In the Wind. . .

Why art?

Raphael’s Sistine Madonna is a magnificent and monumental painting. Almost nine feet tall and more than six feet wide, it is a compelling work in which I see a shy and slightly frightened Mary holding a burly infant who sports a Gotti-esque pout. (Whadaya gonna doo?) Saint Sixtus, the patron saint of the church for whom the painting was commissioned, is shown in the thrall of the mother and child, and Saint Barbara, whose presence was also specified by the commission, looks down at two putti resting their chins, arms, and elbows on the bottom frame of the painting.

Because of its huge scale and rich colors (it’s my guess that in real life, Mary never had such opulent garments), it is a real eye catcher, but those two little imps are the stars of the show. A legend says that they were the children of Raphael’s model, and he painted them just as they looked six hours into the tenth day of watching their mother stand still for the master. Their expressions convey both disinterest and cunning, and they are clearly not impressed by the exalted infant. As grandfather of two boys about the ages of the putti, I have seen those expressions before, and know that they signal time for a diversion. “Hey, boys, let’s go outside.”

Raphael’s putti have been plucked from the painting and reproduced and marketed as if they were nacho chips or soda pop, appearing on post cards, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and tote bags. They are adorable, but something of the original poignancy is lost.

When the pope commissioned the painting, did Raphael take it on as a job, happy to have the income and simply accepting that he was better at painting than others, so it was natural that it would be his job? Or did he take it on as a spiritual challenge, setting out to do something so good that mere mortals would never be able to fully understand?

You can order a 16′′ x 24′′ framed print of Sistine Madonna from Amazon for $29.99, and a 9.5′′ x 7.9′′ mouse pad picturing the putti for $9.99.

Musicians know that the music of Bach or Mozart is the work of genius. When you study the music mathematically and theoretically, you get a sense of what the composer had in mind. But for all its majesty and intricacy, I heard “Brandenburg Five” playing at Starbucks the other day when I ordered coffee. If the barista had been a struggling young musician, perhaps she would have worked the steam nozzle in time with the music. A little puff of steam on “one and three” would have been cute. But no. Bach’s ingenious creation was coexisting with her off-beat steam punk, competing with the grinder reducing my beans for espresso and the gabbling of the women wearing headsets working the drive-thru window.

Michelangelo’s David in a snow globe; Rodin’s Thinker as a paperweight; Rondo ala Turca in an elevator; history’s artistic milestones reduced to the commonplace. Wendy and I are lucky to live in New York City, where great museums are sprinkled across the map, and we can experience many of the greatest artworks at the other end of a short subway ride. Van Gogh’s Starry Night looks fine on a t-shirt, but when you see it in person in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, it takes your breath away. Monet produced around 250 “Water Lilies” paintings, all showing scenes of the beautiful gardens at his home in Giverny. Just like Starry Night, they look nice on t-shirts, but if you have only seen them in that format, you might not realize that they get as big as 13 by 41 feet. That is a huge amount of paint for someone who was suffering from cataracts.

As Monet produced hundreds of gorgeous images in spite of failing eyesight, so Beethoven gave us some of the most sublime, defiant, innovative, and powerful masterworks of music as he was losing his hearing. We know enough about him to have a sense that he could be cranky. If your life is creating spectacular music, I will forgive you a fit or two if you are losing your hearing. A legend has Beethoven playing the piano for a group of socialites in a lavish drawing room, angered by their inattention and chatter, slamming the fall board, standing up to announce, “For such pigs I will not play,” and storming out of the room.

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Dictionary definitions of art use phrases like, “. . . works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Art is pictures, sculptures, music, literature, and drama. Art can be fiction or non-fiction. A bowl of pears and grapes sitting on a table next to a candlestick may be a non-fiction subject, but the fact that every glistening drop of moisture, every vein in a leaf, and iridescent surface of the fruit is represented in paint applied by human hands is the art part. That still life is art because of its beauty more than its emotional power, while Starry Night is all about emotional power.

A painting that depicts a historical event, a battle, or an armistice for example, would be non-fiction. But what about a painting of a biblical scene? Asking whether The Last Supper is fiction feels like a great way to start an argument. I am guessing that most texts that have been set to music are fiction. Most operas and most art songs are fables, allegories, stories, or poetry. I am afraid to categorize sacred music that way. Like The Last Supper, it feels a little dangerous to ask if the Latin Mass is fiction.

But what about a trio sonata, a symphony, or a piano concerto? Can they be defined as fiction or non-fiction? There is something abstract about the concept of music, even tonal music that is controlled and defined by complex sets of rules. It is sound that is organized vertically in chords, all of which are ultimately derived from the overtones that are the structure of any musical note, and it is sound that is organized in time. How chords progress from one to another, how counterpoint allows multiple independent lines of music to intertwine, converting melody into harmony is somehow both logical and mystical. Could that oxymoron be the definition of why music is art?

Michelangelo rendered human flesh, including sensitive facial expressions, in marble. Rodin left us a fleet of sensual and sensuous images in bronze. Manipulating such dense materials with such sensitivity is the essence of art, images that transcend the inanimate quality of their materials.

Music as art is magical because it is fleeting. It happens at the present, and the present is infinite. Each nanosecond is another right now! The motion of a piece of music is like the bow wave of a boat, moving relentlessly through an infinite series of “right nows.” As we play or as we listen, we store up the memories of those infinite moments and assemble the progression of sound into our perception of the music. There is a wonderful photograph of Pablo Picasso tracing the outline of a bull with a flashlight, captured on a long exposure. That seems the closest link between pictorial art and music.

We have invented a recognizable written language to record music, so the creation of the composer can be saved for reproduction. Music is an art, but unless there is a performer who can realize it, is it anything more than notations? We consider a performer to be an artist, but unless the performer is improvising, inventing music on the spot, the art of music is the interpretation of someone else’s inspiration.

We talk about artistic temperament. The phrase is sometimes used to excuse someone’s bad behavior, but at its best, artistic temperament is a frame of mind for expressing beauty or powerful emotions. The splendid Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who died at the age of fifty-five in November 2017, could express the full depth of human emotion with a twitch of his lips. Before he sang a single note, you knew you were in for something special. I strongly recommend treating yourself to twenty minutes on YouTube, entering his name in the search bar, and watching his every move. Musicianship and artistry do not get any better.

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Last week, sitting in the hundred-fifty-year-old second-floor theater (complete with tin ceiling) in downtown Damariscotta, Maine, Wendy and I saw John Logan’s play, Red, as filmed in a live performance at London’s Wyndam Theater in the summer of 2018. It is a ninety-minute production with five scenes, performed without intermission, portraying a two-year period in the life of artist Mark Rothko. Rothko and his assistant, Ken, are the only two characters, and those two years exactly span Ken’s employment in Rothko’s studio. Ken’s entry to the stage a few moments into the play is the moment he is hired.

The play is set in 1958–1959 in Rothko’s studio at 222 Bowery, an abandoned gymnasium. The title is derived from the commission Rothko is working on, a series of monumental murals for the new Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City’s Seagram Building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Phillip Johnson. Rothko makes no secret of the fact that he views this commission as the opportunity of a lifetime. He is being paid $30,000 for it, which he feels is a huge amount of money. Ken is expected to be very impressed by that. Rothko is crushed to learn that Jackson Pollack is Ken’s favorite artist, and throughout the play, the action circles around Rothko’s enormous ego.

Rothko denigrates Pollack, saying that success is the worst thing that ever happened to him, and ridiculing him for owning an Oldsmobile convertible. Racing around Long Island in that car was the antithesis of art. Pollack died in a drunken crash in that car, and Rothko called it a “lazy suicide.” He continues, “believe me, when I commit suicide there won’t be any doubt about it.” (In fact, Rothko did commit suicide with a combination of barbiturates and razor blades. There was no doubt about it.) He goes on to criticize Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtentstein, and Robert Rauschenberg for selling out to commercialism.

The irony of all this, given the $30,000 commission, is not lost on Ken. Rothko is obsessed with the progress of the work and of his greatness, until late in the play, Ken explodes in pent up fury and frustration. “Not every painting has to be so . . . important all the time! Not every painting has to rip your guts out and expose your soul! Not everyone wants art that actually hurts! Sometimes you just want a . . . still life or landscape or soup can or comic book.” The fight continues until Ken bursts out with, “Just admit your hypocrisy: The High Priest of Modern Art is painting a wall in the Temple of Consumption. You rail against commercialism in art, but pal, you’re taking the money.”

The last scene opens with Rothko arriving at the studio the following morning. He tells Ken that he went there. Where? The Four Seasons. He is horrified by the experience, the naked consumerism, the spectacle of the city’s wealthiest people trying to impress each other by spending too much on dinner. He picks up the telephone, dials a number, and asks for Mr. Philip Johnson. “Philip, this is Rothko. Listen, I went to the restaurant last night and lemme tell you, anyone who eats that kind of food for that kind of money in that kind of joint will never look at a painting of mine.” Ken is pleased to have made his point so dramatically, but two lines later, Rothko fires him, and the play ends.

Rothko is the big loser in this story, and the eerie foreshadowing of his suicide is a poignant part of the play. Alfred Molina created the role of Rothko and repeated in the revival production we saw. Eddy Redmayne was the original Ken—in this production we saw Alfred Enoch playing Ken. Red won a Tony Award for Best Play in 2010, and Eddy Redmayne won a Tony that year for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play.

Red was screened in theaters in the United States and the UK on November 7. I do not know if there are plans for it to be screened again. Perhaps it will be available through Netflix or Amazon? Keep your eyes open for it. It is a profound lesson for any artist.

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Who among history’s great artists had a Rothko-esque ego? Rembrandt? Picasso? Michelangelo? Turner? And who among composers? Mendelssohn? Vivaldi? Gounod? Bruhns? It is easier to name performing musicians. Kathleen Battle’s early career was crammed with magnificent performances and recordings, but twenty years later, she had developed a terrible reputation for her elevated ego and poor treatment of the people around her. After a performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1992, The Boston Globe reported that she left behind a “froth of ill will.” And in February 1994, Joseph Volpe, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, fired Battle from her leading role in La Fille du regiment, citing “unprofessional actions during rehearsal . . . conduct profoundly detrimental to the artistic collaboration between all the cast members.” Time magazine reported that the cast applauded when informed of her dismissal. She never returned to the opera stage.

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I know many organists who have been badly treated by clergy. For example, it is pretty common to hear tales of woe about priests who felt overshadowed summarily dismissing successful musicians. But I am troubled by haughty attitudes I often encounter among musicians. A stopknob engraved “Rector Ejector” may be a cute gag, but the thing can get out of hand. I see all sorts of complaints from church musicians on social media, dismissing people who think the organ is too loud, making snide remarks about clergy, and chiding the “ignorant” congregants as if they are not worthy of your music.

I was a regular church musician for about thirty years and gave up the bench twenty years ago when I joined the Organ Clearing House because the travel schedule was not compatible. That means I have a lot more chances than most organists to sit in the pews as a worshipper, and you know what? The organ is often too loud. As much as I love the sounds of a powerful organ, I find it tiring. Every verse of every hymn does not need to include Mixtures. It is refreshing for the congregant if the organist mixes it up a little, changing colors between verses, and saving the big guns for the right moment. If you are playing a gentle hymn, play it gently. When a hymn starts with a huge crash, it can be jarring for people who did not know it was coming. The organ is a musical instrument, a living, breathing thing that encourages people to sing if you do not frighten them.

Ken accused Mark Rothko of acting as though no one was good enough to view his paintings. According to Rothko, museums are mausoleums and art dealers are pimps. Rothko railed against the client who asked to commission a painting that would “go” with a certain couch, and he used the term “overmantle” to denigrate the client who wanted a painting simply to fill a space.

Music is a public art that requires both composer and performer to make it happen. And, of course, it requires listeners who are engaged and who participate in the act of music, especially when they are invited to sing and be part of the performance. A bumper sticker popular among people who race sailboats says, “Have you flogged your crew today?” One for organists could be, “Have you flogged your congregation today?”

Ultimately, Rothko realized that he could not control a commercial space with his paintings. Unfortunately, he was so tied up in his high opinion of himself that suicide was inevitable. He mentioned it himself in a Freudian slip.

Organists: what you do is special. It is an unusual art and a special gift. Invite the people of your church in. Share the majesty and the mystery of your instrument with them. Teach them to appreciate the art as you envelope them with beauty. Never forget that they paid for the instrument that it is your privilege to play. Show them that it was worth it.

An explosion of creativity

We have learned to tell time according to the pandemic, separating the “before and after” times as many of us have settled into vaccinated life and relaxed our mask-wearing regimens. I did not take to the air until a quick trip to Houston in February, but I had a couple other trips this year before Wendy and I went to Greece and Italy in May. Our daughter lived in Athens for five years, and her husband is Greek, so we have deep connections with family there, and our trip was planned around the “destination christening” of our youngest grandchild. That family of four (there is a five-year-old sister) lives in Brooklyn, but his parents were eager to follow the Greek tradition of christening, which is scaled a lot like a wedding with a big catered party, so off we went.

After the family festival, we flew from Athens to Tuscany, landing in Bologna and taking a train to Florence. It was my first time in Italy, and I was excited to see the Renaissance art I had studied so eagerly in college and to learn whether all I have heard about food in Italy is true. It is. In preparation for the trip, I read Brunelleschi’s Dome by Ross King, a vibrant history of the building of the great Duomo in Florence, the competitions to determine the architect, and the extraordinary feat of the construction of the immense dome, which is still the largest in the world nearly 600 years after its completion.

Construction of the nave of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower) was begun in 1296 and completed in 1380, a timespan that included fifty years of slow progress due to lack of funding and a ten-year hiatus because of the Black Death. As the nave was nearing completion, there was no concept of how to build a dome whose base would be 180 feet off the ground and whose diameter would be nearly 150 feet. It seems a little funny to have built such a huge structure without knowing how to complete it, but during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, architects were experimenting with the limits of structure, resulting in events like the collapse in 1284 of part of the cathedral at Beauvais in France, which was so tall and had such huge windows that the flying buttresses could not support the structure.

Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1436), a goldsmith, sculptor, and architect, entered a competition along with goldsmith and sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) for the design of the dome. Ghiberti had earlier beaten Brunelleschi in a competition for the design of the huge bronze doors of the baptistry that shares the piazza with the cathedral. You can imagine there was no love lost between those two. Brunelleschi’s plan for the dome would involve no centering scaffold, which had never been done before, and included the invention of equipment that would hoist stones weighing up to two tons to the extreme height of the dome, 375 feet up. The main hoisting crane was powered by oxen walking on a circular treadmill installed in the crossing of the cathedral. Imagine the hay bale and shovel maintenance of that machine! 

The Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (Museum of the Works of the Cathedral), just across the narrow street behind the apse of the cathedral, houses Lorenzo Ghiberti’s original bronze baptistry doors, protected from the elements and replaced by brilliant replicas at the baptistry. Each door includes twenty-eight reliefs depicting scenes from the Old Testament; each door is fifteen feet tall and weighs thirty tons. It must have been quite a challenge for fifteenth-century craftsmen to hang those doors on freely swinging hinges. There is also a display of hoisting tackle used during the construction of the dome, much like the gear used on Organ Clearing House job sites. 

I recommend King’s Brunelleschi’s Dome, a fascinating read that provides vivid images of life in fourteenth-century Florence and insight into some of the brilliant minds of the Renaissance. King’s descriptions of the roads and spaces around the Duomo evoke the smells of the thirteenth-century city and are a fun prelude to walking on the same streets today. Those streets are defined by 600-year-old buildings and were not designed for modern traffic. Delivery and garbage trucks are in miniature scale, taxis are ubiquitous, and flocks of tourists cling to the edges in single file as the vehicles squeeze by.

Adjacent to the Duomo is the campanile designed and built by Giotto di Bondone (ca. 1267–1337). Many of his paintings grace churches in Florence, particularly in Santa Croce (Holy Cross), which contains a dazzling display of Renaissance art. The campanile, whose construction started in 1334, almost 700 years ago, is almost fifty feet square and nearly 280 feet tall. It houses seven bells, the largest of which is about eighty inches in diameter.

The exterior of the campanile is decorated with dozens of relief panels about eighteen inches across, some diamond-shaped and some hexagonal. The collection depicts the planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the moon), theological and cardinal virtues, liberal arts (music, geometry, rhetoric, etc.), and the seven sacraments. Human history is depicted, along with the mechanical and creative arts (music, blacksmith, building, medicine, agriculture, etc.). These spectacular pieces were started by Andrea Pisano (1290–1348) in 1347 and completed by his workshop after his death. Like the baptistry doors, the original pieces have been removed to the museum to protect them from the elements and replaced outside on the building with replicas.

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Thirty-nine years after the death of Brunelleschi, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475–1564) was born in Caprese, about seventy-two miles from Florence. I have studied, thought, and written about Michelangelo’s genius and the spectacular art he produced, but finally visiting Florence where so much of his work is preserved was the thrill of a lifetime. David is breathtaking. I had the same feeling when I saw Van Gogh’s Starry Night in the Museum of Modern Art in New York or stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon for the first time. I had heard and read so much about it and seen countless photographs, but nothing prepares you for standing in its presence in real time. Michelangelo captured the entire human condition in that piece of stone. He proved to us that people in the early-sixteenth century were just like us, not counting the last half century of Cheetos and French fries.

Michelangelo created this seventeen-foot-tall statue between 1501 and 1504 at the age of twenty-six. The exhibit hall that David dominates also includes several unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo that offer a glimpse into how a human figure is drawn from a block of stone. The finished David weighs about six tons. The original stone must have weighed at least twice that. Michelangelo started chipping away early in the morning of Friday, September 13, 1501. I suppose he worked through the weekend. It seems a miracle that he was able to pull that figure out of that stone.

So much has been written about this iconic sculpture, the youthful pose, the contemplative but tense facial expression. While many representations of David show him after his defeat of Goliath, Michelangelo’s David is shown just before the battle, after he has determined to fight. Muscles bulge with tension, and the body is slightly twisted as though he is about to spring into action. The surface of the marble shimmers, and the figure seems almost alive. We stood staring, taking a few steps to change the angle, with a sense of awe . . . amid a throng of tourists with phones in their hands. Some looked up from their phones to snap a picture, but most were nose down, immersed in their screens in the presence of one of the most famous pieces of art in the world. It is a triumph of human expression, of one man’s interpretation of a legendary mythical moment in time, his squeezing life, action, and emotion from a huge piece of stone, and most of the people in the room were not present to appreciate it, taking up space while dulling their minds.

Wendy’s car has an annoying feature that nags the driver when taking eyes off the road—look to one side for a few seconds too long, and you hear a loud ding as the dashboard flashes, “Eyes on the road.” I wonder if a museum hall could have such a feature. Take your eyes off the art, and you get ejected.

A lucky stroke during our visit to Florence was to visit the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo just as it opened in the morning. Ghiberti’s bronze doors are among the first things you see as you enter, but deeper into the museum is another masterpiece of Michelangelo, The Deposition, the same scene as his famous Pietà in Rome, Jesus being removed from the Cross. It is smaller in scale than David, the figures are roughly life-sized, but like David across town, it is exquisite. Michelangelo worked on this piece between 1547 and 1555, when he was in his seventies. It is supposed that the figure of Nicodemus standing behind Christ is Michelangelo’s self-portrait. We were lucky because we were alone in the room with The Deposition for over fifteen minutes. I did take some photos, but I did not check email, send a text, or order dog food to be delivered before we got home.

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The lives of Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi encompass the earliest days of organ building. There are different theories about the age of the organ in the Basilica at Sion, Switzerland, made famous by E. Power Biggs’s recording from the 1960s. His jacket notes claimed it was built in 1390, while scholars and historians have suggested 1435. In any event, that instrument is from the same time as Ghiberti’s doors and Brunelleschi’s dome—all three artworks are tributes to the skill, ingenuity, and creativity of the day. The organ in the Koorkerk van Middelburg, Utrecht, the Netherlands, dates from 1479, and the organ in the Grote Kerk in Oosthuizen was built in 1521.

Andrea Gabrieli (1532–1585) was appointed organist of San Marco in Venice in 1566, two years after Michelangelo’s death. Orlando di Lasso (1532–1594) was born when Michelangelo was fifty-seven. Di Lasso and Gabrieli met in Munich in 1562, exchanging musical ideas that surely advanced the art of music during the Renaissance. Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621) was born in Deventer in the Netherlands two years before Michelangelo’s death. It is interesting to note that all this dazzling creativity was going on in Europe 200 years before the American Revolution. Sweelinck died the same year that British colonists landed at
Plymouth, Massachusetts.

To the hills

We rented a car in Florence and drove to Camaiore, thirty minutes northeast of Lucca, near the coast of the Ligurian Sea, where we spent four nights in a hilltop villa owned by a wine merchant friend in New York. The house was a lofty eighteenth-century place with thirteen-foot ceilings, marble floors, and feral cats. The bathtub was Carrara marble, as was the three-foot-wide kitchen sink. Our friend directed us to the local butcher, coffee shop, and pasta house. We had lunches in the pasta restaurant and cooked dinners at “home” for the nights we were there using the home-made pasta, treats from the butcher, and produce from a fruit and vegetable shop. 

From Camaiore we took day trips to Lucca where we visited Puccini’s birthplace and Carrara to see the quarry that was the source of the stone provided to Michelangelo for the masterpieces we had seen in Florence. We were there on a Sunday, so there was no work going on, but we saw hundreds of heavy trucks lined up at the nearby port loaded with stones marked in the tens of thousands of pounds. It is a dramatic mountain drive to the quarry itself, and we marveled at the skill and determination of fifteenth-century workers who managed to separate those huge blocks of marble from the mountain and transport them eighty-five miles to Florence. We got out of the car at the gated entrance to a quarry yard full of heavy equipment to soak in the view, and I pocketed three plum-sized chunks of marble that now sit on my desk as inspiration.

Mangia

We drove to Bologna, turned in our car, and took to the streets. After finding our hotel, we met a guide we had engaged for a personal food tour of the old city. Books have been written about experiences like that (I know because I’ve read them), but to walk from shop to shop for three hours with that charming woman sharing her passion about the city’s culinary culture was a highpoint of the trip, not to offend Brunelleschi and Michelangelo. Meat preserved and presented in hundreds of ways is everywhere. The care and pride that goes into the whole gamut of raising, processing, presenting, selling, and consuming food is obvious as people with gleaming smiles offered us samples and described their lives. We were taken to a “laboratory” associated with one of the finest pasta shops where a dozen women were making pasta of all descriptions. I was especially enchanted by Consuela who was making tortellini, taking a pinch of the pork filling from a pouch, and twisting little squares of pasta into the classic shape. They offered us a sample, gently boiled with a little Bolognese sauce. I have nothing to add.

Spectacular meals with exquisite wines (we came home with a new appreciation for Sangiovese), lots more art including Michelangelo, and driving rain completed our short stay in Bologna. It is a city of porticoes, long colonnades that line many of the city’s streets, more than twenty-four miles of them. They originated in the Middle Ages, some dating from before 1100, and were developed to increase the interior space of the upper floors of houses, leaving space for pedestrians at ground level. Most of them have vaulted ceilings, many of which are decorated with frescos. However much they increased the square footage of a city apartment, they sure were handy during four days of steady rain. We were feeling a little grumpy about the constant rain until we learned while checking out of our hotel that thirty inches of rain had fallen in just a couple days north of Bologna, terrible flooding was ruining crops and destroying houses, and more than eighty people had died. Desk clerks and taxi drivers were distraught about the regional calamity.

We flew to Zürich from Bologna where we changed planes to fly home to Boston. I was working on my iPad during the first flight and put it in the pocket of the seat in front of me when a meal was served, and got off the airplane without it. We had left the plane on the tarmac and were bused to the terminal, so I knew there was no hope of getting back to the plane, and I started an online claim for the lost article. As we were taking our seats in the next plane, an airport worker in a reflective vest handed me the iPad. They found it while cleaning the plane and traced our seat numbers. Fly Swiss Air.

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We were enriched by our ten-day immersion in Renaissance art, and I kept thinking about how the history of the organ and its music developed concurrently with the work of Brunelleschi and Michelangelo. Heinrich Scheidemann (1595–1663) was born sixty-three years after Andrea Gabrieli. Dieterich Buxtehude’s lifespan (c. 1637–1707) overlapped with Scheidemann’s by forty-two years, and Johann Sebastian Bach was born forty-eight years after Buxtehude. That succession of great musicians who nourished the art of the organ takes us from the time of Michelangelo to Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809).

The Renaissance was an explosion of creativity and inventiveness that covered the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Art, architecture, music, and science increased exponentially. I have mentioned some of the giants, but each of the great museums we visited is chock full of the work of dozens of other artists.  

We’re living in a time of political mayhem and ecological disasters. Take an afternoon to visit a museum and be reminded about what’s good about human expression, and draw the lines that connect the organ and its history to the wide world of arts and humanities.

Murray Forbes Somerville, graduate of New College, Oxford, holds degrees also from Union Theological Seminary in New York and the New England Conservatory; he served for thirteen years as university organist at Harvard. Retired to South Carolina, he is currently Committee Chair for the L’Organo organ recital series, part of the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston.

To try and categorize Anna Lapwood’s career is a challenge. She is a hugely successful concert organist, performing across Europe, Africa, and the United States; she is a conductor, director of music at Pembroke College, Cambridge (appointed at the age of 21, the youngest ever in Oxbridge); she is a recording artist, arranger, singer, radio and television presenter, TikTok personality with millions of hits, and last year was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire by King Charles III, with Princess Anne making the presentation.

Her recital repertoire includes not only the standard classical organ works of Bach, Duruflé, Price, and the like, but often also her own arrangements of movie scores, a genre she has loved since childhood. Go to her YouTube channel and particularly youtube.com/watch?v=VT5B-vEPeXI for an organ concert performance like none other. Or watch her numerous posts on TikTok.

It took us nine months to find a short time in her schedule for our Zoom interview. And even though she had just finished a European concert tour, traveling back home that day, she was as full of energy as it seems she always is, and (as you would expect from an Oxford graduate) articulate and ready to answer slightly edgy questions about the choral and organ world, as well as sharing her experiences in so many different musical fields and her goals in reaching wider and wider to share her love of the instrument, her love of music, and her joy in communicating with people.

Well, hallo, Anna!

Hello! Good to see you!

Good to see you too, Anna. Thank you for taking time out of what I know is your extremely busy schedule to talk with me. By the way—when did you start in Germany this morning?

I set off at nine and got back home. . . about ten minutes ago.

Wow! Well, for the first question I have been burning to ask you for a year now: how did you manage to get 5,000 people in June 2023 to come to the Royal Albert Hall for a late-night organ concert?

I still don’t really understand what happened there. That felt like such a significant moment, as the concert was such a remarkable experience. I hadn’t expected that number of people, but they were mostly there from social media. It was this massive moment, in my mind, of realizing that what I’ve been doing on social media can translate into bums on seats at a concert hall as well. I think that’s the thing that brings me the most joy, to see people coming to their first ever organ concert. And I hope they’re coming back for more.

Yes, indeed. That leads me to what I was going to ask you about TikTok: how that works for you, how it helps, what use can be made of it? And are you worried about any government bans of TikTok?

Yes, I mean I’m obviously keeping an eye on that side of things; I think it’s slightly less of a conversation here [in the UK] than it is in the U.S. It wouldn’t be ideal, although I obviously do a lot on Facebook and Instagram as well, so there’s a mix of different platforms in there. But I think the thing that I’ve realized is wonderful about sharing on social media, with the organ specifically, is that our biggest problem as organists is that we’re hidden from the audience. If you think about the fact that with any artist on any instrument or a singer or whatever, the whole thing is trying to create a connection with the audience, right? That’s performing, and we are automatically at a disadvantage straightaway. What I think social media is amazing for, is you can bring them immediately right next to you and give them the experience of sitting on the organ bench with you whether it’s in rehearsal or in performance, which then means if they do come to a concert and they can’t see you, they have all those memories from the videos. They know what you’re thinking, they can imagine what it looks like so much more easily, and it helps break down those barriers.

Another thing that has struck me is how comfortable you are at addressing a camera, addressing people. Even when people come up to you during practice sessions you greet them warmly, whereas most of us get annoyed. Do you have any words of wisdom for your colleagues on that subject?

Well, to be fair, we all know that there are different circumstances, right? If you have twenty minutes to register, and that’s nowhere near enough time, and you’re really, really stressed, and someone comes up to you, you’re probably not going to react in quite the same way as if you’re registering for eight hours and have a bit more relaxed schedule. In that case people coming up and asking questions can be a really welcome break from the intense brain work. But the thing I just always keep in my head is that you never know what tiny interaction could sow a seed in someone’s head that makes them want to try the organ themselves, makes them want to go to an organ concert, or it just makes them think differently about the instrument or about classical music in general.

I see all of our roles as organists as evangelists for the instrument, and that spreads through every minute of every day. I love it personally. If I’m doing an overnight at the Albert Hall, it makes such a difference when someone comes up and asks me to play something. It’s like I’ve had a shot of caffeine, and I can keep going for another two hours when I might have been flagging before.

Which leads me to my next question: how did you get started on the midnight to 6:00 a.m. shift at the Albert Hall, and, for the benefit of our readers, tell us a little bit about the place and the instrument.

So, I started working at the Royal Albert Hall a couple of years ago. I had a message from the former artistic director, Lucy Noble, and she just said, “I’d love to have a chat with you about something at the Royal Albert Hall.” And I have never replied to a message faster, literally embarrassingly fast. Within a minute of it arriving, I wrote “Yes, yes,” because I have always loved that organ and I’d had the chance to play it a couple other times in the past. She asked if I would become one of their associate artists; the whole point of that role being to try and bring a different audience to various aspects of the Hall; so, there are a couple of us in different fields.

She said to me, “What would you want to do as associate artist?” And I said that I want to put the organ right at the middle of everything that the Hall’s doing, and I want it to be something that people talk about and think about including in concerts. Whether they are classical concerts or pop concerts or rock concerts, I want them to think of the organ as an amazing novelty thing, to take the concert to a new level. We all kind of looked at each other and went, “Oh, that’s fun, but it’s never going to happen.” And then it just started happening kind of naturally, because the other thing that I said would be really important is getting access to the organ.

They gave me, maybe once a month, a slot between midnight and six in the morning. And sometimes that’s registering for an upcoming concert, sometimes it’s filming videos for the Hall or for my channels. And often I’ve found now that one of those sessions can lead to a concert because people stumble across you there. If they’re in the middle of a residency, then they all want to play the organ, and that’s great. It’s happened a couple of times now, and it’s completely changed my life. It’s an incredible organ, such a rich organ, I mean the orchestral color, the bass drum, the bells—it’s so much fun to play. But I think almost more than that, it is so perfect for that space, it brings together so many different events, not just different genres—they have tennis matches and boxing matches in there. That organ can hold the room, whatever the event is; it can compete with a massively amplified rock band, and it feels like sitting at the helm of a ship.

How would you compare that to some of your experiences in the United States? What are some of your favorite instruments in the States?

You have so many great instruments in the U.S. I know that we have amazing ones here as well, but I do think that organs in the U.S. seem to have more gizmos and fun kinds of bells and whistles, right? And also, things that make our life a little bit easier as organists. They have very logical setting systems and things. I think my favorites from the most recent tour were definitely Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, which was just this massive bucket-list moment. Although next time I go I really want to have more time, because I landed and then I had fourteen hours in one day to register, and then the next day was the concert day and dealing with flight hours. I was so tired and so overwhelmed, and I feel like I sort of scratched the surface of what that organ can do, but I would love just to be there for a week and get to know it properly and spend more time with the amazing people there as well. So that’s one of them. And the other one, possibly my favorite other than the Albert Hall, is Disney Hall in Los Angeles. Oh, such an incredible instrument, and the hall has such a lively acoustic. It’s so warm and so clear. And again, the team there are just such wonderful people, and they care about opening up the instrument to as many people as possible.

Going off on a completely different tangent—having myself lived in Zimbabwe as a teenager (or Rhodesia as it then was)—are you still doing your visits to Zambia?

I am. I’m actually about to take the Choir there. We’re off next week.

Oh, wonderful; congratulations! Tell us more about that.

I started going out there when I was a university student, and there was a charity called the Muse Trust, which started taking these trips where they would take two Oxford students and two Cambridge students who would go to help teach music in Zambia for a month. I went out on this first trip and absolutely fell in love with everything about the place. And the music—there was so much music everywhere, just everywhere you turned, people were singing, people were dancing. And I just thought this is a pretty wonderful thing.

And then when I started working at Pembroke [College, Cambridge] nine years ago, in my first year I got chatting with our dean, who is also our chaplain. He’d spent some time in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and we soon decided to run a choir tour there with them. That kickstarted things again, and I’ve been going back every year since, trying to go for three weeks or a month and doing a whole range of things: teaching music and working with some incredible musicians there.

I basically go and I say, how can I help? What can I do? What would be most useful. And what I find, so much of it is literally can we just sit and make music together, which is the most incredible feeling, right? We all know what it’s like to just spontaneously sit down and be like, let’s just play, let’s just mess around and see what happens. What I try to do, at the request of the musicians that I work with there, is share those videos so that people can see that there is this incredible talent everywhere. And I’m trying to help nurture careers when I can. For example, one of the Zambian singers is now in the UK, and I’m trying to help him as much as I can. One of the other things that I do is talk to them about how you market yourself as a musician, how you use social media to create an income stream from music, because at the moment being a musician in Zambia isn’t really a possibility as a career path.

It’s an incredible thing. I feel so lucky to work there. It’s like this reset every year, which also just reminds me not to take this for granted at all because there are so many musicians there who would desperately love to do what I do for a living and who just can’t because they were born in a different place.

Well, give Victoria Falls my love, please, when you go there again. So let’s talk about Pembroke and what you’re doing there. Before you went there, to be honest it wasn’t always thought of as a musical powerhouse, but you’ve changed that in no uncertain terms.

Yes, it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster.

And you started a girls’ choir; tell us about that.

When I first came up, there was a chapel choir, and I started working there when I was twenty-one, very much learning on the job. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing or what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to make music and loved making music. And it was amazing how they actually let me learn on the job; they took a massive risk appointing someone so young and so inexperienced. I think they saw that I wanted to grow the music department into something that the college could be really proud of and something they were known for. It was toward the end of my first year, I remember the daughter of one of my colleagues coming into my office one day and saying, “I think you need to set up another girls’ choir, because there aren’t enough girls’ choirs in Cambridge. There’s not enough opportunities for girls to sing.” And her dad said, “I promise I didn’t ask her to say that.” But it lit the spark in my brain. It was like, well, that sounds like a fun idea. And because I was twenty-one and because I was so full of energy and was just throwing absolutely everything I had at this job, I thought, “I’ll start up a girls’ choir.” I think there’s something liberating about being early on in a job when you don’t see red tape, you just see opportunities. And so now I think I would have probably done the setting up process slightly more carefully and cautiously; but the college was incredible at helping me turn everything around pretty swiftly. We had a girls’ choir the next year, and now they are like 
my children.

Honestly, when I perform on the organ I have their names written throughout my scores based on what character I’m trying to conjure up in my playing. During the Duruflé [Prelude and Fugue on the Name of Alain] I have names of the girl choristers all the way through. I think it’s just one of the greatest privileges to help shape people’s early musical lives and hopefully give them confidence and make them realize that they’re capable of so much.

I do remember that right before the 100th anniversary of the Nine Lessons and Carols Service, in 2018, when British opera star Leslie Garrett made a statement that there should be girls in King’s College Choir, you wrote at that time that this made you angry. Do you still feel that way?

It’s a really interesting question. I think my thoughts have changed a bit; I think what I would defend is the importance of gendered spaces. So, in the same way that I think having a girls’ choir is such an amazing thing—and I love them so much, and there is something so unique about it being a group of girls—I think having boys’ choirs can be a really positive thing, in exactly the same way. I think the suggestion that we can just solve all problems by mixing everything—I don’t think that’s necessarily right.

I would say when people complain about the idea of introducing girls into something like King’s, I think one of the things they often say is, “Oh, the sound is different.” And I’m like, come on, so often in those early experiments you’re comparing boy choristers who had sung every day and been trained every day with untrained girls. Of course, the sound is different, but actually so many people can’t tell the difference when it’s two well-trained different sex choristers.

I’ve always felt that it’s much more about developmental issues and social cohesion and all that sort of stuff.

Yes. What I would say is that I think gendered spaces are super important for those who want it. I think mixed spaces are also really important for those who want it, but I think what we do need to make sure is that there is parity of opportunity. And by that I mean there is the opportunity for girls to sing to that standard and with that level of publicity, so that it’s not just boys who sing for the really high profile services. That is really important because we all say you can’t be what you can’t see, right? Increasingly you sort of think, why is that and how can we make a difference there?

Of course, the U.S. has a slightly different problem, in that actually it’s often very hard to persuade boys to sing.

Well, this is the other side of it, and it’s one of the reasons I remember finding it frustrating those years ago, having worked with boy choristers in various different places and seeing what a great thing it is for them to be choristers, looking at how if you’d move away from the chorister roles to more general singing, the number of boys versus girls singing in any normal school choir is so skewed the other way. You’re going to have maybe thirty girls and then two boys, so we need to make sure we’re still encouraging boys to sing and finding ways to encourage them. Making sure that the opportunities are there for them as well is essential. But I think it’s about finding the right ways to do that that allows parity of opportunity.

This leads me actually to my next question: how did you feel when you were the first woman organ scholar in 500 years working with the all-male choir at Magdalen College, Oxford? You’ve said you had a stiff learning curve; tell us a little bit more about that.

You stole the words right out of my mouth! Yes, it was a very steep learning curve. When I started as organ scholar I had never accompanied a choir on the organ. And then I was doing it. I had accompanied choirs all the time on piano, but not on the organ. I didn’t know any of the standard choral repertoire because I hadn’t been brought up in that world. I knew orchestral repertoire extremely well because I had spent years as an orchestral harpist, but I didn’t know all the kind of normal choral repertoire you might expect someone to know. I had also been at an all-girls school for my entire school life. So, to say it was a culture shock doesn’t even scratch the surface. It was like suddenly being thrown into a country where you don’t speak the language. I remember vividly being asked to go and get the Psalters from the Song School and having no idea what a Psalter was but being too embarrassed to ask. I was standing there in the Song School looking around, going, “What am I looking for?” because nothing said Psalter, but I was spelling it without the “P”—so this is what I mean by I really didn’t know what I was doing. But in a way I’m so grateful for my time there because I learned so much, so fast, because if I didn’t I wouldn’t have survived.

It was very much like I remember thinking, “I can’t do this, I can’t do this!” Then sitting myself down and being like, “You’ve got to make the most of this opportunity, so you’re going to work as hard as you can to try and catch up on all the stuff you’ve missed.” I practiced the organ for eight hours a day, and once I’d done that for a term and had sort of learned the standard repertoire and started to get a bit more comfortable with things and immersed myself in that world, I loved it.

One of your first media successes that I saw was that amusing video you did back in 2016 about May Morning¹ and behind the scenes, waking up the choral scholars, warming up the choristers, and all of that. I was just wondering whether you think that the rather media-savvy tradition of your college—thinking about Oscar Wilde, Dudley Moore, people like that—was that an influence on you?

I just think I wanted to share a little bit of the craziness that goes on behind the scenes. I mean, it’s a bizarre thing, right? This choir gets up at whatever time it is in the morning, goes and rehearses, climbs the tower, sings to however many thousands of people, then goes and eats breakfast, and then does another service. It’s so crazy. I just thought—actually people might find this interesting. I guess that’s exactly the same ethos I’ve applied ever since. I just think there are so many bits of being a musician generally that are so weird and so crazy, and people find it interesting. Seeing kind of under the hood as it were.

It’s still up there on YouTube, I just checked on it the other day. Now let’s move into one or two quick things. What does it mean to be a member of the Order of the British Empire. Can you tell us about the ceremony and all of that?

I can’t remember when I got the letter now. I was doing carol services, so it was around the end of November when it is Cambridge Christmas. I got this letter, which said on the front, “On His Majesty’s Service,” and I remember I was at Pembroke. I kind of looked at this thing and ran back to my office and ripped it open. It said, “You’ve been made a member of the Order of the British Empire,” and I kind of jumped up and down and screamed quite a lot. It’s a huge honor, and actually the best thing about that day was that my parents happened to be there that evening. They turned up for the service, I grabbed them, I had like two minutes I think before the service, grabbed them, ran to my office and said, “Sit down, you’ve got to hear this!” They have sacrificed so much, and they’ve worked so hard to enable me to do what I do.

And you just happened to have your phone going?

Oh, no, that was very much intentional. I said, “I’m filming you, by the way.” I don’t know what they thought I was going to tell them, but they were very, “What is going on?” But I wanted to capture the moment because I know how much that meant to them. That level of recognition I think was a huge moment for them, almost even more than it was for me. It was a massive moment for me. I cried so much when I read the letter.

And then you told Princess Anne that she should take up the organ?

Yes. I was not very cool at the presentation ceremony, I have to say. They give you all these instructions, and they are very, very kind about it, and you think I’ll be fine and then. . . . Well, I certainly found the moment I stood there I just didn’t know what to say. I freaked out. I sort of whispered at her (because they were playing really quiet music, and I didn’t want to interrupt the music). She said, “You can speak louder than that.” And then she started asking about the fact that there aren’t many female organists. And I said, “Well maybe you should have a go, maybe you should try the organ here,” because we were at Windsor Castle. And she said, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” I was quite persistent in encouraging her to play.

I think perhaps you’re known for that.

And you’re supposed to sort of reverse away. I think I messed that up entirely and nearly fell over. And she laughed out loud. So, all in all it wasn’t my smoothest moment.

You’ve invented a hashtag—#playlikeagirl—how’s that going?

Well, you know what, that was never started as kind of, “Oh, I want to invent a hashtag,” it was just like a response to lived experiences I guess. It came about, as I’m guessing you know, there was this competition where my feedback was “you need to play more like a man.” And that was equated to, I needed more power and authority, which as a nineteen-year-old I remember thinking, “I’m not sure that’s the right way to phrase that.” I had no problem being told to play with power and authority, but I do have a problem with that being equated with only being masculine; and I also had a problem that there was an assumption that the male playing was better. There were other comments from the same person to other people, other female conductors, that were along the same line.

I remember sort of stewing with it for a while, and then maybe about a year later Marin Alsop spoke out about how if she does a certain gesture, it’s seen as “girly,” and if a man does it it’s “sensitive.” Just looking at the discrepancies, I shared this experience and put the hashtag, “Play Like a Girl,” and then it’s sort of just gently grown from there. For me it’s about just saying to people, “You should be happy to play as yourself,” because I think the most important thing in music is that you’re sharing something of yourself through music. My experience is that since I started trying to be myself as a performer instead of being who people want me to be, it’s been a totally different experience. Performing is something that I love, though I used to hate it. I think it’s just saying to people, you can be yourself when you play and own that.

Terrific. I have one other thing. I was just wondering if you’d like to offer any reflections on being an Oxford-trained musician working in a Cambridge College (when it does usually tend to be the other way round).

Well, Oxford–Cambridge, everyone makes a big thing about this, but I don’t really believe that it exists. Ultimately, I think we’re all really trying to do the same thing in very similar places. I mean, I grew up in Oxford so there’s a certain loyalty there, but I have now spent more time in Cambridge than I did in secondary education, which is terrifying, and I love Cambridge with my whole heart. I guess I don’t tend to think about that too much.

Congratulations once again on all you’re doing; you make us all proud. We can’t wait to see what you come up with next. I do know that one of the things that’s next for you is matrimony; we’re thrilled for you and wish you both all the very best.

Thank you so much. No idea when we’ll find time for that, but we’ll find 
a way.

Note

1. Every year, on the morning of May 1, at 6:00 a.m. (weather permitting, the moment when the rising sun first strikes the spires of the great Bell Tower at Magdalen College, Oxford), the College Chapel Choir sings from the top of the tower the “Hymnus Eucharisticus” written for the occasion in the seventeenth century by its then director Benjamin Rogers, followed by madrigals. This becomes the cue for the thousands gathered on the streets below to break out the champagne, start Morris dancing, and generally indulge in all the other traditional rituals associated with the arrival of spring.

Thanks to Meg Davies, associate manager, musicprods.co.uk; the Reverend Amanda Robertson, technical assistance; and Barbara Wilson, transcriber.

Robert McCormick has been organist and choirmaster of Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia, since 2016. Previously he held similar positions at Saint Paul’s Church, K Street, in Washington, D.C., and at Saint Mary the Virgin, New York City. He is represented in North America exclusively by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists, LLC.

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this series (Matthew Glandorf) may be found in the May 2022 issue, pages 20–21; Part 2 (Mary Beth Bennett) in the September 2022 issue, pages 12–13; and Part 3 (Jason Roberts) in the July 2023 issue, pages 16–17.

Introduction

We continue our series focusing on American organist-improvisers with a name familiar to many—Dorothy Papadakos. I first met Dorothy more than two decades ago, when I was director of music at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Times Square, New York City, and she was cathedral organist of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. The first time I ever heard Dorothy play live was at the seating of the Right Reverend Mark Sisk as Fifteenth Bishop of New York in 2001. Dorothy began the first hymn on the celebrated State Trumpet, and off we went. “We’re about to have church,” I thought, and we certainly did. It was a marvelous and memorable liturgy, hardly least due to Dorothy’s glorious playing.

Dorothy surely must be one of the most multifaceted and versatile persons in our profession: she is not only an organist, but also a jazz musician, musical theater composer, and author. She also may well be one of the warmest and most joyful among us. In addition to interviewing Dorothy via email, I have just had the privilege of seeing her for the first time in over a decade over lunch in Philadelphia, alongside her delightful husband, Tracy McCullen, and marvelous fellow organist Peter Richard Conte. After an extraordinary shared meal, two hours later, I walked back to my church refreshed and full of Dorothy’s infectious happiness.

Writing this article, seeing Dorothy in person, and pondering her inspiring responses reminded me yet again of music’s power to stir, heal, and renew. Dorothy is a wonderful example of a life devoted to making the world a better place through the art of music. How many people has she inspired through her musical gifts? (Countless numbers, of course.) Case in point: I have been prompted again to seek to rediscover and recapture a sense of childlike joy and awe in music making. Like many of us, especially being an absolute perfectionist, I spend much of my time focused on the minutiae of music making. Without question, for any of us to practice our art at the highest levels, we must do this. Yet it is so easy to lose sight of the ultimate purpose of music making as a result, for our perspectives to become skewed.

In a church context, the goal of music is to glorify God and to inspire the people who hear it. How many times have I finished a service unable to think of anything other than whether or not I played a difficult passage cleanly enough, or why did I take such-and-such a turn in an improvisation when another would have been better, or whether the choir tuned as well as they could in a particular motet, only to have a congregant share heartfelt appreciation for the beauty of the music offered? (The answer, of course, is virtually all the time!)

Improvisation is perhaps the most personal way to make music. With that in mind, let us now hear directly from Dorothy Papadakos herself.

Discussion

When, how, and why did you start playing by ear and inventing your own music? Did it coincide with your early music training?

If it had not been for a fourth-grade crush, music and I may have never met! I was nine years old in Reno/Tahoe, Nevada, “going steady” with a boy taking piano lessons. Our mothers decided it would be cute if we played duets together, so they started me with his piano teacher, Loren McNabb, a hefty Scottish jazzman with a white goatee who moonlighted playing Reno’s nightclub circuit. To my surprise, I took to the piano instantly. I love math and science, and this was ultimate math and science to me. I enjoyed experiencing how my brain and fingers learned more and more technical pieces. And I loved the feel in my little hands of playing scales, amazed at what my fingers could do, especially when I stopped thinking about them and let them do their thing skiing up and down the keyboard like natural athletes!

After each half-hour lesson I begged Mr. McNabb to play me “his music:” Ellington, Gershwin, Porter, Broadway. Two years in, at age eleven, I went on strike! I refused to practice “that boring classical music” and insisted he teach me “his music:” jazz! I wanted to read lead sheets and chord changes. They were the gateway to a mysterious world, to musical freedom. Mr. McNabb complained to my mom about her problem child; she told him to teach me whatever I wanted if it kept me practicing! (Go, Mom!) I took to jazz like a bird to the air. In just a few years I could read any lead sheet and was playing jazz gigs for local events by age fifteen.

Enter the men who changed my early life and music forever: Liberace and blind British jazz pianist George Shearing. I got to meet Liberace several times backstage at John Ascuaga’s Nugget when he performed in Reno, because my mom knew him from her Hollywood days. I assiduously copied Liberace’s recordings note-for-note to learn his style and to get inside his stunning technique. (How did he do it with all those rings on?) Then the George Shearing Quartet came to town and blew this kid “outta da water!” His album Light, Airy, and Swinging changed my ears and tonal imagination. I knew then and there all I wanted to do was to improvise and compose “cool jazz.”

Tell us more about how you employed improvisation in childhood.

Those first jazz gigs at around age fifteen were for fashion shows in Reno and some Reno High School theater work. Then a turning point came: Trinity Episcopal Church in Reno (now Trinity Cathedral) asked me to join their folk ensemble since I’d been taking guitar lessons and sang in their youth choir. The next thing I knew, I was lead vocalist and guitarist of the ten-piece band playing the 9:00 a.m. service! This was the era of Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, and 1970s folk and pop. It was musical heaven for me, until my dear Mr. McNabb died suddenly. I was 16, devastated, lost, a ship without a rudder. My mother tried everything to find me a new teacher. Of course, no one could measure up. She even took me to the University of Nevada-Reno’s head piano professor for whom I improvised on Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady. Mom and I were so proud of my audition; I nailed every note and nuance! But this piano professor just shook his head, clicking his tongue saying, “It’s too bad she doesn’t play classical.” Mom, furious, grabbed me by my arm saying, “Come on, Dorothy Jean! We’re getting out of here!”

That next Sunday in church my ears heard the organ as if for the first time (a three-manual 1967 Allen). That’s when I approached Mr. James Poulton, Trinity’s wonderful 11:00 a.m. organist and choirmaster, who agreed to give me organ lessons. As with the piano, I’d never given the organ a moment’s thought, but I was so lost without Mr. McNabb, I thought, “Why not organ? It’s a stack of synthesizers!” (Yes, that’s how my sixteen-year-old brain saw the organ.) I now know that if it weren’t for death and grief, the organ and I may have never met—and fallen in love. My scientific mind went crazy for the stops, pistons, 32′ pitches, pedals, the whole tonal palette. I felt like a one-woman orchestra!

I noticed, too, I could “noodle” around on the organ, but no one else I knew noodled (in public), so I assumed this was simply not done. My first organ piece with Mr. Poulton was the famous (attributed to) Bach Toccata in D Minor, every sixteenth note’s fingerings and meticulous counting penciled in. To this day, I still use that really worn-out original score at my Phantom of the Opera (1929) silent film performances (my show opener to set the mood) to remember where I come from. And, of course, I now play the Toccata like the improvisation it’s meant to be!

As a child, did you understand the music theory behind what you were doing, or did that understanding catch up later?

Yes, oh yes, I was very fortunate that both Mr. McNabb and my next mentor, Don Rae, the great jazz pianist/arranger for the legendary Las Vegas comedy team Gaylord and Holiday, insisted I master jazz harmony, voicings, and scales, and listen to classical composers to learn how they put harmonies together. They instilled in me the fierce mental discipline that I rely on today. Once I discovered major and minor ninths, thirteenths, and Burt Bacharach, I was hooked. But when I discovered how just one harmonic shift, or one simple, sexy jazz chord could change the key and slip my improv into a brand-new musical world, it ignited the composer in me.

At age eleven, I learned the circle of fifths and how to read complex charts. It was fun, hard work yet easy to memorize, and it laid the groundwork for reading figured bass when I started playing Baroque continuo. I spent thousands of hours at my stepfather’s Steinway grand piano and couldn’t wait to get home from school to play through a new fake book or disco tunes Don Rae brought me. Don’s big improvisation game changer was teaching me the Blues. In losing Mr. McNabb, I understood gut-wrenching loss and grief, but I didn’t know how to get there musically, how to turn anguish into beauty. Don had me prepare a new improvisation weekly by memory in all twenty-four keys, major and minor, over twenty weeks, on anything I wanted. I remember that first time I played one of my improvs for him, it was about four minutes long. Nervous as I was, I let myself go in it. When I finished, he was silent. I turned and saw him, his jaw open. I remember it so well. That’s when he knew I had a gift; me, I wasn’t so sure. I thought I was a copycat, just imitating Duke Ellington and George Shearing. I still didn’t feel original or unique because I worked so hard to emulate others.

I must add here a pivotal moment almost every successful person I’ve met has experienced. It happened at the end of my freshman year at the University of Nevada, Reno. Remember the piano professor my mother stormed out on? They assigned him to teach me organ! Oh no! He was no organist, and I knew this would be bad. At our last lesson he dismissed me in no uncertain terms: “Missy, I suggest you give this up. You don’t have what it takes to make it in music.” In that instant I thought of Liberace, George Shearing, Mr. McNabb, Don Rae, Duke Ellington, my improvs. (I also thought of words that are unprintable here!) He was wrong, and I knew it. But what was I to do, having been told, “Don’t come back”? Well, the gods were listening!

Was there a watershed moment that inspired you to become a professional organist and church musician?

Yes! Enter Saint Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, New York City, and Robert K. Kennedy, organist and master of the choirs at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, Long Island. One springtime Sunday morning in Reno before church I serendipitously caught the TV broadcast of the 9:00 a.m. contemporary service at Saint Bartholomew’s with guitars, drums, organ, handbells, a big choir, and congregation singing amazing jazz church music!

I froze, mesmerized in total disbelief. Oh, the joy in their music! I knew I was meant to be there. I packed up and drove across the country to live with my dad in Saint James, Long Island, and started commuting on Sunday mornings to St. Bart’s as a choir member and guitarist in the 9:00 a.m. band. At the same time, I began organ lessons as a sophomore at SUNY Stony Brook traveling to Garden City to work with the brilliant, warm, and wonderful Kennedy, who gave me the “You get serious or else!” talk. He whipped me into shape like a real organ teacher. The Bach-Vivaldi Concerto in A Minor always makes me think of Robert. I credit him with helping me decide to become a professional organist and believing I could do it if I gave everything to my craft. So I did­—everything. I dove into repertoire and completely forgot about jazz and improv. I told myself they were no longer of any use. At this point I still had no idea anyone improvised on the organ, even though Robert was teaching at the same time his astonishing protégé Peter Richard Conte, my dear friend and improvisation colleague!

Beyond Robert Kennedy, who were your principal teachers and influences in organ and organ improvisation? How did you learn from them?

At Saint Bartholomew’s I met the great conductor and organist Dr. Dennis Keene, who was at the time St. Bart’s assistant organist, while finishing his doctoral degree at Juilliard. Dennis would become pivotal in my organ education.

St. Bart’s by now had hired me as their Christian education secretary, and one night working late I heard Dennis practicing two pieces on St. Bart’s glorious Aeolian-Skinner organ: Messiaen’s Le Banquet Céleste and Duruflé’s Scherzo. I stopped my work. I quietly snuck out to a partially opened chancel door and listened and watched him play in that sparkling, golden Byzantine mosaic space.

Le Banquet Céleste brought tears to my eyes. What on earth was this exquisitely inexpressible music? And this playful scherzo! Who on earth wrote this jewel of pure spontaneous magic? Both were jazz but not jazz; earthly yet other-worldly. Duruflé and Messiaen became my repertoire gurus. Soon Dennis was teaching me French Romantic and contemporary repertoire on the organ in St. Bart’s side chapel. (Organist Jack Ossewaarde prohibited anyone but Dennis and him from touching the great organ, especially newbies like me!) When Dennis became organist and choirmaster downtown at the Church of the Ascension, our work continued, and he trained me up for Juilliard and Eastman auditions. Those years studying with Dennis and the thousands of painstaking hours of blood, sweat, and tears formed my technique into what it is today. I have Dennis to thank for not letting me get away with anything less than excellence. And he gave me a front row seat as organ-page-turner at some of the finest choral and orchestral concerts in the world presented by his Ascension Music. I have lifelong gratitude for all he gave me, especially the privilege of hosting Madame Duruflé in my cathedral apartment (because Je parle français) for a week at Saint John the Divine— wow—il n’y a rien à dire! (There are no words!) She and I remained dear friends for many years after and shared unforgettable visits in France. Now there was une grande improvisatrice! And with such petite hands!

May I digress and share with you the thrill of a lifetime? On a visit to Marie-Madeleine’s lovely stone house in Cavaillon in Provence where she was on holiday with her dear sister Elianne, we were having tea in her living room when I commented on the lovely old brown upright piano against the far wall, a candle mounted on each end, fine lace lying across the top. She told me, “That’s where Maurice composed his Messe Cum Jubilo.” I started to cry as I so love that gorgeous work. I can still feel that hot Provence August afternoon with her and smell the fragrance of her giant rosemary bushes infusing that cool stone living room.

While studying with Dennis, I won the New York City AGO organ competition, and to my joy and astonishment got into Juilliard for fall 1983 to pursue my dream of studying Messiaen’s works with Messiaen’s protégé, the sublime artist Dr. Jon Gillock. What a world Jon brought me into; what an extraordinary friendship we built. Messiaen’s harmonies, registrations, birdsongs, and Hindu rhythms blew my mind. Through all this, improvisation took a back seat until three things happened at once: first, Dennis gave me Marcel Dupré’s two improvisation books; second, I began studying improvisation at Juilliard with my dear friend and colleague, the legendary improviser “Uncle” Gerre Hancock at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue (that’s an article all its own!); and third, I heard Paul Halley’s iconic improvisation album Nightwatch on the great organ at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where he was organist and choirmaster.

If there was a seminal person, moment, place, and organ in my improvisation career, this was it: Paul Halley at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and the mind-blowing Aeolian-Skinner Opus 150-A, “Miss Scarlett,” housed in the cathedral’s astounding eight-second acoustic (now nine seconds since the 2001 post-fire restoration!). Paul Halley’s organ improvs exploded my mind, ears, and musical imagination. In his playing I heard jazz improvisation like nothing I’d ever heard; he used the organ in ways I never imagined possible, especially the strings. I memorized Paul’s album, tried to replicate his sophisticated progressions, his sonic palette, his tricks with acoustics. I worked my butt off learning this extraordinary new thing: jazz-infused improvisation on a pipe organ, wonder of wonders! My four improvisers (two hands, two feet) found their home. This is when I made the commitment to find my voice and forge my own style.

My “second childhood,” as I call my twenty-three years at Saint John the Divine, began prior to my Juilliard studies, as a Barnard College junior in 1980. One autumn Friday I was unexpectedly called in as a last-minute sub to play for the cathedral’s weekend sleepover-in-the-crypt youth program, Nightwatch. It went so well that I was invited back on many Friday nights when Paul Halley was on tour with the Paul Winter Consort. Nightwatch and I would continue together for the next nine years, and it became my weekly “improv lab” to try out new ideas! Can I even begin to describe what it was like to be in that vast, dark cathedral on those marvelous cold winter Friday and Saturday nights, improvising in the dark and speaking to thousands of kids visiting from across the country about the great organ, showing off its cool sounds and taking them on a grand sonic ride they still to this day write to me about?

While at Juilliard in 1983, I found my courage to write Paul Halley asking if he’d consider taking me on as an improv student, knowing he didn’t teach because of his heavy touring and cathedral schedule. But, oh my goodness, he asked me to come in and play for him! He’d heard about my subbing at Nightwatch, and I’ll always remember that audition: afternoon light in the great organ loft, me seated on the bench, terrified in awe to be in Paul’s presence as he opened the hymnal to a Gregorian chant, one I would soon come to cherish, Conditor alme siderum.

I don’t remember what I improvised; I do remember thinking I made a total hash of it! I finished, waited in silence, then turned. Paul was relaxed, leaning back, arms stretched wide along the organ loft railing. With that great smile of his, he nodded saying, “Yes, I’ll work with you.” I thought I would die. My spontaneous squeal of joy echoed through the cathedral! What a privilege to become Paul’s improvisation protégé. And what a challenge: I never worked so hard in my life, never felt such a drive to excel, to prove myself and to achieve my dream of becoming a great improviser. And in all those years of study, Paul never charged me for a lesson.

In January 1984 Paul asked me to substitute for him in my first ever Paul Winter Consort gig at the Princeton University Chapel on their colossal organ. Thus began my nearly forty-year friendship and life-changing work with my dear friend and musical guru Paul Winter. Here was an entire band of world-class improvisers who welcomed me with open arms. And who knew one could improvise with humpback whales, timber wolves, or canyon wrens? Again my sonic world exploded! In 1986 Paul Halley named me cathedral organ scholar and trained me up on how to devise choral accompaniments and hymns in the English Cathedral style. In 1987 he and the dean appointed me cathedral assistant organist and then in 1990, when Paul left the cathedral, I was appointed cathedral organist. I remember once asking Paul why he hired me, and I’ve never forgotten his answer: “Because you’re great with kids (the Cathedral Choristers), you’re an accomplished woman organist (an endangered species in 1980s New York), and you read Samba charts (unheard of for an organist!).” Wow. There it was: all my years of improvisation and jazz landed me the coolest job on planet Earth.

A funny side note to this: at Juilliard my dear teacher Dr. Jon Gillock fully supported my improvisation work with Paul Halley. Jon deeply revered the great French organ improvisers and wanted me to give my improv and repertoire studies equal effort like the French do. But Juilliard found out and threatened to expel me for studying with a teacher outside the school, even though I had Dr. Gillock’s blessing. So, I assured the powers-that-be that I would stop—and of course, I didn’t! Never in a million years could I have imagined when I graduated from Juilliard with my master’s degree in organ at age twenty-five that in four short years I would be appointed the first woman cathedral organist at Saint John the Divine, because of my improv chops!

How does improvising in concert settings differ to you from liturgical settings?

There is quite a difference for me, like two alternate sonic worlds with very separate harmonic languages, techniques, themes, timings, feeling, purpose, audience, energetic intent, all of it. In accompanying silent films, my job (as I learned in reading my hero Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography) is to provide the emotional subtext of every scene: to improvise music that provides the emotional counterpoint to the action to enhance, not compete with, its drama, comedy, and conflict, and also to prepare the audience for what’s coming in the next scene. The music is the narrator. It must be subtle yet blunt, amorphous yet cued, often with specific timed “hits” (like a crash or surprise), and it is very much about surrendering to the three-way micro-millisecond relationship between oneself, the audience, and the actors. It’s a powerful and very real energetic triangle, and when you give yourself over to it, that’s when the magic happens, when the audience gets lost in the film and forgets you’re there.

In liturgical settings it’s all about surrender, again, but this time it’s surrender to what is ineffable, wonder-filled, and sacred inside each person in a holy gathering. Here we are, friends and strangers gathered in worship in a once-in-a-lifetime gathering that’ll never be repeated in all of time, with all our burdens, sorrows, challenges, and joys. I’ve found that yearning is at the core of everyone’s worship—our deep yearning for divine intervention, divine comfort, for the sublime, for answers, transformation, the soul aching to be heard and held. Organ music can express and even meet this yearning like nothing else. Whether it helps people cry and release, or is a cradle of peace, or uplifts them in an ecstatic experience of the divine, it is a sacred honor and opportunity we organists are entrusted with.

The very first thing I do in any performance is “take the temperature” of the room. Even thirty feet up and three hundred feet away hidden in a cathedral organ loft, you can feel a congregation’s mood. It’s hard to describe, but it’s palpable. It’s a vibration that imbues the space. I use this as the starting point of my prelude improv, the launch of any Sunday morning’s spiritual journey in which we organists are the first soul to express our yearning. Gradually the congregation joins us in hymn singing, joins the clergy in prayer, and together we go on the journey.

My musical goal in any liturgy is to shift the mood from what it was at the start to something entirely new and different by the end. My liturgical harmonic language is completely different and more contemporary than my silent film language. Silent films tend to dictate what harmonies and progressions work so you don’t “take the audience out of the film.” In a liturgy, I find there’s room for broader expression and risk-taking, especially in a big acoustic on a big instrument with lots of toys onboard. My liturgical improvs are infused with jazz and French Romantic harmonic worlds and massive rhythm. I’m talking massive; rhythm is everything! It’s the heartbeat of any improvisation, loud or soft, fast or slow.

Paul Halley taught me this. It’s what thrills and soars and tingles and creates awe. You could vamp on plain old C major with a killer rhythmic pattern, a few textural shifts, a 32′ Bombarde, and it’ll make your congregation stomp and cheer! I aim for one thing in my liturgical improvs: to continually lift up, even in somber Lenten modal mysterious improvs. I constantly let myself let go—this keeps the journey lifting and wondering (versus wandering!) for whomever I’m playing. If I’m surprised, they’ll be surprised; if I’m moved, they’ll be moved. I tell my students that improv is sheer blind trust; it’s surrender to divine channeling. It’s losing one’s conscious thought, so time stands still and you can’t remember what you played. And that’s when they really go on the ride with you. That’s when you come out of it thinking, “Wow, what just happened?” That’s when your congregation knows you gave yourself to them. I never, ever forget this maxim: “You can’t fool an audience.” They just somehow know if you’re holding back or are bored, scared, unprepared, not into it, or not giving your all—they know when there’s no lift off!

Do you consider yourself to have your own distinct musical language? Is there anything distinctly “American” about your improvising?

My musical passion is world music. I love combining ethnic sounds, especially Greek, Brazilian, Celtic, Middle Eastern, and Asian. I love stretching where the organ can go, seeing what part of the world it can travel to through a culture’s musical voice. That’s what I loved at Saint John the Divine in those golden years under the visionary leadership of our global-minded dean, the Very Reverend James Parks Morton. One minute I’d be playing Tibetan music for the Dalai Lama, then Eritrean hymns at a Coptic funeral, then Sakura for a Japanese tea ceremony, then “Hava Nagila” at a Jewish-Christian wedding, then New York, New York on the State Trumpet celebrating a Yankees-Mets Subway Series! If you see our magnificent country as the great melting pot of immigrants, then yes, my improvs and compositions are highly “American” in that I embrace all our ethnic styles. In terms of my own style, I don’t know how to describe it. I just know it as me and that it’s ever evolving. I’m often told by people, “Oh, Dorothy, I just knew when I walked in it was you playing—I’d know that sound anywhere!” I always wonder to myself, which sound(s) gave me away?

Tell us more about your jazz background and how it informs your improvising at the organ.

In addition to what I described above, I’d add two things: the legendary jazz pianist Lyle Mays of the Pat Metheny Group, with whom I had the tremendous privilege of studying jazz composition, told me, “Dorothy, if I ever hear you cadenced with plain old V–I, I’ll call the jazz police!” And Lyle also said, “The greatest musicians on the planet are jazz players. They can improvise in any style because they get inside the style, they don’t just copy it.” I’ve bided by Lyle’s words throughout my career.

Do you ever imitate specific composers or historical styles?

Oh yes, of course! We all stand on the shoulders of those who’ve come before us, and we borrow from our contemporaries, too. No musicians, especially improvisers, are creative islands unto themselves. Day and night we unconsciously take in shards of music, hooks, and tunes we’re not aware of. They lodge and cook in our musical psyche, then days later pop out in a gig or writing session, and we’re like, “Whoa, where’d that come from?” I borrow rhythmic hooks from Bartók, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Ravel; toccata patterns from Cochereau, Vierne, and Dupré; and every day I listen on BBC Radio 1 to the hottest pop, chill, dance, and cutting-edge tracks. I relax to Indian ragas and cook to electronic soundscape artists like Aurah. It all informs my improvs, my music theater scores, my organ and choral works. In fact, I’m listening to Aurah while writing this: it’s “I Decree Peace” on their Etherea Borealis album. Check it out!

How does improvisation differ from composing to you? Do you prefer one or the other?

To me improvisation is spontaneous composition, and composition is repeated improvisation until you find something you want to save and write down. They are equal in fertility and joy to me. I’d say the great gift that improvisation brings to a composer is to know if you don’t like something you wrote, you can improvise a hundred other ideas to replace it with! Composer-improvisers trust the unlimited flowing fountain of ideas inside of them. It’s unfailing, and the perfect idea is always just an improv away. Improvisation is ultimately just about trusting the unknown yet to be revealed in you. Each of us is a creative giant we have this lifetime to get to know, so from me to you I say, “Go for it, and rock da house!”

Reflection

I hope readers are as fascinated and stirred by Dorothy’s words as I am. She reminds us, if I may use a tired cliché, not to neglect the trees (as Dorothy clearly has done her homework, thoroughly learning music theory and technique, inside and out), but truly to see and appreciate the whole forest. I’m not sure about each of you, but that’s a reminder I needed at this moment. May each of us heed Dorothy’s advice to “go for it.” ν

Dorothy Papadakos’s website: dorothypapadakos.com

Experience Dorothy’s artistry at our website: thediapason.com/videos/dorothy-papadakos-plays-phantom-opera

A word

Over the last year or so I have attended more cultural and artistic events than I have in several years. I have had periods of doing more of this sort of thing than I had on average before the pandemic: catching up on theater, dance, music, art galleries, one figure skating exhibition, poetry readings, lectures, movies, etc. This has been extraordinarily satisfying, life-affirming, and a good antidote to a certain claustrophobia that had rather naturally set in before. I have noticed that as it seemed to become safe to go out and experience public life in these ways, I pursued doing so almost frantically. I get maybe 100 emails per day informing me about some sort of concert or play, and for quite a while I reacted to each such email by thinking “Yes, I have to do this!!” Recently I have noticed that this exaggerated fervor has simmered down to something more normal.

Upon attending theater, concerts, and such, I noticed that I was beginning to think about performance—not so much the phenomenon as the word itself. It felt like I was saying to myself things such as: “How nice to be attending a performance again;” “I haven’t been to a performance in a long time;” “I had never gone this long without experiencing a performance.” The word began to sound weird to me, the way a word does once in a while if you hear it enough. Yet, it also sounded interesting. I began to seek out instances of the words “performance,” “performer,” and “perform.” And though it was not the point initially, I became interested in the connections between that word and our relationship to it as musicians. In particular, I wonder what holding that word up to the light a bit might say about the perennial problem that we all face: that performance is hard, nerve wracking, and productive of anxiety. Certainly most of what is so difficult about performing music is intrinsic to the activity, not something that is created by the word itself. However, the word may shape expectations of feeling to some extent.

By chance these musings about the word “performance” tie in with something that I had planned to write about anyways, and that will form the subject of the next column.

Performance

So what about that word “performance?” Below is a potpourri of some of the ideas, observations, and questions that have been going through my head.

Performance is used in the arts (or the “performing arts”) to refer to a situation in which someone provides a public exhibition of their art. What are the performing arts? Is it interesting to suggest that they are arts that involve movement through time? That is, movement through time when they are being taken in by a patron, customer, or audience member. Everything exists in time, so a painting or sculpture exists in time. When someone looks at it and focuses on or appreciates it, that takes time. But the art is not using time.

There are some moving sculptures. If that is not “performance,” why not? Presumably because the sculpture has no consciousness or volition, and the person who made the sculpture is not the one doing the moving. So if something is a “performance,” someone has to be doing the performance in real time, though not necessarily at the same time that the audience is experiencing it. Acting in a movie or television show is just as much “performance” as acting in the theater.

We certainly would say that an orchestra gives “a performance.” But would we say that of an individual orchestra member? “I love (or hated) his performance of the oboe solo in such-and-such a symphony.” “She gave a great (or terrible) performance of the opening horn solo in Schubert’s Ninth.” Probably not. We would say, “I liked (hated) the way she or he played that passage.”

What about conductors? We might say, “That conductor gave a great performance of that symphony last night.”

What about in church? Would we say that someone gave a performance of a certain piece as prelude or offertory? Maybe, though I think that in reality we would be more likely to use a phraseology involving “playing” rather than “performing.” “That prelude that you played today was a favorite of mine.” How about with hymns? I would be astonished if anyone said, “I loved her performance of Hymn #284,” rather than “I loved how she played. . . .” If I am right about that, what does that tell us? When you accompany a hymn in church you are, first of all (like a member of an orchestra), not creating the whole of the musical, artistic entity. You are also doing something that is only partially directed at the listeners/audience, or in this case the congregation, whom we have stipulated as part of the “performance” situation—that is, only partly directed at them as listeners. You are helping them to sing, and in turn their singing is probably not what we would call a “performance;” the singing is essentially for the benefit of the people engaged in doing it.

So performance is presumably directed outward. Usually? Always?

Occasionally at one of these performances I have been so avidly attending, I find myself chatting afterwards with an actor or dancer. This is usually in a small group in the lobby or out on the street in front of the venue. Occasionally, I will say, “I am also a performer,” or something to that effect. What I find fascinating is that I always feel that in saying this I am being a bit presumptuous or even a bit of a fraud. Yet, I am a performer. So what’s up? I think that part of it is that we tend to put “performers” on pedestals; we do not think of them as being “regular” people, and I happen to know first-hand that I am a “regular” person! So at some visceral level I feel as though I am misrepresenting myself or perhaps impolitely trying to cut down the real performer to whom I am talking. There is also more neutrally just the feeling that using the concept of “performer” to equate two very different things is somewhat inaccurate and reductionistic.

The difference between the two things may come down to an actor plays a part pretending to be someone else, whereas performance of music does not. Is that really true? Is it a hard and fast difference? This is the thread that I will pick up next month.

The word performance is also used with respect to athletics. “That was a great pitching performance.” “He underperformed his career average.” In athletics the word almost always means what you achieve in relation to defined standards. If I say that a golfer’s performance in the final round of a tournament was amazing, I do not mean anything other than that they shot a great score and perhaps executed some shots along the way that were really difficult. That may not be a comprehensive way of putting it, but it is all about the concrete, measurable carrying out of defined tasks. I might very well appreciate the elegance of a golfer’s swing or something about their demeanor—maybe a particular look of concentration, but in this context that is not part of their “performance” on the golf course. 

This is one of the reasons that we think that we can compare how “great” different athletes are. It is not just that statistical descriptions exist of what each athlete did in their sport. (Sometimes that information is lacking, which makes the evaluation impossible as a practical matter, but does not change the concept.) It is that “performance” is defined as being those objective results. 

Picture this: you have been sitting around the living room visiting with some friends. All of a sudden one person stands up, starts to express displeasure with everyone else in the room, increasingly loudly and insistently, and walks out shouting, “I’m finished with the lot of you!” Let us say that this was unprovoked. Someone in the room might then look at the others and say, “Well, that was quite a performance!” If the person who left the room had instead just visited peacefully and eventually said a pleasant “Good night,” no one would have characterized that as a “performance.”  

When someone acts as the officiant at a wedding, their words, gestures, and signature make the marriage official. We might say that they have “performed” a wedding ceremony. However, we would probably not refer to that phenomenon as “a performance.” When shaking the hand of a member of the clergy or judge or ship’s captain, we might say, “I loved the way you spoke at the wedding” or “I loved the way you conducted the wedding.” Maybe, “I loved the way you performed the ceremony just now.” But certainly not “I loved your performance earlier this afternoon.” What does this tell us, and what does this mean? 

Performance vs. performance art

What about “performance art?” It resists definition, as the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the subject illustrates. That interesting article opens with statements such as, “Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants,” and “Its goal is to generate a reaction,” which do not really distinguish it from other art. That leads back to the question: why use the word “performance” as the defining title of an art form or art movement that is not any more about “performance” than any theater piece or piano recital? It seems an abstraction of the concept of performance, perhaps an assertion that the act of performance as such has a life and a meaning independent of the forms through which it has traditionally been channeled. Can that concept of performance as an independent entity then be turned back on our awareness of what performance is in any form?

There is a whole other set of uses to which the word “performance” is put. One that is found disproportionately in ads and commercials is a use like “performance motor oil,” “get the best performance from your stove,” or “high performance grass seed.” This is another abstraction or maybe just a more fundamental use of the word. It means something like, “How you do something (anything).” It is interesting that in this context the word “performance” implies “really good performance.” I suspect that this is fairly new, as is a similar way of using the word “quality.” This usage is related to the “performance” of a stock or mutual fund. Two characteristics of this sort of usage are that it has an unambiguous good-to-bad axis—no one would disagree about what’s good and what’s bad—and that it refers to inanimate entities. The things doing the performing have no consciousness or awareness.  

The second of these is clearly a departure from the way “performance” is used in the arts. The first is more intriguing. I wonder whether this is connected with our heightened feelings of expectation and nervousness when what we are doing at a given moment is a “performance” rather than just playing through a piece or reciting a poem out loud because we like the sound of it. There are many reasons to find performance difficult, reasons that are grounded in the content of what we are doing. But I wonder about the linguistic: “performance” is supposed to be good, can always be better, can be measured, and can be used to create rankings.

As an anecdote about my own recent experience, I have done very little performing since the pandemic began—just two short harpsichord recitals, a year or so ago. I feel confident that I will progressively get back to performing, but it still all feels rather abstract. On the other hand, I have been doing a lot of playing at home and in my studio, playing through things, sort of practicing, but usually not in a goal-directed way. My own ears are telling me that, for my own taste and in relation to what I want to try to make happen when I play, I am playing categorically more effectively than I ever have before. I suspect that what I am hearing in my playing is related to the sense of being free from the demands of performance. And if true, this is in large part due to the substantive anxieties and pressures of performance. But I suspect that the language plays a part. If we are contemplating a “performance,” we are at risk for thinking that we have to behave like “performance motor oil”; if we are just playing, we can just play.

An upcoming workshop

I will be offering a one-day workshop on J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue on Saturday, April 1. The event, presented by Princeton Early Keyboard Center, will run from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. in the chapel at Princeton Theological Seminary, 64 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey. The workshop is free, and no advance registration is required. However, if you let me know in advance that you are coming, I will be able to keep you informed of any changes of plan, and I will also invite you to tell me about any specifics of what you would like to get out of the day. It has always been important for me to keep the exact content of workshops flexible so that we can end the experience having addressed the needs of each person who has attended. This event is open to anyone: keyboard players, other musicians, other artists, any person with any interest in The Art of the Fugue, from any background. I hope to be able to offer a valuable experience to people who already know the work very well as well as to those who know nothing about it but are interested. 

I will have at least one harpsichord at the event, and we will also be able to use the Paul Fritts organ in the chapel. I will not be giving a performance of The Art of the Fugue, but I will be playing substantial amounts of the piece. There should be opportunities for workshop attendees who wish to play a bit on various instruments.

There is information about the workshop on the PEKC website (pekc.org) and on my own website (gavinblack-baroque.com), and both of these will be kept up to date with any changes. There will likely still be some sort of Covid protocols in effect for visitors to the seminary at that time. This information will be found at both websites.

Please feel free to come, and also to let anyone know who you think might be interested. I hope to see you there!

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)