In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

User friendly
We call it Classical Music. It may be Renaissance Music, Baroque Music, Contemporary Music, or Romantic Music—but we call it Classical Music. And Classical Music has a bad rap. It’s perceived by many as pricey, snooty, exclusionary, and snobbish. We could say that Classical Music has earned its bad rap, and I think we might be the culprits.
In the early 1970s I was a teenager learning to be serious about music. Around the corner from our house was a Congregational church with a new Fisk organ where I had my lessons on Friday afternoons and where I practiced most days after school. My father was rector of the Episcopal church (home of another Fisk organ). His invariable routine was to close himself in the living room on Saturday night with a card table and a black manual typewriter. He tuned the KLH hi-fi to WCRB, Boston’s only commercial Classical Music station, and wrote the sermon for the next morning, accompanied by the live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
For decades, Richard L. Kaye was the announcer for those broadcasts. I listened to many of them on my own (far superior) hi-fi gear in my upstairs bedroom and became devoted to the show that followed the broadcasts, WCRB Saturday Night. Also hosted by Richard L. Kaye, this was an erudite mix of music and humor that I think may have had something to do with my musical formation. Richard Kaye was a connoisseur of music-based humor. He played parodies by Spike Milligan and Allen Sherman. He was the first in Boston to broadcast Monty Python’s Flying Circus, even before they “went video.” Victor Borge was a perennial favorite, and I know that I heard the King’s Singers first on his program, giving London weather forecasts to Anglican chant.
I’m afraid I was a pretty serious teenager, very sure (way too sure) of myself when it came to the Praeludia of Buxtehude, dead sure that an organ recital should open with a suite from Classic (read Baroque) French music, and horrified if some unwitting devotée would presume to applaud after the Prelude and before the Fugue during one of my (perhaps too frequent) recitals.
Richard Kaye ran semi-annual fund raisers on WCRB for the Boston Symphony dubbed Boston Symphony Marathons. His obituary in The Boston Globe (December 23, 2006) credited him with raising more than three million dollars for the orchestra. I loved listening to the marathons because they were peppered with interviews of the orchestra’s players, conductors, and guest artists—and I was fascinated to hear those luminaries talk about their musical lives. One marathon included a contest for musical puns with prizes that included concert tickets, back stage visits, tee-shirts, the whole nine yards. My entry: “Of Korsakov only between movements.” No tee-shirt.
While I thought that was the height of musical humor, it was also an early sign of musical snobbism. I was intimately familiar with the polite shuffle heard over the radio as patrons shifted themselves in their seats and gave the little “symphony coughs” that they had been stifling for the previous eight minutes. And I knew personally the agony of sitting in the hall with my glottis clamped shut, wishing that for once they wouldn’t take all the repeats. It was unthinkable to me to be the boor who dared interrupt the musicians’ flow.
Several years after graduating from Oberlin, I had an impromptu reunion with a conservatory classmate who had become principal trumpet for a regional symphony orchestra. He told of an evening when during a performance there was a commotion in the balcony and the (unpopular) music director stopped the orchestra and whirled around indignantly to berate the audience. The heart-attack victim survived—the conductor didn’t.
§
applaud v – intr. 1. To express approval, especially by the clapping of hands. 2. To commend highly; praise. (from Latin, applaudere, to strike upon, clap.)1
The ancient Romans were early developers of organized applause. There was a hierarchy of expression, starting with the snapping of fingers, moving through rhythmic clapping of hands, to the hair-raising waving of the flaps of togas. The emperor Aurelian suggested substituting the waving of handkerchiefs for the flapping of togas, certainly more appropriate for organ recitals and other events of immense dignity.2 Although as I write, I’m imagining a hilarious scene involving togas that might well take place at an organists’ convention.
Pittsburgh sportscaster Myron Cope (perhaps unwittingly) took up the tradition instituted by Aurelian when he invited fans of the National Football League’s Pittsburgh Steelers to bring yellow dish towels to the stadium for use as applause props during a championship game with the Baltimore Colts in 1975. Nearly 30 years later, Steelers’ fans are famous for the yellow Terrible Towel, available officially in various forms from the Pittsburgh Steelers at <http://news.steelers.com/catalog/
TerribleStuff/> for about $7.95, or from Amazon.com (new for $5.79, used for $.99). (I suppose you’d choose a used one to take to a concert of which you didn’t expect much.)
To help with your decision of which to buy, I offer words from Aurelian’s applauded successor, Myron Cope himself:
The Terrible Towel is not an instrument of witchcraft . . . It is not a hex upon the enemy. THE TOWEL is a positive force that lifts the Steelers to magnificent heights—and poses mysterious difficulties for the Steelers’ opponents only if need be. Many have told me that THE TERRIBLE TOWEL brought them good fortune, but I can’t guarantee that sort of thing because the Steelers, after all, are THE TOWEL’S primary concern. Still, at the least, the symbol of THE TERRIBLE TOWEL will serve as a memento of your having been part of the Steelers’ Dynasty and if it causes good things to happen to you, so much the better.
I realize that Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium (replaced in 2001 by Heinz Field Stadium) is a long way from Symphony Hall in Boston, and that the events typically presented in those venues bear little in common. But I wonder how much good the stuffy applause etiquette practiced at serious concerts does for the future of good music. Edward Elgar’s First Symphony was premiered in Manchester, England in 1908. His wife Caroline wrote, “after 3rd movement E. had to go up on platform & whole Orch. & nos. of audience stood up—Wonderful scene.” It’s hard to picture that scene today. Who would give the “first clap” after the first movement? One concert musician wrote that she liked it when a few uninitiated people started to clap between movements because it meant there was someone new there.
I read an interesting article by Henry Fogel in the online Arts Journal <http://www.artsjournal.com/onthe
record/2007/03/the_applause_issue.html>. (That’s where I got the quote from Elgar’s wife.) The article ended with a lengthy set of blogging responses. One was from a woman named Ashley, who had taken her ten-year-old son to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She wrote,

Everyone had their nose so far up in the air that they could barely see my son walking in front of them—the last straw was when several people on the lower level began applauding so my son followed suit and the people around us were FREAKING OUT, making rude comments, and shushing them . . . my son and I felt like idiots (and I hadn’t even clapped). We will NEVER attend again . . . I have enough stress in my life—I don’t need to be made to feel like a 2nd class citizen and a complete idiot while trying to enjoy some culture with my son . . .
Are we alienating our future public by trying to prove how much we know? After all, you really show that you know the piece well if you dare applaud loudly the second a piece is finished. Conversely, when you’re hearing a world premiere performance, are you going to be the first to applaud? The audience sits nervously, glancing around, clappers poised, not daring to budge until the conductor asks the orchestra to stand . . .
Concert pianist Emmanuel Ax is challenging tradition. He has written in his website blog <www.emanuelax.word press.com/2008>: “All of us love applause, and so we should—it means that the listener LIKES us! So we should welcome applause whenever it comes. And yet, we seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.” I was made aware of this “Ax of evil” in an article by Sam Allis in The Boston Sunday Globe, January 16, 2009, “Make a joyful noise; Classical audiences should loosen up and applaud at will.” He begins, “Manny Ax is my new hero.” (This is a local joke on Manny Ramirez, of late the left fielder of the Boston Red Sox, and an extraordinary hitter, who is perhaps best known for his arrogance and poor attitude on the field.)
In his article, Sam Allis cites Mark Volpe, distinguished general manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra:

Mark Volpe . . . agrees that there is a snobbism attached to the vow of silence, and stands firmly with Ax on the applause issue. Volpe also recognizes that an orchestra’s goal, particularly in these brutal economic times, must be to expand the classical audience, not terrify newcomers out of the hall.
§

They loved me in Milan, they loved me in New York
There may be no more formal concert venue in America than the Metropolitan Opera of New York. If you think it takes a lot of money to run a symphony orchestra or a pipe organ, consider the Met. It has a symphony orchestra plus a chorus, a battery of high-end singers, a dance company, countless stagehands, designers, choreographers, storage facilities, transportation departments, and lighting technicians. The patrons of the Met are assumed to be the wealthy and elite. But—the Met offers 15-dollar seats, admittedly not very close to the stage, and if you hear something you like you can applaud. In fact, it’s customary for the audience to applaud vigorously after a well-sung aria.
On Monday, April 21, 2008, a singer sang an encore of an aria during a Met performance for the first time since 1994. Tenor Juan Diego Flórez was singing the role of Tonio in Donizetti’s romp, La Fille du Régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment). The highpoint of this role is the aria, Ah! mes amis, in which Tonio shares that he has joined the regiment as a soldier because of his love for Marie (the title role), sung magnificently and hilariously by Natalie Dessay. (We saw the production on HD simulcast the following Saturday, and I’ve got to tell you, she’s a virtuoso with a steam iron, an absolute laugh-riot. Plus, she can sing.)
The tenor’s aria includes nine high Cs, eight of which are reached by octave leaps, allegro. Luciano Pavarotti’s fame was established in large part by this aria, earning him the sobriquet, King of the High Cs. (Aaargh!) Two days after the encore, Robert Siegel of National Public Radio interviewed Peter Gelb, the innovative general manager of the Metropolitan Opera on All Things Considered. Mr. Gelb told us that Juan Diego Flórez had recently sung an encore of that aria at La Scala in Milan, and when the tenor arrived in New York for rehearsals with the Met, Mr. Gelb asked him if he would like to plan for an encore if the audience response warranted one. Mr. Gelb has a box seat in the Metropolitan Opera House with a hotline to the stage manager. Forty-five seconds into the roar of applause following the aria, Mr. Gelb made the call, the stage manager pressed a button to turn on a light on conductor James Levine’s music stand, the conductor and the singer made eye contact, and they were off to the races.
Siegel asked if, now that the ice has been broken again, more singers would be invited to sing encores. Gelb’s response, “We should only have that problem.”
You can hear Siegel’s eight-minute interview of Peter Gelb, including the high Cs, on <NPR.org>. Here’s the address—it’s worth it, tell them I sent you: <www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89884693&gt;.
Why can’t we do that at an organ recital? If people like the music, let ‘em roar! In fact, plan your programs and present your performances so they feel invited.You’d rather have them come back, even if they don’t know the difference between the Prelude and the Fugue. (Are there really such people?)

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

User friendly
We call it Classical Music. It may be Renaissance Music, Baroque Music, Contemporary Music, or Romantic Music—but we call it Classical Music. And Classical Music has a bad rap. It’s perceived by many as pricey, snooty, exclusionary, and snobbish. We could say that Classical Music has earned its bad rap, and I think we might be the culprits.
In the early 1970s I was a teenager learning to be serious about music. Around the corner from our house was a Congregational church with a new Fisk organ where I had my lessons on Friday afternoons and where I practiced most days after school. My father was rector of the Episcopal church (home of another Fisk organ). His invariable routine was to close himself in the living room on Saturday night with a card table and a black manual typewriter. He tuned the KLH hi-fi to WCRB, Boston’s only commercial Classical Music station, and wrote the sermon for the next morning, accompanied by the live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
For decades, Richard L. Kaye was the announcer for those broadcasts. I listened to many of them on my own (far superior) hi-fi gear in my upstairs bedroom and became devoted to the show that followed the broadcasts, WCRB Saturday Night. Also hosted by Richard L. Kaye, this was an erudite mix of music and humor that I think may have had something to do with my musical formation. Richard Kaye was a connoisseur of music-based humor. He played parodies by Spike Milligan and Allen Sherman. He was the first in Boston to broadcast Monty Python’s Flying Circus, even before they “went video.” Victor Borge was a perennial favorite, and I know that I heard the King’s Singers first on his program, giving London weather forecasts to Anglican chant.
I’m afraid I was a pretty serious teenager, very sure (way too sure) of myself when it came to the Praeludia of Buxtehude, dead sure that an organ recital should open with a suite from Classic (read Baroque) French music, and horrified if some unwitting devotée would presume to applaud after the Prelude and before the Fugue during one of my (perhaps too frequent) recitals.
Richard Kaye ran semi-annual fund raisers on WCRB for the Boston Symphony dubbed Boston Symphony Marathons. His obituary in The Boston Globe (December 23, 2006) credited him with raising more than three million dollars for the orchestra. I loved listening to the marathons because they were peppered with interviews of the orchestra’s players, conductors, and guest artists—and I was fascinated to hear those luminaries talk about their musical lives. One marathon included a contest for musical puns with prizes that included concert tickets, back stage visits, tee-shirts, the whole nine yards. My entry: “Of Korsakov only between movements.” No tee-shirt.
While I thought that was the height of musical humor, it was also an early sign of musical snobbism. I was intimately familiar with the polite shuffle heard over the radio as patrons shifted themselves in their seats and gave the little “symphony coughs” that they had been stifling for the previous eight minutes. And I knew personally the agony of sitting in the hall with my glottis clamped shut, wishing that for once they wouldn’t take all the repeats. It was unthinkable to me to be the boor who dared interrupt the musicians’ flow.
Several years after graduating from Oberlin, I had an impromptu reunion with a conservatory classmate who had become principal trumpet for a regional symphony orchestra. He told of an evening when during a performance there was a commotion in the balcony and the (unpopular) music director stopped the orchestra and whirled around indignantly to berate the audience. The heart-attack victim survived—the conductor didn’t.
§
applaud v – intr. 1. To express approval, especially by the clapping of hands. 2. To commend highly; praise. (from Latin, applaudere, to strike upon, clap.)1
The ancient Romans were early developers of organized applause. There was a hierarchy of expression, starting with the snapping of fingers, moving through rhythmic clapping of hands, to the hair-raising waving of the flaps of togas. The emperor Aurelian suggested substituting the waving of handkerchiefs for the flapping of togas, certainly more appropriate for organ recitals and other events of immense dignity.2 Although as I write, I’m imagining a hilarious scene involving togas that might well take place at an organists’ convention.
Pittsburgh sportscaster Myron Cope (perhaps unwittingly) took up the tradition instituted by Aurelian when he invited fans of the National Football League’s Pittsburgh Steelers to bring yellow dish towels to the stadium for use as applause props during a championship game with the Baltimore Colts in 1975. Nearly 30 years later, Steelers’ fans are famous for the yellow Terrible Towel, available officially in various forms from the Pittsburgh Steelers at <http://news.steelers.com/catalog/
TerribleStuff/> for about $7.95, or from Amazon.com (new for $5.79, used for $.99). (I suppose you’d choose a used one to take to a concert of which you didn’t expect much.)
To help with your decision of which to buy, I offer words from Aurelian’s applauded successor, Myron Cope himself:
The Terrible Towel is not an instrument of witchcraft . . . It is not a hex upon the enemy. THE TOWEL is a positive force that lifts the Steelers to magnificent heights—and poses mysterious difficulties for the Steelers’ opponents only if need be. Many have told me that THE TERRIBLE TOWEL brought them good fortune, but I can’t guarantee that sort of thing because the Steelers, after all, are THE TOWEL’S primary concern. Still, at the least, the symbol of THE TERRIBLE TOWEL will serve as a memento of your having been part of the Steelers’ Dynasty and if it causes good things to happen to you, so much the better.
I realize that Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium (replaced in 2001 by Heinz Field Stadium) is a long way from Symphony Hall in Boston, and that the events typically presented in those venues bear little in common. But I wonder how much good the stuffy applause etiquette practiced at serious concerts does for the future of good music. Edward Elgar’s First Symphony was premiered in Manchester, England in 1908. His wife Caroline wrote, “after 3rd movement E. had to go up on platform & whole Orch. & nos. of audience stood up—Wonderful scene.” It’s hard to picture that scene today. Who would give the “first clap” after the first movement? One concert musician wrote that she liked it when a few uninitiated people started to clap between movements because it meant there was someone new there.
I read an interesting article by Henry Fogel in the online Arts Journal <http://www.artsjournal.com/onthe
record/2007/03/the_applause_issue.html>. (That’s where I got the quote from Elgar’s wife.) The article ended with a lengthy set of blogging responses. One was from a woman named Ashley, who had taken her ten-year-old son to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She wrote,

Everyone had their nose so far up in the air that they could barely see my son walking in front of them—the last straw was when several people on the lower level began applauding so my son followed suit and the people around us were FREAKING OUT, making rude comments, and shushing them . . . my son and I felt like idiots (and I hadn’t even clapped). We will NEVER attend again . . . I have enough stress in my life—I don’t need to be made to feel like a 2nd class citizen and a complete idiot while trying to enjoy some culture with my son . . .

Are we alienating our future public by trying to prove how much we know? After all, you really show that you know the piece well if you dare applaud loudly the second a piece is finished. Conversely, when you’re hearing a world premiere performance, are you going to be the first to applaud? The audience sits nervously, glancing around, clappers poised, not daring to budge until the conductor asks the orchestra to stand . . .
Concert pianist Emmanuel Ax is challenging tradition. He has written in his website blog <www.emanuelax.word press.com/2008>: “All of us love applause, and so we should—it means that the listener LIKES us! So we should welcome applause whenever it comes. And yet, we seem to have set up some very arcane rules as to when it is actually OK to applaud.” I was made aware of this “Ax of evil” in an article by Sam Allis in The Boston Sunday Globe, January 16, 2009, “Make a joyful noise; Classical audiences should loosen up and applaud at will.” He begins, “Manny Ax is my new hero.” (This is a local joke on Manny Ramirez, of late the left fielder of the Boston Red Sox, and an extraordinary hitter, who is perhaps best known for his arrogance and poor attitude on the field.)
In his article, Sam Allis cites Mark Volpe, distinguished general manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra:

Mark Volpe . . . agrees that there is a snobbism attached to the vow of silence, and stands firmly with Ax on the applause issue. Volpe also recognizes that an orchestra’s goal, particularly in these brutal economic times, must be to expand the classical audience, not terrify newcomers out of the hall.
§

They loved me in Milan, they loved me in New York
There may be no more formal concert venue in America than the Metropolitan Opera of New York. If you think it takes a lot of money to run a symphony orchestra or a pipe organ, consider the Met. It has a symphony orchestra plus a chorus, a battery of high-end singers, a dance company, countless stagehands, designers, choreographers, storage facilities, transportation departments, and lighting technicians. The patrons of the Met are assumed to be the wealthy and elite. But—the Met offers 15-dollar seats, admittedly not very close to the stage, and if you hear something you like you can applaud. In fact, it’s customary for the audience to applaud vigorously after a well-sung aria.
On Monday, April 21, 2008, a singer sang an encore of an aria during a Met performance for the first time since 1994. Tenor Juan Diego Flórez was singing the role of Tonio in Donizetti’s romp, La Fille du Régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment). The highpoint of this role is the aria, Ah! mes amis, in which Tonio shares that he has joined the regiment as a soldier because of his love for Marie (the title role), sung magnificently and hilariously by Natalie Dessay. (We saw the production on HD simulcast the following Saturday, and I’ve got to tell you, she’s a virtuoso with a steam iron, an absolute laugh-riot. Plus, she can sing.)
The tenor’s aria includes nine high Cs, eight of which are reached by octave leaps, allegro. Luciano Pavarotti’s fame was established in large part by this aria, earning him the sobriquet, King of the High Cs. (Aaargh!) Two days after the encore, Robert Siegel of National Public Radio interviewed Peter Gelb, the innovative general manager of the Metropolitan Opera on All Things Considered. Mr. Gelb told us that Juan Diego Flórez had recently sung an encore of that aria at La Scala in Milan, and when the tenor arrived in New York for rehearsals with the Met, Mr. Gelb asked him if he would like to plan for an encore if the audience response warranted one. Mr. Gelb has a box seat in the Metropolitan Opera House with a hotline to the stage manager. Forty-five seconds into the roar of applause following the aria, Mr. Gelb made the call, the stage manager pressed a button to turn on a light on conductor James Levine’s music stand, the conductor and the singer made eye contact, and they were off to the races.
Siegel asked if, now that the ice has been broken again, more singers would be invited to sing encores. Gelb’s response, “We should only have that problem.”
You can hear Siegel’s eight-minute interview of Peter Gelb, including the high Cs, on <NPR.org>. Here’s the address—it’s worth it, tell them I sent you: <www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89884693&gt;.
Why can’t we do that at an organ recital? If people like the music, let ‘em roar! In fact, plan your programs and present your performances so they feel invited.You’d rather have them come back, even if they don’t know the difference between the Prelude and the Fugue. (Are there really such people?)

Abetted by Satan

On August 5, 2014, the New York Times published a review of two concerts performed on the same evening as part of Lincoln Center’s “Mostly Mozart Festival.” Both featured Swedish clarinetist Martin Frost, about whom critic Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote, “In earlier times, the talent of Martin Frost would have attracted suspicion. Like that of Paganini, whom contemporaries suspected to be in cahoots with the Devil…” Ms. Fonseca-Wollheim gushed on: “… something approaching the supernatural … sounds he drew from his clarinet were so extraordinary that they produced incredulous laughter and head-shaking …” The headline read, “Languid, Meandering, and Clearly Abetted by Satan.”

In the second half of the first program, Frost joined the Emerson String Quartet to play Mozart’s glorious clarinet quintet. Ms. Fonseca-Wollheim reported that his artistry pulled the Emerson’s players back together after a lackluster first half. Of that, she wrote, “Without him … the Emersons were having a bad evening … visibly struggled to hit their stride … uncharacteristic intonation problems … It felt as if the players were fiddling with the radio dial in search of a frequency on which to broadcast the music clearly.” Ouch! She went on, “It was an entirely different string quartet that returned for the performance of the Mozart…”

It’s unusual for a critic to carry on with such abandon. It was as if the fair Corinna was smitten and couldn’t help herself.

Last week, there was another article about Martin Frost in the New York Times. This time the writer was George Loomis, and he was commenting on another facet of Frost’s apparent genius. He opened the piece reporting that Frost was to start his season of appearances by playing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, adding that he had played the same piece thirty-seven times last season. But the point of the article was Martin Frost’s “urge to move beyond the traditional concert format to create a new kind of experience.”

In an interview following his appearances at the “Mostly Mozart Festival,” the forty-three-year-old Frost said, “I’ve started to look back at my career from a point in the future. When I’m 85, what will I think I’ve done with my life? I wouldn’t be proud that I’d done 1200 Weber concertos. I need to shake myself around and be brave enough to develop new ideas.”

In that interest, Martin Frost has created a program that includes music taken from Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and other well-known works, in which he appears as soloist, conductor, dancer, actor, and master of ceremonies. Two other clarinetists appear (Bless their hearts!) along with other orchestra players, the whole enhanced by lighting and choreography.

Silk and goats

In the world of sports, “the greatest of all time” can be defined, at least in part, by numbers—the most home runs, the most goals, the most saves, the most strikeouts. It’s more difficult to define “the greatest” in the arts. Who was the greatest painter? Was it Rembrandt, Picasso, Monet, or Pollock? The work of those four can hardly be compared, so it seems impossible to know who was best.

The twentieth century knew three great cellists, Pablo Casals (1876–1973), Mstislav Rostropovich (1927–2007), and Yo-Yo Ma (born 1955). The twenty-first century has given us Facebook as a new vehicle for the dissemination of wisdom. A lovely quote from Casals appears regularly in those ubiquitous pages. Asked at the age of ninety-three why he still practiced three hours a day, Casals replied, “I’m beginning to notice some improvement.”

It’s easy to argue that those three masters set the standard for modern cello playing, if one fails to mention Jacqueline Du Pré, Janos Starker, or Lynn Harrell. But in the spirit of gushing, I’m willing to single out Yo-Yo Ma as an inspiration, a technical wizard, a magical interpreter, and an imaginative performer. Heaven knows how many times he has played The Elgar, The Barber, or The Dvorak (there are two Dvorak cello concertos), but it must be hundreds of repetitions for each.

Yo-Yo Ma has made more than seventy-five recordings and he has sixteen Grammy Awards to show for his trouble. A Grammy Award is a mighty special thing, and many performers are satisfied with just one. But think of this. He received those sixteen Grammys in just twenty-seven years, between 1986 and 2013. That’s an average of 1.7 Grammys each year! Give me a break.

But wait, there’s more. You might expect that Yo-Yo Ma’s Grammys would be in the usual categories: Best Chamber Music Performance, Best Instrumental Soloist Performance, Best Classical Album. Of course he’s all over those. But he’s also received four for Best Classical Crossover Album and one for Best Folk Music Album!

Instead of satisfying himself with the acknowledged glory of playing the great works for cello and orchestra on all the world’s greatest stages, the height of ambition for most performers, he has collaborated with the electrifying genius Bobby McFerrin, and founded the Silk Road Project, which has brought the world’s indigenous music together in the most energetic and meaningful way. Wendy and I attended a concert of the Silk Road Project at Tanglewood last summer, and were thrilled and mystified by the beauty of the collaboration. I was especially moved to witness Yo-Yo Ma (the world’s greatest cellist?) sitting as an equal between two younger brilliant cellists.

Remember that folk music Grammy? The Goat Rodeo Sessions is the collaboration of Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile. It’s roughly described as a blend of classical and bluegrass music, and the term “goat rodeo” refers to a chaotic event that can succeed only if everything goes just right. One of the cuts on the album (my kids hate it when I use the old-fashioned word, album) is titled “13:8.” Students of music have pored over the piece analyzing the meter in attempts to make it conform to the time signature, 13:8. The mystery was revealed during a concert at Tanglewood in August of 2013, during which Stuart Duncan shared the story of an airline pilot with the audience. Each evening, when the flight attendant served his dinner, he replied, “Hebrews 13:8.” Her interest piqued, she finally looked up the New Testament verse: “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

By the way, The Goat Rodeo Sessions was awarded two Grammys: Best Folk Album, and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.

What should I play this year?

I served a Congregational church in suburban Boston as music director for almost twenty years. I was fortunate to have lots of resources to work with including enthusiastic volunteer singers, a professional quartet, a fine pipe organ and excellent piano, and funds sufficient to maintain a large library and to engage other musicians for festivals and concerts. I was proud of the programming, but as I look back on it, I know I wasn’t always as imaginative as I could have been. I could never resist the temptation to play Bach’s settings of Valet will ich dir geben on Palm Sunday. They are both smashing pieces, based on the tune we know colloquially as St. Theodulph (“All glory, laud, and honor”). Of course, I published the title in German, assuming that the parishioners would figure it out. I haven’t gone back through archives to prove it, but it’s a safe bet I played those pieces on each of those nineteen Palm Sundays.

What’s the formula for a classic organ recital? I can give you a couple. The simplest is the “All-Whomever” recital. Your choice. Bach, Buxtehude, Scheidt, the list goes on and on. Open with a  chaconne, then a set of chorale preludes, followed by a choral fantasy. Interval. Second half: minor prelude and fugue, trio sonata or set of variations, close with a major toccata and fugue.

Or for more variety: Classic French set (the usual Couperin, Corrette, De Grigny, or Clérambault), three German chorale preludes, then a Baroque prelude and fugue. Interval. Second half: Selections from a favorite collection (Vierne or Langlais 24, or Pierné 3), novelty (elves, nymphs, naiads, your choice), close with swashbuckling barnburner.

Similar formulas also apply to the programming of orchestral concerts: Opera overture, classical piano concerto (“Elvira Madigan”). Intermission. Second half: Major Romantic symphony with lots of recognizable tunes and French horn solos.

Catch–22

Joseph Heller’s novel published in 1961 is a brilliant, satirical telling of the experiences of a group of World War II airmen in a fictional squadron based on an Italian island. The common thread seems simple enough—they are all trying to hold it together until the end of the war or their discharge from the service, whichever comes first. Some are trying to maintain sanity, while others are trying to convince their superiors of their insanity. The telling is so complex that the title of the book has become a catchphrase in our language describing an enigma, a puzzle that cannot be solved. A simple example that happens to me: if you lose your glasses, you can’t see to find them.

The commercial demands of the symphony orchestra have never been more clear. The past few years have shown a spate of stories about strained labor relations between orchestral musicians and the institutions that pay them. The Minnesota Orchestra is a premier example. When the board of directors asked the musicians to accept reductions in salary and benefits, the musicians pointed out that the wildly expensive renovation of the concert hall was the cause of the orchestra’s financial difficulties. The dispute raged for years with the board of directors locking out the players, culminating in the resignation of music director Osmo Vänskä, who was credited with creating a dramatic increase in the quality and popularity of the orchestra. 

The musicians made a unanimous vote of no confidence in the board’s president, Michael Henson. Vänskä stated that Henson’s departure would be essential to the orchestra’s recovery. Henson resigned, and eight other board members resigned in protest. Now, Vänskä has been engaged in a new two-year contract to start rebuilding the fortunes of the orchestra. This dispute has been a classic example of the struggle between art and commerce. It costs a fortune to place an elite symphony orchestra on stage for a single concert. One might wish that excellence in performance and programming would be enough to assure funding.

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James Levine was music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 2004 until 2011. Levine, a musician’s musician, brought a host of terrific collaborators to the Boston stage. And as a tireless champion of new music, he programmed the most fascinating series of concerts. Wendy and I benefitted from this in three ways. One was simply the exposure to many brilliant performances of exciting and challenging new music. The second was when friends offered us their excellent subscription seats because they were tired of all the new music. The third—we lived for two years in an apartment on Massachusetts Avenue next door to Symphony Hall and as BSO audiences dwindled, the management of the apartment building received complimentary tickets from the BSO in their effort to put “butts in seats,” and we were only too happy to accept those offers.

It’s ironic that we who are interested in hearing new music benefit from the dismay of the many who don’t. It’s a safe bet that if Levine returned to the beloved formula, the hall would be filled.

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In September of 2013, the stagehands at Carnegie Hall went on strike, demanding that they should have control over the movement of musical furniture in the hall’s new educational wing, due to open the following month. The turmoil was well documented in the New York Times and other august publications. Forbes Magazine documented that the hall’s executive director Clive Gillinson was paid $1,113,000 in 2012. The next highest-paid employee was stagehand Dennis O’Connell ($465,000), followed by carpenter James Csollany ($441,000). Fourth on the list was the Hall’s chief financial officer. Fifth and sixth were an electrician and another stagehand. How in the world can we afford to make music if we have to pay someone $465,000 a year to move music stands? Many of us sweated through this dispute because the opening of the Carnegie Hall season was in doubt, and our friend and colleague Stephen Tharp was to appear with the American Symphony Orchestra in Aaron Copland’s Organ Symphony. Happily, that concert was presented as scheduled, but the season opener, ironically an important fundraising event for the (recovering from a bitter labor dispute) Philadelphia Orchestra, celebrating its new music director, was cancelled because of the strike. By the way, because the new wing is specifically dedicated to educational activities and is not a performance space, the stagehands lost that round.

On August 22, the New York Times published an article about the opera house Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy. The story opened with snide comments about how Italian opera houses are typically known for poor management and finances, singling out Teatro Regio as one company that’s making waves with wonderful performances, and ambitious tours and recording projects. But once again we run into that struggle. Music director Gianandrea Noseda is threatening to resign, accusing the company’s general manager Walter Vergnano of reigning in the finances unnecessarily. Noseda is quoted as saying, “Now we have the engine of a fantastic car, like a Ferrari, but you cannot drive a Ferrari and win the Gran Prix if you leave the brake down all the time.”

The mother of them all

All of these stories pale in comparison to the recent wild machinations at the Metropolitan Opera. The Met’s general manager Peter Gelb has been heralded as a genius in the field of arts administration, especially through his introduction of live HD simulcasts of Met performances, showing in some 700 movie theaters around the world, and attended by nearly a million viewers. But when the Met faced growing and serious deficits in its colossal budget, which exceeds $330,000,000, the salaried employees accused Gelb of placing too much of the burden of economy on them. According to the Met’s website, there are some 3400 employees, including 300 solo artists, 100 orchestra players, and 80 chorus members. These most visible workers are supported by legions of carpenters, tailors, directors, make-up and hair artists, painters, electricians, and—you guessed it—stagehands. All of these workers are represented by powerful unions, and the dirty details were published in the Times in a long series of complex articles. 

We learned that members of the orchestra and chorus are paid over $200,000 a year—nice compensation, but it doesn’t seem like that much when you realize that the 2012–2013 season included 209 performances of 28 operas. Add the requisite rehearsal time, and you have a mighty busy year! We learned that the highest fee paid to solo artists is about $16,000 a performance. Nice compensation, but given the depth of education and preparation compared to an evening’s take for a hip-hop artist, it doesn’t seem like that much.

The dispute put the musicians into the awkward position of arguing for fewer new productions of old favorites, and less new music in the interest of saving money. The recent new production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle cost nearly $20,000,000. Why not just trot out the old one? There was an excruciating series of articles as the company threatened to lock out the employees and cancel the season. A special national arbitrator was engaged to direct the negotiations. Several deadlines passed or were extended, and finally a settlement was announced. The show must go on.

And our survey says…

In many markets, the most banal of classical music programming is the most successful. Radio stations run audience surveys whose results are predictable. The audience wants to hear the “greatest hits.” Brilliant and innovative programming, such as Levine’s in Boston, reduces the audience, but we need programming like that to sustain the arts, to encourage creativity, and to be sure there always is new music.

But the enigma continues. While I am strongly supportive of bold programming in concert venues, and am disappointed when programming seems weak when bending to popular demand, I realize that the future of the organ world, performers and audiences alike, depends on the discovery of bold new ways to use our venerated and ancient instrument. “Dead White Men” is a phrase that implies the kiss of death in the world of the arts. I interpret that to mean that we shouldn’t depend on the work of those from centuries before us for the completeness of our artistic expression. And with its huge heritage of ancient music, its correct and unswerving connection with the church, and its often arcane voice among the clamor of the modern world, the pipe organ can be the ultimate example of the Dead White Man. 

I got interested in the organ as a kid simply because I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I have many friends and colleagues who share that experience. Ours is a world in which you can easily spend $250,000 on a fine piano. When I was a student at Oberlin in the 1970s, that was the price of a new 45-stop Flentrop (Warner Concert Hall). We’re more than a tenth of the way through the twenty-first century. Let’s give ’em their money’s worth. 

The high cost of beauty

When the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun was discovered in 1922, the world went agog over the dazzling beauty of the artifacts that had been hidden since his death some 3,300 years earlier. There were large pieces of gilded furniture, ornate masks, jewelry, and lots of hieroglyphics and paintings. The level of craftsmanship was bewildering, given the degree of antiquity. Other members of Egyptian royalty were buried in similarly grand circumstances, in tombs located under the great pyramids. And who built the pyramids? Slaves.

Big-time personal money always has and always will be part of the arts world. If there had been no Medici dynasty, we wouldn’t have had Michelangelo, Leonardo, Brunelleschi, and Donatello, to name just a few. How did the Medici make their money? They were bankers, the wealthiest family in Europe. They parlayed their wealth into political influence, and many family members became important politicians. The family even produced four popes in the sixteenth century. If that implies it was possible to purchase a papacy, I’m surprised that Silvio Berlusconi didn’t try it. A family tree I found online shows more than twenty generations of Medici between 1360 and about 1725. 

We’ve learned a lot about the ethics of banking and investment in recent years, where executives use their clients’ money to leverage their own fortunes, bring down institutions, and go home with bonuses that equal the annual wages of hundreds of normal workers. I’m not setting about a researched dissertation on the source of the Medici’s money, but I’m willing to bet that much of it came at the expense of others.

Heavy metal

The Carnegie Steel Company was one of the country’s first major producers of steel, and in the late 1880s and early 1890s, it developed important improvements in the manufacturing process, including open-hearth smelting and installation of advanced material handling systems like overhead cranes and hoists. The result was higher production levels using increasingly less skilled labor, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck against the Homestead Steel Works. There were various waves of strikes, and at first the union prevailed. 

Henry Clay Frick ran the Carnegie Steel Company for his eponymous partner. He announced on April 30, 1892, that he would keep negotiations open with the union for thirty days, and on June 29, he locked down the plant and the union announced a strike. Frick engaged the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to provide security, and more than three hundred armed Pinkerton agents were involved in bloody battles with striking workers. The Pinkerton force surrendered, and the governor sent in the State Militia and declared martial law. There was a failed assassination attempt against Frick. The union was broken and collapsed about ten years later. 

It was important to Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick to beat down the union because they had their lifestyles to maintain. Carnegie built a majestic home on Fifth Avenue at 91st Street in New York (now the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum) in which he installed a large Aeolian pipe organ. He paid about $65,000 for the organ at the time when workers in the Aeolian factory earned about $600 a year. Hmmm. The organ cost as much as the annual wages of more than a hundred workers. Not as bad as King Tut, but sounds about right.

Henry Clay Frick installed a large Aeolian in his gracious home on Fifth Avenue at 70th Street (now housing the Frick Collection, commonly known as “The Frick”). These guys really knew how to build houses. Hank and Andy must have warmed each other’s hearts living just twenty blocks apart—an easy twenty-minute walk, just long enough to smoke a hundred-dollar cigar (six weeks for that Aeolian worker). Frick also built a tremendous Aeolian in his summer home at Manchester-by-the-Sea in Massachusetts and gave a four-manual job to Princeton University. That’s four big pipe organs built on the backs of striking steel workers.

Three years before the Homestead Strike, Andrew Carnegie paid about $1,000,000 to buy the land and construct the venerable Manhattan concert hall that bears his name. The place was owned by the Carnegie family until 1925 when they sold it to a real estate developer.

I’m giving Mr. Carnegie a hard time, because at least some of his business practices were mighty ruthless, and the mind-boggling wealth that he accumulated was not a reflection on his largess. But it’s important to remember that he was also an important philanthropist and the foundation that was founded on his fortune is still a major source of grants for all sorts of educational programs, scientific research, and artistic endeavors. Visit the website at www.carnegie.org.

I served a church in Cleveland as music director for about ten years, where a four-manual Austin was installed as a gift from the Carnegie Foundation in 1917. The Bach scholar Albert Riemenschneider of Baldwin-Wallace College was organist there when the instrument was installed—the perfect organ for a performance of Bach’s Orgelbüchlein.

Among many other projects, Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Foundation installed more than 8,800 pipe organs in America’s churches and founded more than 2,500 public libraries. That’s important.

Moving musical chairs.

On Thursday, October 3, 2013, Wendy and I attended a concert of the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall to hear Stephen Tharp play the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra of Aaron Copland. Until about three o’clock that afternoon it was doubtful that the concert would happen because Carnegie Hall’s stagehands had struck the night before, causing the cancellation of the concert on October 2. They were striking over the rules for soon-to-be-opened educational spaces above the hall, claiming that they should have the same jurisdiction as in the great hall itself. Carnegie Hall’s management took the position that as it would be an educational venue, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees should not have such control. It’s probably not this simple, but should Theatrical Stage people control educational spaces?

The New York Times reported that Carnegie Hall employs five full-time stagehands with average annual compensations of more than $400,000 a year, with additional part-time union members brought in as needed. I know a lot of organbuilders who would make great stagehands, and Wendy was quick to say that I missed my calling.

The strike was settled in time for us to hear Stephen play with the American Symphony Orchestra. The New York Times reported that the union backed off, as it seemed ridiculous to almost anyone that a teenaged music student would not be allowed to move a music stand. You can read about that strike in the New York Times at: www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/arts/music/carnegie-hall-and-stagehands-sett….

It’s an exquisite irony that the October 2 concert cancelled because of the strike was to be a gala celebratory fundraiser for the Philadelphia Orchestra, recently revitalized after years of labor disputes. Yannick Nézet-Séguin was to open his second season as music director in what was billed as the triumphant return of that great orchestra to its role as a national leader.

Vänskä-daddle

On October 3, 2013, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Osmo Vänskä had resigned from his position as music director of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. His action was anticipated. The musicians had been locked out by the Board of Directors for more than a year in a dispute that pitted the player’s requests for salary increases against the board’s decision to spend $52,000,000 renovating the concert hall while claiming there were no funds to increase salaries.

The orchestra had long planned to play a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York during the fall of 2013. Ironically, Vänskä was widely celebrated for having brought the MSO into new prominence with several seasons of brilliant performances and celebrated recordings, and the Carnegie Hall concerts were to celebrate the MSO’s bursting into the upper echelons of American symphony orchestras. Vänskä had announced that the dispute must be settled so rehearsals for those concerts could begin on September 30. If not, he would resign. It wasn’t, and he did. Former Senator George Mitchell, famous for negotiating settlements of disputes in Northern Ireland and steroid use in Major League Baseball, had been enlisted to help with the MSO negotiations—turned out that Northern Ireland had nothing on the MSO.

In the past several years, a number of important orchestras have suffered serious financial stress leading to labor disputes, including the orchestras in Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Chicago. 

Eerily, on September 30, 2013, the same drop-dead-date for Väskä’s resignation, Norman Ebrecht of ArtsJournalBlogs reported that players in one hundred German orchestras struck simultaneously to draw attention to the increasing number of orchestras closing because of dwindling government support. There were 168 orchestras in Germany at the time of reunification in 1991, and there are 131 today. It’s a big deal to lose nearly forty orchestras in twenty years.

Do the numbers.

I love to do goofy math. In the 1970s when I lived on a farm outside Oberlin, Ohio, I wondered how much corn might grow in a day. I measured a couple dozen plants in the morning, then again in the evening, and came up with an average amount of growth. I measured and multiplied to get the number of plants in an acre, then again by the number of acres on the farm. Of course I can’t remember the numbers, but I know it added up to many miles of growth in a day. You could almost hear it while lying in bed at night.

I did that recently with the economics of a symphony orchestra. I found a list online of American orchestras with the largest operating budgets. Los Angeles tops that list at $97,000,000. Boston is second at $84,000,000. I stuck with Boston because it’s home, and I got the rest of the information I needed. The BSO plays about a hundred concerts a year—that’s $840,000 each. Symphony Hall seats about 2,600 people. The average ticket price is around $75, so ticket revenue for a full house is about $195,000. That’s a shortfall of $645,000 per concert that must be made up by private and corporate donations, campaigns, bar and restaurant revenues, and heaven knows what else—if they sell out each concert. Read the program booklet of the BSO and you’ll be surprised how many of the orchestra’s chairs are “fully funded in perpetuity,” named for their donors. Three cheers for them.

I know very well that this is bogus math. There are many variables that I’ve overlooked, and doubtless many of which I am not aware—but I think it’s a reasonable off-the-cuff illustration of the challenges of large-scale music-making in modern society. You can buy a pretty snazzy new pipe organ for the $645,000 that’s missing for each BSO concert after ticket sales.

While I was surfing about looking for those numbers, I learned that the starting salary for a musician in the Boston Symphony Orchestra is about $135,000. That’s pretty good when compared to the Alabama Symphony Orchestra where the starting salary is more like $48,000. I suppose that senior members of the BSO must earn over $200,000. In the business world, concertmaster Malcolm Lowe would qualify as an Executive Vice President and head of a department—worth $250,000 or $300,000, I’d say. But not as much as a stagehand. 

I guess I’m laboring under an old-fashioned concept that the artistic content should be worth more than the support staff. Big-time stagehands are hardworking people with important jobs. It’s not just anyone who can be trusted to fling high-end harps around a stage. But how many church choir directors would like to have someone else available to set up the chairs?

If the cost of operating a symphony orchestra seems high, get a load of the Metropolitan Opera. I found an article in the New York Times published on October 1, 2011, that put the Met’s annual budget at $325,000,000, of which $182,000,000 is from private donations. The Met had just passed New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as the arts organization with the largest budget. (Counting baseball, New York City has three Mets.)

I found a page on the Met (opera) website that listed the administrative staff, which includes the General Manager (Peter Gelb), Musical Director (James Levine), and Principal Conductor (Fabio Luisi), along with twenty-five assistant general managers, artistic management, design, production, finance, development, human resources, house management, stage directors, stage management, carpenters, electricians—a total of more than three hundred administrative employees. Add a symphony orchestra, costumes, make-up, custodians, ticket sellers, and—oh yes—singers, and you wind up with a whopping payroll.

Since I’m not a stagehand, I pretended I was going to buy one ticket online. I chose a performance of La Bohème on Saturday, March 22, 2014, at 8:00 p.m. I couldn’t choose between a seat in Row B of the Orchestra (down front, near the stage) for $300, or one in Orchestra Row U for $250. And nearly half of the operating budget is funded by donations. If you take a date and have a nice dinner and a glass of wine at intermission, that’s pretty much a thousand-dollar night, something stagehands could afford if they could get the night off.

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The source of much of the money that has funded the arts over many centuries is questionable, and it’s especially difficult to accept how much of has been the product of slavery. But scary as that is, I’m sure glad we had the Medicis and hundreds of others like them. It would be a barren world without the art and architecture that they funded. I have to admit that when I’m standing in a museum looking at a work of art, I’m not fretting about the suffering involved in its production.

Today’s system seems more just—concert-goers buy tickets, and corporate and individual sponsors theoretically make up the rest. That works as long as costs are reasonably controlled, and donors can be kept happy. The problem with that is how it can affect programming. 

If you listen regularly to a commercial classical radio station anywhere in the country, you would be able to list society’s favorite pieces of music: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Beethoven’s 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 9th, Mozart’s 40th Symphony and 23rd Piano Concerto, Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances—you get the idea. Organists know how hard it is to get a bride to choose something other than the Taco-Bell Canon, or Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.

Lots of serious classical music ensembles, from local choruses to major symphony orchestras, adjust their programming to please their patrons. The box office at Boston Symphony Hall has a long-standing tradition allowing people to pass on their subscription seats to friends. When James Levine came to town as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he increased dramatically the amount of contemporary music on the programs, and friends of ours who had long held great seats on the balcony above the stage asked if we wanted to take them over because they couldn’t take all the modern music. We did.

And, in a related matter, the players of the BSO made public the extra workload brought on by Levine’s energetic and imaginative programming. On March 17, 2005, the Boston Globe reported that orchestra players were concerned about longer concerts, extra rehearsals, and programming of exceptionally difficult music. You can read it online at www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2005/03/17/levines_pace_prove…. They cited aggravation of injuries and increased stress and negotiated with Levine to alter some of the planned programs. And the BSO Trustees created a special fund to support the cost of the extra rehearsal time. But smaller institutions with limited resources would not be able to do the same. So it’s back to the crowd-pleasing favorites at the cost of innovation.

I’ve often repeated a story about an experience Wendy and I had with artistic patronage. An exceptionally wealthy friend, now deceased, was well known in his community as a generous supporter of the arts. He lived in a city that is home to a nationally prominent repertory theater company that was mounting the premiere production of Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home. The play tells the story of a family’s gay son contracting AIDS, with the main dialogue happening in the family car driving home from a holiday celebration. The production was to include larger-than-life bunraku puppets that would provide the action less suited for the stage, conceived by the playwright, to be constructed by a New York-based puppeteer. Our friend was asked to fund the puppets, which were to cost nearly a hundred thousand dollars. He told us the story over dinner, saying that he hated the idea, was uncomfortable with the subject, but thought he should provide the funds because he knew it was important.

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Recently organist David Enlow and harpist Grace Cloutier performed a recital at David’s home church, Church of the Resurrection in Manhattan, where the Organ Clearing House installed an instrument a couple years ago. At dinner after the concert, we were discussing the instruments we play, and I noted that with the exception of pianos and high-end violins, the harp is probably one of the most expensive instruments that musicians typically own privately. Organists have to rely on the institutions for which they work to provide them with an instrument to play. And they sure have gotten expensive.

I’ve always felt that a three-manual organ with forty or fifty stops is just about right for a prominent suburban church with a sanctuary seating five hundred people or more. But a first quality organ of that size will push, and easily exceed, $1,000,000. It’s pretty hard for many parishes to justify such a whopping expenditure. I grew up in the era when it was all the rage for churches to replace fifty-year-old electro-pneumatic organs with new trackers, and many organists fell into the habit of getting what they asked for. Those days are largely over, because now that we really know how to build good organs of any description, we also know what they cost! We have to remember what a big deal it is for a church to order a new instrument.

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I’m troubled by the striking stagehands. I believe in the concept of the labor union. They were formed to confront real injustice, and in the strange and shaky state of our economy, injustices are still firmly in place. But this is a time when they’ve gone too far. That kind of labor organizing can threaten the future of live music in concert halls.

The Organ Clearing House uses Bank of America because we work all across the country, and it’s convenient to be able to get to a bank pretty much anywhere we go. But we were not bursting with pride when Time magazine reported on November 9, 2013, that the bank was to be fined $865,000,000 for mortgage fraud related to the Countrywide Financial scandal. At the same time, our bank is a Global Sponsor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Alvin Ailey Dancers, and the Metropolitan Opera HD Broadcasts in public schools. We thank them for all that.

Bank of America is also a “Season Sponsor” for Carnegie Hall, supporting the Hall’s mission “to present extraordinary music and musicians on the three stages of the legendary hall, to bring the transformative power of music to the widest possible audience, to provide visionary education programs, and to foster the future of music through the cultivation of new works, artists, and audiences,” as stated on Carnegie Hall’s website.

So the concert hall that was built on the backs of striking steel workers, whose schedule was recently interrupted by striking six-figure stagehands, is now supported largely by a bank guilty of major mortgage fraud. 

May the music keep playing. Sure hope it does. The stakes are high. 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

revolution: n. 1a. Orbital motion about a point, especially as distinguished from axial rotation: the planetary revolution around the sun. b. A turning or rotational motion about an axis. c. A single complete cycle of such orbital or axial motion. 2. The overthrow of one government and its replacement with another. 3. A sudden or momentous change in a situation: the revolution in computer technology. (The American Heritage Dictionary, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000)
evolution: n. 1. A gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form. 2a. The process of developing.
b. Gradual development . . .
word-play: n. 1. Witty or clever verbal exchange; repartee. 2. The act or an instance of such exchange.

I can name that tune in four notes.
In 1964 the comedian and parodist Allen Sherman (1924–1973) performed a concert with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra. The program included Sherman’s reading of Peter and the Commissar, a parody on Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf with Cold War overtones (when discussing the effectiveness of an imaginary Politburo, Sherman quipped: “A camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.”), and a hilarious orchestral medley, Variations on “How Dry I Am,” which opens with a statement of the original and familiar melody (sol-do-re-mi) and continues with the beginnings of a series of familiar compositions and songs that start with the same four notes, ranging from You are my sunshine to the 1812 Overture. There’s even an inversion moment quoting one of the variations of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini.
I think most musicians have had the experience of freely associating a few notes from one melody with another. I know it’s happened to me many times—I’m sitting all dressed up at Symphony Hall surrounded by serious music lovers (and a few old men snoring), when one of those associations hits me—I chuckle and receive my wife’s elbow. And I know I amused the choir at church countless times (at least I thought so) by interrupting a rehearsal to turn a phrase from an anthem by Vaughan Williams into a Rodgers and Hart song. As a budding continuo player while a student at Oberlin, we roared one night in rehearsal turning the second trio from the last movement of Bach’s first Brandenburg Concerto into “The Lonely Goatherd” from The Sound of Music. You can’t tell me Richard Rodgers never heard Bach.
Word-play is same sort of thing. You hear a word that reminds you of another, swap them in context, and you have a pun—that high form of humor that invites such frequent elbows. It’s a matter of sound association—does that make musicians naturally inclined as punsters (otherwise known as pundits)?
I’ll give you a couple classics for free:
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) was a writer and poet, perhaps best known for her humorous commentary on urban life in America published in The New Yorker. She was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, critics, and other literary folk who gathered each day for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel (West 44th Street near Fifth Avenue) from 1919 to about 1929. Harpo Marx, Tallulah Bankhead, and Edna Ferber were among other participants. Speaking about the Round Table years later, writer and curmudgeon H. L. Mencken commented, “their ideals were those of a vaudeville actor, one who is extremely ‘in the know’ and inordinately trashy.”
One session included a contest—each member was given a word around which to construct a pun. Ms. Parker was given horticulture. Her response, “You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.”
Science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov presented his favorite pun, which involved the story of an old cattle rancher whose offspring inherited the ranch, renamed “The Focus Ranch” as a stipulation of the will. The source of the name—“Where the sun’s rays meet.” Get it—focus, sun’s rays?1

An evolutionary revolution
In the last several days I’ve experienced two artistic revolutions and as I reflected about them, the word evolution joined the fun. I couldn’t find any published etymological connection between the two words, but I can’t avoid the sound association leading to a more meaningful connection—is a revolution a re-evolution? The evolution of musical theater includes several revolutionary moments like Monteverdi’s opera, The Coronation of Poppea (1642), which stands out as a breathtaking and groundbreaking composition with a raft of soloists, a chorus, lots of orchestral music and dancing—a mid-17th-century foreshadowing of the tradition of romantic Grand Opera.
Yesterday we attended a live-by-satellite broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera of Hector Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust. The revolutionary brainchild of Peter Gelb, general manager of the Met since 2006, these performances are broadcast to nearly 800 venues, including movie theaters and concert halls, exponentially expanding the Met’s paying audience. The audiences are treated not only to huge-format excellent-quality broadcasts of the great operas, complete with “see every hair” close-ups so well known from televised sports, but also to backstage tours and interviews that give a great sense of the bustle that goes on behind the scenes. You see grand stage-sweeping shots and intimate close-ups. When the on-stage lovers are embracing, noses five inches apart and singing at the top of their gargantuan voices, one wonders if there is any hearing left when the afternoon is over. (Makes me think of the cheek-flapping films from early G-force experiments.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) created the character of Doctor Faust, a melancholy aging scholar who is contemplating suicide until he hears church bells and an Easter celebration. As he changes his mind, he is approached by Satan (Mephistopheles), who undertakes to win his soul. After several twists and turns, Satan provides Faust with the vision of a lover who ironically kills her mother using Faust’s bottle of poison as a sleep aid, trying to keep the old woman out of the way so she could encounter Faust. In the original Faustian Deal, Dr. Faust signs a pact with the Devil committing his soul to the underworld in return for freeing his lover for ascension into heaven. (After all, it wasn’t her fault that Satan made her fall in love!)
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was a revolutionary composer. His skill and insight as an orchestrator was such that his treatise on orchestration is still used in formal musical educations. He was a pioneer of the use of huge musical forces, on several occasions conducting more than a thousand musicians in performance. Berlioz originally called La Damnation de Faust a “légende dramatique”—as such it has most frequently been performed as an oratorio, only gradually evolving into a recognized part of opera repertoire.
Berlioz’s score is fantastique, contributing to the evolution of the symphonique tone poem, his interest in the form having been piqued by such masterworks as Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique. His orchestral technique is far ahead of its time. His sense of the dramatique is unique—the evil villain’s actions oblique, and the outlook for Faust’s soul is blique.
The evolution of stagecraft has been forever changed by electronics. The set for the Met’s production of Faust is a three-tiered skeleton on which the cast of characters carries on, and onto which virtual scenery is projected. The grid changes from a crucifixion scene to a bustling boozy inn to a stately mansion—from a creepy and spooky forest to the underworld and finally to heaven, all controlled by the proverbial flicking of switches. The concept is as revolutionary as the media. And I’ll tell you, watching such a progressive production in a quaint little tin-ceilinged second-story theater in a small town in Maine is surreal. Damnation and ascension complete, we walk out onto Main Street greeted by a wintery wind and the familiar sights and sounds of our little town. Revolution complete.
I think Hector Berlioz, whose imagination stunned the French public in the middle of the 19th century (200 years after the first performance of Coronation of Poppea), would have loved how the Metropolitan Opera, ostensibly but no longer that most stodgy of institutions, would present his music in such an imaginative and revolutionary way.
The other evolution of my week of revolutions was my second visit to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. I have yet to hear the extraordinary, revolutionary Rosales/Glatter-Götz organ in a live performance, but I have now had two opportunities to be with the organ in the company of Manuel Rosales in an otherwise empty hall. The visual design is fanciful enough in photographs, more so when viewing the organ from the hall. But the most fanciful is standing amongst the curved 32-foot Violone pipes that comprise the essence of the unique design. It’s a little like looking in a curvy fun-house mirror—the familiar is lost, and you feel a little disoriented. After all, the façade pipes of most organs sit obediently on an impost above the fray. To get to the “tracker console” of the Disney organ, you walk between a forest of façade pipes. Their toes are on the stage floor around the console—wind coming from who-knows-where through the floor.
Looking at the façade from inside the organ is a little like getting a backstage glimpse at the Met—you can see the clever structure that supports the façade: each pipe is curved, each pipe faces in a different direction, and there’s no apparent order to them that can be derived from musical scales, tuning systems, or chest order, as with virtually every other organ with an architectural presence. So much for obedience. (Notice that I didn’t bother to mention symmetry!)
In one sense this mighty organ represents a logical evolutionary step. In the past couple decades we’ve celebrated the design and construction of quite a few tremendous new concert hall organs. Each one has design features that build on its predecessors. A terrific amount of work has been devoted to understanding how to move enough air through an organ to produce pleasing and musical tones that can take a listener from whisper to volcano. It’s a grand achievement for a pipe organ to “stand up to” a modern symphony orchestra, which is capable of bewildering volumes of sound. To achieve that with modest wind pressures and slider chests is especially impressive.
There’s nothing quite like the bass response of a symphony orchestra. No great conductor is willing to wait a nano-second for a bass note to develop. The bottom notes from the orchestra’s tuba, trombone, contrabassoon, cellos and basses, and timpani are in the listener’s ears right now. Having spent a lifetime working to make organs sound their best, I can remember myriad struggles with bass response. Think of that low note in the Pedal Bourdon that yodels a little around the second partial before it settles on its pitch, or the note in the Contra Bombarde that offers a half-second of pfffff before you hear a note. No way. The organs that play with modern orchestras have to perform with their orchestral neighbors. On the Disney organ it’s possible to draw a dozen or stops at 32- and 16-foot pitch and play staccato notes in the bottom octaves—surreal.
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On the score of his massive Grande Messe des morts (Requiem), Berlioz notes, “The number [of performers] indicated is only relative. If space permits, the chorus may be doubled or tripled, and the orchestra be proportionally increased. But in the event of an exceptionally large chorus, say 700 to 800 voices, the entire chorus should only be used for the Dies Irae, the Tuba Mirum, and the Lacrymosa, the rest of the movements being restricted to 400 voices.”
The score calls for 4 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 English horns, 4 clarinets, 8 bassoons, 12 horns, 4 cornets and 4 tubas (in the orchestra), 4 brass choirs [Choir 1 to the north: 4 cornets, 4 trombones, 2 tubas; Choir 2 to the east: 4 trumpets, 4 trombones; Choir 3 to the west: 4 trumpets, 4 trombones; Choir 4 to the south: 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, 4 ophicleides (usually substituted by tubas)], a battery of percussionists, 16 timpani played by 10 timpanists, 2 bass drums, 4 tamtams, 10 pairs of cymbals, 25 first violins, 25 second violins, 20 violas, 20 violoncellos, 18 double basses, 80 women’s voices (divided between sopranos and altos), 60 tenors, 70 basses, and tenor soloist.
Alas, no organ. And he thought it would be a grand performance.
But the nearly equally ambitious (minus the four spatial brass choirs) Te Deum is scored for 4 flutes, 4 oboes (one doubling on cor anglais), 4 clarinets (one doubling on bass clarinet), 4 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 cornets, 6 trombones, 2 ophicleides/tubas, timpani, 4 tenor drums, bass drum, cymbals, tenor solo, 2 large 3-part (STB) mixed choirs, 1 large unison children’s choir, strings, and (yes, Virginia) organ.
I’d love to hear that piece performed in Disney Hall. Given available space, they’d probably have to settle for about 300 singers, but that’d do. In the hall’s spectacular acoustics I’m sure I’d be able to hear every “K”, every “T”—and while most vowels would be clear, I’m afraid barely “O’s.” (Sorry, Hector.)

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The upper class
I’m thinking about virtuosity these days. Last Tuesday, October 10, the New York Times published a tribute to Joan Sutherland following her death on the 8th. That day (noted as 10-10-10) happened to be my mother’s birthday and I enjoyed the coincidence as I remembered a family episode from the late 1960s. My parents are great music lovers and the instrument of choice when I was a young teenager was the then cutting-edge KLH stereo with amplifier and turntable in one sleek little unit and separate speakers. It seemed super-modern in those days of the console hi-fi built in the shape of a credenza. My father, an Episcopal priest, had a routine of closing himself into the living room on Saturday nights with a little analog typewriter on a card table and writing his sermon to the Saturday night live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra hosted by Richard L. Kaye on WCRB, 102.5 FM.

Joan
My mother was devoted to recordings by Joan Sutherland as confirmed by the Winchester, Massachusetts police department. When our house was burglarized, mother was asked over the phone if she could identify the stereo. Not being much of techno-wiz, all she could say was she knew there was a Joan Sutherland record on the turntable. Good enough to reclaim the prized machine.
The piece in Tuesday’s Times, written by the paper’s long-time astute and influential music critic Anthony Tommasini, shared story after story of triumphant debuts, thunderous ovations, immense technical facility, monumental stage presence (in every sense of the word), and a flexibility of stylistic intuition and pure ability that allowed this one artist to be revered as perhaps the greatest living interpreter and presenter of the operatic roles of Handel and Wagner—two musical worlds that are afterworlds apart.
Miss Sutherland was also humbly self-deprecating, referring to her figure in her autobiography as flat in the bust but wide in the rib cage. Tommasini quoted her as saying that certain dresses “could make her look like ‘a large column walking about the stage.’”

The supremacy of youth
I had a brief personal contact with her. When I was an undergraduate organ major at Oberlin, I was, naturally enough, accompanist to a gaggle of singers. Joan Sutherland was to give a recital in Akron, about two hours away, and I rented a car from the college fleet to haul a bunch to hear her. We had terrific seats very close to the stage so my youthfully discerning and supremely knowledgeable companions could witness every tic. I don’t remember what she sang or who was the accompanist, but I sure do remember that, inspired by a couple little bubbles we heard in the Diva’s voice, one of my flock greeted her in the receiving line asking if she had a cold.
Another lovely moment with virtuosi in my Oberlin career was the morning after the long-awaited artist recital when Itzhak Perlman sat in the student lounge chatting with the students. A lot of classes were cut that morning. I’ll not forget his bright smile and twinkling eyes as he casually shared thoughts about music-making while drinking vending-machine coffee.

Re-creation as recreation
Vladimir Horowitz was one of the greatest virtuosi of the twentieth century, and while I never had an opportunity to hear him in live performance, I’ve seen and heard plenty on television and recordings. He was inspiring to watch. His posture had his face close to the keyboard and his hands were pure magic and mystery. The piano was made a chameleon with a range of tones as great as any hundred-knob organ. Of virtuosity, Mr. Horowitz wrote,

In order to become a truly re-creative performer, and not merely an instrumental wizard, one needs three ingredients in equal measure: a trained, disciplined mind, full of imagination; a free and giving heart; and a Gradus ad Parnassum command of instrumental skill. Few musicians ever reach artistic heights with these three ingredients evenly balanced. This is what I have been striving for all my life.

I love the use of the word re-creative, implying that once the music is created by the composer, the performer with free and giving heart can re-create the music. Earlier in the same quotation, Horowitz writes,

Classical, Romantic, Modern, Neo-Romantic! These labels may be convenient for musicologists, but they have nothing to do with composing or performing… All music is the expression of feelings, and feelings do not change over the centuries… Purists would have us believe that music from the so-called Classical period should be performed with emotional restraint, while so-called Romantic music should be played with emotional freedom. Such advice has often resulted in exaggeration: overindulgent, uncontrolled performances of Romantic music, and dry, sterile, dull performance of Classical music.
The notation of a composer is a mere skeleton that the performer must endow with flesh and blood, so that the music comes to life and speaks to an audience. The belief that going back to an Urtext will ensure a convincing performance is an illusion. An audience does not respond to intellectual concepts, only to the communication of feelings.
He speaks directly to the conundrum inspired by concepts like Historically Informed Performance. It’s essential to play music with deep knowledge of the practices of the times in which it was created, but never at the expense of the “communication of feelings”—the imparting of depth and delight to the listener. To any listener.

Biggsy
As a teenager growing up in the Boston area, I had quite a few opportunities to hear E. Power Biggs play recitals, especially on the beautiful Flentrop organ that he had installed in the hall formerly known as the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now called Busch Hall), a reverberant stone space on the campus of Harvard University. That organ was perhaps best know then (and still is today?) for the series of recordings, E. Power Biggs Plays Bach Organ Favorites, a fabulously successful series of recordings that gave both organ aficionados and professionals a new perspective on the music of Bach. I never questioned it then, and the group of organists I traveled with didn’t talk much about Virgil Fox except as some decadent music killer. Of course, now I realize that those two artists represented two wildly divergent points of view, both valid and both influential.
In his book Pulling Out All the Stops, Craig Whitney, former senior editor of the New York Times, presented an eloquent history of the relationship-feud-competition between Biggs and Fox. It continues telling the story of the twentieth-century American pipe organ by chronicling the lives and careers of Ernest Skinner, G. Donald Harrison, and Charles Fisk—a great read that still makes a terrific Christmas gift for anyone you know who’s interested in the organ.
In the fall of my freshman year at Oberlin, the new Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated with a recital played by Marie-Claire Alain. A galaxy of stars of the organ world were there for an exciting weekend of discussions, lectures, and concerts, and I was fortunate to be chosen with a classmate to give Biggs and his wife Peggy a tour of the conservatory building and its organs. It was thrilling to spend that time with them, and while Biggs’s arthritis meant he was not up to playing, he had us demonstrate practice organs for him. We ended the evening sharing beers.
My girlfriend at the time was still in high school in Winchester. She didn’t believe my story, so went to meet Biggs at a record signing at the Harvard Coop, and Biggs corroborated for me: “Oh yes, he was the bearded one.” (I’ve had the beard since high school—it’s never been off.)

Yo-Yo
In the panoply of living virtuosi, perhaps none is more esteemed and admired than Yo-Yo Ma. He took the world by storm as a very young man, playing all the important literature the world across. The rich tone he produces from the instruments he plays warms the heart and feeds the soul, and his mature collaborations with other musicians have proven his versatility and inquisitiveness. And I’ll not soon forget his self-deprecation made public in his appearance on Sesame Street. The cool-dude, dark-shades, saxophone-playing Muppet, Hoots the Owl, greeted the great musician, “Yo, Yo-Yo Ma, ma man!” Wonderful.
A few minutes ago I took you to Winchester, Massachusetts, where my father was rector of the Parish of the Epiphany, a thriving and dynamic place with a wonderful music program and an organ built by C.B. Fisk. It happened that Yo-Yo Ma and his family lived in town. His wife was a Sunday School teacher and his children were part of the place. He asked my father for an appointment at which he asked if he would be allowed to play in the church on Christmas Eve. Dad responded showing the respect for church musicians that has so inspired me, “You’ll need to speak with Larry, the organist. Planning music here is his responsibility.” Larry Berry did not have to consider for very long.
Dad remembers that as he and the other clergy were robing for that special Christmas Eve service, a couple obviously unfamiliar with the familiar knocked on the obscure back door that opened into the clergy robing room. “Is this where the concert is?” asked the boor. One of the clergy replied, “Actually, we’re celebrating a birth here tonight.”
Yo-Yo Ma also appeared a couple times to play for the children’s Sunday morning chapel service, to the amazement and excitement of the Sunday School teachers. I was not present for any of those experiences, but I’m still touched by the humility that would lead such a great artist to make such a gift.

Jimmy
Wendy and I have seats at Symphony Hall for the “Thursday A” series of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. James Levine has been music director of that great band since the retirement of the organ-deploring Seiji Ozawa, and we’ve been treated to some of the most extraordinary music making since “Jimmy” came to town. His programming is innovative and imaginative, and his rapport with the orchestra is obvious and thrilling. Our seats are in a balcony above stage right, so every time he turns to the concertmaster we feel we can hear everything he says—he’s talking and singing all the time as he conducts. His consummate musicianship is communicated with the musicians of the orchestra, and through them to the audience. There’s something very special about the sound of Levine’s music. Mr. Levine is well known for the admiration his collaborators feel for him, made abundantly clear in the up-close interviews of Metropolitan Opera stars during the HD-simulcasts of the Met’s performances.
A pure example of Levine’s facility happened on Saturday, October 9. That afternoon at 1:00 he led the Met’s performance of Wagner’s Das Rheingold and flew to Boston in time to lead the BSO and Tanglewood Festival Chorus in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at 8:00. Holy cow! And this from a man who missed much of last season because of serious illness. Hey Jimmy, what do you want to do tomorrow?

There’s nothing to it
The thing about virtuosity is that it takes infinite effort to make it look easy. And when it can look easy it sounds good. A student musician might tackle a great masterwork and exult that he “got through it” when the performance was finally over. “Getting through it” is not the apex of the musical or artistic experience.
I think it’s correct to say that a virtuoso is born. Unless one is endowed with particular gifts, one cannot become a virtuoso. But he who is born with those gifts and doesn’t embrace them by dedicating his life to nurturing and developing them squanders what he has been given. The musician who plays scales and arpeggios by the hour achieves the appearance of effortlessness. The musician whose power of thought, concentration, and memory allows him to absorb and recall countless dizzying scores achieves the ability to knock off performances of multiple masterworks in a single day. Have you ever stopped to wonder at the spectacle of the great performer having to “cancel due to illness,” only to be replaced at the last minute by an artist who dashes across the country, roars from the airport to the concert hall, combs his hair, washes his hands, and walks on stage to play a concerto with a strange conductor, a strange orchestra, and a strange piano? There’s nothing to it.

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I feel privileged that my work brings me in contact with some of our greatest instruments and therefore, some of our greatest players. These thoughts on virtuosity are fed by the many thrilling moments I’ve had chatting with a great player at the console of a legendary organ. He draws a stop or pushes a piston and rattles off a passage, tries it on another combination, tries it with different phrasing or inflection. His conversation reveals that he is always thinking, always questioning, always searching for the actual essence of the music. There’s a depth of understanding of the relationship between the instrument and the acoustics of the room, between the intentions of the composer of the will of the re-creative performer.
Wendy and I have just gotten back to our sublet apartment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. This afternoon we heard Ken Cowan play the dedicatory recital of the large new Schoenstein organ at St. James’ Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue at 71st Street. There was a large-screen video monitor set up on the chancel steps showing Ken’s work at the console with three different angles. There’s a great debate about whether or not this detracts from the experience. I love it. The organ is alone in its concealment of its players. Excepting the relatively few concert venues where the console is placed on the stage, most organists are completely hidden from view when they play. The extreme is the organ with Rückpositiv in a rear gallery. (I remember one concert where the organist was sitting on the bench before the doors were opened and announced he was about to start by playing a simple chord on a Principal. The audience never even laid eyes on him before he started. I can understand the desire to allow the music to speak for itself, but isn’t the performance of music a human endeavor and a human achievement?)
It’s great fun to watch an artist like Ken work the console, and seeing it on a clear screen adds greatly to the experience in my opinion. And of course, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch! The orchestration of Ken’s playing is the point. And of course, the Schoenstein organ is symphonic in design and intention—a great marriage between artist and instrument. It was a wonderful concert—fascinating programming and great artistry in a beautiful church building.

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This little string of remembrances, inspired by Joan Sutherland’s obituary, seems to be about the humanness of music-making. Some great musicians are haughty and unapproachable. I was once eating in a restaurant at the same time (not the same table) as Lorin Maazel, then conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. He stood out because he stood up—when the waiter was ready to take his order he stood and announced the orders of everyone in his party. I don’t know if they knew beforehand what they would be eating. It seemed to me to be the performance of “a very great man.” I doubt he would have graced the Sunday School class of a suburban Episcopal church.
When a great virtuoso connects with the audience as a human being everyone learns a lot. As Horowitz said, it’s about communicating feelings. ■