A tribute to Charles Krigbaum

Let All the World in Every Corner Sing: The Yale Institute of Sacred Music Celebrates Fifty Years

The Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM) is an interdisciplinary graduate center for the study and practice of sacred music, worship, and the related arts. Its students pursue degrees in choral conducting, organ, and concert voice with the Yale School of Music, or they engage in ministerial or academic studies in liturgy, religion and literature, music, or visual arts with the Yale Divinity School. The ISM is essentially a sequel to the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary (New York City), which lost its funding in the early 1970s and closed its doors. Robert Baker, then organist and dean of the School of Sacred Music at Union, relocated three faculty and one administrator from the Union school to Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, after securing funding from the Irwin-Sweeney-Miller foundation of Columbus, Indiana. This family foundation was headed by Clementine Miller Tangeman, whose late husband was a musicologist at Union, and her brother J. Irwin Miller, who was serving as senior trustee of the Yale Corporation. With its strong programs in divinity and music, Yale was deemed the perfect place to reconstitute a school or institute of sacred music. In 1973 inaugural director Robert Baker, together with chaplain and liturgical scholar Jeffery Rowthorn, musicologist Richard French, and administrator Mina Belle Packer, migrated to New Haven. After a year of intense preparation, the Yale ISM welcomed its first class of students: five in music and five in divinity. In 2024 the ISM celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of that momentous occasion.

The School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary

The roots of the ISM begin with Union Theological Seminary. Music was an important component of the curriculum at Union since its founding in 1836. That this ecumenical Protestant seminary held such value for music and the arts can trace some of its inspiration to Anglican and Roman Catholic instantiations of liturgical renewal stemming from the Oxford and Solemnes movements. Church musicians were regularly appointed to the theological faculty at Union to teach music history, hymnody, and related musical subjects to complement the theological education of seminarians.

In 1928 Clarence Dickinson (who had been teaching music to the seminarians at Union since 1912), together with his wife, Helen Snyder Dickinson, met with seminary president Henry Sloane Coffin to discuss establishing a separate entity at Union: a school of sacred music. This school would specifically train church musicians within the context of the seminary. Since the “joining of music and theology, of divinity students and music students, did not seem at variance with the Seminary’s history,” Union began admitting musicians into the seminary, granting them the degree Master of Sacred Music. One sees similarity of vision with that of the Schola Cantorum in Paris, founded by Dickinson’s teacher, Alexander Guilmant.

Clarence and Helen Dickinson were the quintessential interdisciplinary couple. Clarence was an organist, choir director, composer, and teacher whose profound influence earned him the moniker “Dean of American Church Musicians.” His wife Helen, the first woman to graduate with a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University, was an art and liturgical historian who taught alongside her husband at Union. Together they envisioned a curriculum in which the church musician would acquire not only musical skills, but also the theological and pastoral skills needed to successfully navigate the complex ministry of church music. The Dickinsons also understood the benefits of having musicians and clergy interact with each other at the seminary: “In such an atmosphere, the church musician . . . and the minister meet and train together in much the same way as they will work together in actual parish situations.” Interdisciplinary study and collaboration between clergy and musicians were hallmarks of the School of Sacred Music at Union, and it is upon this foundation that the Yale Institute of Sacred Music was built.

Early years at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music

The 1975 Bulletin of the Yale Divinity School includes a succinct description of the ISM: “The curriculum will lay particular stress upon organ playing, choral conducting, historical aspects of the church’s musical development, the liturgical framework of religious worship of all faiths, and practical musical techniques, and will be of a highly participatory nature.” Three early graduates of the program, however—Steven Roberts, Patricia Wright, and Walden Moore—paint a broader, more colorful picture of the nascent ISM and its early years. Steven Roberts was an organ student in the first class that arrived at the ISM in 1974; he later taught organ at Western Connecticut State University and was music director at Saint Peter Church in Danbury before retiring to Bolivia. Patricia Wright was also an inaugural organ student at the ISM, receiving her Master of Musical Arts degree in 1976 and Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1982. An adjunct organ professor at the University of Toronto, Wright was director of music at Toronto’s Metropolitan United Church, where she played Canada’s largest pipe organ for thirty-five years before retiring in 2022. Walden Moore came to the ISM in 1978. Not long after graduating in 1980, he was appointed organist and choirmaster of Trinity Church on the Green, New Haven. Although Moore retired from Trinity in 2024 after forty years of distinguished service, he and composer/organist Mark Miller continue to teach service playing to organists at the ISM. These three remarkable church musicians share common threads in reminiscing about their time at the ISM in the 1970s: the importance of interdisciplinary study, the emphasis on church music, and the benefits of studying at one of the great research institutions of the world.

Interdisciplinary study in the 1970s primarily involved the study of worship and liturgy. Wright and Roberts both highlight the importance of Jeffery Rowthorn’s liturgy class, Wright going so far as to describe the course as “life changing.” In many ways, it is this study of worship and liturgy—that is, the church at prayer—that unites the musician, seminarian, and scholar. Liturgical studies has become a part of the very DNA of the ISM; it was inherited from the School of Sacred Music at Union, and continues to play a seminal role in the work of the ISM today.

When director Robert Baker brought the ISM to Yale, the School of Music already had an established and prestigious program in organ performance led by university organist Charles Krigbaum. Baker added to the mix an emphasis specifically on training organists for work in the church. Roberts recalls that “Dr. Baker taught me about being a church musician, not just an organist.” Wright remembers Baker teaching conducting from the console. Students were taught the art of leading congregational song and accompanying anthems. Moreover, Baker encouraged students to learn this craft from multiple experts. Moore recalls the director sending him to observe Vernon de Tar on a Sunday morning at Church of the Ascension in New York. Moore was so impressed with this experience that he always welcomed ISM students to observe his program at Trinity.

Yale added a more rigorous academic vision to what had been offered at Union, says Moore, and organists took full advantage of all that Yale had to offer. Roberts took courses on Scarlatti and Couperin with harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick; Wright studied Schenkerian analysis with Allen Forte. Trips to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library were commonplace. With a profusion of courses and resources at their fingertips, organists were able to tailor their education to their specific interests while acquiring a solid grounding in church music. “It was up to us organ students to take advantage of the myriad of opportunities Yale afforded us,” says Wright. The opportunities have only increased over time.

The Institute of Sacred Music today

The ISM has grown exponentially over the past fifty years; the original community of three faculty and ten students now numbers well over a hundred individuals. Successive directors have expanded the program. John Cook (1984–1992) created a robust program in religion and the arts at the ISM, a development that undoubtedly would have delighted Helen Dickinson. Under Margot Fassler (1994–2004), the music program expanded from organ and choral conducting to include a major in early vocal music and oratorio (James Taylor, program coordinator). Current director Martin Jean (2005–) has fostered a fellowship program in which international scholars and practitioners join the ISM community for an academic year to further their work while collaborating with the ISM community. Together with the Divinity School, Jean also launched an interdisciplinary program in Music and the Black Church (Braxton Shelley, program director).

An abundance of courses awaits organ students admitted to the ISM. In addition to weekly instruction in organ performance from Martin Jean and/or James O’Donnell, students are invited to lessons and masterclasses with visiting artists. Church music skills, originally taught by Robert Baker during lessons, now include courses in choral conducting (Felicia Barber), liturgical keyboard skills (Walden Moore and Mark Miller), and improvisation (Jeffrey Brillhart). Musicological study has expanded to include both historical musicology (Markus Rathey) and ethnomusicology (Bo kyung Blenda Im). Offerings in liturgical studies comprise courses in historical and contemporary issues taught by an expanding and increasingly diverse faculty. Students wishing to broaden their knowledge in religion and the arts can take courses in religious poetry, architectural history, and other related arts.

Ten concert and liturgical choirs are supported by the ISM, the newest of which is the Yale Consort, a group of professional vocalists who sing evening liturgies (Choral Evensong or Vespers) in local parishes under the direction of James O’Donnell. Organ students accompany these services, acquiring liturgical service playing skills in a unique pedagogical setting from one of the world’s finest and most recognized church musicians.

International study tours, typically every other year, take the entire ISM student body around the globe to study the ways in which sacred arts are manifested in areas of the world not our own. The organ faculty often extend the study tour for their students, to allow them to visit and play the significant organs of the region.

In recent years the ISM has offered a week-long summer Organ Academy, in which advanced undergraduate organ students study with some of the nation’s top organists. Participating students receive daily lessons and attend workshops and recitals, all while interacting with their peers from around the country.

What began as Robert Baker’s humble continuation of the noble interdisciplinary program at Union has blossomed into an extensive program of sacred music, religion, and the arts at one of the world’s leading research institutions. As the ISM celebrates fifty years at Yale, Robert Baker’s stately anthem on the hymn text “Let all the world in every corner sing” provides an apt motto. The interdisciplinary, ecumenical, and expansive vision of the ISM, shaped by faculty, students, performers, and fellows, is indeed one in which all the world in every corner sings. May this glorious vision continue for many years to come.

Organ professors at Yale, 1973 to the present 

Charles Krigbaum had already been at Yale for fifteen years when the Institute of Sacred Music arrived in 1973. His legacy at Yale includes acquiring the Rudolf von Beckerath organ for Dwight Chapel (1971), premiering the newly discovered Neumeister Chorales of Bach in Battell Chapel (1985), and recording the organ works of Widor and Messiaen on the Newberry Memorial Organ in Woolsey Hall.

An advocate of the organ reform movement, Krigbaum was well versed in all organ music, his seminars covering composers from Titelouze to Tournemire. He promoted well-roundedness, so that students who came to him with a solid background in the North German Organ School left with an admiration for Widor, and those with knowledge of the Romantic schools left with appreciation for Scheidt.

A student of Clarence Dickinson at the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary, Robert Baker was the quintessential church musician. In addition to teaching the standard organ literature, he instructed students in the practical skills of the church musician. Baker loved the Newberry Memorial Organ and enjoyed teaching in the Romantic style. He would tell his students to always include a “gum drop” (something sweet that people will enjoy) in every recital. Baker’s arrival at Yale complemented the organ performance program directed by Charles Krigbaum.

Thomas Murray came to Yale in 1981 from the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Boston. An organ student of Clarence Mader at Occidental College, Murray became one of the most renowned and field-changing organists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is best known for his interpretation and transcriptions of the Romantic repertoire. He has concertized around the globe, and his multiple recordings have earned him universal acclaim.

On the Newberry Organ at Yale, Murray taught students the art of registering exhilarating crescendos and dramatic diminuendos. His transcriptions often required manipulation of two enclosed divisions at the same time to gracefully bring out a melody. The Newberry Organ, however, was not merely a symphonic organ for Murray; his teaching of the other Romantic repertoire, whether Rheinberger or Mendelssohn, was most authoritative. Indeed, he brings integrity to every musical style and period.

Martin Jean joined the Yale faculty in 1997. A self-professed generalist, Jean brought with him particular expertise in the north and central European Protestant organ repertories but also sustained a love for the French symphonists. With an earnest interest in historic performance, Jean led the project with Thomas Murray and Margot Fassler that resulted in the meantone organ (Opus 55) of Taylor & Boody in Marquand Chapel. Jean accrued some formal training in theological studies, which made him a natural partner at the ISM.

James O’Donnell came to Yale in 2022 after a forty-year career leading two of the most prominent London choral foundations. As organist and master of the choristers at Westminster Abbey, he presided over such state occasions as the wedding of Katherine Middleton and Prince William, which was broadcast to millions. One of his final acts in London was to lead the music for the funeral liturgy of Queen Elizabeth II, which 4.6 billion people were said to have heard, comprising arguably the largest single broadcast audience in history for an event featuring classical music. An internationally acclaimed concert artist, O’Donnell is a model for many students at the ISM: organist, conductor, liturgical musician.

The pipe organs at Yale

The Newberry Memorial Organ in Woolsey Hall ranks among the finest symphonic organs in the world. The original instrument was built by the Hutchings-Votey Organ Company in 1902. Expanded in 1915 by J. W. Steere & Sons, it was rebuilt and expanded again in 1928 by Skinner Organ Company, all through the generosity of the Newberry family. University organist Harry Jepson, who played in the inaugural recital of the original build (it is reported that there were 3,000 people in attendance despite a drenching rainstorm) as well as both rebuilds, curiously programmed Franck’s Pièce Héroïque in all three recitals.

The final Skinner rebuild is a glorious four-manual Romantic organ with 142 stops, 197 ranks, and 12,641 pipes. While Romantic organs fell out of favor in the decades that followed, many such organs falling victim to replacement or alteration, the Newberry Organ remains in its original condition to this day, a stunning instrument lovingly maintained by the A. Thompson-Allen Company. (The Woolsey Hall organ is featured on the cover of the November 2016 issue of The Diapason.)

The 1951 Holtkamp organ in Battell Chapel is a fine example of the mid-twentieth-century Orgelbewegung. The main three-manual transept organ is complemented by a two-manual apse organ (one organ, two consoles). This organ was designed by university organist Luther Noss together with Walter Holtkamp. Yale’s organ curator, Joe Dzeda, recalls that during Sunday services at Battell Chapel, Noss would often play the prelude and postlude from the transept while assistant university organist H. Frank Bozyan would accompany the choir from the apse console. Built on the principles of low wind pressure, balanced registers, and exposed pipework, this three-manual organ has 71 ranks and 3,740 pipes.

In his History of the Yale School of Music, 1855–1970, Noss, who was later dean of the Yale School of Music, wrote: “With the availability of the Newberry Memorial Organ in Woolsey Hall, an outstanding example of the 19th- and 20th-century ‘romantic design,’ and the classic Holtkamp instrument in Battell Chapel, organ students at Yale would now have the rare and valuable opportunity of studying the organ literature of all periods on the appropriate instrument.” (The Battell Chapel organ is featured on page 1 of the June 1950 issue of The Diapason.)

H. Frank Bozyan was appointed instructor in organ in 1920 to assist Harry Jepson in teaching an organ class that averaged twenty-five students. At the time of his death in 1965, he was university organist and organ instructor emeritus. The three-manual, 54-rank Beckerath in Dwight Hall is named in honor of Bozyan’s forty-five years of dedication to the organ program at Yale. Charles Krigbaum, who followed Bozyan as university organist, had Rudolf von Beckerath design and build this colorful tracker. Notable stops include the Terzian, Trichterregal, and Rankett. Krigbaum adored this organ, presenting a series of five Bach recitals after its installation. Some fourteen years later, on March 21, 1985, Krigbaum, along with nine other organists from Yale and New Haven, performed an all-day Bach marathon to celebrate Bach’s 300th birthday. (The Dwight Chapel organ is featured on page 1 of the December 1971 issue of The Diapason.)

Thomas Murray, Professor Emeritus in the Practice of Organ, likes to speak of Yale’s collection of pipe organs as the “goodly heritage.” The most recent addition to this goodly heritage is the Charles Krigbaum Organ in Marquand Chapel. Martin Jean was the impetus behind this three-manual tracker in meantone temperament built by Taylor & Boody. Modeled on the 1683 Arp Schnitger organ in the St. Jacobi Kirche, Lüdingworth, this instrument is ideal for teaching early organ music. Its seventeenth-century design, however, does not preclude it from playing contemporary organ music; indeed, the ISM commissioned Matthew Suttor to compose a new work, Syntagma, which was premiered by Martin Jean in 2007 as part of its year-long celebration to welcome its newest pipe organ.

For further information

To explore the many opportunities at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, visit ism.yale.edu. For information about the various degree programs, contact admissions manager Loraine Enlow at [email protected]. For information about long- and short-term fellowships,  contact assistant director Eben Graves at [email protected].

—Glen J. Segger, Yale ISM ’95

Lecturer, Yale Divinity School

Andrew Schaeffer

Andrew Schaeffer holds degrees from St. Olaf College, Yale University, where he was a student of Thomas Murray, and University of Oklahoma. He currently serves as the director of music at Luther Memorial Church in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, and as editor-at-large of The Diapason.

Andrew Schaeffer: Let’s begin by hearing a little bit about your formative years in California.

Thomas Murray: I must begin with the single most important thing, which is that my mother and father were unsparingly supportive of my musical interests. I had piano lessons early and was fortunate to be a member of the Pasadena Boy Choristers when it was still directed by its founder, Dr. John Henry Lyons.

When it came time to think about a career, my parents were fully aware of the risk of trying to make a living in classical music. American culture doesn’t support that at all well! I was a keen organ student during high school years with a dream of being a performer both in concerts and in the church. My family wanted me to have a liberal arts education, in part to act as a safety net in case my passion for playing burned out! Very wise! Fortunately I was admitted to Occidental College in Los Angeles—a perfect choice, because that’s where Clarence Mader taught organ! He was one of the very finest teachers of his time, especially in the West. It’s important to note that, as a liberal arts institution, Occidental was not a place where you had the option of living in a practice room ten hours a day. But I was inseparable from music, and to be honest, I’m not sure if my aptitudes would have led me successfully down any other path. 

Where did you land after your years at Occidental?

When I was preparing to graduate, Mader asked me where I hoped to go to graduate school. I didn’t want to move on directly to graduate study, at least not right away. I yearned to be active in the profession, have a church and develop my ability in choral conducting. I have a feeling he privately shook his head with dismay, because the prevailing thought back in 1965 was that graduate degrees acted as secure passports to great jobs. What we didn’t know at the time was just how saturated the church music field would become with people who had advanced degrees.

The single most important thing was that my parents did not try to prevent me from pursuing my dream. As far as events are concerned, a pivotal one occurred in 1966, when I was awarded first place in what is now referred to as NYACOP. The judges that year were Mildred Andrews of the University of Oklahoma, Vernon de Tar of Julliard, and my future senior teaching colleague at Yale, Dr. Robert Baker. A small world!

Tell me a bit about Clarence Mader as a teacher. Is there any contemporary pedagogue that you know of who embodies his style today?

I studied with him prior to the rise of performance practice as a dominant orthodoxy. Mader stressed making the best musical use of whatever instrument one was playing for those there “in the present” to listen. He was deeply influenced by his teacher, Lynnwood Farnam, but was also “tuned in” to many of the contemporary composers of that time. I am certain he was disappointed in me because I had an aversion to much contemporary music of that period. I can embrace dissonance when it has an expressive purpose, but too much music of the late twentieth century I found acerbic and irritating. Dissonance is wonderful as a “spice,” but not when it becomes the “main course.”

When I studied with Mader he was not performing much, except on Sunday mornings at Immanuel Presbyterian Church. He had discovered that he loved teaching—just loved it—once telling me he had taught ten lessons in a day without a break! He was a gifted and avid composer, and I regret that the 2004 American Guild of Organists national convention in Los Angeles did not make a special effort to feature his music, because that year was the centennial of his birth.

What instruments were available to you during your time at Occidental? Did they make an impact on you?

The Schlicker in Herrick Chapel was installed after I graduated, so my time was spent on the 1930 Skinner organ in Thorne Hall. It was built for a Methodist Church in San Francisco that was forced into bankruptcy during the Great Depression. Occidental acquired it in 1938, installing it with the pipes in the back in a space probably intended for balcony seating and a projection booth. The console was located in an orchestra pit at the front. As you can imagine, it was not a comfortable arrangement, and additionally, reverberation was, and still is, non-existent. That organ, Skinner’s Opus 819, fell into disuse but has now been removed and will be restored for the Episcopal High School in Belaire (Houston), Texas.

Occidental had a fine reputation for high caliber organ instruction. Not many remember now that David Craighead taught there for several years before his appointment at Eastman in about 1955. It was Craighead who encouraged Occidental to hire Mader to succeed him. When the administration noted Mader’s lack of any college degree, Craighead, to his everlasting credit, told them “that doesn’t matter!”

Speaking of organs, what were some of the first ones you were exposed to in Los Angeles, and did any of them cultivate your love of the symphonic style of building?

O yes! When I was growing up in Los Angeles, there were still fine pre-World War I instruments built by Murray M. Harris, and there were E. M. Skinners, Kimballs, and pre-World War II Casavants as well. Harris’s organs were characterized by English-type ensembles and a few had imported Tuba stops from England. All Saints Church, Pasadena, and Second Church of Christ, Scientist, Los Angeles, are two that I was familiar with.

And there were some romantically trained organists who were really inspiring to watch and hear. I had the pleasure of knowing Anita Priest who played at First Methodist in Pasadena on their four-manual 1923 Skinner. Like many Skinners of his early period, it only had three general pistons, but Anita magically coaxed twelve out of the instrument! How? When she played a service, she could start with three generals for the prelude. (No one in those days would waste a general for the hymns!) During the invocation she reset them to accompany the professional quartet or the choir. Following that, she would reset them during the scripture readings in preparation for the offering, and finally reset them once more for the postlude. Presto! Twelve generals!

The choir occasionally did major choral works, one of which was an abridged version of Elijah. There was no orchestra involved, but Anita manipulated the organ so creatively that the music sounded thoroughly satisfying and natural. In the 1950s and 1960s, I witnessed the tail end of that style of accompanying, and in later years her style nearly became a lost art.

Now back to your career trajectory. After Occidental, where did you go?

Clarence Mader, who had been at Immanuel Presbyterian for nearly forty years, felt increasingly that he wanted to have his Sunday mornings free. I was enormously fortunate that he recommended me to follow him, and fortunate that the church acted on his suggestion. This led to my playing my first service there in January of 1966.

After some years, however, there appeared new incentives to think of a move from California. The first was the discovery—through the Organ Historical Society—of the old nineteenth-century Boston-built organs, especially those of E. & G. G. Hook. I was determined to experience New England first hand and was discouraged by the overdevelopment, congestion, and smog in Los Angeles. The idea of being surrounded with so much history and living in a brisk four-season climate was irresistible.

During my first trip to Boston, I became acquainted with the Hook organs at Immaculate Conception on Harrison Avenue, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, and others, and I also met Barbara Owen, one of the great advocates of saving these amazing instruments. After that trip, I was convinced that New England, with its four seasons and historical riches, was where I wanted to live.

You recorded on the organ at Immaculate Conception shortly after that trip, correct?

Yes—in 1971, before leaving California. The first was a recording of Franck’s Grand Pièce Symphonique and the Fantaisie in A. Immaculate Conception, which had originally stood in a very Irish neighborhood, was run by the Jesuits who founded Boston College adjoining the church. That organ was so fantastic—almost French in nature, with bright chorus reeds, singing Diapasons, and delicious flutes, all in sumptuous acoustics! It’s in storage now, but all of us who knew it pray it will be heard again in a noble building like the one it left. 

As a complete beginner in the recording field, there was no assurance whatsoever of releasing any recording on a commercial label, so I hired recording engineers Stephen Fassett and David Griesinger, paid for the editing, and afterward marketed it myself to Sheffield Records in California. They had previously released a disc of Anthony Newman’s (it may have been his first), so I figured they were not averse to organ music! Thanks to great good fortune, they liked it and released it to a favorable reception. By the way, I’ve always been grateful to Robert Schuneman, then editor of The Diapason, for a very favorable review of that first disc. One other thing to note—E. Power Biggs had produced a disc on Columbia called The Organ in America with various light pieces by early American composers. But I believe our Franck recording made at Immaculate Conception can claim to be the first commercial recording of any major works on a significant nineteenth-century American organ, and a magnificent instrument it was, too.

So, when did you finally “bite the bullet” and make the move to Boston?

I left Immanuel Presbyterian in 1973 and was appointed interim organist-choirmaster at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Boston. The Dean, the Very Reverend Charles Henry Buck, had re-established a choir of boys and men a few years before. I was appointed interim because the choirmaster was suffering from poor health and recruitment for the choir had lapsed. Developing and maintaining a choir of men and boys with only after-school rehearsal time is work, as anyone who has done it will tell you! But the dean supported the work of rebuilding the choir, and in due time I was appointed to the permanent position. 

Things then changed considerably in the year after Dean Buck retired in 1978, because the new clergy “management” did not want to continue the choir and yet was unwilling to spend money on starting a choir for girls. But during my years there, before conditions became unfavorable, it was a really exhilarating time for us all!

We managed to take the choir on tour in 1978 to England. I wanted them to hear the best English choirs, so we went the last week of July, which afforded the opportunity to hear some fine London choirs for a week before beginning our own residency at Saint Alban’s Cathedral. We also sang services at Saint Paul’s, London, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and, because we were from Boston, we traveled by coach to Boston in Lincolnshire to sing choral Evensong in the splendid medieval parish church there.

We shouldn’t leave this subject without noting that one of the boy trebles in that choir was Jonathan Ambrosino, now very well-known as an organ consultant and writer on all things organistical, and that Jonathan was influenced by the 1952 Aeolian-Skinner organ at Saint Paul’s, Opus 1207, another organ that has now been removed to make room for an elevator. One of the men of the choir on that trip was Stephen Kowalyshyn, inventor of the “Kowalyshyn Servo-Pneumatic Lever” used on large mechanical-action instruments, and another notable name from the organ world is Robert Newton, for decades the head of Andover Organ Company’s restoration department—he was a fine bass with us at Saint Paul’s.

I know that you were making recordings during your time at Saint Paul’s. Tell us about some of those projects.

Soon after moving in the summer of 1973, I made the first of two LPs of Mendelssohn sonatas on the 1854 E. & G. G. Hook organ at the Unitarian Church in Jamaica Plain. Because of the enormous frequency range of organ sound and the power of organ bass, one disc allowed only about twenty-four distortion-free minutes per side in those days. Sonatas 1, 3, and 4 were on that first disc. The acoustics in the church were so dry that we carried out the pew cushions and stacked them in the narthex. I also brought two blankets from home and built a tent on a 2 x 4 framework so they could be draped behind and above the console to keep the clatter of the worn key action out of the recording. It is a fascinating instrument that has recently received fine conservative restoration work by Scot Huntington. 

To complete all six of the sonatas, we recorded a companion album with numbers 2, 5, and 6 on the 1857 William B. D. Simmons organ at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in East Boston, another rare survival among our pre-Civil War organs. The adventure there was dodging the noise from the Boston airport!

So, how were these instruments perceived when the recordings were released? Were they in fashion? Out of fashion? Or simply forgotten?

Most of them had been forgotten except among Organ Historical Society people. And as I said before, the only comparable record had been made by E. Power Biggs with his album of early American keyboard pieces. For that reason, I am confident these early discs of ours broke entirely new ground in establishing the integrity of our American instruments.

Through your recordings and work at St. Paul’s, you were firmly establishing yourself in the New England organ scene. How did your association with Yale come about?

Charles Krigbaum invited me to do a program in Woolsey Hall in about 1976. Not long before, Robert Baker had left the Union Seminary School of Sacred Music to be the first director of the newly established Yale Institute of Sacred Music. I remember devoting that first program to three sonatas, one each by Rheinberger, Hindemith, and Elgar. It must have left a favorable impression with both Charles and Robert, because late in 1980, Charles called me to say that Yale was creating a junior instructor position in organ and that the search committee would welcome an application! 

So I applied and was interviewed for that in the spring of 1981, playing a lecture-recital on the Beckerath organ in Dwight Chapel. I was enormously fortunate, yet again, that the audition was well received, resulting in the invitation to teach at Yale in the fall of that year. In retrospect, I suspect the new junior position was planned in preparation for Robert Baker’s retirement, because he taught only a few years after that.

When I started, my job consisted of teaching a few organ students, directing the Marquand Chapel Choir at the Divinity School and playing some weekday services there. A little later on Charles Krigbaum stepped away from playing at the University Church (Battell Chapel), and I assumed those responsibilities as well. Around the same time, Fenno Heath, the revered long-time director of the Yale Glee Club decided to give up the Battell Choir so I took that on for about five years. When Charles Krigbaum decided to retire from Yale in 1995, I left all choral commitments to focus on the organ department.

I remain enormously grateful, not only to Charles Krigbaum and Robert Baker, but to Martin Jean, who came to join me on the faculty in 1997. Martin, now director of the Institute of Sacred Music, though under great pressure in his administrative role, has been a cherished colleague, an outstanding coach for his students, an excellent advocate for the organ here, and a dear friend. 

When you arrived in 1981, the Romantic School of organbuilding and playing was still largely out of fashion, and I recall hearing that the organ in Woolsey Hall was not universally appreciated. Could you provide some insight into that? 

That’s true. For several decades, especially after the arrival of the Holtkamp organ in Battell Chapel in 1951, the organ in Woolsey, properly known as the Newberry Memorial Organ, was dismissed by many as a decadent, categorically flawed instrument from a “bad period.” Some give me credit for raising awareness of the worth of this wonderful instrument, but it was really Charles Krigbaum who laid the groundwork for its return to favor. Though he played a wide variety of literature and believed in being a “universalist” about repertoire, Charles had a particular fondness for Widor and the music of Messiaen. He recognized the organ in Woolsey as a persuasive vehicle for that music, and he recorded much of it there—including all ten Widor symphonies!

So, interest was already brewing by the time I arrived. We should all be thankful that during the “dark years” when there was a lack of interest among the students, the organ was conserved in its original form by Aubrey Thompson-Allen, the Yale Curator of Organs. Our current senior curators Nick Thompson-Allen and Joseph Dzeda, and now the younger members of their staff, Nate and Zach Ventrella, keep that legacy alive. Interestingly, as a student at Kent State University, Joe Dzeda had a framed photo of the Woolsey instrument in his dorm room!

Little did he know that his name would eventually be synonymous with its care!

Exactly! He’s admitted that during college, he wondered if he’d ever get the opportunity to see the instrument in person! Not only has he spent his career in it, but upon his demise, he will rest in the Grove Street Cemetery across the street, as he says, “to keep an eye on ‘The Newberry’!”

Speaking of Woolsey’s care, it must be gratifying, at the end of your time at Yale, to see the organ completely restored. Tell us about that process.

Yes, over many decades, the curators made timely repairs to the instrument to keep it in reliable working condition. But as years passed by repairs became more frequent and more urgent. In 2006, Martin Jean and I decided that the time was right to press for the first-ever comprehensive restoration, to be funded entirely by the Institute of Sacred Music. Readers may be surprised to learn that, until recent years, many of the 1915 Steere chests and 1928 Skinner chests were still operating on original leather! Due to the magnitude of the project, it was decided to undertake the work in stages over seven years, a division at a time during the summer months, to keep the organ in use during the academic year. The result is magnificent, and we are greatly relieved now that Skinner Opus 722 is poised for another century of service.

Back to recordings. So far, we’ve focused on your early work, recording historic instruments in Boston. I’d like to hear more about your recordings of orchestral transcriptions. I think its safe to say that you were one of the first to champion transcription playing.

Well yes—and you could say I took risks in doing that, but I don’t think I could have resisted the temptation! There are responsibilities we can’t ignore when playing original literature, particularly where composers are specific about registration. With transcriptions, it’s not that way. The philosophical question a player faces is whether to be faithful to arrangements as devised and published by a transcriber or to be as faithful as possible in translating the original score. I take the second approach, in part because the organs we have now offer flexibility and versatility not dreamed of in Edwin H. Lemare’s day. So I don’t take published transcriptions, even those written by Lemare, to be “holy writ,” though existing arrangements can often be useful as a “working score.”

Over the years, I’ve adapted several piano pieces for the organ. I really enjoy trying to get into the mind of the composer and posing the question: if I were Liszt, how would I orchestrate this piece? Do the figurations on the keyboard suggest an orchestral color? There may be no single right or wrong answer, but we must make a piece sound as convincing as possible in the new medium, the organ. There are two CD anthologies of transcriptions from Woolsey Hall: The Symphonic Organist and The Transcriber’s Art. One is on the Gothic label and the other on Priory. It’s the style of playing that I love, more than the fact that such pieces are transcribed ones. Of course, there is original organ music that invites the same approach as well.

Do you generally write your own transcriptions?

I’ve done only one transcription “from scratch” worth mentioning. Elgar wrote a major piece in the late 1920s, commissioned as a band competition piece called Severn Suite. No surprise that it’s in B-flat major! He must have sanctioned a proposed organ version by Ivor Atkins, his friend and Worcester Cathedral organist. That was published as the Second Sonata but, regrettably, Atkins eliminated a whole movement—the “Minuet”—adding an entire page of his own music in its place! 

Later on Elgar rewrote the piece for full orchestra and transposed it to C major. I decided that I wanted to play this version—the definitive one—in the worst way! It is a superb multi-movement work and every bit as wonderful as Elgar’s original Organ Sonata, opus 28. It was released by Joe Vitacco on JAV Recordings, no longer available on a “physical” CD, but can be downloaded from i-Tunes. Just look for Elgar’s Severn Suite, and you can have it for 99 cents per movement!

In addition to your work as an educator and recording artist, you’ve been a prolific recitalist all across the globe. Care to share some highlights?

I’ve been grateful for many invitations to play programs over the years, many for American Guild of Organists and Organ Historical Society conventions. In fact, there was a time when I was receiving an OHS invitation nearly every year, which led me to worry about folks becoming weary of me! There is such a thing as “too much of a good thing!”

I’ve been fortunate to do many performances in North America and Western Europe. An especially memorable tour was to Buenos Aires, organized by my former student Ezequiel Menéndez. From Australia came an invitation to play one recital in Sydney and two in Melbourne, and there was a recital at Suntory Hall in Tokyo when their Rieger organ was new.

My recital activity has been far from all consuming, though, and entering retirement, I’m happy to retreat a bit from that aspect of my activity. There are so many talented students I’ve had the pleasure of coaching. Not all have their heart set on concert playing, but for those who do I’d like to see them getting opportunities I had earlier.

Though you’ve stepped away somewhat from your recital career, you continue to serve as a church musician. Tell us about your responsibilities at Christ Church, New Haven.

For twelve years now I have been artist in residence and principal organist there, enjoying the spacious acoustics and playing a very satisfying English-sounding instrument. I’ve also mentored organ students from the Institute of Sacred Music who serve as organ scholars. Christ Church adjoins Yale’s campus and is one of America’s finest examples of Gothic Revival architecture anywhere. In my time we have had two fine rectors and a very appreciative congregation. It is a very happy association.

One final question. As you look at the profession, what are the challenges, concerns, and opportunities you see moving forward.

While there is certainly reason to be pessimistic about many trends we see in church music, I remain hopeful for a future that continues to support the music we love, music that nourishes because it is enduring! Churches supporting organ and choral music will not disappear, but they are becoming fewer and resources are diminishing. Too many think of “traditional” music and ceremonial as something stuck in the past. “Museum Church” they sometimes call it. People need to see that it really means being in the tradition—being a part of an ever-continuing creation of music and art that enriches the human spirit. My advice to students is to make sure they spare no effort to become as fine a musician as possible. If you’re among the best, you will have a far greater chance for success. 

Also, if you’re an Episcopalian or Roman Catholic, don’t be lured into thinking that the best jobs are in cathedrals! Good parishes are often better motivated and better equipped to support robust music programs.

Beyond that, we must learn to be far more effective at being advocates for what we do, for its enormous worth in society. I wish more academic professional programs would provide students with the strategies—the tools for advocacy! Every branch of music education, especially the “classical” branch, must rise to meet this need in our time.

Thank you so much for your time, and best wishes for a tranquil retirement!

Hearty thanks to you for this opportunity—my pleasure! But “tranquil?” I don’t anticipate that! It’s more a transition from employment to “self-employment,” happily with more freedom to enjoy many things, extra-musical and musical alike.

Photo: Thomas Murray, Luther Noss, and Charles Krigbaum in front of Woolsey Hall, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Jennifer Lucy Bate, 75, born in London, UK, November 11, 1944, died March 25. She was the daughter of H. A. Bate, organist of St James’s Muswell Hill from 1924 to 1978. An international concert organist, she was considered an authority on the organ music of Olivier Messiaen, having befriended him within the last twenty years of his life as his organist of choice. In 1986, she gave the first British performance of his Livre du Saint-Sacrement at Westminster Cathedral and later made the world premiere recording of the work under the personal supervision of the composer, winning the Grand Prix du Disque. He also endorsed her earlier recordings of all of his other organ works. Bate owned scores that contain many personal markings and references made by Messiaen. In 1995, Bate opened the Messiaen Festival at l’Église de la Sainte Trinité, Paris, France, where his complete organ works were performed and recorded. Among numerous awards for her CD were the Diapason d’Or (France) and Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (Germany).

Bate performed and recorded a broad repertoire spanning several centuries, including English organ music, the complete organ works of César Franck, and the complete organ music of Felix Mendelssohn. A frequent performer at organ festivals, she often played works written for her. She also presented numerous masterclasses and lectures. She was instrumental in the formation of the annual Jennifer Bate Organ Academy, a course for young female organists, and she was the lead patron of the Society of Women Organists.

Bate was briefly married (as his second wife) to George Thalben-Ball. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bristol in 2007. In 1990, Bate was recognized with the Personnalité de l’Année award by the French-based jury, only the third British artist to achieve this distinction, after Georg Solti and Yehudi Menuhin. In 1996, Bate was granted honorary citizenship of the Italian province of Alessandria for her services to music in Northern Italy over 20 years. In 2002, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and in 2008 was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

In 2011, M. Frédéric Mitterand, minister of culture and communication, awarded Jennifer Bate the rank of Officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, stating that this honor is awarded to renowned artists and writers who have promoted French culture throughout the world. Subsequently, President Sarkozy appointed Jennifer Bate to the rank of Chevalier in the Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur, stating that this honor was awarded in recognition of her skill as an organist and her contribution to making Olivier Messiaen’s organ works more widely known throughout the world. She received both awards in 2012.

 

Marillyn Ila Freeman, 85, musician and teacher, died March 24. Born in Marion, Wisconsin, February 23, 1935, she grew up in New London and Appleton, where she began playing the organ for local church services at the age of twelve. She graduated from Appleton High School in 1953 and the Lawrence College Conservatory of Music, Appleton, earning a degree in music performance in 1957. While at Lawrence, she met her future husband Ralph Freeman, and they were married in 1958. Following graduation Freeman taught music at Lawrence and worked in the president’s office at Princeton University, eventually returning to Wisconsin and settling in Green Bay, where she taught piano and played organ in the Moravian church.

In 1965 the Freemans moved to Neenah where a year later she began a 54-year career as organist for St. Paul Lutheran Church. In addition to playing organ and piano, as director of music ministries she planned worship services, directed youth choirs, accompanied the adult Sanctuary Choir, presented church musicals, and guided the church in purchasing a new Dobson organ in 1986. She earned an associate certificate of the American Guild of Organists in 1995 and an associate in music ministry certificate in 2000.

Throughout her career Freeman continued to teach piano and organ, organizing piano recitals, judging piano competitions, and mentoring young musicians in the Fox Valley. She was a member of the Fox Valley Music Teachers, a member of the Sigma Alpha Iota International Music Fraternity, served as treasurer of the North Eastern Wisconsin chapter of the American Guild of Organists, and was active in the Hymn Society of the United States and Canada. For many years she and her husband Ralph, a pianist, violinist, and published author of hymn texts, performed organ and piano duets each August as part of the Lunchtime Organ Recital Series in the Fox Valley region.

Marillyn Ila Freeman is survived by her husband Ralph Freeman, five children: Rebecca Freeman (Stephen Fusfeld) of Neenah; Jennifer Timm (Terry) of Neenah; Robert Freeman (Robin) of Darien, Illinois; Jon Freeman of Whitefish Bay; and Paul Freeman (Nicole Berman) of Stow, Massachusetts; twelve grandchildren, and several great grandchildren.

Memorial gifts may be made to the music ministry program at St. Paul Lutheran Church, 200 N. Commercial Street, Neenah, WI 54956, or to either the Melanoma Research Fund or the Surgical Oncology Outcomes Research and Awareness Fund at the University of Wisconsin (supportuw.org/give).

 

Josephine Lenola Bailey Freund, 90, died February 8 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. A lifelong musician, she was a professional organist for almost 70 years and taught piano and organ. She performed organ recitals and directed choirs throughout the United States, as well as in Swaziland and Papua New Guinea.

Josephine Bailey was born April 8, 1929, in Indianapolis, Indiana. She began piano lessons at age six and started studying organ at age thirteen. Among her first professional jobs were playing the organ to accompany silent movies and substituting as an accompanist and organist in local churches.

Following graduation from high school in 1946, Bailey attended Wittenberg College, Springfield Ohio, later transferring to Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. There she earned a teaching certificate in organ and bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In 1952, she was the first female graduate of Peabody to earn a master’s degree in organ performance.

During the 1950s Bailey played at various churches in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, including serving as music director for First Baptist, Washington, D.C., which President Truman attended; and St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, Annapolis, Maryland, where she was honored to play for a royal visit by Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. From 1956 until 1961, she was associate professor of music at Longwood College, Farmville, Virginia. She was also organist of First Presbyterian Church, Farmville, and taught music in local public high schools.

In 1963, Bailey became the first full-time director of music at Trinity Lutheran Church, Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. She later returned to Indianapolis to teach in public schools and was the organist and assistant choir director at First Presbyterian Church. In the early 1970s, she moved to East Lansing, Michigan, to work on her doctorate in music theory at Michigan State University. She also was associate professor of music and organist and choir director of Martin Luther Chapel at Michigan State. It was there that she met her future husband Roland Freund who was an Australian agricultural missionary working on his master’s degree. They married in July 1971 and moved to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

In 1976, the family moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Josephine taught piano and was organist at Grace United Methodist Church. The family spent 1982–1984 working on a U.S. AID and Penn State University project in Swaziland, Africa. There she taught music in several schools and directed the largest choir in the country for a performance of Brahms’s Requiem.

Upon returning to Carlisle, Josephine Freund served as organist and choir director at St. John’s Episcopal Church and Gettysburg College Chapel. She was adjunct professor of organ for Dickinson College and an active member and officer of the Harrisburg Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. Freund played her final organ recital in 2010, but continued to teach piano and organ and to substitute and support church services, weddings, and funerals for a few more years. She was a lifetime member of the national honors fraternity for women in music, Sigma Alpha Iota.

Josephine Lenola Bailey Freund is survived by her husband, Roland Paul Freund of Carlisle; her nephew, Matthew Freund of South Australia; and her son, Colonel Ernie Freund, daughter-in-law Megan Sayler Freund, and granddaughters, Amelia Rose and Adelaide Pearl, all from Burke, Virginia.

Funeral services were held February 15 at Trinity Lutheran Church, Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. Memorial contributions may be made to Residential Hospice, 100 Sterling Pkwy #110, Mechanicsburg, PA 17050 or the Traditional Music Fund at Trinity Lutheran Church, 2000 Market Street, Camp Hill, PA 17011.

 

Eleanor Marie Fulton, organist and music educator, died February 23 in New Haven, Connecticut. Born August 9, 1939, in Morristown, Tennessee, she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Bennett College, Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1961, and continued her education at the Manhattan School of Music, New York City; the Haydn Conservatory, Eisenstadt, Austria; and the University of Ghana’s International Center for African Music and Dance.

She served as the longtime organist and director of music for Center Church on the Green, New Haven, and was a music teacher for New Haven Public Schools, director of the New Haven Children’s Chorus, assistant organist and director of Christian education for Battell Chapel, Yale University, New Haven, consultant to the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, and a private piano and music instructor. She was the featured performer on a CD released by Raven, performing on the 1971 Beckerath organ of Dwight Chapel, Yale University, with works of Bach, de Grigny, and Mendelssohn (Eleanor Fulton, Organist: Dwight Chapel, Yale University, OAR-810).

 

Odile Pierre, French liturgical and international concert organist, professor, and composer, died in Paris, France, on February 29, shortly before her 87th birthday. Born in Pont-Audemer (in Normandy) on March 12, 1932, she decided to become an organist at age seven, inspired by a recital by Marcel Dupré on the Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Ouen Abbey in Rouen. After taking lessons with Madeleine Lecoeur, organist at St. Nicaise Church in Rouen at age fifteen, she served as organist and choir director at the St. Martin Church in Barentin (in the Seine-Maritime region of Normandy). From 1950 to 1952, she studied harmony with Albert Beaucamp and organ with Marcel Lanquetuit at the Rouen Conservatory. She then entered the Paris Conservatory, where she was awarded first prizes in the classes of Maurice Duruflé (harmony), Noël Gallon (fugue), Norbert Dufourcq (music history), as well as organ and improvisation with Marcel Dupré and Rolande Falcinelli. At the age of 23, Odile Pierre became the youngest Marcel Dupré student to win a first prize in organ and improvisation at the Paris Conservatory. She won this prestigious prize the same year as Éliane Lejeune-Bonnier (1921–2015), with the unanimous approval of the jury, which included Jeanne Demessieux.

From 1955 to 1957, Odile Pierre officially substituted for Jean-Jacques Grunenwald, then organist at Saint-Pierre de Montrouge Church in Paris. She then studied organ performance with Fernando Germani at Saint-Cecilia Academy in Rome and at Chigiana Music Academy in Sienne, and with Franz Sauer at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. In 1969, she succeeded Jeanne Demessieux as titular organist of the gallery organ of the Madeleine Church and remained in this post until 1979. By coincidence, on the day after she died, Olivier Périn began his functions as the official assistant to François-Henri Houbart, her successor at the Madeleine.

Well known for her mastery of organ repertoire from early to contemporary masters, Odile Pierre performed at least 2,000 concerts throughout the world, including appearances in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Canada, Iceland, Russia, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Austria, and the former Czechoslovakia, including twelve tours in the United States and six in Asia. In 1977, she represented France at the Third International Organ Congress in Washington and Philadelphia. She performed organ concertos under the direction of conductors such as Lorin Maazel, Pierre Dervaux, Antoine de Bavier, and Georges Prêtre.

Odile Pierre recorded for RCA, Mitra, Motette, Festivo, Editions Lade, and IFO. At least two of the recordings were made at the Madeleine Church in Paris: Camille Saint-Saëns’ Preludes and Fugues (1972, RCA LSB 4088) and The Great Romantic Toccatas (1978, RCA/RC 8108). In 1991, she recorded (for SCD 814) Jean-François Muno’s reconstitution of Jean de Joyeuse’s 1694 organ at the Auch Cathedral, which she had inaugurated in 1988 with André Isoir. Her Poetic Symphonic Organ Music (Vierne, Debussy, Duruflé, and Odile Pierre) on the Cavaillé-Coll of the Trinity Church in Fécamp and at St. Godard in Rouen (1988, MP/FR 51190 C) calls upon her Normand origins; her record of Widor, Vierne, and Guilmant at the Orléans Cathedral (1993, Motette 11251), reminds us that she lived nearby, in Tigy, in the Loiret department, at the end of her life.

As professor, Odile Pierre taught organ and music history at the Rouen Conservatoire from 1959 until 1969 and then organ and improvisation at the Paris Regional Conservatoire from 1981 until 1992. Among her students were Michael Matthes, Léon Kerremans, D’Arcy Trinkwon, Kristiyan Seynhave, David Di Fiore, and Lionel Coulon (titular organist at the Rouen Cathedral since 1992, he substituted for her at the Madeleine for four years). In 1991, she gave organ classes at the Scuola Internationale d’Alto Perfezionmento Musicale in Perugia, Italy, and gave masterclasses in numerous colleges and universities. She also served on the juries of international organ competitions. In 1977, she was appointed as a member of the Commission on Organs in Paris.

Her organ works were published as early as 1955: Chorale and Fugue on the first antiphon of the Second Vespers for Christmas (1955, Procure du Clergé), and Chorale and Four-Voiced Fugue (1955, republished by Europart-Music in 1988), Four Pilgrimages at the Virgin Mary for four hands, opus 1 (Leduc, 1988), Variations and Fugue on three Christmas Carols (Leduc, 1990), The Martyr of St. Thomas Becket, op. 4 (Bergamo, Carrara 1994), Chorale and Fugue on the Name of Charles-Marie Widor, op. 5 (Mayence, Schott, 1994), and Canonic Variations and Fugue on Two Christmas Carols from Naples, op. 6 (1955). Her edition of some of Alexandre Guilmant’s organ works was printed by Bornemann in 1983 and 1984. In addition, she wrote about Marcel Dupré’s improvisation exams in 1953 and 1954 (Leduc, undated). Odile Pierre received three awards for her contributions to French culture: Officer in the French Legion of Honor, Commander in the French Order of Merit, and the Silver Medal of the City of Paris.

Odile Pierre is survived by her husband, the historian Pierre Aubé.

—Carolyn Shuster Fournier

 

Philip Astor Prince, 89, of New Haven, Connecticut, died February 5. Born January 5, 1931, in Evanston, Illinois, Prince attended the Taft School before entering Yale University with the Class of 1952. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Latin, subsequently studied musicology in the Yale Graduate School, but completed a Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music in organ performance under H. Frank Bozyan in 1959. Prince was drawn to the Anglo-Catholic liturgy celebrated at Christ Church, New Haven, and became associated with the music program there, succeeding Richard Donovan as organist and choirmaster in 1966. He became respected among colleagues for his English-language arrangements of Gregorian chants and psalmody and for his hymn accompaniments.

Prince published scholarly articles on Max Reger’s organ music (see “Reger and the Organ,” The Diapason, March 1973) and a performing edition of a sonata da chiesa of Johann Gottfried Walther. He also taught organ students at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, where he served as university organist for nearly 30 years and played annual recitals. In 1988, he joined the choirs of St. Mary Church, New Haven, and the St. Gregory Society and continued singing with them well into his 80s. Prince became an associate fellow of Ezra Stiles College in 1974. He was a longtime member of both Mory’s and the Elizabethan Club in New Haven, and the American Guild of Organists and Association of Anglican Musicians. Prince was a supporter of the Yale swimming team, and for many years he refereed at swimming matches and tournaments.

Gavin Black

Westminster Choir College: memories and reflections

This column marks my return from a seven-month break—a sabbatical that I took to catch up on various things and to think about and plan for the future direction of this column. I return quite eager and feeling relaxed and energized.

During these seven months a lot has happened in the world—not surprisingly. But a few things that have occurred during my break are of particular interest to organists and of some relevance to this column. In early June, Rider University of New Jersey announced various cuts in programs. These cuts were university-wide, but they had a particular effect on Westminster Choir College since they included the elimination of the organ performance and sacred music degree programs. The organ department and its performance program constituted my professional home for many years, and even though I have not had much direct connection to Westminster for the last twenty years or so, this change feels momentous to me. It occasions most of the reflections in this column.

Also during these same months, two former longtime Westminster organ professors passed away: Robert Carwithen on May 11 and Donald McDonald on August 5 (see McDonald’s obituary in this issue). I did not study with either of them, but I knew them and would see each of them a few times most weeks for decades. I would not be the right person to write a thorough tribute to either of them. But I want to mention here that I got a lot of joy from knowing each of them and had deep respect and admiration for their knowledge and insight, as well as their kindness to me as a student and later as a young colleague.

I should mention that I do not intend to analyze or discuss the whole arc of the changes that have taken place with respect to Westminster Choir College over the last several years, which are massive in nature and extent. I share the visceral sadness that many friends and colleagues experience at the thought of the Westminster campus in Princeton vacant and void of college life. This sadness is especially vivid and present for me since the Princeton Early Keyboard Center studio is across the street from that campus, and I see it most days. I am not privy to much real information about what has been going on at Westminster, and I have no idea how things will evolve going forward. Nonetheless, I have used the announced end of the Westminster organ program as an occasion for me to look back on some of what that program meant to me over the many years when I was closely and deeply involved with that program as a visitor, student, and teacher.

In a recent column I described how my then-teacher Paul Jordan helped me find a new teacher in Princeton as I was about to head off to college from my home in New Haven, Connecticut. He did so by speaking to Helen Kemp of the Westminster faculty, whom he knew and had worked with. As far as I recall, this was the first time I had heard of Westminster Choir College. What I get from this memory now is a reminder that I was somewhat insular in my approach those days. I am pretty certain I had never heard of Gustav Leonhardt or Virgil Fox, to name two examples from different corners of the world that I hoped to inhabit. The performers whom I happened to encounter I delved into deeply—Helmut Walcha, E. Power Biggs, Marcel Dupré—but my overall approach was one of an innocent lack of curiosity. I believe that it is also at least tangentially related to something that is probably a strength, a well-developed lack of interest in being buffeted about by fashion or influence. That youthful lack of curiosity (or laziness about looking into things and expanding horizons) might be related to my insistence on working things out for myself. This is something I believe in very strongly and commend urgently to students.

As I have also recounted elsewhere, I started studying privately with Eugene Roan shortly after I started at Princeton University. We had our lessons at the university chapel, so the first time that I set foot on the Westminster campus was at a recital that Professor Roan gave in the fall of 1974 on the Casavant organ in the basement of Dayton Hall. That building was a dormitory above ground, but below the surface was the central venue of the organ department. The recital hall was at one end, and along various corridors were faculty offices and practice rooms. One thing that I get now out of remembering that first visit is an awareness of how long that space indeed stayed much the same. I am fairly sure that the offices housed mostly the same faculty members, and the practice rooms the same organs, for about twenty years after that day.

But the Westminster organ department was a place. I care a lot about the sense of place.

The place that was the Westminster organ department was labyrinthine. The basement that I mentioned was the hub. But corridors connected that space to other basement spaces where there were also practice organs. There was even an organ in a small room that was located in a corridor between buildings. The web extended to other buildings—a couple of other dormitories, nearby though not connected, where there were practice rooms; the chapel building, where there was an organ in the upstairs chapel space itself, and other organs in smaller rooms on the ground floor level, and, if I remember correctly, a closet for the organ maintenance department. This is the kind of interconnected and spread-out space that I love.

With so many practice rooms and students, faculty members, and visitors, one had to expect practicing to be overheard as a matter of course. During the time when I was a student at Westminster in the 1980s this sense of being overheard helped me to overcome or at least to manage performance anxiety and a general kind of shyness about playing and about artistic expression. These are indeed two separate things. There is the stage fright sort of anxiety, the fear of making mistakes, even falling apart, or of being judged a “bad” player by someone who hears you play. I had been consumed by that fear at least all the way through high school and well into my college years. I got a great deal of help in this department from Professor Roan in lessons and discussion, and from simply making myself perform. I also got a lot out of the particular Westminster approach to teaching performance, which I wrote about in these terms in February 2018 issue:

With pieces that we were working on there were levels of performing that were pretty carefully stepped up. First there were two informal ones: the awareness that everything that went on in any practice room could be heard pretty easily by anyone who walked by, and the customary practice of students playing informally for their friends. The next step was studio class, where the atmosphere was relaxed, where all of the other people in the room were in exactly the same boat, and where you could play a given piece more than once as the weeks went by and get more comfortable with it. Then some pieces would be brought to performance class, the same sort of thing, but department-wide, with the ever-present possibility that some people from outside the department might be there. Then on to various recitals . . . .

This starts with the awareness of being overheard. That awareness also exists to be ignored—doing so is good concentration practice.

The practice organs at Westminster exhibited a great deal of variety. The two very small two-manual Flentrops were the instruments that interested me the most. They were of the same design—upper manual featured only a 4′ flute, the lower manual consisted of 8′ + 2′, the pedal consisted of a lone 8′, and there were the usual couplers—but sounded and felt a bit different. Those of us who focused on these instruments tended to have one of them that was our favorite. They both had an extremely sensitive action along with flexible (or what some would call “unsteady”) winding. The action was sensitive in that the shape and nature of the attacks and releases varied a lot with different sorts of touch. Each of these organs could sound like a different instrument based on the minutiae of how they were being played.

A certain small Noack practice organ in a nearby room also had a very sensitive action, but in a different way: the action was light enough that it was painfully easy to make notes sound by barely brushing up against them from the side. This made it an ideal instrument for drilling notes and in general for developing accuracy and straightforwardly clean playing habits. I should probably have spent more time than I did in that room.

The Flentrops, however, had the shortest pedal sharps that I have ever encountered. That, combined with the sensitive wind supply, made them really intense training tools for pedal accuracy, in particular for those who wanted to play on flat pedalboards. The presence of a variety of pedalboards—flat, American Guild of Organists standard, other sorts of concave and/or radiating with various levels of sensitivity—helped train me not to care very much about pedal differences. Sometime in the course of my student days I realized that I could go back and forth among pedal keyboards as different as they come without any trouble. This led to some of the specifics of my approach to teaching pedal playing, in particular conceiving of the physical act of pushing down pedal keys as being a point rather than a line.

In addition to being a place, the Westminster organ department was also a community. Everyone who was a member of that community had their own feelings about it at the time and subsequently has their own memories of it. I have no sense that mine are the same as others. I also know that school is difficult, and that students and faculty members can experience tensions arising out of overwork, competitiveness, envy or jealousy, fear about career prospects, and so on. However, my own experience of the department as a community when I was a student and later as a faculty member was that it was relaxed, friendly, nurturing, conducive of cooperation rather than conflict, and in general a social and academic environment in which I could thrive. I do not mean this as boilerplate, but rather as something quite specific. As I have written before from time to time, I was a “late bloomer” as a practical musician. I was deeply interested in music from a very early age, but it took me ages to develop the focus and discipline to practice particularly well or indeed very much at all. When I was ready to go to college, I was not a developed enough player to consider applying to music schools. During my undergraduate years at Princeton I spent a lot of time and mental effort on remedying this with help from Professor Roan via the private lessons that I took with him. When in due course I was ready to apply to graduate school, I had reached a stage where I could play some music very well. But I was not anything like a polished virtuoso as I had a small repertoire and was an atrocious sight reader. I was subject to lapses in concentration that made it pretty much hit-or-miss whether I would play anything like my best any given time. The atmosphere of graduate school could easily have been crushing to my spirit. Among the older musicians I knew there were several who advised me not to put myself into that kind of situation. At Westminster I found a kind of infectious joy in whatever each member of the community could do well, a sense that not everyone had to be good at or even involved with the same things, and an awareness that there is plenty of time to learn whatever you still need to learn. This was exactly what I needed to thrive at that point in my life, rather than wither away or shrivel up. These ideas form one of the cores of my own approach to teaching.

I picked up a lot of “little random stuff” while at Westminster. I know that there are many pieces that I first became interested in because I walked by a room in which someone was practicing something that was unfamiliar to me and that intrigued me. I believe that I became interested in Messiaen that way. There was a time when a fellow student whom I did not particularly know opened the door of his practice room as I was passing by and asked if I would come in and listen to him play the Buxtehude Praeludium in D Major and give him my feedback. I did not know why at the time—I probably filled in the “why” with the assumption that he thought that I was a great Buxtehude expert. Just as likely he just wanted to practice playing under the pressure of someone’s listening. Maybe he was asking for feedback just to be polite. This was a significantly more skilled (advanced) player than I was at that point, so I was rather stunned that he wanted my help. It was a small thing, but it actually contributed a little bit to my sense that I could be an effective teacher someday.

One day Gene Roan and I were walking along the corridor chatting when he stopped near a practice room door. He told me to listen, and then after a couple of minutes said, “even his very slow practice has a sense of direction.” I did not know who the practicing student was. I think that I was shy about actually peering through the little window, or maybe it was papered over. But that was a significant lesson to me. I have tried to make sure that my slow practicing has a sense of direction ever since! And as that happens to tie in with what I will be writing about next month, I will leave it at that for now.

David Herman

It was the only paying job I’d ever had.

So said Ralph Vaughan Williams, speaking on the biographical DVD, O Thou Transcendent, as he talked about his first—and only—church organist position.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), arguably the most imaginative, prolific, and engaging British composer of the first half of the twentieth century, wrote so relatively few works for solo organ.¹ Why was this? Other twentieth-century British composers (such as Matthias, Leighton, Wills, Jackson, and, especially, Howells) contributed to the organ’s literature in major ways. Some say Vaughan Williams did not like the organ. It is more accurate, I believe, to suggest he did not enjoy playing the organ. It might have been difficult for him; he was, after all, a large man and had (as noted by relatives speaking on the DVD) long fingers and “enormous” feet! Others suggest his personal brand of Christian agnosticism got in the way of composing solo organ music.² But there are, of course, British organs in not only churches and cathedrals but also in many town halls and other non-religious concert venues. There was even an organ set up in his childhood home in Surrey so that he could practice.

Perhaps Vaughan Williams could not quite sort out how to translate some musical thoughts into organistic musical thoughts. In one of his many profoundly important observations on playing the organ, the late Erik Routley once wrote, “The organist must translate the [hymn] score into organ language [author’s emphasis] when he or she plays.”³

It is true that while many places in Vaughan Williams’s organ works have the ingredients for great musical expression, they are not entirely easy to bring off at the organ, due to matters of fingering, pedaling, and especially of texture. The same could be said of organ music by some other composers (Jehan Alain comes to mind), for which the player’s creative imagination must be called upon to combine with the composer’s notes.

It is the goal of this short work to consider Vaughan Williams’s views about and experiences with the organ and to examine the organ works that he left us. In so doing we will note some of the important influences on his compositional life, including his friendship with Gustav Holst, and especially his long and admiring relationship with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. And, we will see that the organ had an important role in Vaughan Williams’s life from his early teens through his funeral in Westminster Abbey in August 1958.

A final theory offered by some in explaining Vaughan Williams’s relatively small output for the organ is that he simply couldn’t play the organ well.

I cannot tell that I think he is justified in going in for an organist’s career which is his pet idea. He seems to me so hopelessly ‘unhandy’ . . . . I can never trust him to play a simple service for me without some dread at what he may do.

So wrote Alan Gray, Vaughan Williams’s organ teacher at Trinity College.⁴ Vaughan Williams himself, likely with a degree of false modesty, was critical of his own playing. We should take care, however, in believing that he was not a competent organist, as many factors suggest otherwise. To begin with a significant milestone, he studied for and passed (in 1898) the demanding Fellowship exams for the Royal College of Organists (only to resign his membership a few years later). John Francis, Vaughan Williams scholar, author, and vice president/treasurer of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, suggests that the situation above that Alan Gray complained of was due to the fact that Vaughan Williams was “unpredictable rather than technically incompetent.”⁵ Francis continues:

Self-deprecatory remarks by Vaughan Williams in later years have perhaps been taken too often at face value. We have no account of his [organ] playing by anybody who heard him play.

Further, Gray himself followed his lament by adding,

And this he combines with considerable knowledge & taste on organ and musical matters generally.⁶

This essay is not a biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams; fortunately, there are many excellent volumes available, some issued quite recently. Nevertheless, many events in his childhood, youth, and university days are intertwined with a study of his organ music. The reader will note at the end a list of some twenty-four sources consulted. Also particularly useful is the Timeline found on the website of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society: www.rvwsociety.com.

Vaughan Williams’s father was the vicar of Down Ampney (which Vaughan Williams pronounced “Amney”)⁷ in Gloucestershire. He died when his son was only two years old. His mother came from families of means: she was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood (of pottery fame) and the niece of Charles Darwin.⁸ Let Vaughan Williams’s own words summarize the next few years, as spoken in Tony Palmer’s video, O Thou Transcendent:⁹

At age 11 [1883] I was sent to a horrid school at Rottingdean. Three years later I arrived at Charterhouse [1887]. They still sing my hymns there to this day. From Charterhouse I was sent off to the RCM [1890], and there I met a fellow pupil called Gustav Holst.

In his youth Holst had also secured a church position involving considerable responsibility. Vaughan Williams’s niece, recalling these early days with Vaughan Williams, remarked,

We used to laugh about Uncle Ralph but he wasn’t very good at the organ, and yet he was always playing for funerals or weddings or things.¹⁰

While at Charterhouse he was once greatly impressed by a schoolmate’s playing of Bach’s “St. Anne” fugue—a work that would remain a favorite throughout his life and which he himself designated as the postlude for his memorial service in Westminster Abbey.¹¹

During school holidays he practiced diligently, and the family even arranged for an organ to be installed at Leith Hill Place near Dorking, the seventeenth-century house in Surrey, wherein lived Wedgwoods and Darwins and which had become Vaughan Williams’s childhood home. (He later remarked that Dorking was “my home for nearly 40 years.”¹²) He inherited the house from his brother in 1944, whereupon he gave it to Britain’s National Trust.¹³ Breakfast at Leith Hill was at 7:30, and “Mr. Ralph” normally practiced beforehand. “The trouble about the early morning was finding a blower for the organ.”¹⁴ The butler, housemaids, groom, and gardener all avoided him!¹⁵ On Sundays he would practice long after the rest of the household had started to walk the two miles to church, usually arriving just as the service was starting. While a student at Charterhouse he was allowed to practice on the chapel organ. (One wonders what pieces he was working on!) In any case, from an early age Vaughan Williams seemed committed to the organ.

Throughout his childhood Vaughan Williams was steadfast in declaring his desire to be a professional musician. His family agreed, with the provision that he became an organist. (Thoughts were different in the late nineteenth century!) He later wrote:

I believe I should have made quite a decent fiddler but the authorities [!] decided that if I was to take up music at all the violin was too ‘doubtful’ a career and I must seek the safety of the organ stool, a trade for which I was entirely unsuited.¹⁶

It should be noted that when he subsequently left his only church position after only four or so years, it would seem that, although he disliked being an organist, there is no evidence that he disliked the organ.

The Royal College of Music

Vaughan Williams entered the Royal College of Music in 1890, just prior to his eighteenth birthday, and there became a pupil of Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. His family wanted him to commute, which he usually did by rail but occasionally on foot! (Really? London to Leith Hill in Surrey—some thirty miles! Far from the 200 miles Bach supposedly walked from Arnstadt to Lübeck, but . . . ). He often announced his arrival at Leith Hill Place by first having a go at the organ.¹⁷

While studying at the Royal College of Music he also entered Trinity College, Cambridge (1892), and there experienced a “spiritual awakening.”

As my mother insisted that I had a ‘proper’ education, I was sent to Cambridge . . .
what an awakening that was! You might almost say a spiritual awakening. The sense that even if you didn’t believe in God, there was something beyond. Something mysterious.¹⁸

Vaughan Williams would have heard many organ recitals and services at Cambridge and in nearby Ely Cathedral (whose organist then was T. Tertius Nobel, later to become organist at Saint Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, New York City). Undergraduates at Trinity College were obliged to attend chapel services, and Vaughan Williams sometimes avoided this duty by retreating to the organ loft. At Cambridge he studied the organ with Alan Gray¹⁹ (organist of Trinity College) and left the university with a B.Mus degree in 1894, returning to the Royal College of Music in 1895. There Vaughan Williams began composition study with Charles Villiers Stanford, with whom he had a famously difficult relationship; Stanford’s comment on Vaughan Williams’s music often consisted only of “All rot, me boy.” Vaughan Williams, however, was in later years to speak warmly of him.

The Church of Saint Barnabas, South Lambeth

Vaughan Williams was appointed organist here in 1895. Since this was to be his first and only church position it seems appropriate to include here some details of the place and his duties. It seems that he held this post until 1899. Vaughan Williams describes his work there, again with some false modesty:

I was appointed to my first and last organ post, at St. Barnabas, South Lambeth. As I already said, I never could play the organ, but this appointment gave me an insight into good and bad church music which stood me in good stead later on. I also had to train the choir and give organ recitals and accompany the services, which gave me some knowledge of music from the performer’s point of view.²¹

This was a large church (originally seating 1,500 people) on Guildford Road in South Lambeth. The parish, as confirmed by the Diocese of Southwark office, exists no more.

The building, however, is still there, having been gutted and refitted as a series of “council flats” (low-income housing). Interestingly, when I visited there, the building manager was astonished to learn that a very famous composer had once served as organist of the church! Vaughan Williams presided over a largish instrument built by Hill and rebuilt by Bishop.²² At the time of his tenure the church supported an ambitious music program with a sizeable budget. The duties, for which Vaughan Williams was paid a salary of £50 per year, were demanding and time consuming.²³ His wife Adeline reported that he worked very hard and practiced on the organ up to five hours per day. For Vaughan Williams the salary was probably incidental to the experience.

He did not need to earn a living, having a healthy but not excessive private income. His work as an organist was for his continuing education, not to keep body and soul together.²⁴

His time at Saint Barnabas was not easy. He told his friend Holst that his choristers were “louts” and the vicar “quite mad.” The vicar insisted on the organist’s taking communion; Vaughan Williams felt that he, as a principled atheist, could not. So he resigned, without any apparent regret.²⁵ First, however, resolving to go abroad to study (with Max Bruch), he requested from the church, and was granted, a leave of absence. It is here that his friend Gustav Holst enters the picture.

Vaughan Williams and Holst

Vaughan Williams met Holst (1874–1934) at the Royal College of Music in 1895, and they remained fast friends for forty years until Holst’s death, going for extended hikes in the countryside and critiquing each other’s compositions. These “field days,” when they played and dissected their respective works were to prove invaluable to them both. Although in his youth Holst also had various tries at being a church organist, he was instead to become a professional trombonist (recommended as a treatment for his asthma).

He [Holst] left the College of Music to abandon the eminently respectable career of an organist . . . and to get at music from the inside as a trombonist in an orchestra. The very worst that a trombonist has to put up with is as nothing compared to what a church organist has to endure.²⁶

In taking leave of the organ bench at Saint Barnabas it was natural for Vaughan Williams to think of his friend Holst. There are somewhat differing accounts of the manner in which he broached the subject with Holst. Heirs and Rebels,²⁷ the collection of letters exchanged between the two composers, establishes some clarity. First, in a letter from Vaughan Williams to Holst, probably July 1897:

I am leaving this damned place [Saint Barnabas] in October and going abroad.

And then, contrary to some accounts in which he offered Holst the job, he in fact inquired about the latter’s interest:

Suppose you were offered it would you consider the matter? The screw [sic!] is £50 [per annum] and the minimum duties . . .

And here he lays out what sounds like a demanding list of tasks, working on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, as well as running the choral society and giving occasional organ recitals. Vaughan Williams later states:

Mind I AM NOT OFFERING IT YOU [VW’s caps] only [sic] if you would like it I will do my best to Back you.

He concludes by asking Holst to deputize for him while he is gone and provides many specific instructions on getting through the service (pitches, cues, etc.). He suggests beginning the morning service with a “short and easy voluntary” and concluding with a “long and difficult voluntary.” He notes about the choir:

Those louts of men will slope in about 8.45 and make you mad—the only ones who can sing will be away.

As a postscript VW adds, “The vicar is quite mad.” (Does any of this sound familiar to us today?) In any event, the position was not taken by Holst but probably by William H. Harris (later a faculty member at the Royal College of Music and organist at Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor).²⁸

Vaughan Williams and Bach

Vaughan Williams showed nearly life-long fondness and admiration for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whom he placed above all musicians. He regarded the Saint Matthew Passion, a work that he would conduct many times, to be Bach’s greatest achievement. Vaughan Williams had clear and strongly held thoughts on performing Bach’s music. First, he insisted that, for his audiences, the choral works, including the Matthew Passion, be sung in English (a preference shared by the late David Willcocks when he was director of the Bach Choir). He did not have patience with so-called “authentic performance practices” of early music.

Bach, though superficially he may speak the eighteenth-century language, belongs to no school or period.²⁹

Vaughan Williams had a clear and oft-stated aversion to the harpsichord! He used the grand piano as the continuo instrument in his many Bach performances.

The harpsichord, however it may sound in a small room—and to my mind it never [author’s emphasis] has a pleasant sound—in a large concert room sounds just like the ticking of a sewing machine.³⁰

He had similar thoughts about the so-called Baroque organ, which in the 1950s put him distinctly at odds with those planning the new organ for London’s Royal Festival Hall.

By the way, I see there is a movement afoot to substitute the bubble-and-squeak type of instrument for the noble diapason and soft mixtures of our cathedral organs.³¹

It is interesting to note that the opening recital on the Royal Festival Hall organ included Vaughan Williams’s Three Preludes Founded on Welsh Hymn Tunes.

These views on instruments and performing practices may now be considered old-fashioned and out-of-date. They are, nonetheless, the beliefs of a great musician whose musical thoughts and ideas, planted in the mid-Victorian era, grew through more than a half-century of music making. “Vaughan Williams paid tribute to Bach practically, in his non-authentic but deeply moving performances of the major choral works at Dorking.”³² [For the Leith Hill Festivals, founded in 1905, which he conducted from 1905 to 1953.]

The Great War

The effect of war on musicians has been a topic of lengthy and interesting studies. In addition to the English composers who did not return from the First World War, the Second World War took the lives of many composers, including Jehan Alain and Hugo Distler, and affected the lives of countless others. Although space does not permit an excursion on this topic, it seems relative to touch on Vaughan Williams’s army service, which relates to his work as organist and church musician.

Vaughan Williams volunteered for military service in the Royal Army Medical Corps (in 1914, at age 42!) and from May 1915 was stationed at Saffron Walden where he spent considerable time at the organ of the parish church,³³ finding refuge from the horrors of war through playing Bach. At the outbreak of war he was for a time stationed with his unit in Dorking. When there was a death in the company and no organist could be found for the service at Saint Martin’s Church, Vaughan Williams offered to play, providing he could have some volunteers to form a choir. In the same year he was posted to a field ambulance brigade. The following year he was sent to France (at the rank of lieutenant) and was involved in the Battle of the Somme.

Vaughan Williams’s patriotic spirit was evident during the Second World War through his composing of film music to aid the war effort and in many types of volunteer work. For example, he regularly gathered scrap metal. His Thanksgiving for Victory was written and performed in 1945 in celebration of the war’s end.

Vaughan Williams and church music

We have seen that, with the one exception of four or so years at the end of the nineteenth century, Vaughan Williams never functioned as a parish musician. Nonetheless, his many choral works, large (Hodie) and small (O Taste and See), enrich the repertory of all manner of choral organizations, ranging from parish singers to concert choirs. His choral music was written not so much for places (as with Howells’s many settings of the services for various cathedrals and collegiate chapels) but for occasions (coronations, victories, and more).

One of Vaughan Williams’s most monumentally important works in the field of church music was as editor of The English Hymnal. In 1904 a committee headed by the Reverend Percy Dearmer³⁴ set about creating a new hymnbook, in succession to the venerable Hymns Ancient and Modern.³⁵ Vaughan Williams was invited to be the musical editor and, by his own testimony, in the process learned a great deal about music—the good and the bad. He introduced several new tunes of his own creation as well as folk melodies, making it a thoroughly “English” book. He succeeded in purging the new hymnal of many poor Victorian hymn tunes (while retaining the better ones), and those which he was forced to keep he banned to the back of the book in a section he called “The Chamber of Horrors.”

Songs of Praise followed in 1925, once more with Dearmer as general editor and Vaughan Williams, assisted by Martin Shaw, the musical editor. It is said that Vaughan Williams was thrilled by the sound of an enthusiastic congregation singing a great hymn. The same trio of Dearmer, Vaughan Williams, and Martin Shaw worked together again to produce The Oxford Book of Carols in 1928.

Organist friends of Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams loved the typical cathedral organs of the first half of the twentieth century and liked hearing them played. In return, many cathedral organists enjoyed playing for him—often at night when the building was closed, often playing works of Bach. Such special playings took place often—by Walter Alcock at Salisbury; Herbert Sumsion in Gloucester; William McKie in Westminster Abbey, as they worked together preparing for the 1953 coronation. After Vaughan Williams’s death in 1958, it was decided to place his ashes next to those of Stanford and Purcell in the Abbey.

Other prominent organists who were friends and colleagues, and from whom he no doubt learned much about the instrument: Thomas Armstrong, Ivor Atkins, Harold Darke, Walford Davies, John Dykes Bower, Alan Gray, Herbert Howells, John Ireland, Henry Ley, Christopher Morris, Boris Ord, Cyril Rootham, Martin Shaw, R. R. Terry, and George Thalban-Ball.³⁶

In considering Vaughan Williams and the organ, Relf Clark suggests an interesting comparison with Elgar:³⁷

Early in their careers, both were briefly the organist of a parish church. Neither of them appears to have enjoyed the experience very much. Both wrote for the instrument a handful of not entirely characteristic works. Both made notable use of the organ in a few orchestral scores. And both enjoyed the friendship and support of professional organists.

In a famous letter to The Daily Telegraph, January 14, 1951, Vaughan Williams makes some views clear, beginning with his thoughts on the “bubble and squeak” tones of continental organs.

Is it really proposed that we should abandon in favour of this unpleasant sound the noble diapasons and rich soft ‘mixtures’ of our best church organs?

He particularly admired the organ at Saint Michael’s Church, Cornhill (Hill; Rushworth & Dreaper), presided over by his friend Harold Darke, and believed it possessed the ideal English organ tone.

The works for organ

This essay offers not so much analyses but comments on Vaughan Williams’s music. For structural and thematic analyses of the organ works see the excellent articles by Hugh Benham [See “Sources and further reading,” B/2] and Relf Clark [See “Sources and further reading,” C]. It would seem that Vaughan Williams’s major organ works were conceived or written at Saint Mary’s Church, Saffron Walden, where he spent a great deal of time practicing while stationed there in 1915. The late Michael Kennedy, the chief authority on the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, cites the following as “The Organ Works:”

• Three Preludes Founded On Welsh Hymn Tunes, published in 1920 by Stainer & Bell. The second prelude of the set, Rhosymedre, was played at Vaughan Williams’s funeral in 1958. Clark observes that the registrations in the score likely reflected the organ at Trinity College. He further suggests that Vaughan Williams first encountered these tunes when editing The English Hymnal (1906). The preludes are likely among the first works completed after his leaving the army in 1919.³⁸

Bryn Calfaria is at once the most interesting musically and, although fun to play, nonetheless the most challenging to bring off at the organ. It is dramatic and improvisatory; fragments of the tune are given out through a thick and tangled texture. Like many other fine organ works (some of Alain’s come to mind) the piece involves the player as interpreter: adding musical imagination to the text.

Rhosymedre is the most well liked and often played of the three. Simple, quiet, and gently dance-like, it states the tune twice, in a straightforward manner.

Hyfrydol makes a bit of an odd conclusion to the set: a very thick-textured setting of the tune (difficult to play, especially for those with small hands) above a constantly moving pedal part that romps over two octaves (get out your Gleason book to help your feet prepare).

• Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, composed in 1921 for orchestra and first performed in that year at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford. The orchestral version was performed first (conducted by the composer). The piece was then arranged for organ between 1921 and 1930 (completed in 1921, revised in 1923, published in 1930). Vaughan Williams told the dedicatee Henry Ley that the work was modeled on Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 546.³⁹ Ley (pronounced “Lee”), then organist at Christ Church, Oxford, commented on the piece’s difficulty. According to Ley, Vaughan Williams said that the work was written in 1915 while he was stationed at Saffron Walden using the organ at Saint Mary’s Church.⁴⁰ The prelude and fugue together occupy some ten minutes.

The Prelude is very well written for the organ. Vaughan Williams was attentive to details of registration (including frequent use of manual 16′s) and manual divisions. The piece has quite a lot of bitonal dissonance. Ley was right: it is not easy play, due to the constantly changing chord colors, large amount of chromaticism, and fast contrapuntal passages. Vaughan Williams employed chords in parallel sweeping lines, often in contrary motion. Thick homophonic passages alternate with longer sections of thinner, busy counterpoint, generating an ABABA design. The quick B sections are terrifically fast at the specified tempo of quarter = 120 beats per minute. Thinking I could not play it that fast, I initially suspected a case of “composer tempo overreach.” David Briggs, however, manages these brilliantly on the two-CD set of the complete organ music (original and transcriptions) of Vaughan Williams, Bursts of Acclamation. (Albion ALBCD021/2, available from the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, https://
rvwsociety.com).

The prelude is somewhat impressionistic in sound, using parallelism, tonal vagueness (often resulting from mixed modes), the use of ninth and major-seventh chords, as well as tetra- and pentatonic scales. The result: the prelude clearly sounds like Vaughan Williams. It ends suddenly in C major, a somewhat astonishing tonality not really heard before in the piece.

For someone who was a master at contrapuntal writing and an ardent admirer of Bach, Vaughan Williams seems not to have written very many fugues. This fugue is a good one, a double fugue in fact, whose two subjects are first treated separately and then combined at the climax. It begins not so much in C minor but C Aeolian. The omnipresent triplets against duplets, which get a bit wearing (to this player, at least), is an element in both fugue subjects. Parallel chords in contrary motion, drawn from the prelude, occasionally interrupt the rather dissonant fugal entries.

• Two Organ Preludes, founded on Welsh Folk Songs, published in 1956. These are Romanza (“The White Rock”) and Toccata (“St. David’s Day”). These works are generally regarded as being less than indicative of the composer’s skill and imagination and not very “organistic.”

• In 1964 Oxford University Press published A Vaughan Williams Organ Album (still in print) consisting of transcriptions as well as the two organ preludes of 1956. Various composers, including Henry Ley, have made organ transcriptions of several of Vaughan Williams’s orchestral works.⁴¹

• Kennedy mentions an Organ Overture, from 1890 (the manuscript of which is in the British Library).⁴²

• A Wedding Tune for Anne, 1943 (contained in A Vaughan Williams Organ Album).

• Various incomplete sketches left at the time of his death.

Returning to the opening question

There are two Vaughan Williams organ works of relatively major stature, dating from during and just after the time of the First World War: the preludes on Welsh hymns and the Prelude and Fugue in C Minor. A generation later would come Benjamin Britten’s comparable opus, Prelude and Fugue on a Theme of Vittoria (1946). They have not much in common, save being one of few examples of their masters’ contributions to the canon of organ music. Both composers wrote for situations or performances: Vaughan Williams for the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford, for example; Britten’s was a commission from Saint Matthew’s, Northampton (for which he had earlier written the cantata Rejoice in the Lamb, containing some of the most original and dramatic writing for organ in any choral work). These preludes and fugues, valued for their singular stature, are nonetheless not entirely representative of their composers’ genius, language, invention, and musical imaginations.

Douglas Fairhurst suggests that Vaughan Williams, as a great artist, was more at ease and naturally expressive having a larger canvass for his music. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams commented that, while it was unorthodox to consider canonization for a non-believer, the Christian church owed a great deal to him for his contributions.⁴³ In any case, after his death in 1958 Vaughan Williams’s ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey, appropriately near those of Stanford and Purcell. Of special note: his was the first funeral service held in the Abbey for a commoner since that of Purcell, nearly 300 years earlier.⁴⁴

Supplement I: some other works in which the organ is prominent

The organ has played a central role in many centuries of choral music. Vaughan Williams realized the expressive and dramatic powers of the organ and used them to good effect in some of his orchestral works as well.

• Job, A Masque for Dancing. In Scene VI (the Dance of Job’s Comforters) we see/hear a vivid representation of Satan and his retinue in Hell. Included is a part for “Full Organ with Solo Reeds Coupled,” supplementing the full orchestra.

• A Vision of Aeroplanes⁴⁵ is a substantial late work (1956) for chorus and organ, setting familiar words from the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel. It opens with a dramatic, dissonant organ solo that, as with subsequent organ interludes, reminds one of the organ’s use in Howells’s A Sequence for St. Michael, to be written some five years later.

• A Sea Symphony includes passages for organ, more for support, as a member of the orchestra, than for effect.

• However, the dramatic blast of chords occurring about 3/4th through the “Landscape” (Lento) movement in Sinfonia Antarctica, shows the organ as hair-raising, important, and soloistic.

Supplement II: selected choral works in which the organ has a prominent role

[These lists extracted from Neil Butterworth: Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Guide To Research. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1990.]

Vexilla Regis (for the Cambridge B.Mus), 1894

Mass (for the Cambridge D.Mus), 1899

Toward the Unknown Region, 1907

Fantasia on Christmas Carols, 1912

Sancta Civitas, 1923–1925

Three Choral Hymns, 1929

Flourish for a Coronation, 1937

Six Choral Songs: To be sung in time of war, 1940

England, My England, 1941

Thanksgiving for Victory (later A Song of Thanksgiving), 1945

Folk Songs of the Four Seasons, 1949

Fantasia (Quasi Variazione) on the “Old 104th Psalm Tune,” 1949

Hodie, 1953–1954

Supplement III: some choral music for the church

O Clap Your Hands, 1920

Lord, Thou Hast Been Our Refuge, 1921

Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis (The Village Service), 1925

The Pilgrim Pavement, 1934

O How Amiable, 1934

Festival Te Deum in F, 1937

All Hail the Power (Miles Lane), 1938

Services in D Minor, 1939

Hymn for St. Margaret, 1948

The Old Hundredth Psalm, 1953

Te Deum and Benedictus, 1954

A Vision of Aeroplanes, 1956

Notes

1. In this he does not stand alone, of course. The same could be said of RVW’s best friend, Gustav Holst (who around 1930 started what he hoped would be an organ concerto). We wish Alain and Distler could have had longer lives in which to continue their composing for organ. And, although the organ parts in many of Benjamin Britten’s choral works are tour de forces of rhythm, texture, and organ color, Britten, too, left us a regrettably small number of organ works (which reveal relatively little of his musical genius).

2. Many have pondered this seeming contradiction between belief and the creative settings of sacred texts. One factor: he had, of course, a life-long love affair with Elizabethan English.

3. Church Music and the Christian Faith, by Erik Routley. Carol Stream, Illinois: Agape, 1978, p. 105.

4. Quoted in Aldritt, p. 55.

5. Francis/2. [The booklet pages are not numbered.]

6. RVW/3, p. 42.

7. Palmer.

8. Reference to the famous remark about Darwin is irresistible. As a child, VW asked his mother what was all the fuss about Great-Uncle Charles? She replied that the Bible says the earth was created in six days; Great-Uncle Charles believes it took somewhat longer.

9. Palmer.

10. Ibid.

11. Aldritt, p.30.

12. Palmer.

13. VW/3, p.258.

14. Ibid., p. 28.

15. As stated by J. Ellis Cook, son of the gardener at Leith Hill Place; quoted in Tributes, p. 25.

16. VW1, p. 134.

17. Aldritt, p. 37.

18. Palmer.

19. “Our friendship survived his despair at my playing and I became quite expert at managing the stops at his voluntaries and organ recitals.” And then wrote Alan Gray: “I cannot tell him that I think he is justified in going in for an organist’s career which is his pet idea. He seems to me so hopelessly ‘unhandy.’ I can never trust him to play a simple service for me without some dread as to what he may do.” Aldritt, p. 55. VW clearly achieved significant improvement by 1898, when he passed the F.R.C.O. exams!

20. The British title “organist” usually implies “organist and choirmaster.”

21. VW/1, p. 146.

22. Clark, p. 9.

23. In addition to services, these included four choral rehearsals each week as well as giving occasional organ recitals. Kennedy, p. 41.

24. Heffer, p. 18.

25. Ibid., p. 19.

26. VW/1, p. 71.

27. VW/4, pp. 5–6.

28. F/5, p. 9.

29. VW/1, p. 122.

30. Ibid., p. 123.

31. Ibid.

32. Mellers, p. 158.

33. F/2 (pages unnumbered).

34. Vicar of Saint Mary’s, Primrose Hill, where his organist was Martin Shaw.

35. Hymns Ancient & Modern, first published in 1861, continues to be found, in subsequent editions, in some British church pews today, often next to The English Hymnal.

36. All listed in B/3, Personalia, pp. 315–345.

37. Clark, p. 7.

38. Ibid., p. 10.

39. F/4, p. 8.

40. F/3. p. 16.

41. For details of these, see Randy L. Neighbarger’s, “Organ Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Descriptive List of Original Works and Transcriptions,” The Diapason, October 1991, p. 10.

42. K/2, p. 3.

43. Palmer.

44. Ibid.

33. Written for RVW’s good friend Harold Drake, organist at the Church of Saint Michael’s, Cornhill, the work sets the dramatic account of the whirlwind, cloud, and fire from the book of Ezekiel.

Sources and further reading

A: Aldritt, Keith. Vaughan Williams: Composer, Radical, Patriot—A Biography. Ramsbury, Wiltshire: Robert Hale Books, 2015.

B/1: Barber, Robin. “Vaughan Williams in Hamburg, 1938: A Brush with Nazi Germany.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue 66, June 2016.

B/2: Benham, Hugh. “Music for Solo Organ by Ralph Vaughan Williams.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue 55, October 2012, 3–8.

B/3: Butterworth, Neil. Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Guide to Research. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990.

C: Clark, Relf. “Vaughan Williams and the Organ: An Anniversary Review.” Organists’ Review, August 2008, 7-15.

F/1: Francis, John. Vice-Chairman of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society (UK) in correspondence with the author.

F/2: Francis, John. Notes in the booklet accompanying Bursts of Acclamation, two CD recordings of organ works by RVW published by Albion Records.

F/3: Francis, John. “Composers of the Great War Revisited.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue 65, February 2016, 15–16.

F/4: Francis, John. “Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Organ.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue 63, June 2015, 3–11.

F/5: Francis, John. “A Question of Chronology.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue No. 74, February 2019, 9.

H/1: Heffer, Simon. Vaughan Williams. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000.

H/2: Holmes, Paul. Holst; Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers. London: Omnibus Press, 1997.

K/1: Kennedy, Michael. The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964; 2nd edition,1996.

K/2: Kennedy, Michael. A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

M/3: Manning, David, ed. Vaughan Williams on Music. Oxford University Press, 2008.

M: Marshall, Em. Music in the Landscape. London: Robert Hale, 2011.

M/2: Mellers, Wilfrid. Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989.

N: Neighbarger, Randy L. “Organ Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Descriptive List of Original Works and Transcriptions,” The Diapason, October 1991, 10–11.

T: Tributes to Vaughan Williams: 50 Years On. A reprint of The RCM Magazine, Vol. LV, No. 1, Easter Term 1959.

P: Palmer, Tony. O Thou Transcendent (a video commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s death). Isolde Films, 2007.

VW/1: Some Thoughts on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, With Writings on Other Musical Subjects. London: Oxford University Press, 1953.

VW/2: National Music and Other Essays. London: Oxford University Press, 1987.

VW/3: Vaughan Williams, Ursula. R. V. W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964.

VW/4: Heirs and Rebels: Letters written to each other and occasional writings on music by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Edited by Ursula Vaughan Williams and Imogen Holst. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Photograph of Ralph Vaughan Williams by Frank Chappelow (used with permission)