Carl Fischer Christmas book

Sean Vogt attended Central College, Pella, Iowa, where he was a winner of Central’s Concerto/Aria competition, and named a Cox-Snow distinguished scholar. He also studied in London, serving as assistant organist/choirmaster at St. Cuthbert’s Church in Woodgreen. He holds master’s and doctoral degrees in choral conducting from the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University and Michigan State respectively. While at Michigan State, he was the director of the 100-voice Men’s Glee Club, assistant conductor of the MSU Chorale, artistic director and conductor of the Steiner Chorale—a semi-professional choir based in Lansing—and was music director at St. Jude’s Catholic Church. He was also one of the featured conductors at the Oregon Bach Festival. In addition to degrees in choral conducting, Vogt worked on a doctorate in organ at the University of Iowa, holds a diploma in organ from the Haarlem Internationale Zomeracademie voor Organisten (The Netherlands) and a master’s degree in organ from SMU. He has given solo recitals at the National Cathedral (Washington, D.C.), St. Philip’s Cathedral (Atlanta), and Fourth Presbyterian Church (Chicago), and has performed for the American Guild of Organists’ education video series. Dr. Vogt has served on the faculty for the Leadership Program for Musicians serving small congregations, and as the American Choral Directors Association’s Repertoire and Standards Chair for Music and Worship for the state of Iowa. He is currently Department Chair and Director of Choral Activities at Mount Marty College in Yankton, South Dakota.

Gloria in excelsis deo, et in terra
pax hominibus (“Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to all people”), Luke 2:14, was likely the first carol ever heard, sung by the angels over the fields of Bethlehem. It would be more than a millennium before the next documented account of carol singing. In this case, it happened in Greccio, Italy, where St. Francis made the first Christmas crèche (crib) in 1223, in response to the Manichaeism1 of the eleventh and twelfth centuries—recreating the stable, even obtaining an ox and ass. People from around the village began to gather around St. Francis’s biblical re-creation. As a result, the people “poured out their hearts in praises to God; and the friars sang new canticles…”2
The dawn of the Protestant Reformation brought carol singing—amongst a myriad of other activities—to an abrupt halt. The Reformation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resulted in a fragmented church. The Lutherans viewed the feast of Christmas as a popish abuse. Since the Calvinist movement was quite popular, Christmas was consequently unpopular in England. Christmas Day was abolished by Parliament from 1644–1660; The Book of Common Prayer had no seasonal hymns. It was not until the Supplement to the New Version of the Psalms (1700) that interest in carols was rekindled. Only one Christmas hymn was included in the supplement: “While shepherds watched.”

A brief history of the carol
Interestingly, Christmas thrived more in secular society than it did in the church during this time. One of the first examples of music printing in England is an anthology from c.1530 that contained, among other things, carols by Ashwell, Cowper, Gwynneth, and Richard Pygott.3 Carols were primarily used in the home and private chapel. It wasn’t until later that they became a part of the parish church. This is likely why carols from plays (the ‘Coventry’ carol, being one example) and carols for domestic use appear to be in constant use. Two domestic carols from Poor Robin’s Almanac (1700) are as follows:

Now that the time has come wherein
Our Saviour Christ was born,
The larder’s full of beef and pork,
The garner’s filled with corn.4

And we do hope before we part
To taste some of your beer,
Your beer, your beer, your Christmas beer,
That seems to be so strong;
And we do wish that Christmas-tide
Was twenty times as long!5

For England, the eighteenth century was the “Golden Age of Hymnody” under Isaac Watts and the Wesleys. Hymns gained popularity over metrical psalms. The reason for the hymn’s popularity was that the congregation could finally have a participating role in the worship service. Carols became increasingly hymn-like to fit the current trend.
By the nineteenth century, thanks to the efforts of the Methodists a century earlier, carols began finding their way into many ecumenical books like Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), the first universally accepted hymn book of the Anglican Church.6 A renewed interest in the past, coupled with the Oxford Movement,7 provided the opportunity for John Mason Neale, an Anglo-Catholic cleric, to promote the ancient texts and music found in the Piae Cantiones (1582). The Victorian revival of the carol produced numerous new books, some devoted solely to the carol: Some Ancient Christmas Carols (1822), Carols for Christmas-tide (1853–54), and Christmas Carols New and Old (1871) being just a few examples.
From the Piae Cantiones, which itself contained medieval carols, to the Victorian carol books, twentieth-century composers could now build on the carol tradition that dated back hundreds of years. John Mason Neale, in his preface to Carols for Christmas-tide, described the method that twentieth-century English composers would also follow:

It is impossible at one stretch to produce a quantity of new carols, of which words and music shall alike be original. They must be the gradual accumulation of centuries; the offerings of different epochs, of different countries, of different minds, to the same treasury of the Church.8

The notion of carol singing was heightened significantly with the service of Nine Lessons and Carols. Originating at Truro Cathedral, Cornwall, on Christmas Eve (1880), the service retells in scripture and song the Redemption story of Christ—moving from the mystery and wonder of Advent to the miracle and joy of Christ’s birth. The service was modified and introduced by Eric Milner-White, the newly appointed Dean of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1918. It is this modified service that has been adopted by scores of parishes in England and abroad. Since its initial broadcast in 1928, the service of Nine Lessons and Carols has been heard by millions of people all over the world. An order for the service can be found in the back of Oxford’s 100 Carols for Choirs. A look at this book also reveals a multitude of English composers who have made carol arrangements. Among the more well known are Holst, Britten, and Rutter.

Gustav Holst
It was the simplest of compositions by Gustav Holst (1874–1934) that would become one of his best-known: In the Bleak Midwinter (1905). Holst arranged the text by Christina Rosetti (1830–1894) while staying at a cottage9 in the Cotswold village of Cranham; it is also the reason why the tune is entitled Cranham. Just one year later, having gained significant popularity, his carol arrangement appeared in the English Hymnal (1906).
In the Bleak Midwinter is simplistic in that it is set like a standard four-part hymn: regular meter (4/4), homorhythmic, and functionally tonal harmonic motion. The choice of F major links Holst with the past, since F major was a common key in the Renaissance and Baroque eras for themes of a pastoral nature.
One way of preserving several items of importance is to collect them. Choir partbooks and the multiple compilations of carol books have accomplished the art of preservation. Holst did something similar, but on a smaller scale, when he wrote Christmas Day, a choral fantasy on old carols with accompaniment for orchestra or organ.
Dedicated to the music students of Morley College, the work is a compilation of four well-known Christmas carols: “Good Christian Men Rejoice,” “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen,” “Come, Ye Lofty, Come, Ye Lowly,” and “The First Noel.” With the exception of two simultaneous carols occurring at the same time, the rest of the work is homorhythmic throughout.
Much like Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Christmas Carols, this work by Holst opens with a soloist who sets the ambiance as if about to tell a story around a fire. The carols provide the form of the composition. Ascribing numbers to the carols—1) Good Christian Men Rejoice, 2) God Rest You Merry Gentlemen, 3) Come, Ye Lofty, Come, Ye Lowly, 4) The First Noel—the form is 1, 2, 1, 3 and 4, 1, 2 and 4, and 1. True to rondo form, “Good Christian Men Rejoice” always appears in the tonic key, E-flat major. The simultaneous occurrence of two carols also provides unique contrast to the homorhythmic sections. The orchestral accompaniment is equally accessible, having many of the same attributes of the chorus parts, making it appropriate for amateur ensembles.
Like many English composers, Holst was influenced by folksong. In regard to carol settings and collecting them, it was his Four Old English Carols (1907), for mixed voices and piano, that embraced the “tender austerity”10 inherent in the songs of the English countryside. Although inspired by folksong, these tunes were of Holst’s own creation. A Babe Is Born, Now Let Us Sing, Jesu, Thou the Virgin-Born, and The Saviour of the World Is Born make up this mini-collection.
The medieval text Jesu, Thou the Virgin-Born, the third carol from Four Old English Carols, was infused with plainsong and simple polyphony (largely homorhythmic). The use of both plainsong and polyphony in this particular work is not surprising, given the fact that Holst had been spending time copying Victoria and di Lasso motets for St. Paul’s Girls’ School.
As evidenced above, Holst seemed drawn to set multiple carols within one work. This mini-collection of carols is equally true in his Three Carols for unison chorus and ‘ad lib.’ orchestra. Holst was clearly thinking of the symbiotic relationship between music and people with this work. There are scarce examples of a significant choral work with orchestra that includes a unison chorus and an orchestra that can be made up of as many or few instruments as available (‘ad lib.’) and still be a viable work of art. “Holst was a conductor who allowed all genuine amateurs to play in his orchestra ‘if humanly possible’.”11 The three carols include the following: Christmas Song: On This Day, I Saw Three Ships, and Masters in This Hall.
There is one carol by Holst that does not exist in a set: Lullay my Liking for unaccompanied chorus. Like other carols, the text is medieval. Changing meters help accommodate natural text stress. With the exception of the chorus’s fourth verse, the other verses are sung as a solo, and the choir answers with the refrain “Lullay my liking, my dear Son…” This piece is also very accessible for an amateur chorus, as the refrain remains unchanged throughout the work.

Benjamin Britten
It was during the 1942 wartime months of March and April that Britten (1913–1976) wrote, while on board the ship that was taking him from America back home to England, A Ceremony of Carols.12 Scored for treble voices—three parts to be exact—and harp, the work is powerful in its simplicity.
One aspect of simplicity is the accompaniment of a single instrument, the harp. One of the first instruments mentioned in the Bible, the harp has been the symbol of the psalmists, the heavenly host of angels, and serenity. Britten was planning on a harp concerto around this time; harp manuals were just a few of the books he had on his nautical voyage. However, despite the pleasurable sonorities from the harp that audiences have enjoyed for decades, this was not the case initially. “The use of the harp as an accompanying instrument in this context was considered radical at the time of the première.”13
The simplicity is also instantly audible from the first and last movement. Plainsong settings form the musical pillars to the eleven movements. Here, Britten chose Hodie Christus natus est from the Christmas Eve Vespers to serve as a musical processional and recessional. The processional and recessional are both in A major, a key Bach often used for its Trinitarian symbolism in the key signature.
With such careful musical architecture, it is not surprising that the middle movement be solely devoted to the harp. In true pastoral fashion, the rhythm is a compound (12/8) meter. More interesting is the choice of key. Where the traditional pastoral key would be F major, Britten chooses the equidistant enharmonic equivalent, the tri-tone (C-flat major). The piece ends on the dominant F-flat, minus the third—a common medieval device.
A final aspect of simplicity is the choice of voices and the way they are set. The sound of a child’s voice, and their presence on stage, can create a sense of innocence and purity synonymous with simplicity. Musically, Britten was always careful when he wrote for children. Although the music often sounds complex, Britten generally used the technique of canon as a way to produce polyphony. What better way to produce the feeling of timelessness than with canon—where a melody could continue ad infinitum if need be? The most oft-performed extracted movement is This Little Babe, a perfect example of Britten’s canonic writing for children’s voices.

John Rutter
Perhaps the most frequently performed carol arrangements are those of John Rutter. Born in London in 1945, Rutter is arguably the most prolific and published composer of carols in the twentieth century, not only in England but also around the world. In Oxford’s 100 Carols for Choirs, nearly thirty carols are by him. There are simply far too many carols by Rutter to discuss here. However, some examples show his connection to the past while writing in a modern romantic language.
“Joy to the World” is one of the most common carols in the Western hemisphere. Rutter could not have chosen a carol with more links to England’s past than this one. The text is by Isaac Watts (1674–1748) and the original tune by Lowell Mason (1792–1872). Rutter modeled the accompaniment for the carol from the orchestral writing of Handel. Complete with descant, the Handelian orchestration to Lowell Mason’s tune on John Wesley’s text is one of Oxford University Press’s most rented carols during the Christmas season.
Rutter wrote several other carols for chorus with orchestra or organ: Wexford Carol, Jesus Child, Donkey Carol, Angel’s Carol, Nativity Carol, Star Carol, Candlelight Carol, Shepherd’s Pipe Carol, and others. It is arrangements like Candlelight Carol, which can be classified as both a carol and an anthem, that have made Rutter a wealthy man. They contain the qualities necessary for any carol—a verse followed by a refrain, or burden.
In addition, the melodies and their respective accompaniments tend to be very sweet-sounding and melodious. It is this latter trait that has brought Rutter fame and fortune. In this music one can hear the influence of Fauré-like orchestration, Vaughan Williams-inspired melodies, and the often-used flattened seventh that is so common in popular music.
Many of the above-listed carols are Rutter originals. As in Shepherd’s Pipe Carol, for example, both the music and the text are by Rutter. The same is true of Jesus Child, Donkey Carol, Angel’s Carol, Nativity Carol, Star Carol, and Candlelight Carol. Of the composers discussed thus far, none wrote as many original texts and tunes as Rutter. His contributions to the carol genre alone have brought significant attention to the choral world.

Herbert Howells
No discussion of the English carol would seem complete without mentioning A Spotless Rose by Herbert Howells (1892–1983). Herbert Howells wrote the piece,

After idly watching some shunting from the window of a cottage…in Gloucester which overlooked the Midland Railway. In an upstairs room I looked out on iron railings and the main Bristol-Gloucester railway line, with shunting trucks bumping and banging. I wrote it for and dedicated it to my Mother—it always moves me when I hear it, just as if it were written by someone else.14

With its parallel thirds and fourths, the piece evokes a sort of impressionistic quality. The irregular meters (3/4, 7/8, 5/4, 5/8, etc.) give the piece a fluidity of plainsong-like phrases not found in other carols. The fourteenth-century text also provides a subtly respectful timelessness to the piece. A Spotless Rose is mostly in four parts except at cadences where it breaks into five or, in the case of the final cadence, six parts. It is this final cadence that was much beloved by Vaughan Williams and Patrick Hadley. Since the work’s creation (1919), Howells received a postcard every Christmas thereafter from Patrick Hadley that contained the cadence and these words, “Oh Herbert! That cadence!”15

Summary
Holst, Britten, and Rutter represent the carol in their own unique way. Each had a distinct musical vocabulary that can be heard in their music. Some used the traditional approach of setting plainsong to their own time. Others, especially Rutter, have set melodies that are distinctly their own. Nearly every composer, it would seem, has taken a traditional carol and adapted a “modern” accompaniment to the otherwise traditional melody.
In terms of texts, it would be difficult to find an English composer who never set an already established text. From these examples, it is clear that the medieval carol is among the more popular. Rutter, although there are others not listed here, chose to write melodies and accompaniments to his own texts.
Carols functioned as a social outlet, as Poor Robin’s Almanac illustrates. Interestingly enough, although mention is made of Jesus, plenty is also made of food and drink. Like folksong, carols were for the people. It is for this reason that they continued to exist outside church walls.
Carols were also devotional. For those who had their own private chapel, one could find them being sung there. In the parish church, it would take the efforts of the Victorians to regiment them as part of the liturgical service. It would not be until 1918 that the entire world would be affected by the Nine Lessons and Carols service at King’s College, Cambridge, which is perhaps the most influential reason for the popularity of the carol today.
Besides being both social and devotional, carols have served as sparkling gems in choral concerts. Carols are “art music.” Like many things throughout history, it is the way in which something is used that gives it definition. It does not seem out of place when a carol is sung in a secular location or by a secular ensemble. They exist for the betterment of music as a whole. Therefore, in this case the carol would be more closely linked with the social classification. As a result, the carol is one of those enigmatic genres that exist both liturgically and secularly—neither side taking issue with the other.
The main reason why the carol can dually exist is its simplicity. There is nothing to muddy the waters and create controversy, even when the subject matter is based on religious/biblical themes. Composers throughout the twentieth century in England managed to evoke their own voice while remaining true to the inherent simplistic quality of the carol.
Holst’s simplicity came as a result of the element crucial to the carol: the people. He wrote for them. Simple melodies, textures, and accompaniments meant that nearly every amateur could be an integral part of the carol tradition. Through simplicity of text, voicing, and accompaniment, Britten created his own form of simplicity. Rutter’s simplicity is in the way the music sounds. It is so very easy to listen to (the same cannot necessarily be said about singing or playing them!).
Following the Victorian rediscovery (and regimentation) of the English carol dating from the Middle Ages, the carol tradition in England remained strong and thrived under several great composers: Holst, Britten, and Rutter among the more well-known. Through their carols, they presented the carol through use of traditional qualities (plainsong, medieval texts, and the like) while infusing their own musical language, aligning themselves in the great carol tradition. With the carol’s multiple characteristics, it was and remains an enigmatic genre that is social, devotional, and art music, separately and all in one. With the inception of what is perhaps the greatest advocate of the carol, the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, English composers have provided the means for the carol genre to thrive, all over the world, for centuries and millennia to come. ■

People, look east. 

The time is near . . .

We’ve done it again. We’ve finished a holiday season replete with performances of Messiah and Nutcracker, carol services, and pageants. We’ve roared through the glorious descants by David Willcocks, the Noël variations of d’Aquin and Balbastre, and we’ve sent choir members home to their families in the wee hours of the morning. We’ve tolerated ten weeks of holiday advertising—the first Christmas displays I saw this year were in Home Depot, two weeks before Halloween—and through it all, we’ve celebrated the holiday with our family and friends.

November and December are busy organ tuning months. In the northeast where I live, we think of these as “cold weather” tunings, adjusting the organs as required by the flow and striation of heated air, or the exposure of one organ chamber to prevailing winds while the other is in the lee. In this neck of the woods, Christmas and Easter are both winter holidays, so it makes more sense to tune in November and May. In the last couple months I’ve tuned more than fifty organs in New York and Boston, shuttling in and out of buildings, greasing the bearings of blower motors, cleaning keyboards, setting temperaments, and regulating reeds.

Of the crowning of the year . . .

I’ve been doing this since the 1970s, and I’ve always thought it’s fun to poke around the choir rooms to see what music is out. It’s also fun to see little packages of goodies that have been left for the organist, sometimes even a bottle or two, and notes on white boards offering thanks for the beautiful music.

Christmas is a holiday of traditions, so each church has a list of pieces that get sung each year. And lots of those pieces are common to hundreds of churches. Carols for Choirs is ubiquitous, in all its volumes. When I was a junior chorister, starting around 1966, Carols for Choirs I was five years old. The Willcocks descant to O Come, All Ye Faithful must be the standard against which all others are judged; how many millions of people know to start “Sing, choirs of angels . . .” on D. And let’s not forget those fantasmagorical chords under “Word of the Father . . .” or the majestic progression in the last phrase of the refrain after verse 7—all those sharps! Wow. Fifty-five years later, it stills gets me every time. Nice work, Sir David.

Daniel Pinkham’s Christmas Cantata is another favorite, with its beguiling mix of Renaissance-inspired motives and rhythms, and contemporary harmonies. Choirs love to sing it, and congregations love hearing it. I was at a party with Pinkham where he mentioned that Christmas Cantata paid for his house. Nice work, Daniel.

In the past generation, John Rutter’s music has renewed Christmas for many churches. Shepherd’s Pipe Carol is a peppy little number that makes people smile, and I imagine that Candlelight Carol will be as much a staple as Silent Night, Holy Night in a decade or two. Nice work, John.

Many organists consider the French Noël variations an essential part of Christmas. I know I do. But I had an interesting moment once when a parishioner asked me what was all that French stuff I play at Christmas. He helped me realize that the people in that New England Congregational church had never heard the French carols, as familiar to a French congregation as Hark! The Herald Angels Sing is to us, and equally familiar to organists. I had published the titles in the bulletin in French, meaningless to everyone except me. I knew it was Christmas music, but no one else did. Claude Balbastre (1724–99) was one of the most popular musicians in France, a virtuoso for the people. His Noël variations were wildly popular and people thronged to hear him play them, causing such a disturbance in the church that the Archbishop of Paris barred him from playing Christmas services. We should all have such trouble. Nice work, Claude.

Make your house fair as you are able . . .

Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965) was a British writer, best known for the more than eighty books of stories and poems she wrote for children. She won several prestigious literary awards, and the Children’s Book Circle, a society of publishers, authors, and librarians, presents the Eleanor Farjeon Award annually in Great Britain for excellence in children’s literature.

Farjeon’s People Look East is a delightful sprightly poem, familiarly set to the tune of a French carol. It was first published in the Oxford Book of Carols in 1928 and has become a mainstay of traditional Christmas music. I bet the tune is rollicking through your mind’s ears as you read. I love this carol, both for its beguiling singability, and for the marvelous metaphorical allusion it suggests. Obviously, “. . . Make your house fair as you are able . . .” suggests the pleasure of decorating our houses, yards, and church buildings for the sweetest of Christian holidays. Nice work, Eleanor.

But it means so much more. As we prepare for the celebration of the birth of Christ, we pull out the rich heritage of seasonal music. While I know it’s important to take Facebook with a grain of salt, my community of “friends” includes thousands of organists and organbuilders making thoughtful comments that enrich my experience. As we approached Christmas I saw conversations about how to finger tricky passages, how to read composers’ metronome markings, and what people might suggest for new and interesting choral music to offer during this most traditional of celebrations. Working out the slithery fingerings for Dupré’s Variations on a Noël is just another way to “trim the hearth and set the table.”¹

To the organ tuner, in addition to oiling blowers and tuning reeds, making the house fair expands to include making sure the Zimbelstern reversible works reliably. And given the usual keys for such carols as Silent Night and O Little Town of Bethlehem, it’s smart to check that B-flat and F in the chimes are sounding their best. The sickening clunk of a chime struck by a faulty hammer can change everything in that magical moment at midnight when everyone is singing with a candle in their hands.

We all love to play the French Noël variations, so it’s important to check the Cornet combinations on each organ. The classic registration is flue pipes at 8′, 4′, 22⁄3′, 2′, and the pesky 13⁄5′. Sometimes the Cornet is created by combining five independent ranks, sometimes it’s independent ranks at 8′, 4′, and 2′, plus the Sesquialtera, which comprises the 22⁄3′ (Nazard) and 13⁄5′ (Tierce) ranks, and sometimes all five pitches pull as one stop. It’s most common for those five ranks to be wider-scale flutes, although some larger organs have Cornets both as flutes and as principals. In any event, those pitches, especially the two mutations, the second and fourth in the overtone series, complement the Cromornes and Trumpets of the organ because they reinforce the predominant overtones that color the reed voices.

If the organs you play have Trumpets, Nazards, and Tierces, you can prove this to yourself. Play a note on the Trumpet and turn the Nazard on and off. When it’s on, it reinforces that pitch hidden in the tone of the Trumpet, and when you turn it off, you can hear the tone linger as a component of the reed’s voice. If you have trouble hearing it, try it with different notes until you find one that’s clearer. It works best in the tenor range. This trick also works with an Oboe, Krummhorn, or Clarinet.

The Tierce is one of the most difficult pitches to hear in any organ. They’re tricky to tune accurately. But the pitch is clearer to your ears against a reed than a flue pipe. Try it. Play the Tierce with the Octave 4′, which is the usual tuning reference stop, then play the Tierce with a reed. I bet you’ll hear the tuning easier. It’s a good trick to tune a Tierce to a reed, as long as the reed has stable pitch and speech, and as long as you check each note as you go.

In French Classic organs, the combination of Cornet was developed to reinforce the treble ranges of the reeds, which were weaker than the tenor and bass ranges. That’s a simple explanation for why there are duets between cornet trebles and reed basses. It’s also the reason for the predominance of the Grand Jeu in French registrations. Those organs have lusty, powerful reeds that sound great with a Cornet added to the treble range. Hmm. Maybe that’s why the five-rank Cornet starts at middle C. Nice work, François (Bédos de Celles).²

Trim the hearth and set

the table . . .

The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens (CMBG) is a spectacular example of community imagination, effort, and achievement. In 1991, a group of about ten families in the area of Boothbay, Maine, founded the original organization. They mortgaged their homes to raise the funds to purchase a 270-acre tract of coastal land, rescuing it from development, and they established the not-for-profit corporation. Corporate and private sponsorship came in at a rapid rate, and in June 2007, the gardens held a grand opening celebration. Less than ten years later, the CMBG comprises a rich collection of theme-based gardens, several public buildings with a café, gift shop, and educational facility. They present chamber music concerts and dozens of public events, and receive more than 100,000 visitors each year.

You might think that plants all grow at a common rate, but as we have visited the gardens several times each year, we wonder what they are using for fertilizer. You can almost hear the garden grow if you stand still. It’s gorgeous, thrilling, informative, and enriching. If you’re ever in the area, about forty miles up the coast from Portland, I recommend you stop in. Take a look at www.mainegardens.org.

Last year, CMBG introduced “Gardens Aglow,” an extensive lighting display festooned about the grounds. This year, with a houseful of family from out of town for Thanksgiving, we convoyed to the Gardens to witness the spectacle. Knowing it would be crowded, we arrived as they opened at 4:00 p.m., just as the sun was setting (Maine is at the extreme eastern end of the eastern time zone, and includes the eastern most point of land in the United States). We were amazed by the number of people. It was the third night of the season, and we learned that they had received more than 10,000 visitors over the previous two nights. That may not seem like much to city dwellers, but considering that the population of Boothbay is under 2,500, and the ten neighboring towns combined have fewer than 12,000 people, this is a big deal. They anticipate more than 100,000 visitors before the exhibit closes on New Year’s Day, effectively doubling the annual attendance at CMBG. Nice work, people.

The “Gardens Aglow” page of the CMBG website mentioned that the exhibit is open Thursdays through Sundays, November 18 through December 31, but closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve—that was the only time I saw or heard the word Christmas connected with the event. The tasteful jazzy music playing through Bluetooth speakers seemed Christmasy, but it was actually just the wintery classics we associate with Christmas: Let it Snow, Jingle Bells, Sleigh Ride, Frosty the Snowman. Rudolph was nowhere to be heard, abolished, no doubt, due to his connection to Santa Claus, even though Jesus makes no appearance in the lyrics. Even the word “holiday” was missing.

It sure felt Christmasy to me, as it did to our Greek Orthodox in-laws. But I thought it was nice that the marvelous event could be freely enjoyed by people of any faith, or by people of no faith.

People, look east and 

sing today . . .

The United States has just experienced a painful and nasty presidential election. The amount of abuse suffered by both the candidates and their supporters is unprecedented. Things were said across public media that wouldn’t be tolerated in school playgrounds, and people of all races and ideological backgrounds were savaged and humiliated in public. No matter how we each feel about the results, no matter how we voted, we can’t escape the fact that it was a disgraceful display, a national tantrum displayed to the rest of the world. We should all be mortified. As a nation we are better than that.

While The Diapason is not a place to express or exchange political opinions, this experience must resonate for many readers because so much of the discourse involved interpretations of religious freedom. The idea that the United States was founded on religious principles is at best only partially correct, and according to many historians, it’s patently false. Of course, there was a huge indigenous population here before European settlers arrived in the early seventeenth century. But those European settlers did not arrive with the intention of establishing a religious country, they were escaping persecution because of their beliefs.

The point was to be able to worship freely, not just as Puritans, Anglicans, or Catholics, but as members of any faith. In the age of the Internet and the culture of social media, we express and confirm our opinions through memes, especially photos taken out of context and peppered with clever captions—modern versions of a political cartoon, and the campaign season fertilized many doozies. There was one that said, “If your religion tells you to hate anyone, you’re doing it wrong.” In others it was easy to interpret that “religious freedom” meant denying someone else the freedom to worship or express themselves.

A particularly poignant moment occurred less than a week before the election, when members of the Westboro Baptist Church protested in front of New York’s Juilliard School of Music. Their message was against the vanity of the arts and included hateful derogatory language directed at the faculty and students. The students responded elegantly. They came out onto the sidewalk with their instruments to play patriotic and religious music, and spoke eloquently about the importance of the arts to our shared human expression. Nice work, Juilliard students.

This was a small protest. Only three members of the Westboro Baptist Church were involved, including the daughter of the church’s founder, and fewer than a hundred students responded. It was not covered by major newspapers. Without social media it wouldn’t have amounted to much. But it was symbolic of how hatred and intolerance allows some people to condemn huge segments of society, justifying that intolerance by excerpting passages from the Bible out of context.According to my quick Google search, Playbill Magazine was the most prominent publication to carry a story with photographs. You can read the article at http://www.playbill.com/article/juilliard-students-greet-westboro-bapti….

Love the Guest is on the way.

A few days after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, I was invited to visit Trinity Church Wall Street to inspect the organs there. I lived in Boston then, and while I had seen dozens of hours of television coverage of the attack, I was surprised by the devastation, the misery, and even the smells I encountered. St. Paul’s Chapel, the neighboring church building that is part of the Trinity family, had instantly been converted into an emergency aid station, providing rest, refreshment, medical attention, even massages to the rescue workers. And the iron fence surrounding the property became a poignant memorial, adorned with photos of missing people and lost loved ones and expressions of national loss and unity through poetry, art, music, and memorabilia.

I had a brief encounter with the church’s rector, a tall handsome guy with an enviable white coif, and suggested to him that it seemed a little strange to be thinking about a pipe organ in the midst of that immense tragedy. He responded that the work of the church had never been more important—and he meant all of the work of the church.

Many, if not most of us who read and care about The Diapason, serve the church in at least one capacity. We plan and present the church’s music, maintain and prepare its musical instruments for worship, sharing the message of the church through its music and through all forms of artistic expression. As we work through the next seasons of the Christian year, we should be aware of how bruised we are as a people. Our work has never been more important. Celebrate the talents and gifts you’ve been given, nurture them through study and practice, and return them to the church and to the nation, doing all you can to make this a better world. It matters. And it’s important. Go do it. Good work, people. ν

Notes

1. Eleanor Farjeon also wrote the poem, Morning Has Broken, popularly set to the Gaelic tune, Bunessan.

2. François Bédos des Celles (1709–1779), familiarly known to organbuilders as Dom Bédos, was a Benedictine monk and master organbuilder. His treatise, L’art du facteur d’Orgues (The Art of Organ Building), published in 1768, is still central to the education of every modern organbuilder.

John Collins has been playing and researching early keyboard music for over 35 years, with special interests in the English, Italian, and Iberian repertoires. He has contributed many articles and reviews to several American and European journals, including The Diapason, and has been organist at St. George’s, Worthing, West Sussex, England for almost 26 years.

In 2010 there are several composers for organ from the 16th to 18th centuries whose anniversaries can be commemorated, albeit only some of the dates are certain. Many of the names listed here will not be well known, but their compositions are well worth exploring and many are suitable for both liturgical and recital use. Although the dances and variations were destined primarily for the harpsichord and clavichord, they would have also been played on the domestic chamber organ—even performance on a church organ can sound most effective when using carefully selected stops based on clarity, rather than thick diapasons. From the 16th century onwards, publishers had an eye for commercial exploitation and frequently included multiple instrumental possibilities on the title pages! This list makes no claim to completeness, but the compiler has copies of almost everything here, although it is entirely possible that some items are out of print and would have to be consulted in libraries.

Antonio de Cabezón (1510–66). Leading 16th-century Spanish composer for keyboard. Several of his works (including 14 tientos, some 15 hymns, and two short diferencias or variations) were published in Venegas de Henestrosa’s Libro de Cifra Nueva (1557), which includes important comments on performance practice, including ornaments and fingering; modern edition by Higinio Anglés in two volumes (Groen’s catalogue mentions a reprint in four volumes) for Monumentos de la Música Española. The posthumous Obras de Música para Tecla, Arpa y Vihuela, published by his son Hernando in 1578 (which also includes invaluable comments on performance practice), contains much liturgical music; after four duos and five pieces in three parts headed “for beginners,” there follow 11 hymns, sets of four versos, four fabordones, six (on the second, third and fifth tones) or seven verses on the Magnificats, and four Kyries on each of the eight tones, in addition to 14 tientos, nine diferencias, a setting of Duinsela, and over 40 glosadas (intabulations) in up to six parts, including four by Hernando, one by Juan de Cabezón, and one anonymous. A modern edition in three volumes excluding the glosadas is edited by Anglés and published by Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. A new edition is in preparation, edited by Claudio Astronio for Ut Orpheus. The glosadas have been edited by Maria Ester Sala for Union Musical Ediciones. A few pieces in MS 242 at Coimbra published in Portugaliae Musica Vol. XIX have tentatively been assigned to de Cabezón, although the ascription to A.C. may well have meant Antonio Carreira, the leading Portuguese organist of the 16th century.

Ercole Pasquini (ca. 1560–1620). Organist in Verona and Rome, from which post he was apparently dismissed in 1608. He left over 30 pieces in MSS (none autograph), including six toccatas (some with interesting rhythmic patterns in the note groupings), ten canzonas, one fuga, sets of variations including Ruggiero, two on Romanesca and two Pass è Mezzi, an intabulation of Ancor che co’l partire, a sonata, a gagliarda, and the earliest known examples of two durezze and two correnti. Collected edition by W. Richard Shindle, published by American Institute of Musicology, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music 12.

Peter Philips (ca. 1560–1628). Spent much time in Italy, Spain, France, and Belgium, where he died in Brussels. Left some 34 compositions, including pavans, galliards, three fantasias, 15 intabulations of madrigals, and a set of 10 verses on Veni Sancte Spiritus. Nineteen pieces, mainly dances and intabulations, are to be found in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book Vol. 1. A further eight pieces, including an almande, pavana, fantasia, four intabulations, and the setting of Veni Sancte Spiritus, are edited by John Harley for Stainer & Bell’s Early Keyboard Music K40. The complete keyboard works, edited by David Smith, are in Musica Britannica, Vol. 75.

Hieronymus Praetorius (1560–1629) was organist of the Jakobikirche in Hamburg. He left a large corpus of organ music in the Visby MS, of which the eight Magnificat cycles bear his name. Ascribed to him with some certainty from the same MSS are 19 hymn cycles (of Latin hymns) and 10 Kyrie cycles as well as four sequence cycles, a setting of Psalm 113, of the German Magnificat using the Tonus Peregrinus, and two recently discovered lengthy chorale fantasias, on Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam and Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist. All of these pieces have been edited by Klaus Beckmann in three volumes for Schott (ED 9581–9583).

Johann Benn (ca. 1590–1660) worked in Messkirch (Baden) and Lucerne, and left seven ricercars and two canzonas in a MS now in the BL. A modern edition by R. Schächer is published by Cornetto Verlag (CP342).

Pedro de Tafalla (1606–1660) was organist at El Escorial, Spain, where his three known compositions for organ are preserved. They include a Tiento lleno on the 2nd Tone, a Medio registro alto on the 2nd Tone, and a Tiento de dos tiples on the 7th Tone. They have been published recently by Ediciones Escurialenses in Música para órgano (siglo XVII) Volume 1-1, which also includes works by Diego de Torrijos and Cristóba1 de San Jerónimo, available from Tritó, Barcelona.

Henri Dumont (1610–84). Born in Belgium, Dumont became organist at St-Paul in Paris and left 17 pieces, including 11 allemandes, one courante, one pavane, and four préludes. Modern edition P. Bonfils, Editions Musicales de la Schola Cantorum et de la Procure Générale de Musique, L’organiste Liturgique 13.

Bernardo Pasquini (1637–1710). Organist in Rome and teacher of Zipoli, Casini, Georg Muffat, composer of over 200 pieces for keyboard conserved in four main MSS, covering all the main genres (17 suites, a few individual dance movements, about 30 short arias, over 35 toccatas, two capriccii, a fantasia, three canzone), one fuga, four ricercari (one of which runs to 345 bars), four sonatas, 22 variations (including four passacagli), and including over 300 versos and 14 sonatas for one and a further 14 for two instruments with just a figured bass. Available in seven volumes, edited by Maurice Brook Haynes, published by American Institute of Musicology, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music 5—this edition is unfortunately very unreliable but does group the works by genres. The far more accurate new Italian edition in seven volumes—which, after volume one that contains an Introduzione and Pastorale, and 60 versetti, all taken from a newly discovered MS in Bologna, follows the haphazard groupings of the (mainly autograph) MSS—is available from Libreria Musicale (www.libreria musicale.com). A facsimile edition of the Landsberg MS has been edited by Emer Buckley in two parts plus CD, published by Anne Fuzeau Classique (www.
editions-classique.com).

Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725). Better known for his sacred and secular vocal music, he left many toccatas in MSS, most of which are multi-movement (with some loose fugues as well as dance movements), including lengthy sets of variations on the Folia. Some toccatas are retrospective, others are forward-looking, with many dissonant clashes and lengthy passages of chords to be arpeggiated. An excellent new edition by Andrea Macinanti and Francesco Tasini with a most illuminating introduction on performance is published in five volumes by Ut Orpheus: Alessandro Scarlatti, Complete Works for Keyboard, Vols. 1–5, Ut Orpheus AS 01–AS 05; <www.utorpheus.com&gt;.

Johann Kuhnau (1660–1722) worked in Leipzig and published two sets of seven suites (the first set in major, the second in minor keys, also including a sonata in B-flat), seven sonatas in from three to seven movements, and a set of six sonatas that are multi-movement programmatic pieces entitled Biblical Histories. All are available in facsimile, published by SPES. The edition by Moser for Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst volume 1/4 is out of print, but a new edition in two volumes has been edited by C. Harris in Art of the Keyboard Vol. 6 for Broude Brothers: Johann Kuhnau: The Collected Works for Keyboard, ed. C. David Harris; AOK 6, 2 volumes; Broude Brothers Limited (www.broude.us/Catalogues/EarlyMusic2006.pdf). The Biblical Sonatas are available separately, AOK 6C.

Christian Witte (ca. 1660–1717), organist in Altenburg, left about 20 pieces in MSS, including suites, preludes, fugues, three chorale preludes, and ciaconas; a passacaglia on D-C-Bb-A with 30 variations was formerly attributed to J. S. Bach. A modern edition of 12 pieces has been edited by Laura Cerutti for Armelin (www.armelin.it) in two volumes (AMM 026/053), of which the pieces best suited to organ are in volume 2. Three pieces from the Mylau Tablaturbuch are edited by John R. Shannon for American Institute of Musicology, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music 39. A capriccio in the Andreas Bach Book has been edited by Robert Hill for Harvard University Press: Keyboard Music from the Andreas Bach Book and the Moller Manuscript, ed. Robert Hill; Harvard University Press (www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/HILMUS.html).

Georg Leyding (1665–1710) studied with Reincken and Buxtehude and became Jakob Bölsche’s successor at Braunschweig. He left three praeludia, a chorale prelude on Wie schön leucht uns, and a set of six chorale variations on Von Gott will ich nicht lassen, which have been edited by Klaus Beckmann for Breitkopf & Härtel: Georg Dietrich Leyding, Organ Works (EB 8405) (www.breitkopf.com).

Vicent Rodríguez (1690–1760) was organist at Valencia Cathedral, successor to the great Cabanilles. In MSS he left a Libro de Tocatas (30) for harpsichord and a few pieces for organ including a fantasia, six tocatas (several of these are pieces for the clarines or trumpet stops and are much lighter in style than those by Cabanilles), and a partido. New edition by Águeda Pedrero for Tritó edicions (www.trito.es). Ten versos sobre Pange Lingua have been edited by Vicente Ros and included in Música de Tecla Valenciana Vol. 5.

Thomas Arne (1710–78). Left Six favourite concertos for organ, harpsichord or piano-forte published ca. 1787, which may be performed without the accompanying parts; edited by Robin Langley for OUP; and Gwilym Beechey has edited the organ solos from the concerti for Peters (H 1544). Arne also published a set of Eight Sonatas or Lessons for the harpsichord in 1756, facsimile edition edited by Beechey and Dart for Stainer & Bell K27.

Thomas Gladwin (1710–99). Worked in London, where he published Eight Lessons for the Harpsichord or Organ, three of which have violin accompaniment, in the 1750s. Facsimile edition of these two-movement pieces has been published by Jacks, Pipes and Hammers; <www.
btinteret.com/~edjacksph/pub.htm>.

Giuseppe Paganelli (1710–63). Worked in Venice, Bayreuth, Munich, and Madrid, where he may have succeeded D. Scarlatti. He published XXX Ariae pro organo et cembalo in 1756, facsimile edition in Minkoff, and edited by M. Machella for Armelin AMM163. He also published in 1757 Amusement for the fair sex or Six sonatines for the harpsichord, modern edition by Laura Cerutti for Cornetto Verlag (CP388). Three further sonatas are included in volumes 2, 3, and 4 of the Haffner Raccolta. Facsimile edition of volumes 2 and 3 in Raccolta musicale… Bibliotheca Musica Bononiensis IV/56 Bologna.

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710–84). Oldest son of Johann Sebastian, he left relatively few keyboard works, most of which sound best on the clavichord, including eleven sonatas, eight fugues, twelve polonaises, ten fantasias, seven chorale preludes, and eight fugues from isolated MSS, in addition to pieces in the Notebook for W F Bach compiled by Johann Sebastian. The eight fugues have been edited by Paul Simmonds and Mike Daniels (www.paulsimmonds.com/publications/php) and published by themselves. They are also included in volume 1 of the organ works edited by Traugott Fedke for Edition Peters in two volumes (vol. 2 includes the chorale preludes and some more fugues). A new complete edition of the keyboard music in two volumes (vol. 1 just published) is in progress for Carus Verlag (Carus 32.001, 32.002). Best suited to the organ are the fugues and chorale preludes.

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–36) is better known for his operas and sacred music, but three organ sonatas are included in Splendori del ’700 Napoletano Vol 1. and one in Vol. 2, edited by Maurizio Machella for Armelin as AMM 161 and AMM 240 (www.armelin.it). Many pieces formerly attributed to him in 18th-century sources have now been identified as being by other composers—the one certain thing about Pergolesi is that he died young!

Many of the publishers mentioned have their own websites and accept orders from anywhere; the following would supply “one-stop shopping” for orders from more than one publisher, although they themselves would have to order titles from many of the smaller publishers, including the Spanish and Italian.
Jacks Pipes and Hammers: <www.jackspipesandhammers.com&gt;
Saul Groen: <http://saulgroen.nl&gt;
Sheetmusicplus: <www.sheetmusic plus.com>

Other individual publishers’ sites include:
Edicion Tritó: <www.trito.es&gt;; especially useful for Spanish scores
Corpus of Early Keyboard Music: <www.corpusmusicae.com/cekm&gt;. 

This article is a considerably expanded version of a list originally published in British Clavichord Society Newsletter 46.

Marilyn Biery, DMA, AAGO, is a Pi Kappa Lambda graduate of Northwestern University, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in organ performance, where she studied with Richard Enright and Grigg Fountain. She holds the DMA in organ performance from the University of Minnesota. In 1982 she was a finalist in the National Open Competition in Organ Playing, sponsored by the American Guild of Organists. From 1986–1996 she was director of music ministries at the First Church of Christ in Hartford, Connecticut. Since 1996 she has been associate director of music at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, Minnesota. Biery is a former director of the National Young Artists Competition in Organ Performance, sponsored by the AGO. Her texts and music are published by Alliance Publications, GIA, MorningStar, and Augsburg Fortress. Marilyn Biery is a frequent collaborator with a number of American composers, including Libby Larsen, David Evan Thomas, Stephen Paulus, Pamela Decker, and James Hopkins. She has written a number of articles on American organ music, including “The Organ in Concert,” The Diapason, January 2005, and with her husband, James, was the subject of an interview in The Diapason (“He said, she said: A conversation with James & Marilyn Biery,” June 2008).

My lifelong interest in new music began to come alive in a vivid way when I attended a workshop on the subject given by Harold Stover at an AGO regional convention in New England in the mid-1980s. My organ studies at Northwestern University had begun my interest in contemporary music by introducing me to the music of Messiaen, Hindemith, Distler, Dupré, Duruflé, and other early twentieth-century organ composers, but my interest flamed into a slow-burning passion at this convention and this workshop, because here was the first opportunity for me to actually meet a composer. This was a huge turning point for a twenty-something musician, and not only did I meet this composer, but I discovered that he had a sense of humor and personality, he was approachable and friendly, and he knew how to generate interest in new music. It was a defining moment, and I’ve never forgotten Stover or the workshop. His distinguished career has demonstrated the vigor with which he has championed new music, his personality has brought vitality and style to the field through his commitment to composing with unusual subjects and methods, and his vision of new music and its role in worship and concerts tells a compelling story of past and future for those who listen.
I don’t remember much about the workshop content but vivid in my mind is Stover telling about a performance of his Nocturnes where the button on his shirtsleeve got caught in-between the keys during a forearm cluster. He took a serious subject and made it fun instead of stuffy. I have also heard him tell of doing such a cluster at another performance where someone from the audience, concerned about his lingering, prone position on the keys, shouted out during the piece: “Are you okay??” According to Stover, he has since learned to tell the audience what he will be doing before starting any piece with such an effect, so as not to raise any concerns during the performance that he might be ill or incapacitated.
And so the workshop reflected the nature of the music written by Stover: engaging, slightly quirky, decidedly and wholeheartedly American (with homage to Virgil Thomson, Charles Ives, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, among others), and reflective of his interest in stretching technical boundaries of the organ through use of clusters, glissandos, tremolos and random repetitive patterns. Stover juxtaposes styles from various periods of music history and mixes musical genres not commonly found in compositions for organ.
Much of the information contained in this article comes directly from Harold Stover, beginning with his biography. Stover was also gracious enough to provide most of the analysis of his pieces, except for Shall I Tell You Who Will Come to Bethlehem?. My work in bringing this article to the public was primarily that of compiler, not as author. So I am grateful to him for all his enthusiasm and responsiveness to my myriad requests for information and clarification. It is my hope that readers will be intrigued by this presentation and discussion of Stover’s music, and that they will add these pieces to their repertoire.
Harold Stover was born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1946. He graduated from the Juilliard School in New York in 1969 with a major in organ, having also previously attended Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His principal teachers were Vernon de Tar, John R. Lively, Robert Ivey, and Donald G. Wilkins in organ and church music, Nikolai Lopatnikoff and Carlos Surinach in music theory, composition, and orchestration, and Abraham Kaplan and Richard Strange in choral and orchestral conducting.
From 1968 to 1992 he served as organist and choirmaster of Second Presbyterian Church in New York City, where he directed the church’s amateur and professional choirs and was founder and director of the “Music at Second” concerts, which presented a wide variety of choral, instrumental, and keyboard music, including many first performances of new works. In 1986 the church’s music program was the subject of an hour-long profile on the nationally syndicated radio program IBM Salute to the Arts. During this time, Stover also served as director of music of the Alexander Robertson School, a private elementary school in New York, and as organist of the St. Andrew’s Society of the State of New York.
In 1992 he was appointed organist and director of music of Woodfords Congregational Church in Portland, Maine, where he directs the adult choir in service music and in concerts of major choral works with orchestra, directs the Pilgrim vocal choir and the Woodfords Ringers handbell choir, and serves as producer of the choir’s recordings. He also directs the Portland-based chamber chorus Renaissance Voices, a position to which he was appointed in 2001. In May 2008 Stover was honored and his music celebrated during an all-Stover concert sponsored by Woodfords Congregational. At that time he was presented with the gift of a two-week creative leave each year in honor of his fortieth year as a professional musician, and fifteenth year at the church.
From 1977 to 1992 he served on the faculty of the New York School of Liturgical Music, where he taught organ, choral conducting, sight singing, music theory, and church music history. In 1995 he was appointed to the faculty of the Portland Conservatory of Music, where he teaches organ and music theory.
His compositions include keyboard music, choral and vocal music, chamber and orchestral music, electronic music, and two film scores. In 1986 his Triptych on the Name of Bach was one of the prize-winning entries in the international composition competition held at Southern College, Collegedale, Tennessee. In 1989 he chaired the New York City AGO chapter’s “Organists Against AIDS” benefit, and twice served as chair of that chapter’s Presidents’ Day Conference. His writings on organ and church music have been published in The American Organist, The Diapason, The New England Organist, The Tracker, and Worship, Music, and Ministry. Harold Stover lives in Hollis, Maine, with his wife Elizabeth. They have two daughters: Alice, of Washington, D.C., and Lucy, of Portland.

Concert music for organ and piano
The first two pieces highlighted are examples of his concert music, beginning with his duet for organ and piano, Neumark Variations. At first hearing, this piece enthralls the listener with its sense of fun, its continuity, and its elegant, charming and innovative variations, each with a clear intention and purpose. Performance length is just under fifteen minutes; six of the eleven variations are discussed here in some detail.
“In January 1987 I was asked by organist Daniel Junken for a piece for organ and piano, to be performed by him and pianist Nancy McDill, the request specifying a work based on a hymn tune. I chose the Lutheran chorale Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten, better known in American hymnals as Neumark, after its composer Georg Neumark (1621–1681). The tune is a solemn one in a simple AAB form, and it proved an ideal subject for the construction of a set of variations ranging widely across the stylistically diverse landscape of late twentieth-century American music. The result is a postmodern1 work in that all eras of musical history are freely drawn upon for the styles of the different variations. Neumark Variations was first performed in October 1987 at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, by its dedicatees.
Variation I: Musette with Ghost Image. Two flutes are heard in the organ pedal, the upper one sounding a sustained note, the other repeating quarter-note beats in the manner of an 18th-century French musette. Above this, two voices sound the A portion of the chorale in a tonal and rhythmic canon. The theme is given to a reed stop in values that produce a 9/8 meter (the quarter note of the original version now equaling a dotted eighth), and to a 2′ stop in values that produce a 3/8 meter (the quarter of the original now equaling an eighth). The pedal’s steady pulse of 3/4 accentuates the polymetric effect. The piano, joined by pianissimo string stops in the organ, sounds the B portion of the theme in minor-12th chords. These mysterious chords, following the bright sounds of the musette, were inspired by the images that remain in the eye after a photographic flash has gone off. (See Example 1.)
Variation III: Trio with Sound Effects. Organ and piano here coexist in different historical times. The organ sounds a chorale prelude in 18th-century trio style, manuals in a strict canon based on the chorale, pedal sounding the cantus firmus in longer notes. The bass of the piano inserts loud clusters intended to sound like the cannon in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, using the “cannon” as a bad pun on the “canon” in the organ part. The treble of the piano further contributes to the historical mélange in a crazed distortion of the baroque organ’s Cymbelstern bells, identified in the score as le cymbelstern maudit, after César Franck’s cursed huntsman,2 in a further blending of music history’s epochs. (Example 2.)
Variation VII: Second Dialogue. The 19th century here makes an appearance in a dialogue whose keyboard textures are modeled on the piano works of Brahms. The romantic virtuosity of both parts builds to the principal postmodern surprise of the work, Variation VIII: Country Dream Sequence. This variation transposes Neumark’s chorale from its original key of g minor into G major, and transports it from 17th-century Germany into the American countryside. The piano part—influenced by the country piano stylist Floyd Cramer—and the organ part—drawn more on the urban theatre organ style of the 1920s—are synthesized into a variation based on the American vernacular music the love of which Daniel Junken and I shared, both in its original form and as transformed by composers like Charles Ives and Virgil Thomson. (Example 3.)
Variation IX: Bitonal Canon. The theme is harmonized in triads in D major and E-flat major, heard in a canon à 4 over a G pedalpoint. (See Example 4.)
Variation XI: Finale. The tempo indication is “Rocking out!”, indicating that the source of this final variation is the sound of American popular music as it was transformed in the 1950s and 1960s. The repeated chords in the piano (a characteristic sound of early rock and roll) and the syncopated ground bass set up a back beat (one-AND-two-AND), augmented by a triplet toccata figure in the treble of the organ and a syncopated variant of the theme in the bass of the piano. (Example 5.) These elements are exchanged among the registers of the instruments as the variation unfolds and the harmonic and rhythmic tensions build to a climactic piano cadenza in double octaves and a fortissimo, dissonant organ harmonization of the first half of the chorale’s B section that ends with the pedal repeating C-naturals and E-flats, decreasing in tempo and volume and finishing on a sustained E-flat. Over this sustained tone, the piano quietly completes the chorale, its original harmonization quietly calling across the centuries. In the last two measures, the piano sounds the opening notes of the theme rapidly and loudly in the bass, but what seems to begin a new statement of the chorale is cut off by a low G marked “very long—hold till all sound has died away.” This is a final postmodern gesture, this time toward an iconic musical moment of the late 20th-century, the E-major chord that ends John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s A Day in the Life.”

Concert music for solo organ
“Mountain Music is a suite of three movements, each based on a Shaker melody. The Shakers are the oldest surviving religious communal society in the United States; the last active community is at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. At Evening, a quiet nocturne, quotes Fr. James’ Song No. 1, notated by Elder Thomas Hammond at Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1853 but originally sung by Father James Whittaker in 1783 (Example 6). The second movement, Quick Dance, featuring Quick Dance No. 2 (South Union, Kentucky, 1838) (Example 7), is a comedic scherzo that seeks to reconcile the disparate worlds of the classical organ and the country fiddle (Example 8). Pilgrimage, based on The Happy Journey, also notated by Hammond, but sung at Hancock, Massachusetts, at least as early as 1808 (Example 9), is a set of variations over a descending ground bass. Performance length of the set is about fifteen minutes.
All three of these tunes were created by Shakers with a religious intent, but only the final movement of Mountain Music could be construed as overtly sacred music. In adapting the other two melodies to secular purposes, I have tried to take my cue from the way in which the Shakers were able to instill in the most utilitarian tasks a purity of purpose and devotion that reflected their mantra of ‘hands to work, hearts to God.’”

Music for concert or worship
The next two compositions, Angel and Toccata Brevis, are shorter works for solo organ, each less than five minutes in length, and are appropriate for concert or worship.
“The initial inspiration for Angel was non-musical: a radio broadcast in 1997 commemorating the launching of the first man-made satellite 40 years earlier, and featuring a recording of the signals that it sent back from space. I remembered listening to the original broadcasts of those signals as a young boy and being struck by how otherworldly they sounded—a message from a vast beyond. The work begins with a musical evocation of the radio signal and continues to depict the visitation of an entity that draws nearer, assuming various guises as it does, and then retreats leaving radio signals alone in the vastness of space. The musical material consists of several short themes heard in various harmonic and contrapuntal combinations.
In 1998 I was invited to play one of the 30-minute Sunday afternoon organ recitals at Westminster Abbey in London. I naturally wanted to include a work of my own in that historic venue, but one that would not consume so much of the short recital time as to limit the options for the rest of the program. I decided to compose a three-minute piece that would serve as a musical calling card and curtain raiser, and thus Toccata Brevis was born.
The work takes its title not only from its short length, but from the brief motifs on which it is constructed. These consist of:
• a fanfare-like theme heard in the first measure (Example 10)
• a sixteenth-note figure that twists and turns back on itself (Example 11)
• a series of overlapping broken chords in eighth notes played on only the black keys by one hand and on only the white keys by the other, producing the effect of a kaleidoscopic burst of sixteenth notes (Example 12)
• a series of homophonic chords that punctuate the toccata texture (Example 13).
These elements are freely developed and juxtaposed throughout the brief duration of the piece, which ends with a six-measure coda built on variants of Examples 12 and 13.
The metrical structure throughout the piece is a measure of nine eighths divided into four plus five, giving the effect of steady but uneven larger beats. The tonal center is C major, although the keys of D major, F-sharp major, G major, and E-flat major are alluded to in the course of the material’s development.”
The last composition mentioned in detail is Stover’s newly published composition for SATB choir and organ, a Christmas anthem on an old Spanish carol translated by Ruth Sawyer, Shall I Tell You Who Will Come to Bethlehem?.
Shall I tell you who will come to Bethlehem on Christmas morn?
Who will kneel them gently down before the Lord new-born?
One small fish from the river with scales of red, red gold.
One wild bee from the heather, one grey lamb from the fold.

One ox from the high pasture, one black bull from the herd.
One goatling from the far hills, one white, white bird.
And many children, God give them grace,
Bringing tall candles to light Mary’s face.3
This delightful anthem features an organ ritornello, inspired by the 18th-century French tambourin noëls, alternating with choral statements of the text. The ritornello comprises a drum-like rhythmic pattern in the left hand and a right-hand melody on a 2′ stop (Example 14). The vivid picture painted by the Sawyer text matches the musical diversity as the anthem provides charming and unexpected shifts from the tonal center of G major through C major, E minor, A major, B major, A-flat major, F major, G minor, A-flat major, C minor and E minor on the way back to G major.
Harold Stover’s music is intentionally eclectic as he draws from all angles and aspects of musical styles and periods. The vision and skill with which these diverse ingredients are mixed together creates an impression of delightful juxtaposition and creative innovation. This music, brimming with vitality, is to be delighted in and chuckled at, vigorously proclaimed from organ lofts and pipe chambers, savored and internalized. Harold Stover’s compositions paint vivid pictures for listeners to conjure up their own visions of musical storytelling.

Available compositions
by Harold Stover
All music without publisher listing is available directly from the composer at <www.haroldstover.com&gt;.

Sacred Choral
And We’ll All Sing Hallelujah (SATB, org)
None Other Lamb (SATB a cappella, ECS Publishing)
Shall I Tell You Who Will Come to Bethlehem? (SATB, org, Paraclete Press)
Jubilate Deo (SATB, org, Triune Press)
Forth in Thy Name (2-pt, org, handbells, Triune Press)
Thus Sings the Heavenly Choir (2-pt, org, H. W. Gray)
Phos Hilaron (SATB, vc, handbells, org)
Psalm 150 (SATB, org, opt br quartet, timp)
A Litany of Praise and Thanksgiving (SATB, br quintet, org)
Across the Desert (SATB, fl, perc, org)
This I Am (SATB a cappella)
Earth Eternal (SATB, org, br quartet, perc)
The Spirit of the Lord (SAB, org)
God Is Love (SAB, org)
I Find My Refuge, Lord, in You (SATB, org)
Sweet Was the Song (SATB a cappella)

Secular Choral
springsongs (SATB a cappella)
Three Shakespeare Songs (SATB a cap)

Organ
Te Decet Hymnus Deus in Sion (Boosey & Hawkes)
Nocturnes, Book I* (MorningStar Music Publishers)
Five Preludes on American Folk Hymns (H. W. Gray)
Tambourine
Symphony No. 2
Mountain Music (MorningStar Music Publishers)*
The Stations of the Cross (w/2 narrators)
Toccata Brevis
Angel
Carillon: Nine Chorale Preludes (Augsburg Fortress)

Organ and instruments
Nocturnes, Book III (w/tpt, perc)
Neumark Variations (w/piano, MorningStar Music)**
An Easter Carillon (w/br quartet, perc)

Piano
Souvenir
Chaconne

Two pianos
Rag, Pastorale, and Carillon***

Voice and piano
Celtic Invocations (m-sop)

Voice and organ
Sayings of Jesus (sop)

Chamber ensemble
String Quartet No. 1 (Rag–Very Slowly–Tango)
String Quartet No. 2 (Allegro agitato–Passacaglia)

* recorded on Albany TROY765 and ACA Digital 20094
** recorded on ACA Digital 20050
*** recorded on ACA Digital 20023

Musical Examples
Toccata Brevis examples reproduced with the permission of Harold Stover.
Mountain Music and Neumark Variations: Copyright 2006, Birnamwood Publications (A division of MorningStar Music Publishers). Used by permission.
Music from “Shall I Tell You Who Will Come to Bethlehem” (PPMO0828) by Harold Stover, ©2008 Paraclete Press, used by permission of Paraclete Press,
<www.paracletepress.com&gt;.

Larry Palmer is harpsichord editor of THE DIAPASON.

Expensive as national conventions of the American Guild of Organists have become, it was still a bargain to be in eastern Minnesota enjoying an extensive program of musical treasures from France, England, and Germany, without the financial challenges of elevated euros or precious pounds. Add the Twin Cities advantages of near-perfect cool summer weather, many events scheduled within walking distance of the central city hotels, and a well-organized charter bus transport package available for travel to sites farther away, for further incentives to participate in the morning-to-midnight musical marathon detailed in the lavish (and heavy) 252-page program book.
Each of the nearly 1800 registrants attending the AGO’s 49th biennial gathering (held June 22–28 in Minneapolis and St. Paul) will have unique impressions of the meeting, based not only on individual tastes, but also on which of the presentations were heard. Many recitals and all workshops were offered concurrently. This report describes what I chose to experience, in this, my 50th year of attending such national meetings. Comments about several events I did not attend are treated as “convention buzz.”

From France: Messiaen Plus
France was represented with quite a lot of music by Olivier Messiaen: it is, after all, the centennial year of his birth. The first organ recital heard on Monday, the first full day of the convention, was played by Stephen Tharp, who gave a masterful account of Messiaen’s Messe de la Pentecôte as the climax of his all-French program on the bright and forthright 2001 Lively-Fulcher organ in St. Olaf Catholic Church. Tharp’s brilliant playing recalled again the visceral shock of this music when first encountered at Oberlin, presented by Fenner Douglass as very recent music. Even now it is not possible to hear the most evocative and accessible movement of the cycle, the Communion Les Oiseaux et les Sources (The Birds and the Springs) without remembering Douglass’s trenchant, if acidic, review of a 1972 performance in a non-reverberant Dallas sanctuary: “The birds . . . called out weakly as they died on the branch, and the drops of water more resembled curds of old cottage cheese.”1
I suspect the late, lamented Professor Douglass would have been happier with Tharp’s account! This time the birds sang jubilantly and chirped ecstatically before flying off into the stratosphere, while the springs burbled gently as they descended to subterranean depths at the piece’s ending.
Following a riveting performance of the final movement from Widor’s Symphonie Romane and works by Jeanne Demessieux, the Mass served as a bracing reminder of just how much hearing a dose of Messiaen’s organ music helps to balance some of the pabulum so often served up as modern church music. But it does remain difficult listening, and oft times more fun to play than to hear. Tellingly, a perusal of the entire convention program revealed no other organ works by Messiaen listed for performance during the entire week! For National Young Artist Competition in Organ Performance [NYACOP] contestants, for the Rising Stars organists, as well as for more established recitalists, the French notes of choice were most often penned by Langlais, Dupré, or Naji Hakim.

. . . at Orchestra Hall
Kudos to the convention program committee for making certain that nearly everyone got some exposure to works by one of the 20th century’s most eminent masters when the entire convention attended the most discussed program at Orchestra Hall on Tuesday evening. All-Messiaen, the concert contained no organ music at all (not surprising, since there is no organ in this major symphonic space); live music was followed by a post-concert showing of Paul Festa’s mesmerizing 52-minute documentary film, Apparition of the Eternal Church.
For more than two hours the assembled church musicians and organists heard readings of three poems by the composer’s mother Cécile Sauvage and secular pieces by Messiaen, performed almost exclusively by women. These were all early works: Theme and Variations for violin and piano, 1932; voice (selections from Poèmes pour Mi, (1936); three of the Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus for solo piano (1944); and, best of all, two of the eight movements from the composer’s chamber masterwork, Quartet for the End of Time (1940–41)—Abyss of the Birds for solo clarinet; and the final eight-minute transcendent Praise to the Immortality of Jesus, for violin and piano—performed with maximum expressivity and intensity by clarinetist Jennifer Gerth and violinist Stephanie Arado with Judy Lin, piano.
Programming the 35-minute closing piece, Festival of Beautiful Waters (1937) for a sextet of Ondes Martenots, provided a probable once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear this work expertly played by L’Ensemble d’Ondes Martenot de Montréal. The delicate electronic instruments, their sounds inspired by the changing frequencies of radio dials, produced tones somewhat like Benjamin Franklin’s eerie glass harmonicas (tuned water goblets). Capable of playing only single notes, the keyboard instruments have considerable dynamic and touch-sensitive possibilities. The audience dwindled markedly as the clock approached ten, and passed it: sad, because the short explanation and demonstration of the Ondes Martenots following the performance was both instructive and charming.
I missed the first part of the subsequent film showing while attending a posh Eastman Organ Department reception in the Orchestra Hall Green Room, an especially celebratory event since the first place NYACOP winner this year was current Eastman doctoral student Michael Unger. Something—perhaps as simple as not wishing to walk back alone to my hotel—led me to look in on the film in progress. I stood, totally engrossed, for the remaining third (arriving just as the late harpsichordist Albert Fuller described an early life-changing experience in the low C pipe of Washington Cathedral’s Skinner pipe organ. The unexpected sight and story grabbed my attention!).
A program book disclaimer read, “Please note that the film deals frankly with sex and violence in explicit language . . . However, DVDs are available for sale [at an Exhibition booth], should curiosity get the better of you afterwards.” The filmmaker, Paul Festa, writing of his creation, explained that Messiaen regarded one of four tragedies, or “dramas” of his life experience, to have been that “he was a religious composer writing, for the most part, for nonbelievers.” This film concerns “what . . . the nonbelievers see when they hear his music,” in this case the 1931 organ composition Apparition of the Eternal Church. The film shows responses to Messiaen’s creation by 31 individuals. They range from Yale professor Harold Bloom and filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell to fringe culture and drag figures, as well as Fuller and the composer Richard Felciano, a student of the French composer.2

. . . and in workshops
Messiaen’s music was the featured topic for a pedagogy track during the workshops, a new concept implemented to replace the pre-convention pedagogy workshops of previous years. Charles Tompkins filled in as master teacher for the indisposed Clyde Holloway. His “Windows on Lessons” featured students Brent te Velde (Trinity University), Tyrell Lundman (University of Montana, Missoula), Julie Howell, and Erin MacGowman Moore (both from the University of Iowa).
Youthful scholarship was represented in two juried papers, selected by the AGO Committee on Continuing Professional Education (COPE). I attended the presentation by Yale student Christopher White—“Creating a Narrative in Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur”—in which he assigned certain extra-musical associations to various individual pitches and chords (an example: E=Jesus, E Major=Jesus on earth, as human) and made a convincing case for such an analysis of Messiaen’s nine-movement Christmas cycle. The University of Iowa’s David Crean followed with a complex discussion of “Messiaen’s Sixty-four Durations” (from the extraordinarily complex Livre d’Orgue, possibly the composer’s most abstract organ work).
Indiana University faculty member Christopher Young gave a workshop on “Understanding the Theory Behind the Art in Messiaen’s Organ Works.” However, it may have been the quiet mysticism of the Frenchman’s lush Communion motet O Sacrum Convivium, sung as the opening work at Thursday’s finale concert, that made the most friends for Messiaen’s elusive art.
A fully subscribed workshop (on a non-Messiaen topic) was musicologist John Near’s “The Essence of Widor’s Teaching: Interpretive Maxims.” I arrived slightly after the appointed starting time, learning later that I had missed a brief recorded example of Widor’s voice! Pithy exhortations from the composer—“Let’s learn to breathe,” “Derive tempo from the space in which you are performing,” and an oft-repeated “Slow down” (borne out by each subsequent lowering of the metronomic indications for the composer’s signature work, the Symphonie V Toccata) as well as his instruction to “Respect the work, not the performer”—all ring as true today as they did in the previous century! Dr. Near, currently working on a biography of Widor to complement his stellar editions of the composer’s organ symphonies, continues to do service to our profession by reminding us of the basic root values underpinning the French symphonic tradition. Nearly all the auditors stayed on to engage in further questions and comments.

A French recitalist
French organist Marie-Bernadette Duforcet Hakim’s opening de Grigny Ave Maris Stella was more effective than a jolt of double-strength espresso as a wake-up aid for her early-morning recital on the House of Hope’s large C. B. Fisk magnum opus. This organ’s Grands jeux, weighty, noble, and thrilling, provided a filling mass of sound in this Presbyterian Gothic edifice, which unfortunately lacks an extra five seconds of reverberation that would allow the loud and brilliant organ to bloom. That virtual coffee may have had an adverse effect on the recitalist, resulting in an overly brisk tempo for Franck’s Pièce Héroïque (after all the composer did mark it Allegro maestoso). Mme Hakim’s nuanced performance was stylistic, but any majesty was decidedly of the jet age. It seemed perverse, as well, to be hearing this beloved Romantic work on such unforgiving sounds, when directly before us stood the sanctuary’s other organ, an 1878 instrument by Merklin, created in exactly the same year and country as Franck’s composition.
Like most fine instruments, the Fisk took on the character of its player and served her especially well in her own composition Vent Oblique. After hearing an abundance of bright upperwork, it gave pleasant aural relief to encounter warm and lovely 8-foot sounds in the mid section of Jean Langlais’ Jésus, mon Sauveur béni, based on a hymn popular in his native Brittany. The program concluded with a set of well-crafted short variations on Pange lingua by husband Naji Hakim, and an improvisation that seemed to be based on the Ave Maris, but with an unexpected appearance, near the end, of the hymn tune Ein’ feste Burg as an offering, apparently, to the many Lutherans who call Minnesota their home.

English visitors
From St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, the choir of men and boys was in residence for three convention appearances, repeating a highly successful visit to the 1980 national meeting in the Twin Cities. Mark Williams, a former assistant sub-organist and director of music at the Cathedral School, stood in as the choir’s conductor, replacing an indisposed Andrew Carwood. Visually arresting in black cassocks, with bright red stoles and music folders, all seemed in good shape chorally (save for the occasional trumpeting tenor), and organist Tom Winpenny displayed his sensitive musicianship over and over again, both as soloist and impeccable choir accompanist.
The Monday evening concert took place in the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul—the most apt of venues, a magnificent 1907 Wren-like domed structure blessed with ample reverberation. Major offerings of early English motets by Weelkes, Peter Phillips, Orlando Gibbons, and the Mass for Five Voices by William Byrd were interspersed with organ works: Fantasia in G by Byrd, and the Fantasia of Foure Parts from Parthenia by Orlando Gibbons. The cross relations in these Tudor pieces sounded forth pungently from the three-stop portative organ in the chancel.
Employing the cathedral’s gallery and chancel organs for maximum surround sound, the second part of the concert offered Judith Bingham’s Cloth’d in Holy Robes (2005), an entirely engrossing and striking setting of a poem by Edward Taylor, with spinning wheel-evoking accompaniment supporting both the opening lines and subsequent allegorical references to clothing in this beautiful text. Anthems by Gerald Hendrie (Ave Verum Corpus, sung by the men of the choir) and Stephen Paulus (Arise, My Love) were separated by Paulus’s challenging Toccata for Organ, given an absolutely flawless and viscerally exciting performance by young Mr. Winpenny, who then returned to his accompanying duties for Benjamin Britten’s cantata Rejoice in the Lamb, a performance made particularly memorable by the male treble soloists in the fourth and fifth sections “For I will consider my cat Geoffrey” and “For the Mouse is a creature of great personal valour.”
Is there anything more sublime in Britten’s choral output than the quiet “Hallelujah” that ends this memorable setting of Christopher Smart’s idiosyncratic poetry? It provided an inspired conclusion to an enchanting concert.
Back on the other side of the river, the choir sang both Matins and Evensong in the Minneapolis Basilica of St. Mary. The afternoon program on Tuesday gave us baroque music of John Blow (Cornet Voluntary in D Minor) and his prize pupil Henry Purcell (Hear My Prayer, the anthem Jehova Quam Multi Sunt Hostes Mei, and Evening Service in G Minor) with responses by Thomas Tomkins. The hymn, Bishop Thomas Ken’s 1695 text “All praise to Thee, my God, this night” was sung to the familiar Tallis’ Canon tune (for one retrospect of the Renaissance), the psalm to a 20th-century chant by Walford Davies, and the closing voluntary brought us back to the baroque with music by Purcell’s Danish contemporary, Dieterich Buxtehude, his oft-played Praeludium in G Minor, BuxWV 149, in a stylish, virtuoso performance by Winpenny. The basilica was overflowing with rapt conventioneers who had arrived by bus before our walking group made it to the church. Seated in a far rear pew that was probably in another zip code, it was difficult to hear much except a soothing, but beautiful, wash of reverberated sound.
Matins, early the next day, was quite another matter (conventioneers like to party till the wee hours, so there were only a third as many worshipping at this morning service). I found a pew with good sight lines only several rows back from the chancel; both sound and repertory were worth the early rising! A full program of British 20th-century cathedral music, from Herbert Howells’s Rhapsody in D-flat, complete with a seamless decrescendo at its conclusion; Edward Bairstow’s I Sat Down Under His Shadow, the ecstasy of Bernard Rose’s responses, one of William Walton’s most inspired canticle settings, Jubilate Deo for double chorus (who would not be joyful in the Lord with such music as this?), and the somewhat less inspired, but serviceable Te Deum in G of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Elgar’s The Spirit of the Lord was the anthem, its extended organ introduction beautifully rendered, and the service concluded with organist Winpenny’s brilliant traversal of Fernando Germani’s Toccata, opus 12. That evening the Londoners flew back to Britain, these three convention appearances their sole purpose for the trip across the Atlantic.

Otherworldly Holst
What a gem of an organist is Peter Sykes! Perhaps even better, what a fine musician, whatever instrument he plays or music he chooses to program!3 His own transcription of Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets was beautifully made and impeccably realized in a Wednesday recital at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral. From the lowest rumblings of the opening movement (Mars, the Bringer of War), with growling reeds and a flawless quick crescendo, to the final Vox Humana above strings (a most satisfactory sound for evoking Holst’s wordless female chorus) as Neptune, the Mystic subsided in echoes of the spheres, Sykes missed nary a nuance with his clever use of organs fore and aft (perhaps most fittingly in Mercury, the Winged Messenger). The Welte/Möller/Gould and Sons organ was an apt partner (continuing this convention’s fine record for careful pairing of instruments and players), but then, how could one go wrong with an instrument possessing a Divine Inspiration stop?4

A welcome German recitalist and some Americans playing
German music
My second recital of the convention introduced an outstanding German artist new to me, Elke Voelker (whose U.S. connections include study with Wolfgang Rübsam at the University of Chicago). Ms. Voelker is the first to record the complete organ works of Sigfrid Karg-Elert. Her program in the Basilica of St. Mary utilized a good-sounding four-manual Wicks organ (1949), greatly enhanced by the spacious six-second reverberation of this domed, marble-interior building, America’s first basilica (according to pew cards in the church). Two major works by Karg-Elert, his Symphonic Chorale: Ach, bleib’ mit deiner Gnade and the monumental Passacaglia (55 Variations) and Fugue on BACH, opus 150, were flanked by Wagner’s Festival Music from Die Meistersinger and Bach’s celebrated Air from Suite in D, BWV 1068, both in arrangements by Karg-Elert: so, in essence an entire program of music by the German impressionist.
Elke Voelker made convincing music from these many notes, handling the organ with panache and ease, managing her own page turns, and giving us many thrilling moments. The opening Wagner brought chills to the spine at the pedal entrances in familiar music from the opera, and the addition of the Chamade Trumpet to the final chord was a capping effect. The Symphonic Chorale, one of the composer’s better-known works, is of a reasonable length and very appealing. As for the lengthy BACH work, I am pleased to have heard it, but would not seek to repeat the experience in the near future.
Further musical highlights of this “German theme” were provided by the sterling American artist Stewart Wayne Foster (winner of the first Dallas International Organ Competition). I have never heard Foster play poorly, and his concert for the convention (heard in its second iteration on Thursday) was another example of superb results made possible by his carefully calibrated articulation always employed in service to the musical line. Foster’s attention to each voice, including the bass, reflects his extensive background in harpsichord continuo playing.
Partnered with the 2004 Glatter-Götz/Rosales two-manual organ of 50 stops, Foster showed what a small number of keyboards could be made to accomplish with skillful use of a sequencer coupled to an ear for color and utilizing stops in various octaves. Karg-Elert again, this time three of his lovely Pastels from the Lake of Constance (not necessarily what one would expect to be played so idiomatically on a two-manual tracker instrument) were prefaced by an attention-gripping reading of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 535, and a rhythmically infectious treatment of Buxtehude’s baroque dance-based chorale fantasy on Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, brightened with two appearances of the Zimbelstern, the second as counterpart to an improvised cadenza leading into the final cadence.
Three North American works, especially Rising Sun by Brian Sawyers, provided the “wow” factor for this program. It was good also to hear two of Samuel Adler’s Windsongs, and the winning work of the AGO organ composition competition, Canadian Rachel Laurin’s Prelude and Fugue in F Minor, with its reminiscence of the Dupré opus 7 work in the same key. Foster’s overall theme for the program, “Atmospheres: A Prayer for the Environment,” demonstrated his special affinity for unusual thematic programming. The organ, with both 16-foot flues and reeds on all divisions, and added 102⁄3 flue and 32-foot reed in the pedal, possessed a gravitas that was welcome in the favorable acoustic of Augustana Lutheran Church, St. Paul.
More German offerings were, of course, to be found in various convention programs. One could characterize Carla Edwards’s program as Germanic (Buxtehude, Bach), or German-inspired (Planyavsky’s lively Toccata alla Rumba, neatly dispatched on the recent two-manual Fisk organ in Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church, Shoreview; and Petr Eben’s astringent take on the ubiquitous Prelude, Fugue and Chaconne in C, his Hommage à Dietrich Buxtehude). A non-Teutonic exception was provided in Triptych of Fugues, an early work by Gerald Near. Though Minnesota-born, Near seems often to be curiously under-represented in programs featuring Minnesota composers. His three lovely contrapuntal movements were played here without the requisite suppleness of line needed for this composer’s idiosyncratic amalgam of lyricism with strict fugal form.
And, of course, the convention buzzed about Cameron Carpenter’s version of THE Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, an arrangement using selected added material from Romantic-era transcriptions by Busoni, Friedman, Godowsky, Grainger, Liszt, Tausig, Stokowski, and Sir Henry Wood, that turned the possibly-not-by-Bach work into a “ . . . sort of cumulative celebration flinging wide the gates of possibility.”5 I did not hear Mr. Carpenter’s program (there were simply too many concerts in one day), but his awesome technical prowess and showman’s style may mark a return to ”the good old days” of the Virgil Fox versus E. Power Biggs opposites in America’s concert life. Carpenter’s popularity seems a positive development if it signals a healthy resurgence of bankable diversity in organ playing. Anyone who can attract more people to organ concerts has my admiration and support. And having fun at a recital? What a great concept!

Final concert: Siegfried Matthus’s Te Deum (2005)
At 8:40 trumpets from the rear gallery sounded the opening fanfare to the ten-minute opening movement of Matthus’s monumental work, composed for the dedication of the reconstructed Frauenkirche in Dresden. One hour later the same trumpets signaled the start of the final movement (Amen), with most of the same music, though some appeared in different sequence. Most magical of all, the cathedral tower bells were used in the very last measures, gently dying away as the chorus quietly intoned over and over again Te Deum laudamus.
English visitors having departed, it was left to local singers to provide the choral forces for this great work. Magnum Chorum, the Minnesota Boychoir, the National Lutheran Choir, and VocalEssence Ensemble Singers and Chorus, each group garbed distinctively, comprised the voices assembled under the confident baton of conductor Philip Brunelle. There were six vocal soloists, plus John Scott (ex London St. Paul’s) playing the significant organ part, not the least of which was his fine rendition of the Bach Toccata in D Minor, above which composer Matthus had set a text from The Organ by Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariae, beginning “Listen to the rushing wind in the silently expecting organ which it is preparing for its sacred song.” Herr Matthus was in attendance for this highly successful first American performance. Ovations were lengthy, loud, and deserved.
The first third of this closing concert united the three European national strands together with a fascinating selection of choral music: the Messiaen motet mentioned earlier and an excerpt from Dupré’s early De Profundis; the curiously moving avant garde work by John Tavener (“Verses Written on an Ecstasy” from Ultimos Ritos) in which four soloists in the chancel, the Magnum Chorum behind us in the nave, with larger forces split on both sides of the transepts, provided a cruciform arrangement of choral forces. The singers mused in ever more significant phrase fragments based on an underlying taped performance of the Crucifixus from Bach’s B-Minor Mass, at first barely audible, but ultimately overwhelming by the end of this effective work. An intense rendition of Stephen Paulus’s modern choral masterpiece, the Pilgrims’ Hymn that concludes his church opera The Three Hermits, realized the exquisitely chosen harmonies that find the simplest of resolutions in the work’s octave unison Amens.
John Scott played a convincing first performance of an appealing organ work commissioned for the convention. Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi took his inspiration from a poem by Emily Dickinson, And Hit a World, at Every Plunge. In program notes the composer mused, “. . . it is certainly not a comfortable piece. At some point I realized that I was . . . harking back to the very first time I heard an organ piece by Messiaen.” Organized as variations on an underlying twelve-tone row, the piece is “restless.” In a disarmingly honest description the composer noted that “the variations are very different in character and length, from funeral march to moto perpetuo. Although [the piece] aspires to a triumphant ending, it never quite seems to get there.” Indeed the work ended with three tonal chords, interrupted by cluster-crashes, leading to an ultimately quiet culmination. I found it engrossing, a work I would definitely want to hear again.6
Another convention choral commission, The Love of God by Aaron Jay Kernis, suffered from pitch problems in its first performance. The pre-Matthus part of the concert ended with an audience sing-along of Hubert Parry’s O Praise Ye the Lord (1894), cementing the English choral music arc of the week.

Organ concertos, American and “Jacobean”
Benson Great Hall of Bethel University was the site of this convention’s organ concerto program: four works for organ and instruments, conducted by Philip Brunelle, with organists Stephen Cleobury and James Diaz. A fine American eclectic three-manual 67-stop instrument by Blackinton Organ Company dominated the ample stage and was well balanced in this large, yet intimate-feeling, auditorium.
Ron Nelson’s Pebble Beach, commissioned for the 1984 AGO national convention in San Francisco, opened the program. Diaz’s sparkling playing was abetted by brass and percussion in this loud, lively curtain-raiser. Winner of the 2000 Dallas International Organ Competition, Diaz was also the brilliant soloist for Stephen Paulus’s Grand Concerto (Number 3), a Dallas Symphony commission first heard in 2004 (with the most recent Dallas Competition winner, Bradley Hunter Welch, as soloist).
Paulus is a composer who not only knows his craft, but one who has something to say with that facility. This major work has many impressive moments from its beginning with the organ and lower strings, through a second movement featuring the organ’s Harmonic Flute, then orchestral flute and strings, and finally the organ’s strings—a lovely blend of timbres. Building to a climax, the movement ends with a reference to the hymn Come, Come Ye Saints (a favorite of the composer’s father) and pizzicato lower strings. In the final movement (marked Jubilant) there is joy in virtuosity, especially in the rapid jumping between manuals, a lovely bit of lyricism when the high strings introduce the folk melody O Waly, Waly, and a knock-your-socks-off pedal cadenza. The audience loved this piece, the only one requiring a complete symphonic complement of instruments. Woodwinds and brass having joined the strings, the orchestra made its best showing of the day in this culminating performance. Cheering and ovations were deserved.
The other two concertos were in the capable hands of Stephen Cleobury, who had a rather thankless assignment in Calvin Hampton’s Concerto for Organ and Strings. Understandably, the program committee chose this work commissioned for the previous Twin Cities national meeting in 1980. Preparing at that time for my own concerto program in Orchestra Hall, I did not hear this work by a dear friend from undergraduate days at Oberlin, although subsequently I learned that Calvin himself did not regard the piece highly. Hearing it now I did not find the string writing particularly apt, and I am sad that this was the only piece to represent such a gifted American composer during this 2008 convention. The ending, at least, is memorable, with organ arpeggios providing a bit of filigree above orchestra strings, which were, unfortunately, not well tuned.
Cleobury’s second stint on the organ bench was as soloist in Judith Bingham’s convention commission, Jacob’s Ladder—Concerto for Organ and Strings. (In her notes for the program book, she wrote that her inspiration was derived from the first view of a photograph showing the laddered effect of the attractive organ façade.) Four brief movements bearing programmatic titles showed a fine correlation of component parts to produce an appealing ensemble work. Once again the upper strings were quite messy.
Hindsight is, of course, always more successful than foresight, but it did seem as if three ensemble works rather than four could have allowed more rehearsal time for each, and in a day jam-packed with musical events, would have been quite enough for the audiences as well.
Pipedreams Live (and program long)
We all owe much to Michael Barone for his continuing contributions to the public awareness of the pipe organ, its wide range of literature, and many diverse styles of instruments, as heard weekly in the successful Minnesota Public Radio series. The service he renders to the profession is unparalleled in today’s media. That said, it was fortunate that this Wednesday evening audience in Wooddale Church consisted almost exclusively of the already convinced. Anticipatory at the beginning, fatigued or comatose after a two-hour and fifteen minute program without intermission, many of us would have appreciated an earlier employment of the organ’s cancel button.
As for repertory, it was a program in which the oldest piece heard was Joseph Jongen’s 1935 Toccata, opus 104, the program opener, given a brilliant rendition by this year’s NYACOP winner Michael Unger. Then followed a steady stream of new and unfamiliar pieces played by first-rate players who slid on and off the bench either of the movable console or of the attached mechanical-action one of the large Visser-Rowland organ: Herndon Spillman, Calvin Taylor, Barone himself, splendid jazz player Barbara Dennerlein, Ken Cowan, Aaron David Miller, and Douglas Reed (who brought the marathon to an end with William Albright’s Tango Fantastico and Alla Marcia, aka The AGO Fight Song!).
Along the way, Jason Roberts, winner of the National Competition in Organ Improvisation, perhaps sensing the encroaching weariness, gave a brief example of his art in a French Classic idiom; well-loved Lutheran church musician Paul Manz was warmly applauded after the playing of his chorale-improvisation Now Thank We All Our God by Scott Montgomery; and Isabelle Demers, in the penultimate program slot, played with consummate musicianship a gentle and moving Prelude in E Minor by Gerald Bales and Paulus’s As if the whole creation cried.

AGO business/The business of music
The business meetings of the Guild during national conventions have been fun and musically rewarding during the six years of outgoing president Fred Swann’s administration. This time the afternoon event was held at Central Lutheran Church, where Marilyn Keiser gave first performances of a prize-winning work and a commissioned movement to be featured at the Organ Spectacular (officially scheduled for 19 October 2008) during this International Year of the Organ: Bernard Wayne Sanders’ Ornament of Grace for organ and solo melody instrument (published by Concordia Publishing House) and Stephen Paulus’s Blithely Breezing Along, a seven-minute solo organ piece (available from Paulus Publications).
An impressive number of exhibitors (102) displayed their wares in the exhibition spaces of the Minneapolis Hilton Hotel. From Nada-Chair back slings (for organists with “Bach Pain”) one could wander to composer Stephen Paulus’s booth, often manned by father and son Andrew; or stop by the AGO national headquarters table, where a newly released compact disc of Conversations and Lessons with David Craighead preserves some taped lessons with Judith Hancock as well as more recent responses to queries about various pedagogical topics as posed by an unidentified interviewer. (Buzz has it that the interlocutor is Richard Troeger.) The purchase of this disc also triggered the bonus gift of “A Grand Occasion,” an AGO cookbook from the past. This brought on extreme nostalgia for several familiar figures who contributed some favorite recipes: Robert Anderson [caramelized carrots], Howard (Buddy) Ross [Shrimp Howard], and L. Cameron Johnson [Philly-Miracle Whip Dip]!
Some random items of interest found in various publishers’ displays: the recently republished Distler organ works in an “Urtext” edition at Bärenreiter; a reminder via a special brochure from Breitkopf that 2009 will mark the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth; Calvert Johnson’s valuable new edition of Frescobaldi’s Fiori musicali (with variant chromatic alterations from the Torino Manuscript) at Wayne Leupold; from ECS Publishing, free copies of their prize-winning anthem heard at the opening celebratory service, Stephen R. Fraser’s Rejoice, the Lord is King (SATB and organ), with its especially haunting, chromatic shift from a melodic F-sharp to F-natural between the second and third measures of the idiomatic and very effective organ accompaniment; from Oxford University Press, a special brochure on the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, in commemoration of this year’s 50th anniversary of his death.
A pre-convention mailing had brought advance word of a special recording titled Real French Sounds to be had at the convention, the promotional gift from the Association of French Organ Builders. This two-compact disc set comprises an elegant set of performances by various French organists, including such well-known players as Olivier Latry, Daniel Roth, Thierry Escaich, and Pierre Pincemaille, playing fifteen historic instruments (restored by the firms Atelier Bertrand Cattiaux, Jean-Baptiste Gaupillat, Michel Jurine, Patrick Armand, Giroud Successeurs, Nicolas Toussaint, and Jean-Pascal Villard). It is, overall, a useful demonstration of some lovely organs.
American pipe organ builders were well represented here, as were makers of digital instruments. The Twin Cities provided good examples of outstanding organs from many of the exhibitors, as identified throughout this report. Happily, I acquired only one new trinket, a black stop knob key chain from the Wicks Organ Company. It joins useful previous white ones, giving my collection some needed diversity. A year’s worth of compact discs and DVDs were available for purchase, and all this commerce, especially that transacted during late night hours, was made more pleasant by an accessible cash bar.

Summary thoughts
I heard it expressed several times that “this was Philip Brunelle’s program.” The wide-ranging, often challenging exploration of new music (seventeen commissions and competition prize-winning works were listed on the Convention Evaluation Form), plus the programming of other recent works surely new to a majority of the convention goers, reflected both appetite and taste of the prodigious program chair, this year celebrating his 40th anniversary as organist-choirmaster of Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis. Brunelle certainly generated a great deal of musical excitement, not only as planner, but also as conductor for the two major orchestral and choral/orchestral programs.
That the music of Stephen Paulus held such a prominent place at this convention was particularly gratifying. Currently AGO’s composer of the year, the Minnesotan is one of America’s finest, an artist who consistently produces challenging music for organ and for choral forces as part of his ongoing artistic efforts. He is also a genuinely kind person whose many interactions with convention-goers was much appreciated.
A personal regret was that there was not at least a tad more celebration of Hugo Distler’s centenary, which actually occurred on Tuesday, June 24, right in the midst of this gathering. One workshop, one choral composition (the motet Singet dem Herrn, heard on two days at one of four concurrent worship services presented on Monday and Thursday), and that was all. In Lutheran territory? (At least St. Paul’s Luther Seminary had presented a March symposium on the composer’s life and works!)
Appreciated amenities: possibly the easiest to see, least self-destructing name tags of any convention in my experience, and a many-pocketed, multi-zippered convention tote bag with an external water bottle holder, the whole a classy production that also ranks with the best ever: no expense spared here, and usable at home, too.
And, certainly not least, a smoothly functioning hospitality/information center at the hotel, staffed by Twin Cities AGO chapter volunteers. There one could find nibbles, coffee and water, transportation schedules, gay pride guides, and the occasional leftover workshop handouts, among which two of the more interesting were on Latin American Organ Literature from Cristina Garcia Banegas and Organ Music from Czech Composers from Anita Smisek.

And finally . . .
A tally of convention events from Saturday afternoon through Thursday evening gave these numbers: three open performance and improvisation competition rounds; four evening concerts plus two performances of the daytime concerto program; fifteen organ recitals, each performed twice, plus two carillon concerts and nine Rising Stars organ programs; sixty-six workshops including choral reading sessions; an opening evening church service, four individual daytime worship opportunities, each given twice, plus Evensong and Matins services. [For complete details, refer to the convention website <www.ago2008.org&gt;.]
My apologies to artists whose programs I was not able to attend. Many are friends, or friends of friends, or students of friends. It must be obvious that no one person, not even the proverbial little old one in tennis shoes, could cover as large and event-filled a gathering as this national convention. The time in the Twin Cities remained enjoyable primarily because I did not attempt to do everything.
Throughout the week there were many cherished meetings with people not encountered often enough, individuals who trigger memories of shared experiences, ones who make such professional gatherings personal. To mention a very few of them: Marjorie Jackson Rasche, FAGO, now of Galveston, TX, whom I met at my very first AGO regional convention 52 years ago when both of us were young Ohioans; Carl and Kathy Crozier, of happy Honolulu memories; professional colleagues Jim Christie, Susan Marchant, and Cal Johnson; and new acquaintance, Alexander Schreiner’s son John.
Of memorable chats while traveling on the buses two stood out in particular: one with West Point organist Craig Williams; and another with Patricia Scace from Maryland, who told of acquiring a John Challis instrument that turned out to be the first harpsichord I ever played.
And finally, the realization that as the Twin Cities 2008 national convention became part of AGO history on Friday June 28, there remained only 735 days until the July 4 opening of the 2010 meeting in our nation’s capital city. Start saving up for it now!

A Beginning Keyboard and Pedal Method for the Organ

Wayne Leupold is president of Wayne Leupold Editions, Inc., in Colfax (Greensboro), North Carolina.

The Discover the Organ® beginning keyboard and pedal method for the organ, published by Wayne Leupold Editions, Inc., now provides an opportunity for upper-elementary and middle-school students to study the organ at much earlier ages than in the past. This method has been in development for ten years and is the result of contributions by six editors, over 100 composers, a graphic artist, and over 50 test teachers.

Since there were no similar classically oriented, elementary keyboard methods published for the organ as models, a test-teacher program was instituted to evaluate the materials before they would be published. The feedback from these test teachers has been invaluable in developing materials that appeal to young students and develop sensitive musicianship and solid technical facility.

The Discover the Organ® beginning keyboard and pedal method for the organ is now available in four different levels: the beginning series (Discover the Basics®: A Beginning Series for Any Keyboard Instrument) and levels one, two and three in five different series (Basic Organ Repertoire, Modern Keyboard Technique, Christmas Season at the Organ, Easter and Pentecost Seasons at the Organ, and Organ and One Instrument). Volumes in levels four and five are in preparation.

The beginning series, Discover the Basics®: A Beginning Series for Any Keyboard Instrument, co-edited by Wayne Leupold and Lucy G. Ingram, utilizes an intervallic approach to reading music and consists of four successive books (A, B, C, and D). Each book is complete in itself, in that it contains lessons, theory, repertoire, and technique materials, therefore eliminating the need to buy multiple books for each level. Book A introduces intervals up to and including fifths. Book B reinforces these intervals within the context of the grand staff. Book C presents eighth notes and beginning two-part playing. Book D introduces the intervals of sixths, sevenths, and octaves, more expanded two-part playing, and the beginning playing of three very easy simultaneous parts, and emphasizes note spelling. Many pieces have optional pedal points and approximately 70 percent of the compositions in all four books have a duet part for the teacher to play. Folk songs and spirituals from many different countries and cultures are used extensively. The four families of organ tone are gradually presented (illustration 1) and practice suggestions (illustration 2) throughout the four books assist the student in developing good practice habits. Several distinctive features with many illustrations broaden the student's general musical knowledge: (1) a brief history of the organ at the beginning of Book C (illustration 3); (2) a brief history of stringed keyboard instruments (clavichord, harpsichord, and piano) at the beginning of Book D  (illustration 4); and (3) brief biographical sketches of composers, throughout books B, C, and D, who significantly contributed to the organ, piano, and harpsichord literature (illustrations 5 and 6).

Book A may be begun with students as early as the third grade. Older children and adult beginners may begin with Book B. Book B also may be used for adult beginning class keyboard instruction. In our test-teacher program the B, C, and D books have been used successfully in colleges and universities as the texts for their beginning class keyboard courses. A supplemental beginning book of hymns and carols also is available: Christmas Season at the Organ (beginning level).

While studying in the beginning series, a student may use any keyboard instrument for daily practice, i.e., a piano, electronic keyboard, or an organ. When the student has progressed to the level one materials (see below), it is recommended that he or she have at least one practice session a week at an organ to become comfortable with the optional simple one- or two-note pedal parts.

Discover the Basics®: A Beginning Series for Any Keyboard Instrument may be used in a variety of different ways: (1) it can be the beginning method for a student beginning keyboard study exclusively on the organ; (2) it can be the beginning method for a student beginning keyboard study exclusively on the piano, with no interest in ever playing the organ (in such a situation, the explanations about the organ sounds, the registration suggestions, and the suggestions for optional pedal points can be ignored); and (3) this beginning series also can be used in an approach of blending the initial teaching of the keyboard between both the piano and the organ. In such a situation, the student can use a piano for daily practice and can take his/her weekly lesson on a piano. However, in addition, the teacher also may take the student to an organ during the weekly lesson, where he/she again may play some or all of the assigned pieces on the organ, utilizing the suggested registrations and pedal points for the feet. Because of the thoroughness of the Discover the Basics® beginning series, a separate piano primer series is not necessary. A student could continue this simultaneous study of both instruments indefinitely. When he/she has finished the Discover the Basics® series and has progressed to the level one books for continued organ study (see below), he/she also could progress into any standard classical piano literature series for continued piano study. This approach would give the student the exposure to and advantages of both keyboard instruments. The profound advantage of the first and third approaches, from the perspective of the organ, is that more students will be exposed to the organ much earlier in their educational experience than traditionally has been done in the past. Hopefully, in the long term, this approach will generate more interest in the organ among more young students who then will continue to study the organ and will eventually become active organists (amateurs and/or professionals) and church musicians.

Upon completion of Book D, the student progresses to Discover the Organ® in the various series of level one (Basic Organ Repertoire, Modern Keyboard Technique, Christmas Season at the Organ, Easter and Pentecost Seasons at the Organ, and Organ and One Instrument). The first two are considered basic series, while the remaining three are supplemental. The levels one through four of Discover the Organ® method roughly parallel the technical-difficulty levels of the Bastien Piano Literature Series, volumes 1-4.

The Basic Organ Repertoire series, levels 1, 2, and 3, co-edited by Wayne Leupold and Naomi Rowley, contains both free compositions and pieces based on well-known hymn tunes and spirituals. Many different cultures are represented including Early American, African American, Native American, Hispanic, Jewish, and Asian, as well as many European countries. Over one hundred composers are represented in this series. Among the living composers represented are Michael Burkhardt, David Cherwien, Emma Lou Diemer, Alfred V. Fedak, Wilbur Held, Dan Locklair, Austin Lovelace, Robert J. Powell, and Larry Visser. The compositions were particularly written to appeal to young students. Students who like to play loud pieces will be delighted with Janet Correll's Fanfare (illustration 7), Procession of Praise, and Triumphal March found in the level one volume. They also will be fascinated with the many echo pieces, which require manual changes, such as Janet Correll's Carol of the Birds, Alfred V. Fedak's Echo Dialogue and Antiphonal Hosanna, Larry Visser's Echo  (illustration 8), and Randolph Currie's "Little Jesus, Sweetly Sleep," all also found in the level one volume. Levels 2, 3A, and 3B also contain similar types of compositions. Children who like to play fast with a loud registration will find many toccatas in this series beginning in level two, i.e., Toccatina by David Schack, level 2 (illustration 9); Toccata by Emma Lou Diemer, level 3A (illustration 10); and Toccatina on "Here, O Lord, Your Servants Gather" by Larry Visser, level 3B (illustration 11). A unique feature of this repertoire series is the appearance in each level of an original sonatina for organ by Larry Visser (level 1 - Sonatina on Spiritual Themes: I "Somebody's Knocking at Your Door," II "Steal Away to Jesus," III "Standing in the Need of Prayer"; level 2 - Sonatina on Themes of Creation: I "This Is My Father's World," II "Morning Has Broken," III "All Things Bright and Beautiful"; level 3B - A Sonatina for Holy Week: I "He Is King of Kings: He Is Lord of Lords," II "Were You There?," III "He Arose"). These compositions give the organ student exposure to many of the classical forms traditionally associated with the sonatina and sonata, i.e., sonata allegro form (illustration 12), ABA song form (illustration 13), rondo form (illustration 14), and ritornello form (illustration 15). Practice suggestions appear where needed throughout these volumes, with an introduction to the organ at the beginning and a glossary at the end of each volume. This series contains compositions in a variety of keys, textures, and styles, and is intended to expose the student to a very broad spectrum of music.

The Modern Keyboard Technique series, edited by Wayne Leupold, is intended to develop a solid keyboard technique on the organ. This series contains legato "organ" exercises, exercises by Hanon and Czerny, and scales and arpeggios. A unique feature of the legato exercises is the grouping of musical compositions after each exercise that emphasize within a musical context the specific technical feature presented in that exercise (illustration 16).

The Christmas Season at the Organ series, arranged by Alred V. Fedak, contains carols, hymn tunes, and other seasonal melodies associated with Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany (illustration 17). Each volume also includes a preface explaining these seasons.

The Easter and Pentecost Seasons at the Organ series, also arranged by Alfred V. Fedak, contains hymn tunes and other melodies associated with Lent, Palm Sunday, Holy Week, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, Reformation, All Saints, Thanksgiving, weddings, funerals, Communion, baptisms, and patriotic occasions (illustration 18). Each volume includes a preface explaining these seasons and occasions (illustration 19). Also included are easy arrangements and transcriptions of compositions all organists play, such as J. Clarke's The Prince of Denmark's March  (illustration 20) and H. Purcell's Trumpet Tune (illustration 21).

The Organ and One Instrument series, arranged by Allan Mahnke, provides an ensemble experience for the young organ student. Many of the compositions are based on well-known hymn tunes. The instrumental parts, in both the C and B-flat versions, are of a comparable or easier level for the instrumentalist (illustration 22).

All the compositions in the entire Discover the Organ® method are carefully edited and fingered. The inside back cover of each volume contains a registration information page that presents an explanation of the different pitches of organ pipes and lists of the names most commonly used for the four families of organ tone. Practice suggestions, in addition to appearing throughout the beginning series (Discover the Basics®) and the Basic Organ Repertoire® series, also are in all the other series. Although primarily included to help students develop effective learning habits, practice suggestions also have been provided to assist any teachers who have had little or no previous teaching experience.

While the Discover the Organ® method focuses primarily on developing manual skills, elementary pedal concepts are introduced. The Discover the Organ® method also may be used as an introductory organ method for students who have or are presently acquiring keyboard skills through piano study. A piano student may begin simultaneous study with this organ method at any time or switch over to this method from piano study at any level.

By the time the student is in the level three materials, his/her manual facility should be sufficiently developed so that simultaneous study in a traditional organ method, such as the First Organ Book, may begin. This assumes that by this time the student also has long enough legs to do traditional legato, toe-heel pedaling. For the continued development of manual technique, the student should continue in the various series through levels four and five of the Discover the Organ® keyboard method, particularly the Basic Organ Repertoire series and the Modern Keyboard Technique series. Such a constant and thorough approach will ensure the development of a solid keyboard technique at the organ.

Many young people find the organ fascinating with all its keyboards, pedals, buttons, stop knobs, and multiple sounds. Children can become interested in the organ through exposure in their church services, demonstrations by the church organist, and different types of events presented by AGO chapters or other groups of interested individuals. When such interest is awakened, there should be an immediate follow-up. Immediately get them on organ benches, studying and playing the organ at whatever keyboard level they are. If they have no keyboard experience, start them on the organ from the very beginning, for now there is a keyboard method available that can develop a child's keyboard ability on the organ from the very beginning of his/her study of music. (Other instruments also could be studied simultaneously, if desired.)

For the organ to remain the principal instrument in the church, we must train more organists. To accomplish this we must first expose the organ to more young people, and second, begin to teach the organ to children at much earlier ages than previously has been done. There is no reason why young children cannot begin both their musical education and the development of their keyboard stills at the organ. Let's have more children Discover the Organ®!

This is a revised and enlarged version of the article that first appeared in The American Organist (September 2000).