In the Wind: Basso continuo

Someone had to do the dishes.

Wendy and I are empty nesters with four grown children between us, three of whom have families with children—our sixth grandchild is due in February. One of those families, with girls ages one and five, was with us last weekend for a rollicking visit. After a raucous and hilarious dinner, the evening before they left (grandpa’s grilled chicken legs with Za’atar were a big hit), mother, father, and grandmother went upstairs to supervise bath time, while I tackled the dishes. I connected my iPad to the Bluetooth speaker in the kitchen and started a favorite recording of mine, Joan Lippincott playing Bach sinfonias with orchestra (Gothic Records) on the beautiful organ with two manuals and twenty-nine stops built by Paul Fritts & Company (Opus 20) in the chapel of Princeton Theological Seminary. Joan presents a variety of Johann Sebastian Bach’s (1685–1750) instrumental movements with organ obbligato and orchestra imaginatively arranged into three-movement concertos.

The cheerful music filled the room as I loaded the dishwasher and packed leftovers (there would be a great lunch the next day), and I marveled anew at the mystery that is our music. These pieces were all written in Leipzig in 1726. Bach was in his early forties and at the top of his game, composing, arranging, rehearsing, and performing a new cantata every week. He played the elaborate organ parts on the three-manual organs in the churches of Saint Thomas and Saint Nicholas in Leipzig, miracle instruments that were the most complex devices of their day.

Organbuilders make intricate charts showing the math involved in making organ pipes with diameters halving at something like every seventeen notes resulting in parabolic lines of the tops of the pipes—all that mathematical precision was developed by Bach’s organbuilders and those who preceded them over the centuries. Eighteenth-century craftsmen made the grids for slider windchests, keyboards, casework, stop actions, key actions, and hand-pumped wind systems using hand tools to transform trees into the intricate and precise pieces and parts that make up any pipe organ. We marvel at all that today, the brilliant sounds and sophisticated tuning systems of instruments made with modern power tools. Bach played on organs with 16′ choruses, complex mixtures, and colorful reeds. The longest days for the people pumping the organ bellows must have been when the tuners were at work. It takes hours to tune a six- or seven-rank mixture with the stable and consistent air pressure from a modern organ blower. I can imagine the organ tuner in Leipzig in 1726 hollering at the pumping assistant to keep the pressure steady, hour after hour.

Put yourself in a pew as an eighteenth-century churchgoer, hearing the “world premiere” of a new Bach cantata every week. Maybe you recognized each as an astounding achievement, but maybe it never occurred to you that it was something special, that generations of succeeding musicians would admire and perform that music. Not to compare myself to Bach, but the oft-repeated comment in the narthex, “The music was great, as always,” seemed sometimes to ring a little false. Did parishioners at the Thomaskirche take their organist for granted?

We listen to performances and recordings of today’s finest players who set high standards of virtuosic musicianship. I wonder what Bach’s music sounded like as he played and conducted it. Were the violinists, oboists, bassoonists, and harpsichordists of Leipzig all brilliant players with pedagogy and techniques like what we are used to, or were they groups of local yokels aswim in the fantastic other-worldly, never-before-seen technical demands of the music of the local master?

Think of the coloratura fireworks of Bach’s Cantata 51, Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen. It is a lifetime achievement for a modern soprano to tackle and master that heap of notes. Was there a parishioner in Leipzig’s Thomaskirche who could toss it off? Maybe she had a couple kids who sang in the choir. I wonder if she had a day job. And do not forget the trumpet part in that piece—the high tessitura with patterns of repeated sixteenth notes to be played on a valveless eighteenth-century trumpet. Was that trumpet player a shopkeeper in real life? Maybe a cop, because he must have been able to whistle like crazy with that embouchure in his face.

There must have been local recognition that something special was going on. How else could the music produced by the local organist of a single church have been preserved and reproduced for the ages?

What were they really like?

Fifty years after Bach wrote those organ sinfonias, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s (1756–1791) creative genius was defining the identity of the recently invented fortepiano. His sonatas and concertos were central to the introduction of the instrument into the musical mainstream. Most of Mozart’s music was performed in private salons and small public halls—at the time of his death in 1796, there were not many concert halls with more than 500 seats. I wonder what those evenings were like. Were people smoking and drinking while Mozart played? Were they talking? Was the piano well in tune? Were servants milling about offering snacks? The 1984 movie Amadeus portrayed Mozart as bawdy, rude, even vulgar. Do we suppose this was based on fact or legend? He was destitute toward the end of his life. Did he show up to play in a fancy drawing room wearing torn and dirty clothes? Did he stuff his pockets with those snacks because he did not have food at home? Did people forgive his unpleasant mannerisms because his music was sublime?

A generation after Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) helped transform the piano into a larger-scale concert instrument. As his keyboard technique was growing, he demanded more from the instruments on which he played, breaking strings and grousing about weak tone, once complaining to a piano technician that the instrument “sounded like a harp.” Nannette Streicher (1769–1822) and her brother inherited their father’s piano factory, and while the brother ran the business office, Nannette reengineered their pianos to keep up with the expectations of the burgeoning virtuosity of the day.¹ Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785–1849) was reportedly the first artist to play lightning-fast passages of octaves in both hands, that technique that dazzles and confounds many organists. I can imagine the reaction of the piano technician witnessing that power on an early-nineteenth-century keyboard for the first time.

Nannette Streicher increased the range of the piano, adding octaves at each end of the keyboard. She increased the scale and tension of the strings, beefing up the internal structure to withstand the added pressure, and she developed a new form of keyboard action to propel the dampers toward the strings with greater force. She also built an 800-seat concert hall adjacent to the factory where Beethoven and other virtuosos performed, an important part of the passage from salon musicales toward what we know today as large public performances.

Nannette’s profound contributions to the development of the piano coincided with Beethoven’s advancing the art of playing and writing for the piano. I love imagining their interchanges. Did Beethoven visit her in the factory, looking over prototypes for new designs? It would have been fun to be a fly on the wall. Besides their professional relationship, Nannette was devoted to Beethoven personally, helping him organize his notoriously sloppy household and managing his scraggly finances. We read that he could be irascible, maybe nasty sometimes, but I suppose Nannette was patient and gentle with him. She was the epitome of the full-service piano technician, and she was a brilliant engineer in an age when women were seldom recognized for their professional acumen.

Warm in their PJs, and sent off to bed

Continuing with my after-dinner chores, I put on another of my favorite recordings, Camille Saint-Saëns’ (1835–1921) Second Piano Concerto in G Minor played by Jean-Philippe Collard with André Previn conducting. The second movement, “Allegro Scherzando,” gives insight into the witty, impish side of Saint-Saëns’ personality as it shifts back and forth between different themes and styles with moments of campy “boom-a-chick” rhythmic accompaniments. Remember, this is the guy who included a parody of pianists in Carnival of the Animals, poking fun at the drudgery of practicing scales. He plays another joke in Carnival, offering the nimble and subtle melodies of the “Scherzo” from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Berlioz’s Dance of the Sylphes to be tromped on by the elephantine double basses of the orchestra.

There is a wonderful photograph of Saint-Saëns wearing a voluptuous pair of pajamas, standing on an elaborate carpet and surrounded by ornate decorations, including a bronze statue on a table behind him—it looks as though it might be Rodin. (You can easily find the photo by googling “Saint-Saëns pajamas.”) He is looking sideways out of his eyes, maybe a little suspiciously, as if he is surprised to be caught in his PJs. In his memoir, Recollections (Belwin-Mills, 1972), organist Marcel Dupré shares a few anecdotes about his personal encounters with Saint-Saëns, remembering him as kind and gentle. Studying the many photos and listening to his music, I imagine him as a lot of fun. There is a twinkle in his eye and a twinkle to his music that suggests he knew a good joke when he heard one.

Thinking of the parishioner at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig and wondering if she took for granted the world-altering music she heard every week reminds me of an anecdote told by Clyde Holloway during his tenure as professor at Indiana University as he took a group of students on a study trip to Paris. While the students were in the thrall of Marcel Dupré’s (1886–1971) brilliant improvisation, dazzled by the thrill of it, he noticed a woman sitting in a corner pew with her hands covering her ears. Curious, he went to her and asked if the music was bothering her. “Yes, it’s horrible, and it’s like this every week.”

Bath time is over, and the grown-ups are back in the kitchen for a nightcap and some more chat before bed. I’ll turn the music down now, but it has been fun wondering about the lives and personalities of some of my musical heroes as I cleaned up after dinner. I continue reflecting on the magic that is music. The arranging of musical notes in a certain order, the creation of harmonies by stacking notes above each other, and the progression of harmonies that propel a piece of music toward its conclusion seem other-worldly. The wide variety of instruments we have developed over centuries allows us to bring music to reality in time and space. It is easy to be baffled by the complexity of the organ, but consider the violin, a pound of carefully shaped wood and tensioned strings that can fill a concert hall with sound. Whose idea was all that? We might pay $5,000,000 for a forty-ton organ ($125,000 a ton) while a high-end violin can cost $15,000,000 ($937,500 an ounce). Which is the better value?

I recall my idol, Pythagoras, passing by a blacksmith shop on the Greek Island of Samos around 400 BC, noticing extra tones in the sounds of the anvils, what we know as overtones. His observation led to harmony and melody and the limitless collection of musical timbres we treasure today. But it was flawed mortals­­—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, and Dupré—who imagined the music and wrote it down for us to bring back to life.

Well done, good and faithful servant

Brian Jones, long-time director of music and organist at Trinity Church, Copley Square in Boston, Massachusetts, and conductor of the Dedham (Massachusetts) Choral Society, passed away on November 17, 2023, from complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was eighty years old. When I was finishing high school, my father took me to meet Brian for advice about where I should continue my organ playing education. Brian was a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and that is where I went. I was seventeen and he was thirty.

Brian was appointed to his position at Trinity in 1984 and served there until 2004 when he received his appointment as Emeritus Director of Music and Organist. During his tenure, the Trinity Choir achieved national recognition through the release of five recordings including the fabulously successful Candlelight Carols that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and raised the annual Christmas carol service at Trinity to a “must go, standing room only” celebration.

Brian’s twenty-seven-year tenure with the Dedham Choral Society saw the group’s membership increase from twenty-five to 150 singers. Their venues advanced from local church sanctuaries to performances of works like Verdi’s Requiem with full orchestra in Boston’s Symphony Hall. His giant personality and infectious love of music drew people to choirs he led and concerts he presented.

I worked with Brian at Trinity as organ curator for more than ten years starting in 1987. A large part of that work was tuning from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. each Friday in preparation for the regular noontime organ recital. I would typically stay for the concert so I could join in the rollicking post-concert lunches at House of Siam, a superb Thai restaurant across Copley Square. Brian was the raconteur at those lunches, regaling the extended table with endless stories, sometimes bawdy, always hilarious. There were many scores of lunches, and I met countless brilliant and fascinating people. “Fridays at Trinity” was a rich education for me about the world of the organ, and Brian was the Dean, leading the laughter.

There were recording sessions scheduled for the wee hours to minimize the intrusion of city noises, and I was always present to correct short-term lapses in tuning or mechanical mishaps. One night, we were interrupted by an immense grating noise from outside just as Brian was starting a take. A machine with a toothed wheel twelve feet in diameter was gnawing a trench in Clarendon Street, and the recording engineer had enough cash in his pocket to convince the crew to keep quiet for the next hours.

The beautiful recording Carols for Choirs was originally produced in-house and was such a success that it would be rerecorded professionally for wider distribution. To make compact discs available for sale before the Christmas shopping season, the recording sessions were in July. It was horribly hot, and the sessions were in the middle of the night. The organ’s many reeds were built and voiced for sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, but as the church had no air conditioning, the sultry summer heat brought temperatures to the high nineties in the higher reaches of the organ, and it was not possible to raise the pitch of the reeds enough to match the pitch of the flues. Brian and I had some difficult conversations as I explained the permanent damage that might be caused to the historic, iconic organ pipes, and we experimented with altered registrations to find lovely sounds that were not compromised by the fractured off-season tuning. As the sessions progressed, I lay on the pews, dressed in shorts and t-shirt soaked with perspiration, listening to that superb choir singing the best music of Christmas in July, a treasured absurd memory in the life of an organ tuner.

In December of 2012 I brought a New York colleague to Boston to show him some of the city’s great organs, and we had dinner with Brian in a restaurant on Boylston Street. That afternoon I heard from my son that his wife had gone into labor with our first grandchild, and during the meal I received updates by text message. Ben was born as we were having our last sips as Brian shared stories about his grandchildren.

I am grateful to Brian for encouraging me to study at Oberlin, and I am grateful to him for all the shared experiences at Trinity Church. His friendship and influence were an important part of my appreciation and understanding of the music of the church, and his contributions to American church music seem endless. Rest well, good friend.

Notes

1. I wrote in more depth about Nannette Streicher in the February 2021 issue of The Diapason, pages 10–11. 

Thar she blows.

In the July 2023 issue of The Diapason, I shared that Wendy and I sold Kingfisher, the twenty-two-foot Marshall Catboat on whom we had more than ten seasons of special fun and adventure taking week-long cruises up and down the Maine coast, overnight sails to anchor in island coves or to friends’ houses for stayovers, and daysails with friends and family. Wendy and I worked hard with the decision because it meant giving up a special part of our lives, but we agreed to call it a wonderful chapter and move on to other things.

As it turns out, the summer of 2023 was a terrible time for sailing in Maine. People around here were joking that it had rained twice here this spring and summer, once for thirty-five days, and again for twenty-seven days. We sat watching the rain saying, “Sure am glad we don’t have a boat in the water this year.” And more profound, at least to me, in the last week of July I had surgery to repair torn rotator cuff muscles. An MRI showed two muscles separated from my shoulder, and the surgeon’s paperwork referred to a “massive tear.” My right shoulder started hurting last summer, and I know that handling the five-to-one mainsheet on Kingfisher had something to do with it.

I grew up singing a whimsical folk song based on a poem by Charles E. Carryl (1842–1920), set to music by Joseph B. Geoghegan (1816–1889). It was always close to the surface when we were sailing:
A capital ship for an ocean trip
Was “The Walloping Window Blind,”
No gale that blew dismayed her crew
Or troubled the captain’s mind.
The man at the wheel was taught to feel
Contempt for the wildest blow,
And it often appeared, when the
     weather had cleared,
That he’d been in his bunk below.

So, blow ye winds, heigh-ho,
a-sailing I will go.
I’ll stay no more on England’s shore,
so let the music play-ay-ay—
I’m off for the morning train
to cross the raging main,
I’m off to my love with a boxing glove
ten thousand miles away.
There are five more verses, each sillier than the last.

§

I am back at my desk, the fingers of my right hand poke out of the sling toward my laptop. I have recently had several conversations about large organ blowers with colleagues and clients, and I am thinking about organ wind. In July of 2021, Aug. Laukhuff GmbH, then the world’s largest supplier of pipe organ parts, went out of business. For many American organ builders, Laukhuff was the “go to” source for electric organ parts like slider motors, pallet pull-down magnets, drawknob motors, and keyboard contacts. Their catalog included thousands of widgets for building tracker actions like squares and roller arms, and Laukhuff was one of the most important sources of organ blowers.

Laukhuff blowers are found in hundreds of organs built or rebuilt in the last fifty years. They are quiet, reliable, and compact. Along with blowers built by the Swiss supplier Meidinger, they were a technological revolution. We are all familiar with the hulking subterranean roaring monsters that blow wind for organs built before 1950. I am not sure just when blowers started getting compact and quiet, but I am certain that the advances in the technology of fan blades that brought us jet engines and modern turbines are related. The legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier flying the Bell X-1 aircraft on October 14, 1947. It took a decade or two for that to translate into more efficient organ blowers, but I know they were ubiquitous by the time I got into the trade in the 1970s.

Organists from Praetorius to Dupré relied on human power to operate the bellows of their instruments. While playing the music of Buxtehude, Bach, and Mendelssohn, do we forget that those masters had to round up people to pump organ bellows to play even a single chord? Max Reger died in 1916, so we can assume he played organs with electric blowers later in his short life, but much of the grand, dense, complex organ music he wrote predated the electric organ blower.

Marcel Dupré wrote of a Sunday in 1919 when Claude Johnson, the chairman of Rolls-Royce, was visiting the organ loft at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. While Dupré was playing at full organ, the crew of pumpers fizzled out, and the wind supply died. Johnson quickly offered to donate an electric blower, telling Dupré to have the firm of Cavaillé-Coll draw up plans, but adding that they had better get permission from the cardinal archbishop since Johnson was an Anglican.

I have long loved and often written about the thought that Widor was organist at Saint-Sulpice in Paris from 1870 until 1933, and while I do not know the actual date, an electric blower must have been installed there around halfway through his tenure. Imagine playing that mighty organ for thirty-five years relying on human pumpers and climbing the stairs to the storied loft for the first time to flip a switch and play the organ alone. Remember that huge body of organ literature that are his ten symphonies were written before 1900. Twentieth-century organists have been able to take the luxury of unlimited, uninterrupted practice time for granted.

Blower hygiene

It is common to find modern high-speed blowers ensconced within an organ case, which is only possible because they operate so quietly, but the old-time machines are typically located in remote rooms in basements or towers because they are so noisy. Ideally, those rooms are kept locked so unknowing, unauthorized people cannot get in, which means they get dirty and fill up with spiderwebs and other signs of critter life. The air intake for a blower should have a particle filter to ensure that no debris gets sucked into the organ’s interior. Sometimes we find that mounted on the door to the blower room. A fleck of sawdust or a carcass of a fly is enough to stop a reed pipe from speaking, to cause a cipher if it winds up on the surface of a valve, or a dead note if it clogs a windchest magnet. How would a fleck wind up there? Follow the air flow from the blower, through the regulators and wind lines, into the windchests, and up to the toes of the pipes as the notes are playing.

I once made the mistake of casually mentioning to the staff of a church that a blower room is dirty, only to find on my next visit that the sexton had taken my comment to heart and scrubbed the place. That may sound good and industrious, but he could have caused serious damage to the organ—to avoid such damage, we have protocols for cleaning a blower room. Here is mine. Shut off the power to the blower so it cannot be started accidentally. Vacuum the interior of the blower’s air intake, taking care not to push dust into the blower, and seal the intake by taping it closed with heavy plastic—a contractor’s trash bag and black Gorilla tape will do. Clean all the surfaces in the room with a vacuum cleaner, and scrub with water and detergent (be careful not to wreck the bellows leather). Wait twenty-four hours for the dust to settle. Clean the room again, and wait another twenty-four hours. Do not forget to clean the plastic seal on the blower intake. Now you can be sure that there is nothing floating around in the air so you can open the intake and start the blower. And now that I have described that process, I recommend you leave this work to your qualified organ technician.

That well-meaning guy who cleaned without protocol raised a shower of dust in the room. If the blower had been started soon after, the organ could have been wrecked by sucking dust into 
its innards.

Sometimes we find an organ blower in a hallway closet doubling as storage. You notice that the organ is suddenly all out of tune and find a stack of folding chairs on top of the static reservoir. Extra weight and higher pressure means bad tuning and spoiled pipe speech. Our rule when installing an organ is that all spaces occupied by organ components are designated “organ only” spaces. I had a Saturday emergency call from an organist reporting a wedding starting in ten minutes and the organ would not play. It took me forty-five minutes to get there, and I am guessing people were getting tired of the bagpipe on the front lawn, but it only took me a couple minutes to find a card table sucked up against the blower intake. No air, no organ. Tell that to the mother of the bride.

Biggest in the fleet

I am fortunate to have worked on some very large organs, so I have taken care of a few monster organ blowers. Aeolian-Skinner Opus 1203 was installed at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), in Boston in 1952. It has about 240 ranks of pipes including nine 8′ stops in the Swell, eight ranks of 16′ flues, and over forty reeds. It is about eighty feet wide, forty feet tall, and twelve feet deep. There is more than three thousand square feet of gold leaf on the façade pipes. Most of the organ is front and center behind that façade, three stories high with an iron stairway at the left end of the organ, and a jumble of ladders to the right. The Solo division is high above the organ, behind a round grille in the pendentive to the left of the arch that contains the main organ. In the days when I was in that organ a couple times a week, I knew how many stairs I climbed to go through the blower room to the Solo, but all I remember now is that it’s a lot. We measure the capacity of an organ blower in cubic feet per minute (CFM) at a given wind pressure. One hundred CFM at ten inches of pressure is more air than 100 CFM at three inches of pressure. The blower in The Mother Church organ is the size of a minivan and produces 30,000 CFM at ten inches. There is a step-up blower that gets air from the big one and increases it to twenty-five inches for the Cor des Anges (Horn of the Angels) immediately behind the Solo grill.

Any organ blower has a motor and an enclosed fan. On most blowers, the fan is mounted directly on the shaft of the motor, but once the fan assembly exceeds a certain length and weight, the shaft is continued through the fan housing and supported at the other end by a bearing assembly something like the wheel of a car. The bearings at both ends of such a shaft have some sort of lubrication device, usually either a grease fitting or an oil bath with a bronze ring on the shaft that acts as a wick to bring oil up to the top of the bearing. The fans are big wheels fixed on the shaft with vanes fastened to them with rivets.

The French organist Pierre Pincemaille came to Portland, Maine, in April of 2004 to give a recital on the Kotzschmar Organ, the hundred-stop Austin located in Merrill Auditorium of City Hall. When he turned on the blower for one of his practice sessions, there was a series of big bangs, and the blower failed. Several fan blades had come loose inside the blower as their rivets wore out, and metal shards were everywhere. The blower received an instant emergency repair, and the show went on. It was determined that eighty years of sudden starts had eventually wrecked the rivets, so as part of the repair, the blower’s power supply was equipped with a Variable Frequency Drive (VFD), which starts the motor and brings it up to speed slowly, exerting less torque on those rivets.

Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City houses a magnificent organ, originally a Kilgen, with 142 ranks. The Choir loft is thirty feet above the floor of the nave, and the organ blower is another fifteen feet higher in a large room in the south tower. It has a forty-horsepower motor that moves enough air to produce majestic sounds in that magical, immense building.

Hurricanes

Two locally improbable things happened in Boston in 2004. The Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1918. Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1918 to raise money for the first production of No, No, Nanette. That started the eighty-six-year drought known locally as “The Curse of the Bambino.” The team sponsored publicity gags like exorcizing the field, hoping for a win. In the 2004 American League Championship, the Yankees won the first three games, the Red Sox won four in a row to win the pennant, then swept the Saint Louis Cardinals in four straight games. (I thought the excitement was going to kill my father.)

And in 2004, the Aeolian-Skinner organ at Boston Symphony Hall was rebuilt by Foley-Baker, Inc. That was improbable because Seiji Ozawa, the symphony’s music director, was not a lover of pipe organs. Ozawa retired in 2002, and the organ was completed in 2004. Quick work for a large organ.

Wendy and I lived next to Symphony Hall in those days (and across the street from The Mother Church) and had series tickets with terrific seats in the first balcony above the stage. We attended the concert when the organ was first used—you guessed it, Camille Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony. Simon Preston was the organist. When the organ entered pianissimo in the first movement with deep low notes supporting shimmering registrations, we watched the orchestra members winking, nudging, and smiling at each other, getting the chills hearing those profound bass notes, sonorities that no other instrument can achieve.

Installing the windchests for huge pedal stops like 32′ Bourdon and 32′ Double Open Wood and testing notes before the 2,000-pound pipes have been placed has taught me exactly how much wind comes out of the windchest toeholes when a note is played, enough to blow off a top knot at thirty feet, an absolute hurricane of air to make a single note sound. That controlled and regulated gale of wind makes those unique sonorities possible.

It is thrilling to stand inside a big organ when the wind is turned on. You hear the blower start to turn, air entering the organ, reservoirs filling one after another, until the whole system is charged with air pressure and the instrument fairly trembles with life and anticipation. Each reservoir is equipped with a regulating valve and weights calculated to store and deliver wind at a specific pressure. Each reservoir has windlines leading to one or more windchests. When a note is played, a valve opens to allow wind into the toe of a pipe. Play one note, and there is barely a ripple. Draw a hundred stops or more and play forty or fifty notes a measure as in a flashy French toccata, and thousands of valves are blowing thousands of pipes. It’s almost unimaginable, but the fact that it’s true is the magic of the pipe organ.

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion

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

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

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

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

Tell us more about how you employed improvisation in childhood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you ever imitate specific composers or historical styles?

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

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

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

Reflection

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

Dorothy Papadakos’s website: dorothypapadakos.com

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

Follow the money.

In the spring of 2023 Wendy and I went to Tuscany, my first time in Italy where we visited Florence and Bologna. We also spent several nights in a villa borrowed from a friend in a small town called Camaiore. Marco runs a wine shop in lower Manhattan and is a classic “foodie.” He gave us a list of the markets where we should mention his name, and we had a blast buying the best Italian ingredients and cooking in his beautiful kitchen. The funny thing was that the drain in the five-foot-wide copper sink was not at the lowest point, so we had to keep pushing the water uphill.

Bologna is a gustatory capital with an extensive district devoted to specialty food shops, and we spent an afternoon with a foodie tour guide. We visited a small “laboratory” where a half-dozen women were making pasta for one of the shops. What magic to watch that ancient craft, and what a delight to sample their products from paper cups while they worked. We had meals in wonderful intimate restaurants and fell in love with the ubiquitous local Sangiovese grapes.

Our visit to Florence was revelatory. I took a half-dozen art history courses in college and have long been aware of the vast collections of art housed in Florence, but I was not prepared for the depth and majesty of the place. I was also not prepared for the vast throngs of tourists pulsing through the narrow streets. Florence is frightfully crowded, but in spite of the bad behaviors of some tourists, it is worth the struggle. Florence is all laid out on streets that were established in the fifteenth century and before, and you never saw such a cute little garbage truck.

We managed a magical moment in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (Museum of the Art Works of the Cathedral) by arriving just when it opened while the masses were still sleeping off their Aperol spritzes and were privileged to stand alone for long minutes in the gallery of Michelangelo’s La Pietà, carved from a huge block of Carrara marble and completed in 1555 just before the artist’s eightieth birthday. Once again, a private tour guide helped enlighten us and gained us access for some shorter lines, especially to see Michelangelo’s David.

Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici founded the Medici bank in 1397, starting a powerful dynasty that became Italy’s wealthiest family. The bank’s early prosperity was based on the busy silk and textile trade in the region and expanded into many other industries, giving the Medici family seats of power that lasted nearly three centuries through the high Renaissance. Many of the official and ceremonial buildings in Florence were funded by the Medicis, who were also patrons of Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Galileo. They funded the basilicas of Saint Peter in Rome and Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, which houses a bewildering collection of art. The Medicis’ fingers are everywhere in Tuscany. Wealthy patrons have always been important supporters of the arts, providing funding for iconic buildings, musical compositions, public sculptures, and performance venues.

Running a railroad

Wendy and I moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, three years ago and have been feasting on the wide range of cultural institutions in our area. It is an hour drive to Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), which occupies a vast old mill building in North Adams, Massachusetts. The Clark Art Institute, also an hour away in Williamstown, Massachusetts, houses a huge collection of fine art by the old masters and contemporary artists. The Norman Rockwell Museum is ten minutes from us. We sometimes walk there using a back way because the grounds are so beautiful and Farley the Goldendoodle loves to run in the surrounding fields. Jacob’s Pillow is a busy dance venue where we attended a performance by the Royal Ballet last week.

The crown jewel of the area is Tanglewood, ten minutes from home, the 500-acre summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). Serge Koussevitzky (1874–1951) was the conductor of the BSO when Tanglewood was founded. Today it hosts a wide variety of artists including James Taylor (who gave his fiftieth consecutive July Fourth concert there this year), the Boston Pops, and a galaxy of classical stars. In the past week we have heard the brilliant Chinese pianist Yuja Wang play twice, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the BSO in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, the 5,100-seat venue with roof and no walls, and a solo recital in Ozawa Hall featuring eight preludes by Shostakovich, the Barber Piano Sonata, and Four Ballades by Chopin.

Each weekend the orchestra is playing at Tanglewood, the BSO publishes a program book of around seventy-five pages, which includes the programs for four concerts, biographies of the performers, and program notes for all the music. There are brief histories of both the orchestra and Tanglewood, health and safety protocols, and there are six pages listing the donors and patrons who have contributed amounts ranging from $5,000 to “Ten Million and Above.” In this weekend’s book, there are eight names in “Ten Million and Above,” five in “Seven and One Half Million,” sixteen in “Five Million,” thirty-nine in “Two and One Half Million,” and a hundred-twenty-six in “One Million.” The categories imply ranges, those named in the one million group gave between one and two-and-a-half million, but assuming that each gift was at the base amount of the group, those gifts totaled $421,000,000.

Mark Volpe, the BSO’s longtime president and chief executive officer, retired in 2021 after twenty-three years in that position. During his tenure, the BSO’s annual budget increased from $49,000,000 to $107,000,000, and the orchestra’s endowment tripled to $456,000,000.

The current roster of the BSO is published on pages 12–13 of the program book for July 12–14. It includes ninety-four musicians, fifty-three of whom occupy named chairs “endowed in perpetuity.” John Ferrillo has been principal oboe of the BSO since 2001. Before that, he was principal of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. In 2015 he was paid $286,621; nine years later it must be significantly more.¹ How much money must be set aside to endow Ferrillo’s chair in perpetuity? Enough that the proceeds of the principal will produce over $300,000 which is likely over $6,000,000. Perhaps not all the endowed chairs support salaries as high as Ferrillo’s, but it is fair to guess that they would add up to $245,000,000, and there are another forty musicians in seats that are not endowed. That is what it takes to run that railroad. Toby Oft, the principal trombone, sits in the J. P. and Mary Barger Chair, endowed in perpetuity. Their son Jeff was my pal from fifth to twelfth grades in Winchester, Massachusetts. Like his father, Jeff played the trombone.

In March of 2017 we heard the BSO play Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in Carnegie Hall in New York, the composer’s response to the Siege of Leningrad, the 857-day blockade by the Nazis during which nearly a million people died of starvation. That extraordinary piece opens with a plaintive melody on the oboe accompanied by sparse percussion, and the entire first movement is a great crescendo based on that theme. John Ferrillo was the oboe soloist who recreated the misery and anxiety of the besieged city. He is a terrific oboe player. I wrote about that concert in the May 2017 issue of The Diapason under the title, “Music in a terrible time.”

Wendy and I heard Mark Volpe give a lecture at the Lenox (Massachusetts) Library last April during which he reminisced about the highs and lows of his time with the orchestra, like the winding down and end of James Levine’s career as music director and the search that brought Andris Nelsons to Boston. He mentioned in passing that, unlike any other major American orchestra, the BSO owns 107 buildings. If you spend any time at Tanglewood, you will realize that some of them are lawn mower sheds (there is a mighty amount of mown grass there), emergency weather shelters (violent summer thunderstorms come out of nowhere in the Berkshires), restrooms, and concession stands. But that 107 also includes Symphony Hall in Boston, the Shed and Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, and the new Linde Center at Tanglewood, among other distinguished buildings. In contrast, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is a tenant in Disney Hall, and the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera are both tenants at Lincoln Center.

The administrative staff of the BSO takes up two pages of the program book, and development is the largest department with thirty-six directors and associates listed, implying that there is a larger staff supporting the directors. Are there a hundred or more people in the development department toiling away at the business of raising the money for their own salaries and those of the rest of the staff, the orchestra members, and the people running the lawn mowers? They should be the most popular people on campus.

Besides the massive fundraising efforts, the BSO sees significant ticket revenue at Tanglewood. Lawn seats are $22, which buys you space to spread a picnic blanket or set up chairs, and you can see the action on the stage on huge video screens. Seats in the shed range from about $25 to over $100 close up, and we have been to a few signature concerts where the tickets cost close to $200. Remember that the Shed seats 5,100 people, so a good house is bringing in several hundred thousand dollars, or just enough for a year of John Ferillo’s salary.

Before a concert, the Tanglewood lawn is a splendid spectacle. The lawn around the Shed is huge, and thousands of people are likely to be enjoying their picnics. It is amazing how lush and green the lawn is between concerts. There is an elegant marble monument in memory of a revered head groundskeeper, an indication of the importance of that position. Serge Koussevitzky, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copland have statues on the grounds, but a monument to a groundskeeper is pretty good. Someone has to marshal all those lawn mowers, and more complicated, how do you keep grass growing if 4,000 people have picnics on the lawn three times a week? There are rules about bug spray printed in the program books.

Tanglewood was founded with the gift of a 210-acre estate from the Tappan family in 1936. The Tappan Manor House is preserved on the grounds and houses a museum and administrative offices. The first concert conducted by Serge Koussevitzky was held under a tent on August 5, 1937. Eliel Saarinen designed an open-air concert venue, but the $100,000 budget was inadequate, and Saarinen wrote that the proposed budget would be enough for “just a shed, which any builder could accomplish without the aid of an architect.” The trustees of the orchestra enlisted engineer Joseph Franz of Stockbridge, and the shed was dedicated on August 4, 1938.

I marvel at the vision involved in founding such an institution. It took just a couple years to get it off the ground, and within a few years it was flourishing. Koussevitzky founded the Tanglewood Music Center in 1940, which quickly became one of the premier centers for advanced musical training. My trusty program book includes this statement:

Prominent TMC alumni include Claudio Abbado, Leonard Bernstein, Stephanie Blythe, Karina Canellakis, Anthony Cheung, Phyllis Curtin, Christoph von Dohnányi, Michael Gandolfi, John Harbison, Gilbert Kalish, Oliver Knussen, Wynton Marsalis, Ludovic Morlot, Seiji Ozawa, Leontyne Price, Sanford Sylvan, Michael Tilson Thomas, Davóne Tine, Dawn Upshaw, and Shirley Verrett, as well as some 40 current members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

And to build an organ?

All of us in the organ building trade are familiar with the task and techniques of raising money as it routinely costs hundreds of thousands of dollars if not several million to build or renovate a pipe organ. Over the years I have come to realize that a community of people banding together to raise a million dollars for a musical instrument is a radical act. It takes vision and commitment, smart guidance, and lots of study. It takes planning, wisdom, and let’s face it, good politics. Organ projects are not successful if they are not supported by a common bond or agreement, a political base. I tell the organ committees that I work with that the hard part of an organ project is creating that foundation and raising the money. The easy part is when you give the money to an organbuilder asking them to do what they know best.

Sometimes an organ is funded by a single gift and a big plaque gets screwed to the organ case. This is especially true at universities and colleges. Sometimes there are several lead gifts, perhaps in six figures, followed by dozens of more modest gifts. I love seeing donor lists that include the few-dollars-at-a-time gifts from Sunday School classes. That is when you know the organ project has wide support in the congregation.

Yuja

I mentioned in passing that Wendy and I heard Yuja Wang play a solo recital at Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood. It was such a special evening that it merits some more comment. As I wrote earlier, the program included music of Shostakovich, Barber, and Chopin. While the preludes of Shostakovich are short, they are complex, meaty, and sophisticated. The Barber sonata is a towering, monumental work, and the demanding four Chopin ballades formed a varied, beefy second half of the program. Last winter, Yuja showed the world her immense stamina by playing all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Variations on a Theme of Paganini in one program that lasted over four hours. The other night her published program was nearly two hours long (including intermission), and as the audience howled in approval, she played six encores including transcriptions of several symphonic movements and the overture to Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including the braying donkey. One of the encores, which I did not recognize, was interrupted by a ringing cell phone, and she abruptly left the stage—but she came back to play three more. I think she really loves playing the piano.

Yuja Wang was born in 1987; she is thirty-seven years old. When she was fifteen, she entered the Curtis Institute of Music to study with Gary Graffman, and that year she won the concerto competition at the Aspen Music Festival. Before she was twenty, she was an international star.

She has dazzling stage presence with a brisk walk to and from the piano, a lightning-fast deep bow from the hips that sets her hair flying, a quick transition from standing to sitting, demanding the audience’s attention with the set of her hands over the keys, and a commanding start for each piece, whether it is a bombastic tour-de-force or a gentle breath. There are hundreds of videos of her playing on YouTube, and you sure can see her flinging a lot of notes around. One of her famous encores is a fantasy on themes from Carmen, and you just cannot believe how many notes are being played, but the sonority of her softest notes, the results of just touching the keys, are a deep part of her magical musical genius.

The other night, we were fortunate to have seats on the stage behind her, and her path to and from the stage door was just a couple feet from us. It is clear to see the love she has for music, for the art of performing, for her audience. Such a roar from that audience. There were several people near us shouting her name at the top of their voices each time she entered the stage and each time the music stopped. They made her smile. I thanked her as she walked past between encores, and she smiled at me. What a night.

Notes

1. Ferrillo’s 2015 salary was published in the Boston Globe on July 16, 2018, in a story about salary equity in the orchestra, as principal flutist Elizabeth Rowe filed a lawsuit claiming that she held a comparable position in the orchestra but was being paid 25% less. Ferrillo wrote in support of Rowe’s claim, stating that she held a position equal in prominence and responsibility to his and that she was an artist of equal ability. They sit next to each other on stage.

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

Editor’s note: Part 1 of this series (Matthew Glandorf) may be found in the May 2022 issue, pages 20–21; Part 2 (Mary Beth Bennett) in the September 2022 issue, pages 12–13; Part 3 (Jason Roberts) in the July 2023 issue, pages 16–17; and Part 4 (Dorothy Papadakos) in the December 2023 issue, pages 12–14.

Introduction

For this article, the fifth in a series on improvisation featuring interviews with American improvisers, we turn to Patrick Scott. Patrick won first prize and audience prize in the American Guild of Organists National Competition in Organ Improvisation (NCOI) in 2014 and is a member of The Diapason’s 20 under 30 class of 2016. Following numerous other distinguished positions, he presently serves as director of music and organist at Grace-St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Memphis, Tennessee.

Very early in the summer of 2023 I stumbled upon one of Patrick’s improvisation recordings. I was struck by a compelling balance of creativity, originality, and organization. His structure was abundantly clear. A few weeks later, I saw Patrick at the national conference of the Association of Anglican Musicians in Dallas, Texas, and told him how much and why I had enjoyed his recording. “That was all Gerre [Hancock],” he said, ascribing the structure in his improvisation to his legendary teacher at the University of Texas. I wasn’t surprised, knowing that Hancock was a masterful pedagogue and having had one terrific, lengthy lesson with him myself many years ago. Patrick was among his last students, and I was delighted when he agreed to participate in this series.

As Patrick describes in greater detail below, like many who are fluent improvisers, he began playing by ear before learning to read music. While it may not be a universal theme, this is a pattern among many who are comfortable and enjoy improvising. The marvelous Dutch organist-improviser Sietze de Vries discusses this in his online course in improvisation, which may be found on his YouTube channel. He encourages all musicians to improvise, strongly endorses its development in children, and likens learning how to improvise as adults to learning a second language. Like all analogies, I am sure it is only true to a certain extent, but it is a compelling idea: if introduced in childhood, it is much easier than “taking the plunge” in adulthood. (Nonetheless, I, too, strongly wish to encourage everyone and anyone to improvise!)

Discussion

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

I grew up in a small town in southern Mississippi, where we attended what was a large church for our town, with a forty-one-rank Möller organ. The organist there, Betty Polk, had a degree in organ and had complete facility at the instrument; she became my organ teacher throughout high school. I remember being about four years old when she used full organ for the final verse of one of the hymns we were singing. It was one of the most thrilling things I’d ever experienced. I remember going home and trying to pick out the melody on our piano (as well as a four-year-old could). My older brother was already taking lessons, so we were fortunate to have a piano in our home.

I continued doing this for a few weeks until my parents decided to contact my brother’s piano teacher. She said she usually didn’t take students as young as I was, but my mother explained to her that I was playing things by ear at home, and they just weren’t sure how best to nurture that. She asked my parents to bring me to one of my brother’s lessons. I played a hymn for her, probably “What a friend we have in Jesus,” including a very simplified left-hand accompaniment. Ms. Jacobs, the teacher, said that she would take me!

A few months later, I was playing one of my short pieces for the week when Ms. Jacobs realized that while I was playing the piece accurately, it was in the wrong key. We realized that my brother had been playing my pieces for me, after which I memorized them and played them back by ear. So, we had to take a couple of steps back, but I did finally learn to read music. Over my early years, my parents and my teachers were always encouraging my playing by ear. My teachers at each lesson would ask what I had come up with the week prior.

In my home church, all the service music was based on hymns: preludes, postludes, and offertories. So that’s how I modeled the different pieces that I would make up. A little introduction of some sort, a full statement of the melody either on a solo stop or with chords like a hymn, sometimes an interlude, often a key change, and some sort of ending—sometimes a simplified coda, and probably most times, full-blown Hollywood!

How did you employ improvisation in public over the course of your childhood?

My home church was always very open to having people of all ages participate in various ways of making music. In addition to its usual Sunday morning services, there was always a Sunday evening service. In months with five Sundays, we would have an old fashioned “Fifth Sunday Sing.” Surely it was a chance for clergy and musicians to take a break from their weekly task of having to create yet another service, and often it would just simply turn into a talent show.

I was probably five years old the first time I ever played anything; I’m sure it was very basic, but it allowed me to play in public and began to foster what would become a life-calling of being involved with church music. Over the years I would play more and more, beginning to accompany morning and evening services as I got older and more capable. I would learn pieces to play, but most often the preludes or postludes would be things that I would create myself.

Even on Sundays when I wasn’t scheduled to play, our church organist would stop me and ask if I wanted to play the prelude that day. “I don’t have anything prepared,” I would say, and every single time Ms. Betty would look at me and with a glimmer in her eye, say simply, “just make it up!” It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized this was really improvising.

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

I studied music theory with my teachers, but I really don’t think I took any of this into account while I was playing. I just played what sounded good to my ears. And if it didn’t sound good, I’d make up something else that did.

Was there a watershed moment that inspired you to develop your skills seriously?

Yes! I’ll never forget it! I had become pretty good at this “making up” stuff throughout college. I could create a hymn prelude in almost any style and key and was able to mold it to fit whatever part of the service it needed to be close to.

When I got to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, all students were required to study improvisation with Gerre Hancock. I was so excited, but Gerre wasn’t teaching it until the spring semester, and this was the first semester of school. We had the famous French organist Pierre Pincemaille coming to play a recital and work with us in an improvisation masterclass. Gerre asked during the studio class earlier in the week who would like to improvise; immediately every student looked at the floor so as not to make eye contact. He called out a few students and then of course called my name.

I went up afterward and said, “Dr. Hancock, I’ve never studied improvisation before.” And in a way only Gerre Hancock could, he patted my shoulder, smiled, and said, “Oh, Patrico, it’s going to be wonderful!” It turned out he would be away that weekend playing his own recital, as would Judith Hancock, so I really was all on my own.

Then came the day of the masterclass and my turn to play. We had a student fluent in French who was translating for M. Pincemaille. He asked me what form I was planning to improvise in. My look of panic was clearly enough to give away that I had no idea what he was talking about. The translator turned back to him and said, “Free form.” I had prepared a short hymn prelude on SLANE: a brief introduction, the first verse on a solo stop, a modulation, the second verse with chords like a hymn, and finally a little coda after which I called it a day. I finished and M. Pincemaille started screaming with a very thick French accent, “No! No! No! You must always start and end in the same key!”

The horrific embarrassment was only allowed to last for a second as he made me start again. I began the same way, and by the time I got to the end of the first phrase of the hymn melody, he told me to change keys and repeat the first melody line again, and then change keys again, repeat the melody in some other way, over and over and over again. I felt like I had changed keys a million times at this point, and finally he told me to start finding my way back to the home key.

Of course, you probably wouldn’t want to actually modulate that often, but he was trying to break the mold that I had created for myself. It was at that moment that I realized that improvising was so much more than just playing a melody straight through—that embellishment, repetition, form, rhythm, and harmony played such important roles in improvising.

Who were your principal teachers and influences in improvisation? How did you learn from them?

I was very lucky to have been a student of Gerre Hancock while at the University of Texas at Austin. All students would work through Gerre’s textbook, Improvising: How to Master the Art. Through the book, Gerre taught strict form and counterpoint. In addition to carefully working through each chapter of his volume, there are two specific things I remember from lessons that I still think about today.

First, he would ask each student prior to playing what their plan was: what form or keys might be used, and specifically how long it would be. In class, these were just exercises, not long improvisations. So a student could say twenty measures or so. Gerre would then count each measure, counting to ten and then backward from ten.

Even in a short exercise, a student was expected to introduce whatever material was to be used, and then by the tenth measure begin finding a way to the end. It made us think about each measure and what we were doing, forcing us to stay in a structured time signature, not just wandering aimlessly around the keyboard without any organization. We had to build a scaffold for our musical creations, not just haphazardly playing things at random.

Second, Gerre was famous for saying, “There are no wrong notes,” and he meant that! Many times, while working through free improvisations, he would give us scenarios. “Walking through Paris gathering items for a picnic by the Eiffel Tower while car horns honk in the background. Riding an elevator up, it stops, and then it goes back down, maybe it goes quicker on the way down causing panic. Walking through a public space and seeing people you like and then people you don’t like, and one is walking a dog.” They were extremely random scenarios, but then he would allow us to create improvisations that created the scene for those scenarios. It allowed us to be as free as we could ever possibly imagine.

I perhaps learned most by just listening to Gerre play, both in person and through recordings. His harmonic progressions, clever ways of treating the theme, rhythmic excitement, and flawless registrations made me want to run out and improvise immediately.

I remember in graduate school having a small keyboard in my apartment and sitting on the floor listening to his recordings and playing chords repeatedly until I figured out exactly what he was doing. It’s not just playing one “crunchy chord,” it’s more about how it’s approached and what happens after that. Think of the famous chord in David Willcocks’s setting of the last verse of “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” It’s only effective because of the three chords leading up to it. The same is true when trying to figure out different chords in improvising; what happens before and after a great chord is often more important than the chord itself. Gerre’s brilliance always showed forth. But I think the first half of his recording Christmas Improvisations, recorded on the Taylor & Boody in the gallery of Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, presents his most incredible improvisations, offering the most unique and meticulous technique and style.

When did you first improvise in a concert setting?

I’m not sure I entirely remember, but what comes to mind was an improvisation on a submitted theme at the end of my master’s degree recital. It was not a requirement, but many of Gerre’s students would try their hand at this in degree recitals. Gerre would bring out a theme in a sealed envelope like so many did for him at the end of his recitals. The student would have to open the envelope with great suspense and then play through the tune.

I remember mine being the hymn tune HANOVER. Like most on-the-spot improvisations, I don’t remember much about it, but Gerre seemed pleased. I remember him mentioning that I had about three different endings and I could have perhaps wrapped it up sooner; I guess I was having too much fun!

You won first prize in the NCOI; to what extent has that influenced your career and your identity as an improviser? Have you entered other improvisation competitions?

The AGO’s NCOI competition is the only improvisation competition that I’ve been a part of. Preparing for it was quite daunting, but it pushed me to learn so many different styles and quite frankly return to the basics of being able to articulate what you’re planning to do in almost every measure.

I do feel like it was a turning point in my life as a musician, but especially an improviser. I always felt like I was never truly improvising, but just “making things up,” as I would always say. I felt like the word “improvise” was reserved for someone who knew everything they were doing at all times, through form and theory specifically, and I never felt like I had grasped that well enough. I’m not sure I still do today, to be completely honest, but preparing for and winning the competition allowed me to realize that I have put in a decent amount of study for all of this and could articulate what I was doing: specifically in regard to musical form, registration, theory, and so on.

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

I can’t say that I necessarily think of myself as having my own distinct musical language. I do love jazz, and there’s nothing more American than jazz, so hopefully there are some elements that can be heard in some of the harmony that I use. I’d like to think that my love for church music shines through more than anything else: I feel like my improvisations are more likely to sound like the hymn and psalm preludes of Howells, Brahms, Reger, Sowerby, Hancock, Willan, and Bach than the scherzos or huge toccatas of Vierne, Duruflé, and Tournemire. I love those works and composers, and I dabble in improvising in those styles sometimes when I sit down to play. I feel like the former is what’s most likely to come out of my fingers and feet.

Tell us more about imitating specific composers or periods: is it a different process altogether, or a different side of the same coin?

It’s always fun to imitate a composer or create something that sounds like it was composed during a specific period. A free improvisation or even a hymn prelude comes fairly easily to me, but it takes much more concentration to create something that specifically sounds like someone else. The Pachelbel partitas are always enjoyable to imitate and are actually a really solid way to practice improvising. It’s always fun to imitate the twentieth-century French improvisers like Tournemire or Langlais; just push tutti and come crashing down on dense French chords. I also love imitating French Classic composers like Nicolas de Grigny and François Couperin. It’s so satisfying to create a Tierce en taille, a Duo, a Récit de Cromorne, or Basse de Trompette. The counterpoint with these is often tricky and requires a good bit of practice, but it’s always worth it.

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

I can’t say I compose very much. I wrote a book of hymn reharmonizations and descants published by Selah Publishing Company, and that’s about it. Because I don’t compose very often, it takes quite a bit of time to sit and write what’s going on in my head. I’d like to do more of it in the future. To me, improvising and composing are pretty much the same, because before I could compose anything, I’d have to play it first and figure it out. The problem comes when I can’t remember what I improvised the first time in order to write it down. I clearly prefer improvising to composing!

Conclusion

Patrick Scott’s humility came through when he wrote, “I felt like the word ‘improvise’ was reserved for someone who knew everything they were doing at all times, through form and theory specifically, and I never felt like I had grasped that well enough. I’m not sure I still do today, to be completely honest. . . .” While I (and anyone who hears him, surely) would say that Patrick is far more than worthy of being considered an extremely fine improviser, he does remind us of the adage, “The more one learns, the more one realizes what one doesn’t know.” I have learned a great deal from distinguished colleagues who have participated in this series thus far and look forward to learning even more as the series continues. Hearing their experiences, how they gained their skills, is at once informative and inspiring.

There are as many ways to improvise as there are to make music in general, yet most would agree that learning key skills in harmony, counterpoint, and form is essential to truly begin to unlock one’s potential. Along those lines, I recently shared on Facebook and Instagram a succession of posts on the above. I was pleasantly surprised that the first of them, especially, was shared very well beyond my own group of friends and followers. To follow what Patrick has said, and what he learned from the great Gerre Hancock, I conclude this article by incorporating some of my suggestions here, not necessarily in a particular order, except that the first six are under the banner of keyboard harmony and counterpoint, before moving on to form:

1. Be able to comfortably harmonize (using principles of sound voice leading) major and minor scales in all keys.

2. Practice simple circle of fifths sequences to be able to modulate quickly from a given key to any other key.

3. Learn to transpose any hymn into any and every other key, at sight.

4. Practice transposing to the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian modes, beginning on all pitches.

5. Learn to play figured bass.

6. Learn to read open score of four or more parts, especially works by great polyphonists.

7. Play as many great organ works as possible to build technique and to deepen one’s musical vocabulary. Using familiar tunes or themes, imitate as many of these works as possible when practicing improvisation.

8. Practice constructing phrases comprising only four bars. Begin with simple, stepwise melodies; count aloud. Repeat this exercise frequently. Then improvise a phrase ending in the dominant (a half cadence) followed by one ending in the tonic (specifically, an authentic cadence). Start with melody only, and then add simple harmony. Two phrases make a period; depending on how similar the phrases are, the period will either be parallel or contrasting.

9. After gaining some degree of comfort with the above, improvise a new phrase based on the above, only in a closely related key (relative or dominant). End that new phrase with a half cadence, then add yet another phrase ending with an authentic cadence in that related key. Keep counting aloud as you play!

10. Try to memorize these phrases as best you can. Do not be reluctant to make notes for yourself. Repeat the first period, perhaps with some elaboration, like passing tones or simple ornaments.

11. If desired, add a four-measure introduction, interludes, and a coda (all comprising four measures). Keep counting. These may be very simple, just basic accompaniment figures. Keep counting!

12. Putting together numbers 8–11 above results in one of the simplest musical forms, a ternary or 
song form.

All the above was drilled into me by McNeil Robinson in regular lessons over an extended period (along with much else) and must be practiced as much as possible. Gerre Hancock was also a force in solidifying this in my mind, via that one extremely long lesson, a masterclass or two, and his textbook.

I am grateful to Patrick Scott for sharing so much wisdom with us in his interview. I look forward to what we will learn in future interviews.

Adventures and transitions

In the last six weeks, Wendy and I have attended three singular events involving three very different pipe organs. One was small and in poor condition, another was a grand instrument in an iconic church, and the third was so large as to be off the charts. Most instruments have little variations in size—a violin is a violin, a trumpet is a trumpet—but pipe organs span huge ranges of size as well as styles and even purposes. These events provided a fun overview of extremes.

We traveled to Atlantic City, New Jersey, on April 5 to hear the brilliant young organist Anna Lapwood play a recital on the massive Midmer-Losh organ in Boardwalk Hall. No other organ in the world has ten 32′ ranks, and those are just ten of 447 ranks; the organ has 33,111 pipes. You can find the stoplist and list of ranks at boardwalkorgans.org. (See also the cover feature of the November 2020 issue.) There is an impressive restoration effort underway there, a daunting task being faced by a professional staff and a troupe of volunteers under the direction and curatorship of Nathan Bryson.

According to its website, the interior of Boardwalk Hall is 456 feet long, 310 feet wide, and 137 feet high. Remember that a football field is 300 feet long, and you might imagine the scale of the place. Among the activities in the hall beside organ recitals are car races, tractor pulls, and rock concerts, and it is the only space in the world that has hosted an indoor helicopter flight. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was nominated to be a candidate for president of the United States during the Democratic National Convention in Boardwalk Hall.

The stage of Boardwalk Hall is 148 feet wide, and the main organ chambers flank the proscenium arch. The size of the organ and the number of expressive divisions were obvious to the audience as the organ chamber lights remained on throughout the concert. All the individual sections of the instrument were evident, and hundreds of huge shutters opened and closed suddenly and majestically.

Anna Lapwood is twenty-eight years old and has risen to international fame through her fantastic abilities, popular appeal, and masterful use of social media. Enter her name in search fields for Google, TikTok, Facebook, or YouTube, and one will find days of fun listening. She was recently appointed an MBE (Member of the British Empire) for her service to music. According to her official website, Anna “holds the position of director of music for Pembroke College (Cambridge), associate artist with Royal Albert Hall, and artist in association with the BBC Singers. In 2023 she was awarded the prestigious ‘Gamechanger’ award from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and signed to Sony Classical as an exclusive recording artist.”

Knowing that this would be a popular event among organists and organbuilders, I bought our tickets for Anna’s concert at Boardwalk Hall immediately after they went on sale in early February, and Wendy and I enjoyed our seats at a table on the main floor. Since Boardwalk Hall’s seating capacity is over 10,000 we were not worried about missing the concert. While the main floor was nearly full, the audience of around 1,200 people had plenty of space to move around. We cruised the floor, drinks in hand, greeting old and new friends, and chatting with my admired colleagues who serve on the Historic Organ Restoration Committee, responsible for this, the most massive of organ projects.

Ms. Lapwood’s entry to the concert stage was one only possible at Boardwalk Hall. We heard the blast of a car horn, and a 1938 regency blue Chevrolet Master Sport Sedan entered the hall from the left wing. With horn blowing, British flag waving, headlights blazing, and the audience cheering, the uniformed chauffeur, owner Chuck Gibson, walked around to open the passenger door. Ms. Lapwood stepped out onto the vast floor clad in sparkles and gold shoes, mounted the stage energetically, and we were off. The program featured her transcriptions of Hans Zimmer’s music from Interstellar, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, and my favorite, Maurice Duruflé’s Prelude and Fugue on the Name of Alain.

I have attended dozens of organ concerts offered by serious, even stuffy artists, including many of those I have stuffily played myself. Organ music can be very serious, confusing, arcane, and difficult for lay people to understand and appreciate. Anna Lapwood’s arresting stage presence and honest enthusiasm for the instrument and the music she played filled the cavernous space with excitement. It was a thrilling evening, and that is one room that can truly support 32′ organ tone.

Goodbye, good friend

In November 2023 friend and colleague Brian Jones passed away. (See “Nunc dimittis,” January 2024 issue, page 6.) Brian had been organist and choir director at Trinity Church, Copley Square, in Boston from 1984 until 2004 where he built a widely admired choir program, making brilliant use of the church’s resources and central location to attract wonderful singers to the program, both professional and amateur. Brian along with associate organist Ross Wood and the choir produced eight recordings including the wildly successful Carols for Choirs, which helped transform Trinity’s Christmas carol service into a must-go experience for Boston audiences, so popular that after several years they started offering it twice on a December Sunday. One year Wendy and I took her mother for drinks in the Oak Room at the Copley Plaza Hotel before crossing Saint James Place to enter the church early enough to find seats. I was honored to serve as organ curator at Trinity during Brian’s tenure, and I wrote about some of the experiences we shared in the February 2024 issue of The Diapason (pages 8–9).

Brian’s memorial service was held at Trinity on April 27, 2024. We had dinner with friends the evening before and spent the night at a fine hotel on Copley Square. As we approached the church on Saturday morning, we were greeted by Lydia, Brian’s beloved 1933 cobalt blue Chrysler Coupe, complete with rumble seat and oversized headlamps, parked in the same spot next to the church where I parked every Friday morning for my pre-recital tuning all those years ago. Lydia was a common sight among Brian’s friends, her “ooo-gah” klaxon horn heralding her imminent arrival. She once made an appearance at our house in Maine, that crazy horn blaring through the woods as she came down our long driveway. Seeing that car invoked memories of the immense pleasure Brian got from driving her around, his ebullient, toothy smile as he enjoyed the daylights out of corny, often racy jokes, and his joy of sitting around a table with friends and family.

Brian’s memorial service was a reunion of dozens of colleagues, some I had not seen in years. People came from great distances to be with him in spirit one last time in that great church where it had been Brian’s childhood ambition to serve as organist. The building, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and decorated by John La Farge, is a symphony of crotch-matched marble, painted stenciling, rich dark woodworking, and a magnificent pair of organs, Skinner Organ Company Opus 573, revised, and Aeolian-Skinner Opus 573-C. A small herd of organists took turns at the great four-manual console, and Colin Lynch, Trinity’s director of music, led a large and enthusiastic alumnae choir.

The choir sang a collection of anthems including two great swashbucklers that I first heard sung by the Trinity Choir under Brian’s directions, pieces that he loved and that I taught the parish choir I was leading at the time. “Kyrie,” from Louis Vierne’s Messe Solennelle, expresses the height of the French Romantic symphonic literature for organ as inspired by the stupendous expressive organs built in many of France’s great churches by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, including the doozy at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame where Vierne was organist from 1900 until his death at the organ console with his foot on low E at the end of his 1,750th recital at the church. The organ accompaniment is worthy of Vierne’s six great symphonies for organ, and the choir sings dramatic expressive passages culminating with a soaring soprano line in the closing statement of “Kyrie eleison.” The choir was rehearsing that piece as we entered the church, and I burst into tears. “I can name that tune in one note.”

Brian Jones loved sublime pieces like the Vierne and the carols of John Rutter, and he had a soft spot for syrupy, nostalgic music. A beautiful reading of Adolph Adam’s O Holy Night was included in the recording Carols for Choirs, and Stephen Adams’s The Holy City was a perennial favorite. Colin Lynch and the alumnae choir gave us The Holy City with its dramatic sweeps and swoops, rolling triplets in the accompaniment bass line, and the treacly text that combine to make the piece a sentimental favorite:

And then me thought my dream was changed, the streets no longer rang, hushed were the glad Hosannas the little children sang, the sun grew dark with mystery, the morn was cold and chill as the shadow of a cross arose upon a lonely hill. . . . Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Hark, how the Angels sing Hosanna in the Highest, Hosanna to the King!

There was hardly a dry eye in the house.

Listening to that marvelous barnburner of an anthem, I remembered a moment during my time caring for the Trinity organs. I was sitting at the console, maybe planning the next hour of tuning, when a foreign tourist came up to the velvet rope, got my attention, and asked, “Can you play zee Holy City?” I gave him a chorus of “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” and went down the steps to shake his hand.

Anyone who has attended a convention of the Organ Historical Society has witnessed the best of hymn singing as it is a tradition of the society that the audience/congregation sings a hymn at each recital. That Saturday morning at Trinity Church, Mr. Richardson’s massive roof was raised as the throng of organists and singers poured their emotional hearts into singing some of the great hymns of the faith led by that gorgeous heroic organ, all of them except me, because I cannot sing while weeping.

Brian’s grown children, Eliza and Nat, gave loving moving eulogies, speaking for Brian’s widower Mike and the entire family. Brian had a distinctive, often stentorian voice and a repertory of standard phrases always delivered in the same singsong fashion. Nat Jones’s imitations of his father were so authentic as to bring Brian into the room with us, both hilarious and unnerving. It was a grand morning remembering a grand man.

Why we do this

All that wonderful music in that beautiful place was a reminder of the magic that is the instrument we love so much. In a lofty setting like Trinity, the organ is a monumental presence. Years ago, when I still worked at Trinity, I was at a meeting on Cape Cod discussing the possibility of bringing an organ to a summer chapel there, when a retired Episcopal bishop hearing that I worked at Trinity referred to the organ there as a “weapon.” I am not sure that was the right word, but I think I know what he meant. That organ is a great example of an instrument perfectly suited to its room, with a range of expression from barely audible mystery to thundering triumph, all under the hands and feet of a single musician. The nerdy organbuilder in me sits in a pew picturing the thousands of pouches and valves flapping away inside the windchests, pouring air into thousands of pipes, lifting our spirits. It is mystical, magical, and majestic all at once. That’s why we do this.

Inaugurating a new ministry

Since we moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a couple years ago, Wendy and I have been attending Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church on Main Street across from the Red Lion Inn. I have a previous personal connection with the parish as my grandfather, the Reverend Dr. George Douglas Krumbhaar, was rector there from 1960 to 1974, from when I was four years old until I graduated from high school. I have fond memories of holiday family visits to the rectory, and solo summer weekend trips when my grandparents treated me to concerts at Tanglewood. I practiced and played a couple recitals on the Roosevelt organ as rebuilt with neo-Baroque accent in the early 1960s, and walking around town as an adult fills me with memories from over fifty years ago.

Saint Paul’s is a beautiful building, designed by Charles McKim and richly decorated with appointments by John La Farge and Stockbridge resident Daniel Chester French.¹ Its stately location with adjoining rectory on the northeast corner of the main intersection gives it a local prominence, and its doors are perpetually open, welcoming the many tourists who visit for skiing in the winter and the countless artistic outlets during the summer.

On May 8 we were thrilled to join a throng of clergy, members, and guests attending the installation of the Reverend Samuel T. Vaught as the twentieth rector of Saint Paul’s. Father Sam is young, a newly minted priest, and this is his first appointment as rector of a parish. It was an involved and poignant service full of symbolism and hopefulness. Especially meaningful was the prayer of the new rector, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, yet you have called your servant to stand in your house and serve at your altar. To you and your service I devote myself, body, soul, and spirit.” He proved his youthfulness by delivering the prayer kneeling on the bare stone floor and when finished, standing smoothly with nary a grunt, creak, or stumble. Father Sam is ambitious, hoping to stay long enough to make a difference, and as one of the many silver-haired people in the congregation, I hope that his youthful enthusiasm will attract younger families to join the fun.

Saint Paul’s has the thoroughly picked over old bones of Hilborne Roosevelt Opus 127, built in 1884, the same year that the building was completed and dedicated. The replacement of principal stops with tapered pipes along with the addition of an especially narrow-scaled mixture, Scharff, Sesquialtera, and Krummhorn on electric windchests have obliterated much of the organ’s original character. I am pretty sure that Mr. Roosevelt never heard a Krummhorn. Besides the poorly conceived and executed alterations, the organ is in horrible condition. I have not mounted the steps to the organ loft buried in the base of the tower since my return to Saint Paul’s, but from sitting in the pews, I can list on my fingers which Bourdon pipes have cracks or fallen stoppers and which are dead, which manual notes are prone to ciphering, and which notes of specified stops are out of tune by more than two whole tones. Yikes. There is no choir, and there are two organists casually employed who take turns at the keydesk. Although there is not much of a music program, it is still nice to hear a pipe organ.

In addition to his priestly presence, Father Sam is an organist and pianist. I enjoyed a coffee date with him a few weeks ago during which he expressed the ambition that the church should have an appointed parish musician who could start a program involving solo and choir singing. Knowing that for at least the current moment there would be no money available for significant organ repairs or replacement, I offered to inspect the instrument and suggest what might be repaired with a little bit of local elbow grease, and I am pretty sure I could improve the tuning supposedly applied during Holy Week. While money was paid, it does not sound to my ears that much good happened.

In an age when many parishes flounder, it is fun to think of the possibility of reinvigorating this venerable parish that I have been associated with for more than sixty years. As a twelve-year-old, I thought the organ was great. As a sixty-eight-year-old, not so much. Here’s hoping and anticipating that the arrival of an energetic young priest will bring new life to the place. I think the town is ready 
for it.

Notes

1. Sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) is best known for his monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln housed in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. His summer home and studio in Stockbridge, Chesterwood, is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.