In the Wind. . .

John Bishop

Momentous mementos

In the 2016 movie Sully, Tom Hanks plays Chesley Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who secured a spot in popular and aviation history by safely landing Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in January 2009. In the film and especially in the cockpit voice recordings of the actual flight, Sully was the epitome of cool. As air traffic controllers were frantically suggesting alternative emergency landings at LaGuardia and Teterboro airports, Sully simply said, “We’re gonna be on the Hudson.” All 155 people on board the plane survived, and the episode quickly became known as “The Miracle on the Hudson.” We live in lower Manhattan, and every time I drive on the Henry Hudson Parkway I think of that grand river as Sully’s landing strip.

The movie dramatizes the incident from taxi to take off to splash down, then moves into the chaotic aftermath of the crash. The action shifts back to the hour or so before the flight, and we are introduced to several of the passengers. An aging father and his two sons race to catch the flight they almost missed. A young mother apologizes for her infant son to the friendly man sitting next to her. “He likes to throw everything.” “That’s okay, I like to catch everything.” An elderly woman in a wheelchair and her middle-aged daughter argue in a gift shop. She wants to buy a souvenir for a family member, and paws over the kitschy New York knick-knacks. “Mom, you were never this generous to us when we were kids.” “How ’bout a snow-globe?” “Mom, here’s one.” “Okay, I’ll buy you a [much smaller] snow-globe, too.”

I have a snow-globe. It is my talisman, bringing inspiration and good luck to my superstitious mind. It contains the statue of Pythagoras that stands at the end of the breakwater at the entrance to the harbor of the town of Samos on the Island of Samos in the Greek Aegean Sea. It shows Pythagoras standing erect with index finger pointed skyward forming the long side of a right triangle with a leaning beam forming the hypotenuse (a² + b² = c²). The majesty diminishes when you see the great man’s finger is pointing at a compact fluorescent bulb. We sailed into that harbor in 2014, and I was thrilled to see my hero welcoming us, the grandfather of music who discovered and defined the overtone series, and whose observations are the root of the tuning of western music. There is a 4,700-foot mountain on Samos that rarely receives snow, and never mind that it never snows on the plain or near the coast of the island, I brought that snow-globe home.

Many of us have mementos on our desks, bureaus, mantles. A shell from a beach in Florida, a pocketknife that was a gift from a friend who died too young, a lucky silver dollar, a ticket stub from a World Series game. In the winter, I sometimes grab a shackle from a box of miscellaneous sailboat parts and keep it in my pocket, just to reassure myself that winter will end sometime, and that we will be back on the water.

One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.

Donald Hall (1928–2018) was a prolific writer of both poetry and prose. In his late forties, he married his former student, the poet Jane Kenyon, and moved to the house in rural New Hampshire where his grandmother had been born. The family called it Eagle Pond. Hall had spent summers there as a kid, helping his grandfather with farming chores, an experience that fostered and nurtured his life-long fascination with the concept of work. He had given up the security of a tenured position at the University of Michigan to settle in New Hampshire with nothing to do but write. There he felt freedom in his work, though his method of writing poetry often involved as many as four hundred drafts.

Wendy is his literary executor, and it was with trepidation that we drove to the ancient house in New Hampshire for his estate sale. One of Hall’s books bears the title, String Too Short to be Saved. That could have been the motto of the sale. At first glance, it seemed there were thousands of glass ashtrays. There were cups from the New York World’s Fair, loose gears from a bicycle, rental car receipts from trips forty years ago, at least four empty bottles labeled “Paine’s Celery Compound,”¹ and oh yes, the autograph score of Three Donald Hall Songs by William Bolcom. It was as if no one threw anything away for five generations. The ten-year-old daughter of an English teacher from a neighboring private prep school was dying of boredom while her father searched the house hoping to find the box of short pieces of string.

A wood block plane, a hammer, and a carpenter’s ruler told of the industrious rural farmer keeping things working. A pitchfork, a wood wheelbarrow with spoke wheels, a shovel, a rake all hint at the back-breaking work of farming when the most powerful machine was a horse. New Hampshire is known as the Granite State,² and any farmland is reclaimed from wild forest. It is legend that the easiest crop to grow there is rocks.

And there was an Estey reed organ, a dilapidated mess that once must have filled the parlor with the strains of hymns played by Donald’s grandmother. It is just under seventy miles from Eagle Pond to the Estey factories in Brattleboro, Vermont, and Google Maps™ tells me that it would take around twenty-three hours to walk. I suppose that is about the speed of the horse or ox-drawn cart that carried it to Eagle Pond. When it stopped working, or the last family member who could play it passed away, it was granted a spot in the shed where it could waste away.

We are given a touching look into Hall’s life-long connection with the farm at Eagle Pond in his book Life Work (Beacon Press 1993), where he chronicles how the family’s needs were met through the daily, weekly, seasonal, and annual repetition of essential chores. He tells of spending summers helping his grandfather with those chores, cutting and raking hay by hand, hauling it to the barn on a horse-drawn cart, and pitching up overhead to the loft. When he moved to Eagle Pond, he practiced his life’s work in the shadow of the example set by the generations that preceded him surrounded by the artifacts of the working farm.

The selfie generation

Do you remember when photography was expensive? We would come home from a vacation or study trip with thirty or forty rolls of film to drop off at the drug store. Six days and fifty bucks later, you would have a bundle of snapshots, your mementos from the trip. Today, we snap away at our heart’s delight. Doesn’t cost a dime, unless you consider that in any airplane, any coffee shop, any movie theater, or any concert hall, every single person has a thousand-dollar phone in his pocket.

In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at the Met is a current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It closes on October 4, 2020, so you have plenty of time to get there. It features sumptuous iridescent portraits by the likes of Jan Steen, Vermeer, and Rembrandt, portraits carefully crafted in the seventeenth century. Rather than stepping into a drug store photo booth, a Burgomaster posed by a table for days so his image could be immortalized, a memento of his impression of his own grandeur. A Young Man and Woman in an Inn, their cheeks boozy rosy, are gazing sloppily at something that is amusing them, but while it shows a moment in time, the image took days, weeks, maybe months to complete—a moment set in four-hundred-year-old paint that is so vivid you imagine you can smell their horrible breath. You can tell by the color of their teeth.

Many of these paintings, especially the portraits, were commissioned by the people seen in the images, people who were prepared to spend plenty of money to immortalize themselves. Others were the whim of the artist, capturing a bucolic scene, a frantic scene, or a way of life. Still Life with Lobster and Fruit gives us an idea of how food was prepared in a seventeenth-century kitchen. As far as I know, there is no actual record of what Moses looked like, but in Abraham Bloemaert’s painting, Moses Striking the Rock, the prophet points his scantily draped rear end to the viewer, pretty much concealing his miraculous production of water for the Israelites. I suppose that Bloemaert was being careful not to assume too much about what Moses was actually like as a person, because if I were asked to name the painting without knowing the intended subject, I would call it Barebreasted Muscle-Woman with Pitcher.

Now that I have your attention, you can view all these images at www.metmuseum.org. Click on “Exhibitions,” then “Current Exhibitions,” and scroll down to “In Praise of Painting.” Then choose “Exhibition Objects.” Each image is a memento of a moment, of a personality, or of an allegorical story.

The shorthand of emotion

Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Music is the shorthand of emotion.” Leopold Stokowski wrote, “A painter paints pictures on canvas, but musicians paint their pictures on silence.”

When you are standing in a gallery viewing a painting or sculpture, you are seeing exactly what the artist left behind. The physical touch of a human being is present in the brush strokes. You marvel that Rembrandt himself, the very man with the bumpy nose, made that little squiggle four hundred years ago. You can tell something about the person or the person’s mood by the brush strokes. Look closely at a square inch of a painting to see how the paint was applied, how coarse were the bristles, whether the strokes were straight or not. Then step back and study that square inch in context to see how the texture catches the light, how it affects the square inches around it, and how it contributes to the complete work of art.

Claude Monet revolutionized painting by substituting little dabs of paint with broader brushstrokes, leaving an impression of a scene. Does that make him a dabbler? Between 1890 and 1891, Monet painted twenty-five scenes of stacks of hay in fields around his home in Giverny. Each Meules was a study in light at different times of day, in different weather. Each evokes the other senses, the whiff of drying hay, the whistling of wind across an open field. People must really love Monet’s dabbling. As I write, my iPhone chirps the news that one of those canvasses sold this afternoon for $110,700,000, a record high price for an impressionist painting. How’s that for making hay while the sun shines?

If a painting was like a musical composition, you would not see the image, but you would be schooled in reading the code, the language that unlocks the artwork. You would complete an equation and an artwork would appear. If the viewers of art were like musicians, each viewer would perceive a painting differently, according to the level of his skill. If you were a beginning viewer, you would see a fuzzy image with muddled colors, because you did not have the chops to see it properly.

The same concept can apply to preparing food. A beginning cook can read a recipe, assemble the ingredients, and produce a gooey or burned shadow of a favorite dish. An experienced cook has a starting sense of what happens when you apply heat to a piece of meat or a vegetable, and the skillful chef understands the chemistry and the artistry of making food sing.

Last weekend, on our way to the estate sale, Wendy and I stayed at a country inn whose website made it clear that they were very proud of their restaurant. Rightly so. The drinks were made with the best stuff, blended beautifully, and served in attractive glassware. The wine was nicely chosen and delicious. Each dish was made with the best ingredients, their flavors artfully combined. The servers were friendly and attentive to just the right degree, knowing not to interrupt the nicer moments of our conversations, but being sure we were having a nice time.

The beginning musician can make a weak stab at a monumental musical masterpiece. I have heard countless performances in which the players were not equal to the music. But when the players are up to it, magical things happen. They read the code and interpret the language to get the notes right, but there is so much more to it than that. Like the chef who adds a slurp of wine to a sauté at exactly the right moment and exactly the right temperature to make flames dance over the stove and the dish come alive, so the musician adds a dash of alchemy by blending tempo, intonation, inflection, and energy into a momentary creation that has life and produces energy.

“. . . Musicians paint their pictures on silence.” During a concert at Symphony Hall in Boston on May 5, 2019, the Handel and Haydn Society performed Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music (K. 477). Conductor Harry Christophers brought the piece to a steady measured conclusion, the final chord especially alive with a crescendo followed by decrescendo and held his arms aloft to maintain the capture of the audience’s attention. Several rich seconds of tense silence passed, the kind of silence that makes me fight back tears, and clear as a bell, a young boy’s voice piped up an expressive “Wow!” With the innocence of a child, he spoke that single word that expressed the feelings of everyone present, and the audience broke into laughter and applause.

Boston’s classical radio station, WCRB, was broadcasting the concert so the moment was captured and immortalized. Executives of the Handel and Haydn Society spread the word that they wished to find the “Wow Child” to give him an opportunity to meet the conductor, and sure enough, the word spread to the family of nine-year-old Ronan Mattin whose grandfather Stephen had taken him to the concert. International news outlets quoted Ronan’s father saying that Ronan is on the autism scale and “expresses himself differently,” that he is a huge fan of good music, and that his parents and especially his grandfather take him regularly to high-end performances. David Snead, president of the Handel and Haydn Society, said that it was one of the most wonderful moments he had ever experienced in a concert hall.

You can hear this delightful moment yourself. Enter “Mozart wow child” in any search engine and you will find dozens of stories and the live recording. Ronan Mattin’s “wow” had inflections similar to the final chord that so moved him.

Remember the decoder rings that came as prizes in boxes of Cracker Jack™? When you play a piece of music you are deciphering a code. You have learned the language of the printed score, the recipe for the instant creation of an artwork. The composer has left that for you as a memento. You put on your secret ring, say the magic words, and poof. You have a work of art. When you finish, no one will ever hear the same work of art. You will never do it the same way, nor will anyone else.

Wow.

Notes

1. “A true nerve tonic, an active alterative, a reliable laxative and diuretic. It restores strength, renews vitality, purifies the blood, regulates the kidneys, liver, and bowels. Price $1.00.”

2. A popular bumper sticker says, “Don’t take New Hampshire for Granite.”

John Bishop

Closing the gates

St. Peter took some hard knocks. In the hours before Jesus was crucified, he shamed himself by fulfilling Jesus’s prediction that he would deny his association with Christ, “before the cock crows three times . . . ,” and sometime around 60 A.D., he was crucified under the Emperor Nero of fiddling fame. (If Peter was in his twenties when Christ was crucified, he would have been over eighty when he died.) After all that, Peter was named the gatekeeper of heaven, which I suppose is one of those dream jobs that come with “be careful what you wish for.” His image appears in countless paintings, statues, stained-glass windows, even kneeling cushions, and he is always depicted holding a huge ornate key. Ecclesiastical buildings named for him bear iconic images of keys, and many a cartoon shows him sitting at a lectern wafting in the clouds before a great gate, the fortunate throngs enjoying themselves inside with wings aflutter and harps strumming, the hopeful standing in line awaiting judgment. “You’re a tenor? We don’t admit many singers, but we’re short a few tenors. In you go.” Or “It’s all here on Facebook. Denied.” Or “Your account is not coming up. Give me your username and password again.”

On March 16, the most prominent earthly edifice honoring Peter dramatically shut its doors as Pope Francis announced that Easter services would not be open to the public at Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. The Archdiocese of New York has cancelled public Masses, and countless other dioceses are doing the same. At this moment, the American public is hunkering down and buying everything they are uneasy about doing without. The structure of the supply chain that we normally take for granted is wobbling and threatening to topple. Will distribution centers close so that nothing will be shipped from warehouse to store? While we are used to the airwaves being full of breathless urgent reporting of breaking news, writing for a monthly journal with submission dates six weeks before publication is hardly immediate, and by the time you are reading this, the world may be a different place. We are learning a lot about what makes us tick as we witness otherwise civilized people brawling over toilet paper.

Wendy and I have left New York City for our home in Maine. That is not unusual as we come and go from this house at all times of the year, balancing the rapid pace of city life with the more relaxed setting at the end of a half-mile gravel road. But this time we are joined by daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter who live in Brooklyn. We arrived here separately, filling each car with groceries, booze, and household supplies. With a baby in the house, we sure do not want to run out of laundry detergent, and with five of us here, we are running the dishwasher twice a day.

Social distancing is our new way of life. In a matter of days, we have eschewed the pleasant practice of physical contact when greeting both friends and strangers. Handshakes and hugs are suddenly physically threatening. Public assembly is an important part of our society, but now restaurants, bars, theaters, and concert halls are closed, and we are advised to avoid airplanes, trains, taxis—and any other place where a stranger may have wiped his nose or sneezed before touching something. Someone sneezed in a subway car, and people started shouting.

Many are lamenting the loss of choir rehearsals. It may be easy for the organist and director to feel the grind of yet another Thursday evening, but for countless devoted volunteers, that evening of collaboration, conviviality, and creativeness is important, even essential to their well-being. One colleague wondered online if there is any internet platform that would support anything like a choir rehearsal.

A colleague mentioned that he had watched one of the late-night comedy shows and thought it strange how the host who is usually hilarious fell flat in the vacuum of the empty theater. Public performance of any type depends so much on the energy exchanged between audience and performers. Thousands of organists and clergy have hastily scheduled staff meetings to work out the logistics and dynamics of live-streaming worship from empty churches. One colleague whose church has just received delivery of a large sophisticated new organ noted on Facebook how strange it was to lead worship playing in an empty room.

Out, damn spot!

Wash your hands. We have shared lots of ways to count off twenty seconds. Sing the alphabet. Sing “Happy Birthday.” Recite the Lord’s Prayer or the Prayer of St. Francis. How about the bit from Act V, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when Lady Macbeth shouts regret for her evil ambitions as she washes her hands?

Out, damn spot! Out, I say! — One, two. Why, then, ’tis time to do’t. Hell is murky! — Fie, my Lord, fie! A soldier, and afeared? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him.

I read it to myself in exactly twenty seconds. If you emote a little, your hands will be cleaner for it.

The word virus is derived from the Latin vīrus, meaning “poison” and “slimy fluid,” as is the word virulent. This lively etymology became especially prescient when the churchly conversation took up the epidemiological issue of the common cup. I have been receiving communion using the common cup for over fifty years, and I have never thought much about the sanitary aspect of it.¹ Until last Sunday when I refused the cup, I have willingly put my lips to the wine. I know that the purificator is sacred, but it is a stretch to believe that it has scientific antiseptic properties.

Grinding to a halt

In the beginning of last week, significant cancellations started to appear. All of the in-season professional sports leagues suspended games, and colleges and universities announced campus closings and the advent of distance learning and teaching. On Thursday, March 12, the vibe in New York City changed dramatically as all the major cultural institutions closed at once, including the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the forty-one theaters that comprise Broadway. Wendy and the troupe had left for Maine on Tuesday, and this news was enough for me. I held two meetings on Friday—they seemed safe enough because they included just a few people in empty churches, and I drove instead of taking the subway and then spent the afternoon ransacking our pantries and cupboards to add to the hoard in Maine.

It was fascinating and eerie to watch the city grind to a halt. The subway system that ordinarily carries 5.5 million riders each day saw a drop of 18.5% on Wednesday. Ridership on the principal commuter railroads, Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North, dropped 31% and 48%, respectively. (Metro-North runs through New Rochelle, New York, the site of a virulent breakout of the virus.) Restaurants closed, bars closed, sidewalks emptied. The traffic was significantly lighter as my son-in-law and I drove out of the city on Saturday morning. And no sooner had I arrived in Maine, when Mayor De Blasio of New York City announced the closure of the public schools.

When organbuilders are at work inside an organ, it is common for one to yell for the blower to be shut off in order to open an access panel or clamber across a reservoir. Organ Clearing House lingo for this is “Organ off!”² Someone at the console flips the switch, and you sit inside the instrument watching reservoirs go down, swell shutters flick open, and the wind noise dying away, maybe a little distant whimper of a cipher adding an eerie comment. You witness the life going out of the instrument. The great instrument that was so vital and full of life is reduced to dead weight. New York City felt like that to me last week as the great machine of Gotham ground to a halt.

This brings a converse experience to my hopeful mind. When we leave a dock or mooring in our boat, we use the “Iron Wind,” the snappy little twenty-horsepower diesel engine located in a well under the cockpit deck. It is reliable and easy to control and saves us from ourselves when our sailing skills are outwitted by fluid situations, but it is noisy and contrary to the pleasures of sailing. Once we are in open water, we motor into the wind to raise the sail, “fall off” the wind to fill the sail, and shut down the engine. It is a liberating and exhilarating moment, and I look for it, allowing the wind to take over. I look forward to it each time we set out. As the boat goes quiet, it becomes more powerful. Twenty horsepower is nothing when compared to an ocean full of wind.

Will we gain strength through this ordeal? Will this interruption of our routines bring creative ideas, new challenges, and refreshed outlooks? I hear friends talking about all the new music they will be learning. Maybe our exiles will strengthen our relationships with those close to us. Maybe we will find new and quieter ways to be creative and powerful, like the sailboat gaining its true power when the mechanical propulsion is removed. Six weeks from now, when you read this, you can let me know.

It’s personal.

As colleges and universities are closing, there has been a lot of chatter about what private lessons for performance majors will be like. Teachers are on social media asking each other how they plan to manage one-on-one “distance instruction,” and all sorts of online meeting platforms are being discussed and compared. I wonder if this could have a long-term effect on the dynamic of teaching music. One of the strongest memories I have of my organ lessons at Oberlin was the sound of my teacher’s red pencil making circles and notes on my score as I played from memory with my back to him. My ears would burn, and I would itch to be finished so my inadequacies could be revealed. It was immediate, intimate, and very personal. I wonder if those emotions could be translated through Skype?

As with any other musical instrument, private organ lessons are essential to the development of a musician. In that intimate one-on-one setting, the student’s aspirations, ego, and nascent artistic expression are at stake, and the teacher’s understanding of who and where the student is and where he should or could be going is essential. A good teacher and good student nurture each other.

A great performer is great because of the strength of his convictions and the depth of his academic and emotional understanding of the music, all above and beyond the pedagogy of playing notes. Her chops are assumed, she has worked out answers to all her questions, and she presents with conviction to her audiences. The effective teacher helps the student understand how to build a concept of a piece of music and present it with conviction. This intense one-on-one relationship is a privilege for both the student and the teacher.

I hope that all this teaching and rehearsing can continue somehow during this extraordinary time. I imagine we all will learn something from this, will come away with new perspectives about what we do and why we do it. I also hope that when this is all over, we are not tempted to consider that teaching from a distance is preferable than in person. If you are busy now trying to figure out how to teach effectively online, I hope you will use the experience to note why working in person with your students is more effective. If you have been taking the usual personal approach for granted, this may be a chance to gain the power of the wind as the usual motors stop grinding along.

If it isn’t live . . . .

On March 12, 2020, Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra presented a full-length live concert streamed online. The program included two complicated, searching pieces created in trying times: Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, written shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, written just as World War II was coming to a close. There was no audience present. The orchestra has long had facility for high-resolution broadcasts of their concerts in Berlin’s Digital Concert Hall, normally available through expensive subscription. This concert was offered free, and Alex Ross, longtime music critic for The New Yorker, wrote of the power of the event, but he noted how strange it was when Rattle walked onto the stage not to the applause of a huge audience, but the polite foot-shuffling and tea-time clapping of the orchestra, not to mention the vacuum of silence at the conclusion of each piece.

In his article in The New Yorker of March 14, Ross continued with a description of a similar concert presented by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Beethoven gave his Fifth Symphony a high-octane conclusion with a succession of thundering cadences and swift tempos that whip the usual audience into a frenzy. Ross wrote, “The leaden silence that followed was unnerving. Nézet-Séguin and his players looked a little ashen as they stared out to the cameras. Music is at heart a social medium, and it desperately needs contact.”

If an orchestra plays to an empty hall, is it a performance? If a teacher instructs a student over FaceTime, is it an effective lesson? Live artistic performance such as music or theater is an exchange of energy. The actor sees the audience through the footlights and knows whether they are excited or bored. Even when playing a large organ sitting scores of feet from the nearest audience member, the organist feels the energy of the listeners. That energy rebounds to the musician, and the cycle continues as the music grows more and more exciting.

We are being advised to limit gatherings to ten people. Ten people can make a wonderful party, but it is not enough to generate the excitement of hearing music as part of a thrilled throng. I wonder if our lives will be going back to normal when these words reach you. I wonder what lasting damage there might be to our society, our economy, our tolerance and patience with each other. I hope we can all move forward with the power of a new wind as the engine of everyday life rattles to a stop.

Rather than reporting the news as it happens, I am offering a point of reference for the future. Let me know how you did.

Notes

1. During the distribution of Holy Communion on a sweltering summer evening, the priest inadvertently wiped his forehead with the purificator between communicants. Wendy and I were taken aback.

2. We have other lingo that is useful for particular situations. “The tremolo’s running” is code for “other people have just come into the church,” which means watch your language.

 

Photo: David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, New York, five minutes before the March 10 concert of the New York Philharmonic with music of Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin (photo credit: Mark Pacoe)

Gavin Black

An idea or two

This month I follow on a few loose ends from last month’s column, about the word “performance” and related words, and then discuss a few more aspects of the relationship between musical performance and other forms of performance. Recently I overheard someone say in passing, “Yes, that was performative.” I heard enough of the surrounding context to confirm what I would normally assume from the word “performative;” the suggestion was that something was being done for a reason other than the ostensible one. There was something manipulative or hypocritical going on. Things were not as they seemed. 

To put it a bit less judgmentally, the person who had engaged in the action that was designated “performative” did so in order to get something across that was not the same as what they were ostensibly trying to do or convey. Perhaps this is performance where there should not be performance. But two lines that run through certain uses of the word performance, related but separable, are falseness and negativity. Referring to my example from last month about the person who berated his companions and stalked off, if that person had stood up and said, apropos of nothing in the prior conversation, a lot of extravagantly complimentary things about the others in the room and then departed, no one would have said, “That was quite a performance.”

I have a really strong aversion to being misrepresented. For this purpose, I am not talking about misrepresentation along major societal grounds. Nor am I talking specifically about important things—just ordinary encounters. For example, if someone hears me comment that I do not like eggs but mishears and thinks that I especially love eggs, that really bothers me—not particularly because they might serve me eggs, but just as a matter of principle. The misrepresentation does not have to be negative or neutral. If someone kindly held a door for someone else and the latter person looked around and thought wrongly that it had been I who did it, that would make me uncomfortable. I have a fairly traditional fear of airplanes and flying, but I do travel around a fair amount, mostly by car. If someone knew the latter about me and said, “Gavin must really know his way around all the airports,” that would bother me in this manner, even though being afraid of flying is in itself unfortunate and something that I would love to get over. 

I believe that this is one of the reasons, and perhaps the fundamental reason, that I am so intent on playing pieces the way that I really want to play and feel them. More importantly, it is the reason that I am extremely reluctant to ask a student to do something that does not come from inside them even as a stage in learning. Does this way of looking at it suggest that it would be good, even better, to ease up on that standard a little bit? Would students tolerate more than I can in a sense “misrepresenting” themselves as part of learning? If so, is it then a good idea to let that happen or is it still better not to? Is my concern in fact well grounded in everyone’s psychology, or is it more specific to me than I have realized? I should muse about all of this. This may be a bit of a digression, but since it is this notion that “performance” can sometimes be false—indeed that sometimes the word itself has that connotation—that put me in mind of it, perhaps it is not irrelevant.

As another random observation from theater and music, there are many performing groups that use the word “Players” in their title. Just a few days ago I attended a very fine performance of Othello by the New Place Players in New York City. Near where I live in New Jersey there are theater companies called Spotlight Players, Broad Street Players, and Somerset Valley Players, and the Baroque ensemble, The Raritan Players. At the beginning of the Jethro Tull album Minstrel in the Gallery there is the line, “We have fortuitously happened upon these strolling players.” It is very hard, though, to find performing groups or ensembles that are “The so-and-so Performers.” (I just tried and didn’t find any.) And the Tull line would seem very different if they had written, “We have fortuitously happened upon these strolling performers.”

Willing suspension of disbelief

I have pondered the expression, “willing suspension of disbelief.” Continuing to follow these columns’ premise of looking at words and their history, not just concepts as we think we have received them, I have discovered that this phrase was first used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817. When he used it, he appeared to mean primarily the suspension of disbelief, in the context of reading literature, especially poetry, regarding things that would be false in real life—that is, a fantasy, mythology, or various sorts of surrealism. However, the concept has always been used in a different way, to mean the willing suspension of the awareness that fiction is fictional. We know at some level that Nero Wolfe, Elizabeth Bennett, or Basil Fawlty “don’t exist,” even though each of them could exist, unlike, say, Gandalf, Morgan le Fay, or Sabrina Spellman. But during the time when we are engaging with the fictional world in which such characters are presented, we palpably feel as if they do exist. I have countless times sat on the edge of my seat in front of the television desperately scared that someone who does not exist will do or say something that is against my wishes. At times, I can even tremble at the situation. If it goes the wrong way, I can have trouble sleeping that night. I suppose that the only thing that I am really discovering when the story reveals the fate or behavior of the characters is that a writer or show-runner was of a mind to make up that particular story. Yet we do not react in this real-world meta level.

There was a period when I was having trouble reading. This was not an eyesight issue, but rather a lack of mental focus, and it manifested itself in part by a suspension of disbelief. I would read a sentence such as, “Sarah came down the stairs at a trot, alarmed by what she thought she had heard,” and think, “No she didn’t; there is no such person. Why did someone write that?” I do not know why this started, and I do not know exactly how or why I got over it—though I definitely did. It never applied to fiction being performed—television, movies, theater. It did not apply to music—not to listening, not to practicing and playing.

In drama, part of “performance” is the ability to lead viewers into this state. I have noticed that some commentators maintain that “willing suspension of disbelief” puts the burden of making fiction work on the audience-member or reader. I suspect that this is only partly true. As my experience recounted above shows, the state of mind of the person receiving the fictional content can matter. But the content matters just as much; it has to be “convincing.” In writing this comes mostly from the author, though typesetting, illustration, and other design features might play a part. But with performance-based arts, though composing plays a significant part, it comes mainly from the performance. A corollary of this is that the willing suspension of disbelief is not always fully willing. Of course, you can always opt out—put down a book or leave the theater. Meanwhile, the content that you are taking in is supposed to be in itself strongly pulling and pushing you toward that state of non-disbelief.

Is there anything comparable in music to the willing suspension of disbelief? Let’s leave aside for the moment vocal music that has fictional characters in it—there the phenomenon of the “music” as such and the verbally mediated concrete images are separable, and the latter can be just as susceptible to this matter as any other verbally delivered fiction. But what about music in and of itself?

In Examples 1 and 2, is there something that can be believed or disbelieved? Clearly not, I think. So, is there anything comparable in music to the concept? One way of looking at that is that the “willing suspension of disbelief” is probably usually better described as “willing choice to be affected as if one believed.” And with instrumental music the corresponding phenomenon is perhaps the willing choice to be affected, just as such—to let the music inside of one’s self and one’s emotional life. Perhaps one of the roles of performance is to help nurture that willingness.

Playing a character

I keep returning to this notion of playing a character or not. It is in drama that “playing a character” can be most clearly what is going on. It is the norm. When Patrick Stewart plays Vladimir in Waiting for Godot he is playing a character; likewise, when he plays Jean-Luc Picard in the Star Trek franchise. Stephen Colbert played Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report. (I once had the good fortune to hear Stephen Colbert doing a long Q&A—out of character—in front of an audience. Someone asked him, about some little routine or shtick that the character Stephen Colbert occasionally did on the show: “Do you ever just do that in real life?” Colbert just laughed a bit and said, “No.” No complicated explanation, he just is not his character.) How much “in character” is Stephen Colbert as host of The Late Show? In that capacity he is not ostensibly fictional. How identical is he to the person that he is when he wakes up at home and has breakfast each morning? How much is Patrick Stewart in character during an audience talk-back after a play or during a non-fiction personal appearance with audience questions?

It is a habit of audience members and fans to conflate the character and the actor, and this probably is not something that happens with performers of music. There is no character with which to conflate the player. And what of the composer? If anything, listeners retain a very strong awareness that the player and the composer are very different (leaving aside relatively rare cases where they are literally the same). This is why the question of how well a performer realizes a composer’s intentions not only exists as a question at all, but often looms very large; sometimes it is given as almost the definition of performance.  

I have mentioned over the years that I sometimes attend immersive theater, in which the performers and the audience intermingle and interact. The setup is different from one production to another, but it is not uncommon for there to be moments where by design or by chance an audience member is alone with a performer/character, with the latter acting out a scene. I wonder how many people there are in that room? I think that I can count five: the character, the performer him- or herself, the audience member as a “regular” person, the audience member in whatever slightly different persona they feel themselves to be in, in this artificial setting, and sometimes the audience member in a role that the performer is temporarily casting themself into via the content of the scene being played out. (For example, I have had a character in a play greet me as if I were her son and talk to me in that vein for a while.) 

Am I exactly the same person when I perform in concert as I am when I stroll into my kitchen alone to make a cup of tea or when I sit on the porch in the sun for an hour reading? How about when I am sitting and typing this column? On the one hand I see a clear distinction—an actor playing a part is in character, and everyone else is not. Given this clear distinction, I see a question: is “performance” that does not involve playing a character the same thing as performance that is all about playing a character? I am actually more interested in the areas in between. If we are not exactly the same person while we are performing that we are at another moment, does that help or hinder our ability to present our performance? How does that relate to the notion that performance should be “authentic?”

Since that word is used to mean all sorts of things, some of them even possibly in conflict with one another, I will say that I am talking about “authentic” meaning both “true to oneself and one’s own vision” and “convincing,” having an air of authenticity that in itself tends to create communication. I am not talking about “authentic” in the sense of “what the composer would have done or wanted.” That is also often important, but different. It is possible that when either or both of these two forms of authenticity are perceived to be present in performance, that creates an ability on the part of listeners to trust the performer and also the composer.

The other idea is one that appeals to me and that I have written about before: that when we perform music that someone else has written, we are in a sense playing the character of “someone who could be improvising this music.” It feels more subtle to me than trying to feel like we are playing the character of the actual specific composer of the piece. I would in a sense hesitate to suggest this idea to a student. Or more accurately, since I have shared it with students fruitfully, I would try to be very careful to make it clear that I do not believe that it is necessary or something that any one player would find fruitful—I just happen to. It seems to be a technique that I can use to feel committed to music and my own vision of it and to justify to myself that feeling of commitment. It seems to help with the question of whether I am exactly myself while performing or playing some sort of part. It is very important to hold onto this idea lightly, not to make it too serious or literal.

John Bishop

What’s important?

A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture for the organ class at the Eastman School of Music and the Rochester, New York, Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. The following morning, I met with several Eastman students for an informal chat in one of the organ practice rooms on the fourth floor of the school. I wondered what advanced students of the organ are interested in today, what literature excites them, what their dreams and aspirations are, and I was surprised and delighted by the answer from one young man, “Beauty.” What a marvelous outlook from someone embarking on an artistic career.

As a student, I remember aspiring to the next challenging piece, to giving concerts, to holding an exciting church position, but I do not believe I was smart enough to boil the whole effort down so succinctly. I know I loved beautiful music and art, but I wonder if the quest for beauty was at the heart of my ambition? Driving home from Rochester the next day, I reflected on that comment, thinking of all the beauty that the pipe organ has brought to our world, with its vast repertory of music from Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and Samuel Scheidt to George Baker and Rachel Laurin, from the ebullient anonymous organs of the fifteenth century to the modern masterpieces of the twenty-first century.

Rural and urban beauty

Where we live in mid-coast Maine, the depth of winter has a rich beauty seen in the foamy salt-water ice and the crackle of snow under your feet when the temperature is below zero. We have walked the six-mile Farm Road in the state park next door on a midwinter midnight, lit by the moon alone, witnessing the noiseless swoop of a snowy owl gathering a vole. We have a transitional season here called “mud season,” when the surface of the lawn and driveway begin to thaw, but deep down everything is still frozen. You go in it up to your ankles, and our half-mile driveway is like pudding, slick and treacherous. When all this melds into spring, the forest comes alive with green, the birds return, the gardens reappear, and the air softens. As I write this, the early morning sun is reflecting off the water illuminating my office, especially magical even at twenty degrees when the wake of an oyster farmer’s boat sets the room in motion. This beauty is mirrored in the mountainscapes of our new home in western Massachusetts with melt-fed streams and rivers rushing toward the sea. In the high summer the rocky coast and active sea have inspired countless artists.

Urban beauty can be mesmerizing, like the countless architectural expressions and decorations of building façades as you walk along lower Broadway in New York City and the majestic sculptures in the city’s parks. There are the Art Deco masterpieces like the Edison and Chrysler buildings on Lexington Avenue, and the fifty-eight-story Gothic Revival Woolworth Building designed by Cass Gilbert and opened in 1913 at 233 Broadway. And then there are the churches. Think of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and Saint Thomas Church three blocks apart on Fifth Avenue. Across the Avenue from Saint Patrick’s, one finds the Art Deco Atlas with the earth on his shoulders at Rockefeller Center.

In our new home of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church is a building designed by Charles McKim with a statue by Daniel Chester French, baptistry by Stanford White, and windows by John LaFarge and Louis Comfort Tiffany. The little church oozes beauty.

Beauty expressing horror

In the May 2017 issue of The Diapason, pages 16–17, my column was titled, “Music in terrible times.” Wendy and I had just heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra play Dimitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, nicknamed the Leningrad Symphony, in Carnegie Hall. Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, and began closing off all roads in and out of Leningrad, the last being closed on September 8, isolating and imprisoning three million residents. I wrote:

. . . during the ensuing 872 days nearly a million people died from starvation—one out of three people. Think about your neighborhood. The woman across the street you’ve never spoken to. The kid who delivers your newspaper. The men on the garbage truck. Your husband, your wife, your children. One out of three.

Shostakovich began work on the Leningrad Symphony in September 1941. He and his family were evacuated to Kuibyshev in central Russia that October, and he finished work on the piece there on December 27. The orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre in Kuibyshev premiered the work on March 5, 1942. The Leningrad Symphony had been evacuated, and there were only fifteen members of the city’s radio orchestra left in town. For the Leningrad premiere, musicians were drawn from the Russian army to fill out the orchestra. I wrote:

If you were a musician serving in the Russian army, you hadn’t practiced in months. Your fingers were rough and stiff from the rigors of military life. Your lips were blistered and raw. You were hungry and malnourished, and your health was sketchy. Maybe there was a morning muster of your unit when the commanding officer barked, “All musicians, one step forward.” What would that mean?

You were released from duty for this special performance and smuggled across the lake to the starving city, where people were trading cats with their neighbors so they didn’t have to eat their own pet. Death was everywhere. Water, electricity, sanitation, and medical care were scarce. Your violin was in a closet, untouched for months, maybe years. You tried to tune it and a string broke. Did you have a spare? If not, too bad, because the shop had been closed since the owner died. Your fingers felt like hammers on the fingerboard, your neck and chin chafed as you tried to play. But you played your heart out.

It is ironic that eighty years after the siege of Leningrad that decimated a great Russian city, the tables are turned, and the Russian army is inflicting the same misery on a neighboring country. We learn nothing from history. How many years of peace have there been during my lifetime?

In that essay, I also wrote about the bombing of Coventry, England, the destruction of that ancient cathedral, and the dedication of the new cathedral for which Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was commissioned. Britten combined the text of the Latin Requiem Mass with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, commander of a rifle brigade who was killed during World War II at the age of twenty-five.

I opened that issue with this quote from Leonard Bernstein, dating from the days of the Vietnam War:

This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Bedazzled by the Baroque

Visiting older organs in Europe, I have been amazed by the level of decoration. During my career as an organbuilder, I have made windchests, keyboards, tower crowns, curved stop jams, impost moldings, all the many components that make up an organ, but every part of every organ I have worked on was made using power tools. Whether I was using a big stationary machine like a table saw or thickness planer or an electric hand tool like a sabre saw, router, or simply a screwdriver, it is still hard work to build an organ. When I stand near a monumental organ built in an earlier time, I think of the incredible labor and dedication it took to mill logs into lumber by human power, to make flat and smooth panels, and to build the elaborate moldings on an impost or tower crown. And as if that was not enough effort, so many of those organs are festooned with statues of lions and angels blowing trumpets, adding to what is necessary to hold up the organ, all for the sake of beauty.

Johann Georg Fux completed the organ for the Fürstenfeld Kloster in Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany, in 1736. Its thirty-five-foot-tall case is a riot of statues, gilded pipe shades, and moldings. Case panels at keyboard level are painted as faux marble. The organ’s thrilling sounds provide a huge dynamic range and variety of tone color. The instrument is placed in a second balcony thirty feet or more above the floor of the nave. It took superhuman effort just to get all that material up there. But if all that was not enough, Fux created a nameboard above the top keyboard with a marquetry pun on his name (German for fox) showing a fox stalking a goose. It must have taken him a week or more to create that image using a knife to shape pieces of wood. I marvel at the dedication to beauty behind an instrument like that.

It is fitting that the organ should be so elaborate because it is placed in a high-Baroque masterpiece of a building with explosions of carved, gilded, and painted beauty everywhere you look. Side altars sport carved spiral columns, shaped like the DNA helix. The pulpit bears a dozen carved images depicting biblical scenes, and the vaulted ceilings are covered with frescos. No effort was spared to pack the place with beauty. Christoph Hauser, organist of the Klosterkirche, has a deep appreciation for the majesty of the place, and his improvisations fill the building with the exuberant voice of the organ.

I attended Mass there in autumn 2019, and after the congregants left, Christoph showed me highlights of the building, demonstrated the organ, and allowed me to open case panels so I could admire the work of our ancestors in the craft. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of workers poured their hearts and souls into the creation of that magical place and that awe-inspiring organ. All this happened forty years before the American Revolutionary War, when American architecture was mostly limited to wood frame structures with little or no decoration.

The beauty of creativity

Beauty is central to the world of pipe organ builders. My work brings me the privilege of visiting many organ shops around the country where I witness craftspeople devoted to beauty. A beautiful architectural case takes shape on a CAD drawing. A tonal director sifts through the numbers and math that will define the organ pipes that will be ideal for the acoustics of a room and the needs of a congregation. A woodworker sorts through rough boards, choosing the right grain patterns for the best visual patterns, and mills, cuts, joins, sands, and finishes the structure, case, and decorations of the instrument. A pipe maker melts, casts, scrapes, hammers, and cuts the metal, forming the exact shapes and soldering the seams. The voicer coaxes the tone of the pipes, introducing them to their music.

In 2018, Dobson Pipe Organ Builders completed a magnificent new organ at Saint Thomas Church in New York City. That project included the design and construction of an unusually ornate case on the south side of the chancel. It seems a miracle that the materials, skill, and ambition still exist to create something that beautiful.

In 2013, Taylor & Boody completed a new organ for Grace Church on lower Broadway in New York City. There are two beautiful cases facing each other across the chancel, each of which includes a passageway from altar rail to side aisle allowing congregants to pass through and down a few stairs after receiving communion. A craftsman local to the builders’ workshop in Virginia was commissioned to create black iron railings to help the people down the stairs, stunning touches of beauty, elegant in their simplicity.

La Belle Époche

Ten years ago (or was it more like fifteen?) Wendy and I were in Paris, France. Before the trip, I wrote to a colleague saying I would be in town and wondered if we might meet for lunch. Her reply, “Gillian Weir is playing at Saint Sulpice on Tuesday night. Meet me in the Choir.” Nice invitation. Dame Gillian played
J. S. Bach’s partita, Sei gegrüßet, Jesu gütig, one of my favorites of Bach’s music, and Messiaen’s Messe de la Pentecôte. I sat with her in the Choeur, gazing around in that huge iconic church, listening to a brilliant musician playing that rich music on the spectacular organ, wondering what could be more beautiful? And the punchline? At the end of the concert, my friend said, “In Paris, we don’t play Messiaen on the Left Bank.”

I was recently reminded of the “Intermezzo” from Charles-Marie Widor’s Sixth Symphony, that colorful, jocular dance that is played far less frequently than the grand and virtuosic opening movement of the symphony. It’s been a Class A earworm for me since. What a beautiful piece, and what great fun. There are many photos of Widor showing a range of facial expressions from dour to serene, but I have never seen one that shows the twinkle in the eye or hint of a smile from a humorist capable of such a frolic. Contrast photos of Widor to the many of Camille Saint-Saëns with the humor of his most bubbly piano concertos evident in his face.

Listening to Dame Gillian playing Widor’s organ all those years ago inspired my daydreams of what it must have been like to be in Paris in Widor’s heyday, the Belle Époche. Visual artists like Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gaugin were producing works of great beauty, while at the same time, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, and Debussy were revolutionizing the musical arts. The organbuilder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll was building musical masterpieces that included technical and mechanical inventions, driving the musicians who played his organs to new worlds. We must always remember that without Cavaillé-Coll’s genius, we would not have the music of Franck, Widor, Tournemire, Vierne, and all who followed them onto those marvelous benches. It would be difficult to identify a time and place where more expressions of beauty were created.

Reading the memoir of Marcel Dupré, Recollections (as translated from the original French), gives a glimpse into what that time was like with lunchtime gatherings that included artists, musicians, and authors all outdoing each other as raconteurs. Dupré wrote of sitting in awe in the presence of Widor and his friend Camille Saint-Saëns. Wouldn’t it be grand to know what they were talking about?

§

We see rich decorations everywhere in beautiful churches. Pulpits, lecterns, pews, windows, and altars are individual works of art. It is a special challenge to add a monumental piece of furniture such as a pipe organ to those surroundings in such a way that the organ enhances and improves the building. When it does, the effect is breathtaking. The whole effect inspires worship, even before the organ blower is turned on. Add to that the rich tones of the organ, beautiful singing from choir and congregation, and the vast repertory of sacred music, and it is easy to understand what that young man in Rochester was getting at.

We train our bodies to do this magical thing, striving to overcome physical limitations so we do not stand in the way of our artistic expression. We learn to understand the most complex of musical instruments. We learn to alter its voice for each circumstance. We learn to train choirs and to choose literature appropriate for each moment so the worship of thousands will be enriched. Musical performance is momentarily bringing to life the creations of other artists recorded by notation in print or the instantaneous creation of musical forms through improvisation. The presence of beauty is so necessary in this tangled and complicated world, necessary to inspire hope, caring, and exultation. I am grateful for this opportunity to reflect on why we do all this. It is worthwhile and worthy of our best.

John Bishop

The Organ Clearing House goes to the movies.

In July 2010 Sony Pictures released Salt, a film directed by Phillip Noyce, starring Angelina Jolie and Liev 
Schreiber. Ms. Jolie’s character is Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent accused of being a Soviet spy. Salt sets out to prove her innocence, and lots of people get hurt. One of the pivotal moments is the funeral of the American vice president held at Saint Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue in New York City. The church’s organist and choirmaster at the time, William Trafka, and the Saint Bartholomew’s Choir would perform a bit of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor as the vice president’s dear friend, President Matveyev of the Soviet Union, ascended the pulpit to deliver the eulogy. Salt would enter the church’s crypt from an adjacent subway tunnel, sabotage the organ’s wind and electrical systems creating a roaring disturbance, then detonate explosives that would deliver the pulpit, president and all, to the crypt where she would shoot him. Just another day in the life of a church.

Leslie Rollins, the film’s set decorator, read an article in The New York Times about the restoration by Quimby Pipe Organs of the organ at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, and the Quimby people recommended the Organ Clearing House to decorate the set of the basement mechanical room for the St. Bart’s organ. Leslie invited me to the film’s offices in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood where he led me into the world of make-believe-turned-believable, which is the motion picture industry. The office walls were festooned with concept drawings of the dozens of sets that would be built, and he led me through the story so I could understand the role of the set we would create.

I described the behind-the-scenes functions of a large pipe organ including the blower and adjacent static reservoir and an array of electro-pneumatic-mechanical switching equipment. Since this would be an active operating set, I arranged to take Leslie and a couple people from Special Effects (SFX) to visit a nearby church to see that kind of equipment in operation. As is usual when the blower was turned on, the static reservoir expanded about six inches. They were disappointed—it wasn’t dramatic enough. I told them that while I did not want to build anything that would not be credible to another organ builder, I agreed that we could fashion a mock-up regulator with a more dramatic range of motion.

We provided a large blower from our stock and a huge array of organ electrical equipment borrowed from the yet-to-be-restored W. W. Kimball Co. organ at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey (in return for a nice contribution to the restoration of that organ), and I built a hilarious double-rise reservoir using two-by-fours for top, bottom, and middle frames and ten-inch-wide ribs cut from plywood. I made the usual canvas hinges all around but only put leather on the three sides that would be exposed to the camera. Rather than the measly six-inch rise of a normal organ reservoir, this thing opened close to thirty inches.

The dozens of sets were built in a complex of unused aviation hangars in Bethpage, Long Island, previously owned by Grumman Aerospace Corporation, the site where the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) that landed astronauts on the moon was built. The crypt had ribbed arched ceilings, much fancier than the actual basement at Saint Bartholomew’s, made of two-by-four frames and Styrofoam painted to simulate stone masonry.¹

In April 2009 my colleague Amory Atkins and I gathered the blower and wind-system components along with metal windlines and regulating valves. I drove a truck to Atlantic City to collect the switching machines, and we met in Bethpage to assemble the fabrication. Once the big pieces were in place, we were joined by SFX who added the equipment that would animate the scene. Evelyn Salt would jump off a moving subway train, vault through an opening into the crypt, shoot the chain for the regulating valve causing the reservoir to rise dramatically, and shoot the switch stack causing a noisy explosion (way more sparks and smoke than a usual 12-volt DC organ system could produce). The organ above would roar into a mass cipher, the congregation would panic, Salt would scatter explosives under the foundation of the pulpit, and Bob’s your uncle. The set decorating team included a young hippie woman who floated a cart of art supplies about the place followed by a big floppy golden retriever. It was her job to make things look old. I gave her photos of a “real” organ blower room with the usual accumulation of dirt, dust, spider webs, and debris, and she worked her magic to make it look authentic.

I showed Leslie the completed set and described what Ms. Jolie would have to do to put all that in motion. Bewildered, he asked me to come back in a couple weeks for the filming of the scene so I could explain it in person. When I arrived, I learned that they were running behind and did not know exactly when I would be needed. Could I stay around and be ready at a moment’s notice? For two days I watched the various actors take and retake their scenes, building the movie a few seconds at a time. Phillip Noyce moved from set to set with an entourage of aides with clipboards and flunkies who carried his chair and computer monitors around. I watched Angelina Jolie vault through that opening into the crypt dozens of times—she was doing her own stunts. Then came an urgent message over the public address system, “Organ guy to the crypt, organ guy to the crypt.”

Angelina Jolie came into my little sanctum with hand outstretched, “Hi, I’m Angie.” I explained the set-up, “You shoot this chain;” “I can’t shoot that;” “I’ve seen you shoot.” Mr. Noyce invited me to sit with him to watch the take onto his monitor. “When I point at you, you yell ‘action’!” (My big moment.) Leap, shoot, whoosh, shoot, flash, blam, roar. Noyce hollered, “Fantastic, cause and effect in one shoot.” And that was it. Angie jumped out that tunnel at least thirty times, but she shot my chain in one try.²

With the shoot complete, we broke down the set and returned all the gear. I was on the job for about three weeks. I saw the setup outdoors that would catapult a car off a highway bridge. I witnessed actors who were playing small roles asking Angie for autographs. I saw Angie and Brad Pitt coming and going from her trailer. I learned that 150 carpenters were employed for that one film. And when I saw the completed film, I was struck by how much effort went into building and decorating that set for a scene that lasted just a few seconds. If you watch the movie, do not take your eyes off the screen once you see Salt on a subway, or you will miss it. I was disappointed to learn that you had to be a $100,000 vendor to make the credits. I mentioned that I could have charged that, but it was too late.³

It is easy to stream Salt. I watched it a couple nights ago on Netflix. I saw the completed sets for the barge, the tunnel, the CIA stairway, the office where Salt made a bazooka from an office chair, the hotel room, the Bolt bus, and the North Korean prison.

I happened to ride past Saint Bartholomew’s in a taxi during the filming of the big explosion scene. There were dozens of fire trucks, police cruisers, and ambulances hovering about, and a crowd of extras big enough to create a church-filling congregation of mourners. I am sure the Fire Department of New York was a $100,000 vendor. They must have made the credits.

Let’s take it live.

My friend Angie got dozens of tries to make the perfect leap from the subway tunnel to the crypt of the church. Actors in live theater get one. They may have twenty or thirty performances, more if they are in a well-funded big-city show, but each night they get one chance for each moment of magic.

The other night, Wendy and I saw a production of Cabaret at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The venerable show has a cast of twenty-one, ten of whom are in the chorus known as the Kit Kat Ensemble—the Kit Kat Club is the main set for the show. The story is set in the jumbled unraveling of the cultural life of Berlin in the years leading up to Nazi domination and the start of World War II, where the Kit Kat Club is a refuge for a large part of the population we know today as LGBTQIA2S+, in a time when such self-identification was not understood or accepted by those outside the acronym. The atmosphere in the Kit Kat Club was of forced hilarity, longing, and sexual confusion.

The superb ten-piece orchestra was sitting on a tiered bandstand on stage, just as you would expect a band to be played in a dance club—think of Ricky Riccardo’s band on I Love Lucy—and the energetic dancing swirled around them. Sometimes a lead character would leap into the band to hide, lights out, as the scene was changed. Sometimes a member of the band was soloed-out, spotlight and all. And during the song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” at the end of the first act, the lead keyboard player, who was also the conductor, scooped up a gleaming white accordion and led the ensemble to the front of the stage singing her heart out.

Cliff Bradshaw, the traveling, struggling American novelist, hopes to build a life with Sally, the club’s marquee singer. Herr Schulz, the neighboring fruit vendor, dreams of marrying Fräulein Schneider, the spinster landlady who rents rooms to the various women of the ensemble and tries to turn a blind eye to the parade of sailors coming and going in her house. Then Cliff realizes that he has been used as a courier for the Nazis. Herr Schulz is revealed as a Jew and Fräulein Schneider realizes that she cannot risk her scant living and safety by marrying him. Some characters deny the situation, some try to exploit it, and some are propelled by the frenzy of alcohol, drugs, and sexual freedom to the exclusion of everything else. The emcee is the heart of the show, inciting and weaving the intrigue, hinting at the macabre, reveling in the confusion, and has the longest list of dance steps, acrobatics, complex songs and monologues, costume changes, and sinister gestures of all the characters.

We were attending one of the last performances of the three-week run. As we arrived at the theater, we read that the curtain would be delayed. Sometime around the scheduled curtain time, it was announced that the actor playing the emcee was unable to appear, and the understudy was hard at work with the cast doing a last-minute blocking rehearsal on stage. A half hour later we entered the theater. “Willkommen,” the bawdy opening number, blasted onto the stage, and for two-and-a-half hours we watched, yelled, and whistled in awe as the understudy and heretofore chorus member James Rose (she/they), tall and slender with past-shoulder-length hair, brought the emcee to life in their first and last-minute crack at the role.

I am sure that Wendy and I have seen understudies taking on a role before, perhaps sometimes at the last minute, but not a role as complex as this. I doubt that this performance will go fuzzy in my memory but will join the file in my memory titled “Unforgettable.” The emcee is central to most of the songs and dances, and Rose’s interpretation included endless sinister, sensual, sensuous motions of their extra-long, extra-flexible fingers. I have no idea how much rehearsal time she had with that role, but she certainly spent a lot of time thinking and preparing for it. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that last-minute rehearsal while we were waiting outside for the house to open; it must have been a very dramatic hour.

Art of the moment

In last month’s issue of The Diapason, I wrote about our recent trip to Athens, Florence, and Bologna during which we visited as many museums as our stamina would allow—more, in fact. We reveled in the timeless works by Giotto, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Ghiberti, as art lovers have for 500 or 600 years. If we are still able, we could go back and see them again in twenty years. You lean in to look at brush strokes, chisel marks, dappled sunlight, and facial expressions. Favorite souvenirs from the trip are the two-inch pieces of Carrara marble that I picked up from the roadway when we visited the quarry that was the source of stone for the sculptures of Michelangelo along with many other artists. What makes those stones magical are the hundreds of tiny, shiny facets that sparkle when I turn them under my desk lamp, the quality that breathes life into those monumental statues.

The performing arts are different. A piano sonata, an aria, a symphony, a Broadway show, or a hymn happens in real time. If the artist misses a piston or flubs a note, or a couple dancers run into each other, the moment vanishes but stays in memory. Cooperative music-making is one of the high points of the human condition. A symphony orchestra is a spectacular achievement, a choir is equally special, especially considering that it is just human voices. An opera or the musical we saw the other night is multi-dimensional, including singing, dancing, instrumental music, and live drama, and that production is a real romp—there is something happening onstage every second.

This notice was included as an insert in the playbill for Cabaret:

Barrington Stage wants to remind you that this is live theater; and for some of us, it can be church. Just like in church, you are welcome to come as you are—to hoot and holler or to sit quietly in reverence. Worship and engage however you feel most comfortable. Laugh audibly and have natural emotional and sometimes vocalized responses if you feel it. Just remember that while it’s okay to engage, we should aim to neither distract nor thwart the performance.

I know I hooted a few times, and probably hollered, too.

§

On November 14, 1943, the twenty-five-year-old Leonard Bernstein stood in for the ailing Bruno Walter at the last minute, conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and his career took off like a rocket. James Rose’s performance the other night was other-worldly, and more breathtaking as she was a last-minute fill in. I wonder what was going through their mind during that curtain-delaying rehearsal. During the ovation at the end of the performance, fellow cast members were expressing their admiration, offering quiet, affectionate congratulations, and deferring to Rose for extra solo bows. It was a thrilling performance of a chilling character. The arts matter.

Nota bene

While I took hundreds of photos while working on Salt that show the various sets under construction, we were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement that barred us from publishing photographs taken on the set, and expressly forbidden from photographing the actors. Even though it was almost fifteen years ago, and though I would love to share some photos here, I will stick to the agreement I signed.

Notes

1. A different set for the film used another neat “faux-trick.” Late in the film, there is a scene where the American president is hustled down an elevator to a secure emergency facility deep underneath the White House. The tunnel between the elevator and the facility was ribbed, the ribs were made of swimming-pool noodles covered with thick spray paint.

2. Burt Dalton, foreman of SFX crew, won an Oscar for his work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons the year before. I was impressed by his status on the set. When he walked by, people whispered in awe and respect.

3. Follow this link to see listing of cast and crew for Salt: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944835/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm. There are over 180 cast members from Angelina Jolie as Salt to Zoë D’Amato, mourner. Scroll past the cast to see the crew, which included twenty-three makeup technicians and hundreds of others in the art department, sound department, special effects, visual effects, stunts, costumes, editorial, location, etc. It takes hundreds of people to make a movie like this.

Lorraine S. Brugh

Lorraine Brugh is currently resident director of Valparaiso University’s Study Centre in Cambridge, England. She is professor of music and the Frederick J. Kruse Organ Fellow at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana.

The interview took place January 31, 2018, in Girton, Cambridge, and preceded a luncheon Mr. Rutter attended, given by Lady Rachel Willcocks, the widow of Sir David Willcocks, at her home in Cambridge. Mr. Rutter also had a publishing deadline that day and had already been at work several hours when he arrived at 10:30 a.m. Mr. Rutter began the interview by explaining the luncheon he would later attend.

John Rutter: This is one of the things that Rachel Willcocks does, bless her heart, since Sir David’s death three years ago. She’s really been born again, as she was his principal caretaker. Did you ever meet him?

Lorraine Brugh: No, I never did.

JR: Oh, what a shame! Many Americans did, as you know, as he loved his trips to America working at summer schools, colleges, universities, and churches. He made quite an impression over the years. It was inspiring that he was active in music until his ninetieth year.

He died peacefully in his sleep and was greatly celebrated by his college, by his many former students, protégés, and admirers. After that she started a new life. She would now be 91 or 92. She is an active member of her garden club, her book club, and is out there. Every so often she hosts luncheons for various of her old friends.

She brings together people who perhaps don’t all know each other, but they all know her. My wife Joanne and I were invited but she can’t do it. She’s ringing a quarter peal. She’s a bell ringer, a change ringer. They’re counting on her; it’s been booked for a while, but I will be meeting Rachel. We do that every few months.

LB: There will be others who join you?

JR: There will. But who they’ll be I’ll find out when I get there. It’s usually about four or five others. It’s nice that she’s still having an active social life. Her daughter, Sarah, who lives in London, comes up to assist her. That’s what’s on the agenda for lunch. She is a dear lady, and, of course, I owe a huge debt to David Willcocks.

LB: That’s actually my first question. I know he gave you the opportunity to edit 100 Carols for Choirs together.

JR: That came later, of course. Our first collaboration was on Carols for Choirs 2, the orange book, that volume 2 of the series that throughout the English-speaking world became pretty standard.

That all came about because I had decided I wanted to study music at Cambridge while I was still in high school. I applied, not to King’s College, where David was a renowned choir director and a member of the university music faculty. I thought at King’s I might just get swallowed up, because it is a college with such a strong musical reputation.

What I did, which I never regretted, is I applied at Clare College, which is their next-door neighbor right along the banks of the Cam. Of course, that didn’t prevent me from going to choral Evensong at King’s College, which I did, and at St. John’s.

Back in those days, the two choirs that counted were King’s and St. John’s, the two that have boy sopranos. That all changed later when the first men’s colleges became mixed, but that’s ahead in the story.

I really met and got to know David Willcocks in my second year as an undergraduate when he took what they used to rather quaintly call “Harmony and Counterpoint” class, all rather academic and old-fashioned in its way. I was one of a class of seven or eight that he took every week. At the end of one of these classes, he took me aside and said, “Mr. Rutter, I understand that you’ve been composing. I hear that you have written some Christmas carols.” I thought “Oh my goodness, me, I’m in trouble.”

He was known really as Mr. Christmas. He transformed our musical celebration of Christmas with the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols as he ran it at King’s College, with his own wonderful descants of some of the standard Christmas hymns, and his radiant arrangements of some of the traditional carols. He was very strongly associated with the celebration of Christmas in peoples’ minds.

I think he might have been a bit annoyed that here was this young upstart who was also presuming to write and arrange Christmas carols himself. That was the exact opposite. What he actually wanted to do was to see what I was up to, and to give me encouragement, which was incredibly generous of him. What he said was, “Look, would you bring a selection of your compositions to my rooms at King’s College at 9 o’clock on Monday morning, and I’d like to look through them?”

So, very nervously, with a sheaf of music under my arm, I went to his elegant rooms at the top of the Gibbs building in King’s College, and without a word he looked through the pile, and at the end of it, said, “Would you be interested in these being published?” Now that’s an offer you don’t refuse when you are a young student.

LB: So, there was more than The Shepherd’s Pipe Carol in there?

JR: Yes, there was. There was my very first Christmas carol, The Nativity Carol, and various arrangements of traditional carols of one sort and another. The next thing I knew he took the manuscripts down to Oxford University Press where he was for many years the editorial advisor for their choral music. Their sacred choral music was really chosen by David Willcocks. It was quite an honor that he was taking my work down to discuss it with the senior editor there.

That was the pattern of his Mondays. He spent the morning doing correspondence and administration at King’s, then he would take the train down to London to spend the afternoon at the editorial offices of Oxford University Press. Then in the evening he would take his weekly rehearsal of the Bach Choir, which was his London choir, a large amateur chorus over 200 voices that was and is of great renown.

Amazingly, I received an offer of publication in the mail the next Wednesday, which was pretty fast work really. Later they refused to believe it at Oxford University Press (OUP) because they say they never move that quickly. We have the dates to prove it, so they actually did.

More than that they said, “Would you be interested in an annual retainer?” which gave them first refusal of anything I might write. The sum was £25 per year, which, even then, would not fry many eggs. It was a gesture. From that day to this, OUP has been my main publisher. So it is thanks to David Willcocks that I made the massive leap from being an aspiring composer to a published composer. That mattered a lot more then than it does now.

Now with website, internet, and sound bites, composers have lots more ways of reaching their audience than they had then. Music notation software allows one to put music on paper so it looks like a printed copy. That also wasn’t possible then. We still worked like medieval monks with pen and ink. Of course, the whole revolution didn’t come until really twenty-five years after that. So I was very fortunate to have a publisher working on my behalf. That’s the story of how my work as a composer began, and how it started to spread worldwide through OUP.

David Willcocks, really having put my leg on the first rung of the ladder, then continued to encourage and support me through the rest of his life. This is mirrored in similar generosity to quite a lot of others who passed through his hands, or came to his notice in one way or another: performers, conductors, other composers, organists, singers. There were many who would say that one of the great influences, mentors, and supporters they had was David Willcocks. He was a great man.

LB: Did he consciously see it as his role to nurture and generate new generations of students and other young musicians?

JR: Yes, I’m sure that he did. He saw his role as a leader, an exemplar. King’s College Cambridge was a role model for choirs around the world. They set standards, higher than had been general in the years before that, which everyone was expected to match if they could, or aspire to.

It wasn’t so much for himself as it was what he wanted to do for his college, for its choir, and for musicians the world over. That’s really what I mean by generosity: his gifts were always put to the service of others. You can’t really say anything better of someone than that.

LB: Your work does a lot of the same thing. (Next I showed him the December 2017 issue of The Diapason. The issue contained the article on Francis Jackson’s centenary.) Do you know the journal?

JR: Yes, I do, although I think when I last saw it wasn’t in such lovely full color. It was a little more austere-looking.

There’s Francis Jackson! He continues to play at a small local church. His dean at York Minster, Viv Faull (the Very Reverend Vivienne Faull, current dean of York Minster), was at one time chaplain of Clare College, and so I remember her from those years. Jackson was very loyal to York Minster. Interestingly, he and David Willcocks were often mistaken for each other because they looked rather alike. Sometimes they were congratulated for the other’s work.

LB: I imagine they were pretty gracious about that.

JR: I think they were.

(I mention my interview with Stephen Cleobury for The Diapason, June 2018, pages 20–23.)

JR: Stephen’s reign at King’s has been even longer than David Willcocks’s. David was the organist/director of music at King’s for seventeen years, I believe. He took office late in 1957 when Boris Ord, his predecessor, became ill and needed help. He had something like a motor-neuron disease. It was a degenerative condition, and first his foot began to slip off the pedal notes. David, who had been organ scholar at King’s, was summoned to assist. When it was clear Ord wasn’t going to recover, Willcocks was given the title director of music and Ord had an emeritus role. David continued until 1974 when he went to the Royal College of Music. Philip Ledger followed for a period of seven years and did a fine job. Stephen Cleobury took over in 1982 and will retire in 2019.

We have had two long reigns with a shorter one in the middle. Now his retirement has been announced, and the advertisement has been placed for the job, which will generate hot competition. A lot of interest will attach to it, and many will apply, I imagine.1

LB: What kind of direction do you believe King’s will go, or would you like to see the direction be?

JR: What has changed is that King’s is no longer in the field by themselves. When David Willcocks took over in 1957 there were only two choirs that the world had heard of in the city of Cambridge. King’s was one of them, St. John’s was the other. They were twin peaks; I would never hold up one over the other. King’s has possibly enjoyed the greater renown because it is traditionally broadcast from the BBC at Christmas time that has gone around the world.

St. John’s does not sing during the immediate period around Christmas, so King’s has slightly had the edge. What a new director now has to accept is that King’s is not alone. There are other peaks in the Cambridge choral world. This is a city of choirs.

Once the men’s colleges began to admit women, and, in the case of Girton, the women’s college began to admit men, the choirs became mixed, made up of very gifted and eager undergraduates who wanted to sing at a high level, and have had the example of King’s and St. John’s to inspire them.

Of course, those mixed choirs are more in line with what is happening in the real world, as men and boys choirs are often becoming difficult to recruit. Adult mixed choirs are becoming pretty standard. My own choir, Clare College, Trinity College Choir, Gonville and Caius, Christ College, Jesus College (they actually have two choirs, as they have both a boys and a girls choir), St. Catherine’s, a lot of choirs are vying for excellence.

What has to continue to happen at Kings, as has already begun successfully, is to accommodate to the thought that they don’t have the field to themselves, and they must remain distinctive. For the foreseeable future I think they will retain a boy’s and men’s choir. They do have a mixed choir that sings on Mondays. They need to maintain their tradition.

They have spread themselves quite widely in the scope of their activities, and that will have to continue. They now have their own record label and webcasts that bring their work day by day to a wide audience.

They give a lot more concerts, recitals, and do a lot more tours than they used to. Whoever runs it will have to have a clear sense of the identity of the choir and its tradition, while being able to successfully swim in a much more crowded pool. In some ways it’s a harder job than it was back in the days of David Willcocks at King’s and George Guest at St. John’s, because it was kind of lonesome up there, and now it isn’t.

When they look back and write the history of what’s happening in choral music in Britain, it will be seen that there was something of a golden age at Oxford and Cambridge, and other universities, where many have seen the value of the fine choir tradition and want to copy it. So Royal Holloway College, London University, and King’s College, London, all now have fine choirs.

One thing about a choir is that it’s useful for drawing attention to the college, because the students tapping away at their laptops doing their degree work isn’t very newsworthy. On the other hand, a choir that gives a recital and wows the audience spreads the awareness of the college, helps with recruitment. There’s no question of that. That’s something that’s been understood for a long time in the United States, where, for example, the St. Olaf Choir has always had a big annual tour. This is something we’re rapidly getting used to here in the UK.

Cambridge has always been an international university, and now it has to compete on a global stage with others. There are Asian students who are so committed and dedicated and they have a choice. They could go to a university in this country or they could go to an American university or Australian one, or wherever they feel there is a center of excellence in their chosen field. Choirs will continue to have an important role in waving the flag for their colleges and universities. That will continue to be an important part of what King’s College does.

LB: Some colleges struggle to get enough resources in the budget to be able to tour.

JR: In the end you may find that you attract more funding than you spend. It’s necessary to spend money in order to recoup the costs. The great thing about a choir is that it is transportable. You can’t send the Clare College cricket team on a United States tour. What would they do when they get there? Whom would they play?

That’s something the new director of King’s College will have to be aware of. You always have to fight your corner in a college that isn’t just about music. There are people who are highly expert in many fields of academic endeavor and question music’s place in the academy.

We have to persuade others over and over again that music is important, and why liturgical music that forms part of the music in the chapel is important. This is not so hard to explain to atheists, but it is to people from a different religious tradition. What’s the point of all this elaborate worship in a university setting?

I heard a senior tutor say, “We’re a degree factory.” The response to that is to ask why we should be the same as every other university. If the college or university has a unique tradition, if the choir is built into the fabric and statutes of the institution that go back centuries, then we should be cherishing and nurturing that.

That’s a point, oddly, that is better understood in the United States than here. I’ve talked to people who are attracting tourists to this country and some British planners have said, “We’re not a museum. We’re a vibrant country that’s doing all sorts of new things, pushing back new frontiers in science and technology.” An American in the meeting said, “What people want is your history.” In a sense it is part of what we should be nurturing.

The atom was split here in Cambridge, new bits of the universe have been discovered. Yet, when we have something rather special and lovely that goes back for centuries, we shouldn’t apologize for what went on, we should celebrate it.

LB: For American choral music, the British choral music tradition is still of great interest and curiosity. Are there other mentors than David Willcocks who influenced you?

JR: I have to go back further than my university days. I was fortunate to attend a boys school where music was a very important part of the curriculum. It was in north London, Highgate School, which had a Christian foundation, dating from 1565. It has a plain red brick chapel up Highgate Hill. At the highest point in London, there it is.

That is where I spent my early years under the really inspirational guidance of Edward Chapman. He had been an organ scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in the 1920s, and was a student of Charles Wood. If you’ve ever sung “Ding Dong Merrily on High,” the chances are you’ve probably sung his harmonization. He was a choral and liturgical musician. He was director of music here at Gonville and Caius College. He was a conservative craftsman of great skill who was rather strict and stern with his students, of whom Edward Chapman was one.

I am the grandson of Charles Wood through music because a lot of his ideas and teachings were passed down to me through Chapman. Oddly, of course, Wood wrote and arranged Christmas carols and compiled collections of them, and I’ve done the same. I can’t explain that connection really. The great thing was that I was encouraged to think that composition was normal, which for a teenage boy is quite unusual. In our school it was OK to write music. We were encouraged to write music for our school orchestra or other instrumental ensembles or the chapel choir occasionally.

One of my slightly older classmates was John Tavener, later Sir John Tavener. He was clearly destined for fame and fortune. We still miss him. He died in 2013, just short of his seventieth birthday, which was very sad.

LB: Did he die rather suddenly? Didn’t he compose until the end?

JR: He had an unusual condition called Marfan syndrome, a congenital malfunction of the body’s connective tissues. Marfan’s people generally grow rather tall and can be double-jointed, which can help if you are a keyboard player, I suppose. Indeed John was a fine pianist and organist. It tends to go with a general malformation of the heart and requires heart surgery, which now has an established technique and outcome. At the time when John and his brother, who also had the disease, had the operation the surgery was pioneering. It did give them thirty years of life they wouldn’t have had. Nevertheless, his health was always precarious.

I remember him mostly as a high school friend. We would show each other our newly written compositions, and I was recruited, among his other colleagues and friends, to take part in whatever was his latest compositional epic. I generally worked on a smaller scale than he did and was rather in awe of him.

There were other musicians there among my contemporaries. I remember in a very different field young David Cullen, who became Andrew Lloyd Webber’s orchestrator and assistant, who worked in the shadows, but whose skill and musicianship were relied on by this renowned musical theater composer. He was at Highgate at the same time, as well as Howard Shelley, the pianist, who has had a fine international career.

There was a whole bunch of us who knew that music was important in our lives. I was not the most obvious among them, really, because I had no outstanding performing talent. I’m afraid your readers wouldn’t enjoy my organ playing.

LB: So I shouldn’t ask about it?

No, well, it ceased at age 18. I felt I owed it to myself to study an instrument to a reasonable standard, and I studied the organ up through the standard exams.

As I worked through the eight levels we have here in the UK, the music gets harder and the scales get faster and more intricate. I managed to put myself through grade 8 on the organ and afterwards, when I got my certificate I thought, “Right, I’m giving up,” because I knew my musical gift, if I had one, was for composing and conducting, not for playing. I can rehearse and accompany music, but I never want to play in public.

Yet, well, oddly, a page of orchestral score paper always felt like home territory to me. I always felt very comfortable with what amounts to the cookery of orchestral writing. The recipe is put together from different ingredients. You have to know what goes with what. If you put too much spice in it masks the flavor of something else.

When writing for orchestra, if one puts too much brass in, it will cover up what is going on in the woodwinds and strings, etc. That was something I learned from the great masters as, in the end, every musician does. I was encouraged to write for all sorts of resources back in high school.

We had an annual musical competition with an instrumental ensemble class. The more instruments you included, the more points you got. So if we had within our house, which was a sub-group of the school, a tuba player who could only play about four notes, you would put him in. So that gave me a taste of instrumental writing, where one had to adapt to the resources you have. None of that music survives, fortunately.

LB: What an environment to live in!

JR: Yes, it really was. Our headmaster always thought I should be an academic. He knew enough of the musical profession to know it was full of pitfalls, disappointments, setbacks, heartbreak, and he was not sure that I would have whatever it took to succeed. Nor was I sure, but I boldly applied to Cambridge, slightly under false pretenses, because I said I wanted to study modern languages, French and German. As soon as I came up for the interviews, I confessed to the senior tutor of Clare, “Well, look, I really want to do music.” And he said, “All right.”

So I was allowed to follow my true vocation. Nobody stopped me, and no one has stopped me ever since. I’m still doing today what I was doing as that little child in my parent’s apartment when I first discovered the out-of-tune upright piano.

There’s a story I’ve told many times, but it’s true. At the age of five or six, as an only child, I spent a lot of time by myself, and I would doodle away in a world of my own, singing along in my little treble voice, and just making up music. In a way, that’s what I’m still doing, all these years later, except, with a bit of luck I get paid for it. And I can write it down, which I couldn’t do then. I only learned to read and write music once I got to school.

LB: Do you think that being able to compose a tune is a gift?

JR: I would always describe myself as 50% composer and 50% songwriter. Really they’re not the same skill. I’ve always been drawn to melody among those twentieth-century composers where I found it. That often meant songwriters. I owe a huge debt to the classic American songwriters, which I would call the golden age of American musical theater, roughly stretching from Jerome Kern to Stephen Sondheim. The thing I learned from them, which I also learned from the song writing of Schubert, Schumann, and others, is that a tune is a great carrier for the sense of a text. It’s like a vector for conveying the text, like shooting an arrow into the heart of the listener.

I would never renounce melody. Of course in twentieth-century concert music and opera, one doesn’t normally go out humming the tunes. The composers of that sort of music are developing music in other ways, discovering new sound worlds, new structures, new interrelationships between music and other worlds of the arts. A lot of contemporary music is inspired by dance, visual arts, poetry, etc. One doesn’t go to it expecting the same thing as attending West Side Story. Although my training is 100% classical, I’ve been influenced by music theater and perhaps, to a smaller extent, pop music.

I have this problem that probably goes with age, but pop music stopped for me somewhere after the Beatles, which is a long time ago. “Here, There, and Everywhere” is a lovely song.

I’m not sure that any one pop musician today has any standing like they did. The world of pop music and media was not so fragmented as today. There were not so many radio and television stations, not as many record labels. If you did attain prominence, it is probably greater than anything you could attain now.

The Beatles were so multi-talented. They were very good: great melodists, inventive poets. Their music retains great freshness. I think that’s where melody fits in to what I do. I’ve allowed myself to be influenced by the fields outside of classical music, but it’s contained within the framework of my classical training, I think.

LB: The Beatles created a new sound world as well. When we studied classical music in the 1970s we came home to our dorm and listened to the Beatles. We didn’t see it as a problem or incongruity to put those musics next to each other.

JR: I don’t think it need be a problem. I must say I’m not too enamored with rock music in church. I think it’s too one-dimensional. I think there is a subtlety about the great tradition of church music, and a depth that is more nourishing. I think so much rock music is loud, and all in 4/4, and thus there isn’t the same potential for responding sensitively to what is probably the greatest body of texts we have. Anybody who is going to set words to music is sooner or later going to come upon religious texts. They have the great quality of vision and poetry. We have the great fortune in this country, and I’m fortunate to be a member of the last generation to experience the King James Bible and the Prayer Book of 1662 on a daily basis. These words are majestic English, written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, when they knew how to turn a good phrase.

It was ousted about the time I went to university, first the New English Bible, then other translations. We absolutely need the new translations, and I use them, but when I’m looking for words to set, I find there is more resonance in the historic English of the King James Bible or the old Prayer Book. Somehow it seems to invite music in a way I don’t find in contemporary religious writing. This is not to say that we shouldn’t persevere with it. I remember the dean of St. Paul’s (London) once said to me, “Yes, the contemporary translations of the Bible are not all that fantastic. The only way they’ll get better, though, is if we keep persevering with them.”

LB: There are good reasons for changing and updating English language.

JR: Oh, yes. With inclusiveness, and those things, which they weren’t worrying about in the 1600s. At the same time, it’s good to have a sense of historical imagination, so that when we hear William Byrd setting the words, “Prevent us, O Lord,” we know that he didn’t mean “stop us, O Lord,” but “go before us, O Lord.” If we just eradicate that from our religious language, we lose a sense of how flexible and ever-changing language can be.

Or again, “when man goeth forth to his labor,” it refers to the German “Mensch.” “Mann” in German means a human being, where man in English means a male. In English the same word, unfortunately, serves for both. We need to be aware that a little mental switch goes on and we say, “ah, this is Mensch, this refers to the whole human race.” It would be a shame if we lost that completely, though I do see where it is important the people understand the words as they are meant today. However, young people also need to read old poetry and experience old literature. Otherwise they won’t be enriched by this changing landscape of the English language, which has been such a wonderfully flexible instrument through the changes of many centuries, and continues to evolve.

LB: I recently heard a Mass by Jonathan Dove sung at the Bath Abbey. Do you know it?

JR: Yes, I do, and I know Jonathan Dove quite well, a fine composer. Their director of music Huw Williams has not been there very long. He had been at St. Paul’s Cathedral, as one of the three organists there. He then moved to be the director of music at the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace in London, and then moved within the last year to Bath Abbey, where they have a glorious acoustic—a stone fan-vaulted roof very much modeled on King’s College. The sound floats around in a particularly beautiful way, I think.

LB: I saw you had done a Singing Day the previous weekend at Bath Abbey. Can you say a bit about what those Singing Days are all about?

JR: That Singing Day was one of about twelve to twenty I do every year. Its purpose is to bring people together to enjoy singing for a day without the pressure of a concert or worship service at the end. I really got the idea from the reading sessions that I was asked to be a part of in the United States, often put on by publishers or universities, denominational summer retreats, where people are handed a pile of music at the door and they sing through it. Generally, the purpose is to acquaint those people with the publishers’ music that they might want to use in their own situation. I couldn’t help realizing that they were getting pleasure out of just being together, singing, and not having to worry about polishing the music to perfection.

So I wondered if that idea could be brought into Britain, where it’s not necessarily all about promoting music as such, but just giving people a chance to sing together. It’s aimed at anybody who wants to come. I accept these engagements if I am free, and if the hosts agree to my simple condition that all are welcome. I have ample opportunity to work with professionals. It’s nice to embrace the whole domain of people who sing for fun. A lot of the people who come do belong to civic or church choirs. It might be a small choir, though, without a sufficient balance of parts. So to be part of a choir of 450, which was the maximum we could fit into Bath Abbey, was rather inspiring because it’s different. I do get people who say they are too shy to audition for a choir. I like it if people bring along youngsters to be introduced, painlessly I hope, to all sorts of choral music. Of course there are those who sight read but are a bit rusty, and it improves their skills just like a muscle that needs exercise. So there are a number of functions.

I try to throw in tips for vocal technique. Particularly the men who come to these events may not have sung recently, or even at all since being a child. They come back to it not knowing how to use their voice properly. A few simple things will often put them back on the track, to be able to control their breath, and make a reasonable sound. So there is some teaching purpose, but really the idea is to spend time singing through a bunch of music. I choose about a 50/50 mix of classical or contemporary composers, perhaps not known to them, and my own works. If I didn’t include some of my own work, people would think it’s a bit strange. So, more than anything else, what I find striking about these events is how people feel they must tell me what pleasure it’s given them at the end of the day. It’s almost a physical thing, really, to just say, “I feel so good.” Of course you might get something similar with a good yoga class or Pilates, but singing can have the same beneficial effect on us—body and soul.

LB: And now, as we know more scientifically about brain theory, we can show that it’s true.

JR: Of course, exactly. Sometimes people have to discover, or rediscover that for themselves. These Singing Days form an enjoyable part of my life, and I hope that they spread a love of singing, or reinforce it among those that have dropped out of choral singing, or put new heart into those who struggle with their little church choir week by week, and need something to power them up a bit.

I have to say that my days of traveling abroad to various universities and churches have come to an end, voluntarily. I decided I had to prioritize my time. I like to be in other places, but I resent the time I spend traveling to and from them. I know it’s quick and easy in comparison to the days before jet travel, but it’s still quite tiring. I value increasingly the time I spend at home recording and composing.

LB: I’d like to hear a bit about what you are thinking about for the future. I saw the recent piece Visions you wrote as a violin concerto with boys choir for the Yehudi Menuhin competition. It seemed like a new area for you.

JR: Yes, I never thought I’d end up writing so much choral music, because I simply compose music. I think we delude ourselves if we imagine we are in control of our lives. I don’t think I ever did, or do, have a grand master plan for my life in music. If I ever had it, it hasn’t turned out the way I thought it would. So many of the paths we take are the result of chance meetings or events we hadn’t predicted. If I hadn’t met David Willcocks, and if he hadn’t been interested in my work, I might never have shown my music to a publisher, and perhaps I might have thought I should teach at a university. If people out there in the world of choral music hadn’t gotten hold of some of my early music and requested more of it, there wouldn’t be as much as there is. More than three-quarters of my total output is choral. I don’t fight that too hard, because, when all is said and done, I love choirs. I grew up singing in them. I feel some sense of coming home to my roots when I write choral music. I love poetry; I love words. Music allied to words is rather special to me.

Sometimes, though, it is nice to go beyond words. That is one of the reasons I thought it would be an interesting challenge to write a work that centers on virtuosic violin writing. It is a twenty-minute work for the winner of the Yehudi Menuhin competition in 2016 and was requested to have a part written for the boys choir of the Temple Church (London), where the concert would be held.

Visions is either the only violin concerto with a part for sopranos or it is the only work for soprano voices that has a violin part quite this elaborate. It’s a hybrid piece, but one which sprang out of the circumstances. I receive many invitations to write things, but the reason I said yes to this one was that it was different and drew inspiration from the history of the Temple Church itself, which, as Dan Brown’s readers will know, has links with the Crusades.

The Knights Templars came back with their plunder from the Holy Land, and given that they thought they had been rather naughty, they should spend it on something worthy. So they founded hospitals, churches, and schools. The round part of the Temple Church was built with money they probably supplied, and it’s modeled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. So it was the London base for one of the Crusades. It’s a little hard to speak of this now in a time when the Crusades have become quite politically incorrect. Nonetheless, there is something inspiring about seeing the tombs of the knights, especially when it’s dark in the round part of the church. The rest of the church was bombed flat in World War II, but the round part was sturdy and withstood; the nave did not.

LB: I’ve visited the Round Church in Cambridge, built in a similar way and time, and find the acoustics are splendid.

JR: The Round Church is very similar. In Cambridge it is sadly no longer used as a church. It is sort of a visitor’s center. Of course Cambridge is ludicrously over-churched, and always was. I don’t think that all of those church buildings that crowd around here were ever full, even when everybody went to church. It was like a style accessory; we’ve got to have one. There’s been quite a lot of imagination applied to find a role for them all in the twenty-first century.

LB: The first time I walked into Michaelhouse, a coffee house in a church with choir stalls, an altar, and stained glass windows, I was quite startled. For an American, it felt strange to me.

JR: Michaelhouse Centre is owned by Great St. Mary’s, our university church, which has a thriving congregation. They’ve always had Michaelhouse there, and they scratched their heads a bit to decide what to do with it. I don’t think it’s been used for worship for many years now. It’s not really needed for that purpose, as the university church is just a one-minute walk away. It’s a little bit of a shock, I’m sure.

LB: Do you have the amateur musician in mind when you compose?

JR: If you write for an opera company or orchestra, you’re writing for professionals. If you write for choirs, you are generally writing for amateurs or students. That’s who make up the majority of the world’s choirs. There are a small number of professional European and British choirs, sometimes associated with broadcasting, and certainly university and cathedral choirs that attain a professional level.

The term “professional singer” means something different in the UK than in the United States. Those singers called professional here earn their living solely by singing in professional choirs or vocal ensembles like Tenebrae, Ora, The Sixteen, to name a few. The same pool of singers will populate those groups. There are something like 200 professional small group singers in London. They accept invitations to be in a tour or recording for a group. There is a lot of fruitful interchange.

Many of those singers are from the Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge) chapel choirs, and they want to earn their living as singers but they don’t necessarily want to be soloists. They are really on a level that is unrealistic for other choirs to match. The best of our collegiate choirs are on a similar level. They can perform music of similar challenge and complexity, not available to your average parish choir or local choral society. As a choral composer you have to know for whom you are writing. I’ve just been writing the liner notes for Trinity College Choir’s CD of Owain Park’s music, which is terrific—it creates a sound world opening up before your ears, but don’t expect it to be replicated by your local church choir anytime soon.

I don’t write primarily for the apex of the choral spectrum. Rather, I’ve been writing mostly for choirs somewhere in the middle. One has to be mindful of the liturgical context. The surprise to me is that some pieces I’ve written like All Things Bright and Beautiful and For the Beauty of the Earth, the little ditties, which were crafted with the needs and tradition of the American choirs who commissioned them, have begun to filter back over here. I remember thinking, I will never hear For the Beauty of the Earth sung by an English cathedral choir. Just yesterday I looked at the YouTube video of it being sung by Winchester Cathedral choristers, and indeed the Queen Mother wanted it sung at her 100th birthday celebration service, which it was. I could have never predicted that. What’s happened is that the Church of England has moved its own goalposts a bit, and there has been a loosening up and embracing of a more relaxed, informal kind of church music.

I’ve been generally aiming at a choir in a specific location. It’s always a surprise when a piece gets performed somewhere quite different. I wrote my Requiem within the Anglican Catholic tradition, and it gets done a lot in Japan, where there really isn’t a strong Christian tradition. One never knows where music will reach, and that’s one of the amazing things about it. I always try to write for the performers who will be involved in the first performance. I feel a strong obligation to whoever is doing the piece first. I don’t usually think long past that.

LB: Isn’t it interesting that when you write for a particular context, it often finds a new home in a quite unrelated place?

JR: I almost never write for a general purpose, and I don’t accept commissions anymore, as I want to use my time for my own projects at my own pace. Things like Visions could have never happened if I had been overwhelmed with commissions. This was what I thought was a brilliant idea that was presented to me, and I was glad I had the time to do it.

I still seem to be as busy as ever. The nice thing about being a composer is that no one forces you to retire. You carry on until there is no longer any demand for your services, and of course, composers sometimes carry on even when there is no demand. I hope that day won’t come. It’s nice to be wanted.

LB: What do you still want to do and write?

JR: Oh, everything I haven’t ever done. I don’t want to repeat myself. That’s why I’m a bit shy of doing more choral pieces, particularly if they are attached to a particular celebration, a centenary or a conductor’s anniversary. I’ve done all that. I look for the things I’ve never done before, and I must be realistic. John Williams isn’t going to phone me and say, “I really don’t want to write the next Star Wars score, will you do it for me?” That’s not going to happen.

LB: Would you like that kind of invitation?

JR: Oh, yes, I’d love it. Nor is the Metropolitan Opera going to say, “How about a big new opera for 2020?” It’s happened to my young composer friend, Nico Muhly. His new opera, Marnie, has been premiered in London. It has also been performed by the Met who actually commissioned it. That happens to someone of his generation, but not to somebody of my generation whose track record is in another field altogether.

Then again, if Cameron Mackintosh, the great theatrical man who backed many a musical, were to say “How about a big Broadway musical?” I wouldn’t say no if I had the right idea and the right collaborator to do the book and lyrics. Those are things I’ve never done before, so if they came my way, I would love them.

But, I should be very grateful for the opportunities that have come my way, the people I’ve met, the kind musicians I’ve worked with, the fine texts I’ve been privileged to set to music. It’s been a rich and varied career so far. I’ll be honest with you: I don’t usually plan much beyond a week, because you never know what may happen that may change all your plans. It’s always a challenge to keep up with the commitments that I have undertaken, which sometimes take longer than I’d planned, or those additional ones that come along that I can’t anticipate.

I was amused last year when Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, died. He was very much the architect of the European Union, and my Requiem was to be used in part at his funeral service in the cathedral in Münster. There was an orchestra already booked when they discovered that his vast bulk and the coffin were so huge, and the pallbearers so many, they weren’t going to be able to squeeze past the orchestra, which was off to one side of the chancel steps. They needed to cut the orchestra right down—twelve players had to go.

They asked if I could rescore the Requiem movement for the reduced forces that would be at their disposal. I think I got the email on Friday, and they needed the parts on Tuesday. So I dropped what I was doing. It was a flagship event, televised all around Europe, and I couldn’t let them down. I hadn’t anticipated that, nor had they.

LB: Did you conduct it?

JR: No, I watched it on television. They did get the coffin past, but only just.

LB: You were holding your breath?

JR: We all were. They were big strong pallbearers.

LB: Do you have guidance or encouragement to American church musicians?

JR: Well, you know, hang in there. I think it’s always the first thing to notice that church music has the complication of not just writing for a concert hall where you’re pretty much in charge. You’re part of a team, which is not primarily about music, but is about worship. One must be sensitive about that. I have been told that one of the most common problems by far is professional-personal relationships between clergy and musicians. It always needs patience and tact and understanding on both sides. When it is achieved, then something rather beautiful can happen.

The problems can be in both directions. Sometimes it’s the musician who wants to introduce change, and it’s the clergy or the congregation who resist. Sometimes it’s the reverse, and it’s the clergy or congregation who want music that’s more pop oriented, and it’s the musician who digs in his/her heels and says, “I don’t want to do that.” How do you meet in the middle? I don’t know.

It can make things difficult. One must be a first-class musician and a first-class diplomat, and to be aware of the winds of change that blow, being able to distinguish between temporary fads that everyone will soon forget, and the changes now that are here for good. It’s impossible really to be a successful prophet 100% of the time, but a sense of discrimination, in an altogether good sense, is probably useful. For example, if there is pressure to scratch singing the psalms in the way you are used to, and the new idea is to do them with three chords to a guitar, one must say, “Hold on one minute. This seems to be catching on and isn’t going to last.”

On the other hand, when there has been a general move to make church music more this or more that, then you must consider whether to go with it or risk being written off as someone who is irrelevant. You should always have as your guiding light the music that is in your heart of hearts. Always be true to that.

Notes

1. On May 23, 2018, the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, announced the appointment of Daniel Hyde as director of music at King’s, to take office on October 1, 2019. Hyde currently serves as organist and director of music at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Fifth Avenue, New York, New York.