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In the Wind . . .

John Bishop
Fisk organ, Finney Chapel

Keep your distance.

In both the May and June issues of The Diapason, I wrote about watching the world react to the spread of the novel coronavirus. I have told you how my family and I left New York City for our place in Maine, leaving behind the horror of the spread of vicious contagion in a densely populated city. Individual boroughs of the city have higher death tolls than many countries, and our friends there tell of fear and loss. As I write in mid-May, there have been over 160,000 cases confirmed and over 13,500 deaths in New York City. There have been thirteen cases and no deaths confirmed in Lincoln County, Maine, where we live.

We left New York two days after Broadway, Lincoln Center, and all the museums of the city were closed, that great engine of culture, those vibrant theaters, those stately crowded buildings all going dark at once. By that time, virtually every college and university had closed or was closing. Social media pages became clamors of teachers comparing notes about how to teach from a distance and students facing unprecedented interruptions in their education. I am particularly well connected on Facebook where my community includes some three thousand organ professionals, and I have been impressed by the thoughtful interchange.

I wrote a post asking colleagues if they would be interested in talking about distance learning and, with a half dozen responses, spent more than ten hours last week on FaceTime, Zoom, and video chat (and on the phone when the internet got slow), conversing with friends and colleagues about how they were developing methods to cope with this untenable situation, keeping the wheels of learning turning.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

The common opener was that it is nobody’s first choice to close a campus and send students home, there is no precedent, and we had better figure this out. The biggest variable is whether students have access to organs, pianos, or even cheap keyboards during the closures. When away from campus, students live in a wide variety of circumstances. While some students go home to luxury, others return to poverty where shortage of food is an issue, never mind whether there is a piano, let alone an organ. Before being able to establish connections to continue teaching, some teachers have petitioned their schools to provide instruments, WiFi connections, and, in some cases, food.

Christa Rakich teaches organ performance at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where students were informed a week before spring break that the school was closing and they needed to vacate their dorm rooms. There was a flurry of activity as clothes, books, and personal items were packed and parents came to help ferry stuff home. There must have been a shortage of cardboard boxes in town.

Because Zoom and other video conferencing platforms can be shaky and imprecise, Christa is using video recordings as a primary tool for private lessons. Students send recordings to her that she watches with scores and sends emails with comments referring to measure numbers. “It’s tedious progress, but it’s progress, and helpful for them to have my return email in hand for the next practice session.” 

Christa is also sending weekly “Improv Challenges” to her students by email. In an email before our conversation she wrote, “I submit this with an audio file. I record myself improvising, for example, a two-voice chorale prelude or a pedal cadenza or a fugal exposition in three voices with a cadence, something contained and short. The email includes instructions on how I did it or perhaps a written sample. Students are challenged to send me back an audio file using the same technique with a different tune.”

Early on, Christa experimented with live playing over Zoom for studio class, but found that the platform was unstable, so she and her students have spent productive time together planning future projects, working hard to keep a productive learning environment in place as much as possible. According to Christa, the administration of the school is encouraging students’ ideas for study projects and reading, supporting their creativity by giving credit—“everything you do counts as work.” 

Andrew Scanlon is assistant professor of sacred music and organ performance at East Carolina University and organist at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Greenville, North Carolina, where Andrew’s students are accustomed to having their lessons on the spectacular forty-five-stop C. B. Fisk, Inc., organ (Opus 126, 2005). The university has supplied the faculty with tutorial videos on distance learning helping Andrew to develop techniques for video teaching, and he has been able to find access to organs for all his students. He reports that the organ literature course he teaches has been easiest to transfer, mostly by giving lectures online. He is guiding students toward the AAGO exam and continuing their improvisation training.

Nicole Keller has been teaching organ and harpsichord students at Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory of Music, Berea, Ohio, for twenty years. During our conversation, she spoke of how the school’s administration has been sharing information openly with bi-weekly video town hall meetings for the faculty, and the school’s IT department is helping with information about available resources and helping to get students online. Nicole is facing this disruption, wondering how she can use the experience to become a better teacher. She is finding the exchange of recordings to be effective, and to a lesser extent, playing through Zoom. She added that external microphones for laptops make a big difference in the sound quality, especially when using Zoom, and mentioned that the conservatory has provided microphones for the students.

George Emblom teaches at the University of California at Berkeley and is director of music at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley. He started our conversation with the simple comment that this is unprecedented. No one expected this, and no one had planned for it. With the campus and church building closed, he has been able to secure access to instruments for his students, even in some cases through loans from members of the choir at Saint Mark’s where his students have their lessons on the Flentrop organ. 

We are all learning and developing the art of distance teaching simultaneously, and George believes that some of the new techniques will continue to be useful when we are able to return to teaching private students face-to-face. He particularly mentioned shared video recordings, commenting that he is spending a lot of time watching the pinwheel on his screen as videos are downloading. Students send videos to him through Google Drive, and he shares his screen with them, allowing student and teacher to watch together in real time. He has found that students benefit greatly from watching their performances, seeing their posture, hands and feet, and the motions of their bodies, both useful and unnecessary. “At measure 43, do you think you looked comfortable?” He intends to continue using this tool in the future.

George’s performance degrees are in piano. Remembering that there were always two pianos in a teacher’s studio so the teacher could demonstrate, he has been using the piano more extensively as a teaching tool and considers this another technique to be developed and used more in the future. He also reminded me that the concept of distance teaching for serious musicians is in its infancy. He is in conversation with colleagues around the country comparing and assessing techniques and imagines that new and more powerful platforms will be developed quickly.

Jonathan Moyer is assistant professor of organ and chair of the organ department at Oberlin and organist at the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland, Ohio. He is teaching some private lessons with students sending him recordings followed by video conferences, usually on Zoom. But he is really focused on finding new ways for students to learn. Organ literature classes are productive as he can provide listening lists on YouTube. Students “mute out” to listen, then return for discussion. He shares PowerPoint slides on Zoom and gives out reading assignments, some of which temporarily take the place of performance.

Oberlin is well known for its extraordinary collection of more thirty organs, and Jonathan feels that a big part of education there is being on campus with those instruments, sharing musical inspiration in person with students and teachers. He feels that most of his students have had enough of the “video thing.”

Katherine Johnson is a third-year student of Christa Rakich at Oberlin. She spoke of the shock of being told to vacate her dormitory just before spring break. She is working hard to make the most of it and is fortunate to have a Hauptwerk instrument in a relatively private space at home where she is working on the “self-taught” piece she has chosen for her jury, whenever that will be. In course work, she notes that her fellow students are in different time zones, which makes it difficult to schedule class meetings online, but she is generally impressed by how video platforms make distance learning possible.

§

I am grateful to the six people who spoke with me last week. Each spent an hour or more with me and shared not only how they are approaching the different acts of teaching and learning, but also about their concerns for each other. All five of the teachers echoed their concern for the well-being of their students, many of whom have been shuttled off campus into stressful situations of crowded houses full of distance learners and parents working from home. WiFi is everything, and housemates are having to negotiate for bandwidth. Students who are strongly self-motivated are finding rich new ways to learn, while others are struggling with the difficulties and uncertainties of their situations and the disruption of their education.

As of this writing, none of the schools involved has yet made announcements regarding the status of the fall semester. Jonathan Moyer mentioned that Oberlin would be deciding by mid-June whether to open the campus for the fall, perhaps without large ensembles and with limited class sizes. Different schools are considering having only single rooms in dormitories and somehow staggering the semesters, a scheme that falls apart in a hurry when you get to communal bathrooms.

All of the teachers spoke of the spirit of camaraderie and cooperation among students. Everyone I spoke with mentioned fatigue, especially screen fatigue. Even if you are used to spending hours in a practice room or teaching studio each day, you are still moving around between classrooms, offices, and dormitories. Likewise, there was a lot of talk about maintaining energy, keeping things lively and inspiring in online discussions. Teachers are spending lots of time just talking with their students, helping them redefine their dreams and ambitions while staying optimistic.

And what about church?

All but one of the teachers I spoke with also serve as church musicians, and each shared a little about how online worship is working. Very few church buildings are open, so most are either sorting and streaming recordings from years past, or recording preludes, postludes, and hymns on whatever instrument they have at home.

Last month we published a photo of John Cantrell, choirmaster and organist at Saint Michael’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan seated at the desk he has adapted for the production of the church’s video services. He described to me the challenge of creating an essence of worship for the congregation. He has always been interested in audio engineering, but “this video thing” is new, and he has been learning on the job. He and the clergy have been drawing on the example of Mr. Rogers and his legendary ability to communicate on television with children. How did Mr. Rogers draw children into the screen, suspending their disbelief, and can we emulate that in online worship?

At Saint Michael’s, the organ scholar records a prelude and postlude in the empty church with John as the videographer, allowing the congregants a rare glimpse of the organist who is normally hidden by the Rückpositiv of the great Beckerath organ. They also record at least two hymns, generally one verse for each, and show the text on the screen so “distance congregants” can sing along. John records a rehearsal track for an anthem that he sends to choir members who practice and record their part, and they send it back to John who stacks the tracks, tweaking the early or late notes as needed, and mixes the whole thing into a choir. This is far from perfect, and many people are unable to participate, especially elderly parishioners with no internet skills. We can suppose that powerful apps will be developed making all this possible without the need for each music director to reinvent the wheel.

A common concern is the future of choirs. On April 29, The Guardian reported that the German government had met with church leaders and agreed that when German churches open for worship in May, singing would be prohibited. The article noted that three quarters of the members of a church choir in Mount Vernon, Washington, fell ill and two died, and that fifty-nine of seventy-eight singers in the choir of Berlin’s Protestant cathedral contracted the virus. On March 8, the Amsterdam Gemengd Koor (mixed choir) gave a performance of J. S. Bach’s Saint John Passion in the Concertgebouw, the city’s famed concert hall. Of 130 singers, 102 contracted COVID-19 and four died. The American Choral Directors Association has issued an announcement to its membership stating that singers are “super spreaders” of the coronavirus because singers breathe more deeply than normal and expel breath at great velocity. A group of people singing may as well be sneezing on each other.

Andrew Scanlon said the reason the choir at Saint Paul’s in Greenville sings psalms so beautifully is that they do it all the time. It is in their blood. Will choirs have to wait years before being able to gather again? How much interest, proficiency, and experience will be lost?

Lemonade

We have no idea how long this will last. My family and I came to Maine thinking we would be here for a few weeks and have now been holding in place for over eight weeks. Given our usual lifestyle with two homes and a significant amount of business travel, this is the most consecutive nights I have spent in one place in nearly twenty years. The statistics of the epidemic as some states try opening selected businesses may indicate that we will be in this longer than we have yet imagined. From our seclusion, it is impossible to imagine when we might next enter a Broadway theater with twenty-inch wide seats and endless lines for the restrooms.

Most organists are employed by churches or universities. Although playing the organ seriously is a solitary venture, both types of institutions depend on people working in groups. Seminars, classrooms, staff meetings, faculty meetings, and especially choirs are important to the work of the organist. At the moment, the challenge of setting up distance learning and distance choral singing is taking more time for many people than the familiar weekday rehearsals and Sunday services. 

Once you have mastered and improved the techniques, will you have more time for personal projects? Is this your chance finally to learn those last eighteen pieces so you can say you have played all of Bach’s organ music? The Vierne symphonies? How about some of those pesky masterworks by Rachel Laurin or Jeanne Demessieux? Maybe it is time to finish and submit that article to The Diapason? Spend some more time with Beethoven’s piano music? Or admit it, you have always wanted to take the FAGO exam. Contact your chapter leadership and sign up. Maybe you were going to spend a week or two at conventions this summer. How often have you wished for a couple extra weeks to tackle something you have always wondered about? Guess what, kids, now’s the time.

When we meet on the other side, let me know how you did.

C. B. Fisk, Inc., Opus 116, Finney Chapel, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio (photo courtesy: C. B. Fisk, Inc.)

Related Content

In the Wind. . .

John Bishop
Concert in New York City

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)

Going Places: an interview with Katelyn Emerson

Joyce Johnson Robinson

Joyce Johnson Robinson is a past editor of The Diapason.

Katelyn Emerson with Ray Cornils

Katelyn Emerson is a member of The Diapason’s inaugural 20 Under 30 (2015) class, an honor bestowed prior to receiving her undergraduate degrees from Oberlin. She had already earned top prizes in numerous competitions in the United States, France, and Russia. She teaches in her private studio and performs nationally and internationally. Katelyn Emerson is represented in North America by Karen McFarlane Artists, Inc.

Katelyn, what were some of the first instruments you played? What led you to prefer the organ?

Growing up, I was drawn to voice, piano, flute, and organ. Singing was integral to my childhood as my whole family sang in a church choir and my older brother, Andrew, and I both sang in the Sandpipers Seacoast Children’s Chorus, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 

When Andrew turned ten, he began piano lessons. Naturally, as a six-year-old enamored with everything he was doing, I began to sightread through his piano music, and my parents sought a piano teacher to spare them from the cacophony coming from the keyboard—and so that I wouldn’t learn bad habits. 

Four years later, all I wanted for my birthday was flute lessons as I had watched my mother play and loved the sound of the instrument. Flute and voice ultimately allowed me to join both local and all-state youth symphonies and choruses. 

Dianne Dean, director of the Sandpipers Chorus, first introduced me to the possibility of playing the organ. I had plunked out a hymn or two at my parents’ church but thought this imposing instrument out of reach for a small girl. However, Dianne had been instrumental in founding the Young Organists’ Collaborative, an organization that introduces young people to the pipe organ and funds their early studies. She encouraged me to audition for a scholarship, and upon receiving it, I studied piano, flute, and organ through high school.

The “lightning bolt” moment was during the Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, opus 78, of Camille Saint-Saëns. I was principal flutist of the Portland (Maine) Youth Symphony Orchestra, playing at the heart of the ensemble while my then organ teacher, Ray Cornils, played the Kotzschmar organ in Merrill Auditorium. There had been no time to rehearse with the organ prior to the concert, so those brilliant C-major chords of the final movement came as a complete shock. I realized the organ could be all the musical instruments I loved—and that it could even keep pace with a full symphony orchestra! This could be my instrument.

Tell us about your experience with the Young Organists’ Collaborative.

The Young Organists’ Collaborative (YOC) was founded in 2001 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when a new Létourneau organ was installed in Saint John’s Episcopal Church. When Bishop Douglas E. Theuner came to bless the instrument, he donated $1,000 seed money with the charge to find a way to bring young people to play the pipe organ. Chosen students received a year’s worth of lessons and a small stipend for shoes or scores. Today, students come from around the seacoast—Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, etc.—and are paired with an approved local teacher who can help find practice spaces. They are required to play at the end-of-year recital and are invited to take part in a masterclass with a professional organist partway through the year. The YOC can fund up to three years of study and offers additional scholarship competitions.

I received one of these scholarships in 2005 and began studies with Abbey Hallberg Siegfried, who worked at Saint John’s. When she went on maternity leave a year later, Abbey connected me with Ray Cornils, municipal organist of Portland, Maine, whose teaching included practice techniques, patience, and good humor that form the foundation of my playing and teaching. 

When and where did you give your first recital? What did you play?

It’s difficult to recall my first recital! I do remember my first organ masterclass vividly, when I had only been studying for about six months. This class, sponsored by the YOC, was with Ray Cornils, whom I was meeting for the first time. I played the “Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Major” from the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues attributed to Bach. After I played through the work in its entirety, Ray quietly asked if I realized which pedal note I had missed in the prelude. While I can’t remember now which note it was, I do remember him guiding me through the process of identifying the reason for the mistake. That detective work set the standard for how I problem-solve in my own practice and how I work with my students to do the same.

You earned your degrees at Oberlin and subsequently studied in France and Germany. How did each of these experiences form you?

During my first semester at Oberlin, my assigned teacher, James David Christie, went on sabbatical. While usually a cause for chagrin, this was an extraordinary stroke of luck: he swapped positions with Olivier Latry. 

I have always learned repertoire quickly, but Professor Latry’s demands put me into high gear. At least one new piece each week was expected, which meant that I had expended the music I had prepared over the summer halfway through the semester. After panic-learning Duruflé’s Prélude et fugue sur le nom d’Alain in five days, I finally mastered “the back burner”; with two dozen or so pieces in progress at once, each at a different stage of learning, a new one would hit the “lesson-ready” point just at the right moment. Professor Latry also expanded my arsenal of practice techniques, and I would credit nearly all of my inherited practice methods to him and Ray Cornils.

Professor Christie’s preferred pedagogical approach was almost perfectly opposite: rather than covering new music every week, he preferred a lengthier study of style, working through a half-dozen pieces over the course of a semester to develop deeper understanding that could be applied to other music of that genre. I have grown to appreciate this more than I did as a teenager and to balance learning notes quickly with understanding and translating the music. 

My love affair with all things French had begun only two years before university, and fortunately additional academic scholarship was available if I pursued the double degree program at Oberlin (a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Music after five years), so French language and literature was the natural choice. I remember asking Professor Latry about studies at the Conservatoire de Paris within our first few lessons together, likely to his amusement!

My first solo trip abroad was in 2011, between my freshman and sophomore years, for the last iteration of the Summer Institute for French Organ Studies, led by Jesse Eschbach and Gene Bedient. Aided by a scholarship, I traveled to Poitiers and then Épernay, wondering if I could handle being alone abroad. Wandering the cobblestones of Poitiers, reveling in that 1787 Clicquot, and then the 1869 Cavaillé-Coll of Église Notre-Dame in Épernay, and getting to know the other students from Indiana, Utah, and Canada, I discovered that I thrived on travel. 

During my sophomore year at Oberlin, Marie-Louise Langlais came to teach. In contrast to Professor Christie’s detail-oriented teaching, Madame Langlais emphasized beautiful broad lines, Wagnerian long phrases, and propelling the music forwards no matter what.

At Oberlin, one of my most impactful teachers was not an organ professor. David Breitman remains head of the historical performance department and teaches fortepiano. After I carelessly ran through a Mozart sonata in one of my first fortepiano lessons, I remember him asking, “Now, this is an opera. Tell me about the first character. What else was Mozart working on while composing this?” Ray Cornils had planted the first seeds of exploring musical character in my mind (“If you met this piece walking down the street, what would it look like? How would she feel? Where would he be going?”), but I hadn’t applied this inquisitive curiosity more broadly. Professor Breitman’s similarly Socratic method of teaching was a continuation of Ray’s. Neither teacher ever dictated interpretation. Instead, they posed questions that led a student to make informed decisions and arrive at possible conclusions themselves through a contextualization and personification of music that has become a cornerstone of my playing and pedagogy. 

The formative experiences and broad education I received from Oberlin continued to feed my curiosity. I took classes in psychology, astronomy, anthropology, rhetoric, French literature, and more. 

Upon graduating, I won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Toulouse. I documented a fraction of that year in France on my blog (katelynemerson.wordpress.com), but spent most of it on road trips to see untouched instruments in the countryside, locked into Saint-Sernin at night, scrambling for practice time, being clapped at because nobody had mentioned a noon Mass, stopping by the marché for bread and a bottle of wine for a picnic, and showing up at the Conservatoire to discover there was another strike and it was closed. Life had a different pace. Concerts were a train ride away, I performed on instruments sometimes wonderful and sometimes frightful, and I met brilliant colleagues and lifelong friends. 

My teachers in Toulouse, Michel Bouvard and Jan Willem Jansen, once again revealed how contrasting teaching styles can enrich study. With Michel Bouvard, I delved into the French Romantic, allowing the instruments to inform how the repertoire can really be played. His relaxed technique and unpretentious approach to this music gave it space to sing. Jan Willem Jansen had extraordinary attention to detail. After hearing me play the “Allein Gott” trio from the Clavierübung, he rightfully informed me that the fourth and fifth sixteenth notes of measure 27 had rushed. I doubt my ears will ever be so attuned to proportion, but I still strive for it nonetheless!

As my year in France concluded and I prepared to pursue further graduate studies, I was offered the associate organist and choirmaster position at the Church of the Advent in Boston, which I simply couldn’t turn down. I had worked with music director Mark Dwyer for several months while at Oberlin and was in awe of the program, liturgy, and choirs. Mark remains a dear friend, colleague, and teacher, and his attention to detail emphasized the importance of every part of music—from note to silence. 

The itch to live abroad is difficult to scratch, so I’m particularly grateful to make a living based on travel! Having heard that Ludger Lohmann would retire in 2020, I applied for a German Academic Exchange Scholarship (DAAD) to pursue the Master Orgel at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart. It broke my heart to leave Boston but I looked forward to two years in Germany.

Navigating life in France had been fairly easy given my comfort with the language. I had enough German to be dangerous—enough so that people assumed I understood. Thankfully, I avoided extreme disaster, realized the meaning of halb zwei in time not to miss my lessons, and discovered the delicacies of southern German cuisine. Lessons with Ludger perfectly balanced churning through new repertoire, exploring historical context, and receiving a list of sources (often primary) to consult. When the pandemic disrupted studies, we met at his beautiful home on the border of Switzerland to indulge in cake and then play and discuss Reger on the three-manual tracker in his living room.

I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have mentors, human and instrumental, that have each shared perspectives and ideas for ways to approach both music and life. This is but a small sample of those who have shaped my understanding, and I hope those not mentioned will still feel my appreciation and forgive the oversight, due solely to lack of space.

How has your knowledge of foreign languages and your living abroad given you insights into the music of those countries’ composers?

Music is inevitably tied to the social, historical, and cultural context in which it was conceived, even while its nature as organized sound allows it to have meaning outside a single context. My understanding of different languages and sensitivity to ways of comportment have helped me to get to know people all over the world, and I continually strive to connect with and understand them better. As an interpreter, I try to delve into the composer’s influences as well as my own, linking both to the present listeners as we undertake the aural tour of emotive depth and structure that is music performance. To do this, I strive to learn as much as I can of the time, place, and people that surrounded the music’s conception to make interpretative decisions that both link and are drawn from the past and present. The more I learn and study, the richer and more complex these relationships become, which results in further exploration and endless excitement!

Tell us about your recordings—those already made, and those planned for the future.

I have released two recordings on the Pro Organo label, working with Fred Hohman. The first of these, part of the prize package from the American Guild of Organists’ 2016 National Young Artists Competition in Organ Performance, was recorded on the glorious 1935–1936 Aeolian-Skinner at the Church of the Advent in Boston where I was working. These winners’ CDs are typically variety programs, so I sought to showcase how this liturgical instrument can play a variety of repertoire brilliantly, with music by Bruhns, J. S. Bach, Mendelssohn, François Couperin, Alain, Vierne, Tournemire, Thierry Escaich, and Howells. The album title, Evocations, comes from Escaich’s Évocation III (this was its first CD recording). Two years later, Andover Organ Company approached me about a new recording on their magnum opus, Opus 114, at Christ Lutheran Church in Baltimore in honor of their company’s seventieth anniversary. For this CD, Inspirations, I played Rachel Laurin’s Finale, opus 78 (this was the first recording), Horatio Parker, Rheinberger, Buxtehude, Bairstow, de Grigny, Langlais, and Duruflé.

Over the last two years, recording has become more essential than ever. I now have my own video and audio recording equipment and, while none of it equals commercial-level recording equipment, I can use it to pre-record recitals for venues that want to “premiere” the recital on YouTube or Vimeo, particularly if they don’t have their own equipment, and I can also make recordings for my channels. I have a huge “dream list” of instruments on which I would like to record CDs and frequently tweak ideas for programs on them. One idea would juxtapose commissions of living composers with previously composed repertoire related by inspirational source or another contextual consideration—an idea that will hopefully come into being in the next few years!

Who are some of your favorite composers?

My favorite composers are those who wrote the music I’m currently playing! Similarly, the best organ in the world is the one on which I will perform next or am currently playing, and the best piece in the world is the one that’s on the music desk right now. While this might seem to be a cop-out, it’s a simple truth: we play music better when we like it—so we must like what we are working on in order to play it well.

When push comes to shove, I am happiest playing a variety of music. My music bag currently contains music by Parry, Bach, Taylor-Coleridge, Dupré, Demessieux, Reger, Sowerby, Alcock, Laurin, Duruflé, Price, Widor, Whitlock, Franck, and Scheidemann, as well as a few others.

Tell us about your teaching.

After beginning at Oberlin, I was asked to help guide incoming students as an academic ambassador, explaining the sometimes-overwhelming collegiate administration and helping them to choose courses that would feed their curiosity. I tutored French, music theory, and organ at Oberlin, and taught music theory at the local community music school.

Since graduating, I have continued teaching, both privately and in masterclass and lecture settings, holding general question-and-answer sessions that follow tangents of interest as well as structuring courses that focus on specific topics. I enjoy connecting sometimes disparate ideas and exploring possibilities, discussing why decisions can be made this way or that, and, above all, searching for the many nuanced ideas that make an individual “tick.” 

My teaching studio is loosely divided into three groups: those working on interpretation, those seeking to improve practice strategies, and those learning about injury prevention or working to recover from injury. Of course, most are tackling all three! 

Interpretation, at its core, requires working with ideas, examining options, and then seeking physical means to translate them convincingly into sound. Since we organists cannot modulate volume with touch as pianists can, nor can we swell or diminish sound via the breath of wind or the bows of string players, much of our playing is about manipulating smoke and mirrors to turn our intention into aural reality. Since we can now so easily record ourselves, I hold even greater admiration for how players listen in the moment to what is going on, and particularly for how each of my students has a different way of perceiving the sounds swirling around them. Couple this with learning about the context of the composer, their influences, the instruments they may have known, and the time and place in which the piece was composed, and we have rich, unique “readings” of the repertoire that can link to the interests of any student, all while we explore techniques to help bring that perspective to reality. 

Time is short for everybody, and practice must be as efficient as possible. Having studied with excellent teachers of practice methods and having experienced fairly limited practice time during study and travel, I continue to explore ways to break down repertoire for efficient practice. I often make a game of turning difficult sections into manageable chunks, isolating them from the context that can distract from them. Sometimes, I encourage a student to leave it in that “practice mode” for days or even weeks, which allows the subconscious mind to digest novel movement. The best part of this technique is the excitement with which a student brings me new ideas for this “game,” ideas that I can then share with others when similar sections come up!

Surveys indicate that somewhere between 60% and 90% of professional musicians in the United States have experienced some kind of performance-related musculoskeletal disorder, most often due to overuse. The enthusiasm with which the work of pedagogues such as Roberta Gary and Barbara Lister-Sink has been received, the many stories shared by colleagues and students, and both the unnatural perch on the organ bench and the similarity in how organists use their hands and upper body to that of pianists all make me suspect that this prevalence is much the same in organists.

At age fourteen, I developed bilateral tendonitis in my wrists and forearms. Giving music up was not an option, so I undertook technical retraining with Arlene Kies, late professor of piano at the University of New Hampshire. Arlene helped me to completely rebuild my technique, as I had had almost no technical training in my six years of study. Through her work and that of my mother, a certified hand therapist and occupational ergonomist, I regained my ability to make music and developed a deep respect for my body. By paying attention to its abilities and limitations, I overcame many flare-ups throughout the next decade (including several during competitions). 

This firsthand experience with how playing and practice techniques can couple with contributing factors for tragic consequences inspired me to deepen my understanding of these complex issues so I can work with musicians, particularly organists, to prevent injury and, when injury happens, collaborate with the individual and their medical specialists to work towards recovery. We discuss healthier practice techniques that utilize mental involvement to balance out physical repetition that can lead to overuse, review postural considerations, and discuss ways to give whatever part of the body that is most at risk a little relief, whether avoiding using force when opening jars or cans or making small changes to computer and office workstations. If a student is experiencing pain or discomfort or is recovering from an injury, I always strongly recommend that they work with a medical professional for treatment in addition to exploring adjustments at their instrument.

Being a teacher and being a student go hand in hand. We teach ourselves while in the practice room, but the added variable of joining another person on their journey of learning means that we are continually exposed to different vantage points and ideas. 

How have things been for you during the time of covid?

In spring of 2020, I was based in Germany, but, when rumors that international borders might close began to proliferate, I was on tour in the United States. Fortunately, I made it back to Baden-Württemberg just a few days before flights were grounded. Despite the restrictions, I was able to complete my final semester of my master’s study, performing a program of Froberger, Messiaen, and Reger to an audience of fourteen (including the jury) in the Stuttgart Musikhochschule’s concert hall. That summer was spent waiting and then moving quickly as restrictions changed, but my husband, David Brown, who then worked for Glatter-Götz Orgelbau while I completed my studies, and I managed to return to the United States in September 2020 so he could resume work at Buzard Pipe Organ Builders.

Many people I have spoken with have described challenging months, yet they have almost always also shared silver linings like cherishing time with family and friends or pursuing new projects. My 2020 and 2021 were the same: over seventy concerts were postponed (incredibly, very few canceled entirely), which broke my heart, but my time was filled with writing articles, teaching in person and over Zoom (which I had been doing while traveling, even before 2020!), and learning new repertoire. I also took a course in occupational ergonomics to support my teaching of injury prevention. The world felt like it was on hold for so long, but hope was always on the horizon with wonderful events scheduled for the future—many of which are taking place now! 

What are some of your hopes and plans for the future?

We live in such an exciting time. No previous generation has had so much information at their fingertips, just a click away. The work of thousands of previous performers and researchers—and the life experiences of millions of human beings—is there for our perusal and for us to build on. 

It is incredibly easy to pour through stacks of music and literature, both physically and online, and I’m constantly noting repertoire that I want to learn and share with people. Including some of this less-familiar music in programs requires that I show why this music matters and why audiences should care about it. Without knowing the context or inspiration of a particular piece, how could a listener attending a concert after a busy workday be expected to respond to it? They often have nothing to hold onto, particularly with a longer or more esoteric work, so why should they come back to hear more? Highly aware of this, I seek to share my passion for each piece, proposing some ways through which to relate to it. Connecting a particular piece of music with the heart of the listener has become one of my highest performance priorities.

I would also like to help to evolve the definitions of success for us musicians and organists. I have spoken with so many who did not experience their “big break” before age thirty and who desperately strive to feel successful. We are so often told what success should look like that we can no longer hear our internal voice showing us how our unique skills could create something quite different. This leads to discouragement, depression, and sometimes a heartbreaking lack of self-compassion. I tackle this with my students and work with musicians in all stages of life to help curate their unique careers and pursue whatever they hope to achieve. My own path has been rather unusual, with several gap years that opened Europe and Asia for performance and study, and with my primary income from performing and teaching. The latter is integral to who I am as a person and a musician, as is writing articles that continue conversations about a diverse range of ideas.

While I don’t yet have the answer to this challenge, I try to work with my students and colleagues to explore ways to find our place in a world large and varied enough for all of us. We all may play the pipe organ, but our unique backgrounds—culture, language, family, and everything else—cause us to approach life and this instrument so vastly differently that each of us have the potential to fill a gap that the field didn’t even know was there.

It just takes listening.

Thank you, Katelyn!

Katelyn Emerson’s website: katelynemerson.com

In the Wind. . .

John Bishop
John Cantrell

If a tree fell in the forest and there was no one there to hear it . . .

Suppose that we are sharing Christmas dinner. We are sitting with family and friends at a “groaning board” festooned with Granny’s stemware and china, ironed linen napkins, and the best silver, freshly polished. Red juices flow from the beef tenderloin as slices fall from the knife. Please pass the potatoes.

Over the clinking of silverware I happen to mention, “By the way, did you hear that all the churches will be closed for Easter?” Silence. “And not just Easter, Palm Sunday, and all of Holy Week.”

Shazam! I was right! To be truthful, I did not foresee it. No one did. According to Science Daily (April 9, 2020), by Christmas 2019, COVID-19 was more than a glimmer in the eye of a Chinese bat, but no one imagined that it would be spreading across the globe like wildfire a few months later. When my family and I left New York City for our house in Maine on March 14, there were fewer than 500 cases reported in the city. Three weeks later there were more than 20,000. Today, just one month later, there are over 110,000 confirmed cases with over 10,000 deaths in New York City alone. With the deadline for submissions to The Diapason six weeks before publication, writing these essays is no way to report the news. I am writing in mid-April, and you are reading in early June—plenty will have happened in the meantime. I hope some of it was good.

March 14 was the day Pope Francis announced that Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City would be closed to the public and Easter Masses would be celebrated with no congregation. Thousands of churches around the world shared the example. The internet was rich with video clips of worship being led by two or three people in an empty church or by individuals participating in orders of worship individually from their homes, iPhone videos spliced together for broadcast on Sunday morning. Thousands of brass players and singers lost income. Hundreds of thousands of volunteer choir members missed the high point of the season. And thousands of preachers delivered Resurrection messages via their laptop screens.

The New York Chautauqua Assembly was an adult education, entertainment, and social movement founded by 1874 for the purpose of bringing cultural experiences to rural communities. Started as a summer camp on the shore of Lake Chautauqua in western New York, it grew to have chapters across the country. President Theodore Roosevelt commented that the Chautauqua Assembly was the most American thing in America. In the June 1883 issue of the journal, The Chautauquan, the question was posed, “If a tree fell on an island where there were no human beings, would there be any sound?” The essay went on to say, “No. Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion.” I am not smart enough to second guess such an august source of philosophy, but my crude understanding of the science of noise is that sound is created by the vibration of air stimulated by some physical source and exists as sound waves that travel whether or not there is a receptor. That rhetorical question is reminiscent of Neils Bohr challenging Albert Einstein to prove there is a moon without looking at it.

Because of the widespread shutdown in response to COVID-19, we are learning a lot about working empty rooms. Late-night television hosts are trying to get big laughs while sitting in their living rooms. Symphony orchestras are presenting live broadcast concerts in empty halls. And we hear the peace and word of the Lord by way of a MacBook Pro, a church’s organist leading Zoom worship from his piano at home. All performing artists know that audience reaction is palpable. When you are playing before an enthusiastic crowd, you can feel the excitement, even if you are sitting with your back to them, buried behind a massive Rückpositiv case. Many of my performing friends have identified this as a challenge during recording sessions. Does your performance sound, feel, and project differently when the audience is absent? How do you get that fire in your belly when playing for a few recording engineers and a roomful of microphones? Part of the magic of public worship is sharing the experience with the people around you, both old friends and strangers.

I love the notion that congregational singing led by a pipe organ is a physiological phenomenon in which all the producers of tone are using the same body of air as fuel. What the singers exhale goes into the blower intake, and a great circle is established. That is not happening on Zoom.

Alternative worship

This phrase brings fear into the hearts of many organists, conjuring up images of guitars, drum sets, and songs with four notes, four chords, four lines, four stanzas, and four tuned strings. Several years ago, I was assembling the restored tracker action of a nineteenth-century organ, working toward an Easter deadline. The church’s contemporary ensemble needed to practice, and I needed the time, so we agreed that I would just keep working quietly inside the organ while they rehearsed. One thing was certain: they needed to practice. Another thing was certain: it didn’t help. Their rehearsal technique was to barge through a song four or five times compounding the mistakes and slapping each other on the back as if they had just finished their set at Woodstock.

But alternative worship can mean many different things. A little over twenty years ago, I was working on a project on the campus of UCLA and staying in a twenty-room hotel on campus that was operated by students in the hotel management school. The icy phone calls during which my first wife and I were separated happened when I was in that room. It was not a fun time.

I was interested in hearing and seeing the mammoth organ at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles and planned to attend worship there on Sunday, but I was on Eastern time and woke up at three in the morning. Organ preludes would start at 10:30 a.m., so I figured I had plenty of time for a drive up the coast, thinking that some wind off the ocean would ease the darkness I was feeling. I do not remember just where I wound up. A glance at a map suggests it must have been somewhere between Ventura and Santa Barbara where I noticed a group of at least fifty people gathered on a bluff staring at the ocean with binoculars. I was curious—what would bring so many people together so early in the morning—so I parked my car and walked toward the group.

Someone welcomed me in and explained what was going on. The Los Angeles Chapter of the American Cetacean Society was counting migrating whales. There were tables set up with coffee and pastries. The people with binoculars were shouting out numbers while people with clipboards were recording them. There was a strong sense of comradery driven by a common purpose, and I quickly abandoned my plan of going to church. Standing by the ocean with a group of friendly people watching the glory of creation swim by was worshipful enough for me that day, lifting my spirits and clearing the mess from between my ears.

That singular Easter has just passed. We are all learning new ways to worship. Facebook is often a wormhole of self-satisfaction. I am not interested in your haircut or your magnificent meal. But I sure am interested in the dozens of posts I have read from colleagues sharing what it was like to participate in virtual Easter. Some showed clips of people dressed casually, leading a hymn from the piano in their living room, shifting to a pastor sitting at a desk leaning earnestly toward the screen speaking of the Resurrection “in this unusual time.” Others showed elaborately vested social-distancing priests at a high altar festooned with lilies, beeswax candles afire, a group of singers standing six feet apart, and the organist raising the dead with blazing trumpets.

Our rector in New York City spoke of taking a walk in abandoned lower Manhattan and seeing a small fleet of refrigerated trucks serving as temporary morgues behind a neighboring hospital. Realizing what they were and struck by the tragic loneliness of the scene, he stopped and offered a blessing. How’s that for an Easter message?

Resiliency

In the relative safety and serenity of our place in Maine, we have had two dramatic weather events in the last few days. In the afternoon of Holy Thursday, the wind came up, heavy rain turned to far heavier snow, the power went out, the generator came on, and the storm whipped through the night. On Good Friday, we woke to six inches of white wet glop, nearly impossible to walk on. Lichen-encrusted branches had fallen everywhere, and walking a few dozen yards up the driveway with a dog was like running a gauntlet with snow and debris falling from trees every few steps. The driveway is a half-mile long. It was grocery day, and I was planning to go to town. I put a saw in the car and spent a couple hours moving stuff off the road into the ditches.

The power was out all day, through Friday night, through Saturday night, and into Sunday afternoon, coming back on just as hundreds of colleagues would be launching into “the Widor” across the country. The head of our driveway is four miles down a rural road from the village, and the power lines snake through a maze of branches. There was a heavy ice storm shortly after we moved in the winter of 2001, and the power was out for nearly a week. That was when we installed the generator, and it has been a trusted part of the household since.

On Easter Monday, the rain started again, and the wind whipped up to gale force. The temperature was mild so there was no snow, but that storm stood out for the velocity and ferocity of the wind. The trees along the shore at the bottom of the yard were whipping wildly back and forth. After dinner I sat on the deck in the lee of the storm watching the crazy motion in the darkness and listening to the roar of the wind when it stopped. It did not lessen and die down. It just stopped. The roar became silence. The next morning, we confirmed that nothing new had fallen in the yard or on the driveway. After all that whipping about, no trees had fallen. Such resilience. Such strength. Such stability. A metaphor for facing life today.

In the 1964 film Mary Poppins, George Banks (played by David Tomlinson) works for the Dawes Tomes Mously Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. He is the father of Jane and Michael, husband of Winifred, and Mary Poppins’s employer. He is a man of rigid routine. Early in the film, arriving home from the office, he sings:

I feel a surge of deep satisfaction

Much as a king astride his noble steed.

When I return from daily strife to hearth and wife,

How pleasant is the life I lead . . . .

. . .  I run my home precisely on schedule.

At 6:01, I march through my door.

My slippers, sherry, and pipe are due at 6:02,

Consistent is the life I lead.

The trouble is that while he is singing, Winifred is trying to interrupt to tell him the children are missing.

I can hear Wendy snickering. Cocktails here are at six-oh-oh. Dinner at eight-oh-oh. The routine is regular enough that Farley the Goldendoodle can tell time. “Paws up” on the bed at 6:30 in the morning. (That is the only time he ever gets on furniture.) A couple minutes before cocktails, he is sitting watching me. He gets an ice cube or two when I am fixing drinks and a dental “chewy” when we sit down with them. He depends on that routine as much as I do. We have laughed about it many times. Sometimes wryly.

But consistent no more. Our daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter who live in Brooklyn, New York, came to Maine with us—and their dog. Remembering those refrigerated trucks, we are glad we can offer them shelter from the ravages of the city. We are four adults, a toddler, and two dogs, and the quiet, comfortable routine of two empty nesters is on sabbatical, if not just gone. We are five weeks into it now, and I have had some tough moments adjusting. But think of our Brooklynites. At least we are at home. We have lived in this house for almost twenty years, the longest either of us have lived in one place. We have clothes in the closets, unread books on the nightstands, extra toothbrushes in the drawers in the bathroom. It is familiar. They have left their home behind, all their daily routines, and all their stuff. We are coming up with new common daily rhythms, and the great news is that we are getting more time with our granddaughter than we could have imagined.

The new normal

I wonder when things will go back to normal. I wonder what the “new normal” will be. We were living in an unusual time before the start of the pandemic. Yesterday, CBS News reported that this is the first March since 2002 without a school shooting in the United States. Why? Simple. Schools are closed. Every significant arts organization in the country is closed. Thousands of orchestral musicians, actors, stagehands, ushers, and administrators are out of work. When the Metropolitan Opera laid off its entire staff with pay ending on March 31, I wondered if that fantastic assembly of talented skilled people could ever be gathered together again? But it is not as if disgruntled, they would take other jobs. There are no other jobs.

I can imagine sitting down again with trusted friends for a drink or a meal, maybe not so long from now. I can imagine taking an unessential drive to a park for a picnic. I can even imagine booking a hotel room and working on a job away from home. But knowing how I feel when I have to walk past an unmasked stranger in a grocery aisle, I cannot imagine walking through a foyer into a crowded theater or concert hall, exposing myself and those I love to whatever foolish indiscretion a seatmate might have committed. I assume I will go to a concert again, but I cannot imagine it yet. A vaccination against COVID-19 must be the greatest brass ring for medical research since polio.

The community of the church choir has always been a source of recreation and spiritual enhancement. In a video interview produced by the publisher J. W. Pepper in 2015, composer and conductor John Rutter says, “. . . choral music is not one of life’s frills. It is something that goes to the very heart of our humanity, our sense of community, and our souls.”1 I first sang in a children’s choir in 1966 when I was ten years old. I have vivid memories from a few years later of using my new grown-up voice as a member of the adult choir singing Bach’s Cantata 140. (Va-ha-ke-het auf, Va-ha-ke-het auf, Va-ha-ke-het auf—two, three, one—ruft die Stimme!) I trust that future generations will have similar thrills, knowing the joy of singing closely with others.

In this column in the May 2017 issue of The Diapason, I wrote under the title, “Music in terrible times.” Wendy and I had just heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra play Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. I started that essay with Leonard Bernstein’s famous quote from the Vietnam era: “This will be our response to violence: to make music more intensively, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” I wrote of the siege of Leningrad in which more than a million people died, a battle that inspired Shostakovich’s masterpiece. I wrote of the bombing of Coventry, England, in 1940 from which came Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. I wrote of Stalag VIIIA where Olivier Messiaen was a prisoner of war and a sympathetic guard provided him with pencil and paper, allowing him to create Quartet for the End of Time.

Those great masterpieces are all the expressions of creative geniuses responding to vast human crises. The people who lived those days must have wondered if it would ever end. And horrible as they were, they all did end. Many people suffered, many people died, families were destroyed, and dreams were shattered. I trust that we will see each other at the symphony again. We will go to the theater again. We will go to ball games again. We will go sailing again. For now, we have to stay strong, take care of the people we love, and nourish the creativity within.

Now go practice while you have a chance.

Notes

1. You can see the interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-Pm1FYZ-U.

Photo: John Cantrell, choirmaster and organist, St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, New York, New York. John records rehearsal tracks for choir members, they practice and send in their videos, and he mixes them into a virtual choir, adds readings recorded by parishioners at home, sermon, and voilà! (Photo credit: Kathleen Cantrell)

An interview with John Rutter

Lorraine S. Brugh

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

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

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

Lorraine Brugh: No, I never did.

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

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

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

LB: There will be others who join you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB: I imagine they were pretty gracious about that.

JR: I think they were.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB: So I shouldn’t ask about it?

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

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

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

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

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

LB: What an environment to live in!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB: Would you like that kind of invitation?

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

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

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

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

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

LB: Did you conduct it?

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

LB: You were holding your breath?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

In the Wind . . .

John Bishop
Amphitheater

Photo caption: The amphitheater at Epidaurus (photo credit: Carole Raddato, used through the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)

A break in the action

Last night, my wife Wendy and I watched the American Masters documentary, “Where Now Is,” about Michael Tilson Thomas, widely known as MTT, who recently retired as music director of the San Francisco Symphony. His tenure in San Francisco spanned nearly twenty-five years during which the orchestra grew in stature and popularity. I admire how a brilliant conductor can build an orchestra over time, nurturing the musicianship of the individual players and the strength of the ensemble. I consider the symphony orchestra to be one of the greatest achievements of human culture. It amazes me that all those musicians, each an accomplished soloist with the requisite ego, can come together on a hundred-foot stage and perform with such precision of ensemble.

MTT had a dramatic conducting debut at a very young age. On October 22, 1969, William Steinberg was conducting a concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, opening the program with Brahms’s Second Symphony during which he fell ill. At the end of the piece, Steinberg left the stage, found MTT, assistant conductor of the BSO, said something like, “Put on a suit. You’re going to conduct,” and was taken to Roosevelt Hospital. 

The following morning, Harold Schoenberg of The New York Times reported, “Young Mr. Thomas, 24 years old, had his golden opportunity and made the most of it. He conducted Robert Starer’s Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra, and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel with an air of immense confidence and authority and showed that his confidence was not misplaced.” (Leonard Bernstein had a similar sudden debut. He was twenty-five when he filled in for the ailing Bruno Walter at the last minute, conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.)

MTT’s precocious brilliance kick-started his storied career as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and principal conductor of the London Philharmonic before going to San Francisco. Perhaps his crowning achievement is the creation of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida. Founded in 1987, the New World Symphony is an orchestral academy whose mission statement is “to prepare highly gifted graduates of distinguished music programs for leadership roles in ensembles and orchestras around the world.” 

I was especially moved to watch MTT in private coaching sessions with the young musicians of the New World Symphony, as well as his rehearsal techniques with the full orchestra. Wendy and I commented to each other that he was always smiling. Of course, the editor of the film may have had some control over that, moments of ill temper left on the cutting room floor, but I don’t think so.

Frank Gehry was the principal architect for the spectacular New World Center, home of the New World Symphony, opened in Miami Beach in 2011. Hilariously, it was noted that Gehry was MTT’s babysitter when both were growing up in Los Angeles. 

Watching that film was bittersweet. It has been more than a year since we sat in a concert hall to hear an orchestra perform. The last live performance Wendy and I saw together was a disappointing new opera, four days before she left the city for our exile in Maine. (I followed her four days later.) MTT’s enthusiasm and that of the many colleagues we saw in orchestras and in separate interviews was infectious and a poignant reminder of all that we have lost in the last year. As I remember our life in the city, I think of the many thrilling plays, musicals, and concerts we have seen. I think of the stagehands, ushers, electricians, carpenters, costume designers, and actors whose livelihood vanished overnight. A quick look at my calendar shows that I had dinner with a colleague in a posh restaurant in lower Manhattan on Thursday, March 12, 2020, the same day that forty-two Broadway theaters, countless off-Broadway venues, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and many other cultural venues closed. It first seemed that those places would reopen in a few weeks, but that was not to be.

Weathering the storm

In the December 2015 issue of The Diapason, I wrote of our first visit with our grandson Samuel, four days after his birth. In that essay, I wondered what life would bring him, I looked forward to being able to share cultural experiences with him and his older brother Benjamin, and I wondered what their educations would be like. I remembered the goitered and aptly named Mrs. Louden who taught music in the public schools when I was a kid, making twice-a-week visits to each classroom, braying simple songs. She drew staves on the blackboard with that cool five-gang chalk holder and taught us musical notation. “Every good boy deserves fudge,” but come to think of it, I do not remember what the girls got. I don’t think that is going to happen for them in public school.

As I thought about that precious young life, I could not have imagined that he’d spend his fifth birthday on lockdown, or that Chris would take leave from his job as a high school teacher, develop a curriculum for approval by the school principal, and home-school his sons so they would not have to spend all of Covid-tide glued to screens. I could not have imagined that they would have to be isolated from their friends, many of whom they can see from the windows of their condominium apartment or learn to wear masks whenever they leave their home.

I wonder what it will be like for them when the coast is clear and they can re-socialize. Will they experience growing pains as they reconnect with their pals? Will it be hard for them to return to classroom learning? We all wonder together what the “new normal” will be, even as we look forward to returning to a former life.

Rusty

On February 3, 2021, Gregory Wallace and Pete Muntean reported on CNN that airline pilots who had been idled by reduced air travel during the pandemic are finding that they are rusty when they return to the air and making errors managing their aircraft. Early in their article they wrote, “‘This was my first flight in nearly three months,’ one pilot wrote in a June report explaining why he or she neglected to turn on the critical anti-icing system. ‘I placed too much confidence in assuming it would all come back to me as second nature.’” A few paragraphs down, there was a bold heading, “Boy, was I wrong!”

Watching MTT lead rehearsals had me wondering what it will take to rebuild musical ensembles when the spread of the virus is contained. A symphony orchestra becomes great because its members play together all the time. They are in rehearsal and concerts five or six days a week, and they learn the musical intuitions as well as the quirks and habits of their fellow musicians. A violinist might think to herself, “He’s going to flub that note at the page-turn,” and compensate subconsciously. A second clarinet is inspired by the principal to stretch that phrase just a touch. How much rejuvenation will it take to rebuild the intimate ensemble, that greatest of collegial achievements? Musicians often refer to a sloppy performance as a “train wreck.” I hope “plane crash” does not become part of that lexicon.

Will a rusty theater electrician fail to tighten a bolt allowing a light to fall during a play?1 Will actors and dancers step on each other’s toes? Will they have crises of confidence? Performance is a tricky thing that blends pedagogy, intuition, memory, expression, and confidence. Remember Harold Schoenberg writing that MTT conducted with “an air of immense confidence and authority and showed that his confidence was not misplaced.” I love that his confidence was not misplaced. Any performer knows exactly what that means and so do astute listeners, as in, “He had no business being that sure of himself.” I know I have played concerts during which my confidence was misplaced.

§

Human creativity reached a zenith in the last centuries before the birth of Christ. The marvelous architecture of ancient Rome and Greece, the literature of Sophocles and Euripides, and the mathematical understanding of Archimedes and Euclid all bear witness to the genius of that age. And don’t forget my hero Pythagoras (570 BC–495 BC) who discovered the musical overtone series, defined musical intervals, and developed systems of tuning.

The Sacred Triangle of Greece comprises the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the Temple of Athena Parthenos (the Parthenon) in Athens, and the Temple of Athena Aphaia on the island of Aegina. The three sites were built within a few years of each other around 500 BC and form a perfect isosceles triangle, a hundred miles on each side. How did they plot that triangle when one leg crosses mountains and the other two cross bodies of water? Celestial navigation was first practiced by the Phoenecians around 2000 BC, and in the second century BC, Hipparchus, a Greek astronomer, developed the concept of longitude, assuming a spherical earth and dividing it into 360 degrees.

Several years ago, visiting our daughter’s in-laws in Athens, Greece, her father-in-law Christos, an architect, took us to visit the Sanctuary of Asklepios, the god of medicine, at Epidaurus, about ninety miles from Athens. We have probably visited a dozen Greek amphitheaters, but the one at Epidaurus, built in the fourth century BC and seating 14,000, takes the cake. The immense structure is a section of a perfect sphere that produces whispering acoustics in a vast space and has remained perfectly level for over two thousand years. How did they do that without a laser-level? How did they know the ground would be that stable for millennia? How did they plot that perfect sphere?

Christos told how he worked for a large architectural firm that held retreats at that site, when the head of the firm posed the rhetorical question, “Who was the bastard who burned the library at Alexandria?” That library was a depository of human knowledge recorded in hundreds of thousands of scrolls, estimated to be the equivalent of 100,000 books. Its destruction was part of the decline of intellectual activity that led to the Dark Ages, which ran roughly from 700 AD until the thirteenth century. It was a time of ignorance and war, and as populations increased faster than medical care developed, the era was rife with disease and pandemics such as the Black Death.

Humankind broke out of the Dark Ages into a time of explosive creativity. In the world of music, we remember the remarkable pipe organ in Sion, Switzerland (approximately 1390), Guillame DuFay (1397–1474), Johannes Ockeghem (died 1497), and Josquin des Prez (died 1521). Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) had a lot to say in the arts and sciences, Titian (1490–1576) and Michelangelo (1475–1564) brought the visual arts to dizzying heights. 

§

Our year of pandemic is a hiccup compared to the Dark Ages, but just as the Renaissance bloomed out of despair, I think we are going to see an explosion of creativity when orchestras can return to the stage and rehearsal room, when theaters can open and host dramatic expression, when museums can welcome in crowds hungry to learn, and when we can gather with friends before or after a concert to revel in the thrill of creativity and the thrall of our lasting companionship.

While Facebook is full of flaws and has certainly made it easy for people to stir up trouble, I have loved witnessing the “creativity in exile” of many friends and colleagues. People have been sharing their Covid-tide projects, learning new literature, writing new music, finding ways to create ensembles online, all to keep the arts alive. I have seen performances of Bach cantatas on Zoom that project the intimacy of musical relationships and love of the music. If those great pieces can be brought alive remotely, I cannot wait to hear how musicians interact when they can gather in person again.

I have been thinking especially about church choirs. In my days as a church musician, choir night was a highlight of the week. Thinking of my own workload and availability of volunteer time, I appreciated the ability of people to carve out that time. Many of the members of choirs I led had young children, so their participation depended on the willingness of a spouse to be at home making supper, supervising homework, and making sure the kids got cleaned up and to bed on time. And each Thursday evening, as many as a dozen choir members came to our house for BYOB after rehearsal, singing around the piano, ordering pizza, building a loving social group as part of their volunteer service to their church.

Those deep and lasting friendships had everything to do with the quality of their music making. Chatting about the music over drinks after a rehearsal is a big part of ensemble building, as are shared visions, shared life experiences, shared opinions, and shared jokes. A choir that can laugh together sings better together. I remember an evening when we were working on a particularly difficult passage in William Byrd’s five-part (with two tenors) setting of Ave, Maria, when in frustration, one of the tenors burst out with “Oy vey, Maria,” and the choir fell into the kind of unstoppable laughter that makes your eyes water and your belly hurt. It took a few more readings of the piece before we could pass that measure without cracking up, but the performance was the richer for it.

Tens of thousands of devoted choir members are missing all that these days. I encourage those of you who lead choirs to be nurturing your groups, maintaining those social and musical relationships in any way possible, and helping the volunteers to look forward to returning to the marvelous work of making music for the church. Won’t it be great to see the vested choir waiting at the back of the church as you start that processional hymn with a room full of people?

It’s not a train.

There’s a glimmer at the end of the tunnel. Vaccines are spreading across the globe, and they are proving to be effective. While most large cultural institutions are still closed or operating with significantly reduced schedules and capacities, there is a sense that we may be over the hump. I know I am eager to get back on the road and resume my former pattern of visiting the organs that I am dealing with. As I correspond with so many of you, I am longing for the time when I can call and say, “I’ll be in town next week, can we meet?” And I am looking forward to witnessing the celebrations as orchestras get back to work and our beloved church choirs can be free to have their fun. Be sure you’re ready, and when the time comes, give it all you’ve got.

Notes

1. I was once sitting in a concert hall with my first wife, waiting for a friend’s voice recital to start, when a heavy stage light crashed in front of the piano, right where the singer would have stood. The falling light was enough to cancel the concert. This was when my children were young, and we got home far earlier than expected to find the babysitter on the couch making out with her boyfriend. “Hi, this is Jimmie.”

Harpsichord Notes

Larry Palmer
Default

Giving thanks from A to Z

As I near my eighty-first birthday on November 13, I have been thinking nostalgically about the palindromic symmetry of 18 and 81 and wondering how I could write something of interest using those numbers. Searching through many composer biographies, I found only one major figure who was born in 1881 (Béla Bartók) and another who died in that year (Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens), so I decided instead to give thanks to so many friends, mentors, and helpful teachers who have made both the personal and professional experiences not only possible, but most often awesome and exciting. Immediately, although in reversed alphabetical order, the first two are women of great talent and extraordinary teaching abilities who began the template: my first outstanding organ teacher, Mabel Zehner, and the person who kindled my love for the harpsichord, Isolde Ahlgrimm.

In the prelude chapter to my 2006 book Letters from Salzburg, I wrote the story of my childhood insistence on studying piano while my Presbyterian minister father was serving as pastor of a small church in Corsica, Pennsylvania. It took the hiring of a neighbor girl to give me several lessons before my parents gave in and enrolled me in the piano studio of Erma Bowdish in nearby Brookville. In the chapter I continued:

A reed organ at church, a clarinet at school, a move to Crestline in central Ohio where the church had an 1890s Jesse Woodbury pipe organ; a change from clarinet to oboe, continuing piano lessons with my high school music teacher Lucille Pennington—all this dovetailed with a high school career that included a switch to the oboe, participation in orchestra, concert and marching bands as well as choir, many student government positions, three years as class president, and graduation in 1956 as the class valedictorian. Much of the academic success was due to the superb faculty of Crestline High School. I learned so much from two maiden ladies, Elizabeth O’Leary (penmanship and English composition) and Faye Griebling (Latin), the latter going so far as to agree to tutor another student and me in a two-person third-year class, which helped to broaden our foreign language experience since the school did not offer any contemporary European linguistic study.

During that final year in high school, at last in possession of a driver’s license, it became possible for this young musician to study organ with an expert teacher, Mabel Zehner of Ashland College, thirty miles away. Her kind tutelage prepared the young student for admission to Oberlin Conservatory and its large organ department. For two years I worked with a strict, authoritarian teacher, Leo Holden, who required me to develop a solid technique that would serve quite well. I sang in the 180-voice choir of First Church in Oberlin (Congregational), conducted by Oberlin’s director of choral activities, Robert Fountain. I learned much from Oberlin’s distinguished faculty, especially from virtuoso theory teacher Robert Melcher and from Oberlin graduate and visiting professor of music history, Janet Knapp. And, after two years “with Holden,” I requested a change of teachers and finally joined the studio of Fenner Douglass, whose knowledge of historical styles and repertoire and advocacy of mechanical-action organs meshed more nearly with my own interests.

Another hallmark of my life seems to be the good fortune of being at the right place at the right time: perhaps that was why I was so anxious to make my debut that I surprised both mother and father by arriving six weeks ahead of schedule (born on a Sunday morning, I often wonder what my dad’s sermon must have been like that day!). Calvin Hampton and I were the youngest members of the organ department’s 1956 incoming freshman class, and I also wondered if we were so compatible because, had I waited until the later date, we would probably have been born on the same day, December 31.

At any rate eighty-eight members of the music department were informed at the end of that first Oberlin year that we would all be studying for our entire junior year at the Salzburg Mozarteum. No third-year music classes would be offered at the Conservatory during the 1958–1959 academic year. And so it was that letter number 17 from Austria informed my parents:

18 November 1958

This morning I first met Frau Isolde Ahlgrimm, a person who will be, I think, quite important in my musical life [an understatement if ever there was one!]. Frau Ahlgrimm is my new harpsichord teacher, and here, as with Mr. Douglass last summer, I have a teacher in whom I can fully believe and whose musical ideas I can fully respect. She is absolutely fabulous! . . . I had my first lesson from 4 till 5:30 this afternoon, and we are beginning with some very early English music and through this will study English ornamentation, then go on to early German and early French music. Since I have always wanted to study harpsichord [since first hearing Wanda Landowska’s first vinyl recordings that I was permitted to borrow from the Crestline Public Library, generously allowed by my dear friend and supporter, the town librarian Marie Welshon, another major helper in my musical development] . . . I think it a real privilege to have such a good teacher here. She has just been hired, lives in Vienna, and comes here three days a week. She has quite a reputation in Europe, I understand.

A citizen of the world

The Salzburg year was a tremendous success for most of us. But, as I have come to realize, successes do not always please every faction. Despite a student approval rating of more than 90% during the six years of Oberlin’s “Salzburg Program” the faculty in Ohio was not so happy with the student results, and after six seasons they voted to end the program. True, we were probably not as disciplined in our memorizations, and we had less practice time and fewer facilities for practicing, but the wonderful things we learned about music and life completely changed the entire trajectory of many of our future activities. And the sheer joy of making music in rooms where our beloved composers had spent time—Oberlin, at least in the late 1950s, could not quite measure up in that department.

For my senior year back on campus I had the honor of being selected as the “roomer” in the house of Intellectual History Professor Frederick Artz. And it was particularly a good fit because I could get to my church organ job by climbing over the hedge to First Church and its early twentieth-century Skinner pipe organ. Yes, I had been offered the job of organist for Robert Fountain. Little did I know how much this would influence my first two teaching positions! But more of that later.

Most immediately to this saga I received a phone call from Professor Douglass one fall morning at church, “Would you like to audition for Eugene Selhorst from the Eastman School of Music, an institution that was about to launch a doctoral program in church music?” Of course, I said yes, especially since my father had made it clear that, after their generous support for my Oberlin years I would have to finance the rest of my education myself. Long story made short, I, along with two other Oberlin students, received the full tuition and stipend grants financed by the United States government to help develop new academic programs. Shortly after looking at a New York City possibility, Union Theological Seminary’s well-known sacred music degrees, and learning that scholarships were tiny and not easy to come by, my next three years might not only be paid for, but there it could be that money would not be a problem.

And so it was that after a glorious, if frantic, senior year on the Ohio campus I joined the wonderful ambiance of the Eastman School, which offered an additional waiver of tuition fees since I was the graduate assistant for the head of the new Master of Music/Doctor of Musical Arts church music program, M. Alfred Bichsel, a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor, choral conductor, and linguist of exceptional intellect and extreme kindness. So followed my single year to the Master of Music with a thesis recital of works by Sweelinck, and, at Dr. Bichsel’s suggestion, the project that became my calling card to so many venues for recitals and lectures: the first-ever book-length biography of the German composer Hugo Distler, a study even mentioned in William Austin’s Norton History tome Music in the 20th Century, even before my work was published by Concordia Publishing House.

With extra resources galore, I was able to keep my promise to my parents and take them to “my” Europe for their wedding anniversary, particularly since I needed to do onsite research about my thesis subject and even got to interview the composer’s widow Waltraut Distler. Back in Germany I was able to go to Lübeck to visit the Distler Archive, and my parents were able to meet, in Passau, the builder of my first harpsichord—Kurt Sperrhake, whose small two-manual harpsichord arrived during my senior year at Oberlin (via the St. Lawrence Seaway) and was promptly ensconced in the side gallery of First Church during that year (where it was much easier to get to than its snug, just-barely-movable perch in my third floor small room at 20 Sibley Place in Rochester). (I still shudder when I remember my uncle, who helped move the larger major things to the “north land” and who nearly got his neck caught between the wall and a railing as he aided us in moving it to the lofty height.) Needless to say, it did not leave that room until three years (and two degrees) later—and several of my most difficult experiences turned out to be the occasional private harpsichord recital that could accommodate twenty people (if they would stand up and not breathe too deeply).

Especially memorable was just such a program that occurred when Isolde Ahlgrimm was brought to Eastman for other concerts and masterclasses. The music history department was filled with my friends, both faculty and students, and when they asked me whom to bring for Baroque music I was delighted to suggest my wonderful Austrian teacher, who was, that year, spending time at Oberlin as visiting professor. As she was wont to do, Ahlgrimm played the complete Well-Tempered Clavier preludes and fugues—but the most difficult thing for me was trying not to snub anyone who wanted to attend the program, but—it was a very tight and fairly long evening. But what playing . . .

It was at Eastman that I was able to commission my second organ piece (the first one had been a short offertory for my summer church job in Canton, Ohio, during the Oberlin days when I asked Calvin Hampton to compose something for a broadcast service). Since one of my topics in graduate study was Gregorian chant I had developed a program based on the Kyrie fons Bonitatis and was having trouble finding a contemporary work. The very young first-year student Neely Bruce endeared himself to me when he tapped me on the shoulder and asked where Dr. Bitchell’s office might be since he would like to audition for the Sacred Music Choir. When I stopped laughing I told him to be sure to say Bichsel, not Bitchell. Neely became a dear friend and after he left Eastman to return to Tuscaloosa for further study, he surprised the music rack of my Sperrhake with the first example of a newly composed harpsichord work specifically for me, his Nine Variations on an Original Theme—still a gem that I love to play.

Organ study with David Craighead was also a great joy and, even though I had only a Hammond organ to play at the nearby Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word (a new edifice awaiting its already ordered Walter Holtkamp pipe organ), but even with the electronic instrument I was able to give the first Rochester performances of Distler’s A Little Advent Music and Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb. I was honored when offered an extension of my contract when it came time for graduation and a full-time job.

But the salary was not a living wage, and I was tired of the Arctic winters, so when I was offered a chance to fill a sabbatical leave vacancy at the African-American St. Paul’s College in Lawrenceville, Virginia, I accepted it happily. Those years of the earliest (and sometimes violent) Civil Rights events and the murders of so many great figures marked a most eventful time in our history. I was very happy to be organist and choral director, although once again that meant an electronic organ, but the friendships and the sheer joy of making beautiful music with my young singers continues to provide many happy memories.

And St. Paul’s was not that far from Norfolk, where I had heard that there might be an opening at Norfolk State College, the African-American state school in the city that also had Old Dominion College for the paler folk. And there it was that on my first day at the college I received a call from Lyman Beecher Brooks, the college president. Dr. Brooks was a very good administrator and, as the newest member of the faculty (having been hired to teach organ and start an early music program), I could not turn down his request: “The conductor of the choir has wrenched his back and is not able to rehearse them for the opening convocation. Would you be able to take over the rehearsal later this afternoon?” That was the prelude to some of the happiest times of my teaching career.

The choir was second only to the basketball team for the school, and, to finish my story, at the end of that first rehearsal I said to the choristers, “Take your music with you and come back tomorrow with it memorized.” They were good, but undisciplined, and to make a longer story short, they hit the ball out of its lower bounds and apparently made a hit with the audience. Brooks never gave the choir back to its former conductor and I had five exciting years of touring with them and of planning wonderful events including opportunities for them to sing at Oberlin, Wagner College, Westminster Choir College, churches in Washington D.C., etc. In my final year at NSC we took the Penderecki Stabat Mater on tour and Oberlin’s Robert Fountain had only the highest compliments. And it was with this group of stalwart singers and beautiful human beings that we joined Duke Ellington’s sacred music program in the Tidewater city of Portsmouth—one of the highest of high points in my lifetime of joy in making music.

It was during the 1960s decade that I submitted my first offering to The Diapason—a short biography of Hugo Distler. And thus it was in 1969 that Editor Frank Cunkle, who succeeded the magazine’s founder, turned over the harpsichord column to me.

To be continued.

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