In the wind. . . .

John Bishop

Organs for the people

The early twentieth century was the golden age of the municipal organist. Dozens of cities across the United States installed monumental organs in public auditoriums, and brilliant organists were hired to play them, paid with public funds. Those were days when the economics of symphony orchestras limited attendance to the top-hat and sable-stole crowd, so in the days before radio, the general public might not ever have a chance to hear a Beethoven symphony or Rossini overture.

That was also the age of rapid development of electric organ actions and a dizzying display of registration aids. Just as Aristide Cavaillé-Coll’s organs changed the work and scope of musicians and composers 60 years earlier, Ernest Skinner and others were baring their engineering teeth and festooning their consoles with swell shade selectors, programmable crescendos, and settable combination actions with general pistons. Great ideas for new console controls came along, such as super couplers that didn’t affect high-pitch stops and cutouts that would shut off all mutations.

In the 1920s, the populace of Chattanooga, Tennessee, or Topeka, Kansas, would gather loyally each week at their big municipal auditorium to be treated to a varied performance by a great organist. The immense popularity of such concerts was described by Cleveland city architect Harold MacDowell, who wrote after the dedication concert of the 149-rank Skinner organ in that city’s 13,000-seat Public Auditorium in 1922:

 

Despite the oppressive heat, the crowd which had been collecting since noon soon exceeded the capacity of the mammoth hall and long before the time set for the inaugural recital all seats were filled and more than 5000 men, women, and children were crowding the corridors of the colossal structure. The police which were out in large numbers were at first able to hold the crowd into a semblance of order, but soon gave up in despair as the eager mob swept all before it.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had a riot before an organ recital.

City Hall in Portland, Maine, was destroyed by a calamitous fire in January 1908 that started, ironically, in the new-fangled electric fire alarm system in the office of the city electrician. The city fathers (there were no women in government then) wasted no time, hiring Carèrre & Hastings, who had famously designed the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, and the new City Hall was ready for dedication in August 1912.

Concurrently, the publishing magnate, Portland native Cyrus H. K. Curtis, made a gift of a hundred-stop Austin organ for the auditorium of the city hall. Curtis’s father had invited Hermann Kotzschmar to move to Portland where he established himself as the most prominent musician, influencing generations of Portlandians through his tireless work and brilliant performances. The friendship between Curtis’s father and Kotzschmar was so strong that he named his son Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis, and Cyrus H. K. Curtis in turn dedicated the organ to Kotzschmar. During the dedication ceremony of city hall and the organ on August 22, 1912, Curtis addressed the assembled crowd:

 

Mr. Mayor,

I present to the City of Portland through you, this memorial to Hermann Kotzschmar, who for more than fifty years was pre-eminent in this city as organist, composer, and teacher, a man who was loved by all classes for his kindly spirit, his high ideals, and his devotion to music.

He cared little or nothing for material things or fame—he never sought them, but here is his monument­—a monument to one who did something to make us better men and women and to appreciate that indefinable something that is an expression of the soul.

 

The great William C. Macfarlane was engaged as Portland’s first municipal organist, and a city music commission was formed. Macfarlane served from 1912 until 1918 and returned for a second stint between 1932 and 1934. Edwin H. Lemare, another musical luminary, served from 1921 to 1923.

In the 1970s, municipal funds were dwindling, and the maintenance of the organ suffered until 1980 when the city council voted to stop funding the organ. A group of interested citizens came forth in 1981, founding the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ (FOKO), which would develop a board of directors and assume responsibility for the care and presentation of the organ. The organ would remain the property of the city, and a carefully crafted relationship was formed and nurtured that has endured to this day.

In the 1990s, the auditorium was to be renovated and modernized, and the Kotzschmar Organ was removed to storage. This was a critical moment in the life of the organ, as once it was in storage, there were voices in town that would have been pleased if the organ had not been returned to the new hall. Through FOKO’s tireless devotion, funds were raised to install the organ in a specially built space above the stage in the newly renamed Merrill Auditorium.

Most importantly, it was the effort of David Wallace, the organ’s curator, who was dedicated to seeing the organ brought back to life, even though proper funding was not available. It was that effort that made possible FOKO’s crowning achievement, the Centennial Renovation. After 30 years of tireless maintenance of the reinstalled organ, an ambitious fundraising project was undertaken, and on August 22, 2012, the one-hundredth anniversary of the dedication of the organ and the hall, the Kotzschmar Organ was removed for a second time, this time for transportation to the workshop of Foley-Baker, Inc., in Tolland, Connecticut, for a thorough, professional renovation. A few new voices were added, the Austin Universal Air Chest was replaced with a new one of authentic design, returning the instrument to its original dimensions. The electrical system was replaced, damaged pipes were repaired, and the organ now speaks with clarity and brilliance as if it were brand new.

 

A twenty-first century municipal
organist

Ray Cornils was educated at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music and held positions as organist at various churches in the Boston area until he and his partner, now husband, David Bellville, felt an urge to move to Maine. Ray secured the position of director of music at First Parish in Brunswick, Maine, in 1987, and in 1990 was appointed the eleventh municipal organist of Portland.

Following the final concert of 2017, Cornils retired from the position in Portland. He had retired from First Parish in June, and with all those responsibilities behind him, he and David retreated to their home on the beach in Salinas, Ecuador. Salinas is at the tip of a peninsula that juts into the Pacific Ocean from the west coast of Ecuador, right near the equator. Ray and David also have a home in Quichinche, high in the Andes, an hour or so north of the capitol city, Quito (altitude 9,500 feet), ten hours from Salinas, and they have retained their home in Maine. I caught up with Cornils by Skype the other day and spent a pleasant hour and more chatting about FOKO. He described his current state as “taking a deep breath” and learning to live without the relentless responsibilities of those two demanding positions.

When Cornils was appointed municipal organist, FOKO was nearly ten years old and growing steadily in organization and effectiveness. The annual budget was around $20,000, and the condition of the Kotzschmar Organ was in steady decline. Ray acknowledged the organ’s terrible condition as “. . . a given. You registered music with handfuls of stops because there were so many dead notes.” Some stops worked sporadically because of worn and unreliable contacts. The roar of the basement blower joined the chorus of thousands of wind leaks in the organ on the stage to create a high level of ambient noise, so that when the organ was used with the Portland Symphony Orchestra, it was turned off during rests because the musicians of the orchestra objected to the extraneous noise.

On several occasions, the organ failed completely. When Pierre Pincemaille was preparing for a recital, the huge organ blower “threw its fans.” After years of torque from starting the heavy machine, the rivets were worn, and when they failed, torn sheet metal blew through the windlines into the big windchest. It must have made quite a noise. And there was David Wallace to dismantle the blower and take the fans to a local sheet metal company that fabricated new vanes overnight, and though Pincemaille only had a few hours to prepare, the concert went on as scheduled.¹

Ray spoke of the challenges of communicating with an organ that was operating at such a low level. FOKO was working diligently to keep the organ going, but the instrument was unraveling. After the organ was reinstalled following the renovation of the auditorium, the press heralded the triumphant return of the “restored” Kotzschmar Organ. While the organ had not, in fact, been restored, its condition was substantially improved, allowing a fresh start for programming. Cornils resumed the work of inviting prominent organists to present recitals, serving as the tireless and gracious host as he introduced them to the organ.

When I asked Ray what impact the position had on him over the years, he answered, “the ability to listen.” To listen to reactions of the audience to the artists and music being presented. To listen to the input of lay people serving on the FOKO board as they commented on what sells and what doesn’t. To listen to himself as he spoke at meetings, as he conducted the relationship with the city, and as he addressed audiences about the music he was playing. To listen to his playing, trying always to be a growing musician and effective communicator. To listen to the organ, responding to what it seemed to be able to do best. And to listen to the guest artists, noticing what they were able to get out of the organ and how they did it.

It is unusual for an organist to get to hear their home organ played regularly by different people. It is more usual that the “home” organist of a church never hears anyone else playing the organ, which is often not to the advantage of the listener. Ray spoke at length about the value of that part of his work. It’s a challenge for any organist to arrive in town with a few days to prepare a concert on a strange organ, especially one that’s not in terrific condition.

Professionals in the pipe organ community are a tiny subset of society, and Cornils worked to find ways to connect the organ world with the real world. He encouraged guest artists to address their audiences, and instituted preconcert conversations in which he would interview a musician, allowing for more personal contact between artists and audiences. Late in his tenure, FOKO began publishing brief videos on social media featuring guest artists playing selections from their program and speaking about what excited them about the music and the experience of playing in Merrill Auditorium.

Cornils was always mindful of the heritage of the Kotzschmar Organ. The instrument was presented to the city by a music lover who had been moved by the work of a prominent local musician, a moving response to an artist’s life work. Ray understood the responsibility of honoring and nurturing that heritage by keeping the Kotzschmar Organ in front of the public and always showing its best side, no matter what particular foibles it presented on a given day.

During his tenure, Cornils was active in and devoted to FOKO’s educational outreach. He spoke of the rich rewards of working with children in public schools and working with the teachers to plan curriculums that melded into the other topics discussed in the classroom. He made an effort to pick up on the sorts of vocabulary the class was used to and to tie the marvels of the organ into scientific, historical, and artistic conversations. He recognized that many people experience the sound of the organ as scary because of its use in popular horror films and other media. Ray enjoyed sharing the organ’s joyful, triumphant, meditative, and tuneful sides with the students, and some of his highest moments were when parents greeted him after concerts saying that their kids had experienced FOKO in their classrooms and encouraged the family to come to Merrill Auditorium to hear the organ in person.

§

The Centennial Renovation was a crowning achievement of the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ, and Cornils’s well-known humility would never allow him to claim credit for it. It was a magnificent effort put forth by an active group of volunteers serving on the board, supported by the generous donations from the public. But Ray’s decades of service, his unflappability, his gracious and thoughtful presence as FOKO negotiated the relationship with the city, and his continuous presence on stage and in public as the voice of FOKO, the ambassador for the organ, and an artistic leader in the city were central to the success of the project. His voice and artistry helped make the Kotzschmar Organ a worthy recipient of the hundreds of private donations involved in funding that ambitious project.

It was fitting that Cornils’s tenure extended after the completion of the renovation. After the thrilling festival of rededication, Ray was on the bench of the Kotzschmar Organ for three years until his retirement. Now, guest artists gush their enthusiasm about the organ’s transformation, especially those who had played it before the renovation. And Ray had time to learn the organ’s new strengths and to experience afresh those voices that had been unusable. The original personality of the organ reemerged under Ray’s fingers, and the public was delighted.

On December 22, 2017, Ray made his last appearance in Merrill Auditorium as municipal organist in the city of Portland. Over the years, “Christmas with Cornils” programs had developed into a seasonal highpoint for the community, and predictably, the 1,600-seat hall was filled. Ray was joined by an 11-piece brass choir, percussion, chorus, and handbells for a rollicking romp through beloved holiday repertory. At intermission, Ethan Strimling, mayor of Portland, presented Ray with a key to the city. Ray responded to the audience’s ovation by saying, “This is not goodbye, it’s thank you.”

During the concert, Cornils was aware that his successor, James Kennerley, was present in the hall. At the end of the evening, without prompt and without plan, Ray invited James to join him on stage, signaling to the audience his support of the future, and generously giving James and the audience a chance to see each other. No one who has worked with Ray as student, colleague, peer, or collaborator would be surprised to learn that Ray’s last public gesture as municipal organist of the city of Portland would be one of humility and generosity.

Some people might assume that the role of the municipal organist would be to present a haughty, theatrical demeanor. That was not Ray’s way, and the city of Portland is a better because of his 27 years on that bench.

Notes

1. Ray’s telling of that story was especially poignant as Pierre Pincemaille had passed away on January 12, the day before my converastion with Ray Cornils.

The 101-rank Kotzschmar Organ in Portland, Maine, is 100 years old, is about to undergo renovation--and Portland, Maine has ponied up $1,250,000 to care for its treasure

John Bishop

It was a dark and stormy night . . .¹

In the early hours of January 24, 1908, a cold westerly wind gusting to thirty miles an hour buffeted Portland, Maine. With the temperature hovering in the mid-teens, the wind chill factor was between forty-five and fifty degrees below zero. Around 2 am, two men walking up Exchange Street toward Congress Street smelled burning rubber, noticed a red glow in City Hall, and ran to the Central Fire Station.²

Ironically, the fire was caused by a short circuit in Portland’s Gamewell Fire Alarm, which was housed in the city electrician’s office in City Hall. The fire, fanned by the strong winds, spread rapidly through the building. Firefighters responded from neighboring towns, but their primitive equipment was not equal to the emergency, and by morning the grand building was a smoldering wreck encased in ice. Government records were lost and the city’s fire chief was seriously injured, but there were no fatalities and the fire was confined to the single building.³

City leaders were quick to respond. Less than six months later, Mayor Adam Leighton announced the appointment of the famed architectural firm Carrère & Hastings (designers of the New York Public Library) to design the new City Hall, which would include a large auditorium. An Australian pianist visiting Portland pointed out that many British and Australian city hall auditoriums included large pipe organs, and Mayor Leighton called on his friend, the publishing magnate Cyrus H. K. Curtis, who responded with a gift to the City of Portland for a large concert pipe organ to be installed in the new auditorium. The organ would be named for Cyrus Curtis’s namesake. Mr. Curtis set two ground rules: the organ would be built by the Austin Organ Company without any direction or interference, and the cost should not exceed $30,000.⁴

 

The life of  the 

Kotzschmar

The 101-rank Kotzschmar Organ is 100 years old as I write today. As the City of Portland was forced to stop funding for the organ and its programming in the late 1970s, a not-for-profit organization called Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ (FOKO) was formed in 1981. You can read about the history of the organ and of FOKO at the website www.foko.org, and you can see the organ’s stoplist at www.foko.org/stop_list.htm.  

The organ was expanded by Austin in the 1920s and physically moved across the stage by a house-moving company in the 1960s. Merrill Auditorium was reconstructed in the 1990s and the organ was removed from the hall, to be returned when the hall was ready—on a shoestring budget, through the Herculean efforts of the organ’s curator and the FOKO Board of Directors. After a century of ups and downs, it’s great to report that programming has expanded to include significant educational outreach, bringing the pipe organ to public schools in the Portland area. FOKO has even had a portable three-rank pipe organ built that travels to schools to enhance these efforts. Hundreds of great organists have played recitals on the organ, and it remains a beloved icon in the center of Maine’s largest city. If you live in one of America’s more populous states, you may imagine Portland to be larger than it is. With an art museum, symphony orchestra, municipal organ, and opera company, the city boasts an unusually rich cultural life for its population of just over 66,000 people!

Over the past five or six years, the people of FOKO have come to grips with the fact that the Kotzschmar Organ is in failing condition. It sounds great, and has been played energetically and regularly all along. But to reuse a well-worn phrase, it’s time to pay the pipers, all 6,760 of them! To shorten the long story of a complicated path, FOKO, the City of Portland, and the people who love the Kotzschmar Organ have come up with the perfect gift for the organ that has everything in celebration of its hundredth birthday—the millions of dollars necessary for a full-blown, soup-to-nuts renovation, which will take place in the workshop of Foley-Baker, Inc. of Tolland, Connecticut. The City of Portland has set a bold example for government support of artistic and cultural activities by providing a matching grant of $1.25 million toward the renovation of the organ, an amount readily matched by private gifts. 

 

Centennial celebrations

The new City Hall and the Kotzschmar Organ were dedicated at two o’clock on the afternoon of August 22, 1912. At two o’clock on August 22, 2012, a large gathering of pipe organ professionals and enthusiasts were gathered in a meeting room at the Holiday Inn by the Sea in Portland in a plenary session concluding a week-long Centennial Festival celebrating the Kotzschmar Organ and its role in the life of the city. Michael Barone, host of Minnesota Public Radio’s Pipedreams, was moderator. The panel included the panoply of performers assembled for the festival: Scott Foppiano, Walt Strony, Peter Richard Conte, Fred Hohman, Fred Swann, John Weaver, and Municipal Organist Ray Cornils. (Felix Hell and Tom Trenney had left the festival early because of other concert engagements.)

A couple of hours later, the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ hosted a Gala Centennial Banquet attended by about two hundred people. And on Wednesday evening, we enjoyed the Centennial Concert played by Ray Cornils, Peter Richard Conte, and the Kotzschmar Festival Brass. You can see the festival schedule, the specifications of the organ, and learn the history of the organ and of the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ at the website, www.foko.org.

I serve on the board of directors of the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ, where I am chairman of the organ committee. Seems natural enough, doesn’t it, that someone serving as a volunteer on the board of a not-for-profit organization would take a role from his professional life? But there’s something very funny about it. Throughout more than 35 years working as an organbuilder, I’ve been involved in hundreds of conversations with organ committees from all sorts of institutions, but always as an organbuilder, as a contractor, never as the “customer.” Since the conversation about renovating the Kotzschmar Organ started early in 2007, I’ve been on the other side of the table. The organ committee and I prepared requests for proposals and sent them to a list of organbuilding firms, we reviewed and compared the various proposals we received, chose the contractor, and spent many hours in conference with the staff of Foley-Baker planning the project. It was an extraordinary learning experience, rounding out my understanding of the process of conception and planning of a major organ project, and I am grateful to Foley-Baker, the organ committee, and all my colleagues on the FOKO board for this very rich experience.

 

Wait, wait, when can we work? 

Planning the schedule of this project has been unusually delicate. Merrill Auditorium is a grand home not only for this wonderful organ, but for many other activities as well. It is home to the Portland Symphony Orchestra, the Choral Arts Society, the Portland Opera, and the Portland Ballet. (How many cities of 66,000 people can boast such a lineup?)  Each year, many high schools, colleges, and universities hold their graduation exercises there, most of them accompanied by the organ. The City of Portland uses the auditorium for meetings and conferences, and very importantly, the hall is the premier venue in the State of Maine for all sorts of cultural activities, from rock concerts to comedians, from classical musicians to this summer’s live sell-out production of National Public Radio’s ubiquitous favorite show, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! That means two things—thousands of people throng from all over the state to hear this wide variety of events, and the rental of the hall for high-profile programs is of primary importance to the operating budget of the auditorium.

The second major factor defining the delicacy of the schedule is the fact that it’s difficult to maintain an audience in a dark hall. The Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ have cultivated an enthusiastic audience for the organ, comprising many local enthusiasts and countless tourists who plan their visits to Portland to coincide with concerts at Merrill Auditorium. How to maintain the presence of the organ and nourish the audience during its approximately twenty months of absence is the question that FOKO has been grappling with since the beginning of the conversation.

The five-week period necessary for the removal of the organ must have been the largest single block of time reserved since the hall was reopened after its renovation in 1997, for which the organ had been removed from the building.

A few paragraphs ago, I mentioned that the conversation about the renovation of the organ started in 2007, just ten years after the Kotzschmar Organ was installed in Merrill Auditorium for the second time. As the auditorium had received a thorough facelift that included new theater seats, a renewed acoustical environment, and a new and larger stage equipped with all the machinery and gear necessary to support complicated theatrical productions, you can imagine that there was much fanfare about the organ’s return to the hall having been cleaned, repaired, and modified to fit the new environment. In fact, the word “restoration” had been used.  

When early in 2007, FOKO’s organ committee reported to the full board that the organ’s condition merited a thorough and very expensive overhaul, there was an eerie silence in the room. The next sound came from a board member who correctly commented, “I thought we restored the organ when the hall was rebuilt.”

In August 2007, FOKO hosted a symposium, inviting seven acknowledged pipe organ experts to visit and inspect the organ and participate in several days of both private and public conversation. Theatre organist Walt Strony, Thomas Murray, Joseph Dzeda, and Nicholas Thompson-Allen of Yale University, Peter Richard Conte and Curt Mangel of the Wanamaker Organ, and organ consultant and historian Jonathan Ambrosino were the invited guests. Craig Whitney of the New York Times, and author of All the Stops (PublicAffairs, 2003), served as scribe for the public round-table discussion. The result of the symposium was a unanimous recommendation by the participants that FOKO commission a professional survey of the organ’s condition, which would serve as the basis for a request for proposals for the renovation of the organ. Five years later, as I write today, the organ is being dismantled for its multi-million-dollar renovation.

 

The tricky “R’s” . . . 

From the very beginning of five years of conversations, FOKO board members have referred to this project as a renovation. In the world of the preservation of antiquities, the word restoration should be used very carefully. The word implies returning an artifact to its condition when brand new. If the Kotzschmar Organ were being restored, the five-manual console built in 2000 would be removed and the original either repurchased and restored (with its mechanical “ka-chunk” one-level combination action) or faithfully reconstructed, and the significant voices added by Austin in the 1920s (and paid for by Cyrus Curtis) would be removed. While the original organ was a glorious instrument, the various additions and modifications have improved the instrument for modern use by myriad artists.

The current project includes a faithful reproduction of the original Austin Universal Air Chest, which was significantly modified during the 1995–97 project, replacement of pipe valves and pneumatic note-motors with authentic parts supplied by the Austin Organ Company, and the addition of two new 32-foot voices. It would be inaccurate to refer to this project as a restoration. We believe that the effect, aura, and ethic of the original Austin organ will be retained and the essential character of the organ will not be changed. 

 

The centennial star parade

The Kotzschmar Centennial Festival was a brilliant convocation. The array of visiting artists was inspirational. It was both fun and rewarding to meet with the visiting faithful, many of whom were not professionals, but people so dedicated to the thrill of the pipe organ that traveling hundreds of miles to spend a summer week sitting in churches, conference rooms, and a concert hall is a joy. It was both thrilling and moving to see how the people of Portland came out to celebrate and support their most visible cultural icon. And in the light of all that, enriching for me to have such a broad opportunity to visit with my colleagues who have so much to offer on stage and at table.  

Felix Hell gave us a brilliant performance of Liszt’s Fantasy and Fugue on Ad nos ad salutarem undam. After the concert I caught a glimpse of John Weaver and Felix Hell embracing, the epitome of the deep experience between mentor and student. I’ve had many conversations with great teachers about the joy of working with gifted students, and that which I had with John Weaver at breakfast a couple days later was a classic about how a great performer takes what he learned from his teachers and builds on it as he matures as a performer and develops his vision of a given piece.

Thomas Heywood (www.concert
organ.com) travels the world with his wife Simone, who assists him at the console for his performances, and manages his career. Thomas has the hands and feet of a conjurer, allowing him to play fiendish passages, especially those in his own transcriptions, with abandon and most notably, joy. He bounds onto the stage as if he were winning an Oscar, then jumps on the bench and dazzles. He tested the repetition rate of the organ’s aging action with his reading of the Overture to William Tell.

Fred Swann and John Weaver shared a recital on Tuesday night, August 21. While we celebrate the brilliant young players who are bringing new life to the pipe organ, the opportunity to hear two such masters play on the same evening is to recall the majesty, dignity, and depth of musical interpretation that can only be achieved through a lifetime of practice, study, and thousands of performances. I doubt that anyone in the hall failed to recognize the significance of that collaboration.

Tom Trenney, Scott Foppiano, and Walt Strony helped us appreciate the versatility of the Kotzschmar Organ, which presents itself architecturally as a formal concert organ, but with its array of percussions like Harp, Marimba, Glockenspiel, drums, and Turkish Cymbal, can easily jump the line between the classical and the popular. Tom accompanied the silent film, Speedy, and Scott and Walt gave varied and colorful performances that showcased the widest ranges of the organ’s resources, and their creative and colorful personalities.

Fred Hohman honored the memory of one of Portland’s early municipal organists by playing transcriptions and original compositions by Edwin Lemare, whose virtuosity impressed early twentieth-century audiences, and whose creativity in understanding the capabilities of the organ console is still educating concert organists.

I’ve written before in the pages of this journal that I suspect Peter Richard Conte to be armed with universal joints in his fingers rather than the more usual “up-and-down” knuckles that hamper the rest of us. As an audience member sitting 100 feet from the console in the Grand Tier of the auditorium, I heard sweeping performances of familiar orchestral scores. As a friend who has often stood next to Peter as he plays, I know he’s capable of playing on four keyboards simultaneously while playing two independent parts on the pedalboard. You think it’s super-human and impossible until you see it up close.

Ray Cornils has served Portland as municipal organist since 1990. He, like Hermann Kotzschmar, must be the premier musician of the City of Portland and the State of Maine. His rapport with city officials, board members, and with the audience is a joy to witness, and his approach to his role, complete with sparkling costumes and a smooth croon of a voice as he addresses the audience at Merrill Auditorium, speaks of his understanding and appreciation of the role of leader of the city’s music.

 

Say good night, Gracie.  

During the last piece of the centennial concert, attentive audience members noticed a light turning on inside the organ, and several people sneaking across the organ behind the façade pipes. As the audience stood in ovation, Ray and Peter slid back onto the bench and launched into a fresh four-hands arrangement of Auld Lang Syne. The entire staff of Foley-Baker, Inc., some twenty strong in suits and hard hats, walked onto the stage with a huge stepladder, and started removing façade pipes as the audience sang and wept.

All this about a pipe organ? The pipe organ is the most complex of musical instruments, the most expensive, and the most difficult to care for. Organs are subject to the whims of weather, politics, and the global economy (try to solicit a leading gift from a donor whose portfolio has just crashed). For many, they are the symbol of lost ages, the ultimate icon of the dead white man. They are the timeless symbol of the church, which compels an ever-decreasing percentage of our population.

Portland, Maine has ponied up $1,250,000 to care for its treasure. Can your town, county, state, or nation be persuaded to do the same? Never, never take pipe organs for granted.

 

Notes

1. Edward Bulwer-Litton, Paul Clifford (opening line), published by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, London, 1830. It is widely quoted as an example of “Purple Prose” celebrating the worst extremes in writing:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

2. Behind the Pipes: The Story of the Kotzschmar Organ, Janice Parkinson-Tucker, Casco House, 2005, pp. 2–3.

3. Lima Daily News, Lima, Ohio, January 24, 1908 (http://www.gendisasters.com/data1/me/fires/portland-cityhall1908.htm)

4. Behind the Pipes, p. 14.

John Bishop

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

 

Of the people, by the people, for the people . . . 

 

. . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

These words from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address are in tribute to those killed during the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg of the American Civil War. In the eulogy he delivered after Lincoln’s assassination, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner said, “The world noticed at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.” Sumner’s other claim to fame is as namesake of the Sumner Tunnel that connects downtown Boston to Logan Airport by passing under Boston Harbor.

Perhaps it’s rare for words like these to appear in the pages of a trade journal, and in today’s volatile political climate I know very well that I tread on dangerous ground. The relationship between politics and religion is strong and prevalent, though the United States Constitution specifically calls for the two to be separate. The differences in worship styles between Northeastern Anglicans and Southeastern Evangelicals are as vast as the wide range of styles found in the world of the pipe organ.

Like it or not, the pipe organ has been associated primarily with the church for some five hundred years. It’s hard to imagine what the pipe organ would be today were it not for the influence of the church. From the late Renaissance to the modern day, most of the music written for the organ comes from the church, and by extension, most of the organ music we might consider secular couldn’t have happened had the church not provided us with the parade of instruments that is our history. One might argue that the organ symphonies of Vierne or Widor are not ecclesiastical music, but without the Cavaillé-Coll organs in the grand churches of St. Sulpice and Notre Dame in Paris, I doubt those two masters would have gotten it together to write that music.

Some twenty years ago my friend and colleague, the widely respected organ historian Barbara Owen, commented, “We have to get the organ out of the church.” I was dumbfounded—I guess because I found I was too dumb to understand what she meant. How could the organ possibly survive without the church? It was the comment of another friend and colleague, Steven Dieck, President of C.B. Fisk, Inc., that enlightened me a little. To paraphrase Steve’s comment, large portions of modern society might never have the chance to hear a pipe organ—those people who would never be caught dead in church, or more to the point, those who would only be caught dead in church! After all, some people never go into a church unless they’re in a coffin.

The organs we find in concert halls, university auditoriums, and increasingly rarely, in municipal auditoriums are available to the general public without risk of exposure to the perceived perils of organized worship, and it’s the municipal organ that is of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The first American municipal organ appeared in 1864 when E. & G. G. Hook built a four-manual organ with 64 stops for Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts. That organ was restored by the Noack Organ Company in 1982 and is still very much in use. Records show that Roosevelt built an organ with 129 stops for the Chicago Auditorium in 1889, the year that Benjamin Harrison was inaugurated as America’s twenty-third president, and three years after the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. I don’t know how many organs that large had been built before 1889—but it sure must have stood out as one of the great cultural icons of its day. And with what I know about the organs built by Hilborne Roosevelt, it must have been a knockout.

In 1882, Thomas Edison proved the practicality of the commercial and residential use of electricity by installing electric lighting in the home of J. P. Morgan at the corner of Madison Avenue and 36th Street in New York. When the Roosevelt organ was built, the development of electrical applications was still in its infancy—the organ had tracker action. That’s a huge organ. The stoplist shows that there were indicators for low, medium, and high wind pressures—imagine the army of people needed to pump that organ.

In 1921 E. M. Skinner built a five-manual instrument with 150 stops for the new 13,000-seat Municipal Auditorium in Cleveland. Those were the days before radio and recordings, and it was expensive to hear the few great symphony orchestras across the country, so the municipal organ was the only way for many to hear live performances of great music. Accounts of the introduction of that organ give us a glimpse into the popularity of the public pipe organ. Following the dedication of the organ, Harold MacDowell, the Cleveland City Architect wrote: 

 

Despite the oppressive heat, the crowd which had been collecting since noon soon exceeded the capacity of the mammoth hall and long before the time set for the inaugural recital all seats were filled and more than 5000 men, women, and children were crowding the corridors of the colossal structure. The police which were out in large numbers were at first able to hold the crowd into a semblance of order, but soon gave up in despair as the eager mob swept all before it.¹

 

That means there were at least 18,000 people in attendance. A riot before an organ recital? Wow!

It wasn’t only big cities that had municipal organs. Melrose, Massachusetts is about seven miles north of Boston. Today there are around 29,000 residents. In 1919 when the Austin Organ Company installed the 78-stop organ in Soldiers and Sailors Hall, just over 18,000 people lived in Melrose. As we learned in Cleveland, that’s just enough to make an audience.

If you’re interested in reading more about this heritage, visit the website www.municipalorgans.net, where you’ll find a chronological list of American Municipal Pipe Organs. You can click your way further in to find stoplists and histories of most of the instruments. Thanks to the creators of that website for making so much information available. I’m sure that was a labor of love!

Two cities in the United States still have important secular organs with seated municipal organists: San Diego, California and Portland, Maine. San Diego is home to the Spreckels Organ, housed in the Spreckels Organ Pavilion at Balboa Park. It’s one of the world’s largest outdoor organs, and though it must compete with the flight paths of San Diego International Airport, it remains a popular attraction. Municipal Organist Carol Williams and visiting artists offer weekly concerts. Like so many other cities, San Diego has been struggling to manage a deficit budget, and after much well-reported arguing, the City Council voted in 2011 to renew Williams’ contract for ten years, continuing the city’s sizable contribution to her salary. You can read an article about the city’s decision in the San Diego Union Times at https://www.utsandiego.com/news/2011/aug/02/civic-organist-contract-renewed/?ap. The article cites that the city has a $40,000,000 deficit—but they approved funding of $286,000 for a ten-year contract for Williams. Compare that to Alex Rodriguez (aka A-Rod) of the New York Yankees who was paid $33,000,000 in 2009. That’s more than $203,000 per game, which is close to ten years for Carol Williams. According to www.baseball-reference.com, A-Rod’s aggregate salary as a baseball player is $296,416,252. That’s enough money for a thousand municipal organists for ten years. Play ball!

As the weather in Portland, Maine is nothing like that of San Diego, Portland’s Kotzschmar Organ is indoors, located in Merrill Auditorium of City Hall. Housed in an elegant case at the rear of the stage, and sporting a five-manual drawknob console, this grand instrument is the pride of its city. And while San Diego has just over 3,000,000 residents, the entire State of Maine has about 1,300,000 people, 64,000 of whom live in Portland, the largest city in the state. To put the scale of the state in closer perspective, the capital city of Augusta has 18,500 residents! 

 

The institution that was Curtis

Cyrus H. K. Curtis grew up in Portland, Maine. His father Cyrus Libby Curtis was an interior decorator and amateur musician who met the struggling immigrant musician Hermann Kotzschmar in Boston, and offered to help him establish himself in Portland. Kotzschmar became conductor and pianist for the Union Street Theatre Orchestra, in which Curtis played the trombone, and organist and choirmaster of the First Parish Church (Unitarian) where Curtis sang in the choir. Can you detect a pattern? As Kotzschmar was gaining traction in Portland, he lived with the Curtis family, and Cyrus Libby Curtis gave his son the name of his favorite musician, hence the initials H.K.

In the ensuing years, Kotzschmar founded choral societies and orchestras, performed as conductor, organist, and pianist in countless concerts, and taught a generation of the city’s musicians.

Meanwhile, Cyrus H. K. Curtis really made something of himself. He founded the Curtis Publishing Company in 1891 and subsequently launched the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies’ Home Journal. Later he founded Curtis-Martin Newspapers, Inc., whose properties included the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Evening Post. Cyrus
H. K. Curtis made a lot of money, and he carried the musical influence of Hermann Kotzschmar all his life. He purchased three pipe organs for his home in Wyncote, Pennsylvania (Aeolian, Opus 784, 943, and 1374); he donated a 160-stop Austin organ to the University of Pennsylvania where it still stands, recently renovated, in Irvine Auditorium. He gave huge amounts of money to the Philadelphia Orchestra, and his daughter Mary Louise Curtis Bok founded the Curtis Institute of Music, named in honor of her father. Hers was a particularly classy honor as the Curtis Institute was founded nine years before her father’s death!

§

At about 2:00 in the morning on January 24, 1908, a fire started in the city electrician’s office in Portland’s City Hall, ironically caused by an electrical short-circuit in the Gamewell Fire Alarm System that was housed in the office (pesky new-fangled contraptions). Because the alarm system was the first thing to go, the fire quickly went out of control and City Hall was destroyed. Coincidentally, Hermann Kotzschmar died on April 15, 1908. After plenty of discussion, the remains of the building were razed and the cornerstone for the new City Hall was laid on October 6, 1909, and on January 10, 1911, former Mayor Adam Leighton announced that Portland native Cyrus Curtis was donating a pipe organ to be installed in Merrill Auditorium of the new City Hall in memory of Portland’s most prominent musician.

The new City Hall was dedicated on August 22, 1912. Municipal Organist Will C. Macfarlane was at the organ. The program included Macfarlane’s performance of Boëllmann’s Suite Gothique, a report from the city building committee (Adam Leighton, chairman), presentation of keys to the building by Owen Brainard of the architecture firm Carrere and Hastings (designers of the New York Public Library and the House and Senate Office Buildings in Washington, D.C.), presentation of the organ by Cyrus Curtis, unveiling of the Hermann Kotzschmar bust by his widow Mary, and acceptance of the whole shebang by Mayor Oakley Curtis (no relation). Macfarlane also played his own compositions Evening Bells and Cradle Song, and a transcription of Kotzschmar’s Te Deum in F. Judge Joseph Symonds gave an oration, and representing the Catholic Bishop of Portland, Rev. Martin A. Clary gave the prayer and benediction. Must have been a lovely afternoon.²

§

In January of 2007, the FOKO board asked the organ committee to investigate the possibility of some additions and major repairs to the organ. Specialists were called in to assess the questions and replied that the general condition of the organ was poor enough to make the work feasible. FOKO responded by inviting a group of widely respected experts to participate in a public symposium in August 2007 to discuss the organ in detail and develop recommendations for the future of the instrument. The participants were Joe Dzeda, Nick Thompson-Allen, Jonathan Ambrosino, Walt Strony, Curt Mangel, Peter Conte, and Tom Murray. Craig Whitney of the New York Times served as scribe and followed the event with a written report. As chair of the organ committee, I was moderator of the event. After years of study, the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ and the City of Portland announced plans for the renovation of the organ. In September 2011, Portland’s City Council approved a grant of $1.25 million for the project. Just before the Council meeting, Mayor Nicolas Mavodone, City Manager Mark Rees, and two members of the City Council joined me on the stage of Merrill Auditorium for a tour of the organ. The mayor marveled at the thousands of pipes, took a slew of photos with his cell phone, and commented that he had stood on the stage dozens of times presiding over civic events without having any idea what was behind the organ case. He repeated those comments for the City Council and the members approved the funding unanimously. Watching both elected and appointed city officials discuss and approve the motion to care for that organ at such a meaningful level was a great experience for an organbuilder.   

FOKO is raising the balance to fund not only the organ’s renovation but to endow the positions of Municipal Organist and Organ Curator, and to extend the organization’s ambitious and effective education programs, bringing Maine’s schoolchildren together with the King of Instruments.

The renovation of the organ will be accomplished by Foley-Baker, Inc., of Tolland, Connecticut. Having completed similar projects on the organs of the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston (The Mother Church), Symphony Hall in Boston, and the Aeolian organ in the Chapel of Duke University, Mike Foley and the staff of FBI bring vast experience to this project.

To commemorate the centennial, FOKO will present a Centennial Festival of concerts and masterclasses starting on Friday, August 17, 2012, and culminating with a grand Kotzschmar Centennial Concert on the actual anniversary, Wednesday, August 22. Participating artists and presenters include Tom Trenney, Walt Strony, Mike Foley, Dave Wickerham, Frederick Hohman, Michael Barone, Thomas Heywood, Peter Conte, John Weaver, Felix Hell, John Bishop, and Ray Cornils.  

The festival will be housed at Portland’s Holiday Inn By the Bay. Details will be announced soon. Like a hawk, you should watch the website of the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ, www.foko.org. Summer in Maine is as good as it gets, the Kotzschmar Organ is a grand instrument, soon to be prepared for its second century. And you’ll never have a better chance to gather with such a list of luminaries in such an intimate city. Hope to see you there.

 

The Kotzschmar Organ, 

Merrill Auditorium 

Portland City Hall,  Portland, Maine

For a century and a half, the name Kotzschmar has personified the outsized musical ambitions of the small city of Portland, Maine. Johann Carl Hermann Kotzschmar, who arrived in Portland in 1849 from his native Germany, became a leading citizen, beloved as teacher, organist, composer, and choral conductor. He lived at first with a Portland decorator and his wife, who then named their first child Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis. Curtis grew up and went off to Philadelphia to become the fabulously wealthy publisher of the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and much else.

Two years after his namesake’s death in 1908, Curtis donated $30,000 towards a grand orchestral pipe organ for the auditorium of the new Portland City Hall that was being built after a disastrous fire had destroyed the old one. The new instrument was to be a municipal organ, owned and enjoyed by the citizenry, as a memorial to Hermann Kotzschmar, and with a municipal organist to do the honors. The first, Will C. Macfarlane, a noted organist and composer from New York City, dedicated the 69-rank instrument, Austin Organ Company Opus 323, on August 22, 1912. 

Ever since, the Kotzschmar Memorial Organ has been a beloved part of Portland’s municipal life. With the city, it has been through hard times, enduring financial hardships and even scandals; and with the city, it has also enjoyed high points. Curtis came through with another large donation for a significant enlargement of the instrument in 1927, with the addition of numerous upperwork ranks in the Swell, a new 14-stop Antiphonal division added to the original Echo division chamber, in the ceiling of the hall high above the audience, and a full set of percussion “traps” from Snare Drum and Glockenspiel to Marimba. All in all, the organ is, as Thomas Murray has put it, “a wonderful work of art which represents the best thinking and skills of its time.”

That time was the early 20th century. But in the late 20th century, troubles multiplied. The organ was twice damaged by manhandling during renovations of the auditorium. City funds repeatedly ran short, and the organ went into decline in the 1970s. Premature demise was narrowly avoided in 1981 by grateful citizens who formed the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ, Inc. (FOKO) to take over financial responsibility for the instrument. But three decades later, as its centennial approached in 2012 and its home, now named Merrill Auditorium, was again to be renovated, whether the organ could survive was again a real question.

The answer this time has been a resounding YES! from the people of the city, their elected officials, and other friends of the organ near and far and wide. All rallied to raise the money it took to restore and renovate the organ from top to bottom. Foley-Baker, Inc., the lead contractor, took the entire organ to its shops in Tolland, Connecticut, in summer 2012 and has overseen cleaning and revoicing of nearly 7,000 pipes and the building of additional ranks that bring the total to 104. Organ Supply Industries, Inc., Broome and Co. LLC, and A. R. Schopp’s Sons, Inc. all participated importantly in the work, and Austin Organs, Inc. provided needed parts. Foley-Baker built a completely new walk-in Austin Universal Windchest to the 1912 specifications of the original, 54 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 7 feet high inside, equipping it with the latest mechanical and digital technology. “All the thousands of valves and relays of manual motors are new—it was simpler to rebuild everything than it would have been to try to repair,” said Philip Carpenter, the project supervisor for Foley-Baker, which finished the new air box in mid-2013. 

Portland’s 66,000 people paid for $1.25-million of the $2.6-million cost of the organ renovation with a municipal bond issue financed with a $2 surcharge on all Merrill Auditorium events—operas, symphonic concerts, plays, and shows. Friends of the organ from Portland and all over southern Maine, as well as “people from away” paid for the rest, and more. “Very few communities have been able to build and maintain and preserve an organ as important as this, and most of the ones that have are bigger than this one,” said Laurence H. Rubinstein, FOKO board president. “We raised a substantial amount of money—much larger communities have fallen on their faces trying to do what we have done.” The ultimate goal is $4 million to endow positions for the municipal organist (now Ray Cornils, in his 24th year in the post) and for a curator and set up a fund for visiting artists and education programs. The pipes will all be back in place by the end of summer 2014, and Portland will celebrate this happy ending with a gala concert on September 27 with Cornils, Wanamaker Grand Court organist Peter Richard Conte, and full brass choir and percussion in a specially commissioned celebratory work by the organist and composer Carson Cooman. “It will be a wide-ranging program, which will highlight the immense tonal and dynamic range of the Kotzschmar, along with its wonderful ability to work symphonically with and without other instruments,” Cornils said. The organ will also be heard in Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass with the Portland Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1923, on September 30.

The story of Portland’s municipal organists is as full of cliffhangers as the history of the organ itself. John Morgan, who succeeded Macfarlane in 1919, resigned unexpectedly two years later. He left town with a woman after convincing her that her husband was not the Portland engineer he appeared to be but actually the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa. The city then persuaded the famous Edwin H. Lemare to take the job, but he lasted only until 1923. That year, the municipal music commission then in charge of administering the organ program asked him to play hymns for a community service before his contracted ten Sunday afternoon recitals a year (in addition to twenty-five evening recitals). They wanted him to take a salary cut besides. “I was assured by the commission which engaged me that such services were never expected of me,” he objected; “The reason for the attitude of the present commission is, so I am informed by its chairman, lack of funds, owing to the previous commission’s engaging such expensive artists as the great Russian basso Fyodor Chaliapin at the last winter concerts.” In a huff, Lemare went off to Boston and then Chattanooga—there were plenty of municipal organs in those days, especially in cities too small to support orchestras (today only Portland and San Diego, with the outdoor Spreckels Organ, Austin Opus 453, still have them).

Lemare’s successor, Charles Raymond Cronham, stayed until the spring of 1932, when the commission, by this time in a real financial crisis because of the Great Depression, dismissed him and persuaded Macfarlane to come back for another term. Cronham insisted that the job was still his, and little wonder—he earned more in 1930 than the superintendent of schools. There was a standoff until the end of May, when Cronham threw in the towel, but then the city council refused the music commission’s request for money to pay Macfarlane. Bickering continued until late 1933, when the exasperated city council voted to abolish the commission. Macfarlane soon decamped, and Alfred Brinkler, an Englishman, was named municipal organist in 1935, keeping the job until 1952.

The organ’s troubles began during the tenure of his successor John Fay in 1968, when the City Hall auditorium’s stage was enlarged by moving the organ back 15 feet. The movers jacked the huge Universal Air Chest off its foundations, put the entire 30-ton framework on wheels on steel rails, and rolled it, façade and all, out of the way of the construction crews. A 10-foot section of the chest had to be removed to make room for a chimney from the auditorium’s boiler room before the organ was trundled back, and a 32′ Magnaton rank whose 32 pipes would not fit in the new location was removed, and later lost. During all the moving, the 12 large-scale 32′ Contra Bombarde pipes either fell or were knocked over, wrecking their metal resonators.

Without some of its deepest bass sounds, the organ was put back into playing order, but soon city funds were again running so short that funding for concerts was cut off. In 1971 the city’s Director of Aviation and Public Buildings (!) recommended that the Municipal Organ Department be shut down. That was staved off when Fay and fellow organists raised enough money privately for at least a few concerts to continue. Douglas Rafter, who succeeded Fay in 1976, persuaded donors to give money to gild the façade pipes, but the city council, still strapped, made clear that this time it really was ready to abolish the department and eliminate his post. He resigned before that happened, but it did, in 1981.

At that low point, the mayor of Portland was Pamela Plumb, whose husband, Peter S. Plumb, was an attorney—and an organist. Encouraged by her spouse, Mayor Plumb kept the organ alive, but despite the heroic efforts of its acting curator, Burt Witham, things were touch and go. When the Boston Symphony Orchestra organist, Berj Zamkochian, brought a group of people from Kennebunk one Sunday morning to see and hear the organ, he had to apologize for its condition—wheezing and ciphering, many notes not playing. One visitor, Abbott Pendergast, was moved to bring a check for $10,000 for the restoration of the organ and present it to Russ Burleigh, the manager of the Portland Symphony, on whose board Peter Plumb also served. The two of them decided that the best way to save the organ would be an independent group of supporters that, with the blessing of the city council but not dependent on it for funds, would take over financial responsibility for the organ and hire the municipal organist. Burleigh came up with its name, and FOKO was born on November 21, 1981, with Plumb as president and Burleigh as treasurer.

They hired a Portland organbuilder, David Wallace, to start repairs, one division at a time. “Less than 25% of the manual ranks worked,” Wallace later recalled. “The organ was choked with a thick layer of sooty dust and had so many air leaks that the softest stops could not be heard at all.” The windchest had never recovered from losing its base in the 1968 move. But for quick fixes and ad hoc repairs, funds began to come in, from the city as well as from private donors, and Wallace could begin work. He built wooden resonators on top of the bases of the 32′ Contra Bombarde pipes that had been wrecked, and put them back into the organ. As FOKO’s archivist, Janice Parkinson-Tucker, writes, “In ten years FOKO raised enough money that 90 percent of the organ was restored and tonally preserved.”

Ray Cornils became municipal organist in 1990 and soon became the personification of what the Kotzschmar Organ means to the city, through innovative educational and children’s programs and an annual “Christmas with Cornils” with organ, brass, handbells, and other instruments. A $9.7 million remodeling of the City Hall auditorium was to begin in 1995, however, requiring the removal of the stage organ once again, this time for two years. Cornils and the Friends took the concert program to St. Luke’s Cathedral on State Street, with its E.M. Skinner organ (Skinner Organ Co. Opus 699, 1928), and Wallace and the Organ Clearing House stored the Kotzschmar pipes in a nearby warehouse. Other work rebuilt the missing ten feet of the windchest, with pneumatic relays and solid-state controls. The 32′ Contra Magnaton that had been removed in 1968 was replaced with similar pipes that came from another Austin organ, Opus 279, at Smith College. 

The reconstituted Kotzschmar organ was brought back and inaugurated again on April 22, 1997, in the hall, renamed Merrill Auditorium. The following year four donors, Anita and Charles Stickney and Sally and Malcolm White, gave $130,000 towards the purchase of a new Austin five-manual console, the fifth in the organ’s history.

But all the quick-fit patchwork over the years was not holding together for the long term. Within ten years, the giant windchest was leaking so much air that it was beginning to sound like a hovercraft. Working inside, technicians found that relays and contacts controlling the pipes above were corroded and unreliable. The pipes themselves were once again full of dust, and the voicing out of regulation. Metal fatigue let some pipes collapse on themselves. 

The pedal bass stops that had been damaged and repaired were troublesome, and some of them could not be tuned. In early 2007, the FOKO board had raised some money and wanted to add a couple of new bass voices. But, as John Bishop, its organ committee chair, recalled, “We got an expert who came, with others, and inspected, but they said they couldn’t make additions to the organ because it was in such poor condition.”

What to do? The board decided to ask a panel of experts, who came that August. Its members—Peter Richard Conte; L. Curt Mangel III, curator of the Wanamaker Organ; Jonathan Ambrosino, organ expert and consultant; Thomas Murray, university organist and professor of music at Yale University; Nicholas Thompson-Allen and Joseph F. Dzeda, both of the A. Thompson-Allen Company, the curators of the Skinner orchestral organ in Yale’s Woolsey Hall auditorium; and Walter Strony, a noted theatre-organ performer—agreed unanimously in two days of deliberations that the Kotzschmar Organ was a national treasure with a global reputation, and recommended that FOKO should commission a thorough survey of how to dismantle, clean, repair, and rebuild it, and how to raise the money. 

The board then hired Ambrosino to do a thorough study of what needed to be done, and Rubinstein and Plumb formed a fundraising campaign committee and began training volunteers. They quickly realized that having the project completed by 2012 would be impossible, and decided to make the centennial that year a festival that would launch the start rather than the completion of work. “We knew we had to raise at least $2.5 million, and we decided on a two-pronged strategy,” Rubinstein said; “Peter Plumb had great access to the city council, and when we approached the city, that did the trick.” In September 2011, the mayor then, Nicholas M. Mavodones Jr., and the rest of the city council voted to issue $1.5 million in bonds, $1.25 million to be matched by FOKO and the rest to make additional small improvements to Merrill Auditorium. “It wasn’t really debated at all,” said Bob Keyes, a Portland Press Herald reporter. “Nobody suggested that better things could be done with the money. The organ has always been universally supported.” 

Four companies bid for the job after FOKO issued contract specifications, and it went to Foley-Baker, which had had experience dealing with work in busy auditoriums before, with the restorations and renovation of the Boston Symphony Hall Aeolian-Skinner and the Duke University Chapel Aeolian instruments. When the last note was played at the Kotzschmar’s centenary gala on August 22, 2012, Foley-Baker technicians came dramatically onstage and started taking down pipes. Later, Mike Foley, the company’s president, observed, “I don’t think we’ve ever worked on so high-profile an organ that was in such tough shape.” 

The Friends and Cornils knew that the work would take two years and hit the road with educational outreach programs in schools, “Christmas with Cornils” and “Bach Birthday Bash” evenings in churches in Portland and other cities, and much else, to make sure nobody in Portland would think the Kotzschmar was not coming back. As the renovation progressed—the new air chest, large bass pipes, and expression boxes were all installed and work on the Echo and Antiphonal divisions was completed during the summer of 2013—they also hosted visits and crawl-throughs so that Portlanders and other donors could see what their money was doing.

The work this time is meant to last another century. Besides cleaning (especially impressive with the façade pipes, once again gleaming gold), re-regulation and some revoicing, the changes in the specification will be especially noticeable in the bass ranks of the pedal. The 32′ Contra Magnaton—only 12 pipes—from Smith College had never tonally fit in with the rest of the organ, and some of them had been badly damaged. They have now been put in storage behind the organ, replaced by twelve new wood Haskell basses that extend the organ’s original 16′ Open Wood stop, now renamed, to 32′. Another new stop, a metal Principal, also plays in the Pedal at 16′, 8′, and 4′, as well as on the Great at 8′.

A 32′ reed stop with only half-length resonators, the Contra Tuba, has been removed, and new full-length 32′ Contra Bombarde pipes with industrial-strength metal resonators replaced the wooden ones Wallace had supplied decades ago. A new V-rank Mixture in the Great replaces a IV-rank Mixture donated in 2002. The Swell has additions of a 4′ Octave and a 4′ Clarion. 

The numerous tonal percussion stops above the Solo division have all been completely rebuilt and reconditioned, and the non-tonal cymbals and drums have been relocated to a position above the Orchestral division, along with some new toys: Birds, Car Horn, Door Bell, Train Whistle, Fire Gong, and Hoofs, among them. The five-manual console has been completely rebuilt and renovated.

All in all, it amounts to the glorious rebirth of a great American cultural monument. “The city of Portland is extremely appreciative of our community’s support, and of the Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ for being such great stewards of this historic instrument,” said the city’s current mayor, Michael F. Brennan; “We look forward to the return of this city treasure.” 

—Craig R. Whitney

 

Cover photo credit: Len Levasseur

With appreciation for Janice Parkinson-Tucker’s Behind the Pipes: The Story of the Kotzschmar Organ and Hermann Kotzschmar: An Appreciation, published respectively in 2005 and 2006 by Casco House Publishing of South Portland, Maine.

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.

Ennis Fruhauf

Ennis Fruhauf holds Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from the University of Michigan (1967, 1968), and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Southern California (1973). He has held occasional church music positions, college and university teaching appointments, and is currently publisher, editor, music copyist, arranger, and composer for Fruhauf Music Publications (since 2004).

Ricercare (Ital.), “. . . ricercare is a verb, meaning to investigate, query, inquire, search out with diligence . . . testing the tuning, probing the key . . . .” (Johann Gottfried Walther, Musikalisches Lexikon, Leipzig, 1732);¹ and as a noun: “. . . Thus in Bach’s time it served almost exclusively for the title of a strict and, in its polyphonic texture, highly elaborate fugue.”²

 

Introduction

Ah, well, it is perhaps a tale to be retold yet once more, an instructive yarn well worth spinning anew, offered up here as an autumn fantasy, one with an exceedingly wry afterglow. The occasions and events in question took place some 300 years ago. And in spite of unexpected setbacks that overshadowed the final outcome, the adventure might after all be credited with having led to the creation of an unusual composition for organ, one that might otherwise have never come to light in the same context. 

The tale is of Johann Sebastian Bach’s trip to Dresden in the autumn of 1717, undertaken at the urging of the royal Saxon court chapel’s violinist-concertmaster, Jean-Baptiste Volumier. Bach was charged, in essence, with the mission of upholding the honor of his homeland’s keyboard music tradition against a figurative incursion launched by one of France’s eminent composers, Louis Marchand (1669–1732), Organiste du Roi. Marchand was on an extended leave from Paris at the time, touring Germany with a display of his keyboard and compositional talents, and currently seeking favor from the royal Dresden court. Bach also hoped to win favor and a remunerative purse, while at the same time pitting his skills against Marchand in an international venue. 

The composition in question is Bach’s legendary Pièce d’orgue (thus titled in more than one manuscript source), a three-section work, at the heart of which is a finely crafted extended fantasy for keyboard, presumably for pipe organ with pedals. It is a living time capsule—one of few words and many notes—that offers up a vibrant slice-of-life drawn from the travels of an adventurous composer in his early thirties, who was hard-pressed by circumstances on his home front, while also on a quest for recognition and honor abroad.

Bach’s arrival coincided with the day of Marchand’s tests, trials, and demonstrations. Concertmaster Volumier took the initiative of arranging for Bach to overhear portions of these recitals from a concealed vantage point. It has been recorded that by the end of his contest, Marchand had indeed won the day and would continue his sojourn victoriously, having received meritorious and remunerative recognitions.

What might have taken place in the course of the evening that followed is a subject for speculation, perhaps even for imagination. Is it possible that these two notable exemplars of Germanic and French keyboard artistry might have been able to escape the rigors of international diplomacy, that they might have found time to meet in one of the city’s spacious church sanctuaries, one where they might also find a pipe organ installation that would provide a viable proving ground for their dueling skills? Just imagine what could have been . . . .

 

A Fantasy  

(Extract from an anonymous personal diary, Journals, dated October/November, 1717)

. . . It was already past dusk when the two principal parties of the contest arrived at the door leading up to the organ loft. There were three of us surveying the scene from a distance, gathered together in a tight knot and hidden from view in the shadows of the front chapel. We recognized Concertmaster Wolumyer of Dresden as he entered, followed by Concertmaster Bach, who was accompanied by two of his Weimar students. The French King’s Organist-Composer, Louis Marchand, arrived soon after, in company with two attachés assigned to his visit. Apparently Bach was to launch the evening’s music-makings, and indeed, as we watched he turned to M. Marchand, greeted him cordially, withdrew a vellum music manuscript from his folio and held it out to his elder colleague. M. Marchand graciously received the score, opened it, and proceeded to peruse the contents. Although their conversing tones were lost in the acoustical ambiance of a lofty nave, it was apparent that Bach was to begin the evening’s music-making with his recrafted Pièce d’orgue, written and ornamented in the French manner. We would hear it now with the addition of two outer movements. 

As we watched, the trio from Weimar separated from the others, making their way up to the dimly candle-lit organ loft and taking their places at the console. Bach had been allowed time to familiarize himself with the instrument earlier in the day, and his two flanking assistants were well coached in advance. Soon enough the first notes of an arpeggiated tonic chord broke the silence, ever so light in touch and sounding out on clear stops: we heard a single line of dancing arpeggios and passaggios in a compound triple meter, falling and rising, rippling through the gamut of the keyboard. This was the newly added Très vitement, a sparkling warm-up exercise for the fingers, leading up to the five-voice Gravement. Contrary to the French tradition of a Grand plein jeu registration, tonight the Gravement began on one of the instrument’s gentlest registers. We heard a low tonic pedal note, then a G-major chord in the manuals, with the soprano tonic pitch suspended over to the first quarter-note of the next beat, and four descending scale notes in succession. This motivic pattern migrated from one voice to another, delicately ornamented internally, and at each successive cadential gesture. Also of note, at major cadences a new stop or set of stops would be added by the two flanking registrants. By shifting from one manual to another and progressively engaging manual and pedal couplers, a tightly imitative ricercar with a brief compound motif for a subject was being transformed into a majestic paean, echoing gloriously through the nave’s acoustical environment. This was Bach in his native setting, ‘testing the lungs’ of a church’s instrument as he had done from year to year in the course of his many investigative journeys. In the final line of the Gravement, we heard a new voice enter in the manuals, further intensifying the texture and leading up to an abruptly dramatic pause on an unresolved deceptive cadence. After a momentary silence, the Lentement resumed on foundation stops, beginning with arpeggiations of the Gravement’s closing chord, sounded over a bass line that descended step by chromatic step to an extended dominant pedalpoint and final closing cadence in G Major.

There was a stillness and silence that followed the last chords as they faded into the upper reaches of the nave. We sat quietly, awed and deeply moved by the music we had just heard and calmed by its lingering aura. Within moments it became evident that Bach was preparing registrations for his next selection. Even though we had been advised in advance that he would likely play one of his newest keyboard compositions, a single-movement fantasy in D minor for clavier, nothing could have prepared us for the intense drama that was to follow . . . . 

[End of Journals extract.]

Who could fathom what might or might not have transpired in the course of such an evening? If it had even taken place, who might possibly divine what Bach would have played, or what selections Marchand could have chosen from his repertoire. There is no indication that the two of them resorted to swordplay—whether improvising with epées, or instead on keyboards, each of them with assistants in alert attendance. Nor is there evidence to suggest that Marchand carried an inked copy of Bach’s Fantasy with him back to Paris and the royal library. And if fate had denied Bach an opportunity to perform his recently penned chromatic Fantasy in D Minor³ for Marchand at an organ console, it could well have been included in his harpsichord recitations on the following day.

Varied accounts of Bach’s letter of invitation addressed to Marchand in which he proposed a public contest indicate that the two of them were to meet at the private mansion of Count Joachim Friedrich Flemming for a public display of their musical prowess. Alas for Bach, his competitor—perhaps wisely—chose to bow out of the tentative commitment, traveling on to his next port of call in the early hours of the designated morning. In spite of Marchand’s unanticipated absence, the public hearing was to take place after all: Bach’s impressive solo performance on that day won him royal recognition as hoped, and his meeting with Count Flemming would prove invaluable in the coming years. Alas, his prize purse of 500 talers was waylaid in the course of its delivery. And in the event Bach had traveled to Dresden with a hand-copied score of the Fantasy in G in his possession, it rode back with its composer on the return trip. More importantly though, a doorway had been opened that would offer future return visits, valuable musical associations, activities, and honors.

 

Discussion

Could it be that the middle movement of the Fantasy, as we know it today, might have evolved from on-the-spot improvisations performed on some of the various church organs Bach visited in his many travels? Could the music of an earlier version of the mid-section have offered an idealized means of “testing the lungs of an instrument”—a ricercare, or a seeking-out—by starting with quiet stops and gradually adding registers at subsequent cadential breaks and convenient moments? It is easy enough to imagine that a far more sophisticated end product, impeccably written in five- and six-voice tightly imitative counterpoint in the manner of a classic ricercata, was eventually honed for solemn occasions and processionals and found its way to ink and paper. An earlier manuscript of the central movement, one with French markings and an abbreviated ending, is cited as a possible compositional byproduct of Bach’s exposure to French keyboard music studied and copied in Weimar’s music library.⁴ Could Bach have added the improvisatorial framing introduction and closing sections (with their French titles) at a later date, in anticipation of his supposed meeting with Marchand? 

The Gravement is written in common meter with alla breve note values (i.e., two half-notes per measure). The quasi-motivic subject that serves to generate 157 measures of tightly knit counterpoint is generically no more or less than a suspended quarter- or half-note, followed by four descending pitches, the two units serving interchangeably as a head and a tail. It is freely imitated in tight succession, as well as in multiple paired overlapping entries. A secondary structural event can be found in the fantasy’s numerous staircase-like scalar progressions of whole-note pitches in the pedal line, employed with dramatically telling effect.⁵ Overall, the Gravement is neither fugue nor fancy, rather it is a one-of-a-kind ricercar-like construction, albeit perhaps an imitative fantasy, but one that is uniquely imbued with un esprit français.

There are additional elements throughout all three movements that hint strongly at Bach’s emulation of a classical hexachord fantasy, a formalized contrapuntal structure emanating from sixteenth-century practices. Hexachordal elements are present freely in the six-note groupings of the Très vitement’s compound meter,⁶ in the six diatonically related keys traversed in the course of the Gravement’s tonal excursions, and finally in the hexachordal arpeggiations of the Lentement.⁷ It is worth noting that the title, Fantasy, would appear to have been applied by cataloguers of subsequent generations, but not by the composer. Above and beyond formalized or traditional concepts, and viewed as a single entity, Bach’s storied BWV 572 is in essence a grand tone poem, a broadly proportioned triptych of three contrasting sections—two linear outer panels framing an impeccably woven central tapestry. 

 

Coda

In support of a progressive registrational plan for the Gravement, there are numerous authentic and half cadences throughout the contrapuntally textured movement that facilitate the addition of stops and couplers, or shifts from one manual to another.⁸

There is the anomalous presence of a low pedal B-natural (measure 66), a note not normally found on Germanic pedalboards but occasionally present in French manual and/or pedal dispositions. While such an insignificant deviation could easily be glossed over, it is cited here in support of a Francophile leaning and interpretation, one that is already abundantly apparent in the French titles of the opus and its individual movements. 

There is also the matter of a quasi-legendary pedagogical lineage to be considered in the course of these closing words. A multi-generational succession of teachers—one of many that can be traced from Bach into the 20th century—extends from a late Leipzig organ student, Johann Christian Kittel (1732–1809, Erfurt), through Christian Heinrich Rinck (1770–1846, Darmstadt), to Adolph Friedrich Hesse (1809–1863, Breslau); and from Hesse continuing through Jacques Nicolas Lemmens (1823–1881, Belgium, Paris), to Alexandre Guilmant (1837–1911, Paris), and to Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937, Paris); passed on in turn by Guilmant and Widor to Marcel Dupré (1886–1971, Paris). Notable from Dupré—and relevant to this discussion—is his recorded version of the Fantasy, registered and performed in an accumulative and glorious manner on the Cavaillé-Coll instrument of St. Sulpice, Paris, during his tenure as titular organist.⁹

And now, to end this autumn reverie of what-ifs—much in the same manner as it began—on an inquisitive note: Is it possble that the tradition of a broadly romantic and accumulative interpretation could have been passed on and survived intact in its passage through such a fragile and tenuous teaching tradition, spanning over six generations from 1750 to the latter twentieth century, and onward?

 

Notes

1. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 330. 

2. Ibid., p. 329.

3. Eventually Fantasy in D Minor, S. 903 (without Fugue).

4. Notably Nicolas de Grigny’s Livre d’orgue (1699, Paris, reissued 1711), Bach’s hand copy dating from ca. 1713.

5. See Example 2.

6. See Example 1.

7. See Example 5.

8. See  Examples 3 and 4.

9. See http://www.marceldupre.com/ CD: Mercury Living Presence recording of Marcel Dupré: Bach (Six Schübler Chorales, Fantasy in C Minor, Fantasy in G Major) Saint-Sulpice, 1959, available in CD reissues.

 

A Selected Bibliography

David, Hans T., and Arthur Mendel, ed. The Bach Reader, A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1945, 1966.

_____________. The New Bach Reader, A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents, revised and expanded by Christoph Wolff. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.

Gaines, James R. Evening in the Palace of Reason. New York: Fourth Estate, Harper Collins Publishers, 2005.

Gardiner, John Eliot. Bach, Music in the Castle of Heaven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

Geiringer, Karl. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Culmination of an Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Griepenkerl, Friedrich Conrad, and Ferdinand Roitzsch, ed. Johann Sebastian Bach, Orgelwerke, Vol. IV. New York: C. F. Peters Corporation, 1950.

Widor, Charles-Marie, and Albert Schweitzer, ed. Johann Sebastian Bach, Complete Organ Works, Vol. III. New York: G. Schirmer, Inc., 1913.

Wolff, Christoph. Bach, Essays on His Life and Music. Cambridge (MA) & London: Harvard University Press, 1993.

____________. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Learned Musician. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

 

An apologia and acknowledgements

In order to provide a degree of continuity and to avoid undue interruptions in the flow of the text, end notes have been kept to a minimum. All details and factual accountings have been extracted from the sources cited above; they are often repeated in more than one source, sometimes with degrees of variation that have required editorial pruning. The Journal entry is a fictitious creation, a work of imagination. In his Evening in the Palace of Reason, James R. Gaines offers an exemplary format for overlapping multiple perspectives and layers of narration, and for combining recorded facts with speculative premises and intuitions to produce an animated account of historical events. His model has provided a structural guidepost for the essay featured here, offered informally as an example of speculative musicology. There are sure to be lacunae great and small in these words, for which all due apologies are offered.