In the Wind. . . .

John Bishop

In the niche of time

The history of organ building and organ music is deep and rich, but the longer I toil in those vineyards, the more I realize how small it is in the wider world. The histories of art, architecture, literature, and philosophy fill libraries and geo-political history—especially the great procession of warfare that dominates every epoch of human existence, influencing the flow of the arts and academic thought. It may seem trite to acknowledge the relative insignificance of the pipe organ, but I notice that many professionals in the field focus on the interrelation of historic and geographic subdivisions of organ history, separate from the context of more general world history. 

I’ve often mentioned the juxtaposition of the fashionable Rococo courts of Western Europe, complete with minuets and powdered wigs, and the Minuteman of Lexington, Massachusetts, scrambling behind walls and fences, trying to outsmart the British Redcoats in the early days of the American Revolution. Paul Revere (1735–1818), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) were all contemporaries. 

Most of us have all the libraries of the world at our fingertips—a few clicks or keystrokes can call up reliable information on any subject. You can do it while you’re sitting on an organ bench. Give a Google or two to consider the composer on your music rack today—what painters, philosophers, or writers might he have met? What war was coming up or going on? How might that have influenced his thinking? Or did he scram when things got rough so he could work in peace?

 

Ancient roots

The history of the pipe organ spans more than 2,250 years, starting with the hydraulis created by Ctesibius of Alexandria, Egypt, in about 256 BC. Sounds mighty old, but the hydraulis didn’t come out of thin air. Panpipes are still familiar to us today and predated the hydraulis by many centuries. With a dozen or more of individual flutes lashed together, the panpipe is a sort of pipe organ, minus the mechanical valve systems and the User Interface (keyboards) of “modern organs” built after 1250 AD. You can hear live performances on panpipes (for a modest donation) most days in New York’s Times Square Metro Station.

The Chinese sheng is a little like an ocarina with vertical pipes—an obvious precursor to the organ. It’s easy to find photos online. It is a common mainstay of Chinese classical music, with ancient roots. Archeologists working in the Hubei Province in 1978 unearthed a 2,400-year-old royal tomb that contained a sheng.

Most of us learned about the supposed oldest playable organ from E. Power Biggs, who featured the organ in the Basilica of Notre Dame in Valère, Sion, Switzerland, in his 1967 recording, Historic Organs of Switzerland. We read on the jacket notes of that vinyl LP that the organ was built in 1390, more than a century before Christopher Columbus ostensibly discovered the New World. It’s now generally thought to have been built in 1435, 17 years before the birth of Leonardo da Vinci. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) was active in Florence at that time—the dome of the cathedral there for which Brunelleschi is perhaps best known was constructed right at the time of his death. Cosimo de’ Medici, the great patriarch of the fabled Florentine banking family, inherited his fortune in 1429. Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who told us that the sun is the center of the universe, wasn’t born until 1473.¹ It’s fun to note that Cosimo, Brunelleschi, and the builder of the organ at Sion lived in a world where it was believed that Earth was the center of the universe.² As a sailor, I wonder how Christopher Columbus navigated?

 

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621)

Sweelinck was born and died in Amsterdam. He assumed the position of organist at that city’s Oude Kerk in 1577 at the age of fifteen and worked there the rest of his life. His employment was unusual for his day in that playing the organ was his sole responsibility. That left him with plenty of time to teach, and his studio included such luminaries as Praetorius, Scheidemann, and Samuel Scheidt. So while he was born in the last years of the broadly defined Renaissance, his music and teaching formed a bridge between, let’s say, Palestrina and Buxtehude—a mighty tall order.³

One of Sweelinck’s greatest hits is Balletto del Granduca, a set of variations on a simple theme. On my desk right now is the “sheet music” edition I bought as a teenager ($1.00), Associated Music Publishers, edited by E. Power Biggs. (Wasn’t he a great educator?)

Painters Rubens and Caravaggio were Sweelinck’s contemporaries, and St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome was completed a few years after his death. Heliocentrism (the Sun as the center of the universe) was confirmed by astronomer Johannes Kepler in his publication Mysterium Cosmographicum in 1596. The Edict of Nantes was signed by King Henry IV of France in 1598, recognizing the basic rights of Protestants (Huguenots) in predominantly Roman Catholic France, including the right to freely practice their religion. Henry IV was murdered in 1610 by the radical Catholic François Ravaillac, and succeeded by his son, Louis XIII. Coincidentally, the King James Bible was published in 1611.

Sweelinck was a Calvinist, a doctrine governed by the regulative principle, which limited worship to the teachings of the New Testament. Calvin notwithstanding, Sweelinck’s creativity was encouraged by the Consistory of Dordrecht of 1598, in which organists were instructed to play variations on Genevan Psalm tunes in an effort to help the people learn them.

On closer shores, British refugees established the Colony of Virginia in 1607, French refugees established the city of Quebec in 1608, and Dutch refugees founded New York in 1612. The first African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, two years before Sweelinck’s death.

Given that much of the migration of Europeans toward the “New World” was inspired by religious persecution, we read that Sweelinck lived in an era of dramatic international religious tension and change. It’s not much of a stretch to compare those tensions around the year 1600 with today’s religious persecution, division, and fundamentalism.

(I’ll let you do Bach!)

 

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47)

Beethoven (1770–1827) was 29 when Mendelssohn was born, and Mendelssohn was 24 when Brahms (1833–97) was born.⁴ Felix Mendelssohn was as precocious as musicians get. He wrote 12 string symphonies between the ages of 12 and 14. His three piano quartets were written between 1822 and 1825 (you do the math!)—these were his first published works. I’ve long counted his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream among my favorite pieces. Its brilliant passagework, soaring melodies, sumptuous orchestration, and driving rhythms are a tour de force for modern orchestras and ferociously challenging to organists playing it in transcription. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a mature work, but it’s the product of a 17 year old. What were you doing when you were 17?

The 1820s was a decade of violent uprisings all over Europe. Italians revolted against King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies, resulting in the formation of a constitutional monarchy. A colonel in the Spanish army assembled a mutiny against King Ferdinand VII, who capitulated to their demands for a liberal constitution. France answered Ferdinand’s plea for assistance by sending 100,000 soldiers, quelling the uprising, and restoring the absolute monarchy. There were revolutions in Portugal and Brazil, and in a brutal revolutionary war, Greece won independence from the Ottoman Empire. The death of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1821 coincided with Mendelssohn’s prolific adolescence. In the United States in 1825, John Quincy Adams was president, the Erie Canal was opened, and Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, passed away.

One of Mendelssohn’s greatest hits is his Violin Concerto, completed and premiered in 1845, four years before his death. The year 1845 was a busy one around the world. Edgar Allan Poe published The Raven, Baylor University and the United States Naval Academy were founded, James Polk succeeded John Tyler as President of the United States, and the potato blight began in Ireland. In 1845, Frederick Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, an earth-shaking work that represented several giant steps in the march toward the American Civil War.

There were many “firsts” that year: a “screw-powered” steamship crossed the Atlantic, anesthesia was used to ease childbirth, the New York Herald mentioned baseball, and the rubber band was invented in Great Britain. It has never occurred to me to associate Felix Mendelssohn with baseball, anesthesia, or rubber bands. Do you suppose Mendelssohn ever rolled up a manuscript with a rubber band?

 

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937)

Widor is probably forever to be remembered by legions of organists and brides for one piece of music. But seventy-five measures of sixteenth notes in 4/2 time, followed by three of big whole-note chords in F major is a pittance when compared to the rest of his massive output of music. He wrote tons of orchestral music including symphonies, works for orchestra with organ, piano, violin, cello, harp, chorus, and various huge combinations. There are six duos for piano and harmonium, a piano quartet, a piano quintet, and sonatas for violin, cello, oboe, and clarinet. There are reams of piano music, songs, and choral music, even music for the stage. But all we really know are ten organ symphonies along with a half-dozen incidental pieces for organ. And most of us only play one of his pieces. Oh yes, there’s also a doozy in G minor, but it’s a lot harder.

Widor was one of the most important teachers of his generation, succeeding César Franck as professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire in 1890, later leaving that post to become professor of composition. His students included Marcel Dupré, Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire, Darius Milhaud, and Albert Schweitzer.

Widor studied in Brussels with Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens (lots of us play Lemmens’s Fanfare). When he finished those studies in 1868 at the age of 24, he moved to Paris where he was appointed assistant to Camille Saint-Säens at Église de la Madeleine. And in 1870, he was appointed “provisional” organist at Ste-Sulpice, the most prestigious post in France and home to the fantastic Cavaillé-Coll organ that is revered, cherished, and studied by generations of organists and organbuilders around the world. His primary advocate for that envied position was Aristide Cavaillé-Coll himself, who had been disappointed by the flippancy of the music of Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély (1817–69), the previous organist who had presided over the first years of Cavaillé-Coll’s masterpiece. It’s rumored that Cavaillé-Coll’s agitation contributed to Lefébure-Wély’s early death. (You gotta watch out for those organbuilders!)

Daniel Roth, the current organist at Ste-Sulpice,⁵ visited New York City to play a recital at Church of the Resurrection, where I, with the Organ Clearing House, had installed a renovated and relocated 1916 Casavant organ. It was an exciting moment for us to have such a master player perform on “our” instrument, but one of the most interesting moments came not at the organ console, but walking the sidewalks of Park Avenue, when Monsieur Roth told me some of the back story surrounding Widor’s appointment in 1870.

That’s the year that the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had used brilliant and nefarious schemes to provoke a French attack on Prussia. The French Parliament declared war on the German Kingdom of Prussia on July 16, 1870, the Germans were armed and in position, and quickly invaded northeastern France. Paris fell to Prussian forces in January of 1871. In May of 1871, the Treaty of Frankfurt gave Germany what is now Alsace-Lorraine, and the balance of power in Europe was upset. France was determined to reclaim lost territory, Britain was nervous about the change of balance in power, and the seeds were sown for World War I.

In that harsh political climate, patriotic (and perhaps, bigoted) Frenchmen considered Belgium as German,⁶ and Widor’s detractors whispered in the ears of the priests that Widor “plays like a German.” Cavaillé-Coll prevailed, and Widor was appointed. But his appointment was never made formal. He served Ste-Sulpice as provisional organist for 64 years. Widor’s student Marcel Dupré succeeded him, and served until 1971—more than a hundred years after Widor’s appointment.⁷

Claude Monet (1840–1926) completed some of his early works while living in Paris between 1865 and 1870, when Camille Doncieux was his model for The Woman in the Green Dress, Woman in the Garden, and On the Bank of the Seine. Camille gave birth to their son in 1867, and they were married on June 28, 1870, less than three weeks before the start of the Franco-Prussian War. As the war started, Monet fled to England with his new wife and child, where he studied the work of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. How’s that for war influencing the arts?

Édouard Manet, James Whistler, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Renoir were contemporaries of Widor. Monet, Manet, Degas, and Renoir were all active in Paris when Widor was organist at Ste-Sulpice. I wonder if they met? What would they have talked about?

 

And that organ?

The Cavaillé-Coll organ at Ste-Sulpice was built in 1862, incorporating some pipes from the previous (1781) Clicquot organ. With five manuals and a hundred stops, it was one of the largest organs in the world. (An additional voice was added when Widor retired.) It included pneumatic actions to assist the vast mechanical systems, a complex wind system with multiple wind pressures (all in the days of hand-pumping), a state-of-the-art whiz-bang console with arrays of mechanical registration devices, and a huge palette of tonal innovations. 

Europe had not cornered the market on war in those days. The American Civil War was in full swing when Cavaillé-Coll completed that organ. In 1862, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as President of the Confederate States of America, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Henry David Thoreau died on May 6, 1862. Do you suppose Widor ever read Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government, Slavery in Massachusetts, or Walden? And who will be the first to include Battle Hymn of the Republic on their recording at Ste-Sulpice?

§

Maybe Felix Mendelssohn was aware of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, but it would be a reach to trace how that machine influenced Mendelssohn’s music (though there are dissertations out there that seem just as obscure). Widor had to have noticed the Prussian occupation of Paris as he was starting his epic tenure at Ste-Sulpice. He must have had terrifying walks to church past Prussian soldiers brandishing weapons. Such a sight would have influenced my improvisations. And suppose he had happened to meet Degas or Renoir at a reception. Would he have gone to the studio for coffee the next day and discussed the confluence of pictorial art and music?

In its collective history, the organ is an exquisite example of the highest of human achievements. It combines an array of crafts, it functions thanks to scientific principles, and it evokes the full range of human emotions. But it’s not a be-all or end-all. Its place in our society is the result of complex evolution, and given the complexity of today’s world and the state of today’s church, we’re passing through a time that has been less than a Golden Age.

But the range of the instrument, the breadth of its history, and the sheer power of its voice continue to keep it in the forefront. However obscure and arcane, its nearly unique status as a vehicle for improvisation equips it perfectly as an instrument of the future. What will future generations deduce from today’s organ music when they look back and consider the wide world in which we live today?

And here’s a hint: your recital audience loves to hear this stuff. Of course we’re interested in the intricacies of sonata form, or the structure of a fugue (“listen for the entrances”), but the people might get more out of connecting your organ world with their history world, their literature world, their art world. It took me about seven hours to write this piece, including the deep research. It’s not a big effort, and it adds a lot. The buzz phrase in the real estate world is “location, location, location.” How about “relevance, relevance, relevance?” ν

 

Notes

1. A general note: In this essay, I’m tossing about lots of supposedly specific facts. As usual, I’m sitting at my desk with nothing but a laptop, and I’m gathering data from quick Google searches. Much of the data comes from Wikipedia, which we suppose is generally accurate, but cannot be relied on as absolute. I am, therefore, not citing each specific reference, and offer the caveat that any factual errors are unintentional. They are offered to provide general historical context, and discrepancies of a year or two are inconsequential for this purpose.

2. There may well be some hangers-on who still believe that the sun revolves around the earth!

3. Similarly, Haydn was eighteen years old when J. S. Bach died, just as the Baroque era was ending. 

4. I like telling people that my great-grandmother, Ruth Cheney, was seven years old when Brahms died, and my sons were present at her funeral in 1994. On her hundredth birthday she increased from one cigarette a day to two! I treasure her piano, an 1872 rosewood Steinway, passed through our family to me as the only musician in my generation.

5. Daniel Roth has just been named International Performer of the Year by the New York City AGO chapter.

6. Today, Belgium has three official languages: French, German, and Dutch.

7. It’s poignant to remember that in his memoir, Dupré wrote of the agonies of World War II. He and his wife stayed at their home in Meudon during the Nazi occupation. German officers visited their home, planning to install guns on the roof, which commanded a view of Paris. Somehow the presence of the big pipe organ in the Salle d’orgue helped them decide not to. Later, their home was badly damaged by a German bomb. For the first two weeks of the German occupation, with no other transportation available, the Duprés (then in their fifties) walked the several miles to Ste-Sulpice.

John Bishop

Why it matters.

An hour ago, I finished my last “Christmas” tuning. It’s been a fun season involving lots of organs—some wonderful, and some a little less wonderful. I started tuning organs in Boston in 1984 when I joined Angerstein & Associates after returning from almost ten years in northern Ohio that included my years as a student at Oberlin, my first marriage, a long stint as director of music at a large Presbyterian church in Cleveland, and my terrific apprenticeship and friendship with Jan G. P. Leek. I still tune quite a few of the organs I first saw when working for Dan Angerstein in 1984—organs that were nearly new then and that have lots of miles on them now. In those churches I’ve outlasted as many as ten organists, five pastors, and who knows how many sextons.

It’s fun to return to these places several times each year, visiting the old friends who work in the buildings and monitoring the condition of the organs. Many of my tuning clients couple with a particular restaurant or sandwich shop. We were disappointed a couple weeks ago in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to see that the favorite sandwich shop near the church had been torn down. A sign indicates that they’ll reopen in a new building in the spring, but I think it will take twenty years to get the place seasoned so things taste right.

I’ve been fortunate over the years to be associated with some very special organs—special because of their size, their musical beauty, or their historical significance. It’s exciting to tune an organ that was played by Marcel Dupré, Lynnwood Farnam, or Pierre Cochereau. And I’ve had the thrill of preparing organs for concerts by such giants as Simon Preston, Madame Duruflé, Catharine Crozier, and Daniel Roth. You sit in the audience waiting for the artist to play that C# in the Swell Clarion you had so much trouble with two hours ago. Hold on, baby, hold on!

Of course, most of those experiences happen in big city churches with rich histories, fabulous artwork, heavy tourist traffic, and outstanding musicians. I’ve always felt it’s a special privilege to work behind the scenes in those monumental places, surrounded by all that heritage. But let’s not forget the importance of the small church with the seemingly inconsequential organ. 

Yesterday, I tuned one of the older Möller unit organs known as The Portable Organ. The opus list of M. P. Möller includes something like 13,500 organs, and while we know plenty of big distinguished instruments built by that firm, by far the most of them were these tiny workhorse organs with two, three, or four ranks. They built them by the thousand, and you find them everywhere. Maybe you’re familiar with the newer Artiste models that have a detached console, and one or two, or even three eight-by-eight-by-four foot cases stuffed full of pipes like a game of Tetris. The model I’m referring to predates that—they were popular in the 1940s, had attached keyboards, and usually three ranks, Spitz Principal (they called them Diapason Conique—oo-la-la), Gedeckt, and Salicional. The ranks were spread around through unit borrowing, each rank playing at multiple pitches, and there were compound stops such as “Quintadena” which combined the Gedeckt at 8′ and the Salicional at 22⁄3′.

The particular instrument I tuned yesterday was originally in a Lutheran church in Bronx, New York. As that parish dissolved a few years ago, the Organ Clearing House moved the organ to another Lutheran church in Queens. There was no budget for renovation, so we simply assembled it, coaxed all the notes to work, gave the case a treatment of lemon oil, and off we went. It had been a year since the last tuning, and it was fun to find that all the notes were working, the tuning had held nicely, and the organ sounded nice. I spent less than an hour tuning the three ranks, chatting with the pastor, and cleaning the keyboards.

When I got home this afternoon, I had a quick lunch and took a look at Facebook to be sure everyone out there was behaving. I was touched to see a post by colleague Michael Morris who works for Parkey OrganBuilders in the Atlanta area. He had just tuned another copy of the same Möller organ and wrote this:

 

It’s not always the quality of the instrument that makes a tuning job enjoyable. For some years now, my last regularly scheduled tuning has been in Georgia’s old capital of Milledgeville. It’s usually a pleasant drive through farm country to get to the antebellum Sacred Heart Church.

This was Flannery O’Connor’s parish, the center of her spiritual life and an influence in her writing. In 1945 Möller delivered a three-rank unit organ and placed it in the heart-pine gallery. It’s not a distinguished instrument, but it’s always easy to tune and I enjoy the thought that this instrument was part of the fabric of her life.

I’m always done just before the parishioners start the Rosary before noon Mass. I have lunch at a Mexican restaurant, then drive back to Atlanta knowing I have put another tuning season behind me.

 

Nice work, Michael. 

Flannery O’Connor (1925–64) was a devout Roman Catholic. After earning a master’s degree at the University of Iowa, she lived in Ridgefield, Connecticut, with classics translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife, Sally. In 1952, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus (from which her father died in 1941) and returned to her childhood home, Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. 

Her writing is spiritual, reflecting the theory that God is present throughout the created world, and including intense reflections on ethics and morality. The modest little organ in Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville was present for her whenever she worshipped. On such a personal level, that three-rank organ is every bit as important as the mighty 240-rank Aeolian-Skinner at The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston or the iconic Cavaillé-Coll at Saint-Sulpice in Paris.

How did you get started?

After his ordination as an Episcopal priest, my father was rector of a small church in Somerville, Massachusetts. Subsequently, he was the first rector of a new parish in Westwood, Massachusetts, starting there when it was formed as a mission. I was two years old when we moved into the rectory next to the church building. The church building was designed as a very simple structure, sort of an A-frame with a linoleum floor. It was furnished with folding chairs, so the single room could be used for worship, dinners, and all sorts of other things. A few years later, the planned second phase was executed. An adjoining parish hall was built, and the original building was turned into a proper church with towers, stained glass, pews, and a rear gallery for organ and choir. The organ was also planned in stages. It was one of the first instruments built by Charles Fisk, back in the days when he was of the Andover Organ Company. It had six stops, mechanical action, and a detached-reversed console, all mounted on a six-inch-high platform down front. Get it? It was the console and Rückpositiv of an organ that could be expanded to include two manuals and pedal. When the second phase was under construction, there was a moment when the roof was off—and that’s the moment they moved the organ. They lifted the whole thing with a crane, pipes and all, and placed it in the new balcony. I would have a fit if someone did that with one of my organs today, but seeing that organ hanging from the hook of the crane is one of my earliest pipe organ memories. It was more than twenty years before the second case containing Great and Pedal was built.

When I was ten, we moved to Winchester, Massachusetts, where Dad became rector of the Parish of the Epiphany, home to an Ernest M. Skinner organ built in 1904 (Wow! That’s an early one.), during the time when Robert Hope-Jones was working with Mr. Skinner. I started taking organ lessons a couple years after we got there and was quickly aware that the organ was on its last legs. I didn’t play the Skinner organ much, because less than a year after I started taking lessons, I was playing for money at other churches. That organ was replaced by a twelve-stop Fisk in 1974, their Opus 65. Six additional stops that were “prepared for” were added in 1983. The on-site installation of those stops was under way when Charles Fisk passed away. A 16′ Open Wood was added in 2012.

My organ lessons continued a few blocks away at the First Congregational Church in Winchester, home to Fisk’s Opus 50.¹ During my high school years, I was assistant organist to George Bozeman at the First Congregational Church in neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, where I played on the fabulous 1860 three-manual E. & G. G. Hook organ, which at 156 years old is still one of the very few remaining pre-Civil War three-manual Hooks. I didn’t know how lucky I was until I got to Oberlin a few years later and started hearing about the organs my classmates got started on.

All my college buddies were terrific organists, but I learned that some of them had never played a pipe organ before their audition at Oberlin. And while I had free access to those glorious organs by Fisk and Hook, some had only ever played on modest electro-pneumatic unit organs. The first time I played a tiny electro-pneumatic pipe organ was in a practice room at Oberlin! But thinking back and knowing that all of them were wonderful organists when they were in high school, I’m sure that thousands of parishioners in those few dozen churches were moved and excited to hear such young people play those organs so beautifully.

 

A matter of scale

Many composers and musicians consider the string quartet one of the purest forms of music-making. The composer working with four musicians and four independent parts is writing intimately and minimally. Each measure, each individual chord is specially voiced and tuned for the moment. There is no blurring of the edges; everything is exposed. Compare that to a symphony orchestra with twenty first violins. Conductors are fond of saying that an instrumental or choral ensemble is only as strong as its weakest member. I’ve always thought that was baloney. It’s a great cheerleading sentiment, but it seems to me that in a twenty-member violin section, the stronger players inspire and encourage their colleagues, helping them to achieve new heights. I’ve led volunteer church choirs whose collective ability far outshone the individual skills and musicianship of the weakest member.

We can draw an analogy with pipe organs. A tiny chamber organ with four or five stops is every bit as beautiful as a big-city monster with two hundred ranks. It’s almost unbelievable that both are called by the same name. When you’re playing a chamber organ, you listen to the speech of each individual pipe, but when you’re whipping through a big toccata with a hundred stops drawn, each four-part chord involves four hundred pipes. There might be an individual stinker in the Swell Clarion (remember, the pipe I was having trouble with), or a zinger in a Mixture that stands out in the crowd, but otherwise, you’re really not listening to individual pipes any more than you single out an individual violist in a Brahms symphony.

If we agree that a tiny chamber organ and a swashbuckling cathedral job are both beautiful organs, we should also agree that they serve different purposes and support different literature. I suppose we should allow that it’s likely to be more effective to play Sweelinck on a hundred stops than Widor on five. But we’re lucky that we still have organs that Sweelinck knew, so we can imagine and even reconstruct how his playing sounded. I don’t know if Widor had much opportunity to hear others play his music, but I bet he wouldn’t have liked hearing “that Toccata” on a small two-manual organ in a two-hundred-seat church.

 

Will it play in Milledgeville?

I’m sure my colleague Michael Morris did a lovely job tuning that little Möller organ. I assume, or I hope that some caring person will be playing lovely music and our favorite Christmas carols on the organ in the next few days. Maybe the congregation will sing “Silent Night” while holding candles, lighting that simple sanctuary with magical twinkling. Maybe that lovely effect will make people’s eyes go moist. Families will go home after Mass, whistling and humming those familiar tunes.

We know that Flannery O’Connor worshipped in that church during bleak moments in her life. There was that first Christmas after she was diagnosed with the disease that killed her father. There was that last Christmas before she died, when she must have been in terrible pain. But there was that organist doing that special thing that adds so much to worship at any time, and on any scale. And the organ was in tune.

One more thing . . . 

I’ve tuned around forty organs in the last month. Some days it seems that all I do is carry my tools back and forth to the car. I’ve seen a ton of Christmas decorations—some gorgeous, and some horribly tacky. The brightly colored life-sized inflatable plastic Nativity scene was the nadir. I expect there will be some snickering going on there on Christmas Eve.

The sacred spaces that are the most worshipful are almost always beautifully kept. There are no ragged stacks of last Sunday’s bulletin, no wastebaskets overflowing with Styrofoam coffee cups, and no inflatable Santas.

Wendy and I worship at Grace Church on lower Broadway in New York. It’s a beautiful Gothic-inspired building with magnificent stained-glass windows, elaborate carvings around the pulpit and choir stalls, a big, shiny brass eagle holding up the lectern, and a fabulous organ built recently by Taylor & Boody. John Boody has a degree in forestry and a special affinity for beautiful wood. I believe that Taylor & Boody is alone among American organbuilders in harvesting trees and milling and curing their own lumber. And the Grace Church organ sure looks it. Intricate enchanting grain patterns abound. The two facing organ cases and the massive freestanding console add their gleam to the place. It’s nice that I’ve never seen a stack of music on the console.

There are lots of organ consoles that look like the day after a fire at a Staples store. Everything from Post-it notes to rubber bands, from cough drops to hair brushes festoon the cabinet. The organ console is a worship space, especially when it’s visible from the pews. I know that the console at your church is your workspace. I know you have to view it and use it as a tool, a workbench—something like a cubicle. But you might think of creating a little bag that contains all your supplies, or installing a neat little hidden shelf to hold your hymnals. I bet your organbuilder would be happy to build you one. 

Please don’t let the state of your organ console intrude on someone’s worship. Every week you’re playing for people who are suffering, scared, sick, or worried. Be sure that everything you do is enhancing their experience of worship. That’s why we’re there. ν

 

Notes

1. On the Fisk website, this organ is referred to as Winchester Old and Opus 65 is Winchester New. Another similarly cute organ nickname belongs to the Bozeman-Gibson organ at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brookline, Massachusetts—Orgel-brookline.

John Bishop

A Pokémon world

Last week, I visited a church in Brooklyn, New York, to talk with the rector, wardens, and organist about placing a vintage pipe organ in their historic building. After the meeting, I walked the eight blocks up Nostrand Avenue back to the subway. It was 97°, so I stopped at a corner bodega for a bottle of cold water. While I was paying, there was a series of great crashes just up the street, and I was among the crowd that gathered to see what had happened. A white box truck had rear-ended a car stopped at a traffic light and shoved that car into another that was parked at the curb. The truck must have been going pretty fast because there was lots of damage to all three vehicles—broken glass everywhere, hubcaps rolling away, mangled metal. Apparently, no one was hurt, but everyone present was hollering about Pokémon. 

“Innocent until proven guilty” is an important concept in our system of law enforcement, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that the driver of the truck was chasing a virtual-reality fuzzy something-or-other, and didn’t have his eyes on the road. When I told my son Chris about it, he asked, “So . . . , what did he catch?” 

Take away the deadly weapon of the automobile, and you’re left with at least a nuisance. Living in a big city, much of our mobile life is on foot, and we routinely cross streets with dozens of other people. It’s usual for someone to be walking toward me with ear buds pushed in far enough to meet in the middle, their nose buried in their screen. I often shout, “Heads up,” to avoid a collision. I wonder what’s the etiquette in that situation? When there’s a collision on the sidewalk and the phone falls and shatters, whose fault is it?

I know I’ve called home from a grocery store to double-check items on my list, but I’m annoyed by the person who stands in the middle of the aisle, cart askew, talking to some distant admirer. Perhaps worst is the young parent pushing a $1,000 stroller, one of those jobs with pneumatic suspension, talking on the phone and ignoring the child. No, I’m wrong. Worst is that same situation when the child has a pink kiddie-tablet of his own, and no one is paying attention to anyone. Small children are learning billions of bytes every moment—every moment is a teaching moment. It’s a shame to leave them to themselves while talking on the phone. 

The present danger is the possibility of accidents that result from inattention. The future danger is a world run by people who grew up with their noses in their screens, ignoring the world around them.

 

Starry eyes

An archeological site at Chankillo in Peru preserves the remains of a 2,300- year-old solar observatory comprising thirteen towers whose positions track the rising and setting arcs of the sun, their eternal accuracy confirmed by modern research. There are similar sites in ancient Mesopotamia. If I had paid better attention to my middle school Social Studies teacher, Miss Wood, who nattered on about the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers as if she were reading from a phone book, I’d have a better understanding of modern Iraq and the tragedy of the current destruction of ancient sites there. 

Early astronomers like Aristotle (around 350 BC) and Ptolemy (around 150 AD) gave us the understanding of the motions of celestial bodies. I imagine them sitting on hillsides or cliffs by the ocean for thousands of nights, staring at the sky and realizing that it’s not the stars, but we who are on the move. I wonder if there’s anyone alive today with such an attention span.

 

The man from Samos

In April of 2014, Wendy and I and three other couples, all (still) close friends, chartered a 60-foot sailboat for a week of traveling between Greek Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. These islands are within a few miles of Turkey, and many of us are increasingly familiar with that region as the heart of the current refugee crises. The island of Lesbos has a population of 90,000, and 450,000 refugees passed through in 2015. Lesbos was not part of our itinerary, but it’s adjacent to other islands we visited. We visited Patmos, where St. John the Divine, sequestered in a cave, received the inspiration we know as the Book of Revelation, but for me, our visit to Samos was a pilgrimage.

Pythagoras is my hero. He was a native of Samos who lived from 570 BC to 495 BC. He gave us the eponymous theory defining the hypotenuse of the right triangle, and importantly to readers of The Diapason, he defined musical tone and intervals in terms of mathematics that led directly to our modern study of musical theory. He was the direct forebear of the art of music. Approaching the island from the north, we entered the harbor of the main town (also called Samos) to be welcomed by a statue of Pythagoras. It shows the great man posed as one side of a right triangle, a right triangle in his left hand, and right forefinger pointing skyward toward a (compact fluorescent) light bulb. Okay, okay, it’s pretty tacky—even hokey, but you should see the Pythagoras snow-globe I bought there that graces the windowsill in my office.

Pythagoras deduced the overtone series by listening to blacksmiths’ hammers and anvils; he realized overtones are a succession of intervals defined by a mathematical series, and you cannot escape that his genius was the root of music. He noticed that blacksmiths’ hammering produced different pitches, and he first assumed that the size of the hammer accounted for the variety. It’s easy to duplicate his experiment. Find any object that makes a musical tone when struck—a bell, a cooking pot, a drinking glass. Hit it with a pencil, then hit it with a hammer. You’ll get the same pitch both times, unless you break the glass. So the size of the anvil determines the pitch. 

But wait, there’s more. Pythagoras noticed that each tone consisted of many. He must have had wonderful ears, and he certainly was never distracted by his smart phone ringing or pushing notifications, because he was able to start picking out the individual pitches. Creating musical tones using a string under tension (like a guitar or violin), he duplicated the separate tones by stopping the string with his finger, realizing that the first overtone (octave) was reproduced by half the full length (1:2), the second (fifth) resulted from 2:3, the third by 3:4, etc. That numerical procession is known as the Fibonacci Series, named for Leonardo Fibonacci (1175–1250) and looks like this:

1+1=2

1+2=3

2+3=5

3+5=8, etc., ad infinitum.

The Fibonacci Series defines mathematical relationships throughout nature —the kernels of a pinecone, the divisions of a nautilus shell, the arrangements of seeds in a sunflower blossom, rose petals, pineapples, wheat grains, among countless others. And here’s a good one: count out how many entrances of the subject in Bach’s fugues are on Fibonacci numbers. 

 

Blow, ye winds . . . 

If you’ve ever blown on a hollow stem of grass and produced a musical tone, you can imagine the origin of the pipe organ. After you’ve given a hoot, bite an inch off your stem and try again: you’ll get a different pitch. Take a stick of bamboo and carve a simple mouthpiece at one end. Take another of different length, and another, and another. Tie them together and you have a pan-pipe. You’re just a few steps away from the Wanamaker!

I have no idea who was the first to think of making a thin sheet of metal, forming it as a cylinder, making a mouthpiece in it, devising a machine to stabilize wind-pressure, and another machine to choose which notes were speaking, but there’s archeological evidence that people were messing around like that by 79 AD, when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, destroying the city of Pompeii, and preserving a primitive pipe organ. And 350 years earlier, in Alexandria, Egypt, the Hydraulis was created, along with visual depictions accurate enough to support the construction of a modern reproduction.

I’m sure that the artisans who built those instruments were aware of Pythagoras’s innovations, and that they could hear the overtones in the organ pipes they built, because those overtones led directly to the introduction of multiple ranks of pipes, each based on a different harmonic. Having five or six ranks of pipes playing at once produced a bold and rich tone we know as Blockwerk, but it was the next smart guy who thought of complicating the machine to allow single sets of pipes to be played separately­—stop action. They left a few of the highest pitch stops grouped together—mixtures. Then, someone took Pythagorean overtones a step further and had those grouped ranks “break back” a few times, stepping down the harmonic series, so the overtones grew lower as you played up the scale.

Here’s a good one: how about we make two organs, one above the other, and give each a separate keyboard. How about a third organ with a keyboard on the floor you can play with your feet? 

As we got better at casting, forming, and handling that metal, we could start our overtone series an octave lower with 16-foot pipes. Or 32 . . . I don’t know where the first 32-foot stop was built or who built it, but I know this: he was an energetic, ambitious fellow with an ear for grandeur. It’s ferociously difficult and wildly expensive to build 32-foot stops today, but it was a herculean task for seventeenth- or eighteenth-century workers. And those huge shiny pipes were just the start. You also had to trudge out in the forest, cut down trees, tie them to your oxen, drag them back into town, and start sawing out your rough lumber to build the case for those huge pipes.

How long do you suppose it took workers to cut one board long enough to support the tower crown over a 32-foot pipe using a two-man saw? It’s a good thing they didn’t have smart phones because between tweets, texts, e-mails, and telemarketers, they’d never have finished a single cut.

It’s usual for the construction of a monumental new organ to use up 50,000 person hours or more, even with modern shortcuts such as using dimension lumber delivered by truck, industrial power tools, and CNC routers. How many hours did the workshops of Hendrik Niehoff (1495–1561) or Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) put into their masterpieces? And let’s remember that Schnitger ran several workshops concurrently and produced more than 150 organs. Amazing. He must have been paying attention.

 

Pay attention

The pipe organ is a towering human achievement. It’s the result of thousands of years of experimentation, technological evolution, mathematical applications, and the pure emotion of musical sensibilities. Just as different languages evolved in different regions of the world, so did pipe organs achieve regional accents and languages. The experienced ear cannot mistake the differences between a French organ built in 1750 from one built in northern Germany. The musicians who played them exploited their particular characteristics, creating music that complemented the instruments of their region. 

Let’s think for a minute about that French-German comparison. Looking at musical scores, it’s easy to deduce that French organs have simple pedalboards. But let’s go a little deeper. It’s no accident that classic French organ music is built around the Cornet (flue pipes at 8′, 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, 13⁄5′). Those pitches happen to be the fundamental tone and its first four overtones, according to Pythagoras, and they align with the rich overtones that give color and pizzazz to a reed stop. The reeds in those organs are lusty and powerful in the lower and middle octaves, but their tone thins out in the treble. Add that Cornet, and the treble blossoms. Write a dialogue between treble and bass using the Trompette in the left hand and the Cornet in the right. (Can you say Clérambault?) Add the Cornet to the Trumpet as a chorus of stops (Grand Jeu). And while you’re fooling around with the five stops of the Cornet, mix and match them a little. Try a solo on 8′-4′-22⁄3′ (Chant de Nazard). How about 8′-4′-13⁄5′ (Chant de Tierce)? It’s no accident. It’s what those organs do!

History has preserved about 175 hours of the music of J. S. Bach. We can only wonder how much was lost, and certainly a huge amount was never written down. But 175 hours is a ton of music. That’s more than a non-stop seven-day week. I guess Bach’s creativity didn’t get to rest until about 9:00 a.m. on the eighth day! We know he had a busy life, what with bureaucratic responsibilities (he was a city employee), office work, rehearsals, teaching, and all those children. When he sat down to write, he must have worked hard.

Marcel Dupré was the first to play the complete organ works of Bach from memory in a single series of recitals. We know he had a busy life as church musician, professor, mentor, composer, and prolific performer. When he sat down to practice, he must have worked hard.

In 1999, Portugese pianist Maria João Pires was scheduled to perform a Mozart concerto with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly. She checked the orchestra’s schedule to confirm which piece, and prepared her performance. Trouble was, the published schedule was wrong. The first performance was a noontime open rehearsal. Chailly had a towel around his neck, and the hall was full of people. He gave a downbeat and the orchestra started playing. A stricken look appeared on Pires’ face, and she put her face in her hands. She spoke with Chailly over the sound of the orchestra, saying she had prepared the wrong piece. It’s not easy to tell what he said, but I suppose it was something like, “Let’s play this one!” And she did. Perfectly. You can see the video by typing “Wrong Concerto” into the YouTube search bar. Maybe Ms. Pires wasn’t paying attention when she started preparation for that concert, but she sure was paying attention when she learned the D-minor concerto. It was at the tip of her fingers, performance ready, at a panicky moment’s notice.

Often on a Sunday morning, my Facebook page shows posts from organ benches. Giddy organists comment between churches on the content of sermons, flower arrangements, or the woman with the funny hat. Really? Do you have your smart phone turned on at the console during the service? If your phone is on while you’re playing a service, is it also on while you’re practicing? I suppose the excuse is that your metronome is an app? Oh wait, you don’t use a metronome? To paraphrase a famous moment from a 1988 vice-presidential debate, I knew Marcel Dupré. Marcel Dupré was a friend of mine. You’re no Marcel Dupré.¹

 

A time and a place

I love my smart phone. In the words of a colleague and friend, I use it like a crack pipe. I read the news. I order supplies and tools. I look up the tables for drill-bit sizes, for wire gauges, for conversions between metric and “English” measurements. I do banking, send invoices, find subway routes, get directions, buy plane tickets, reserve hotel rooms, and do crossword puzzles. I check tide charts, wind predictions, and nautical charts. I text, tweet, e-mail, telephone, and “go to Facebook.” I listen to music and audio books, check the weather, look for restaurants, pay for groceries, and buy clothes.

The people who invented and developed our smart phones must have been paying attention to their work. It’s a world of information we carry in our pockets, and there must be millions of lines of code behind each touch of the screen. I’m grateful to have such an incredible tool, but I’m worried about its effect on our lives. We know a lot about the stars and orbiting planets, but I’m sure we don’t know everything. I hope there’s some smart guy somewhere, sitting on a remote hillside with no phone, wondering about something wonderful.

I’m not pushing strollers so often anymore, but I keep my phone in my pocket when our grandchildren are visiting. I keep my phone in my pocket when I’m walking the dog because it’s fun to be with him. And I keep my phone in my pocket when I’m walking the streets of the city alone. I wouldn’t want to miss someone doing something stupid because they weren’t paying attention. Hope they don’t drop their phone. ν

 

Notes

1. Poetic license: truth is, I never met Marcel Dupré.

Leonardo Ciampa

Leonardo Ciampa is Maestro di Cappella Onorario of the Basilica di Sant’Ubaldo in Gubbio, Italy, and organist of St. John the Evangelist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it. And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.

—Yuko Hayashi

 

Yuko Hayashi is gone.

I feel unworthy of eulogizing her. I do not presume to rank among her greatest students—a very long list that includes James David Christie, Carolyn Shuster Fournier, Mamiko Iwasaki, Peter Sykes, Christa Rakich, Gregory Crowell, Mark Dwyer, Kevin Birch, Kyler Brown, Barbara Bruns, Ray Cornils, Nancy Granert, Hatsumi Miura, Tomoko Akatsu Miyamoto, Dana Robinson, Naomi Shiga, Paul Tegels, and others too numerous to name. 

I cannot describe, or comprehend, the fortune of being her student between the ages of 15 and 18—at the time, her only high school student. She was in her late 50s—still at the height of her powers, still performing internationally and recording. She brought a constant parade of heavy-hitters to Old West Church in Boston for recitals and masterclasses. During those three years alone (1986–1989), there were José Manuel Azkue, Guy Bovet, Fenner Douglass, Susan Ferré, Roberta Gary, Mireille Lagacé, Joan Lippincott, Karel Paukert, Umberto Pineschi, Peter Planyavsky, Michael Radulescu, Montserrat Torrent, Harald Vogel, and the list goes on. Yuko was something of an impresario. In the 70s, when Harald Vogel was completely unknown in America, she brought him to Old West to play his very first concert here—for $100, which she paid out of her own pocket! Guy Boet, same story—his first concert in America, for $100. In 1972, at the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, Yuko organized the very first organ academy ever held in Japan, bringing both Anton Heiller and Marie-Claire Alain. In 1985, Yuko, Umberto Pineschi, and Masakata Kanazawa started the Academy of Italian Organ Music in Shirakawa. A list of her accomplishments would be long, indeed.

At the time, I knew virtually nothing about Yuko’s life or career. Meeting her was truly random. It was September of 1985 (Bach’s 300th birthday year). I was skimming the concert listings in The Boston Globe, and I happened to see that there was going to be an all-Bach organ and harpsichord concert at Old West Church, given by Peter Williams. I had never heard a “real pipe organ,” and I had never set foot in a Protestant church before. I had no idea who Peter Williams was, and I had no particular interest in the organ or harpsichord. I was a 14-year-old piano student in the New England Conservatory prep school. The craziest part of all? I had not the faintest idea that the New England Conservatory organ department held their lessons, classes, and concerts at Old West, or that the church’s organist happened to be department chair. Attending the concert was nothing more than a whim.

I was immediately grabbed, both by the sound of the Fisk’s ravishing plenum, and by Williams’s exquisite selections, all from Bach’s youth. I still remember every piece on the program, which opened with Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739. After the concert, a short but elegant Japanese woman introduced herself to me and shook my hand. I had no idea she had any affiliation with NEC. I’m not sure I even understood that she was the church’s organist.

Who could have predicted that, one year later, September 1986, I would quit the piano and become an organ student of Yuko, taking lessons on that same instrument? But even that was random. In the NEC prep school catalogue, under “Organ,” Yuko’s was the name listed. That’s the one and only reason I contacted her.

 

Early years in Japan

(1929–1953)

Yuko Hayashi was born in 1929 in Hiratsuka, a coastal town 24 miles from Yokohama. She was born on November 2. (She used to joke about having been born on All Souls’ Day, having missed All Saints’ Day by only one day!) Many of Yuko’s students would come to notice her unusual perceptiveness. A couple of us thought it bordered on ESP. She had the ability to reach for things even when she couldn’t see them. Case in point: why did a woman who was born in 1929, in a country that was only one percent Christian, decide that she wanted to become an organist, when she didn’t even know what an organ was?

Yuko’s father was a Japanese Anglican priest. He was the pastor of St. Andrew’s Church in Yokohama. At age five, Yuko started playing the reed organ at St. Andrew’s. (Soon enough, she became sufficiently proficient to play an entire Anglican service.) In sixth grade, her music teacher suggested she learn the piano. “Hanon: hated it. Czerny: a little better. Burgmüller: not as bad. But then, Bach Inventions! I became hooked on this music. I practiced all hours; I didn’t want to quit.”¹ She reasoned, “If Bach wrote pieces for the organ, then the organ must be a wonderful instrument.”² She knew that she wanted to play the organ, even before she had ever seen one! The only instruments she knew were the reed organ at church and a Hammond. In 2007 I asked her, “When you were young, how did you know you wanted to play the organ if you didn’t even know what an organ was?” She replied, “I knew when I met J. S. Bach.”³ In a 2009 email she wrote, “If I was not exposed to the two-part Inventions by Bach just by chance in my youth, I am positively sure that I [would] not [have been] drawn into music for so many decades since. Certainly, I would not have chosen organ as my main instrument.”⁴

Finally at age 15 she saw a pipe organ for the first time, in Tokyo. It was important to practice on a pipe organ, for she was preparing to audition for the Tokyo Ueno Conservatory (now named Tokyo University of the Arts). Imagine this 15-year-old girl, in 1944, with bombs falling around her, traveling two and a half hours to Tokyo to practice for two hours on this organ, then making the two and a half hour return trip home. (I recall that, in the 1980s, she told me that this organ was an Estey.⁵ However, other students remember her saying it was a Casavant.⁶)

She passed the audition and enrolled in the conservatory. Eight students had to share “a Yamaha and an electric-action pipe organ with a hideous sound. We each practiced for 50 minutes and then let the motor rest for ten minutes in between because it was old and cranky.”⁷ 

 

Study in America (1953–1960)

In the early 1950s, Yuko’s father urged her to visit America. She accepted a scholarship to attend Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. The port of entry was faraway Seattle. The sea voyage from Yokohama to Seattle took 12 days. She arrived in Seattle on July 23, 1953. Tuition, room, and board were covered, but she had only thirty dollars in her pocket (which was all she was allowed). She stretched the thirty dollars as far as she could, though at least she had an Amtrak pass that enabled her to travel by train anywhere in the country.  

 

My father arranged a train trip for me around half of the country, visiting some of his friends. When I arrived in Seattle on July 23 [1953], his friend’s daughter, who was the secretary of St. Mark’s Cathedral, came to pick me up. Within two hours of setting foot on American soil, I played the organ at St. Mark’s. I think it was a Kilgen.⁸ I met Peter Hallock, and he gave me some of his compositions. From Seattle I went to San Francisco and stayed with my father’s friend there. I heard Richard Purvis play a recital in a museum, and I remember I kept looking around for the pipes, which were not visible. That was my second American organ experience. Next I stayed in Los Angeles for a few days. I didn’t see any organs there, but what I remember most was my first American picnic, a culturally foreign experience for me. Then I went to Salt Lake City, found the Mormon Tabernacle organ and went to two concerts in one day. Alexander Schreiner was there. Can you imagine? Next I visited my father’s friends in Minneapolis, and then the remainder of the summer stayed in a guesthouse at the University of Chicago. Finally, I arrived at Cottey College, and do you know what I found there? A Baldwin organ!⁹

 

After a year she was no longer able to stay at the school; however, she received a scholarship to go to any other school of her choice in America. Where would she go? She knew nothing about Oberlin or Eastman. Ultimately, her decision was influenced by having grown up by the sea.

 

At that school in Missouri, every Friday you know what we had to eat? Fish. That fish must have been dead for ten days by the time we had it. The fish was so fresh in Japan. So I knew I wanted to live near the sea. New York was too big. Washington, D.C., was too political. But Boston . . . .¹⁰

And so in 1954 she entered the New England Conservatory and studied organ with the legendary George Faxon.  

 

I spoke almost no English, and he didn’t say very much. So our lessons were filled with music but had long silences! One week he asked me to bring in the Vivaldi[/Bach] A-minor concerto. And I memorized it. I’d never memorized anything before. He didn’t say much. But you know what he did? He wrote on a piece of paper “Sowerby Pageant” and told me to go to Carl Fischer [Music Company] to pick up the music. When I got to the store and showed the man the piece of paper, he said, “Oh, you’re playing this?” I said, “Yes.” I had no idea what it was. Then when I opened the music! Incredibly difficult. At my next lesson Faxon wrote in the pedalings, very quickly, from beginning to end. What a technique he had. And you knew where he got it? Fernando Germani. Once Faxon took me to Brown University to see his teacher, Germani, play the Sowerby. I got to sit very close to him, so I could see Germani playing. And there he was, five-foot-three, his feet flying all over the pedalboard.¹¹

 

On February 6, 1956, Yuko played her bachelor’s recital in Jordan Hall, her first recital ever. In only three weeks Yuko memorized the daunting program, which included Vivaldi/Bach A-minor concerto (first movement), D’Aquin Noël X, Schumann Canon (probably B minor, op. 56, no. 5), Bach Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue, Liszt “Ad Nos” (second half), Sowerby Pageant, Titcomb Regina Caeli, Dupré Second Symphony (Intermezzo), and Messiaen L’Ascension (third movement).

In 1956, Faxon told Yuko, “This is still a secret, so you can’t tell anybody. But I’m leaving NEC and going to teach at B.U. [Boston University]” Yuko was disappointed at the news. “I wanted to follow him to B.U. I didn’t know anybody else. But he said, ‘No, don’t follow me. You studied with me two years—that’s enough. Stay at NEC.’ And then he said, ‘You must make Boston your home.’”¹²

Yuko was disheartened and considered returning to Japan. But Chester (“Chet”) Williams, beloved dean of NEC, would have none of it. Faxon’s imminent departure was still a secret. But Chet had another secret for Yuko: “There is another man coming, someone with great ideas.” That man was Donald Willing. On Chet’s advice, Yuko stayed at NEC.

Willing had been to Europe and was galvanized by the new tracker instruments being built. He immediately arranged for NEC to purchase new practice organs by Metzler and Rieger. The 1957 Metzler was voiced by Oscar Metzler himself.

 

As soon as I touched the instrument, I had an immediate reaction: “This is it! This is a living organism!” My teacher did not persuade me to have this reaction—I had it on my own, from touching the instrument myself. That was 1957. The next year, 1958, I got my M. M. from the conservatory. And that same year, the Flentrop was put in at Busch-Reisinger [now Adolphus Busch Hall]. That was Biggs’s instrument. He let all the students play it. We had to practice at night, when the museum was closed. And we were poor; we couldn’t afford to pay a security guard. So Peggy [Mrs. Biggs] would act as the guard. The Biggs’s were so generous to organ students.¹³

 

Not all the organ students were taken by these new instruments. “They would say, ‘Are you going backwards?’”¹⁴ Yuko was undeterred. She played her Artist Diploma recital on the Flentrop in 1960.

 

Leonhardt and Heiller (1960–1966)

In 1960, Yuko joined the faculty of the organ department of New England Conservatory. At this point she had not yet heard of Gustav Leonhardt.  

 

I first heard of Leonhardt from John
Fesperman. Before John went to the Smithsonian, he taught at the Conservatory. The organ faculty was Donald Willing, John
Fesperman, and I, who had just been hired. I don’t know why, but John had been to Holland already, and he said, “Leonhardt is coming; you should go study with him.” So I did. I used to go to Waltham [Massachusetts] to practice cembalo at the Harvard Shop, and once a week I went to New York to study with Leonhardt. He was young, late 20s. A whole summer [1960] I studied with him.¹⁵

 

Yuko so enjoyed her study with Leonhardt that she considered switching to harpsichord. Indirectly it was Leonhardt who dissuaded her.

 

Finally [Leonhardt] said, “You really should study organ with Anton Heiller.” And I thought, “Who is that?” So I bought records of Heiller. You know, the old LP records. [. . .] [I]t was grand playing. Already I noticed something.¹⁶

 

1962 marked Heiller’s first visit to America and his first ever trip on an airplane! He gave two all-Bach performances on the Flentrop at Harvard University. Yuko attended the first performance and was so impressed that she attended the second one as well.  

 

And you know the most wonderful thing he played? O Mensch . . . with the melody on the Principal . . . . The whole program swept me away. And I immediately said, “This is the man I want to study with.” But I was shy, so I didn’t go to him right away. [. . .] He used to come to America every three years. He had come in ’62, so in ’65 he came back, and he returned again in ’68, ’71, etc. So in ’65 he was teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. I went down there, and for the first time, I met him. [The course was] six-and-a-half weeks. Every morning, he gave four hours of classes. Bach, David, Reger, and Hindemith—on a Möller! Then, in the afternoon, private lessons on a 10-stop Walcker organ in a private studio.¹⁷

 

Heiller urged Yuko to enroll in the summer academy in Haarlem the following year (1961). This marked her very first visit to Europe. She went on to study with Heiller sporadically, following him wherever he happened to be playing. (She was the only Heiller student who didn’t study with him in Vienna.)

 

Maybe [Heiller] taught differently with other people, but with me, most of what I learned was from his playing, not from his words. [H]e played a lot [during lessons]. But I would move and he would sit on the bench. He didn’t just play over my shoulder. With him, nothing was halfway. [. . .] Funny thing: when he was just standing there, without doing anything, I played better. He felt the music inside him, and it came out. It was a weird thing. [. . .] I performed his organ concerto. Of course he wanted to hear it at a lesson. But I wasn’t ready. He only told me about it three weeks before. But again, he was standing right there. And it’s funny, I was able to play it. You see, he was so perfect, he made me feel I could play. [. . .] You know, I was so little—I’m still little. (laughter) And he was much bigger than me. But he said to me, “Don’t be afraid of the piece.”¹⁸

 

In 1969, Yuko became chair of the organ department of NEC. She remained until 2001, a total of 41 years on the faculty, 30 of which as chair.

First European tours (1968)

Yuko’s first concert in Europe was at the 1968 International Organ Festival in Haarlem. From there she went on to play many concerts on historic instruments in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. “The wife of Hiroshi Tsuji, the Japanese organbuilder, arranged my first concert tour in Europe. [. . .] I soon discovered that I loved going to places where I didn’t know the people or the organs. I like to explore things I don’t know.”¹⁹ Here again we see Yuko’s fearlessness in reaching for things she could not see. As Nancy Granert reminisced, 

 

One time, Yuko and I were talking about traveling alone through Europe. I was saying that I always had a map in my purse, and that I really didn’t like being lost. She replied that she loved being lost and to find new places. She, after all, always knew where she was, right?²⁰

Old West Church (1974)

Charles Fisk built one of his most beautiful instruments, Opus 55, for Old West Church in Boston.²¹ It went on to become the main teaching instrument for the New England Conservatory organ department for decades. The organ was dedicated on Easter Sunday 1971 by Max Miller and Marian Ruhl Metson.

In 1973, Old West was conducting a search for a new organist. The organ committee consisted of the Rev. Dr. Richard Eslinger (pastor of Old West), Charles Fisk, Max Miller, and Jeanne Crowgey.²² Sneakily, but fortuitously, Eslinger and Fisk invited Yuko to attend a committee meeting in December 1973. After this meeting, they took Yuko across the street for a beer or two at a Chinese restaurant and lounge. Yuko enjoyed telling this story.

Charlie said, “Yuko, have you ever thought of becoming the organist for Old West Church?” These were absolutely unexpected words, and my answer was simply, “No.” Charlie kept a smile on his face and went on to tell me how convinced he was for me to be the organist of his organ at Old West, and that it was the right thing for me to do.

I was overwhelmed by his totally positive thoughts, and by the end of the conversation that evening I was convinced that Charlie was right and said “Yes” to him without knowing what the future would hold. [. . .] In February of 1974 I began to play for worship services (as a non-salaried organist), organized organ recitals for the season as well as the weekly lunchtime concerts that, after a decade, evolved into the Summer Evening Concerts.

As I look back [. . .] I say to myself, “How on the earth did Charlie know that I would be the appropriate one?” [. . . .] Charlie then knew that if I were caught by [the] beautiful sonorities that I could not leave them, would enjoy them, would maintain the instrument, and would let it be heard and played by all. [. . .] 

As I listened to organ students of the New England Conservatory day by day, year after year, and, of course, through my own practice, I became convinced that the 1971 Charles Fisk organ at Old West is a living organism and not just an organ with extraordinary beauty. This organ responds to the high demands of an artist as if a lively dialogue between two humans is being exchanged. I even dare say that the spirit of Charlie, an artist/organbuilder, is present when the organ is played by any organist who wishes to engage in conversation.²³

 

Yuko remained organist of Old West for 36 years. I was so fortunate to hear so many of her recitals there during the 1980s. I remember matchless performances of Bach’s Passacaglia, Franck’s Grand Pièce, and the Italian Baroque repertoire for which she had an incredible knack. (In fact, I never in my life heard a non-Italian play this music as well as she.²⁴) As late as 2008 (her last recital was in 2010), she gave a performance of Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue that to me remains the benchmark for all others. Few organists can play the middle gravement section without it sounding too long and too heavy. In Yuko’s hands, I was astonished by the articulation of each entrance of each of the five voices. I say without exaggeration that it sounded like a quintet of breathing musicians. I was so gripped by it that, when she got to the final section, I couldn’t believe how short the gravement had seemed.

 

As a teacher

Yuko made good use of her ESP. As a teacher, not only did she adapt to each individual student, but she adapted to each individual lesson with each student. Each lesson with her was a brand new experience—based solely on what she was sensing in the room at that moment. Besides her perceptiveness, she had something else: a regard for the value of each student. I can never forget something she told me many years later: “When you see a bud growing out of the ground, you’re not sure what it is yet, so you water it and feed it, and you wait to see what it grows into. But you don’t want to step on it.”²⁵ Her next sentence was even more unforgettable: “And if the bud is very small, all the more important not to step on it.” It would be hard to find a famous teacher with that level of regard for even the least talented among of her students.

Yuko’s ear was astonishing. She could have used that ear to be a critic or an adjudicator towards her students. Instead, she worked tirelessly to get them to use their own ear, to make their own decisions and judgments. In her gentle, quiet way (her voice never rose above a mezzo piano), she was relentless in making her students listen to the sound coming from the organ, in particular to be aware of the air going through the pipes. Most of all, she wanted her students to learn directly from the composer.

I will never forget playing Bach’s Allein Gott, BWV 664. The moment I stopped listening to one of the three voices, within milliseconds she started singing it. Then I would get back on track. Then, the millisecond that I stopped listening to another part, she would sing that one. That was how perceptive she was—which was both comforting and frightening! Another astonishing moment in our lessons that is worth mentioning is the one and only time I played Frescobaldi for her. In modern parlance, you could say that I was “schooled.” I was playing the Kyrie della Domenica from Fiori Musicali, which is in four voices. I played it and could tell from her facial expression that she was not pleased. She said one sentence: “You know, this music was originally written on four staves.” I played it again. This time, her face was even more displeased, and she said nothing at all. She sat down on the bench next to me and said, “OK, you play the alto and the bass, and I’ll play the soprano and the tenor.” I was floored. Her two voices breathed. They sang. She got up from the bench, without saying a word. Her point was made, and powerfully.

 

Later years

Yuko and I exchanged many emails in 2009. Many of them concerned administrative details of the Old West Organ Society (of which I was then a board member). However, more often the emails were simply about music.  

 

I remember when I first heard Mozart, in a castle outside Vienna, in [the] early 1970s. It was a big shock to me. While they were performing Mozart’s chamber music, I started to have the image about the leaves of the tree which show the front of the leaf and the back of the leaf, back and forth. Their colors are very different from each other, yet [the] only differences are front or back of the same leaf. It influenced the dynamic control as well in their performance at the castle.²⁶

 

During this era she always wrote to me as a friend and colleague, never as a “student.” Only once did she give something resembling “advice:”

 

I believe, there are only two emotions that stand out, “Love” and “Fear.” You have plenty of both, which in [an] actual sense make [a] great artist. Your potentiality is enormous! Don’t waste it, please! After all, it is the gift from God.²⁷

 

She was pleased, then, when not long after that email I became artistic director of organ concerts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (home of two historic Holtkamps from 1955). In October, Yuko called me to congratulate me. She reminisced about Walter Holtkamp, Sr., whom she met in Cleveland.

 

He was a strong character, and rather difficult to get along with. Yet, we liked each other. Walter took me for dinner, and to his organ in the Episcopal Church in Cleveland, and I played the organ for him. He liked my playing because I played exactly as I believed.

That led to reminiscing about Melville Smith, who dedicated the larger Holtkamp in Kresge Auditorium. She even knew about Saarinen, the architect who designed both Kresge and the MIT Chapel. One thing led to another. She ended up telling me practically her whole life story. We spoke for four (!)
hours. She did almost all of the talking. There wasn’t a single dull moment. Every sentence was imbued with energy. She talked about growing up in Japan during the war, doing forced labor even as a teenager. She talked about her earliest musical experiences and about more recent organbuilding trends in Japan. She spoke at length about Marc Garnier, who built the monumental organ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Center. She told story after story about Guy Bovet, Harald Vogel, Peter Williams, and Karel Paukert (in whose presence she set foot in Old West Church for the very first time). She told me about the time she was in France with Michel Chapuis, and she was playing a three-voice work, and Chapuis reached over and improvised a fourth voice over what she was playing. She spoke of Heiller (which she did in most every conversation I ever had with her). She even spoke of events and feelings in her personal life. It is safe to say that it was one of the most extraordinary phone conversations that I have ever had, with anyone. The next time I saw her, in 2010, she showed signs of memory loss. Clearly this was Yuko’s instinct at work, once again: she knew that in that phone conversation in 2009, she needed to tell me her life’s story.

At the 2014 AGO national convention in Boston, there was a workshop entitled “The Organ as Teacher: The Legacy of Performance Pedagogy at Old West Church,” moderated by Margaret Angelini, with Barbara Bruns, Susan Ferré, and Anne Labounsky. Indirectly it was an event honoring Yuko. (Had it been entitled “An Event in Honor of Yuko Hayashi,” she would have strongly objected.) It was hard for Yuko’s friends to see her in this state of diminished powers—at times aware of what was going on, at other times not so much. But then came a moment, after the workshop, when Yuko was standing, chatting with Ferré and Labounsky. All of a sudden she looked at them, pointed to me, and told them, “He’s a wonderful musician.” For me, that was the equivalent of a New York Times review. I have sought no other musical validation since that moment.

Last summer Yuko’s health declined. In September I learned that her condition was so grave that her family in Japan were contacted. Her 88th birthday was to be on November 2, followed eight days later by a celebratory concert at Old West, featuring some of her greatest former students. None of us thought she was going to live until the concert—we expected it to be a memorial service. Each day I checked my iPhone compulsively, not wanting to miss the terrible news. But the news didn’t come. Now it was November 10, the night of the gala concert. Apparently she was still with us—I had not heard otherwise. I arrived at Old West on that bitter cold night. I walked out of the cold into the warm church, and I heard people saying that Yuko was there! At Old West! I didn’t fully believe it. I looked around, and then I saw it: the back of a wheelchair. I raced over, and there she was. Her eyes were as alert as I had ever seen them. This isn’t possible! How did they even get her there, on that bitter cold evening? But Barbara Bruns made it happen. Yuko took my hand in hers and kept rubbing it, looking me straight in the eye the whole time. Not a word was said.  

The entire evening Yuko had that same alertness in her eyes, start to finish. Being at Old West, among her students and friends, hearing Charles Fisk’s beloved Opus 55—the energy from all of it must have thrilled her.

A few months passed. For Epiphany weekend, January 6 and 7, 2018, as a prelude at all of my Masses, I played Bach’s Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 739—the very first piece at Peter Williams’s life-changing recital at Old West so many years ago, the night I met Yuko Hayashi. Eerily, but not surprisingly, only three and a half hours after my last Mass, Yuko Hayashi left this world.

 

Notes

1. Phone conversation with the author,  July 25, 2007.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid. 

4. Email to the author, October 19, 2009.

5. 1918 Estey (Opus 1598) at Rikkyo (St. Paul’s) University, Tokyo. Replaced by Beckerath in 1984.

6. 1927 Casavant (Opus 1208) at Holy Trinity Church, Tokyo. Church and organ were destroyed by a firebomb in 1945.

7. Diane Luchese, “A conversation with Yuko Hayashi,” The American Organist, September 2010, p. 57. 

8. It was a ca. 1902 Kimball (not Kilgen), with tubular-pneumatic action.

9. Luchese, op. cit., p. 57f.

10. Phone conversation with the author, July 25, 2007.

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. From an unpublished interview between Yuko and the author, which took place in Boston on February 17, 2004. 

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Luchese, op. cit., p. 60. 

20. Conversation with Nancy Granert, January 11, 2018.

21. Seven years previous, and 500 meters down the road, Fisk had installed his Opus 44 at King’s Chapel, the first modern American three-manual tracker organ built in the second half of the twentieth century. The organ was a gift of Amelia Peabody. Thanks to the friendship between the pastors of Old West (Dr. Wilbur C. Ziegler) and King’s Chapel (Dr. Joseph Barth), Amelia Peabody gave a grant to Old West for their new organ. The choice of Fisk was endorsed by the organists of both King’s Chapel (Daniel Pinkham) and Old West (James Busby), as well as E. Power Biggs.

22. Jeanne Crowgey was a member of Old West from 1972 to 1980. She was also an organist, who served unofficially as an interim before the selection of Yuko Hayashi. Crowgey went on to be Yuko’s invaluable assistant during the first six years of the Old West Organ Society. Crowgey did a large amount of the administrative work for the international series, the summer series, and the weekly noontime concert series. She was one of the last friends to visit Yuko before her passing.

23. From a reminiscence written by Yuko in 2004 and posted on the C. B. Fisk website (edited by L. C.).

24. Once in the 1960s she played a recital at the Piaristenkirche in Vienna, which included a piece by Frescobaldi. Heiller was in attendance and raved about how she played the Frescobaldi, a composer she had never studied with him (phone conversation with the author, year unknown).

25. Phone conversation with the author, year unknown.

26. Email to the author, June 10, 2009.

27. Email to the author, September 2, 2009.

Faith Freese

Faythe Freese is professor of organ at the University of Alabama School of Music. She recorded Faythe Freese à l’Orgue de l’Eglise de la Sainte Trinité, on the landmark instrument where Guilmant, Messiaen, and Hakim were titular organists. As a Fulbright scholar and an Indiana University/Kiel Ausstausch Programme participant, she studied the works of Jean Langlais with the composer in France and the works of Max Reger with Heinz Wunderlich in Germany. Freese studied with Marilyn Keiser, Robert Rayfield, William Eifrig, and Phillip Gehring, and coached with Montserrat Torrent, Ton Koopman, Pieter van Dijk, Dame Gillian Weir, Simon Preston, and Daniel Roth. A DVD, Sure-Fire Practice Techniques, which includes demonstrations of practice techniques, is available from The American Organist: 212/870-2311, ext. 4318.

When Pablo Casals (at age 93) was asked why he continued to practice the cello three hours a day, he replied, “I’m beginning to notice some improvement.” Efficient, systematic practice is a necessity for learning music quickly. As a career educator, I am aware that organ students often lack the proper practice tools. This article offers suggestions on ways to improve and render practice sessions more efficient and productive. 

 

Good habits or bad habits?

Learning notes is hard work, which is why music is called a discipline. No short cuts exist for learning repertoire. The goals of complete musical understanding and technical perfection can be realized only by developing intelligent practice and study methods until they become habits.

The brain is hard-wired to operate on habit. We carry all habits, whether good or bad, for a lifetime, encoded in chemicals and stored in our brains. New, good habits never really replace bad habits but rather displace them and make the old habits less prominent. Pursued long enough, new habits become stronger than old habits; however, any backsliding of the new habits allows the old habits to resurface. We must strive to create good rather than bad habits, so let us begin with good practice habits—which are an example of self-regulated learning.

 

Components of self-regulated learning

According to educational research, four components of self-regulated learning are required to attain high-level performance. The student must be able to:

• plan, monitor, and regulate his or her learning activities through self-awareness (metacognitive strategies);

• persist at a difficult task and block out distractions (management and control); 

• organize material and cognitively engage in rehearsal; 

• assess progress and determine the next step required to accomplish a goal. This requires perseverance and tenacity—the drive and motivation to follow through, even in the face of failure. 

During my doctoral studies at Indiana University, my teacher Marilyn Keiser requested that I perform the solo organ version of the Requiem by Maurice Duruflé. The work was to be performed in one month; in two weeks, I was to be ready to play piano accompaniment for chorus rehearsals. This assignment took real perseverance, although fear alone served as a great motivator! Another recent experience of mine was learning, in one month, the orchestral reduction of Benedicite by Ralph Vaughan Williams, while simultaneously, within a week, learning both the solo and the organ/brass versions of Grand Choeur Dialogué by Eugene Gigout. Perseverance was imperative to becoming performance ready. Music that is exceedingly difficult accompanied by time restrictions requires the musician to be tenaciously persistent. 

 

Eternal Principles

Self-regulated practice is enhanced by observing the following “Eternal Principles:”

1. Keep practice fresh by avoiding mechanical and unthinking practice. Through body and mind awareness, try to determine what is required to elevate the music to the next level. Avoid hasty practice, keeping tempos slow until the mind, hands, and feet can negotiate the notes. Above all, vary the practice techniques.

2. Practice immediately after a lesson so that the points made by your teacher are easily recalled.

3. Avoid playing incorrect notes from the very start. If an incorrect note is played, complete the phrase, then repeat the passage correctly several times. Also, stop on the corrected note and say the name of the note aloud. A word of caution: do not stop and fix errors as they occur, since this stopping and backing up to “fix” can become a bad habit that is difficult to break. Remember, all of our experiences, whether good or bad, are encoded in chemicals and stored in our brains.

4. After phrases and sections of a composition have been mastered at a slow tempo, build tempo. Phrases that are not yet solid require repetitious, slow practice in subsequent practice sessions.

5. Always practice at a steady tempo. Refrain from playing easy passages fast and difficult passages slowly, rather, select a sustainable tempo at which notes can be played accurately.

6. Place brackets around difficult, trouble areas and devote the most time to these sections. The most inefficient practice is to repeatedly start at the beginning of a piece and play to the end. 

7. Practice in segments, stopping and resting at the first sign of tension. Short periods of mindful, brain-engaged practice are far more productive than four hours of mindless drilling. One should attempt practicing in shorter segments such as 30-minute to one-hour intervals, three to four times daily. Stop, move away from the console, and think about the music. Physical activity such as working out in the gym or mowing the lawn refreshes the mind and body so that practice may be resumed anew. 

8. Once the notes have been learned, register the piece and practice operating mechanical elements such as drawing stops, pressing pistons, opening and closing swell shades. Mechanical skills should be incorporated as early as possible and practiced regularly to achieve total mastery. 

9. Practice on consecutive days. Practice cannot be skipped for two days and made up on day three by tripling the practice time. Time lost equals notes lost.

10. Perform for others. Practicing alone, sequestered away in a practice room is a completely different experience than playing publicly. Public performances, which can prove stressful, benefit the musician by informing how to cope with performance anxiety. Organists may try “breaking in” their new repertoire for the church congregation, who in turn may offer fresh insights into the musical presentation. Be discerning, however: not all congregational comments are appropriate! 

11. Avoid distractions, a key offender being the cell phone. Turn it off. Other distractions can creep into your consciousness as focus deteriorates. Change your place of practice—for instance, move to the couch and study the score.

 

A practice management plan

 The following practice management habits promote self-regulated learning. First, determine a final tempo goal and mark it at the top of the music. Second, prepare a practice checklist (see the sample, above), practice diary, practice log, or weekly practice evaluation. Third, devote a specific amount of time for developing technique, learning new music, memorizing, and polishing music. Set daily practice goals such as, “Today, I will learn the notes of this piece at this new tempo,” or “Today, I will register this piece and learn the piston pushes at half tempo.” 

 

Getting ready: 

Score preparation

A blank score without fingering and pedaling markings is a possible indicator that the fingers and feet are learning different “jobs” with each repetition. The remedy is to mark the fingering and pedaling sufficiently so that the practice techniques discussed later can be successfully executed. Fingering and pedaling should be marked according to the economy of motion principle. Substitutions should be saved as a last resort since they require extra motion. Time and effort is expended to mark fingering and pedaling, therefore be sure to follow the indicated markings always. If, after a week of diligent practice, the markings still feel awkward, then and only then, alter them. Marking the score is important for both early and modern fingering.

When a piece is relearned years from now, a new fingering may be discovered that accommodates the maturation of knowledge such as the learning of historical performance practice or a change in hand musculature or technique. By all means, change your markings as needed.

 

Warm up your hands and feet—Daily!

A strong, healthy technique enables the musician to play any music, no matter the difficulty. The following items are a partial list for a daily warm-up routine: manual scales on piano and organ; pedal scales; arpeggios on piano and organ; and use of technique books such as: Method of Organ Playing by Harold Gleason; The Virtuoso Pianist by Charles-Louis Hanon; 101 Exercises, op. 261 by Carl Czerny; 51 Übungen by Johannes Brahms; and Études, opp. 10 and 25 by Frédéric Chopin.

 

A baker’s dozen: Techniques for learning notes

The following practice techniques may be employed alone and in combination:

1. Hands alone.

2. Feet alone.

3. Hands together.

4. Right hand and pedal together.

5. Left hand and pedal together.

6. All parts together.

7. Select odd registrations in each hand to bring out the lines and toy with your concentration.

8. Register with a 4′ flute for clarity.

9. Practice even notes in uneven rhythms with a metronome at slow tempo; L=Long, S=Short. Slow rhythmic practice increases control and speed of learning the notes because muscle memory is created as the long, accented notes get “into” the fingers. By switching to a S-L rhythm in subsequent repetitions, the long notes are played by alternative fingers, thereby enhancing the muscle memory and getting notes “into” the alternate fingers quickly. Another reason that rhythms work so well when there is a string of short notes followed by a long note, there is a momentary “let up,” or a chance to collect one’s wits while paused on the long note. After every permutation of the long-short rhythms has been played, the organist will note that when playing the music as written great control and clarity has been achieved. Care should be taken to play legato with arm weight, even if staccato is indicated, thus furthering the speed of note learning. Altering rhythms with each repetition also lends itself to mindful, productive rehearsing. Additional rhythms are:

• Triplets: L-S-S; S-L-S; S-S-L.

• Four sixteenths: L-S-S-S; S-L-S-S; S-S-L-S; S-S-S-L; L-S-S-L; S-S-L-L; S-L-L-S; L-L-S-S; L-L-L-S; L-L-S-L; L-S-L-L; S-L-L-L.

• Any additional patterns one can devise.

The “mirror” technique to rhythm practice is “no-rhythm” practice, which removes the “momentary let-ups” naturally occurring in the music, forcing you to keep thinking ahead in the score.

10. Backwards practice with and without metronome. This practice system keeps you out of the “I just want to hear what it sounds like” mode and is also a memorization technique. It is imperative that the score has been fingered and pedaled before embarking on backwards practice. Example 1, from the Prelude in E Minor, BWV 548, begins with hands and feet together in m. 16 on the last eighth note. Play a dotted rhythm to the bar line employing the metronome at about 40 to the eighth note. Should this tempo be too quick, start with a tempo that is manageable. Begin the next repetition on beat three, in rhythms, and play to the bar line. Next, start on the second half of beat two and play to the bar line in a different rhythm. With each repetition, the metronome is moved up by one click. Change the rhythms from L-S to S-L and also play as written, thereby keeping practice fresh and the brain engaged. If a note is missed, do not stop to fix it as the note will be fixed on subsequent repetitions. It is entirely possible to learn a page of music, up to tempo or fairly close to the goal tempo within a 45–60 minute practice session. 

11. Inside Out Practice with or without metronome. Again, it is important that the score be marked with fingerings and pedaling. Bracket a difficult section on the score and begin in the center of that section. In Example 2, from the Sonata in D Minor, BWV 527, let us hypothetically identify the downbeat of m. 117 as the center of a difficult segment. Begin at m. 116, beat 3, and progress to m. 117, beat 2. Play in one of the following rhythms: L-S-S, S-L-S, or S-S-L, or play as written. The next repetition begins at m. 116, beat 2, and finishes at m. 117, beat 3. Alter the rhythm as desired and move the metronome up by one click with each repetition. 

12. Slow to Fast Practice with metronome. Prepare the score extensively with fingerings and pedaling (see Example 3). Set the metronome at a tempo that promotes note accuracy with hands and feet together. In Example 3, with hands and feet together, begin in m. 119 and play to m. 125 in rhythms. On the next repetition, move the metronome up one click and change the rhythm. Use the metronome to “push” the tempo; however, if the playing becomes erratic and inaccurate, decrease the metronome tempo and rebuild the tempo again. 

Caveat! The notes that were learned up to performance tempo on the first day will perhaps seem foreign on the second day. Have no fear! On day two, begin the process anew, increasing the tempo from very slow to the performance tempo. You will note that the beginning tempo on the second day and subsequent days will not be quite as slow as the first day. Your recall of the notes from day to day will be quicker as well. Soon you will be playing the notes with ease and facility.

13. Piano practice: for every 15 minutes of organ practice, practice one hour on the piano, employing rhythms and slow practice. Remember: practice scales! Practice arpeggios! This practice can also be done on harpsichord and/or clavichord, so long as you play with sufficient weight into the keys, so as to achieve the results described in No. 9 (Rhythm Practice) of the Baker’s Dozen Techniques listed above.

 

Polishing the music 

Polishing music is a necessary and sometimes arduous task. In addition to the aforementioned techniques, try the following methods:

1. Practice with both eyes closed. Not only does this test the memory, but one is able to visualize the hands and feet as they move across the keys. 

2. Practice with the dominant eye closed. In learning particularly difficult musical passages, one eye may be blind folded, preferably the dominant eye (see Notes). The success of this technique is possibly due to the addition of a new element that interrupts the performer’s focus, thereby causing the musician to heighten his or her awareness.

3. Score visualization or mental practice. Visualization is the imaginary rehearsal of a skill minus muscular movement or sound, executed away from the organ. In the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, the United States diver, Greg Louganis, was consistently awarded 10s for his dives. When asked how he performed at such a consistently high level, he referenced visualization. That is, he sat on the bench away from the diving platform and visualized every motion of his dive, which included walking to and climbing the ladder, approaching the edge of the platform and standing, poised, readying himself for departure from the platform, the take-off, his position in the air, and entry into the water—without moving a muscle. He visualized perfection every time and then set out to accomplish that vision.

Within a musical context, the performer sits away from the organ console with a score and visualizes playing the work from beginning to the end. The performer “hears” the music and “sees” the hands and feet moving across the keys, visualizing a perfect performance. An added benefit of visualization is the quieting effect on the racing heart and the centering of the mind, a positive counter for performance anxiety.

4. Slow practice at half or ¾ tempo. Play only once a day at performance tempo. Playing repeatedly at performance tempo tends to break down the work, rendering it sloppy.

5. Dead manual practice while hearing the music internally.

6. Record yourself and listen critically with a score. Mark the score where necessary.

 

Maintaining performance-ready music and bringing old music back

Many of the above techniques can be employed, but slow practice on piano and organ, playing at ½ to ¾ tempo, isolating challenging segments, and practicing in rhythms are particularly beneficial.

 

Conclusion

Students seeking to perfect their musical art must utilize every available tool in terms of practice techniques. Employing “Sure-fire” practice techniques regularly will develop time-saving and energy efficient habits that involve the necessary components of self-regulated learning: metacognitive strategies, management and control, cognitive engagement and strategies, and self-efficacy. The diligent student engaged in systematic and efficient practice sessions will be rewarded with a fast and continuous upward trajectory resulting in the attainment of the highest level of musical art. ν

Notes 

Several methods for determining ocular dominance exist. Here are two: 

a. Miles Test: Extend your arms out in front of you at eye level with palms facing away. Bring your hands together, overlapping the thumbs and fingers, forming a small “V” shaped” hole or window. Select a small object at least ten feet in front of you and view it with both eyes through the window in your hands. While remaining focused on the object, slowly draw your hands closer to you. When you have drawn your hands to your face, the window will be placed over one eye or the other. This is your dominant eye. 

b. Porta Test: Extend your arm out in front of you and align your index finger on a distant object. Close the left eye and observe the location of the object. Now open the left eye and close the right eye and observe the location of the object. When one eye is closed, it is likely that the object disappeared or appeared to shift to one side or the other. When the opposite eye is closed the object probably remained stationary. The eye that kept the object stationary in the view window is your dominant eye. If the object did not appear to move when either eye was closed, this is an indication that you are among the rare individuals who have central vision.

 

Bibliography

Byo, James. “Teaching Problem Solving in Practice.” Music Educators Journal 91, no. 2 (2004): 35–39 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3400047 (accessed June 9, 2014).

Cremaschi, Alejandro. “The effect of a practice checklist on practice strategies, practice self regulation and achievement of collegiate music majors enrolled in a beginning class piano course.” Research Studies in Music Education 34 (2012): 223. http://rsm.sagepub.com/ (accessed April 30, 2014).

Gleason, Harold. Method of Organ Playing, 8th ed., Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Maynard, Lisa. “The Role of Repetition in the Practice Sessions of Artist Teachers and Their Students.” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 167 (2006): 61–72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40319290 (accessed June 9, 2014).

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A century after the art of the pipe organ advanced to include all that electricity brought to organbuilding, it advances again to include solid-state controls—an additional wealth of gizmos allowing the organist to express the music ever more effectively

John Bishop

As it was in the beginning

Every student of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach learns early how much more there is to it than meets the untrained ear. There’s no contesting that he was a genius of melody and harmony, but when you start digging into the mathematical structure of his music, you quickly get the sense that the depth is infinite. We might take for granted the seamless counterpoint between the obbligato and the chorale tune in the ubiquitous Jesus bleibet meine Freude (Cantata 147), Nun danket alle Gott (Cantata 79), or Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Cantata 140), but if we think it through even superficially, we’re baffled by how the harmonic progression of the obbligato anticipates the relative cadences at the end of each phrase of the chorale.

We learn about the Fibonacci series, a simple and infinite progression of equations that starts with zero and one, and continues so that each successive number in the series is the sum of the previous two (0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3 . . . 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.). Use that series to chart the entrances of a fugue subject.¹

Or use the formula of numbering the letters of the alphabet (A=1, B=2, etc.). Add up BACH and you get 14. Add up
J. S. BACH and you get 41. Look for those two numbers recurring in Bach’s music—how many notes in a fugue subject, how many measures, etc.? Start digging and you’ll find you’re figuratively sweeping a beach. There’s no end. I haven’t tried it with Anna Magdalena, but I’ll bet it’s a gold mine. Maybe a good pick for the lottery.

When I was an undergraduate, I spent a semester with Bach’s Magnificat in D (BWV 243), writing a nicely researched paper and leading the church choir I directed through a performance. I was amazed to chart the sequence of movements and find the architectural symmetry, and the piece has been with me ever since. It includes some very nice examples of “word painting,” where the music illustrates the text. One of those beauties is the last chord of the alto aria. The text is Esurientes implevet bonis, et divites dimisit inanes (He hath filled the hungry with good things, the rich he hath sent away empty). The alto soloist is accompanied by basso continuo and two flutes in a beautiful duet with lots of parallel sixths. The figures repeat many times (maybe a Fibonacci number?) with a lovely cadence at the end of each, but at the closing cadence, the flutes leave out the last resolving note, sending the rich away hungry with a wafted dominant-seventh chord.

The opening movement is a rollicking jubilation with full orchestra, including three trumpets and timpani like only Bach could do—bouncing chords and driving rhythm. As the piece nears its end, there’s a boisterous reprise of the opening figure driving toward the final Amen. The text for the reprise is Sicut erat in principio (As it was in the beginning)—terrific.

 

Turn, turn, turn

Another part of my undergraduate days was the purity of the music we were focused on. The resurgence of interest in organs with mechanical action was in full swing— there were dozens of companies around the country digging in the history of the trade and creating wonderful new instruments with mechanical action and low wind pressures, and we as students of playing were in the thrall of the quest for authenticity in our performances. When we laid out a concert program, we were careful to consider the progression of keys, and the juxtaposition of historical styles and epochs. Including a transcription of a romantic orchestral piece was unthinkable. We considered them decadent. And the symphonic electro-pneumatic organs on which they were played were considered decadent. As I look back on those days, I see how easy it is to dismiss something about which you know nothing.

 

Chickens and eggs, smoke
and fire, and trees falling in
the woods

César Franck (1822–1890) is generally considered to be the first of the composers of Romantic French organ music, the father of the style. His melodic and harmonic languages exploited the resources of the organs of his day, and his use of tone color foreshadows the voluptuous orchestral intentions of the great masters who followed him. 

Consider this incomplete list of Franck’s successors:

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937)

Gabriel Pierné (1863–1937)

Marcel Dupré (1886–1971)

Charles Tournemire (1870–1939)

Louis Vierne (1870–1937)

Henri Mulet (1878–1967)

The span between Franck’s birth and Dupré’s death is nearly 150 years. The lives of all these revered composers were intertwined. Two of them were born in the same year, and three of them died in the same year. They were each other’s teachers and students. They lived near each other. They must have heard each other play. Think of the Sunday evening dinner after someone’s recital, a festive bistro table with cheese, wine, and cigars, and Pierné and Tournemire arguing about Widor’s registrations. I don’t know enough of the personal relationships between these men to certify such a possibility, but it’s fun to imagine. I’ve been at quite a few of those post-concert tables, at which no one is in doubt! 

Keeping in mind those organist-composers, consider the genius organbuilder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll who lived from 1811 until 1899. Monsieur Cavaillé-Coll was eleven years old when Franck was born, and Tournemire and Vierne were twenty-nine when he died. Throughout the nineteenth century, Cavaillé-Coll was putting magnificent organs under the hands of a bevy of marvelous composers. He was the constant among them, and his mechanical and tonal genius influenced that entire epoch of music. From one monumental organ to the next, he gave his colleague musicians new voices to try, new registration aids, and radical concepts like progressive wind pressures that increased as you went up the scale. The highest notes of Cavaillé-Coll’s Trumpets and Harmonic Flutes soared across the vast stone naves like little comets. What would Widor’s music have been without those heart-rending trebles?

Some of the more rewarding moments of my career have been those spent with clients brainstorming about the capabilities of an organ console as it relates to the tonal resources of the organ. What if the Solo French Horn could be played from the Great, and if so, what if there were divisional pistons under the Great keyboard that affected the Solo stops?

Imagine the conversation between organist and organbuilder involving “what-ifs” like that, before there had been a full century of whiz-bang electric and solid-state gizmos for organ consoles. If you had only ever drawn heavy mechanical stop actions by hand, how would you like an iron pedal that would throw on the principal chorus with one heave of the hips?

Or this: 

 

Cavaillé-Coll: “We could place the reeds and mixtures of the Swell on a separate windchest that you could turn on and off with a lever next to the pedalboard. Any stops you had drawn on that chest could be accessed at once. We could call it a Ventil² because it turns the air on and off.” 

Saint-Saëns: “Yes, please.”

 

There’s a famous portrait of Franck seated at the console of Cavaillé-Coll’s organ at Ste. Clotilde in Paris, his left hand poised with raised wrist on the (I assume) Positif manual, and right hand drawing a stopknob. Take a look: http://www.classicalarchives.com/composer/2536.html. Man, that knob travels far. It’s out about five inches and it looks like he’s still pulling. Franck’s face wears a thoughtful expression—maybe he’s wondering how far does this dagnabbit knob move, anyway? Reminds me of the Three Stooges pulling electrical conduits out of the wall.  

During his lifetime, Cavaillé-Coll introduced dozens of state-of-the-art gizmos. You can bet lunch on the fact that the drawknobs on the famous organ console at St. Sulpice (built in 1862) don’t move that far. For images of that spectacular console, take a look at
www.stsulpice.com.

Let’s skip forward 50 or 60 years. Ernest Skinner installed a new organ with four manuals and 77 voices at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York City, the same year that T. Tertius Noble was appointed organist. New York’s Grand Central Station was opened that year ten blocks from St. Thomas (the centennial has just been celebrated), as was the Oyster Bar Restaurant, which is still located in the station. I imagine a power lunch at the brand new Oyster Bar during which Skinner and Noble argued about whether the 16-foot Swell reed should be available independently on the Pedal at 4-foot. They must have disagreed about something, and it must have been quite a show.

So what came first, the chicken or the egg? It’s widely understood that Cavaillé-Coll was the great innovator, creating marvelous new devices and watching what the musicians could do with them. I think that the early twentieth-century version was more a collaboration between organist and organbuilder—they took turns influencing each other. Americans were being introduced to new technological marvels every day. I can picture a client asking, “If J. P. Morgan can have electric lights in his mansion on Madison Avenue, why can’t I have one on my music rack?” Think of the lucky organist who was the first to have one!

From our twenty-first century perspective, one of the most remarkable but overlooked facts about the huge body of nineteenth-century French organ music is that it was all conceived, composed, practiced, and performed on hand-pumped organs. They may be hundred-stop jobs, but they were hand-pumped. It must be that the electric blower was the single most important innovation in the history of the organ. Widor started his work at St. Sulpice in 1870. I do not know precisely when the first electric blower was installed there, but let’s guess that Widor played that instrument for 35 years relying on human power to provide his wind-pressure. At five Masses a week—again, I’m just guessing—that would be 8,750 Masses. Kyrie eleison.

All the photos I’ve seen of Widor show him to be serious, even dour, and the little herd of pumpers in the next room must have been a distraction, snickering and shirking. But I imagine he cracked a smile the first time he turned on the new blower and sat down to play in that great church, alone with his thoughts and imagination. Having the luxury to sit at the console for hours in solitude must have been a revelation. Organists on both sides of the Atlantic were freed to exploit their imaginations and their instruments.

 

Step right up . . . 

Since the beginning of civilization, people have been flocking to share the latest in entertainment. In the fifth century B.C., a stadium was built at Delphi, high in the Greek mountains. It could seat 6,500 spectators, had a running track that was 177 meters long. There’s a 5,000-seat amphitheater on the same site, built in the fourth century, B.C. I doubt they would have gone to the trouble if people weren’t going to come. Today we crowd into IMAX theaters, elaborate cruise ships, and huge arenas. We’ve been celebrating the “latest thing” for hundreds of generations.

In 1920, a monumental antiphonal pipe organ was the latest thing. Today we joke about “cockpit syndrome”—teasing each other that our consoles look like the cockpits of airplanes. But there was no airplane to compare to the cockpit of a 1915 Skinner organ with four keyboards, a hundred stopknobs, and dozens of buttons, switches, and lights. Think of the impression it must have made to a parishioner, alighting from a horse-drawn carriage onto a cobblestone street, and encountering that gleaming organ console in the chancel. It could have been the most complicated and bewildering thing he had ever seen.

The organist must have been revered as a conjurer, a certified operator of one of the most complex devices in existence. They were the technical equivalents of today’s air traffic controllers, nuclear power engineers, and voodoo software writers, but they were musicians first. It’s no wonder that we read about thousands of people cramming huge municipal auditoriums to hear organ recitals. Attending concerts of a symphony orchestra was expensive, reserved for the elite. At City Hall, or in the church, one wizard could play an overture by Beethoven with grand effect, and no one was sent away empty.

And play them they did. With the electric blower grinding away for endless hours and an ever-increasing array of clever console controls, those organists could experiment with fingerings, and learn to access complicated registrations that were changing continuously, bringing complex orchestral scores alive single-handedly. And as a twenty-year-old I had the nerve to dismiss it as decadent. I hang my head.

Last Monday, the New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists presented their annual President’s Day Conference. The subject was Transcriptions Alive! (Many thanks to my friends and colleagues who were involved in the planning.) On Sunday evening, theatre organist Jelani Eddington played a recital on a large Wurlitzer in Brooklyn. And on Monday, Michael Barone, Peter Conte, and Jonathan Ambrosino presented talks about various aspects of the art, hosted by the Riverside Church. The day concluded with a recital by Thomas Trotter played on the great Aeolian-Skinner organ of the Riverside Church, the home bench to Virgil Fox, Frederick Swann, John Walker, and so many others.

Michael Barone must be the best deejay the serious organ world has ever had.  Using a nicely chosen string of recorded examples, he made the point that organists have been playing transcriptions of other types of music for some 450 years. Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) and Heinrich Scheidemann (1595–1663) played choral music on the keyboard, and Barone’s demonstration flicked cleverly back and forth between the sung and played versions. Tempo and pitch were consistent, the differing factor being the tempered scale of the organs’ keyboards. Good choirs sing in pure intervals.

J. S. Bach transcribed his own orchestral music for the organ, along with concertos by colleague/rival composers such as Vivaldi, Ernst, and Walther. I reflect that while I was ready to dismiss playing transcriptions of orchestral music on the organ, I surely was learning the sprightly stuff that Bach himself transcribed. It was good enough for Bach, but apparently not good enough for me. Point taken. I hang my head.

The terraced dynamics of Bach’s organs were perfect for the terraced dynamics of the Baroque concerto grosso. A couple centuries later, the marvelous expressive capabilities of the symphonic pipe organ were equal to the expressive demands of complex Romantic orchestral scores, chock full of contrasting simultaneous solos (which are not synonymous with duets), and crescendos and diminuendos of all speeds and scopes.

We as organists are blessed with the wealth of literature written especially for our instrument. It comes in all shapes and sizes. It has national inflections and accents that are instantly recognizable to us. You may never have heard the piece, but the instant you hear that Grand Jeu you smell soft ripe cheese and the taste of rich red wine wafts through your imagination. But that doesn’t have to keep us from playing any music on the organ. Any music that sounds good is fair game.

Transcribing orchestral and choral scores to organ keyboards is as old as the instrument itself. Technological advances in organ building between 1875 and 1925 allowed the art of transcription to reach new heights. Later, we spent some fifty years reflecting on the past—that which came before all that innovation, and went to great lengths to resurrect old ideas of instrument building and playing. Sicut erat in principio. And a century after the art of the pipe organ advanced to include all that electricity brought to organbuilding, it advances again to include solid-state controls—an additional wealth of gizmos allowing the organist to express the music ever more effectively. Sicut erat in principio. Cue trumpets.

 

Notes

1. Fibonacci gave us the system of numerals we use today (0,1), finding them easier to use and more flexible for complex computation than the older Roman System (I, V, X, etc.). The Fibonacci series applies to many aspects of nature, from the breeding of rabbits to the structure of the Nautilus shell. A quick Google search will give the interested reader a lot to think about.

2. Ventil comes from the same root as vent—the French and Latin words
for “wind.”