina. Promenade, the Baroque ensemble in
which she performs, can be heard on a compact disc, "Music from the Court
of Versailles."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J-PK: How did you meet Ahrend?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J-PK: The Genevan psalter, I suppose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GL: I think I know what you mean.

J-PK: Fast cars?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’

On the occasion of her 80th birthday

Sarah Mahler Highes is Associate Professor of Music and College Organist at Ripon College, Ripon, Wisconsin, where she has taught since 1989. She holds degrees in music education (B.A., Olivet College, 1976), music history and literature (M.M., University of Colorado, 1979), and organ performance (D.M.A., University of Kansas, 1985). Dr. Hughes teaches piano, organ, harpsichord, and music history courses at Ripon as well as directing the Collegium Musicum. She is also Minister of Music at First Congregational Church in Ripon, where she directs children's and adult choirs and plays for services. Dr. Hughes has published articles on and edited music by women composers and is a regular contributor to THE DIAPASON. She recently studied in Vienna with Michael Radulescu of the Hochschule fuer Musik und darstellende Kunst.

Miriam Clapp Duncan, Emerita Professor of Music at Lawrence
University, Appleton, Wisconsin, celebrates 50 years of teaching and her 80th
birthday on October 26 (the same date as Scarlatti) this year. In honor of her
achievements, the Northeastern Wisconsin Chapter of the AGO has commissioned
from David A. Heller an organ
partita based on "Down Ampney," to be performed by chapter members at
their worship services during the succeeding year. Professor Duncan reflects
upon a long and satisfying career in an interview with Sarah Mahler Hughes.

Q: What was the first musical experience you can remember?

A: It was coming home from my father's funeral--I was five
years old--and playing the songs I'd heard on the piano. My family decided I
had to have lessons.

Q: How did you come to choose the organ as your principal
instrument?

A: I grew up in Anderson, Indiana. As a child, I listened to
radio station WLW from Cincinnati, which wasn't far away. They broadcast a
daily organ program from their studios which I listened to faithfully. I also
had an English aunt, a real character, who lived with us and who wanted me to
learn to play the organ. I started taking lessons at the age of 13 from a nun
who had gone to the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. That's what
influenced me to go there.

Q: Describe your education at the American Conservatory. Who
were your teachers?

A: As a music school, it wasn't the worst place, but it
wasn't the best place, either. I had excellent theory instruction, which really
helped later when I went to Vienna to study with Anton Heiller. I discovered
then that be and I spoke the same language as far as theory went.

Leo Sowerby taught theory, music history, and composition at
the Conservatory, and I'd like to talk a little about his classroom teaching
because as I get older I realize what an influence he had on me. He paid
enormous attention to detail. We had to analyze quantitities of works,
including a dozen string quartets by Beethoven. Sowerby believed in studying
the scores of whatever pieces you were playing. When he was young, he never
went to a concert without going to the library first to get scores of the
things he was going to hear. Who has that kind of self-discipline these days?
He believed you could teach yourself because he had taught himself very much in
that way. He made us write our counterpoint exercises in the old clefs so we'd
know how to read them. He'd sit at the piano and improvise chord progressions,
and suddenly he'd stop cold, point a finger at you, and ask, "What chord
is that?"

Q: Did you also study organ with Sowerby?

A: Yes, but not at the Conservatory. He wasn't allowed to
teach there because he didn't have a degree in organ. He hadn't studied with
anyone famous--in fact, he hadn't even studied! He taught himself to play the
pedals by drawing a pedalboard on a piece of brown butcherpaper which he put
under the piano. I took lessons from him privately, at St. James' Episcopal
Church, where I played the big 1925 Austin organ. It was mostly his own works
we studied, and some English works that he liked to play for church. I learned
a lot about service-playing in the English tradition from him.

Q: Your first teaching job was at Wheaton College, was it
not? How did that come about?

A: One of my organ teachers at the Conservatory was Frank
van Duesen, who had been a student of Guilmant. Mr. van Duesen had surgery for
glaucoma in 1945, and I ended up teaching for him at Wheaton for two years.

Q: After teaching at Wheaton, you finished your M.M. degree
in 1947, and you and your husband moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where be began
teaching piano and theory at Lawrence University.

A: Yes, and I didn't teach at first because Lawrence, like
most liberal arts colleges in those days, bad a rule that wives couldn't teach
in the same department as their husbands. However, the GIs had arrived after
the war, and by 1949 they were desperate for another organ teacher. LaVahn
Maesch, the Dean of the Conservatory and the principal organ instructor, came
to my house one Sunday afternoon and said, "I need you at the
Conservatory, because I know you taught at Wheaton, and we really do need
somebody with experience to teach." So I was in business. I had 26
students that first year, and for the whole year of teaching I was paid $600. I
never dreamed then that I would end up being chair of the organdepartment and a
full professor.

Q: Seemingly your course was set. Yet something happened in
the 1950s--a sort of musical awakening?

A: Yes, and not just for me. It began, I think with the
Haarlem Academy, which the Dutch government sponsored in order to show off the
great organ at Haarlem. College teachers from this country, dozens of them,
went there to study and bring back the gospel of performance practice to their
students. The faculty was the best: Anton Heiller, who did all the Bach
teaching, Marie-Claire Alain, Luigi Tagliavini, and Gustav Leonhardt for
harpsichord. I never attended the Academy workshops, but I heard the Haarlem
organ and learned about what went on there. What the Academy did was bring
people up to date on performance practice, and its influence on organ teachers
has changed organ playing in this country--I don't think that's an
exaggeration. We know things now, and people play very much more intelligently than
they did 35 or 40 years ago.

Q: Were there other significant musical experiences for you
during these years?

A: Yes, two in particular. I spent two summers--1950 and
1951--as a student at the Organ Institute of America in Methuen, Massachusetts,
where the old Boston Music Hall organ had been moved thanks to the efforts of
E. Power Biggs, Arthur Poister, and Carl Weinrich. The organ--a Walcker, I
believe--was a beautiful instrument with a very handsome case. The faculty at
the Institute were all the major organists in the United States. We practiced
in the mornings, had lectures in the afternoons, and heard recitals at night on
that gigantic, four-manual-plus organ. For the first time, we learned what
organo pleno meant, because every division had a plenum. I date my interest in
the organ music of Bach from these sessions.

Sowerby once told me he'd like to go to the Organ Institute
for a summer. Imagine the challenge of trying to explain organum plenum or
tierce en taille to America's first Prix de Rome winner and Pulitzer Prize
winner two times over. Sowerby's Toccata for Organ was the first piece he wrote
after this long conversation with me (accompanied by martinis, of course) about
Baroque organ music.

Q: How did you make the connection between the Organ
Institute and study in Europe?

A: One of my fellow students at the Institute one summer was
Rudy Kraemer, who now teaches at the University of North Carolina. He told me
about his study with Anton Heiller in Vienna. Rudy had gone there on a
Fulbright, but he didn't know about Heiller at first. One day Rudy had walked
into a cafe on the Schwartzenbergplatz and discovered Gustav Leonhardt having
coffee with H. Robbins Landon. Rudy got to talking with them both, and they
told him to go to Heiller, that be was the only organist in Vienna who knew
anything about Bach and early music. Heiller at that time was less than 30
years old, but he'd already established himself as a player and scholar. I
decided that I wanted to study with Heiller, too, and in 1954-55, my husband
and I went to Vienna, thanks to a Ford Foundation grant. I worked with Heiller,
and also with Leonhardt on harpsichord.

Q: What were your impressions of Heiller?

A: He had a very good voice--his first job, in fact, was as
a baritone in the chorus at the Volksoper. He sang a lot at my lessons, and I
never would have learned to play appoggiaturas expressively if be hadn't sung
them first. He also had a fantastic ear. He could pick out a 4' flute in a
plenum and say, "Get that flute out of there!"

Heiller, of course, and Marie Claire Alain, and Tagliavini,
were pioneers in the historical performance practice movement that began in the
'50s and changed the organ world forever. All of these people believed
thoroughly in getting your hands on a photocopy of the original music--the Orgelbüchlein
style='font-style:normal'>, for example. They didn't even trust what somebody
else had written because they didn't know what his scholarship was like. And
they didn't trust trying to play as you heard someone else play. Although
Heiller used to say, "I'm no scholar, but I have friends who are." He
was so modest; however, he had plenty of imitators.

I can't overemphasize Heiller's influence on organ-playing
in this country. Let me give two examples. In 1962, be appeared at the AGO
National Convention in Los Angeles. It was the first time be came over to the
U.S., and he lectured on the Orgelbüchlein normal'>. People were transfixed--they didn't know there was so much to be
known about this collection. They became interested in it again--most of them
had been bored out of their skulls when they'd had to study it, and they
acknowledged that. Heiller toured the country after that, stopping in Appleton,
among other places. He played the entire Orgelbüchlein
style='font-style:normal'> on a little eight-stop Schlicker practice organ at
Lawrence, and he wowed 'em--even the band students, who like all the others,
had been required to go. That's an artist, who can make people interested in
difficult music!

The second monumental event was Heiller's dedication of the
Fisk organ at Harvard in 1967. That's a magnificent organ, and his playing
matched it--I'll never forget his performance of the Reger Wachet auf
style='font-style:normal'>. Every great organ teacher in the United States was
there--Gleason, Craighead, and others. I think some of us realized for the
first time what organ recitals could be. That organ sent ripples across the
entire country and influenced a whole generation of builders and students.

Q: What did you learn from Gustav Leonhardt?

A: Leonhardt was a great teacher--extremely knowledgeable,
and fluent in several languages. The first thing he did was explain to me his
idea that there was no such thing as a German Baroque style because it was all
borrowed from the French and Italian practices. The only German contribution to
a Baroque musical tradition was the chorale. That was a pretty strong
statement, but it illustrates an important fact--the existence and appreciation
of various national styles in this period. For example, once you know the
unique characteristics of these national styles, you can pick out passages in
Buxtehude that sound like Frescobaldi.

Q: What happened when you returned from Europe in 1955?

A: Well, first I had to cope with an old Kimball organ,
which actually seemed like a pretty good instrument because it had replaced one
that was even worse. But the main thing was that when I came back to Lawrence,
I started teaching repertoire outside the French Romantic school, which
dominated the American organ world at that time. I taught Buxtehude, Bach, and
Hindemith and music that I liked and thought was important. And by golly, the
students liked those things, too. I think I began to have a following because I
was not teaching Robert Elmore's "Donkey Dance." People didn't know
what I was up to--they thought I was either mad or trying to undermine Mr.
Maesch.

It's hard to believe, but at that time only a handful of
Bach works were played on recitals, mostly the big preludes and fugues. Nobody
taught and played the Clavierübung or the chorale preludes--the music was
considered too serious. Of course, part of the problem was that there weren't
many organs that could "play" the music well. The French organ
symphonies were known, but only
the "Toccata" from Widor's Fifth was played a lot. I think many
organists were afraid to play something they thought people wouldn't like.

Anyway, I ran afoul of Mr. Maesch, who had studied with
Dupré in Paris, not only because of the repertoire I was teaching but
because I was playing faster and with more articulation. He--and lots of other
people, too--believed that everything should be played legato. Organ music was
like spaghetti--long lines of legato notes--with swell shades used for contrast
and expression. I told him, "It may surprise you to know that Austrian
organists do play at a good clip." He said, "How can they do that in
those acoustics?" I replied, "They play cleanly and they
articulate." This was a new concept!

Q: Obviously, you have been committed to historical
performance practices in your teaching and playing. How did you continue your
studies in the following years?

A: Well, in 1966 I spent a sabbatical in France, Germany,
Italy, and Vienna, listening to and playing old organs, and taking lessons. I
took lessons from Marie Claire Alain at her house, because I wanted to get the
goods on the French Classical school, and I worked with Tagliavini on
Frescobaldi.

Q: You also spent some time at the Newberry Library, didn't
you?

A: Yes, on another sabbatical in 1973, I researched Baroque
treatises in the Newberry Library in Chicago. The Newberry is one of the great
music libraries in this country, which many musicians don't seem to realize.
They have very interesting seminars as well as more early music scores than any
library in the United States. Why bother digging through treatises? Well, many
treatises were written in the Baroque era, not instructing you how to play, but
describing how the playing was done. So it's possible to learn a very great
deal about performance practice by reading, and I don't think anyone is ever
going to be a knowledgeable organist playing Baroque music unless they read
about it.

Q: Your study in Vienna really convinced you of the merits
of mechanical-action organs, did it not?

A: Absolutely. I had to bide my time, but by the mid-60s
tracker organs were becoming popular. I managed to convince my organ majors at
Lawrence that tracker organs were superior even though they'd never heard one
(there weren't any in northeastern Wisconsin). I took a group of students to
Boston in 1967 to bear the Fisk, and we wore our "Tracker Backer"
[modeled on the NFL "Packer Backers"] buttons. E. Power Biggs came
onstage for a recital, and he said, "Welcome, all you Tracker Backers and
all you non-Tracker Backers." I'm still amazed at how many people have
beard of us. People hear 'Lawrence' and they say, "That's where the
Tracker Backers are from." But behind it all was a very serious
appreciation for tracker organs and a longing for one at Lawrence.

Q: And finally that dream did come true.

A: It took 30 years, but in 1995 the Brombaugh Opus 33 was
dedicated in the Memorial Chapel at Lawrence. I truly feel that this is the
culmination of my whole teaching career. I feel like everything has finally all
come together. It's been an inspiration to see it come to fruition because I
know it's the right thing to do, musically and in every way.

Q: You've had a strong committment to teaching, not only
college students, but other people in the community. You were heavily involved
in the OROCO program in the Fox Valley of Wisconsin, for example.

A: That was my idea, and I helped to organize it. The
Outreach Opportunity for Church Organists program started about 1970 to give
people lessons who wouldn't otherwise have had access to training. Many people
were (and maybe still are) playing the organ in church and had never had a
lesson in their lives. We--Mr. Maesch, Clinton DeWitt, an organist from Oconto,
and I--traveled around to churches in northeastern Wisconsin recruiting
students. Originally, we sent teachers, including Lawrence students, out to
these communities to teach group lessons. But then, thanks to a $10,000 gift,
we were able to award scholarships to individuals, and they made arrangements
to study with designated teachers in Appleton, Green Bay, Oshkosh, and Ripon. I
think the program was very successful--many of the OROCO graduates are still
active in church music. I think we turned out at least 45 new organists, and
the program continues to this day.

Q: Officially, you retired in 1985, yet you're still active
and visible in the organ world.

A: I don't think musicians ever really retire--I know I
haven't. Lawrence wouldn't let me retire--I've taught both organ and
harpsichord for sabbatical replacements, and I still have 15 community
students. There seems to be a steady stream of people over the age of 35 who
want to learn to play the organ. In fact, I have a waiting list! But that's
good news for church music. I resist the recent trend of "canned"
music to accompany singing in church, and I hope most other organists do, too.
I think we have to have live music if we're going to have viable church music.
We need to all hang in there and produce more and better organists.

Q: What advice do you have for organ teachers today?

A: Develop patience--it's a slow process to develop organ
technique. Be interested in your students not only as musicians but as people.
And don't expect your students to play the way you do. Many of my teachers just
did what their teachers had done. I think that's a curse. Students who just
play the way they're taught will never make it as performers.

I still think mechanical-action organs are the best for
training organists, but teachers should never allow themselves or their
students to play mechanically. Teach musicianship! It's hard work, but it can
be done. But don't neglect a reliable technique in favor of sleazy
"expression." Don't kid yourself! The most beautiful music is made
more beautiful by impeccable technique.

Teaching organ must be the most wonderful vocation for a
woman organist. I have had great success as a teacher but it's hard work. I've
had some failures. I could never get my students to believe that their senior
recital pieces were not necessarily the most godly music to play for church,
though a case could be made for the godliness of all organ music. Too many
organists, I fear, seek supreme godliness in their own playing rather than in
the purpose of the Supreme Being.

I'm very proud of my students--all of them. Hardly a day
passes that I don't get a phone call from one of them. They call me
"Mother Duncan," and they're all over the country and even overseas.

Q: What would you advise organ students to do?

A: Practice. And learn to listen to your own playing. Don't
rely on CDs and how other people "do it." And, of course, study your
scores and learn as much as you can about music theory and history.

Q: Do you have any thoughts about the future?

A: I'm glad I'm 80 years old this October. At least I can
look forward to hearing some fine organ playing in heaven, and maybe I'll be
able to give J.S. Bach the chance to explain some performance practice to me.
style='mso-tab-count:1'>

Chronology

Born October 26, 1919, in Anderson, Indiana

1942, BMus, American Conservatory of Music, Chicago

1945-47, Instructor of Music, Wheaton College

1947, MMus, American Conservatory

1949, Part-time Intructor, Lawrence University

1950-51, Summer Organ Institute, Methuen, MA

1954-55, Sabbatical in Vienna, study with Anton Heiller

1962, Chair, Organ Dept., Lawrence

1963, First woman organist to perform at St. Norbert's
Abbey, DePere, WI

1964, Full-time Instructor, Lawrence

1965, Assistant Professor

1966, Sabbatical in Germany, Italy, Vienna; study with
Marie-Claire Alain in Paris

1967, Began lobbying for mechanical-action organ at Lawrence

1971, Received tenure

1972, Associate Professor

1973, Sabbatical, Newberry Library, Chicago

1979, Full Professor

1985, Retirement

Mark Buxton's sudden and unexpected death on December 18, 1996 was a loss to all of us in the organ world. See his "Nunc Dimittis" notice on page 4 of the February 1997 issue of The Diapason. His work as a church organist, recitalist, and organ consultant was well-respected and of an enduring quality. Even more so, his voluminous writings will remain as a significant legacy to our profession. The following tributes are offered in his memory.

In Memoriam--Mark Buxton

by Charles Callahan.h2>

The sudden passing of a fine
musician and writer has left a sadness in all of our hearts. A graduate of
Durham University, Mark spoke French fluently and was an especially gifted
improvisateur, having studied with Jean-Jacques Grunewald in Paris. As the
author of countless articles on matters of interest to the organ world, Mark
was known here in North America and abroad. But for those of us who knew him not
only as a colleague but also as a friend, the loss is intense.

For Mark personalized a quality
of idealism that has become all too rare today. His standards of excellence
were accompained by high hopes for a renaissance in the best possible standards
in church music, organ playing, and indeed business and personal relationships.
As a sensitive and dedicated musician, Mark was certainly out of step with the
many clerical types sadly all-too-prevalent in today's church music circus.

For this alone, he would have
earned much admiration! But he "moved ahead" and carved a
well-respected name for himself through his many recitals, reviews, and feature
articles. Those of us who were blessed by his friendship cherished his calls
and cards that demonstrated his care for us, his true friendliness, and his
great civility in a world that sadly needs much more of the same.

Only days before his passing, I
received a postcard from him from St. Mary Redcliffe in Bristol--saying
"what a superb organ it is!" Of course he know how I would revel in
his enthusiasm for one of the supreme examples of English organ building.

Our thoughts and prayers go now
to his wife Sandy and the two children. May he rest in peace, and may perpetual
light shine upon him.

Mark Buxton

by Albert Neutel

To write about Mark Buxton is
about as difficult as it was to get to know him. No, I don't mean to imply that
Mark was a difficult person, in fact, quite the opposite was true. It was
difficult in that Mark was "many faceted" and a complex man while at
the same time one of the clearest thinkers and most articulate writers of our
time. Does one write about his phenomenal keyboard skills, his keen
understanding of the literature, his interest in research and writing? I will
leave these to others who have a deeper understanding of the subjects. One
thing was very clear about Mark: he suffered no fools or idle talk. His respect
for worship and the meaning of the liturgy helped to make Mark what he was: a
consummate musician with great skills to communicate the beauty of all styles
of music to the listener with simplicity and ease.

It was my privilege to have
known Mark for almost three years. It all started with discussions about what a
church organ ought to be. To Mark's mind there are only two kinds of organs:
good organs and bad organs. The size of the organ had no influence on his
simple philosophy. A good organ could consist of four stops and he had many
examples of bad organs that consisted of 40 or more stops. His simple
philosophy extended also to organists as musicians.

During our many discusions,
several times Mark insisted that we go back to visit the small eight-stop
"Willis on wheels" organ in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, to prove
his point of how a few stops, well chosen, wisely scaled and exquisitely voiced
can fill the space of a room, accompany the choirs and be a perfectly fine solo
instrument.

It was a real honor and treat to
have had Mark as our colleague at Reuter. All of us have learned much, gained a
deeper appreciation and found a new desire to continue to build instruments
worthy to be placed in a house of worship to serve the people and our Creator.
He will be missed by us as well as his many friends around the world. Our
heartfelt sympathy to his family Sandy, Kevin and Joanna in Toronto, as well as
to his mother, brother and sister in Manchester, England.

Mark Buxton -- An Icon of Political "Independence" in the Organ
World

by Herbert L. Huestis

Mark Buxton's untimely death at
the age of 35 ended a writing career that was just hitting full stride. He
published over 50 articles, music, book and record reviews in The Diapason and
brought to the magazine a refreshing perspective filled with musicality and
personal experience. He was a master reviewer, able to discover the essence of
a book or recording, abstract it, and reveal its essentials quickly. He did all
that and kept an engaging personal style, filled with pithy quotes that helped
sustain the reader's interest. He could sneak in bits of musical philosophy by
telling a story--its conclusion would reveal his point of view.

Mark preferred the eclectic in
organs as well as organists. He was always open to individualism in organ
building, but was particularly aghast at what he considered "slavish"
copying by organ builders who subscribed to what he considered "historical
trendiness." That point of view came to light with a delightful story in a
review which was published in December 1995. He told a tale of attending a
reception after a recital where he dubbed both food and program as
"provender of dubious provenance." He declared that this fare caused
him to "repair to a pub to fix the damage with pork pie and real
ale."

He disliked the performance of
big Bach works on "tiny scale registrations, which robbed them of their
dignity." He put this notion into especially colorful language:

The organ world suffers from a
pandemic surfeit of Cassandras, blithering on about how large, unwieldy
instruments are bad for our communal health. 

He contended that a certain disk
by Frederick Swann "answered the prayers of those who crave deliverance
from the 'Organ Lite' movement:"

Here is a top-notch musician,
who really knows how to play and project a large organ with spectacular
conviction. Hats off to one of this continent's finest exponents of our
instrument for his devotion to music-making rather than musical trendiness.
This disc will win friends for the organ, and might just remind some of us why
we took up playing in the first instance. It would be gratifying to think that
Mr. Swann likes Lincolnshire pork pipe and ale, and that he sautées his
food in real butter.

There were no holds barred in
the reportage of the organ world for Mark Buxton. Yet humor was always lurking
between the lines and often bubbled up between them. His vocabulary was
extensive and often colorful. He was adept at the sometimes necessary
situations where he felt compelled to remark on various aspects of organs that
he didn't like. This he could do with a certain penache that belied the negative
impact of his commentary.

For example, in a review where
he did not take a shine to the organ, he put it this way:

The organ and the repertoire are
not always the most comfortable of bedfellows.  Frankly,I found it an unlovable instrument, although some
smiles are coaxed from what often appears to be a sullen beast in an
unflattering acoustical cage.

He could be relied on to find a
sly way to deliver a swift kick, when an organ could not do the musical job at
hand:

The various undulants go some
way to imparting a bloom to the sound that otherwise would be absent . . .

Mark had a definite preference
for large, eclectic and interesting organs.  In his commentary on the famous Longwood Gardens Aeolian, he
said the organ was "a sumptuous behemoth if ever there was one." He
continued . . .

The instrument's seemingly
endless and eclectic tonal palette, including strings by the desk and entire
clans of Vox Humanas will curl the ponytails of the purist fraternity . . .

Writing can be a solitary job,
especially for free lance reporters like Buxton.  He divided his time between England, his birthplace, Canada,
where he lived with his wife, and the U.S., where he eventually hoped to
settle. On the subject of expatriate writers, Brian Moore, the author of The
Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne1, observed:
"When you emigrate, you are never quite from anywhere--you are not at home
at home . . ."2

Mark put it this way in
"Off the Beaten Track in England" (April, 1995):

Returning to the land of one's
birth is a peculiar business for the expatriate.  Will things have changed beyond recognition? Will those
favorite places still be there? Will one still feel at home? Or uncomfortably
out of step with current tastes and fashions?

Like Brian Moore, Mark Buxton
was a chronicler and had the knack of making a strong start in his writing. He
could hook the reader's interest and hang on to it until the end of the
article, whether it was an interview, record review or opinion piece.

The tragedy of his early death
denied him the happy ending most of us anticipate.  But within the short period of six years, he contributed
extensively to The Diapason. 
Within that opus we can see an enthusiastic, upbeat and independent
spirit, always communicating the presence (or absence) of music as the real
subject for all that he wrote.

This adds up to a terrific loss
for The Diapason and other journals which benefited from his free-flowing pen.
Filling in that gap will be a demanding burden that will probably require a
team effort. One can only imagine from such beginnings, how magnificent his
contribution to organ reportage would have been. However, the opus that remains
with us is full of insight, sparkle and wit, often punctuated with a good
story. If you collect the issues of The Diapason with Buxton offerings, you'll
have a 2-inch thick pack to go through, but it will be worth the effort. You'll
chuckle at his witticisms, revel at his insights and weep that he is no longer
with us.

A few "Buxtonisms"

On Richard Strauss: "Would
that the composer of Salome and Electra have favored our instrument with a
piece from his top drawer!"

On Edwin Lemare: "Thomas
Murray's recording of music by Lemare, yet another step in the composer's
rehabilitation, serves to prove one again that Fortune's Wheel does indeed turn
. . . After a lengthy period in musical purgatory (a spacious resort, one would
imagine) Lemare's name is back in recital programs, and in recording
catalogs."

Reflecting on an English Organ:
"I cannot disguise a lack of affection for some of the chiffy flues and
assertive upper work heard here . . .. The Tuba Mirabilis has the requisite
hint of good flat lukewarm British beer!"

Some recommended reading

These references do not include
all of Mark Buxton's writings in The Diapason. They are those selections which
are most highly recommended by the author.

Articles and Interviews

October 1992 Daniel Roth at 50

April 1994 Ralph Downes: An
Appreciation

May 1994 A Conversation with
Thomas Murray

August 1994 A Conversation with
Oliver Latry

February 1995 George H. Guest: A
Guest at Cambridge

June 1995 Stephen Cleobury--A
Profile

March 1996 A Conversation with
Martin Neary

Surveys of Organs and Organ
Builders

May 1995 An American Landmark in
Canada, The Schoenstein Organ at Islington Church, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

July 1995 Off the Beaten Track
in England, A Survey of Interesting English Organs

July 1996 Restoration of
the  Casavant Organ at Redlands
University, Redlands, California

February 1997 Rieger-Orgelbau:
The First 150 Years, History of the firm and interview with Christoph
Glatter-Götz

Reviews of recordings

June 1991 An Evening with Edwin
H. Lemare, Thomas Murray, Austin Organ, Portland, Maine

January 1992 The Symphonic Organ
Thomas Murray, Skinner Organ, Woolsey Hall, Yale

February 1992 Marcel
Dupré--Le Chemin Du Croix, François Renet plays the
Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sernin de Toulouse

February 1993
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  The Mystic Organ, Frederick Swann,
Möller organ, Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, DC

February 1993 Romantic Organ
Music, Mikael Wahlen plays the Organ of The Jacobskyrka, Stockholm, Sweden

May 1993 Daniel Roth interprets
César Franck on Three Cavaillé-Coll Organs

September 1993 Charles-Marie
Widor: Symphonies III and IV, Ben van Oosten plays the Cavaillé-Coll
organ of St. François-de-Sales

October 1993 Poesie de l'orgue
symphonique, Odile Pierre plays two Cavaillé-Coll organs

October 1993 Music of Alexandre
Guilmant, François Lombard plays the Cavaillé-Coll organ of St.
Omer Cathedral

November 1993 Organ Duets,
Sylvie Poirier and Philip Crozier play the Aurèle Laramée Organ
in the Chapel of the Maison Provinciale des Frères Maristes, Iberville
Québec. Organ built by Mariste brother Aurèle Laramée

March 1994 The Organs of Oxford,
Nine Organists Play The Organs at Oxford

April 1994 Organ Music of
Franck, Boëllmann, Mendelssohn, Reger, and Grunenwald. Veronique Choplin
plays Cavaillé-Coll at St-Sulpice. (Note: Mark Buxton studied with
Grunenwald, former organist.)

August 1994 Anthems and Motets,
Choir of St. John's Episcopal Church, Samuel Carabetta, director. Lafayette
Square, Washington, DC ("Church of the Presidents")

September 1994 César
Franck--Music for Harmonium and Piano, 
Joris Verdin and Jos Van Immerseel play harmonium and nineteenth-century
piano

October 1994
Reger-Organworks--Heinz Wunderlich at St. Jacobi and St. Michael's, Swabish
Hall. Nelly Soregi, violin

December 1994 Vierne--Works
for    organ, Wolfgang
Rübsam, E.M. Skinner organ at Rockefeller Chapel, Chicago, IL

January 1995 Well Tempered
Organ, John Wells plays the Letourneau organ at St. Paul's Collegiate School,
Hamilton, NZ

May 1995 Organ works of Basil
Harwood.  Roger Fisher plays the
organ of Chester Cathedral Whitley organ, rebuilt by Gray & Davidson, Hill,
and Rushworth & Dreaper

July 1995 Sigfried
Karg-Elert--Organ Works, Wolfgang Stockmeier plays the organs of
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  St. Johannis, Osnabruck, St Martin, Bad
Lippsprige and Herz-Jesu, Bremerhaven-Lehe

July 1995 Hear My Prayer--Choir
boy and choir girl competition--RSCM choir boy and choir girl of the year, 1992

August 1995 The Historical St.
Thomas Organ, Pierre Cochereau plays the organs of St. Thomas Church, NY

September 1995 The Organ Music
of Alfred Hollins, David Liddle plays the organ of Hull City Hall

November 1995 Stars and Stripes
Forever: Organ Duets, Elizabeth and Raymond Chenault, Skinner organ of
Washington National Cathedral

November 1995 Longwood Pops--The
Longwood Gardens Organ, Michael Stairs plays the Longwood Aeolian Organ

December 1995 Four Masterworks--Frederick
Swann at the Crystal Cathedral--Ruffatti organ

June 1996 George Walker--A
Portrait

September 1996 Olivier Messiaen
--Complete Organ Works, Gillian Weir, Frobenius Organ, Arhus Cathedral, Denmark--Early
Frobenius with French reeds

Book Reviews

May 1991 Charles Callahan--The
American Classic Organ: A History in Letters

August 1994 Jane Langdon--Divine
Inspiration, A review of the "organ" novel

Reports

October 1992 AGO National
Convention, Atlanta, GA (with Jess Anthony)

March 1993 Herbert Howells
Centenary Concert, Westminster Abbey

April 1994 21st Lahti Organ
Festival, August 2-7, 1993

Notes

                  1.
style='mso-tab-count:1'>              Moore, Brian. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988.

                  2.
style='mso-tab-count:1'>              Wyman, Max  "Profile--The loneliness of the long-distance writer". Vancouver: Vancouver Sun, January 1997.