In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of The Organ Clearing House.

Life’s rhythm
Working with the Organ Clearing House is all about travel. Most organbuilders spend most of their time in the workshop building an instrument, and then go on the road to install it. Ours is mostly site work. The OCH crew is busy dismantling or installing organs, shipping organs and organ parts around the country, or preparing organ chambers for the installation of new instruments built by others. This means that we travel frequently—sometimes it feels like constantly. Many of our trips last two or three weeks. We arrive in a city, settle into a hotel, find our way around, and establish a temporary life rhythm of work, rest, meals, and calling home.
It’s fun to visit the sites that make a distant city special. While on business trips, I’ve visited art museums from Whitney to Walker and from Getty to Guggenheim. I’ve participated in a census of migrating whales in southern California, been to baseball games in a dozen cities, and attended a performance of A Prairie Home Companion at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul. I’ve worshipped in many of America’s great churches. On one notable Sunday morning, I attended the radio broadcast at the Mormon Tabernacle, a nine o’clock service at the Episcopal cathedral, and eleven-thirty at the Roman Catholic cathedral, all in Salt Lake City. I’ve visited organbuilding shops all over the country. And restaurants—sushi in Los Angeles, an Argentinean steak house in Dallas, Dungeness crab and salmon in Seattle, and I’ve mentioned before the Brazilian steak house in Philadelphia next to the Wanamaker store.

“If you got to ask, you ain’t got it . . . ”
(Fats Waller answering a fan’s question about rhythm)
Exotic and exciting to be sure, but often while traveling I miss the rhythm of life at home—chores, meals, errands, the familiarity of place. And while many evenings on the road bring thrilling new experiences, others are dull and lonely. Recently I ate alone in a restaurant in New York, where a young man was playing the piano. The food was good, service friendly, and there was a pleasant bustle in the place, but the piano playing was deadly. He sat with rigid spine, ninety-degree angle between neck and chin, never moving his head. He was playing standard crooner-type stuff as if he were an animatron in a department-store Christmas tableau. (Some- plink, plink, where- plink, plink, over the rainbow- plink . . . skies- plink, plink, are- plink, plink . . . ) Yikes.
As he went from one song to another, I reflected on rhythm, how on the one hand it’s important for musical rhythm to be firm and clear, even dependable, and on the other hand it’s essential that rhythm be flexible and alive. A listener is troubled by the unpredictability of poor rhythm. A congregation is afraid to sing if the organist’s rhythm is untrustworthy. But if it’s too rigid or too strict, it stops being music. It’s like the little girl dressed up in a starched pinafore, afraid to move.
Once at lunch with colleagues (it was the Brazilian place in Philadelphia, you really have to try it!), we were joined by a lover of organ music who was also a classic-car enthusiast. He talked about driving on a beautiful road in a terrific car, up and down hills, slowing a little before a curve and accelerating through it, taking a moment to notice a beautiful view or a particular building. He compared this with musical performance. A great musician, he said, knows how to step on the gas just enough to make a passage thrilling, how to slow slightly to notice a special sight, how to put the pressure on when things get exciting.
Listening to Mr. Plink-Plink in New York, I thought of that Philadelphia lunch where all of us around the table responded to the driving metaphor. I loved the images from that conversation. I pictured an organist wearing Great Race-style goggles, gloves, and scarf playing a snazzy toccata.
Having never owned a Porsche, I didn’t know until recently that the automaker publishes a magazine for its customers. One of our neighbors does drive a Porsche, and he thought I’d be interested in an article about a pipe organ that he read in the Porsche magazine.
In 2002, Porsche established a new factory in Leipzig, Germany, joining luminaries like Franz Liszt, J. S. Bach, Johann Goethe, Robert and Clara Schumann, and Kurt Masur as good citizens. As the firm was introducing itself to the city, it provided funding for the renovation of the great Ladegast organ at St. Nikolaikirche, the “other” church in the town where Bach made music. Hermann Eule of Bautzen, Germany, was the organbuilder, and the artists at Porsche won a major design prize for the keydesk. (See photo.) Hang on to your hats! Form follows function? Careful of your tempos. And be sure to note the company logo on the right-hand end of the keydesk.

“I got rhythm . . . ”
Swiss musician and educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) is best known for the development of Eurhythmics, a study of motion as it relates to the performance of music. As a student at Oberlin in the 1970s, I was lucky to participate in a special month-long seminar in Eurhythmics, led by Oberlin’s retired professor of Eurhythmics Inda Howland, who had studied with and was a disciple of Dalcroze.
There’s a touching anecdote about how Dalcroze was led to develop this specialty. He was working with a piano student whose rhythm was poor enough that he had trouble playing even beats. Looking out his window across the campus where he taught, Dalcroze happened to see this student striding along with purposeful rhythmic footsteps. It was clear to him that the student had good rhythm at least in his walking, and Dalcroze was inspired to understand how to connect the easy rhythms found in everyday life, such as footsteps and heart beats, with musical performance.
Dalcroze exercises are tailored to emulate natural and easy forms of rhythm. You toss or bounce a ball back and forth in musical time with a partner for example, establishing a beat and letting the bounce of the ball occupy one beat, two beats, or a four-beat measure. The pace of the rhythm is defined by the arc of the bounce—it floats or soars, giving the image or feeling of freedom within rhythmic definition. If it’s a four-beat bounce, it has a life and airiness not found in the pile-driving, one-beat bounce, a great demonstration of rhythmic principles.
Where do we find rhythm in our lives? Drive on a concrete highway. There are expansion joints every fifty feet or so and the tires of your car go ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump. When I was a kid these rhythms inspired family singing: “I’ve been working on the rail- (ba-dump) road (ba-dump), all (ba-dump) the live- (ba-) long (ba) day, (ba-dump) . . .” My car’s directional signals have a triplet beat to them and make me think of the subject of Mendelssohn’s C-minor fugue (Prelude and Fugue in C minor) when I sit at a traffic light: (ba-dee, ba-dah, ba-dee, ba-dah . . .).
Nowadays, carpenters often use pneumatic nail guns that are loaded with cartridges of nails or staples. But watch a skilled carpenter using an old-fashioned “analog” hammer—it’s a pleasure to see his natural rhythm as even, free strokes of the hammer send the nail into the wood in even increments. Twenty nails, a hundred strokes, no bruised thumbs, I feel another song coming on (and it’s not If I had a hammer . . . ).
We think of rhythms in larger cycles. Where we live, the ocean’s high tides are about twelve hours and twenty or thirty minutes apart. It’s not an exactly regular cycle, but high tide advances by about forty-five minutes each day. It affects the rhythm of life in subtle ways. My wife takes a water shuttle to her office. If it’s low tide at seven-thirty in the morning, the ramp to the boat is dramatically steeper than if it’s high tide—an issue in winter weather. The cycles make it be something like high tide one Monday, low tide the next Monday.
We tell time in days, weeks, and months. The tides tell time in lunar months—the tide clock on our wall counts lunar seconds. For centuries, the British Navy used tide cycles as pay periods—there are thirteen lunar months in a year so there were thirteen paychecks.
Ocean tides give us the image of ebb and flow, and we translate that into larger cycles like the rhythm of holiday seasons. As I write, Lent has just started. We’re coming out of the post-Christmas ebb, getting ready to step on the gas and accelerate into Easter with its strong jubilant rhythms (a-ha-ha-ha-ha lay-hay looo-ooo ya). Many church musicians see post-Easter ebbs, followed by special services at Pentecost, church-school Sunday, and something around high-school graduation, all of which leads into the quiet and regular pace of Pentecost through the summer, when choirs are on recess, there’s no Sunday school, services are moved to the chapel, fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high . . . one of these mornings you’re gonna rise up singing, so hush little baby, don’t you cry.
I’m thrilled by the rhythm of good hymn playing. A steady and stately tempo, quick enough that the average congregant can sing a phrase in one breath, slow enough that everyone can sing all the words. Some ebb and flow of registration—not only playing each stanza on a different setting or manual, but including some Swell-box action and a knob or two to accentuate the text within the stanza. The organist who can’t think of anything special to do with stanza three of Hymn 432 in The 1982 Hymnal (O praise ye the Lord!) isn’t worth listening to:

O praise ye the Lord! All things that give sound;
each jubilant chord re-echo around;
loud organs, his glory forth tell in deep tone,
and sweet harp, the story of what he hath done.
Doesn’t that imply some pistons being pushed? (It was sung at our wedding and it gets me every time!)
Stanza three of O little town of Bethlehem gives another registration hint: How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given. Please don’t tear into that with mixtures and trumpets a-popping.
Or how about Dear Lord and Father of Mankind (I know, I know, it’s not inclusive . . .), stanza five:

Breathe through the hearts of our desire thy coolness and thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire; speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.
That’s one hymn I wouldn’t end on General 8.
The organist reads the words and thinks of stop combinations, rhythmic liberties, commas inviting breaths. The organbuilder thinks of quiet stop actions, fast pistons, swell shutters that don’t squeak, bass pipes that speak promptly. How can your organist play rhythmically if low C says fffffwwwaah?
And this is where the art of organbuilding really gets special. Of all the musical instruments, the organ is the most mechanical. Any medium-sized organ has thousands upon thousands of moving parts, little things pushing and pulling, huffing and puffing. Switches open and close, magnets are energized by the hundred, huge masses of wood move silently as a swell pedal is moved by the organist. A rhythmical poke at a toe stud gives a rhythmic response. No organist, chorister, or congregant has to wait or be jarred by a machine responding a split-second late. A good tracker action operates in real time. A good electric or electro-pneumatic action operates at the speed of light: 670,616,629.2 miles per hour or 186,282.397 miles per second. Let’s face it, we can argue about controlling the speed of attack but there’s no appreciable difference in response time.
The machines we build that blow air into organ pipes must support the player with instant response so the machine can vanish into the art. That achieved, the rhythm can be free, the music alive, and we can leave Mr. Plink-Plink sitting stiffly on a piano bench in New York, stifling an otherwise pleasant dinner, while we accelerate into a turn with the sun shining and the wind in our hair.?

A Night at the Opera

When you think of a night at the opera, what images flash through your mind? Stunning sets and costumes? Brilliant singing? Melodramatic stories transformed into staged magic? The thrill of a lifetime to witness such ambitious performances? Or do you imagine fur coats and diamonds, limousines, $200 orchestra seats, standing room lines, no late seating?
I have friends in the Boston area who make special trips to attend performances at the Met. This means traveling to New York ($100 each for the train), staying in a hotel ($300), restaurant meals (say $200), and expensive tickets ($150 each for moderate-priced seats)—a thousand dollars! How accessible is that?
The future audience for opera is today’s children, but how many families can consider such an expensive outing? And how many children can manage a three-hour commitment to sit in a seat and pay attention? What is the future of the art form if it’s not really available to young people? We who are serious about the performance of serious music are used to strict rules of etiquette at concerts. We never applaud between movements. We scorn those who arrive late or leave early; we’re openly derisive of those who leave early and then return to their seats. We focus on authentic performances of complete pieces; we take all of the repeats. We expect our listeners to accept the music on our terms, insisting that we are speaking for the composers. These are all important rules. We should stick to them. But I think we need to admit that these rules apply more to those who are already appreciators of serious music, and that they are not great tools for audience development.
In August of 2006, Peter Gelb succeeded Joseph Volpe as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Mr. Gelb began his working life as an office boy for the great impresario Sol Hurok, presenter of more than 4,000 artists including Marian Anderson, Pavlova, and Andrés Segovia. You can find his biography on the Met’s website . Realizing the importance of offering opera to children, and stating that most operas are simply too long for children, he has spearheaded a striking effort to build tomorrow’s audience. Under his leadership, the Met has created an edited version of Julie Taymor’s 2004 production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte especially for audiences of children. From its typical duration of three hours and ten minutes, the production was cut to 90 minutes.
On Monday, January 1, 2007, the New York Times printed two articles about this revolutionary presentation. Times music critic Anthony Tommasini’s article, “An Opera at the Met That’s Real and ‘Loud’,” reports that “the overture and several ensembles and arias were cut. Other arias were abridged through some very deft trims.” Poet J. D. McClatchy, a lecturer in English at Yale University, created a new free English translation of the libretto. And as perhaps the most important vote of support, James Levine conducted. The matinee performance on Saturday, December 30, was sold out, and Tommasini reported, “Actually the matinee clocked in at close to two hours, but few of the children seemed to mind. The audience was remarkably attentive and well behaved. Of course one strict Met protocol—if you leave the auditorium you are not allowed re-entry until intermission—was wisely ditched for the day, so children could take restroom breaks.”
When Tommasini interviewed some children in the audience, they told him that the singing was too loud. He challenged them, “when children hear amplified music everywhere, even channeled right into their ears through headphones, how could un-amplified singing seem too loud?” They responded that it wasn’t too loud to listen to, but that they “never thought voices could do that.” Tommasini went on, “So their reaction was not a complaint about excessive volume, but rather an attempt to explain the awesome impression” made on them by the Met’s singers.
The other article about this extravaganza was written by Campbell Robertson under the title, “Mozart, Now Singing at a Theater Near You.” As if the abridged edition weren’t radical enough, the Metropolitan Opera went a step further and arranged for the performance to be simulcast live to 100 movie theaters across America, in Canada, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway. The numbers were not all in at press time, but Robertson reported that the average attendance was at 90% of capacity—of the 60 American theaters presenting the simulcast, 48 were sold out. Tickets were priced at $18. The article was full of enthusiastic responses from parents and children. I imagine Mr. Gelb was pleased.
What a radical approach to a seemingly inaccessible art form. If there were 200 seats in each of those 100 theaters and an average of 90% attendance, that’s 18,000 tickets. Add 3,800 seats and 195 standing-room places in the Metropolitan Opera House* and you get 21,995. Now that’s an audience!
This kind of radical programming is not for everyone. We have to admit that the diamonds-and-fur crowd is essential to the Met. Take a look at the program book of any major musical ensemble and you can see who gives what. I have the program from a recent concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in my hands in which is published the list of contributors to the orchestra’s recent Capital and Endowment Campaign. There are three names in the $2,000,000 and up category, eight in $1,000,000–$1,999,999, and seven in $500,000–$999,999. Elsewhere in the same book is the list of supporters of the Higginson Society, which “embodies the deep commitment to supporting musical excellence continuing the legacy of the orchestra’s founder and first benefactor, Henry Lee Higginson.” This list is a little closer to earth with the highest gifts at around $100,000; there are 107 sponsors ($5000–$9999) and 281 members ($2500–$4999). These lists fill eight full pages.
While I’d like to imagine that many of these $2500 to $2,000,000 supporters would approve of such innovative programming as I describe from the Met, I bet that many would prefer to attend a “real” performance of Die Zauberflöte. So of course the Met continues to offer their familiar fare. Go to and you’ll see everything from Andrea Chénier to Eugene Onegin to Butterfly to The First Emperor (the premier of a very ambitious piece by Chinese composer Tan Dun commissioned by the Met, which we heard on the radio this past Saturday).
What does all this have to do with the organ? When’s the last time you saw a family with young children in the audience at an organ recital? What’s your attitude about audience etiquette at recitals presented at your church? How welcoming are the concerts presented in your community? And who will be listening to organ music in your town 50 years from now?
We could promote the simulcast trick for special recitals—something flashy from Walt Disney Hall might fill a few theaters—but there are exciting organs in many (hundreds, thousands?) locales that could attract big crowds of young people if handled right. What would you play if you were guaranteed a full audience of teenagers? Chorale preludes of Johann Gottfried Walther? Elevations by Frescobaldi? Don’t get me wrong—I love that music, I’ve played it and many other things like it. But with respect to Johann and Girolamo, it’s just not the thrall of a 21st-century kid.
Do we have to degrade the organ to make it enticing? I don’t think so, but we have to be creative. Do we cheapen our musicianship by “catering” to the masses? On the other hand, what good are we without the masses? I’ve heard colleagues refer to the lay public as “the great unwashed.” I object to this characterization. Does that make us the “great washed?” (If so, that precludes us from getting “down and dirty” with our music-making.) My objection comes from the feeling that while we certainly expect the respect of our audiences (in both sacred and secular settings), we often fail to offer reciprocal respect. And in that failing, we are shooting ourselves in the collective foot. Just as a wife might compliment her husband for his good taste in women, the organist might applaud the audience for its good taste in choosing their afternoon’s entertainment. And what better way to applaud the audience than to reward it with a thrilling, enlightening, accessible program?
I participate as a member of the board of the Friends of the DaPonte String Quartet, a non-profit organization that supports, promotes, and presents the quartet in regular concerts in mid-coast Maine. In addition to some 30 concerts a year in the home region, they frequently play in distant cities, acting as musical ambassadors from the small towns in which they live. It’s a wonderful organization with a strong audience, and it’s impossible to measure the advantages of having such an institution in a small town. But there’s an inherent struggle. How do we balance the artistic ideals and aspirations of the quartet with the pressures of meeting the budget? The fact is the choice is never that clear. Of course the audience wants to hear the classic string quartet repertory. Of course the quartet wants to explore new music, new concepts, and new challenges. Of course, everyone wants to play and attend concerts of music that is beautiful, uplifting, and stimulating. And of course all of us would like to see more children attending the concerts. It’s a matter of balance.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra rewards its generous donors with “Pre-Concert Talks” presented by leading musicologists before every concert and with museum-quality displays about the composers’ life and work. An educated audience will be more receptive to the unfamiliar.
I was struck by what I read in the New York Times about the Metropolitan Opera. For such a venerable institution to undertake such a radical program should be an example to all who care about the future of the arts. Imagine the expense. A special translation, editing all those scores and parts, recasting the production to allow for a new pace of set and costume changes and lighting cues, relearning and re-rehearsing that most familiar of operas so singers were familiar with the cuts. And don’t forget the paperwork to arrange for all those theaters and organizing the simulcasts. The whole adventure must have cost a fortune, no doubt supplied by well-briefed donors. It’s fun to picture all those children running up and down the grand staircases, covering their ears at the high notes from the Queen of the Night, and going home looking forward to the next time they get to go to the Met. Or the symphony. Or a string quartet concert. Or an organ recital—now playing at a theater (or a church) near you. Make it happen.
* http://www.metoperafamily.org/met opera/about/whoweare/faq/house.aspx

Pay attention

Once I spent an afternoon with a friend, dare I say lover, sitting on a rock at the seashore. The tide was coming in, and we were sitting there long enough to watch the water gain the shore one pebble at a time, until it was covering our feet. It broke in little rivulets around the stones, moved quickly to fill in hollows, and floated the sprigs of rockweed. Clams sensed its approach and gave their little squirts from under the sand, and hermit crabs scuttled along discovering new territory. It was a magical time, and I remember marveling at how gentle the motion was but what a huge force is the tide.

We live on a tidal river in Maine. There is a freshwater source about five miles up from us, but for the twelve miles between the Gulf of Maine and our village, it’s fully tidal with the water level rising and falling between ten and twelve feet twice each day, depending on the cycle of the moon. For most of its length, the river is between a half-mile and one-and-a-half miles wide, but about three miles from the Gulf of Maine, there’s a spot where the entire tidal flood passes through a passage that’s just a few hundred feet wide. Tens of thousands of tons of water race through the narrows every minute—it’s a dramatic demonstration of the power of the tide as eight or nine square miles of ten-foot-deep water race by. And the amazing thing is that the flow reverses with each tide cycle. When the ocean drops below that of the river confined above the narrows, the water flows toward the sea until the levels equalize, the current slows, stops, and reverses. 

There’s a fascinating and huge example of tidal flow through a narrow passage at the western end of the Mediterranean Sea—the Strait of Gibraltar. The Strait is not wide enough to allow the entire Mediterranean to pass through with each tide, so at the eastern end the Adriatic, Ionian, and Aegean Seas around Albania, Greece, and Turkey have no perceptible tides. It’s a little unnerving for someone from New England to see a ship on salt water tied up to a fixed cement pier. At home where the tide can be as much as twelve feet, every boat has to be tied to a floating dock.

The grateful church

As much as I love the ocean, it’s pretty rare for me to sit still on a rock for an entire tide, and it makes me wonder about the people who first noticed, and then bothered to understand the phenomenon. Think of the patience it took to sit there watching night after day after night. Mr. Tide would have had to make the connection between the motion of the water and the passage of the moon across the sky, so the realization that the moon orbits around the earth was part of the project. The fact that tides can be accurately predicted years ahead is the result of millions of hours of observation.

Then think of the people who deduced by looking at the stars that the earth is simultaneously and continually orbiting the sun and spinning on its own axis. People like Copernicus and Galileo must have been very stubborn men to have had the patience to sit gazing at the sky for years.

On September 9, 1998, Hal Hellman published an article in the Washington Post that opened:

On June 22, 1633, Galileo Galilei was put on trial at Inquisition Headquarters in Rome. All of the magnificent powers of the Roman Catholic Church seemed arrayed against the famous scientist. Under the threat of torture, imprisonment, and even burning at the stake, he was forced, on his knees, ‘to abjure, curse, and detest’ a lifetime of brilliant thought and labor.

In the fall of 1980, Pope John Paul II ordered that the evidence against Galileo be reconsidered, and he was acquitted in 1992.

Just keep writing

Mozart lived for about thirty-five years and wrote well over 600 pieces of music. Schubert wrote about 800 pieces and lived less than thirty-two years. If we assume that each had twenty-five productive years as a composer, they each would have about 219,000 total hours to work with (25 x 365 x 24). Some of that time was spent sleeping and eating, some was spent on the logistics of daily life. How much of their total time on earth did those guys spend putting ink on paper? How long would it take you to simply copy the score of Don Giovanni, let alone write it for the first time?

The art of Aristide

Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–1899) was one of history’s greatest organbuilders. He’s on my mind a lot these days because I recently bought a copy of the superb documentary The Genius of Cavaillé-Coll released by Fugue State Films, and I’ve watched it several times. Buy your copy from the catalogue of the Organ Historical Society. If you have any affinity at all for the music of Franck, Widor, Dupré, Guilmant, Tournemire, Vierne, or any of the composers of French organ music since about 1835, you owe it to yourself to see this film. (See the review by Gene Bedient in the July issue of The Diapason.)

The Genius of Cavaillé-Coll tells of his childhood in Montpellier, located on the Mediterranean coast near enough to the Strait of Gibraltar to have tides of around one-and-a-half feet. It tells how Gioachino Rossini was exposed to the work of the young Cavaillé-Coll and encouraged him to move to Paris. And it documents his extraordinary career—how he won his first major contract when in his twenties, and how his imaginative innovations changed the world and music of the pipe organ profoundly and permanently. 

Cavaillé-Coll watched and listened to people playing wind instruments, and noticed that a trumpet player, for example, blew harder into his instrument to reach higher notes. So he divided his windchests, feeding higher wind pressure to higher notes, allowing solo stops like the Harmonic Flute to achieve a soaring quality.

Before Cavaillé-Coll’s innovations, changes of registration and dynamics were achieved by changing manuals or physically moving stop knobs. He divided his windchests across the other axis, separating mutations, reeds, and higher-pitched stops from the foundations—sixteen, eight, and four-foot flue stops. He invented the ventil—an air switch operated by the organist’s foot—that controlled the flow air to the chest with the reeds and mutations. This allowed the organist to “prepare” combinations of stops that could be added to a registration with a flick of the toe.

As Cavaillé-Coll’s organs grew larger and more complex, he incorporated the Barker Lever, an ingenious device that pneumatically magnifies the power and travel of an organ’s mechanical key action, reducing dramatically the force needed from the organist to play keys that open valves against high pressures, and with multiple couplers engaged. This allowed the effective size of organs to increase. The film tells the scurrilous story of politics and smear campaigns that finally allowed Cavaillé-Coll the free use of the Barker Lever, which had been developed by a competitor who controlled its use.

Cavaillé-Coll was influenced by the concurrent development of the symphony orchestra. He considered the organ comparable to the symphony, emphasizing the importance of solo voices, the ability to change combinations of sounds instantly, and the entire organ as a single mass of tone, capable of seamless dramatic crescendos through the vast dynamic range. Of course, his organs still had individual manual choruses allowing the long-established “terraced” dynamics of the vast body of organ literature. But his rethinking of the concept and potential of the organ inspired the musicians who played his instruments to create new worlds of expression.

Of more than five hundred organs built by Cavaillé-Coll, his greatest achievement was the tremendous instrument at Saint-Sulpice, completed in 1862, still in regular use and widely considered one of the greatest organs in the world. With five manuals and a hundred stops, it was the largest organ ever built, and although it’s more than a hundred-fifty years old, it is still as vital, expressive, powerful, and impressive as it was when it was first played. Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély was organist at Saint-Sulpice when the organ was completed, and we learn in the film how Cavaillé-Coll advocated his music, until he became aware of Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens who was the organ teacher at the Royal Brussels Conservatory. Cavaillé-Coll tried to introduce Lemmens to the Paris audience, intending to spare Lefébure-Wély’s feelings by presenting him in concert with Lemmens. But the plan backfired, and Cavaillé-Coll and Lefébure-Wély had a falling out.

I was interested to learn that Widor studied with Lemmens in Brussels—that would give some insight into Widor’s appointment at Saint-Sulpice, replacing Lefébure-Wély. And let’s remember that between 1870 and 1971, just two organists served that church—Widor, and Marcel Dupré. I think that single succession of organists and that singular instrument is enough to justify the claim of Cavaillé-Coll’s unique importance in the history of the instrument.

Cavaillé-Coll traveled throughout Europe studying other organs. The film recounts his impressions after visiting the great organ by Christian Müller at Haarlem. He built organs throughout France, in Spain and Portugal, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Venezuela, and Brazil, among other countries. This was at a time when it took days to travel across France, and weeks or months to cross the ocean. 

If Aristide Cavaillé-Coll had an iPad and a Facebook page, I bet we wouldn’t have had the organ at Saint-Sulpice.

Reviewing a life’s work

Some of our contemporary organ companies have impressive opus lists. Taylor & Boody is preparing to build Opus 70, and the Noack Organ Company is working on number 157—a fantastic productive life for a company with a single principal. Cavaillé-Coll’s workshop was much larger that any that are active today, but nevertheless, I’m staggered to think through the accomplishments of his life. He must have been thinking all the time. And he must have been on the move constantly. France was early outpaced by neighboring countries in the development of railroads, so for much of his career, Cavaillé-Coll would have relied on horse-drawn vehicles for his travel. Google Maps tells me that it’s 748 kilometers (465 miles) from Montpellier to Paris. It would take about seven hours to make that trip in a modern car on modern highways. What an effort it must have been to run between clients scattered across the country in the mid-1800s.

To supervise the sale, design, construction, and installation of more than five hundred organs was a stupendous achievement. To conceive and realize his inventions, from the circular saw blade to the Ventil, was a creative output unequaled in the history of the craft. And we know that Cavaillé-Coll spend much energy promoting musicians, encouraging compositions, and planning concerts.

TTFN, GPP

I’ve learned to refer to a website called netlingo.com when I come across an initialism that I don’t understand. When I received this one in a text message, I knew right away that the first one is “ta ta for now.” But the second one wasn’t on the list, and it took me some time to figure it out. When I realized it was from an organist who must have been sitting on the organ bench during a service, I guessed correctly, “gotta play postlude.” Really? Would that be the same organist who complains that churches don’t pay organists well enough? Would that be the same organist who feels disrespected by the clergy? Would that be the same organist who is disappointed because his idea of encouraging the church to acquire a new organ hasn’t gained traction?

Texting is a great example of how people fail to concentrate. We’ve only been texting for a few years—and I admit freely that I do all the time, and consider it a terrific way to stay in touch. Imagine the Organ Clearing House crew working in a distant city, picture them high on a tower of scaffolding, and Bishop needs to ask a question. A phone call would be a nuisance. A text message is like putting a sticky-note on someone’s refrigerator. I do that even to say, “CWYHAC” (call when you have a chance). 

Yesterday was a beautiful day in Manhattan. It was around seventy degrees, breezy and sunny, and thousands (millions?) of people were out and about. But I’m sure most of them were missing the beautiful day, because when I paid careful attention and counted on my fingers while walking a block or two, I noted that well over half the people were “in their phones.” They were texting, talking, e-mailing, probably searching for music, but they certainly weren’t paying attention to the beautiful day.

Perhaps the most dramatic result of the texting boom is the rapid increase in highway fatalities. It’s amazing to me that people think they can take their eyes off the road and their attention from their driving for long enough to write a note.

Initialism is a new word for acronym. It’s new enough that my spellchecker doesn’t know it. Initialisms in texting are typically short statements like SHWASLOMF (sitting here with a straight look on my face), ROFL (rolling on floor laughing), or the teenager’s staple, PWOMS (parent watching over my shoulder). But there’s another that is a noun (the initials of a three-word name for a clinical condition) that’s started to turn up as an adjective: ADD—as in, “I’m pretty ADD today.” WWST (what would Shakespeare think)?

Our daughter Meg and her husband Yorgos have a beautiful dog named Grace. They got her from a shelter in Greece, before moving to the U.S. last fall. She’s part Irish Setter and, we think, part Saluki—which is the ancient Egyptian breed that is seen in many hieroglyphs. When they first had her, they thought they had her trained to stay off the furniture. But as Meg was studying the art of documentary film making, she got a cool time-lapse camera that sticks to a wall or window with a suction cup. They set it up with a laptop once when they went out, and were amazed and amused to see that in the span of a couple hours, Grace had climbed on and slept on pretty much everything in their apartment. Playing back the film shows a hilarious sequence of her changing her mind. It’s indicative of many people I know, who have such short attention spans that I wonder how they ever accomplish anything.

This is why I bring up the work of Galileo, Copernicus, Mozart, Schubert, and Cavaillé-Coll. I wonder what we are losing today because so many people are so wrapped up in the complexity of accomplishing nothing. I know a few people who actually stand out of the crowd because they have powerful and long attention spans. They really can sit on an organ bench for hours, practicing hard, without no powered-up phone sitting there waiting to ring. We’re increasingly surprised when someone plays an organ from memory, but it’s simple enough—they’ve done the serious work that it takes to master the music. They’ve paid attention.

A friend who is organist of a large and prominent church in Manhattan told me recently that he sits at the grand console in the chancel of his church looking out over a congregation full of people who are buried in their phones. He can see the telltale glow in their eyes. 

Are you paying attention? 

Thar she blows!

I know I share with many organbuilders the sense that the organ is alive. Stand inside an organ chamber when the blower is off and all is silent—unliving. Turn on the blower. The reservoirs fill, the swell shutters give a little twitch, and the instrument seems to quiver expectantly, ready to sound. We normally don’t notice air. We don’t bump into it when we walk. We don’t feel its resistance when we gesture with our hands. But we do notice it when it’s in motion—we call that wind. Reflecting on the nature of wind, we typically refer to blowing wind, as in “it’s blowing a gale out there.” But a sailor knows that the effect is often just the opposite. If there’s a low pressure cell up north, all the high pressure air south of us rushes by to fill the gap. The wind is caused by air being drawn, not blown. Another interesting case is the classic sea breeze that occurs when coastal land is heated by the midday sun causing updrafts. You can’t have a vacuum without an enclosure, so when all that air rushes skyward, the cooler air over the water rushes ashore to take its place. Again, the wind is caused by air being drawn.
Wind n. 1a. Moving air, especially a natural and perceptible movement of air, parallel to or along the ground. b. A movement of air generated artificially, as by bellows or a fan . . .1 The organ is all about wind—air in motion. Because the organ and the piano have similar keyboards, many people assume that they are a lot alike. In fact, they could hardly be more different. The tone of the piano is created by a hammer striking a metal string. The vibration of the string creates the sound, the length and tension of the string determine the pitch, and the impact of the hammer causes the attack. The fact that a great pianist can produce cascades of notes without the sensation of hammering is at the heart of the art—the art of both the instrument and the player. I’ve often marveled during piano performances when a scale or arpeggio gives the impression of falling water rather than hundreds of hammers hitting strings. Here the art surpasses the mechanical—or the mechanical enables the art.
In nature, wind is caused by air being drawn. Of course, the wind in a pipe organ emanates from a blowing device, usually a rotary blower. But when I play, I think it’s fun to imagine the air as being drawn out from the top of the organ’s pipes, originating in my body, leaving my fingertips to make the sound. That imagined sensation is the heart of the player’s phrasing. Remember your teacher encouraging you to breathe with the music? Once again the art surpasses the mechanical. The huge mechanical entity that is the pipe organ in effect vanishes, leaving only the player and the sound of the music.
The sound of the organ is produced by columns of air vibrating in the organ’s pipes—or in the case of a reed stop, by the vibration of a brass reed or tongue. The physical production of those sounds is analogous to the flute whose sound is produced by the player blowing across an open hole (like the top of a bottle), or a clarinet whose sound is produced by the vibrating reed. Whether you are vibrating a column of air by splitting a sheet of air against the edge of a hole or with a vibrating tongue, you need air in motion to do it.
We measure organ air pressure in inches using a manometer. In its simplest form, a manometer is a U-shaped tube filled with water so the level of the water is even on both sides of the tube (gravity does a good job of leveling). When you apply air pressure to one end of the tube, the water in that end is blown down forcing the other side up and you use a ruler to measure the difference. If an organbuilder forgets to bring a manometer to a job, he can make one using flexible plastic tubing as found in a fish tank, a rough piece of wood, and a few staples.
The other measurement we take of organ air is volume—considered as a factor of an amount of air in a specified period of time. In the case of a pipe organ it’s meaningless to say, for example, 1,000 cubic feet of air, because when described that way our thousand cubic feet is sitting still and won’t make a peep. Instead we say 1,000 cubic feet per minute (CFM), which describes a volume of air in motion. And, 1,000 CFM doesn’t mean much unless you also assign a pressure value. So you might purchase an organ blower that can produce 2,000 CFM at 4? WP. That would be adequate for an organ of about 25 stops with low wind pressure. If you needed 2,000 CFM at 10? WP, you would need a more powerful blower. Some organbuilders use the term windsick to describe an instrument in which the wind supply is not adequate for the job. Now you’re an expert.
I’m inspired to write about organ air by the engraving that hangs over my desk. It’s reproduced from L’Art du Facteur d’Orgues, the 18th-century French treatise on organbuilding written and illustrated by the good monk Dom Bedos de Celles—it depicts a large organ in cross-section. On the left side of the image, which is the back of the organ, there is a young gentleman working a set of three large manually operated multi-fold bellows. He walks down the row, pushing down each lever, in turn raising each bellows. The bellows are connected together with a tripping mechanism—when one nears empty, the next one starts to fall, and the young gentleman circles back around to fill the first again. He’s wearing a jacket with some 20 buttons, breeches that buckle at the knee, and stockings that cover his calves from the top of his buckled shoes.
Back then you couldn’t play a note on an organ without someone to pump. I imagine that there were plenty of very bored organ-pumpers. But remembering that mechanical or electric organ blowers are essentially a 20th-century invention—how many of us would have volunteered hours to pump while Buxtehude, Bach, Mendelssohn, Franck, or Widor was practicing? Maybe rival organists tried to infiltrate “enemy” organ lofts by embedding their choir boys in the other’s pumping squad: “What’s that Bach up to this week?”
The great Cavaillé-Coll organ in the church of St. Sulpice in Paris was built in 1862. It has about 100 stops—a very large organ by modern standards and downright huge for the days of hand-pumped organs. Charles-Marie Widor’s tenure as organist there started in 1870 and ended with his retirement in 1934 (he was hired as a temporary fill-in and never given a permanent appointment!), so we can assume that there was a magical Sunday when Widor played the organ for the first time supported by an electric blower. That must have been liberating for the organist.
When organs were pumped by hand, organists were acutely aware of how much wind they were using. The more stops you drew, the more air you used and the faster the pumper had to work. Surely more than one young gentleman quit in protest. Think of Bach’s pumpers dealing with those huge arpeggiated diminished chords midway through the Toccata in D Minor that start with bottom D of the pedalboard, the third biggest wind-consuming note of the organ. Imagine the master playing those soon-to-be famous chords with arms outstretched and head thrown back, reveling in the sonic experience, while the pumpers raced from bellows to bellows, trying to keep up with the demand: “Nice work,” he said, “here’s an extra ducat for your trouble.”
I have had personal experience with this phenomenon. At the time I graduated from Oberlin College I was working with an organbuilder in Ohio named Jan Leek, a wonderful man who was trained in the Netherlands and who shared his wealth of knowledge and experience with me. We restored a 19th-century organ in a church in Bethlehem, Ohio—a project that included the restoration of the original hand-pumping equipment. Garth Peacock, a member of Oberlin’s organ faculty, played the dedication recital, which included some pieces and a hymn to be played with the organ pumped by hand—and I was the pumper. The pump handle stuck out of the right-hand side of the organ case where pumper and player could see each other. As we got into the hymn, Peacock caught my eye and winked. He drew stop after stop, filled in manual chords, then added doubling in the pedals, using all the wind he could, chuckling as I flailed the pump handle up and down. I know he did it on purpose.
My other favorite organ-pumping story happened after I completed the restoration of the 1868 E. & G. G. Hook organ (Opus 466) for the Follen Community Church in Lexington, Massachusetts. That project also included the restoration of the hand-pumping gear, and more than one parishioner felt clever commenting that the organ could be played even during a power failure. And sure enough, one of the first times the restored organ was played in concert there was a power failure and someone from the audience volunteered to go forth and pump.
Those who know me well—and probably some casual acquaintances—know that I love the epic series of novels about the brilliant captains of the Royal Navy in the early 19th century, especially captains Horatio Hornblower (written by C. S. Forester) and Jack Aubrey (written by Patrick O’Brian). Many a turnpike toll-taker has chuckled as my lowering car window emits a hearty “belay there” (audio books have accompanied me for tens of thousands of miles of pipe organ adventuring). Both epics are full of musical allusions, such as when Captain Hornblower rounds Cape Horn in a gale after lengthy adventures in the Pacific, and the groaning of the timbers of his ship Lydia “swelled into a volume of sound comparable to that of an organ in a church.”2
Captain Jack Aubrey, an accomplished amateur violinist as well as a brilliant fighting sea captain, shared hundreds of evenings making music with his closest friend, the equally able cellist and ship’s surgeon (and prolific intelligence agent) Stephen Maturin while traveling through 360º of longitude and twenty novels. Their evening concerts (typically enhanced with toasted cheese and marsala) pepper the active story with allegory while giving the reader a chance to understand the musical tastes of the day. It’s a delight to read how these determined warriors reveled in playing chamber music or improvising on favorite melodies as they sail around the world. On several occasions they discuss the effect of all that damp salt air on their instruments, and Jack Aubrey is smart enough to leave his precious Amati violin at home, distinguishing it from his seagoing fiddle.
In Post Captain, the second book of the series, Captain Aubrey returns to shore at a dramatic and complicated moment in his life. Heavily in debt, badly wounded after a violent sea battle, and thrilled with his new promotion to post-captain as a result of his victory, he is confined to the Duchy of the Savoy in London, a sanctuary where debtors were protected from arrest. After learning the boundaries of the Savoy from his innkeeper, he goes out walking:

Wandering out, he came to the back of the chapel: an organ was playing inside, a sweet, light-footed organ hunting a fugue through its charming complexities. He circled the railings to come to the door, but he had scarcely found it, opened it and settled himself in a pew before the whole elaborate structure collapsed in a dying wheeze and a thick boy crept from a hole under the loft and clashed down the aisle, whistling. It was a strong disappointment, the sudden breaking of a delightful tension, like being dismasted under full sail.
“What a disappointment, sir,” he said to the organist, who had emerged into the dim light. “I had so hoped you would bring it to a close.”
“Alas, I have no wind,” said the organist, an elderly parson. “That chuff lad has blown his hour, and no power on earth will keep him in. But I am glad you liked the organ—it is a Father Smith.3 A musician, sir?”
“Oh, the merest dilettante, sir; but I should be happy to blow for you, if you choose to go on. It would be a sad shame to leave Handel up in the air, for want of wind.”
“Should you, indeed? You are very good sir. Let me show you the handle—you understand these things, I am sure . . . ”
So Jack pumped and the music wound away and away, the separate strands following one another in baroque flights and twirls until at last they came together and ran to the final magnificence . . . ”4

The next day while writing a letter to Stephen to share the news of his promotion, Captain Aubrey recognized the depth of his humor:
. . . in the Savoy chapel I said the finest thing in my life. The parson was playing a Handel fugue, the organ-boy deserted his post, and I said “it would be a pity to leave Handel up in the air, for want of wind,” and blew for him. It was the wittiest thing! I did not smoke it entirely all at once, however, only after I had been pumping for some time; and then I could hardly keep from laughing aloud. It may be that post-captains are a very witty set of men, and that I am coming to it.5
That reminds me of E. Power Biggs’s quip after recording Handel’s organ concerti in the 1950s with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on the instrument that Handel played in St. James’ Church, Great Packington, Warwickshire, when he recalled “handling the handle Handel handled.” I’m long-winded today. I’ve got lots more to say about organ wind, and I’m running out of space. So join me here next month for Thar she blows—some more.

Lorenz Maycher is organist-choirmaster at First-Trinity Presbyterian Church in Laurel, Mississippi. His interviews with William Teague, Thomas Richner, Nora Williams, Albert Russell, and Robert Town have appeared in The Diapason.

The first installment in this series, “From the Dickinson Collection: Reminiscences by Clarence Dickinson, Part 1: 1873–1898,” was published in the July 2008 issue of The Diapason; next appeared “From the Dickinson Collection: Memorizing Controversy,” September 2008; and most recently, “From the Dickinson Collection: Reminiscences by Clarence Dickinson, Part 2: 1898–1909,” February 2009.

Introduction
As a founding member of the American Guild of Organists, Clarence Dickinson (1873–1969) was a frequent speaker at AGO functions throughout his lengthy career. In this speech given to the St. Louis Chapter in 1959, Dr. Dickinson reflects on playing the 1904 St. Louis Exposition organ, offers colorful memories of the chapter’s founding members and of Andrew Carnegie, reflects on his personal career as a church musician, and offers helpful advice to organists of all ages. Additional material has been incorporated into the text from a speech Dickinson gave at Westminster Choir College on October 1, 1968. All material in this series is taken from the Dickinson Collection, Dr. Dickinson’s own personal library, which is housed at William Carey University in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. We are very grateful to Patricia Furr and Dr. Gene Winters of William Carey for granting access to this special collection, and for permission to use these items in this series intended to preserve the life and legacy of Clarence and Helen A. Dickinson.
—Lorenz Maycher
Laurel, Mississippi

I am delighted to be here with you tonight, and to share in the celebration of the Golden Anniversary of the founding of your chapter. Thank you, Howard Kelsey, for all these undeserved kind words. It hardly seems necessary to say anything, but just to stand here and let you imagine I am all things I should like to be. I am not much of a speechmaker. Whenever I find myself in the position of making a speech, I am reminded of Thackeray’s saying: “My wit is cab wit,” which means I always think of the bright things I might have said when I am in the cab going home afterwards!
My first acquaintance with Howard Kelsey came with his arrival at our school at Union Seminary. Many of the students were arriving in ancient, rather dilapidated Fords, which they had purchased for anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars and then sold upon arrival. One of our students, now Dr. Allwardt, met him coming down the hall and said, “I suppose you came in your Rolls-Royce.” Howard answered very simply, “Yes.” He had driven the family car and sold it for enough money to carry him through the entire two years’ course.
I have been rather intimately acquainted with St. Louis—the town, not the saint—and your organization for a long time. I first came here to play at your Exposition in 1904. That was the year Mrs. Dickinson and I were married, and we had been in Europe (Spain and elsewhere) for a long trip, the last stop being England, where, a few days before we sailed, Lady Patterson gave a luncheon for us to meet Lady Penell. We were telling her of the trip ahead of us, how we would travel miles across the ocean, then take the finest train of that time, the Twentieth Century, up the Hudson. Lady Penell interrupted and said, “Oh, that is wonderful! Then you can tell me about my Hudson Bay stock.”
Arriving in St. Louis, I had the pleasure of giving a number of recitals on the magnificent organ at the Exposition, which was designed by Dr. George Ashdown Audsley, the author of the greatest early book on organs and organ building. I remember the old gentleman’s coming to the house for dinner, bringing the two great volumes and putting them down very wearily, saying, “I have brought you twenty-seven pounds.”
The Exposition organ marked a great advance in organ building, with many new mechanical devices. I have always remembered playing Liszt’s “Evocation à la Chapelle Sistine” most effectively on it, as I was able to put more atmosphere into the playing of it than ever before or since. You may remember the main theme is that of Allegri’s “Miserere,” which has been sung every Good Friday in the Sistine Chapel since it was written, in diminishing light, until it is finished in complete darkness. The score and parts were held for use in this manner and were jealously kept secret until the twelve-year-old Mozart wrote it down from memory, and we have all had the wonderful privilege of singing it ever since. Liszt used the Mozart “Ave Verum” for his second theme. On your organ, it was possible to depict the darkness Liszt desired by using in the pedal stops 64′, 32′, 16′ and enough soft 8′ pitch to define the tone, with 32′, 16′, and soft 8′ on the manuals, gradually climbing upward till one could end the final triad at the top of the keyboard on a 4′ flute in an organ in the ceiling of the high auditorium. This is the organ which was later installed at Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia. In the foundation work, Dr. Audsley harkened back to the period of middle 19th-century tone that he advocated, although using a bit more color and control.
I would like to speak a bit about the changes in organ building during my lifetime. The first organ I played in my father’s church was made within the same period as the Exposition organ, as was the first organ of my own in the South Presbyterian Church in Evanston, and later the organ in St. James in Chicago. Organs of this period had clarity of diapason tone, and, in the larger instruments, had brilliance achieved through the reeds and mixtures. With the advent of electric action came the possibility of octave couplers, and the declaration by the Austin Organ Co. that nothing above a four-foot stop was necessary, which unfortunately gave us quite a long period of impossibly dull organs. Even in the large four-manual concert organs no number of super-octave couplers could infuse any life into them. With Mr. Skinner there came additional beauty of tone, which had its drawbacks, too, since many small organs sacrificed the real organ tone in order to secure some of his beautiful color stops—not so far as I remember, though, in his large organs: the Brick Church organ, built in 1918, contained six mixtures, and other overtones, on which a baroque program could sound as successful as much as one built today.
There have been several periods of what you might call “feverish organ building.” One increase in good organs throughout the country we owe to Mr. Andrew Carnegie. The building of better organs led to an increased number of good organists capable of handling the larger instruments, and then to higher standards of church music. This debt has never been adequately acknowledged. Mr. Carnegie gave 8,400 organs distributed all over the United States, and greatly helped the cause of good church music. I speak as one very grateful, since the hundred-rank organ in the Brick Church came to us in this manner. His insistence that the church contribute half the cost was wise, as it interested the members in an undertaking in which they had a part. Mr. Carnegie also had a very fine organ in his home, and maintained an organist so that he awoke to the music of an organ every morning.
I was quite well acquainted with at least three of the founders of your chapter: Ernest Richard Kroeger, the real founder, Charles Galloway, and James T. Quarles. The year before I went to Paris to study with Guilmant, Mr. Galloway had worked with him. Whenever I especially pleased Guilmant with my playing of some large number, he would say, “Mr. Galloway played that very beautifully!”
Mr. Kroeger and I were very good friends. One winter he came to Chicago and attended a rehearsal of my Musical Art Society. My accompanist, as it happened, was away that day, so I ventured to ask Mr. Kroeger if he would mind helping us out, which he very graciously did in wonderful manner. We were rehearsing Grell’s sixteen-part Mass, a mean piece to read at sight as there was no reduced score—just the sixteen-part score. The chorus had only their single parts. The first chorus gives out the first eight-bar theme, then the second enters singing the same bit. As this was their first look at it, trouble soon developed. After straightening it out, we started over again. When the third chorus entered the same thing happened. When I started for the fourth time, Dr. Carver Williams, who was the 2nd bass in the last chorus, threw his part down on the floor and cried out, “I’ll be darned if I will count 64 bars again!”
As you know, Mr. Quarles was organist at Cornell University for a number of years before he moved to St. Louis. Andrew Carnegie had given a splendid new four-manual organ to the university’s large auditorium. Quarles got the idea of having four organists play the dedication recital. So, on this occasion, Quarles opened the recital, Dr. Tertius Noble followed, and William Churchill Hammond, the Holyoke organist, came third. Hammond finished his section with a very soft, quiet number, during which Mr. Carnegie went sound to sleep. I came next, opening with full organ, at which Mr. Carnegie woke with a leap in the air. So I, for once, had the honor of awakening Mr. Carnegie from his slumbers.
I would like to make a few remarks as suggestions of how we, as musicians, may go forward to the new day. In the first place, build up good fellowship among all organists of the city, young and old, long-time residents and newcomers. Too often there are two or more separate sets of members, the older and the younger, with separate, perhaps even conflicting points of view. See if you can build a warm, personal relationship with each other. Let the joy of association help promote a more definite feeling of “togetherness” in what each of you, as individuals, and all of you, as a group, are trying to accomplish. As you cultivate generosity and appreciation of others’ efforts and talents, feelings of rivalry, or competition, of professional jealousy, of any semblance of strife among yourselves, will be minimized. Give emphasis to a spirit of cooperativeness, of encouraging one another, of striving, not separately, but together, toward achieving accomplishment of worthy goals. In the work of the Guild, remember we all either “hang together or we hang separately.” This may necessitate a bit of “giving in” on the part of everyone concerned, but the results will be well worth the effort and the sacrifice. Your Guild, planning and working together, brings harmony and unity, and will have a positive influence in your city. I am not suggesting here that there is any noticeable lack of this fine spirit among your members; rather, this is the very first bit of advice that I would offer any chapter, for I believe it to be a truly basic principle for our progress, and I believe that improvements can always be made in any of our chapters in this regard. It is very important that newcomers to our “fold” be made to feel welcome and wanted.
To my mind, one of the chief good works of the Guild is its bringing us all together, and not only within the confines of our own city, but city mingling with city. It is stimulating and enlightening, and furnishes us much of that in our country which has been one of the chief benefits of our European sojourns. In this connection I have a pleasant thought of such a visit, which I think would, as the Germans say, be “sympathetic” to this occasion. It is of a visit of a couple of hours duration with Georg Schumann, the Berlin composer whose organ “Passacaglia” and “At Evening” we play in this country, and whose motets are sung by all our Musical Art societies. He had been only a vague acquaintance, a composer, but when I came into personal touch, he was—I cannot convey to you how delightful. There was first, with much enthusiasm, the Bach manuscript to show me, which he had just found at the Singakademie, tucked away for centuries and lost to sight. Just as I was leaving and had reached the door, he exclaimed, “Ach, Himmel! I almost forgot! Come back, won’t you!” So I returned to my chair, while he disappeared for a few minutes, then reappeared and passed through his study again, beyond the living room in which I was sitting. Then he called me in. On the wall hung Stuck’s famous “Mask of Beethoven,” which the artist had presented to the composer. It had been put away for the summer, but Schumann had gone to all the trouble of unpacking and re-hanging it, and, as we stood before it, in all its wonderful impressiveness, after a long silence, he said, “Now, whenever you see this in reproduction”—and one does so often, on the covers of all the Hugo Wolf things, for instance—“Whenever you see this in reproduction, you will think of me and of how this hangs just here in my study.”
And so the Guild brings us all in touch; to the newcomer in a city or chapter it means everything, in the unique opportunity it offers for getting acquainted; to the steady residents, it should mean the inciting to do ever better work, and in intercourse with other organists and composers, inspiration. I say organists and composers, for the organists are giving to the world the greatest body of church music; and this, I believe, will be, in future, more and more stimulated by the Guild.
Admittedly, the purposes of the Guild are manifold, and the accomplishing of all of them is no easy task, but let us not forget that one of our principal aims is the raising of church music standards. And, in this, I would offer a word of warning if you are to build wisely and effectively for the future: remember that progress, if it be real and lasting progress, is a slow process. It must be gradual, step by tedious step. It evolves. Rome was not built in a day, you know, but it was practically destroyed in a few hours under the leadership of a stupid, lackadaisical, “fiddling” ruler. In attempting to raise standards, therefore, work positively and confidently, but move patiently, calmly, understandingly, and cautiously.
The future of the world we live in depends on the rising generation. The future of music, as it affects our common life, depends on the ideals being shaped in the minds of our young people. Therefore, try to keep the music sung in Sunday school up to a high standard, as well as that used in the main church service. But, be patient. Do this gradually. After we sang Palestrina’s “Reproaches,” with its use of plainsong, in the Brick Church a good many years ago, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees came up to me and said, “That was a queer thing you gave us this morning.” Notwithstanding this implied criticism, we repeated it some time later, and then again. After the third repetition, without realizing that he had heard it before, the same man came up and commented almost enthusiastically, “That was a beautiful anthem this morning. I hope you will repeat it soon.” I never heard a more vivid reversal of opinion. So, do not get discouraged. But, make sure if it is old and modal, or very modern, that it is really inspired.
And while I am on the subject of high standards in church music, let me remind us that this may be accomplished through a varied musical program and that it is not necessary to limit ourselves merely to “Bach, or Pre-Bach,” as is suggested by one teacher I know. A question I should like to ask is “Why do some of us limit organ specifications to the point that we can play only linear music?” I admire Rembrandt’s drawings greatly, but that is no reason for me to deny myself, and others, the enjoyment of the color in his paintings, as well.
I feel like giving a suggestion to the young players here, as I did recently to the New York chapter when the treasurer had just announced a change of address for seventeen young organists, which meant they were moving from one church to another: When you go out to consider a new position, you look at the organ very carefully to make sure it is an instrument you will enjoy playing, and you examine the choir library to see what material there is to work with—probably also the piano in the choir room—but you do not examine the minister, the most important factor in your future happiness. Scrutinize your minister, because he can make or break your career in that church by loving and demanding rather cheap music, or backing you up on the use of beautiful music and helping you to raise the standards of the music used in that church.
It might interest you to know the one reason I have led a happy life as an organist and choirmaster is the fact that I have invariably been associated with kindly and sympathetic ministers. When I went to my very first church, the small one in Evanston, a big new organ was being installed. I was appointed permanent organist, but for the dedication of the new instrument, a well-known organist from Chicago was invited to play the opening recital. When the program was being arranged, the minister said to the visiting organist, “But do let the lad play the first number on his new organ.”
The minister of the next church I served in Chicago was a very brilliant young man who afterwards became dean of the Harvard Divinity School. He helped me by insisting I should play an organ number after his sermon that carried out the spirit of his text, sometimes quietly meditative, sometimes big and stirring. After a couple of other short associations in Chicago, I became organist and choirmaster of St. James Episcopal Church, and found a rector who was fond of the best, and very sympathetic to all I strove to do in presenting the use of fine music.
When I came to New York and the Brick Presbyterian Church, I had Henry Van Dyke, the poet, writer, and Ambassador to Holland during the First World War. The church was always crowded to hear him preach, yet he was a great enough man to say occasionally, “It hardly seems necessary to preach a sermon—the music has said it all.”
Then came William Pierson Merrill, who had been organist of Union Seminary when a student there, bass of the quartet in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where they always had distinguished soloists, and director of his own choir in Chicago. He also wrote very good anthems and hymn settings, and his text of the hymn “Soldiers of Christ Arise” had gone into practically all the English and American hymnals. You can imagine how interested he was in building a unified service by the fact that he took the trouble to cable from London the text for the first few Sundays in the fall.
In addition to our serious work together, we always had good times because of his keen sense of humor. He liked to tell of the Saturday before his first service as minister of the Brick Church. I was rehearsing the choir in the old building on Fifth Avenue in the first chorus of the “Elijah,” and was having great difficulty in getting the choir to enunciate the final letter P in the word “Help.” It was just at this moment that Dr. Merrill decided to visit the rehearsal and speak a word to the choir. He used to say, “Dickinson stopped them and cried out in a loud voice, ‘You’ll have to do that again—it sounds like hell.’” Dr. Merrill continued, and said, “I decided this was no place for me, and returned to my study.”
His two sons inherited his sense of humor. During the two years that the new Brick Church was being built on Park Avenue, we worshiped in a lovely little Gothic church on 85th and Park Avenue, where there was not room enough for the console in the chancel, and the organist sat in a little curtained room to the side. Ernest Merrill, as deacon, was passing communion, and brought me the bread in this little room. I then looked at my watch and found that I must leave at once to catch the one o’clock train to play a recital in another city, so put another organist on the bench for the finish of the service. When Ernest came in with the wine, his face took on a look of horror, and he asked the other organist in a sepulchral whisper, “What did you do with the body?”
Dr. Merrill and his family once had an audience with the Pope, along with a number of other people. Before the Pope entered, the majordomo went around and pulled down the sleeves, pulled up the collars, and saw that the women had something on their heads. Fourteen-year-old Billy turned to his father and asked, “Wouldn’t it be much simpler to just blindfold the Pope?”
It has been one of my goals to encourage all ministers to acquire knowledge of, as well as an appreciation of, music. I do not see how one can hope for a service of worship if the minister writes the sermon, someone else selects a miscellaneous lot of hymns treating three or four different themes, and the leader of music puts on some anthems he likes, or the soloist chooses a solo he likes. A good old Scotch Presbyterian minister once said, “I preach my sermon, and that’s all I want; I don’t care what they do with the music.” Such a minister deserves the fate of one who preached on the text, “Launch out into the deep,” after which the choir rose and sang, “Throw out the lifeline.”
We must keep ever in mind the power of music to lift the individual person out of his self-centered existence. When he joins in singing a hymn or listens to an anthem, he ceases to be wholly individual; the congregation becomes one, and he a part of it. Personal differences of creed, questionings, doubt, disbelief are forgotten as hearts and voices unite in gratitude, joy and aspiration. It is the privilege and the responsibility of the organist and choirmaster, working with the minister, to offer music so worthy, so noble, so universal in its appeal, that it will not only lift the congregation into closer fellowship with God, but will subtly re-establish in some measure the consciousness of the fellowship of all Christian souls.
Not long ago, one of my pupils gave me some advice, which I should like to pass along to you: “Keep practicing. Although there are no immediate dates pending, keep practicing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Barone's John Weaver interview

See the interview here.

Other items of interest:

John Weaver honored by Juilliard

John Weaver honored by Union Theological Seminary

Honoring John Weaver's 80th birthday

John Weaver dies at age 83

John Weaver honored by long time representative