In the Wind: Teachers

Robert McCormick

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

John Bishop

Out and about

After Christmas 2019 I retired from maintaining pipe organs. With some forty-five years of racing about twice a year to get to every client during “tuning season,” I was looking forward to sitting back, watching my friends and colleagues as they blasted about doing Easter and spring tunings, but as it turned out, no one was doing any tuning that spring. In March of 2020 the world as we knew it shut down, churches closed their doors, and organ tuners across the country stayed home.

My tuning and service career started when I was a student at Oberlin during the 1970s, as I was fortunate to work three days a week for John Leek. If you are a regular reader, you have read about John before. He was a first-generation Dutch immigrant who apprenticed in various workshops in the Netherlands starting when he was a child. He came to the United States in the early 1960s to work with Walter Holtkamp, Sr., whose reputation as an innovating organbuilder was widely known. While working on Holtkamp organs on the campus of Oberlin College, Leek saw that the school was advertising for a full-time organ curator. “That’s the job for me.”

He was still employed by Oberlin when I started working with him, but as he had developed a lively organ service trade outside of his work at the school, he soon left Oberlin and founded his eponymous company. I loved traveling around the area with him servicing organs from the start, going in and out of church and school buildings, working on a variety of instruments. Each client had distinct personalities, both personal and institutional. It was easy to tell if a place was well run or struggling, ambitious or complacent, progressive or conservative. There were people we looked forward to seeing and people we knew would be difficult. There were organs that were fun to work on, and a few that we dreaded. Some buildings were immaculately maintained, always neat and clean, and others were dirty, smelly, and cluttered.

I left John’s shop in 1984 with my wife and two toddlers to return to Boston where I grew up, joining the workshop of Daniel Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and taking a position as music director at a lovely Congregational Church in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. In my first weeks with Angerstein, Dan and I went on service calls together so he could introduce me to the more complex and important instruments, and I was soon exploring my home territory with helpers from the workshop, learning the tricks and foibles of each instrument and client.

Dan closed his business in 1987 to become tonal director at M. P. Möller for what turned out to be Möller’s waning days—that venerable firm closed in 1993—and I took on Angerstein’s service clients as I formed the Bishop Organ Company. Over the years I think I serviced more than 300 different organs, some for short periods, some for well over thirty years, and I know there was a stretch in the 1990s when I had close to 100 clients at once. I had a group of wonderful helpers, three of whom I taught to tune and who were my pleasant travel companions as we rolled around New England.

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We worked on a wide range of organs, from the mighty 240-stop Aeolian-Skinner at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), in Boston where we tuned once a week, to a three-stop positive organ by Bedient Pipe Organ. That Bedient organ is in Saint Mary of the Harbor Episcopal Church in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod. Provincetown is more than seventy-five miles from the Sagamore Bridge connecting Cape Cod to the mainland. It was seventy-five miles from the workshop to the bridge, so we would schedule another service call on the Cape to make the trip worthwhile. After all that driving, tuning that tiny organ was something of a lark. Once as we started that long drive home, my helper Mark was half asleep in the passenger seat, looking dreamily out the window. As we passed a car, I overheard him whimper softly to himself, “They have ice cream.” I took the hint, and we stopped at the next opportunity.

After his retirement, my father was interim rector at Saint Mary, and I played a short evensong recital on the organ. It was like riding a tricycle. The organ had been a gift from an elderly gay couple who had lived in Provincetown for decades who collected $30,000 worth of recyclable bottles and cans by rooting through the dumpsters behind restaurants and bars—600,000 bottles and cans.

I once got fired by a client after a long day of travel. When I was working with Angerstein, we did a renovation and expansion project on a small Hook & Hastings tracker organ on Martha’s Vineyard, a quaint but exclusive touristy island about forty-five minutes by ferry from Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Later, when I was working on my own, the organ ciphered on Good Friday, and I received a call from the organist informing me that Easter was the day-after-tomorrow. His panicky and self-centered demeanor was well remembered from the time of the renovation project. I was finished with my hundred-or-so tunings, and the program of Easter music at my church was ready to go, so on Holy Saturday I made the two-hour drive from home in North Reading, Massachusetts, to Woods Hole where you catch the ferry to the Vineyard. It takes most of an hour to get your car in line for the ferry, and it is a forty-five-minute trip across the water.

I got to the church around noon, opened the windchest bung board, found a pallet caught between two guide pins, pushed the pins apart with my fingers, closed the bung, checked the tuning of the Oboe, and drove back to the ferry terminal. The invoice I sent the next week reflected four hours of driving, four hours dealing with the ferry, the cost of mileage and ferry tickets, and my minimum hour-and-a-half service call. The organist was furious. “You were in the church for fifteen minutes and you’re charging me a thousand dollars? You’re never coming back here.” I would not have expected “I’m so grateful you could get here in time for Easter” from that guy.

I had another panicky call from an organist on a Saturday morning. A wedding was starting in an hour, and the organ would not play. When he turned on the switch, lights glowed, and he heard the blower, but no sound. The church was a half hour from home. By the time I arrived, there were limousines parked in front of the church, a bagpipe howling in front, and people pouring into the church. I raced up the stairs to the organ loft, verified that the organ was running, and the electric stop action was working. I went to the basement and found a card table sucked up against the blower intake. Easy fix. Here comes the bride.

John Leek and I worked for a Polish Catholic Church on the west side of Cleveland. At the end of each tuning day, we presented ourselves at the rectory where the pastor would ask what we like to drink, duck back inside, and return with bottles of booze and cash to pay for the tuning. It seemed like kind of a loose way to run a ship.

Gustatory tuning

When scheduling a slate of tunings, I kept two criteria in mind, geographic proximity and what would be for lunch. Some organs would command a full day a few times a year. On other days we might visit two, three, or even four organs. Wendy and I lived in the Charlestown Navy Yard for ten years, a neighborhood of Boston across the harbor from the city where our neighbor was the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the United States Navy. The Episcopal church in Charlestown was a service client with a neat little two-manual tracker organ. The organist there was a pal who was happy to hold notes, so that church was often an easy fourth stop of the day, getting me home in time for cocktails.

We had pairs of churches close to each other, each pair associated with a nice place for lunch, and I scheduled things so we had a variety of lunches. You would not want to have Mexican food two days in a row. We had a nice range of cuisines including Vietnamese (Harvard Square), Chinese (Boston University), Mexican (Worcester and Quincy, Massachusetts), Thai (Back Bay, Boston), Italian (Newton, Massachusetts), fried seafood and clam chowder (Cape Cod)—you get the idea.

Several of the organists of churches where we tuned often joined us for lunch, allowing fun conversations about what was going on in each church. I paid attention to what music was out in the choir rooms, what music was piled around the organ console, and what notices were posted on bulletin boards, so I had a comprehensive working knowledge of dozens of church music programs, all of which informed my work at the church where I was music director (as well as organ tuner).

Watch your step.

If you are paying attention, maintaining a lot of instruments is an education in organ building. It is a delight to work on a well-designed, well-engineered, well-built, and well-voiced organ. How easy it is to move around inside an organ and how easy it is to reach things that will always need attention is an important reflection on the quality of an instrument. No church wants to hear that an ordinarily simple repair would involve a week of dismantling other parts of the organ to gain access to the offender.

I maintain an organ in a large, central building in New York, built by a widely known and respected builder, that includes a common brand of solid-state controls for switching and combination actions. I was dumbfounded when I realized that the “brain” of the system was installed inside the console in a way that the interchangeable circuit boards could not be removed, making normal maintenance impossible without removing the entire unit from the console and stressing the immense jumble of ribbon cables that connect it to the organ. That Medusa-like tangle made my blood run cold.

We like to see neat wiring on junction boards in an organ, every wire in its proper place, soldered evenly, tied and dressed so it will be easy to troubleshoot in the future. Sometimes we are confronted by tangled messes of wires that show no order or logic. The weight of cables is hanging directly from delicate contacts, odd wires are laced about, and there is no logic from one row of pins to another. You just know by taking a glance that the mess will be unreliable, and it is difficult, sometimes hopeless to dig down to find the wire in question.

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Organs enclosed in free-standing cases are often among the best built, but they can be difficult to service because one must reach everything from walkboards outside the back of the case. If there are seven or eight stops on the Great, that tin façade seems a mile away, and the treble pipes of the Principal down at rackboard level are often out of reach, especially if they are cone-tuned so you cannot use a long tuning iron. Staying with the Great as example, you might find three or even four reeds at the back of the windchest (16′ Trompette, 8′ Trompette, 8′ Vox Humana, 4′ Clarion), and two or three compound stops buried behind them (Mixture VI, Scharff IV, Sesquialter II). It is a stretch to reach over those hulking reeds to get to those tiny mixture trebles. As you get used to such an organ over the years, you realize which big reed pipes you can remove to gain the angles needed.

The lowest notes of the 8′ Gedeckt are probably tubed off the main chest and mounted on the case wall, but they are far away, and they can be especially tough to handle because if the pipe is sharp you must reach the pipe with two hands, one to hold the pipe and the other to move the cap higher on the pipe. Sometimes I asked a helper to hang on to my belt to keep me from falling into the pipes.

Ernest Skinner cared a lot about the serviceability of his organs. Stable ladders, ample walkboards between windchests, and sturdy tuning benches above the pipes make tuning comfortable and safe for both the tuner and the instrument. There are no surprises like treacherous spongy boards underfoot as you pass through the organ. We hope for this quality in any organ, but some are spooky. You must figure out what can bear your weight. A good rule for when you are walking somewhere in an organ where you have not walked before is do not put all your weight on anything without trying it gently first.

Over the years

Over years I learned the priorities and interests of the many organists I worked for. For one, I would always double check all the expression boxes, shutters, motors, and mechanisms, knowing that he used them constantly and considered them an important part of his playing. For another, it might be the trebles of the flutes, making sure that solo stops like orchestral reeds or harmonic flutes were in tune with each other, especially if there were antiphonal pairs of similar stops.

I learned the strengths and weaknesses of each organ, which reeds would need attention, the trebles of stopped wood flutes, keyboard contacts, and recalcitrant tremulants. I also learned which firms build organs that are reliable, easy to maintain, and, most important, beautiful. In my conversations with many organists, I learned what features of an organ made it most useful to the working musician, and how effectively it led the church’s music, especially congregational singing.

It is fun to reflect on how much easier that work is in the age of the mobile phone. Thirty years ago, while on the road doing service calls, I had to find pay phones to let people know if I was running late and to maintain my schedule. I had a memorized list of gas stations that had phone booths that were likely to be available. If I had to call a vendor with questions about the systems of an organ, I would ask in the church office if I could use the phone and sit facing away from the secretary so I could not see her angry glare when I had tied up the church’s only phone line for too long. Today you have your phone with you all the time (and it has a flashlight). If you are explaining something to a technician at Peterson Electro-Musical Products, Organ Supply Industries, or one of our other valued suppliers, you can snap a photo and send it instantly. What could be easier?

In several churches where I tuned for decades, I outlived generations of staff members and could be relied on to find a stepladder, to know where the controls for HVAC equipment were located, and how to program the electronic tower chimes. (I like to call them Bongatrons.) It is fun to think back on tens of thousands of miles driven, thousands of satisfying repairs—it is fun when you solve a knotty problem and get an organ back on its feet—endless conversations with musicians, clergy, and staff members. I had running jokes and teases with people I saw twice a year.

What an adventure, what a privilege, and what an education. Thanks for the great ride.

Lorraine S. Brugh and Richard Webster

Lorraine Brugh is senior research professor of music at Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. Richard Webster is interim director of music at Saint Paul’s Choir School and Church, Harvard Square, Boston, Massachusetts, and music director of Chicago’s Bach Week Festival.

The celebration

“These people will be your friends for life,” Karel Paukert pronounced to his organ class at Northwestern University in the mid-1970s. Looking around, we students likely smirked, unable to imagine this motley crew being lifelong friends. Almost exactly fifty years later, on November 17, 2023, many of those former students along with colleagues, family, and church members gathered to celebrate Karel’s life of teaching, leading, and performing.

Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, named Karel Paukert artist-in-residence on August 2, 2023. He has served at Saint Paul’s since 1979, first as organist and choirmaster, and now continues as organist for their Sunday early service. Most days he is there, practicing and working on a memoir he is writing at the request of two colleagues in the Czech Republic.

Kevin Jones, director of music at Saint Paul’s since June 2022 and a former student of Karel’s, organized an evening of celebration and tribute. Attended by more than 200 people, the evening opened with a recital by five of Karel’s former students. The rector, the Reverend Jeanne Leinbach, welcomed everyone to the recital. Performers were former students of Karel’s from Northwestern University—James Higdon, Richard Webster, and Lorraine Brugh—and the Cleveland Institute of Music—Brian Wilson and Kevin Jones. The recital displayed evidence of the wide range of Karel’s teaching and influence with works of Jehan Alain, Paul Hindemith, César Franck, Nicolas de Grigny, Richard Webster, Petr Eben, and Maurice Duruflé.

A gala reception followed the recital. Wine flowed freely, complemented by delicious canapés and desserts. The Reverend Leinbach again greeted and thanked all who came from near and far to attend. Lorraine Brugh, James Higdon, Richard Webster, and Kevin Jones all gave tributes, as well as a bit of roasting to Karel. Karel then closed the evening by recalling his love for Saint Paul’s and the staff and parishioners who continue to be a source of great love and support for him, his family, many of whom were in attendance, as were his former students. It was a grand evening of sharing across many decades and places where Karel continues to inspire with his music and wit. All shared admiration for his humanity. Indeed, we students had remained friends for life.

An interview

On November 17, before the festivities, Lorraine Brugh and Richard Webster interviewed Karel, focusing on his early life in Czechoslovakia (thereafter the Czech Republic and now Czechia), his escape to the West, and passion for lifelong teaching 
and learning.

Lorraine Brugh: You have been a lifelong mentor to so many students, including the two of us. Would you talk about that role and then tell us who your mentors were?

Karel Paukert: This is very interesting, because I never thought of you two as teenagers. I don’t think I treated you that way. You were both seventeen when you came to Northwestern. I simply saw two young people, extremely gifted; it was oozing from you. I was as excited as I used to be as a child when I was cultivating herbs and flowers. As a kid I loved to grow plants. This was fantastic for me.

I was first teaching young students as a young person myself when my teachers J. B. Krajs in Prague and then Gabriel Verschraegen in Ghent asked me to work with certain students while they were absent. I like to deal with people, especially young people. You two were very eager, like sponges. It was just a pleasure from the very beginning.

Richard Webster: It’s significant that you mention your love of people because many teachers don’t have that love as you do.

I really feel strongly about the role love plays in our lives. It surpasses language, racial, and geographical barriers. Also, good will. I felt it in abundance as soon as I left my oppressed native country and began my life in the West. It instantly changed me, and I became more trusting and harmonious within myself.

During my second week in Iceland, I was entrusted with the role of an oboe teacher in the music school. In my own mind I had no business being a teacher of oboe, but as a member of the Radio Orchestra and being one of the very few oboe players on the island, I fulfilled my task. My student Kjartan became the oboist of the Iceland Philharmonic a few years later.

I think that my positive instincts in that field are in my DNA, as most of my forefathers on one side of my family were teachers in the Sudetenland (frontiers drawn after the First World War in 1918–1919 and in 1938 appropriated by Adolf Hitler). Consequently, I have the need to share good things with other people.

LB: Which side of your family was that?

My father’s family. My grandfather just happened to come to my hometown Skuteč as the new postmaster. He married there. The object of his admiration was my grandmother Hedvika. He ate in a restaurant for ten years watching this young woman, the daughter of the owner, before he asked her to marry him. He had a dignity about him and thought we teenagers were rude for welcoming girls without shirts on, even though it was a hot summer. I was twelve, my brother eight, and he considered us loose, with no manners. He gave us an example of a time he was mortified when his teacher in elementary school took his class to the river and requested them to take their shirts off before swimming. His shyness did not allow him to do it. He was tearing up, sharing this episode with us. I would definitely say I got my love of teaching from his side.

LB: Can you talk about some of your mentors outside of your family?

There was a Catholic priest, Monsignor Jiri Sahula, who, though poor as a church mouse, had a great assortment of musical instruments. When I was about ten years old and was his acolyte for morning Mass in the local Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, he lent me books to read. They were way over my head, but I just perused them to please him and then brought them back. For a change he started to talk about the beauty and nobility of the church organ. That was before it began to mesmerize me. In the same context he talked about a composer, František Musil, a priest, who composed a beautiful sonata.

Many years later, when I played the sonata, I was often in tears, recalling Monsignor’s poverty and humility. You could see him from afar. He walked by our house to the next village, probably to visit ailing folks. Walking through the neighborhood, he would carry a huge leather bag, and village folks often offered him goods. “Just baked, Monsignor.” People loved him and took pleasure in feeding him.

Monsignor Sahula was well known as a published historian, rather conservative, but enlightened. It was moving to see him play a variety of instruments, including a musical saw, a zither, and a one-key flute. When I came home for a visit from the conservatory in Prague, he wanted us to make music together—violin and piano. I was pleased to oblige. Often it was painful because he did not practice and his intonation was painful. In the winter, around Christmas, his huge room with a high ceiling was atrociously cold. It was touching to see him tear up playing or talking about music. (I learned from him and others how much music moves people.) I loved those times with the Monsignor, nevertheless.

RW: Would you tell us about your teachers?

My organ teacher at the Prague Conservatory, Jan Bedřich Krajs, was the nephew of the composer and organ virtuoso, Bedřich Antonín Wiedermann. He was like a father to me, in part because he had the same kind of view on present-day government policy and was opposed to the Communists, as my father was.

Our discussions in the organ studio were without boundaries. At a certain point, perhaps in my second year, a recording line was installed, so that we could record our playing. That was a pretext, and what we did not think of was that they also could tape our conversations. We didn’t realize that when we talked politics, even students among ourselves, someone could record us, and they did. It was brought to the attention of the conservatory authorities, and they threatened to close the department if professor Krajs did not dismiss me.

I seemed to have been the chief culprit. My standing was magnified by an anonymous letter from my hometown Skuteč about my class origin: petit bourgeois. This indicated that I was not worthy to be part of the cadre, the working class in the new Socialist state, but should first prove myself in a factory.

Fortunately, the man who installed the telephone was our instructor of acoustics and the son of Comrade Prchal, a leader of the Revolutionary Movement of the Trade Unions (ROH). He was a friend of my teacher, who, among other maintenance tasks, oiled our organ motors. He asked Professor Krajs with urgency to dismiss me, to prevent the closing of the department of organ. On ideological grounds, Krajs said he was not going to do that. What followed was a search of the apartment of the Krajs family. Professor Krajs was a friend of Jan Masaryk, the son of the first president of the Czech Republic, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. He “died” in Czernin Palace [in Prague] in 1948, by suicide or was possibly thrown out of a window. To this day it isn’t certain how he died.

My father listened to Jan Masaryk and other Czech dissidents on regular shortwave radio transmissions from London on the BBC (London Calls) and from New York (Voice of America) during the War. Broadcasts were in the Czech language, received on our Telefunken radio. This was considered to be illegal activity and could be punishable by prison or even death, as the required orange tag on the dial indicated.

Before leaving the country, Masaryk left Professor Krajs his famous hat, books, letters, and other memorabilia. One day the secret police came to check his apartment, probably to look for objects that could compromise him so that they could take action against him. The Krajs family lived in Malá Strana, in a centuries-old house, below the Prague Castle in Thunovská Street. Upon hearing the doorbell, the professor peeked down from the upper floor and saw men in leather coats, a typical attire of the secret police. Before he opened the doors downstairs he took the things that might be compromising and threw them all into an oven, a ceramic stove that went up all the way to the ceiling in the large room, which housed a small two-manual organ. Unfortunately, later in the day when the professor was at the conservatory, Mrs. Krajs came back and lit a fire in the stove, not knowing what all the papers were about. She burned it all up. There were notes, letters, enough incriminating evidence that almost certainly would have resulted in incarceration.

The early 1950s were tough times after a few peaceful years following World War II. It was the “dictatorship of the working class on the way to Socialism and Communism.” In many ways it mirrored the German occupation and their beastly deeds.

RW: What year would this be?

It began after the February 1948 Revolution with the confiscation of properties of the rich and the nationalization of industry, and climaxed in the last years of Stalin. The years 1952 and 1953 were terrible, because any Soviet doctrine would be copied by the Czech Communists. It was the art and culture of social realism; everything had to be optimistic, with positive depictions of the Russians. Whatever it was, it had to be in agreement with the party line. This was the reign of Socialist realism. So we couldn’t play music that wasn’t relatable to the working classes, especially anything with religious titles. Music that named Jesus Christ or mentioned anything religious was prohibited, with a few exceptions. If a piece was called “Meditation” it might have passed the ideological control.

My colleague, Jan Hora, retired professor of the conservatory and the Academy of Musical Arts, often played in the concert halls of the Soviet Union. He said that there were never printed programs in the Soviet Union. The works would be announced from the stage so that any religious connotations would be erased.

Thanks to Jan I got to know Professor Verschraegen. Jan was my best friend from the conservatory years. He was a fine organist and was allowed to travel abroad. While still in school he won several competitions. In fact, Jan met Professor Verschraegen when he was taking part in the J. S. Bach competition in Ghent. He always brought back organ scores of contemporary composers published in the West. This was music that we never had access to in the “Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.” I was able to borrow and copy some of them.

I also told you about Paul Hindemith and copying his Sonata I. When he came to Prague, I asked him if he would be so kind as to sign it. That much I could say in German. He was very upset—I might say furious. I must have been in a tearful disposition, as his kind wife, Frau Gertrud, had mercy on me, took me by my hand, and invited me to sit with her in the loge at Smetana Hall during the second half of his rehearsal with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. After I explained to her in broken German our situation, vis-à-vis new music from the West, she took me after the rehearsal to the green room. I could tell that she was explaining the predicament of music students to Hindemith. He obviously changed his mind, because he did sign the sonata (“With thanks to the copyist”!!). He also requested my address, and during one of the ensuing summer months I got a package from Schott in Vienna, addressed to my parents’ house in Skuteč, with all three of his sonatas.

Back to Professor Verschraegen. It happened that he was allowed to concertize in the Czech Republic. I was in military service between 1957 and 1959 in Pisek and Tabor. It was in 1958 that I met him. Mr. Palasek, who was the minister at the prayer house of the Czech Brethren, had for our circumstances a nice, small two-manual organ, and allowed me to practice there whenever I had permission to leave the barracks. He told me about an upcoming Verschraegen concert there and asked if I could assist him during his recital.

There was a youngish lady named Vera who was translating for him. The two seemed to have been affectionate with each other. She was a Jew and had spent several war years in the concentration camp. I could tell because she had a tattoo on her arm.

Later in Ghent, I realized that her story fascinated Verschraegen from the very beginning, and he was attracted to her. She asked me if I liked his playing; I said, yes, very much, and she asked if I would like to study with him. She talked to Gabriel about me, and the next time he came to Prague I played for him. He came there to premiere his Concerto for Organ and Strings with the Prague Chamber Orchestra in the Rudolfinum.

He loved Prague and stayed for several days. I tried to communicate with him in my elementary German. He spoke his native Flemish, French, and German. Afterwards, Vera convinced me that I had to improve my German to communicate with him. I listened to her and took private German lessons, making fairly rapid progress.

The Pragokoncert housed him in the Hotel Alcron, a hotel for guests from the West. One evening he invited me there for supper. As we spoke a waiter came to us and silently pointed above his head, toward the chandelier. That indicated to me that there was a recording device. Fortunately, I had not said very much. But I was so grateful, so grateful to the waiter for warning us.

The next day, through the help of Vera, I got to play for him. Later when I was in Belgium, he told me I was like some other Czech organists, who were so rhythmically undisciplined. (He had heard them in various competitions as a juror.) He said I had to buy a metronome and reached immediately for his wallet to give me money, but I did have some money. After two lessons with him I did what he asked me to do—to write in all the fingerings and pedaling in Bach’s Toccata in F (BWV 540i). Thereafter, I passed his requirement.

RW: Just like you, he was very generous to his students.

Thank you. Anyway, so then after two or three lessons, he said that he would like me to teach his son, Dirk. “You can play as you want, but I want you to teach him to use the metronome and note the fingerings.” Obviously, he wanted me to instill discipline in him.

After that I didn’t get many lessons from him. He would listen to me and make a few, always helpful comments. We discussed interpretations away from the organ as well. He was a deep thinker and liked to talk a lot about himself and life in general. I lived nearby, and he would often ring my doorbell in the evening and ask if I wanted to have coffee or a beer chat. We might also meet in the square at a brasserie in front of the cathedral where I was playing weekday Masses, Sunday morning Masses, and other important offices. Or we would talk and walk through the old town. He would talk politics, the world, and Vera in Prague, and I would comment here and there. He loved his city and was a proud “Vlamink” (Flemish citizen).

RW: Last year you received an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Musical Arts in Prague, and a week thereafter the Prize of the Ministry of Culture. What was it like for you to be there and to receive the award?

It was like a dream. My entire U.S. family and Czech relatives came to support me. When I legally left Prague in 1961 I had a suitcase containing some music scores and my oboe for a one-year engagement in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. By not returning for the obligatory summer military training and disregarding all the letters from the Czech authorities, the military court issued me a ten-year prison term. I did not think that even a short visit would ever be a possibility.

I never thought I would be going back. But things changed. The Velvet Revolution was a miracle. I told you about my mother. When I took a train to Skuteč to say goodbye before leaving for Iceland and told her I might not be coming back, she was standing in front of the armoire and was so startled she dropped a mirror on the floor. “You cannot do it.” I didn’t even say goodbye to my father because he was working in an ammunition factory and could only come home on the weekend. I didn’t know myself if I could get to the point where I could divorce myself from my past and never be back again.

Playing in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in Reykjavik, existing modestly, I had saved some money, made some more in Oslo with the recording of Czech organ music in the cathedral in Oslo for the Norwegian Radio. I kept my savings in my shoes, believing that with a little bit of luck I could survive two to three months.

In Oslo I put my suitcase into a railway depot before embarking by autostop to the west coast. I splurged on a pair of blue jeans (my first ones), a small backpack, and a navy t-shirt. Then in the harbor I was trying to find work. I did find it on a packet boat servicing Kristiansand and Bergen. I meditated about my future under the starlit sky when the boat moored at night in one of the magic fjords. The sailors would leave me on the boat alone, sleep somewhere on the shore, and would come back in the morning. I was to clean the kitchen and the deck. After I was finished I watched the stars and made my plans. My kingdom was the deck of the smallish boat.

On the way to Prague in 2022 I was again replaying in my mind the circumstances of my leaving in 1961. It took me many months in Reykjavik to tackle the parting step with my past. The final decision, the realization that I had to leave my past in order to at least touch my dreams, was made during my journey in 1962, hitchhiking from Bergen back to Oslo. After a nap in a haystack in the Telemark region of Norway, awakened by the scent of hay and hearing singing from a beautifully carved chalet (there must have been more than a dozen of them, scattered in the valley), I made the decision to stay in the West. I bought a ticket to Ghent, checked my suitcase, boarded the train, and was on my way to Belgium.

In Sweden there was no passport control from Norway. When we reached Denmark, however, there was a casual passport control at the border to Germany. The officer selected me and said I needed a valid visa. I told him I had one. He stated I needed a visa for each country since my passport was from a Communist country. He said I had transgressed Scandinavian rules. I explained what I was contemplating—to ask for asylum. He said he would let me go to Germany, and there I would need to ask for asylum.

The German border police got me off the train. The realization came to me too late that my suitcase, a “Mitgepäck,” was going to Ghent. Out of fear that I could be apprehended, I had left in it the letters from Verschraegen that could prove he had invited me to come to study with him, plus anything else that would reveal my intentions not to return home. This was August, and I didn’t get to Ghent until November. Meanwhile, I had to exist. The Germans said it would be possible to stay in Germany because I was a musician. But I would have to change my name and go to a camp for refugees, because I didn’t want to become a German citizen.

I was sent back to Denmark on the next train. The same officer, Mr. Poulsen, waited for me at the Padborg station and brought me to a small police station directly in the railway station. There he interviewed me and wrote a protocol. I was jailed overnight and taken with two men, obviously criminals, to Copenhagen by rail and boats. Today the bridges make that part of the voyage a delight.

They brought me to the officer for refugees. I deposited my Czech passport and the return airline ticket to Prague. His office would help me apply for a visa to Belgium. In the meantime, I was required to find housing and periodically report to his office. I was terrified that I would not have enough money to stay in the city while I waited for the visa.

I wrote a desperate letter to a friend in Iceland, Didda Gudrum Kristinsdottir. She was a pianist who studied with Bruno Seidlhofer in Vienna and was at that time the best pianist in Iceland. I gave her the address of the rented room where she could write to me.

Instead of receiving a letter, one day a Danish woman came to my door, introduced herself as Hanne Poulsen, a friend of Didda from Vienna, where she had studied broadcasting. She already knew that I needed help here and offered me the use of her apartment. “I am leaving my apartment and going on vacation. I will be with my mother for six weeks. I would like you to use it.” I just couldn’t accept it. She said she would come in the afternoon and would show me Copenhagen. She drove me all around the city in her beautiful Saab. We ended in Nyhavn with a glass of delicious Tuborg beer. During our sightseeing I decided to accept her kind offer. That helped me to survive in Copenhagen because I had no job. For many years thereafter, whenever I would be nearby, I would meet her for dinner.

I would go to the Belgian embassy to check on my visa almost every day, wearing sunglasses so that I would not be recognized. That feeling of being pursued stayed with me for a long time. It finally disappeared in 1964, when I arrived in the United States.

During my waiting time for the visa I was able to take advantage of the musical life in Copenhagen. Tickets were inexpensive. In Tivoli, the famous amusement park, I heard amazing concerts of all sorts, including Danish avant-garde composers, conductor Zubin Mehta with the Tivoli orchestra, even a piano recital by the seventy-five-year-old Arthur Rubinstein.

One day, in a cafeteria, I met a young man who looked at me quizzically and addressed me in English. By that time I could speak some English. He was a Fulbright student from the USA, Raymond Harris, studying with Finn Viderø. I knew the name of his teacher as he was well known as a prophet, specializing in the works of Buxtehude. Mr. Viderø didn’t mind if I came to his lessons. I learned a lot by observing him and listening to the beautiful Marcussen organ on which he taught. I summoned the courage to visit other organ lofts and was received cordially. Many of the organists were also composers. I could not believe the clarity of those instruments!

Then one day at the Belgian embassy, a kind consular officer, a distinguished older Jewish woman told me, “Do not despair. It will happen.” It wasn’t happening fast enough. I was writing desperate letters to Verschraegen, “Please, please, Herr Professor.” I got no answer. He needed to attest that he was inviting me to Belgium. We had made the agreement in 1961 that he would send me a Christmas card with his signature and an asterisk if the invitation was still valid. Shortly thereafter I received it and still have it. It’s a Christmas card, more than half a century old, with a landscape painting of an old Flemish master, and on the reverse, his signature and the asterisk.

After coming to Ghent I found out that Professor Verschraegen traveled during the summer with the whole family in Europe and was also giving concerts. His mail was collected by one of the sextons, Roger Van de Wielle, a musicologist and author, who was also one of the organists.

LB: Tonight you will be honored for another award, artist-in-residence at Saint Paul’s. Share some of your thoughts about this celebration.

The rector, in her generosity, and Kevin Jones, director of music here, made it possible for me to stay on. I treasure the office I have, because I can hopefully finish my memoirs. I also have a resting place here in the columbarium for Noriko [Fujii-Paukert, Karel’s wife] and myself. She agreed to be buried with me.

Look at this beautiful space. I’m often here until 8:00 p.m. working on details of the remembrances, making sure all the details are correct. Sometimes I come to pleasant, even stunning discoveries. Today, for example, I was reading about two musicians who concertized at the Cleveland Museum of Art in their early careers, Christine Brandes and Joshua Bell. Christine, a sought-after soprano in early music, shone in several of our concerts thirty years ago, and Joshua, now a world-class violinist, was scheduled for one of our summer concerts when he was thirteen or fourteen. He was the first winner of the Stulberg International Competition for string players under age twenty.

This competition was founded by the friends of Julius Stulberg, professor of violin in Kalamazoo [Western Michigan University], a year after his death. It was a stroke of luck, and it happened because of my skiing accident. I found out about Joshua from my orthopedist, Dr. Stulberg, whose father was a German immigrant and the famed violinist. The good doctor, who apparently frequented our concerts, raved about Joshua and put me in contact with his mother. I was fortunate in that regard; so many good things happened to me.

LB: How did the invitation to write your memoir come about?

It was the editor of Prague Radio, Eva Ocisková, who recorded a series of talks for her program Pameti (“Memories”). It was a successful program in many installments on Radio Vltava Prague. From that she must have gleaned some inspiration and asked me to consider writing the story of my life. Her husband, my close friend, renowned organist Jaroslav Tůma, supported it.

LB: They are planning a publication in Czech?

Yes, and there is support for the Czech edition from official circles. What happens further, with the English edition, I don’t know as yet.

LB: What accomplishments are you most proud of, or satisfied with, in your long professional arc?

Well, here in the church I am pleased with the acquisition of instruments. We acquired an Italian organ by Gerhard Hradetzky, the Italian harpsichord by Matthias Giewisch, and the positiv of Vladimir Slajch. Of course, we have the iconic Holtkamp organ.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) procurement was one of my chief preoccupations from the very beginning. I wanted to acquire instruments that would enable us to present a variety of musical styles. Those instruments included harpsichord copies for French, Italian, and German repertoire, an organ positiv, an original Broadwood fortepiano, a copy of Mozart’s Walter clavier, and a clavichord. We used them in the auditorium and in various galleries for concerts. This gave the musical arts also a visual artistic presentation. In both instances it required patience and perseverance to obtain the necessary funds from private individuals and foundations.

Unfortunately, the CMA instruments are now in storage and are not played. That situation pains me very much. Even more, the human capital we assembled through the many activities is no longer nourished by the CMA as it was for almost 100 years. You cannot measure such things with a yardstick, but you can see and feel the respect people paid to music over the years. I was not the first one. I simply continued in that trajectory of the first curators, following in the footsteps of my predecessor, Walter Blodgett.

There are many instrumentalists and composers who were studying here at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) and students at other institutions who, even now after many years have passed, acknowledge how much the CMA program enriched their professional lives through the concerts, listening to rehearsals, and meeting with the artists. We wanted it to be precisely that: a supplemental music laboratory for as many as possible. The young professionals who studied with Donald Erb at CIM got to meet William Bolcom, William Albright, Jacob Druckman, Messrs. Carter and Crumb, and dozens of others. Imagine the young organist to be a few steps away from such legends as Jean Langlais, Pierre Cochereau, Madame Duruflé, Olivier Messiaen, or Yvonne Loriod. There is something sacred in meeting great artists.

It was the same with masterclasses. If we had harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt or Edith Picht-Axenfeld playing fortepiano, students would come from CIM, from Case Western, Cleveland State, or the Oberlin Conservatory, just to experience their artistry. It was the education tangent that I valued very much. What is heartwarming to me now are the occasional encounters with folks I meet in the street or a store, or musicians who participated in our endeavors, age-wise all over the spectrum, expressing gratitude for our musical mission.

LB: Was the new music direction your own, or had it been already established?

I was following Walter Blodgett. He was interested in new music. The CMA juried exhibitions of local artists. Walter complemented this with May festivals, mostly performances of new music. He had people like Karlheinz Stockhausen here before I came. I could not believe it.

So I felt very safe in pushing the envelope. Among others in programming music of different nations, I also wanted to promote Czech music. The general manager of CMA, Beverly Barksdale, previously assistant to George Szell, assured me that because Szell presented Czech music often [with the Cleveland Orchestra], programming Czech music would not be objectionable to Clevelanders. On the contrary, we would frequently combine resources from CMA, the choir from Saint Paul’s, as well as local instrumentalists, and present concerts in the CMA, the Bohemian National Hall, and elsewhere in the city. During the oppressive regime, ending with the Velvet Revolution (Prague, November and December 1989), local folks were unable to visit the homeland and enthusiastically supported our programs of Dvořák, Smetana, Janáček, and others.

RW: What are your regrets?

As humans we all sin. Perhaps I sinned more than others. Feeling guilty helped me do good things and helped me, in part, to overcome my guilt. I should have loved more. I should have spent more time with my family. I should have been more understanding of some of my students. I should have worked harder from the beginning.

RW: What advice do you have to young musicians, particularly organists, composers, and church musicians who are at the beginnings of their careers?

I just really think that, in today’s market, it is necessary to be multi-faceted, to be capable of stepping into diverse situations, in order to earn enough for the basic necessities. I am speaking now as the father of a family. The brilliant ones and those who are hard working will most likely make it. [Young musicians] do not need any advice from us. They just need to find a mentor and continue to love music and know what and why they are doing it.

LB: Well, there aren’t even enough church jobs to go around anymore.

I think you have to follow your call, whatever it is. My teacher at the conservatory, Mr. Krajs, said, when he taught me privately,

Darling, you are ready to take the exams at the conservatory. Think it over. You have to be sure you love music enough. You know how the government treats the church, and it may not change in your lifetime. You may have to play for free in the church, if they are even open, and be employed in a radio station as a sound engineer. But you play oboe; you will be okay.

The satisfaction of being a musician is enormous, especially in religious realms. I was fortunate to have a dream position at the museum (CMA), not in terms of financial rewards but in being an unofficial musical missionary in the city. To that end was added another dimension, serving people in the church, first [at Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church] in Evanston and now in Cleveland Heights. I was fortunate to work under great rectors—in Evanston, Tom Ray, and in Cleveland Heights, Chave McCracken, Nick White, Alan Gates, Jeanne Leinbach, and a host of wonderful musical colleagues. I learned from all of them, and I am still learning.

RW: It’s a calling.

Yes.

Postscript by Karel Paukert

I wish Frank Cunkle were still alive. Thanks to him I made it all the way to the U.S. In 1963 Gabriel Verschraegen asked me to take care of an American music journalist, Mr. Cunkle, who was planning to visit the Festival of Flanders to see diverse organs and attend as many recitals as possible. I agreed to be his guide, not realizing that this encounter would change my life forever.

Frank was the editor of The Diapason, based in Chicago. As I quickly found out, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the U.S. organ scene. He let me know right away that he disliked certain organists, but did like very much the playing of Catharine Crozier and also Robert Noehren. I proudly told him that I met both in Haarlem and that they recommended me to come to the U.S. Frank did not promise me anything but indicated that he would contact a few acquaintances in churches and schools for a possible recital or a class on Czech organ music. It all became reality when I landed in Chicago on December 19, 1964. I was welcomed by Frank, organ builder John F. Shawhan, and two doctoral students at Northwestern University, Benn Gibson and James Leland. They brought me to Frank’s house (he did not drive) in Oak Park.

The Chicago Chapter of the American Guild of Organists invited me to play a recital for their midwinter conclave, undoubtedly, thanks to Frank’s recommendation. It was announced in the December 1964 issue of The Diapason.

In 1968 I returned to the Chicago area to teach at Northwestern University in Evanston and reconnected with Frank. Upon his retirement in 1970 he moved to our small house on Noyes Street and became a frequent babysitter of our children. He eventually fulfilled his plan to retire in Mexico. After he found the experience disappointing, he returned to the U.S. to live close to his sister in Chula Vista, California.

A child of the Great Depression, he was born in Arkansas and was accustomed to living frugally. In his younger years he earned his living in music as an organist, pianist, composer, and arranger. He possessed absolute pitch. His music education was broad. I am his grateful mentee, for imparting to me the skills of American life I would need for the rest of my life.

Special thanks to my friends, Lorraine and Richard, and also to Stephen Schnurr and The Diapason, for allowing me to share my memories.

 

Karel is currently receiving treatment at the University Hospital’s Seidman Cancer Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

John Bishop

J. G. P. Leek

When I was a student at Oberlin (Class of 1978), students were not allowed to own cars, ostensibly to limit traffic and parking congestion in the small town. I lived in an apartment off campus during my senior year, and since it came with a parking space, I flouted the rule and bought a 1969 Mercedes 230. I put a great sound system in it—those cassette tapes were just the thing—and I felt like the big man driving around. It was in pretty good shape, but it was a nine-year-old Ohio car, and there were little fringes of rust here and there.

At a time when my rent was $175 per month, I splurged and spent $200 on four new Michelin tires. The next morning, I drove to the organ shop where I was working and proudly showed off the new tires. My boss, John Leek, quipped, “It’s like putting alligator shoes on a wino.”

John Leek died in Sandusky, Ohio, on November 15, 2019, just short of the age of ninety. Until a couple years ago, I called him on his birthday. We stayed in touch now and again, especially after he read about himself in this column, but I had not seen him in more than fifteen years. I dropped everything to drive to Ohio for his memorial service, but I am sorry I did not drop everything a couple years ago to visit him. I am grateful to him, I miss him, and I want to tell you about him.

His name bears the Dutch pronunciation. A bank teller commented, “Your name should be pronounced ‘leak.’” His quick quip, “Then it should be pronounced ‘Bea-thoven.’”

The wino crack was one side of John. He was able to squeeze the greatest delight from the smallest joke, and when it was a big joke, we would laugh all day. He could also be stern. He had been brought up in the rigorous system of apprenticeships in the Netherlands, starting with a cabinetmaker at a very early age and moving to organ shops in his hometown. His teachers had been tough, and so was he. He was quick with compliments and encouragement and equally quick with a hard lesson. I was late to work once. He was in the workshop, the doors were locked, and he waved me away, telling me to come back tomorrow. I was late to work only once.

§

Johannes Geratus Petrus Leek was born in 1929 in Alkmaar, the Netherlands, on the shortest day of the year, the youngest of eleven children. He apprenticed with Bernard Pels & Zonen in Alkmaar, and he continued his education in the workshops of Vermeulen, Wattell, and Verschueren. He served in the Dutch army shortly after the end of World War II. During his military service, John was seriously injured in a railroad accident. He recalled lying in the wrecked car realizing he was hurt, asking God for “twenty more years,” and then getting the creeps as the twentieth anniversary approached. I do not know the exact dates but suppose that accident happened in the early 1950s. He died last November about five weeks short of his ninetieth birthday—God granted that prayer.

After his time in the army, he returned to work in the organ shop of Verschueren. He and his wife Maria moved to the United States in 1961 as John went to work for the Holtkamp Organ Company under Walter Holtkamp, Sr. He was working on the installation of the organ in Warner Concert Hall at Oberlin when he saw a notice on a bulletin board that the school was looking for a new organ curator. “That’s the job for me.” He worked for the school from 1964 until 1976, all the while gathering organ maintenance clients “on the side,” and he left the school to start his own company in the workshop building behind his house on Route 58 (Main Street), just on the southern outskirts of town.

Just as John was starting out on his own, in the fall of my junior year, I began working with him three days a week and summers, and continued in his shop full time from my graduation until 1984, when my wife and two toddler sons moved to Boston. John was my important mentor in the craft of organbuilding. He taught me to tune, how to read and cut a piece of wood, how to glue pouches, how to build and leather a reservoir. I learned why you want wood to have standing grain for pallets in slider chests and flat grain in keyboards. (Wood warps only between the growth rings. You do not want pallets to warp so their surface does not meet the windchest grid, and you do not want keyboards to warp so the keys come into contact with each other.)

He helped me grow through the awkward end of youth when I was sure I knew everything into the awkward beginning of adulthood when I began realizing how little I knew. He never hesitated to let me know when I was full of it, and he never hesitated to confess when he was. While still an organ performance major, I was increasingly aware that organbuilding was my first love. I wondered aloud to John about quitting school so I could work with him full time. “If you quit school, you’re fired.”

Whenever my weak apprentice attempts resulted in a mangled job, John nailed it to the wall over my workbench. It turned really funny when I came back later to visit and they were still there, warning my successor apprentices to pay attention.

Road trip

Early in the summer of 1978, just after I graduated from Oberlin, we were completing construction of a harpsichord for a former student of the conservatory who lived in Oakland, California. She asked John to deliver the instrument to her, and he invited me to make the trip with him to share the driving. His offer was that I would not get paid, but he promised we would stay in the best hotels, eat the best meals, gamble in Reno, swim in the Pacific Ocean, and eat at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. John had a mustard-yellow Dodge van with a broad brown stripe (remember, those were the days of appliances in harvest gold and avocado colors), just the vehicle for such a caper, and off we went.

The trip is about 2,400 miles each way, and I suppose we drove between 400 and 500 miles each day because I remember it taking about a week in each direction. Anyone who has made a similar trip by land will appreciate our marveling at the rich agricultural heartlands, the prairies, the mountains, and the deserts. We drove all day through Iowa into Nebraska watching a huge weather system develop from the west all across the horizon, driving into light rain, and finally parking under a bridge for more than an hour waiting for the thunder, lightning, and hail to stop. We didn’t see a tornado, but that surely was on our minds.

When we stopped for gas just after entering Nevada, I put a dime in a truck-stop slot machine and won ten dollars. Bad. Very bad. We spent a night in Elko, Nevada, where we had a memorable meal in a Basque restaurant recommended by Howard Hanson, a member of Oberlin’s voice faculty. It is almost three hundred miles across flat arid land from Elko to Reno, and it seemed that we were staring at the distant mountains west of Reno all day, a visual effect that is hard to fathom the first time you see it. It was in a posh casino in Reno that I learned how it was bad that I had been sucked into the slot machine the day before. Inhibitions were loosened as the champagne was on the house, and I ran through all the quarters I could find (I think that may have been before there was such a thing as a dollar slot) while John got beaten up at a Blackjack table. It was interesting how often the dealer came up with twenty-one.

As we delivered the harpsichord, we spent two nights in the house with the customer and her physician husband, allowing us to visit San Francisco and fulfill a couple of John’s original promises. We were both smokers, and that was not allowed in the house. The second night, the good doctor brought home a preserved smoker’s lung in a jar and delivered a thoughtful lecture.

John burst randomly into song many times each day. The simple chanted Alleluia from the Roman Catholic Mass was a several-times-a-day regular. Another was a short clip from a bawdy little Dutch song asking a woman named Elena why the baby poops green. Maria and I joined elbows and sang that one for their grandchildren on the morning of the memorial service. There were many others, all brief excerpts. I do not believe John knew the complete songs, but he sure enjoyed the clips. Over and over.

John and Maria had been naturalized as citizens of the United States in 1968. He thundered the first four words of the refrain of “This is My Country” each time a new wonder was revealed on that wonderful trip. It was a punctuating anthem for a man of deep faith marveling at the process of his life that had brought him to live and work in such a huge country with such diverse landscapes.

The twinkle in his eye

John and his family were members of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Oberlin, which was the site of his memorial service. When I worked for him, new carpet was being installed in the church, and the old had been given to a smaller church out in the countryside where the unworn sections would be enough to cover the floor. John volunteered the two of us to join a crew of parishioners removing the old carpet, which was loaded into his van and my pickup truck, where the huge roll hung over the back of my open tailgate. I was in the lead as we left on the delivery run, turning left from the church parking lot onto Lorain Street. I was stopped at the traffic light at the intersection of Main Street (Route 58) across from the art museum when I felt a strong push from behind. John had been careful to see that no traffic was coming, and, with a maniacal smile clearly visible in my mirror, was shoving me, carpet, truck, and all, through the red light into the middle of the highway.

In between organs, we built a screen porch on John’s house with a high peaked ceiling. Coming to the end of the project we were painting the floor. I was working my way out a corner with my back to John when I became aware of the quick whooshing of John’s brush flashing back and forth as he hurried to paint me into the corner.

Opus 1

In the fall of 1979, John signed a contract to build a new organ for St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia. The organist there was Ben Dobey who had recently graduated from Oberlin as an organ major and was sure that while John had never built a pipe organ himself, he would be well able. Originally, the instrument was planned with twelve stops on two manuals, but the agreement was altered in December of 1980 to include the addition of an independent 8′ Octaafbass in the Pedal, which made necessary the construction of a separate case for the two pedal stops. You can see the specifications of the organ at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=8401.

The case is made of white oak with black walnut accents, drawknobs were made from a huge log of boxwood that John kept in the attic of the workshop, and the pipes were supplied by Jacques Stinkens of Zeist, the Netherlands. The slider windchests were made with sponsils, individual strips of wood fitted and glued between the ribs of the key channels to form the table surface, rather than the more usual plywood windchest table. With the experience of having built more than a dozen harpsichords, we made the keyboards in the shop. (That is when I learned about choosing slab grain.) In the first days of March 1982, I was standing at the drill press in the shop, drilling the holes in rackboards for the three windchests—start with the smallest holes so that if you make a mistake and drill an extra hole of a given size, it is easier to correct by making it bigger rather than smaller. (I have this memory exactly because those were the days of waiting for Pat to go into labor, and our first son Michael was born on March 4. I had quit smoking the previous New Year’s Eve.)

After the first week of the installation, the new organ case was standing in the church’s balcony with façade pipes in place. John and I sat proudly in the pews that Sunday as the congregation was gathering in the quiet church when a little girl near us took a look backwards and piped up clearly, “I like the old one better,” raising a polite Episcopal titter.

Patrick Summers, the current interim organist at Saint Alban’s, provided a great boost to my memory by forwarding the documents concerning the new organ from the church’s archives. As I read, John’s distinctive voice came alive. When petitioning the vestry to consider changing the schedule of payments from a list of completed components to one based on the calendar, John wrote (as Maria typed), “We would like to ask in a very polite manner from the Counsel to be paid each half year.”

John spoke English rapidly and fluently, but he never lost the grammar of his native Dutch. Coming into the shop in the morning, he would declare, “I feel myself good today,” typically followed by the ubiquitous Alleluia. (“Myself” was pronounced my-selliff, just as the name of his hometown was pronounced Allick-mar.) My primitive classroom German gives me, “Ich habe mich . . .” Although I had never been addressed by a nickname, in that workshop I was “Yonnyboy.”

Nunc dimittis

At John’s service I was reunited with his son James who runs the Leek Organ Company, his siblings Paula and Peter, their spouses and children, and his wife Maria. All of us bear the marks of the thirty-five years that have passed since my young family and I moved to Boston to start a new chapter, but the memories and stories flowed like it was yesterday. It was hilarious to hear the familiar stories as passed through the generations to John’s grandchildren, and it was fun to share some they had not heard.

John believed that there is a little voice in the head of a craftsman that pipes up when something is about to go wrong. “If you do that, you will stab yourself with that chisel.” I still hear that little voice and think of him. When I am tuning a chimney flute, I remember the moment he showed me how to hold the tool in the Congregational Church in Austinburg, Ohio, and I remember his teasing my beginner’s “yo-yo tuning” in the chapel at the College of Wooster. He insisted that I learn to tune with both hands and made me tune entire organs left-handed. There are some pipes you just cannot reach with your right hand.

John Leek was not a nationally known organbuilder, but he was widely known by generations of students at Oberlin that gave him an impressive reach. Many of my friends worked for him during their student years, and many other former students have commented in recent weeks about how generous he was with advice and goodwill. He built more than a dozen harpsichords and two pipe organs, renovated or restored dozens more, and performed thousands of service calls on hundreds of different organs. While I worked with him, we helped install four new Flentrop organs including the big three-manual instrument at Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland. I believe his greatest legacy was as a teacher, sharing his old-world experience, knowledge, and insight with young craftsmen.

John and I worked regularly on the big Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland, releathering a division at a time and doing regular tuning visits. As we left the church one afternoon, a woman was contemplating a flat tire, and we offered to change it for her. When we finished, she thanked us profusely, declaring that there would be a special place in heaven for us. John replied, “Yes, tuning harps.”

Lorraine S. Brugh

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

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

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

Lorraine Brugh: No, I never did.

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

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

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

LB: There will be others who join you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB: I imagine they were pretty gracious about that.

JR: I think they were.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB: So I shouldn’t ask about it?

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

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

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

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

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

LB: What an environment to live in!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB: Would you like that kind of invitation?

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

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

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

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

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

LB: Did you conduct it?

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

LB: You were holding your breath?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Samuel Russell

Samuel Russell is the library and archival collections manager at Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales, Florida. He oversees the Anton Brees Carillon Library and the Chao Research Center, which houses the archives of the Bok Tower Gardens Foundation and its predecessor, The American Foundation. The Chao Research Center is also home to many artifacts related to the founder: Edward W. Bok.

This interview took place February 19, 2022, at the Blue Palmetto Café on the campus of Bok Tower Gardens, Lake Wales, Florida. Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra was studying with Geert D’hollander and playing four concerts at Bok Tower during the week of February 14–19, 2022. I conducted this interview before Pamela had a meeting with Geert. The conversation ended a little early as we heard the bells chiming in the background, which reminded us that it was time for her meeting.

I have Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra with me today. She is a carillonist in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I play mid-day recitals at the University of Michigan.

And you are also on faculty there?

Not right now. I was the visiting carillonist at the University of Michigan during the 2019–2020 academic year, when Tiffany Ng was on a fellowship leave.

How long have you been playing the carillon?

Eight years. I first started playing the piano when I was a child. Then I added the organ when I was about twelve. As an undergraduate, I majored first in piano and then organ and choral music education, and then went on to pursue a Master of Fine Arts and doctoral degrees in organ with secondary music theory, conducting, and sacred music fields.

Were you aware of the carillon during your childhood?

No, I didn’t live near a carillon in my childhood. It was only when we moved to Ann Arbor and I took the organ professor position at Eastern Michigan University that I started hearing the bells. I was so enchanted by their time keeping capabilities, but also by their role as messengers—that they could speak to the moment of any given day.

The history of letting people know if there was a special event going on, or pirates were coming, or whatever the news was.

Exactly. I had a sabbatical in Ostfriesland, Germany, to study and play historic instruments there. The oldest organ in that area was from 1457 in Rysum, and the church had a bell that was tuned to a low E, the same low E as the pitch on the organ. In his Fundamentum Organisandi (1452), Conrad Paumann composed E drones with figuration above the repeated Es. The pastor of the Rysum church at that time loved the bell. Every time I’d go to practice, she’d say to me, “Shall we play? Can we do the bell and organ piece?” For that E drone in the Paumann piece, she would keep pulling the bell to ring repeatedly in rhythm, and I’d play the Paumann figuration above it. We had so much fun playing that fifteenth-century “duet.” She called it the “Echt Rysumer Hit,” or the true hit from Rysum. A fifteenth-century piece was their town hit!

But then we had to stop because Rysum is in a rural area and the farmers were plowing their fields. They could hear the bells miles away, kilometers away, and for centuries they used the bells to signal when someone died. They would ring the bell the number of times that corresponded with the age of the newly deceased person. The farmers would stop their tractors and start counting: eighty-two, eighty-three . . ., “Oh, it must not be Berta.” Eighty-four, eighty-five . . ., “I wonder if it’s Henk.” Eighty-six . . . . While the pastor and I were playing, they’d hear the bell over and over, and they got stirred up wondering, “Who in our community died?” So that is why we had to stop.

That is fascinating. It definitely means something to that culture and how the bells were translating a message, or sharing the message of something. Did you find it an easy transition from the piano and organ to picking up playing the carillon?

Well, knowing the keyboard layout and playing with my feet translated from the organ, but as for the dimensions, it was a whole new haptic awareness, because it’s like playing on a keyboard built for a giant instead of using a five-finger technique.

I also play the harpsichord and clavichord. The clavichord taught me a lot about arm weight and getting the most beautiful tone. And even though the clavichord is the quietest keyboard instrument, I found the technique of playing it the most helpful in teaching myself how to play the carillon. When I first learned to play the clavichord, I would just sit at the keyboard for hours and think, how do I get the best sound?

Okay, that note bloomed a little, but could it bloom more? And that note sounded choked. Why?

It’s important to ask these questions. I’m an improviser, which helps to let my ears guide first. I find that I can bring out the soul of the instrument better if I initially improvise on it rather than reading music because then my eyes can take over.

That is a very interesting word choice: can you go more into it? Finding the soul of the instrument.

I discovered this when playing historic organs and then harpsichords and clavichords. Each instrument is different, just as each carillon is different. There are some schools of thought where people impose a technique, usually the same technique, on every instrument they play. Even if they’re Steinway artists, Steinways differ from one piano to the next. I find that the finest, the most sensitive and expressive musicians seek to pull out the sound that the instrument most wants to make. So you pay attention to where the most resonance can be found. Is it in the bass or tenor? Is it in the treble? And what does that tell me about what repertoire I choose? Or about what kind of weight I’m distributing here or there? And what parts must be softer so that the melody comes out? What effects communicate well?

When you’re playing and listening to the instrument in real time, how do you become one with the instrument as you’re playing it so that there is that intimate connection?

It is again improvisation. If I am struggling with a passage or hearing something that doesn’t sound optimal to me, then I’ll take that passage and I’ll create an improvisation that is similar to it to figure out. When I take my eyes out of the equation, it opens up the ears. The instrument will speak. It will, it will . . .

Tell you what it wants to play?

It really does, by the quality of the sound. How much color comes, how much bloom? Does it sound forced? Does it sound weak?

What are your favorite types of things to play on the carillon?

I love Geert D’hollander’s music and how he plays the carillon so sensitively. I’m also strongly committed to presenting works from underrepresented composers and cultures and to broaden our repertoire and audience to be diverse and inclusive.

Let’s talk about both of those aspects. First, are you referring to Geert’s original compositions?

His original compositions. He is such a fabulous composer, and each piece is different. His works never sound like cookie-cutter replicas of each other. There is always something fresh in them and yet something historically grounded where you can tell how much music he’s listened to and how much he has studied. Every time I see he has published something else I want to get it and play it because it is just magnificent. And having the opportunity to coach with him here at Bok Tower is just such a dream. It is thanks to the Emerging Artists grant I received from the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America (GCNA) to come here.

The Emerging Artists grant is new and for people who have passed the carillonneur exam in the past three years. It is a wonderful opportunity. It is not like you’re done studying when you pass the GCNA certification exam. I consider that a new beginning, and I think it is really brilliant of the GCNA to offer the award to encourage people to go deeper and to get to the next level of expressive playing or understanding repertoire.

And because I am a composer and Geert is a composer we are talking about compositional techniques, too. I’m sharing my compositions with him, and he is giving me some great feedback on it, saying, “This is lovely, but this—maybe it’s in G minor too long,” or that kind of thing. And then I’ll say to him, “That is exactly what I was thinking. Let’s talk about that.” Then he shows me some of his new compositions that haven’t been published yet, and we talk about them.

I wrote two books on Bach and the Art of Improvisation. Geert improvises, too. So today we are going to have a session about carillon improvisation in the style of Bach, because he recently was commissioned to take some of Bach’s cello or gamba suites, unaccompanied, and arrange them for carillon, but with a twist. He is giving a kind of modern commentary on them, but you can still hear Bach in them. I create improvisation blueprints from Bach preludes and use the same unaccompanied gamba suites for the organ and the harpsichord, and I have written about this in my books. So today we are going to take my books and then the music of Matthias Vanden Gheyn, the well-known Baroque carillon composer whose three-hundredth anniversary we celebrated last year, and we are going to talk about how this might come full circle so that we can develop an improvisational method for the carillon. A carillon student, Carson Landry, will join us.

This opportunity is hugely stimulating. What a beautiful setting to be here in the Bok Tower Gardens and have access to the carillon all day long—into the evening. That is very rare. Most towers have very limited playing time, but here, the playing time is not restricted, and Geert is accessible, kind, and generous with his time, and we are having a blast.

I’d like to delve into your history as a composer and learn more about your style.

Because I’ve studied and performed a lot of early music, I’ve composed in a Baroque or even earlier Renaissance style as well for some of my organ works. But then I started getting commissions for organ. One of the commissions was from a brilliant young organist, Wyatt Smith, who wanted six pieces for a liturgical cycle entitled Liturgy LIVE! He wanted each piece to have a world influence. I started digging into ethnomusicology and finding music from all over the world and figuring out what aspects I could combine. Wyatt also wanted German chorales from the seasons to be featured with that world music. It was an interesting pairing.

Can you tell me more about what that means?

My daughter is from Ethiopia, so I took some Ethiopian rhythms and combined them with a chorale, for instance. I paired a Yoruban lament from Nigeria with the Advent chorale Nun komm, der heiden Heiland. I featured a French Romantic toccata with the Pentecost chorale Komm, heiliger Geist. Each piece had a different character and musical features from around the globe.

What else inspires you in your writing?

When I came to the carillon, I became acutely aware that this is a public instrument. In Ann Arbor we have students from around the world. So, I’d come out of the tower and hear all sorts of world languages and see people from around the world and then I would think, I’ve just played all this music by dead European men. Right? That is not the demographic here. Even though there are some people from European descent, that doesn’t represent everyone—it excludes a lot of people.

How does this public instrument connect with people from around the world? And imagine how much wonderful music the carillon has been missing when so many cultures haven’t been represented! Then I started thinking that my compositional direction must be to lift up the voices that have been missing from classical keyboard music. I interviewed people from the African American, Muslim, and Arab communities, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and then several people from the Latin community. I asked them about their experience with prejudice. They were incredibly generous in telling their stories. They said they were really glad that somebody finally asked. They wanted to talk and then they gave me permission to write pieces about their stories. It was cathartic for them in that they felt silenced when they were experiencing discrimination, but through this music, they had a voice. And now there was a way to claim agency in a situation where they’d had no agency.

You’re taking feelings from what people tell you and then putting that into the feeling of the music.

The feelings are there definitely, and that’s extremely important to me to get into the right affect for the piece, and the character and style of music. But I’m actually telling a story as well. So the piece I’ll play at Bok Tower today, Earth Blood Reprise, is about a woman, Jackie Doneghy, who grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, and studied with top piano professors when she was in middle school and high school. When she auditioned for a conservatory (not Oberlin), she was heckled because the head of the department didn’t want to allow an African American person into the conservatory. As a result, she dropped the piano and never came back. Her story is implanted into Earth Blood Reprise. I include quotes from Lift Every Voice and Sing, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and spirituals.

How do you take the story and then put it into music notation?

I’ve also been getting into storytelling with journalists. I collaborate with international journalists from the Knight-Wallace fellowship program at the University of Michigan. I compose music on stories that they have not been able to report on. The stories are under-reported and some of the journalists have been censored. These journalists and filmmakers and I founded Collaborative Investigative Composing (CIC) to tell these stories via music and document them in music scores and film.

The process is a little different for each CIC, depending on how much the storyteller wants to get involved in the music notation. I’ve worked with Jet Schouten, a Dutch journalist who took twenty years of piano lessons. Jet wanted to play the notes on the carillon that she wanted in a CIC composition, while I notated the music. Venezuelan journalist Marielba Núñez played themes and effects on the carillon while she verbally told me the stories of Venezuelans who are fleeing the authoritarian government and humanitarian crisis. I took Marielba’s themes and developed them more to fit with her stories. At that point, I play what I notated and ask the storytellers whether the music tells their story effectively or whether something is missing.

Marielba is also a poet, and she has a keen ear for form, structure, and balance. She’s not a musician, but she could describe in literary terms the changes she suggested.

When Jackie gave up the piano due to the audition trauma she endured, she became a singer instead. She asked for some spirituals to be included along with Lift Every Voice and Sing, and then I added the Moonlight Sonata, because that is one of the pieces she played on the piano. Including the Beethoven was a way for Jackie to reclaim it in her own voice, not in the disparaging voice. So there are layers there. A general audience may not know the story there unless there are program notes or if a performer has a chance to talk with them. This means, of course, it is also really important that the music can stand alone, which it absolutely does.

People will ask me questions about it afterwards, and they’ll say, “That is such an intriguing piece. Tell me about it.” And then we have a chance to talk about it after the concert.

As an example, on Saturday (February 19, 2022) at Bok Tower, I performed Earth Blood Reprise along with some pieces from The Music of March: A Civil Rights Carillon Collection edited by Tiffany Ng, some spirituals, including Go Down, Moses and Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child, which I arranged in Global Rings, and Joey Brink’s arrangement of Lift Every Voice and Sing. After the concert, an African American man approached me and he said, “Thank you for including music for us. I like the sound of the bells, but I never thought I’d hear something that directly speaks to our experience. It makes such a difference.” He then told me that as he walked around the gardens listening, he met several other African Americans, and each one of them would smile and nod, or wink, or show a thumbs up that indicated that they, too, felt included by the carillon that day. He asked about Earth Blood Reprise and wanted to hear more of the story. At the same time, he said that the piece spoke to him before knowing the story. Hearing the story served to deepen his experience.

How it is different composing for the carillon in comparison to the piano, the organ, or even the harpsichord. What is unique about the carillon specifically?

Fewer notes can be played at once on the carillon compared to other keyboard instruments. I think of composing for the carillon often as a Schenkerian reduction that happens before the bigger or more expanded piece is actually written. Writing for the carillon must be sparse. I think about the strong minor third partials and not having dense chords especially in the tenor-bass range because then the resonances cancel each other out as they vibrate for so long. If there are two voices close together in thirds, for instance, they really need to be in the treble. But those are technical details.

I mentioned my work with journalist Marielba Núñez to tell stories via music about the humanitarian crisis due to an authoritarian government in Venezuela. Journalist Eileen Truax and filmmaker Diego Sedano reported on the untenable conditions people fled from in Mexico and the issues they face due to unjust U.S. immigration policies. I’m starting to write an oratorio based on those stories. A former TV news anchor and filmmaker from Belarus joined in a CIC piece that demonstrates how an authoritarian head of state forces the media to tell lies to the people. One journalist, Tracie Mauriello, reported on school shootings in the U.S.: gun violence. Another journalist, Ana Avila, reports on misogyny and gender violence in Mexico. Dutch journalist Jet Schouten and I collaborated in a pandemic response, Healing Bells, which was premiered simultaneously by carillonists in fourteen countries. Healing Bells contains an arrangement of Plyve Kacha, a Ukrainian lament.

I return to your question about how we collaborate. When I meet with a journalist in person, I can take them to a carillon, just as happened with Marielba and Jet Schouten. Then I actually ask them to play the feeling of their story on the carillon while they’re telling the story to me a second time around. First, we just sit like this across a table and talk. And then, the second time, even if they haven’t had music lessons before and I might say, play just the black keys and then everything you play will sound good. I get them started with pentatonic modes, so that they can stay focused on the affect of the story. Inevitably they come up with a really interesting theme. And then I build on their theme and use that as a unifying theme throughout their piece.

You say it is people who don’t know music. But everyone kind of intuits that these are the low keys and these are the high keys. For the carillon it’s playing with your fists. You strike the keys, and you might depict your frustration by playing on low keys or reflect your high points on the high keys, and then you might play in the middle of the keyboard. It is an interesting way to get them to express their internal story in an alternative way.

It is so important to the journalists to be able to tell these stories first of all, and with censorship for some of them, these are stories they haven’t been able to tell. And secondly, they feel really strongly that it is important—as an archivist, you’ll appreciate this—to preserve these stories. Otherwise, those stories are erased. They have been erased now in the present, but if they’re also erased in the future then these atrocities from authoritarian governments resulting in humanitarian crises will never come to light.

You said you work with the Knight-Wallace Fellows, and they’re at the University of Michigan?

Yes.

Is that relationship between the two entities—the carillon and the Knight-Wallace Fellows—something formally recognized by the university?

Lynette Clemetson, the director of the Wallace House, approaches me from year to year to ask whether I would present for the fellows. University of Michigan Carillon Professor Tiffany Ng has fully supported this, which has greatly helped to facilitate our CIC initiatives. From carillon presentations, the fellows themselves find out about our CIC way of telling stories. Then they are free to just approach me and say, “I’d love to do something. Can you collaborate?” It starts out rather informally and grows from there.

We at CIC are applying for grants. We really need some funding to create some short and full-length documentaries about our work so that these stories get preserved in music scores and film to reach wider audiences. We’d like to tour to a number of sites to integrate with communities who connect personally with the stories and places where no one knows about these stories and then to culminate with CIC performances. I usually compose a CIC first for carillon. Now, I’m developing CIC works for organ, chamber ensembles, orchestra, choir, soloists, etc. Our CIC team feels passionate about what we’re doing because it meets a need. It is cross-disciplinary, collaborative, and is dealing with a lot of social-justice issues. We’re going to find a way to continue.

To continue telling the stories that people need to share.

Yes, exactly.

Thank you for your time and for sharing what you’ve learned and your methodologies with me. I appreciate it.

Thanks so much for your invitation, Sam, it is really kind.

Bok Tower Gardens library website: boktowergardens.org/library/

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra’s website: pamelaruiterfeenstra.com