Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini dead at 87

Nunc Dimittis

Joseph Peter Fitzer, born February 6, 1939, in Chicago, Illinois, died July 21. In 1970, he received a doctorate degree from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, with concurrent study at the School of Music of De Paul University, also in Chicago. He authored two books on nineteenth-century Catholic thinkers, particularly Johann Adam Moehler, as well as numerous articles for The Diapason and The American Organist magazines. He served on the faculty of St. John’s University, New York, from 1970 until 1988, teaching philosophy of religion and modern church history, and also as organist and choirmaster of churches in New York, North Amherst, Massachusetts, and Chicago. Fitzer was married to Susan Pollack Fitzer (died 2012), to Mary Molina Fitzer (died 2005), and to Mary Gifford. Joseph Fitzer is survived by his wife, Mary Gifford, his son, Paul Fitzer, and two granddaughters, Katherine and Elizabeth Fitzer.

Michael D. Friesen, 63, died June 19 in Denver, Colorado. He was born August 12, 1953, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he attended local schools. He attended Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana, graduating in 1975 with a Bachelor of Business Administration in marketing degree. In 1977, he earned the master’s degree in international business from the University of South Carolina. As part of his degree work, he interned with Air France in Paris, using his weekends to visit the great organs of Europe by train. He later attended Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois, where he earned a master’s degree in public administration around 1991. In 2001, he completed a master’s degree in American history at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb.

After working in international marketing with the Addressograph Multigraph Corporation, Friesen began a career as a civic administrator. After developing an award-winning recycling program for the Village of Hoffman Estates, Illinois, he served as assistant village manager for Algonquin, Illinois, and village manager for Lakewood, Illinois, and later, Meade, Colorado. 

Michael Friesen was married to Susan Werner Friesen from 1978 until 2001. They have one daughter, Elizabeth Ann.

Friesen had a life-long love of the pipe organ, beginning with organ lessons from his mother, Evelyn Friesen. He continued his organ studies while at Valparaiso University. He had developed his own master list of organbuilders by the late 1970s, compiled from The Diapason, The American Organist, and The Tracker, a list from which he planned to visit every builder’s shop. During their honeymoon, the Friesens visited three organbuilders’ shops, and each family vacation included a visit to at least one new builder.

Michael attended his first Organ Historical Society convention with Susan in 1980, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. They were charter members of the Chicago-Midwest Chapter of the OHS, establishing the chapter’s journal, The Stopt Diapason, for which they were the first editors and publishers. Friesen’s extensive research on the history of Chicago pipe organs in the 19th and 20th centuries was and remains highly respected; issues of The Stopt Diapason are archived at the chapter’s website and are still regularly used by researchers in their work today. When the OHS held its first convention in Chicago in 1984, most of the research for the convention handbook was carried out by Michael Friesen. He was a frequent contributor of articles to The Diapason, The American Organist, and The Tracker, as well as articles on pipe organ history for the journals of the Denver Historical Society and the Colorado Historical Society. He served as consultant for new mechanical-action organ projects, as well as relocation and restoration projects for historic pipe organs. He was active in projects commissioning new music compositions, especially “Introit Psalm and Alleluia Verse,” composed by Richard Wienhorst for the Friesens’ wedding, published by Chantry Press. He was dean of the Denver Chapter of the American Guild of Organists from 2010 to 2011.

Michael Friesen is survived by his former wife, Susan Werner Friesen, his daughter, Elizabeth Ann Roscoe (Avery), three grandchildren (Matthew, Julia, and Benjamin), his mother, Evelyn Friesen, two sisters, Sandra Henson (David) and Janice Kuske (Kevin), one brother, Douglas Friesen (Anna-Marie), five nephews and three nieces, three great nieces and three great nephews. A memorial service was held June 24 at St. John in the Wilderness Episcopal Cathedral, Denver, Colorado.

Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini, an Italian organist, harpsichordist, musicologist, teacher, and composer, died July 11 in Bologna, Italy. He was born October 7, 1929, in Bologna. He studied, organ, piano, and composition at the conservatory in Bologna, and later studied organ with Marcel Dupré at the conservatory in Paris, France. He graduated from the university at Padua in 1951. He taught at universities and conservatories in Bologna, Bolzano, and Parma in Italy and Freiburg in Switzerland. He was a guest instructor at various universities in the United States, including Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. He regularly taught organ courses at Haarlem, the Netherlands, and at Pistoia, Italy. He served as organist of the Basilica of San Petronio, Bologna, sharing duties with Liuwe Tamminga. With Renato Lunelli, he founded the journal L’organo in 1960. An active performer, he presented recitals throughout Europe and the United States. Tagliavini was a recognized authority in historical performance practice for the Baroque organ and harpsichord, and was a strong supporter of the historic organ movement in Italy. He was a prolific recording artist, earning several awards for his LP and CD discs. He was awarded several honorary degrees, including a doctorate in music from the University of Edinburgh and a doctorate in sacred music from the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome. As a musicologist, he published numerous papers and edited critical editions of music.

A look at the life and contributions of Luigi Tagliavini is planned for a future issue of The Diapason. Also, see comments on Tagliavini’s work at Southern Methodist University in Larry Palmer’s “Harpsichord News” in this issue.

Introduction

Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini—organist, harpsichordist, musicologist, teacher, and composer—died July 11, 2017, in Bologna, Italy. Born October 7, 1929, in Bologna, he studied, organ, piano, and composition at the conservatory in Bologna, and later studied organ with Marcel Dupré at the conservatory in Paris, France. He graduated from the university at Padua in 1951, and then taught at universities and conservatories in Bologna, Bolzano, and Parma in Italy, and Fribourg in Switzerland. Tagliavini was a guest instructor at various universities and presented recitals and lectures for several chapters of the American Guild of Organists throughout the United States. He regularly taught organ courses at Haarlem, the Netherlands, and at Pistoia, Italy. He served as organist of the Basilica of San Petronio, Bologna, sharing duties with Liuwe Tamminga. With Renato Lunelli, he founded the journal L’organo in 1960. An active performer, he presented recitals throughout Europe and the United States. Tagliavini was a recognized authority in historical performance practice for the Baroque organ and harpsichord, and was a strong supporter of the historic organ movement in Italy. A prolific recording artist, earning several awards for his LP and CD discs, he was awarded several honorary degrees, including a doctorate in music from the University of Edinburgh and a doctorate in sacred music from the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome. As a musicologist, he published numerous papers and edited critical editions of music.

Editor’s note: the staff of The Diapason invited Susan Ferré to assemble some remembrances of Maestro Tagliavini. What follows are remembrances from Ferré, Marc Vanscheeuwijck, Bruce Dickey, Etienne Darbellay, and Margaret Irwin-Brandon.

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It was during a long bus trip to see organs with Maestro Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini that we became friends. He was not obliged to sit beside me. Making sure I boarded the bus first gave him the opportunity of sitting somewhere else. I had interviewed him on public radio, and he knew of my interest in early music and organ restoration. He had read my thesis on Respighi’s organ works and knew of articles I had written on links between Sweelinck and Frescobaldi, through such Neapolitan composers as Giovanni de Macque, Giovanni Maria Trabaci, and Ascanio Mayone, their connections to Antonio de Cabezón, who had traveled to the Netherlands with Prince Phillip, and the numerous questions those links posed, especially concerning the 1635 Frescobaldi Preface.¹ We had a lot to discuss, and I was eager to hear his thoughts, which he shared enthusiastically, even with relish. He could have retreated to safety, but instead, engaged fully, listening as intently as he spoke.

During the years I lived off and on in the French Pyrenees (1969–1972), I enjoyed Italian neighbors and friends whose homes I later visited in the Italian mountains. During those visits and traveling to play concerts with Luis de Moura-Castro in Spain and Italy, Maestro Tagliavini took me to play historic organs not yet restored. It was then I met Susan Tattershall, who, with help from Martin Pasi, was busy restoring some of them, much to the delight of Tagliavini. Our paths crossed in Switzerland, in Haarlem, and in Dallas. His passing removed a most brilliant, most informed thinker, and most generous musician from my world. I didn’t know him well, but the loss of this unassuming, humble, gentle, yet wildly virtuosic musician touched me profoundly. It is with joy that I give voice to the following tributes from those who knew him best.

—Susan Ferré

Director, Music in the Great North Woods, www.musicgnw.org

Director, Texas Baroque Ensemble, 1980–2005

I first met Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini in November 1986 at an exhibition at San Giorgio in Poggiale, Bologna, where he was displaying his vast collection of harpsichords and organs for the first time. My next encounter with him was at San Petronio in Bologna, during concerts for the celebration of the church’s patron saint in 1990. Of course, I had also encountered his numerous publications on the history of Baroque music in Bologna while I was working on my dissertation at the University of Ghent and was deeply honored when he agreed to be the external expert reader for my dissertation and defense in 1995. In those years I had also discovered his importance as a scholar in Italian and European musicology, organology, and historical performance practice.

When I was a student in the 1980s, historical performance practice was not considered to be part of “serious” musicology (certainly not in Belgium), which could only be either historical or systematic. Performance questions belonged in the conservatories, not in the university. As a musicologist and Baroque cellist myself, I always needed to have both “sides” inform each other and the idea of being institutionally penalized by seeking a perfect collaboration between musicology and performance practice forced me to look for a job as far away from Europe as Oregon.

Tagliavini managed to be a leading authority as a musicologist and a professional keyboard player—specialized not only in performance practices on organ, harpsichord, spinet, clavichord, and fortepiano, but also in organology and in the preservation and restoration of historical instruments through his collection.

In that sense Tagliavini was probably the most influential figure in my entire career, and he has continued to be so. This influence continues through one of his most eminent and talented students, Liuwe Tamminga, who first became his colleague as an organist in San Petronio, and then the curator of Tagliavini’s collection of instruments when it became a public museum in the former convent of San Colombano in the center of Bologna. Thanks to this collection and my friendship with Liuwe and Ferdinando, I have been able to play such beautiful instruments (his collection is the only one in the world in which every single instrument has been restored in a historically relevant manner), and I have also been able to introduce many of my students from Oregon and from various European conservatories and universities to these sounds of the early modern period and, maybe even more importantly for me as a performing musicologist, to Tagliavini’s approach to musicology and historical performance practice as a scholarly discipline, which fortunately is becoming more mainstream even in European universities. His influence thus continues on both continents, and I am trying to make it happen as far as I can through my own teaching.

—Marc Vanscheeuwijck

Associate Professor of Musicology, Area Head, Musicology and Ethnomusicology

University of Oregon,

School of Music and Dance

I think I must have met Maestro Tagliavini about 40 years ago, soon after my arrival in Basel at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. I remember that he came to give a talk on tuning and temperament, and that I was astonished, not only by his knowledge of the topic, but also by his extraordinary ability to speak German and English, almost without a trace of an accent and always with eloquence and clarity. After I moved to Bologna in 1985 I came to know him much better and came, at his insistence, to call him Ferdinando, an honor I cherished. I have seldom if ever known anyone who carried his erudition (and in his case it was very substantial) with such lightness and modesty. 

I would like to relate two anecdotes that I think give an impression of his character and personality. Both of these stories relate to rehearsals with the wonderful organs of the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, whose renovation he was, of course, instrumental in securing. On one occasion many years ago, I was rehearsing with him for a concert with some pieces for cornetto and one organ. The morning rehearsal was dragging into the early afternoon, and I asked if we could do one more piece before breaking for lunch. He paused for a moment, then said, “Yes, of course, but I will have to call my mother to tell her to hold off tossing the pasta in the water!” I think he was into his 70s at this point.

The other occasion was some six months before he died. He had been very ill in the hospital and then made a sudden miraculous recovery. Enough of a recovery that he was able to participate in a concert at San Petronio with two organs and two cornetti, together with Liuwe Tamminga and Doron Sherwin. I was with the organ played by Tagliavini. Though he was able to play well enough, he did not have the strength to depress the stop levers without climbing down from the bench and putting all of his weight on the lever. That created some remarkably long pauses between sections of the canzona we were playing. Still, I was thrilled that he was able to play the organs he so loved one last time, and I felt enormously privileged to be a part of it.

—Bruce Dickey

Cornettist, Scholar, Professor of cornetto and 17th-century music, Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (1976—2016)

The following is a personal reflection delivered at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) on September 21, 2017, excerpted and translated by Susan Ferré:

Tuesday, July 11, 2017, “Ferdinando has disappeared!” That’s what was announced to me in a pithy email message from Liuwe Tamminga. It was like a return to the ice age. The image as dizzying as the sound of a scaffold falling: now a world without him, an impossible world that rocked silently in the real one. As this was surely the case for many of us, it took me time to understand. Decidedly, I hate the inexorable. Occasionally, time, a matter essential to the musician, an engine full of promise, now raw, delivers us dirty tricks, chilling, unacceptable, engaging mercilessly on a path without return. It was not only as announced by our friend Liuwe Tamminga the collapse of an entire library, but even more, it was the final disappearance of a point of fundamental support for the evolving science and art of music, an emulator without precedent, for all those who, like me, had the great good fortune to know him. There are circumstances in which we truly learn the opaque meaning of the word “vacuum.”

More than a teacher who would become a master and a friend, Ferdinando was for me a true spiritual father, a support, a reference of wisdom, insight, and intelligence coupled with rare kindness. Always ready to enter into any serious area of knowledge, whether a random encounter or to solve a particular problem, he was at the same time ready to come out with a joke that demonstrated his unfailing sense of humor, which from a natural distance also afforded him his magical freedom in interpretation, both musical and scientific, open to suggestion and to listening.

His tutelage and his inspiring presence accompanied me in all circumstances of my life in the days when, blessed as a young student and apprentice musician, I met him at the University of Fribourg. His influence had convinced me to sign on to the track of musicology rather than physics, with which I was still hesitant. I have never regretted this choice, and this, was because of his presence in the early days, which never wavered in the following ones.

It was here, 50 years ago, seen at the top of the stairs, with a firm footing, he would head toward a large table on which he posed some music or a book. He would concentrate for a few moments, then, without emphasis or oratorical effect, he would begin to speak on the topic of the day, sometimes with a slight smile and an enigmatic look without a target, which gave us the impression that he was reading in his head. He never stumbled or searched for his words, and in all these various data he was consistently accurate. Throughout his life, he possessed a phenomenal and infallible memory, regardless of the field. What struck me most as a student was his mastery, almost discouraging to his colleagues and students, in all areas of music history and in all languages, including Latin. He would jump without difficulty from the exegesis of a grimoire of the eleventh century to the explanation of a technique of composition in “our” century (the twentieth), or the rapport between the voice of the piano in a song of Schumann opposed to Schubert. Nothing would escape his expertise or encyclopedic knowledge. Recently, I actually saw him in Bologna where, as usual, I went to consult with him about a few issues related to the completion of the edition of the Frescobaldi manuscripts.

Often he demonstrated at the blackboard, very precisely, an idea or a particular mechanism, whether a problem of solemnization or even a calculation of temperament. This last area in which he was incredibly competent (in the image of his friend Patrizio Barbieri) was one of his favorite areas of exploration: at the end of the explanation, the board was covered with numbers, fractions, with values of four or five numbers, which he knew by heart, and which he could infallibly recognize by ear! Often he created a demonstration on a small harpsichord that he himself had brought before class for the occasion, or he would gather us, clustered around the instrument, opening our confused ears.

Noting our notorious incompetence in counterpoint, knowledge of which was indispensable in order to follow his course on any particular writing technique of the Renaissance, he set up a kind of accelerated pro-seminar where he taught us with his usual virtuosity the basics and essential tips, the best courses of “music theory” I have ever had!

The biggest revelation of all—when we were touched by his teaching—was without a doubt, those blessed moments when he rose from his small chair to go to the keyboard—normally one of the big beautiful old Steinways, brown from use. Everything became pure magic. Whether sight reading from any large keyboard or full score (for example a Mahler symphony), he gave us a living example of how to prepare a concert following the rules. His virtuosity, his ease, and his proverbial musical insight were marvels. For example, during a course on Frescobaldi, I discovered this fascinating music­—totally unknown to me­, and with which I became a prisoner—a music that served as a passage between us, a ford over the river of life that separated us until the last months before his death. Having become my preferred subject of study and subsequently an area of specialization, it was this bridge that brought me back constantly to him, after my degree and my PhD, as part of the complete critical edition by the Italian Society of Musicology, an edition for which he was the initiator and, always, the ultimate validating reference. I owe so much to Frescobaldi: it is thanks to Frescobaldi that I stayed in almost permanent contact with Ferdinando, Frescobaldi’s first and most important prophet, both as a performer as well as a musicologist.

He loved teaching, and he loved his students. He spent as much time as he could with them. When he conducted a thesis, I think that none of those who have lived the experience would contradict me in saying that he followed it relentlessly, helping the student in the face of difficulties while reading the work with unfailing attention. For me, it was not only a help, but a pleasure, and major assurance as I walked with my clumsy feet in his most personal garden. I cannot forget to mention that his sympathy for his students almost always brought him to share with them his fondness for fondue. How many times did the fondue at the Café du Midi in the street of Romont (Fribourg) serve as an extremely joyful and festive climax to a semester or a business meeting? Besides, the tradition continued in Geneva, where Ferdinando agreed repeatedly to the thankless task of thesis jury, accepting this burden for many of my students who, even today, are grateful. But the fondue there was not as good . . . .

One of the aspects that characterized Ferdinando the best throughout his life was his taste in riddles—perhaps a form of self-satisfaction in view of his incredible ability to solve them. His students of the 1970s and ’80s remember: be it the Album of the Countess (a nineteenth-century manuscript that he had found, containing if I remember correctly a piece by Liszt and which offered several weeks of hilarious and passionate discussions), or a mysterious inscription between two planks of a newly found old instrument that he had discovered in Italy or elsewhere. Each week he reserved for us the surprises of these little mysteries that he presented with his characteristic smile of satisfaction, that he could still be the one to rule over his new find. With his proverbial passion for antique musical instruments, the organ at the top of the list, these are clearly the different traits of passionate curiosity that led him to establish, almost despite himself, the most important collection in the world of instruments of this type, which he gave to the Foundation Carisbo de Bologna, in order to institute at San Colombano a museum of “living sonic monuments.”  

His immeasurable respect for history and masterpieces of the past rendered him uncompromising in the face of inaccuracies in modern editions of early music. When he was confronted in a modern edition with an inaccuracy due to a colleague, he gave us an informative example without blaming or judging, sometimes even excusing it as a teaching example. His tolerance and kindness were also as proverbial as his mastery without compromise.

In the field of organology, it was the same for thoughtless and reckless restorations of organs or harpsichords. One of his recent battle cries was the problem of successive restorations with the set of choices to which they led. It is the same problem as in the restoration of art: does one scrape the Van Gogh in order to find the Courbet, and then the Courbet to find the Cantarini? The evolution of taste is part of the story: the traces that it leaves on the witnesses, too, are newsworthy, which must be documented. In fact, the ideal situation is the reversibility of any intervention. Ferdinando taught us the vital importance of respect for all who, in history, made history.

Ferdinando was world renowned as an interpreter, even if his audience was unaware of his other talents, which, in the first place, was musicology. We have witnessed many times the enthusiastic way in which young people followed him with lots of gear to record and preserve some exceptional moments, like the amazing concert in Bösingen to inaugurate a restoration of the organ. The exceptional quality of his playing, both in vivacious music and in its technical perfection, always had the same impression on his audience which was to experience one of those exceptional moments of existence that one remembered always, between ecstasy and levitation, of “musical Tiepolo.”

I still think back more than 30 years ago of a concert at San Petronio (Bologna) on two organs, with Tamminga: dazzling, aerial virtuosity played with acrobatic garlands of sixteenth-century Venetian ornamentation, the rhythmic vivacity of which has had no parallel. Not so long ago, he told me the amazing story that just happened to him in Messina where he had inaugurated the restoration of a famous organ. Approaching in a car with a friend, he found himself stuck in the city because of incredible traffic. He then said to his friend in the form of joke. “It is because of my concert!” And the last straw was that it was true! It almost didn’t happen, as they had to clear a passage for him in a crowd estimated by newspapers the next day to be about 5,000 people. As the maximum that the church could hold was about 400–500 people, he had to give the concert two more times in the following days to satisfy the frustrated audience.

Thanks to him, therefore, I discovered the organ, its stylistic peculiarities so differentiated in its creation according to Italian or Nordic styles. This is true for the harpsichord in its extreme refinements. Ferdinando also gave us several organology classes dedicated to his chosen instruments, their construction, their sound principles, and their history.

With his disappearance, it is really the first time he leaves us. I have the impression of floating in a world without anchor, disoriented, whose entire grounding has disappeared. This weightlessness confuses me, and the void it digs is called loneliness, a kind of erasure of all landmarks, a general loss of meaning. As with all of those who have had the chance to appreciate him, I will need much courage to continue without him who will remain in our memories and our hearts until we face our own deaths.

­—Etienne Darbellay

Honorary Professor

University of Geneva,

Musicologist

It was 1962 when I first heard the name “Tagliavini”—a name associated with Italian organs and “early” Italian music. He was, I believe, on his first visit to the United States to give a course on playing the music of Frescobaldi. A young woman in our church choir had attended this course and, knowing I was an organist, would speak of nothing else. Six years later I began to understand why, when I attended the Haarlem (Netherlands) Academy for Organists and took the Maestro’s course. This mind- and life-altering experience, three weeks of daily classes, excursions, concerts, and earnest discussions led me to further investigations of the Italian organ landscape—first through participation in a traveling conference of the Gemeindshaft der Deutsche Orgelfreunde, under the guidance of Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini, during which we visited mostly antique organs, many of which were still playable but in need of restoration—and finally concluding at the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, where the two now-famous organs (da Prato and Malarmini) face each other across the choir, both restored under his watchful eye.

There has never been a greater evangelist for the Italian organ and its music than Tagliavini. Through his herculean efforts, and in support of the efforts of others, scores of organs now shine as they once did in centuries past. The treasures of musical composition are opened to new eyes, hearts, and minds. But perhaps the most tangible evidence of his passion is to be found in the Museo San Colombano, Tagliavini Collezione, where upwards of 80 keyboard instruments (and a couple dozen various others) are now on display, in playing condition, and open to the public without charge. In October 2017, a convocation dedicated to Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini, “Il cembalo a martelli: da Bartolomeo Cristofori a Giovanni Ferrini” (the harpsichord with hammers: from B. Cristofori to G. Ferrini), was held at San Colombano, with concerts in the museum and in the Basilica of San Petronio, and papers by scholars in the field. It was my honor to be included as a harpsichordist in one of these memorial concerts, one particularly unusual, in that it included ten of his former students and colleagues, in a program that moved chronologically from Frescobaldi, 1615, to Johannes Brahms, op. 118. This breadth of musical composition in no way traced the boundaries of Tagliavini’s interests, but was clear in its meaning. Music. Music, at the center of his life.

Attending the events of this colloquium the maestro’s two brothers, extended family and friends, shared in the legacy that I believe will accompany his memory in years to come—his keen scholarship, illuminating performance, insightful and inspirational teaching, love of life, jokes, puns, frivolity—all evident in his brilliant fulfillment in a life of music.

—Margaret Irwin-Brandon

Founder/Director, Desert Baroque, Southern California; Director Emerita, Arcadia Players Baroque Orchestra, Western Massachusetts;

Originator, Organs of Italy Tours.

Notes

1. Preface to Fiori Musicali (1635) and its relation to Il secondo libro di toccate (1627).

Organist and musicologist Walker Evans Cunningham died unexpectedly at his home in San Francisco on May 14. He was 65. Cunningham grew up in Blackstone, Virginia, where his mother encouraged him to pursue his love of music. He won a scholarship to Oberlin, where in 1970 he earned a Bachelor of Music degree in organ performance from the Conservatory and a Bachelor of Arts degree in music and German from the College. 

Cunningham then taught at Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, where he was awarded an Andrew Mellon Foundation faculty grant to study with Marie-Claire Alain at the Haarlem Summer Organ Academy, and to do research in France. He spent 1973–74 as a research and performance fellow at the Institut de Musicologie, University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where he studied organ with Luigi Tagliavini. He earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was awarded multiple fellowships. 

Walker Cunningham performed many organ concerts in the United States, including a keynote concert for the Columbia Bach Symposium in New York City, and in Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and Austria. He took second prize at the Hofhaimer Competition in Innsbruck, Austria. Also a harpsichordist, he was a continuo player and accompanist with chamber, choral, and symphonic organizations such as the Berkeley Pro Musica Chorus, California Bach Society, and San Francisco Symphony. He served as organist and music director for St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley, organist and choirmaster for St. John the Evangelist Episcopal in San Francisco, and at other churches in the U.S. and Europe. He authored The Keyboard Music of John Bull (UMI Research Press, 1984). In 1992, he co-edited with Charles McDermott Canzoni d’intavolatura d’organo, a collection of Claudio Merulo organ intabulations. He recorded and produced the CD The Historic San Francisco Organ of the Church of St. John the Evangelist (Arkay Records, 1993), and was a reviewer for The Diapason.

Thanks to his own research and the help of his doctors, he survived two bouts with AIDS and 29 years of HIV. When AIDS brought an end to his performing career, Cunningham became a technical editor and writer at Cisco Systems, and later a consultant. Walker Evans Cunningham is survived by his sister Joy Cunningham of Austin, Texas.

Contributions in Walker Cunningham’s memory may be made to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music Scholarship Fund, either online at https://new.oberlin.edu/office/development/donate or by check to Oberlin College, Department of Development, Room 005, 50 West Lorain Street, Oberlin, OH 44074. 

Carol Newton Hawk died March 5 at age 64. Born into a family of teachers and musicians, she began piano study at age five, and organ study, with her older brother, the late Robert Newton, at age 12. She later studied with Roger Nyquist. After attending DeAnza College in Cupertino, California, she married John Hawk and they moved to the Sacramento area. She served as organist at Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church in Fair Oaks, California for 29 years, and as an accompanist for music programs of local elementary schools. Carol Hawk served the Sacramento AGO chapter in many capacities, including as dean for six years, and was a member of Mu Phi Epsilon International Music Fraternity and the Sacramento Choral Society. Carol Newton Hawk is survived by her husband, two daughters, four grandchildren, her mother, and a brother.

Douglas L. Rafter, Portland’s longest-lived municipal organist, died July 3 in Portland, Maine. He was 97. A native of Wilmington, Vermont, Rafter moved to Portland in 1971. A concert organist, he had a repertoire of about 275 pieces of organ music memorized. He also taught music at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, at the University of Southern Maine, and privately. Rafter served as organist and choir director at Immanuel Baptist Church for 13 years, and then worked at other Portland-area churches until his retirement in 2005.

Over the years, he gave 1,700 concerts throughout the United States, playing his first concert in Portland in 1936, right after earning his associate’s certification from the American Guild of Organists. In March 2010, he was honored by the AGO for 75 years of consecutive membership, all but the last five of which had been in uninterrupted service as a church organist and concert performer.

Douglas Rafter was Portland’s municipal organist from 1976 until 1981, playing both classical and popular works. He played summer series concerts for 68 years, and was also noted for  his Christmas preludes before the annual Magic of Christmas concert.

Musician and organbuilder John A. Schantz, 93 years old, passed away at his home in Orrville, Ohio, on July 4. Born on June 14, 1920, he was the youngest child of Victor and Bess Schantz. His studies in piano and organ at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music were interrupted by service in the U. S. Army during World War II. Upon completion of his undergraduate degree in 1947, he joined the staff of Schantz Organ Company. With his brother Bruce and cousin Paul, John Schantz was part of the third generation of the family business. During his tenure, the Schantz Organ Company rose in prominence from a regional concern to an organbuilding firm of national (and later international) standing. He served as tonal director of the firm for many years, and as corporate secretary/treasurer, and chairman of the board of directors. 

Beyond work with the organ company, he was a lifelong, active member of Christ United Church of Christ in Orrville, an officer with the Orrville Chamber of Commerce, Orrville United Way, and the Orrville Public Library Board. He was a long-time member and officer of the MacDowell Club of Wooster, Ohio. John A. Schantz is survived by his spouse of 60 years, Marilyn, a son Timothy, daughters Molly, Melanie, and Suzanne, and ten grandchildren.

Recital programming: Program notes

Seated one day at the harpsichord, I was weary and ill at ease because the mid-July deadline for this column was approaching too rapidly, and my mind, in its summer mode, seemed frail as a lily, too weak for a thought as I searched for a topic. And then, a miracle: the printed program from my harpsichord recital at the 2012 East Texas Pipe Organ Festival fell out of a score. Rereading it brought not only a wave of nostalgia, but also a sense of continued satisfaction at both the balance and variety of the chosen pieces, selected painstakingly to present contrasting musical styles as well as offering a bit of respite to the ears of the festival participants who heard a number of organ recitals each day.

Some vignettes about the unusual logistics required to present this program at Trinity Episcopal Church in Longview on my 74th birthday may be found in The Diapason’s Harpsichord News column published in February 2013 (page 20). If any readers are curious, I refer them to that issue, which also contains Neal Campbell’s thoughtful commentaries on the entire 2012 festival. What follows in this month’s column has not appeared previously in The Diapason. These are my “notes to the program.” I present them now as examples of brief word pictures intended to aid a listener’s understanding of music that, for many, was probably being heard for the first time. As for the selections, I specifically tried to choose at least some works by composers who might be familiar to organists, while offering a variety of musical styles, durations, and tonalities both major and minor. 

The program notes

Introduction to the Program: The Italian composer Giovanni Maria Trabaci wrote in the Preface to Book II of his Pieces ‘per ogni (all) strumenti, ma ispecialmente per i Cimbali e gli Organi’ [1615]: “the harpsichord is the lord of all instruments in the world and on it everything may be played with ease.” [“il Cimbalo è Signor di tutti l’istromenti del mondo, et in lui si possono sonare ogni  cosa con facilità.”]  

While I am not totally convinced of the ease of playing offered by some of these contrasting selections from the contemporary and Baroque repertoires, I do suggest that each one of them has musical interest. The pieces by John Challis and Duke Ellington are probably unique to my repertoire since they remain unpublished.

The program

A Triptych for Harpsichord (1982)—Gerald Near (b. 1942). In addition to writing a wonderful Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings for me to premiere at the American Guild of Organists national convention in the Twin Cities in 1980, Gerald responded to my request for a new work to play at a recital for the Dallas Museum of Art’s major El Greco exhibition in 1983. The three brief contrasting movements suggest bells (“Carillon”), an amorous dance (“Siciliano”), and a homage to the harpsichord works of Domenico Scarlatti and Manuel de Falla (“Final”). 

Sonate pour Claveçin (1958)—Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959). During the final year of his life, in response to a commission from the Swiss harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer, Martinů composed this compact, but major, Sonate. Essentially it is a piece in one movement with three sections: the first and last are kaleidoscopic, filled with brief colorful musical ideas; the second is gentle and nostalgic, as the homesick expatriate composer makes short allusions to two beloved iconic Czech works: the Wenceslaus Chorale and Dvorák’s Cello Concerto. While quite “pianistic” in its demands, the Sonate also allows brilliant use of the harpsichord’s two keyboards in realizing both Martinů’s magical sonorities and his occasional use of bitonality.

“Chaconne in D Minor” (Partita for Solo Violin, BWV 1004)—Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), arranged for harpsichord solo by John Challis (1907–1974). One of Bach’s most-often transcribed works, this particular setting for harpsichord by the pioneering American early instrument maker survives only in a manuscript submitted for copyright (on Bach’s birthday in 1944), now preserved in the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., Challis also was an early advocate of variable tempi in Baroque music, serving as a mentor in that respect to organist E. Power Biggs, who proudly owned one of the builder’s impressive large pedal instruments.¹

A Single Petal of a Rose (1965)—Duke Ellington (1899–1974), edited in 1985 by Igor Kipnis and Dave Brubeck, and by Larry Palmer in 2012. Edward Kennedy Ellington responded to Antoinette Vischer’s request for a piece by sending her a piano transcription of his A Single Petal of a Rose, a work already dedicated to the British monarch Queen Elizabeth II. When American harpsichordist Kipnis asked if I could point him to Ellington’s unique work for harpsichord, I referred him to the facsimile of Ellington’s manuscript published in Ule Troxler’s book Antoinette Vischer, which details the works to be found in the Vischer Collection at the Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. (See “The A-Team,” The Diapason, February 2017, pp. 12–13.) Years later, Kipnis sent me his one-page transcription for harpsichord, an arrangement made in collaboration with his friend, the jazz great Dave Brubeck. To fit my hands and harpsichord I have made some further adjustments to their arrangement of this lovely, gentle work.²

La D’Héricourt; La Lugeac—Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (1727–1799). These are two of the most idiomatic of French harpsichord works from the eighteenth century, and none is more so than the one honoring M. l’Abbé d’Héricourt, Conseiller de Grand’ Chambre. With the tempo marking “noblement,” this composition stays mostly in the middle range of the harpsichord, a particularly resonant glory of the eighteenth-century French instruments. In contrast, the boisterous, “music-hall” qualities of La Lugeac suggest that it may be named for Charles-Antoine de Guerin, a page to King Louis XV. Known subsequently as the Marquis de Lugeac, the former page became secretary and companion to the Marquis de Valery, the king’s representative to the court of Frederick the Great. The American harpsichordist and conductor Alan Curtis, who edited Balbastre’s keyboard works, noted that “few Italianate jigs—Scarlatti not even excepted—can match the outrageously bumptious and attractive La Lugeac.”

“Lambert’s Fireside,” “De la Mare’s Pavane,” and “Hughes’ Ballet” (from the collection Lambert’s Clavichord, 1926–1928)—Herbert Howells (1892–1983). The composer was the next to youngest person pictured in a 1923 book of Modern British Composers comprising 17 master portraits by the photographer and clavichord maker Herbert Lambert of Bath. As a tangible expression of gratitude for this honor, Howells requested 11 of his fellow sitters each to contribute a short characteristic piece to be presented to the photographer. All acquiesced, but one year later, only Howells had composed anything for the project, so he wrote the additional 11 pieces himself. Issued in 1928 by Oxford University Press, Lambert’s Clavichord was the first new music for clavichord to be published in the twentieth century. Several questions regarding names found in the titles as well as a few printed notes that were suspect led me to schedule a London interview with the composer during a 1974 trip to the UK, a meeting that led ultimately to my commissioning the Dallas Canticles, as well as a respectful, unforgettable friendship with the elderly master.³

Toccata in E Minor, BWV 914—J. S.
Bach. The shortest of the composer’s seven toccatas for harpsichord, the E Minor consists of an introduction (with an organ-pedal-like opening figure insistently repeated six times); a contrapuntal   “poco” Allegro; a dramatic recitative (Adagio); and a driving, perpetual motion three-voice fugue. Musicologist David Schulenberg (in The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach; Schirmer Books, New York, 1992) noted the close similarity of the fugue’s opening and some subsequent passages to an anonymous work from a Naples manuscript ascribed to Benedetto Marcello. While it was not unusual for Baroque composers to borrow from (and improve upon) existing works, the amount of pre-existing material utilized in this particular fugue is greater than normal; however, as Schulenberg concludes, “[Bach] nevertheless made characteristic alterations.” I would add that in no way do these borrowings detract from the visceral excitement of Bach’s propulsive and dramatic conclusion.

Heads up: Registration for the 2017 ETPOF

According to the East Texas Pipe Organ Festival website there is still an opportunity to register (at discounted prices) for the star-studded programs planned for this year’s festival. But do not delay: the opportunity for savings expires on September 15. Visit: http://easttexaspipeorganfestival.com.

Recent losses 

Elizabeth Chojnacka (born September 10, 1939, in Warsaw) died in Paris on May 28. Celebrated for her virtuosic keyboard technique, Chojnacka was known primarily as an avid and exciting performer of contemporary harpsichord music. Her renderings of all three of the solo harpsichord works by Ligeti are highly lauded, and the composer honored her by dedicating the third, Hungarian Rock, to her.

Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini (born October 7, 1929, in Bologna) died in that Italian city on July 11. Organist, harpsichordist, scholar, and instrument collector, Luigi was well known to us in Dallas, having been a guest at Southern Methodist University on several occasions. Most memorably, he was part of the so-designated “Haarlem Trio” organized by Robert Anderson as a week-long postscript to the 1972 American Guild of Organists convention in Dallas. The three major European visiting artists for that event—Marie-Claire Alain, Anton Heiller, and Tagliavini—each gave daily masterclasses for the large number of participants who remained in Dallas for a second week of study with these annual leaders of the Haarlem Summer Academies in the Netherlands, resulting in what may be the only time in Southern Methodist University history that the organ department achieved a financial surplus rather than a deficit!

Two vignettes from that stellar week have become an unforgettable part of   Dallas’s musical history: Luigi’s chosen workshop topic was the organ music of Girolamo Frescobaldi, and he had assigned to the prize-winning finalists from the AGO Young Organists’ Competition all of the pieces contained in that composer’s liturgical settings for organ, known as Fiori Musicali. One of the finalists who had not won an AGO prize left Dallas in high dudgeon. Unfortunately, this participant had been assigned the very first piece in this set of “Musical Flowers.” Professor Tagliavini began his afternoon class with a brief overview of the work’s history and importance, and then peered over his glasses as he announced, “And now we will hear the first piece, Frescobaldi’s ‘Toccata avanti della Messa’.”

The total lack of response became embarrassing; there was no respondent. So our guest teacher moved on to the next piece. And thus it was that each afternoon session began with the same question from Luigi: “And who will play the ‘Toccata avanti della Messa’?”—always followed by total silence. A stickler for completeness, on the fifth and final day of the course Luigi made his same query, again to no avail. So with his usual smile and slight lisp he intoned, “Then I shall play the ‘Toccata avanti della Messa’!” And so he did with total mastery and grace. And all was well within the Italian Baroque solar system,  for Frescobaldi’s magnum opus was, at last, complete in Dallas!

The second vignette, equally Luigi-esque, occurred when Dr. Anderson, always volatile and energetic, and I were awaiting Tagliavini’s arrival to play an evening organ recital for the workshop audience. It was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. and by five minutes before that hour Dr. Anderson was pacing the corridor near the door to the Caruth Auditorium stage. With less than two minutes to spare, Luigi ambled down the hallway. Bob called out, “Luigi, hurry!” To which the unflappable Italian stopped walking, carefully placed his leather briefcase on the floor, and, with his characteristically kindly smile, said, “Why, Bob? Has the recital already begun?” ν

Notes

1. For further information see my essay, “John Challis and Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor,” in Music and Its Questions: Essays in Honor of Peter Williams, edited by Thomas Donahue (Organ Historical Society Press, 2007); and my CD recording of the Bach transcription on Hommages for Harpsichord (SoundBoard 2008).

2. Concerning Lambert’s Clavichord, see my chapter on Herbert Howells in Twentieth Century Organ Music, edited by Christopher Anderson (Routledge, 2012).

The Haarlem International Organ Festival (July 12–26, 2014) celebrated a milestone with its 50th Improvisation Competition this summer. The festival runs concurrently with the Haarlem Summer Organ Academy, which celebrated its 46th anniversary. At the academy, fifteen teachers taught eleven subjects, and it was attended by 110 students from 30 countries. In addition to these classes there were around forty public events: recitals, lectures, masterclasses, and excursions to other cities. These could easily have accounted for every minute of every day, and it would have been a challenge to justify missing any of them. The centerpiece of the festival is the famed 1738 Müller organ at St. Bavo’s (restored by Marcussen, revoiced by Flentrop, and played by Mozart), but organs all around Haarlem are used for classes and concerts, including the Cavaillé-Coll at the Philharmonie and instruments at the Nieuwe Kerk, the Waalse Kerk, and the Doopsgesinde Kerk. 

To celebrate the event the organizers released The Haarlem Essays, a marvelous 480-page book (noted in the October 2014 issue of The Diapason and available through the Organ Historical Society). It contains essays and interviews directly related to the festival, to its instruments, and to its important figures over the years, and is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of this important festival. But it also includes essays on a variety of scholarly, historical, and aesthetic issues by noted scholars and performers, most of which are newly written, and which makes the volume of great interest beyond the subject of the festival itself. 

The Haarlem Essays comes with a compact disc of seven of the winning organ improvisations, dating back to Piet Kee’s in 1955, as well as all of the competition themes starting with the first one in 1951. The theme for the finals of this summer’s competition was by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. It appeared about an hour before the competition and thus was too late to be included. The two top prizewinners were Lukas Grimm, from Germany, who received the audience prize, and David Cassan, from France, who won first prize. They treated the theme so differently that it seemed to me to represent two entirely contrasting conceptions of improvisation: Grimm’s was dazzling in its variety of styles and techniques and built to a thrilling conclusion, while Cassan’s was more of an integrated whole in four large sections, with thematic recurrences as well as a polyphonic elaboration of the theme. Both were remarkable and hard to compare.

At the academy there were four Bach teachers: Ton Koopman, Masaaki Suzuki, Michael Radulescu, and Jon Laukvik, and there were classes by Olivier Latry on Messiaen, Lorenzo Ghielmi on Italian-influenced North German music, Jon Laukvik on Vierne, Louis Robilliard on Franck, Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini on Italian repertory, Bernhard Haas on contemporary repertory, Leo van Doeselaar on Mozart and Bach’s sons, Jürgen Essl and Peter Planyavsky on advanced improvisation, and Jos van der Kooy on improvisation for beginners. 

After a week of two-hour masterclasses it would be foolhardy to try to describe a teacher’s approach in a sentence, but I will try to anyway for the classes I took: Suzuki’s Bach was physical and extrovert in its emotion, and he was both practical and dramatic in his teaching. At one point he had a student playing pleno forearm clusters on the Müller to encourage her to be more physically engaged. I was scared to look over the balcony to see how the tourists were taking it. Radulescu brought great scholarship to his Bach class and showed how understanding rhetorical terms and an awareness of formal and historical issues can illuminate performance. Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini first taught at Haarlem in 1959 (where he was known as a member of the “holy trinity” along with Marie-Claire Alain and Anton Heiller). He returned this summer after a long absence, and it was a privilege to experience the elegance and generosity of his teaching and playing. His admission that he’s still uncertain about whether to normalize accidentals was liberating. Ghielmi’s class, which focused on Buxtehude and Bruhns, showed how drama and imagined operatic scenes can bring this repertory to life (a subject that Jean-Claude Zehnder also treats in his article in The Haarlem Essays), and also how a teacher with a sense of theater can entertain as well as instruct. And Haas’s inspiring class on contemporary repertory brought a level of belief and insight into the modernist repertory that I haven’t encountered in this country in a while, whether he was discussing Cage and the Buddhist conception of silence (not absence of emotion but its foundation), Schoenberg, or Messiaen.

There were excursions between the two weeks of classes, to Utrecht, Amsterdam, and Leiden. At the Nikolaikerk in Utrecht, where festival leader Stephen Taylor was the organist for many years, Christoph Wolff gave a fascinating presentation on the work of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, including the newly discovered document that shows that Bach studied with Georg Böhm when Bach was a student in Lüneberg and may very well have lived in his house. 

Many of the faculty gave forty-five-minute public lectures on a variety of topics. I’ll just mention two of them: Jon Laukvik’s lecture on tempo rubato focused on an aspect of early performance that we tend to ignore but which is well documented. He noted that historical performance practice uses “a small slice of the cake.” Christoph Wolff and Ton Koopman gave a joint talk on Bach in which Koopman reiterated his belief that Bach never used heels (well, with the exception of perhaps six places, according to Koopman). It would have been fun to have had the entire Haarlem faculty in on that topic, as none of them seem to agree with him. Forty-five minutes isn’t enough to deal with the questions that any of these lectures raised, let alone the topic of heels in Bach. But what a great way to both observe the masterclass teachers in a lecture setting and to raise the intellectual level of the conference by at least starting important discussions.

Stephen Taylor, chairman of the artistic council, is the guiding spirit of this most remarkable festival and is a most genial and ubiquitous presence. His introductions to all of the events were models of brevity and wit, but if you engaged him in conversation on any seemingly trivial topic you would discover that he’s something of a polymath, and subjects like neo-Gothic architecture or the history of the Dutch canals are likely to come up. That’s another recommended way to spend your time, if you have any energy left over from the festival.

All photos by Martin Goldray except as noted.