New book by Mark Abley

Christmas gifts:
a few suggestions

Writing this column in mid-October means that I have not given much thought to Christmas shopping. Instead I have spent most working hours planning programs (and then practicing) for the second in our annual schedule of three house concerts, enjoyed the opening nights of Dallas Opera’s fall season by attending Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and Bizet’s Carmen, and preparing for the first-ever wedding to take place in our spacious music room. (After all, with a pipe organ and seating for forty guests, why not?)

However, now as you read these December Harpsichord Notes, I hope they may contain some suggestions that could be of help for all who have yet to make gift selections. So, tally-ho and read on!

• Eagle-eyed subscribers to The Diapason will have seen the notice of J. William Greene’s new compact disc Christmas Ayres and Dances in the Here & There section (page 12) of our October magazine. The disc (Pro Organo CD 7281) comprises Greene’s performances of his genial compositions played on a Gerrit Klop continuo organ and a single-manual harpsichord by Peter Fisk. The clever Baroque-style arrangements of familiar carols and secular songs of the season are sure to delight the ears of music-loving friends. Among my personal favorites is Greene’s Bell Fugue (based on Jingle Bells), sure to be a hit. For colleagues who are fellow keyboardists, why not purchase not only the compact disc, but also the printed scores for these captivating arrangements? All three volumes are available from Concordia Publishing House. Bell Fugue is the final piece in Volume II.

• An earlier publication by Edwin McLean (born 1951) bears the title A Baroque Christmas—Carols and Counterpoint for Keyboard (New Interpretations of traditional seasonal pieces for piano, organ, or harpsichord), issued in 2003 by Frank J. Hackinson (FJH Publishing Company), Fort Lauderdale, Florida. With works somewhat easier than Greene’s compositions, McLean offers a single forty-page volume of charming and useful pieces equally suited for all the instruments mentioned in his introduction, including digital keyboards. Eleven tunes are set: Noël Nouvelet, God Rest You Merry, Greensleeves, Coventry Carol, Kings of Orient, Pat-A-Pan, In dulci jubilo, Veni Emmanuel, Tempus Adest Floridum, Stille Nacht, and Adeste Fideles. I have used most of these for church and concerts and continue to enjoy them very much.

• Now for something completely different: author Mark Schweizer has made a slight deviation from the fourteen murder mysteries that began with The Alto Wore Tweed and progressed through the various vocal ranges (The Tenor Wore Tapshoes, The Diva Wore Diamonds, The Organist Wore Pumps, etc.), a series of novels that has captivated so many of us.  A fifteenth story, also set in St. Germaine (Schweizer’s fictitious small town in North Carolina), is replete with the familiar cast of characters headed by Hayden Konig, police chief and organist/choirmaster extraordinaire of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. But in the shorter novella titled simply The Christmas Cantata the author deviates slightly from the others in his series. It is available in the original paperback format (95 pages) or as a more recent hardback edition, both of which present exactly the same text, but the second edition is in a slightly smaller book format that requires 128 pages—more elegant and better, perhaps, for stocking stuffing. ’Tis a gentle tale, still filled with hilarious episodes, musical references, and sly liturgical guffaws: available from St. James Music Press (SJMP Books). You may wish to include a special handkerchief in that stocking, for the denouement is beautifully touching and may bring tears to the eyes. Also, a warning: this author’s mysteries are habit forming; I sincerely doubt that anyone can read just one! In a surprise email, received as I write this essay, Schweizer announced the fifteenth, and final, St. Germaine mystery: The Choirmaster Wore Out. Definitely a brand-new entry for acquiring and giving away!

• Thanks to my mother I began listening to operas at a tender age. Each Saturday afternoon in fall and winter, beginning when I was nine years old, my ears would be focused on our radio speaker as Mom and I listened to the New York Metropolitan Opera broadcasts in our small town of Corsica, Pennsylvania. I am grateful for this background as well as for my grade- and high-school experiences as a wind player, especially the ones after I began to play oboe. That, plus the choral directing experiences that were part and parcel of my graduate work and early professional engagements taught me a great deal about phrasing and making the music “breathe” in natural ways. I firmly believe that every keyboardist needs this type of training to become a better musician. Later these experiences engendered many a humorous moment in organ or harpsichord lessons when I would stop a student to suggest some necessary phrasing here or there, and often end with the comment, “I still can’t believe that you pay all this tuition for me to remind you to breathe and count!”

As an aid to the development of vocally informed musicality I would suggest as a Christmas gift, both to “self” and “others”—and a most unusual one, at that: ARC, which is the title of the Decca Records debut CD performed by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. This artist (who has been selected as “Vocalist of the Year” by Musical America) has put together a program that demonstrates his self-admitted 50% love of Baroque music and 50% devotion to contemporary works. On this magnificent disc Costanzo performs works by Philip Glass and George Frideric Handel. This modern mastersinger of both styles convinced me of the beauty to be found in each, and I have listened repeatedly, enraptured by his musicality. Costanzo made his Dallas Opera debut on October 30, 2015, in the world premiere of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s opera Great Scott. Since that magical evening I have been following Costanzo’s brilliant career. His artistry, both as singer and actor, earns him my highest recommendation and admiration.

• Another Handelian who could bring tears to the eyes with her exquisite vocalism was the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who began a musical career as violist, but soon was discovered to have one of the great female voices of the twentieth century. Sample her exquisite singing on the Avie CD 30, released in 2002—only four years before her untimely death at age 52. Lieberson is ably abetted by the Baroque specialist, conductor, and harpsichordist Harry Bicket, playing an Italianate single-manual harpsichord by Douglas Maple (after Zenti). This recording is another musical experience that just might be life changing.

• August 16, 2019, will be the sixtieth anniversary of Wanda Landowska’s death. The “mother of us all,” this pioneering harpsichordist still resonates through her recordings and through the memoirs contributed by her devoted friends (and occasional detractors). I was incredibly fortunate to have known Mrs. Putnam Aldrich, known universally as “Momo,” Landowska’s first private secretary during the years they spent together at Wanda’s “Temple of Music” in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, France. I became acquainted with Momo through our mutual friend Richard Kurth, a fellow Ohioan who has spent most of his career teaching French and Spanish at the Kamehameha School in Honolulu. Richard, who drove Momo to the local Alliance Française meetings, actually accomplished our mutual introductions, and thus resulted my invitation for Momo to tell her account of those years for The Diapason. For many subsequent winters I spent my Christmas holidays visiting Richard and Momo in Hawaii (a tough choice, but someone needed to do it), interviewing Mrs. Aldrich year after year and taking notes that eventually found their way into Harpsichord in America: a Twentieth-Century Revival.

It was during one of these remarkable meetings that I, quite brazenly, asked Momo who might inherit a caricature of Wanda that was prominently displayed in each of Momo’s dwellings (she changed addresses several times during these years). That query remained unanswered until the last day of that year’s Honolulu sojourn when Momo handed me a wrapped package, approximately eight and a half inches by six and a half inches. I knew without looking what was enclosed in that brown paper, and I said, “You must keep this! I know what it means to you.” But Momo insisted, and, I confess, I did not argue with her for very long. The caricature, an unsigned watercolor, is widely considered to be the finest of all such drawings, especially in its perfect details.

When I arrived home in Dallas I immediately had some photographs made, and sent them to Momo so she would not be without that beautiful image. Eventually I loaned a professional high-decibel print of “my” Wanda portrait to Martin Elste for his 2009 Berlin Landowska Symposium and Exhibition, and it served as the signature work of that event. It also is published in Dr. Elste’s magnificent book Die Dame mit dem Cembalo [The Lady with the Harpsichord] (Schott Music, 2010, Order Number ED 20853; ISBN 978-3-7957-0710-1). The full-color print of the caricature may be found on page 98. The book’s text is entirely in German except for the four pages from the memoirs of American harpsichordist Irma Rogell: “Walks with Wanda,” on pages 146–150. Even if one is not fluent in German the comprehensive range of Elste’s illustrations (many of which are photographs that he travelled far and wide to make) places this deluxe 240-page volume at the top of the list as the most comprehensive pictorial history of our beloved “Mamusia.”

• I was tremendously moved by Martin Pearlman’s generosity with his Armand-Louis Couperin Edition, made available for all of us to download and print, free of any copyright restrictions. In a recent email Martin included a shorter URL for accessing his gift: http://tinyurl.com/ALCouperin. I pass it on to our readers as per Martin’s suggestion, and wish you, once again, a happy downloading experience.

It is with a small, Pearlman-inspired gesture that I offer my Christmas gift to our readers: free use of my Landowska caricature. Like Martin, I urge you to use it wherever and whenever you wish, copyright free. And, I would ask only that you use the credit “Larry Palmer collection, gift of Momo Aldrich.”

• As my final Christmas suggestion: if you have a friend or acquaintance who does not subscribe to The Diapason, why not present that lucky person with a year’s subscription to this journal? It would benefit your friends and help to ensure that the magazine continues in its beautiful, full-color format for many years to come. What could be nicer? And twelve times a year you make your friend(s) happy­—and perhaps more involved in your musical world.

Why art?

Raphael’s Sistine Madonna is a magnificent and monumental painting. Almost nine feet tall and more than six feet wide, it is a compelling work in which I see a shy and slightly frightened Mary holding a burly infant who sports a Gotti-esque pout. (Whadaya gonna doo?) Saint Sixtus, the patron saint of the church for whom the painting was commissioned, is shown in the thrall of the mother and child, and Saint Barbara, whose presence was also specified by the commission, looks down at two putti resting their chins, arms, and elbows on the bottom frame of the painting.

Because of its huge scale and rich colors (it’s my guess that in real life, Mary never had such opulent garments), it is a real eye catcher, but those two little imps are the stars of the show. A legend says that they were the children of Raphael’s model, and he painted them just as they looked six hours into the tenth day of watching their mother stand still for the master. Their expressions convey both disinterest and cunning, and they are clearly not impressed by the exalted infant. As grandfather of two boys about the ages of the putti, I have seen those expressions before, and know that they signal time for a diversion. “Hey, boys, let’s go outside.”

Raphael’s putti have been plucked from the painting and reproduced and marketed as if they were nacho chips or soda pop, appearing on post cards, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and tote bags. They are adorable, but something of the original poignancy is lost.

When the pope commissioned the painting, did Raphael take it on as a job, happy to have the income and simply accepting that he was better at painting than others, so it was natural that it would be his job? Or did he take it on as a spiritual challenge, setting out to do something so good that mere mortals would never be able to fully understand?

You can order a 16′′ x 24′′ framed print of Sistine Madonna from Amazon for $29.99, and a 9.5′′ x 7.9′′ mouse pad picturing the putti for $9.99.

Musicians know that the music of Bach or Mozart is the work of genius. When you study the music mathematically and theoretically, you get a sense of what the composer had in mind. But for all its majesty and intricacy, I heard “Brandenburg Five” playing at Starbucks the other day when I ordered coffee. If the barista had been a struggling young musician, perhaps she would have worked the steam nozzle in time with the music. A little puff of steam on “one and three” would have been cute. But no. Bach’s ingenious creation was coexisting with her off-beat steam punk, competing with the grinder reducing my beans for espresso and the gabbling of the women wearing headsets working the drive-thru window.

Michelangelo’s David in a snow globe; Rodin’s Thinker as a paperweight; Rondo ala Turca in an elevator; history’s artistic milestones reduced to the commonplace. Wendy and I are lucky to live in New York City, where great museums are sprinkled across the map, and we can experience many of the greatest artworks at the other end of a short subway ride. Van Gogh’s Starry Night looks fine on a t-shirt, but when you see it in person in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, it takes your breath away. Monet produced around 250 “Water Lilies” paintings, all showing scenes of the beautiful gardens at his home in Giverny. Just like Starry Night, they look nice on t-shirts, but if you have only seen them in that format, you might not realize that they get as big as 13 by 41 feet. That is a huge amount of paint for someone who was suffering from cataracts.

As Monet produced hundreds of gorgeous images in spite of failing eyesight, so Beethoven gave us some of the most sublime, defiant, innovative, and powerful masterworks of music as he was losing his hearing. We know enough about him to have a sense that he could be cranky. If your life is creating spectacular music, I will forgive you a fit or two if you are losing your hearing. A legend has Beethoven playing the piano for a group of socialites in a lavish drawing room, angered by their inattention and chatter, slamming the fall board, standing up to announce, “For such pigs I will not play,” and storming out of the room.

§

Dictionary definitions of art use phrases like, “. . . works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Art is pictures, sculptures, music, literature, and drama. Art can be fiction or non-fiction. A bowl of pears and grapes sitting on a table next to a candlestick may be a non-fiction subject, but the fact that every glistening drop of moisture, every vein in a leaf, and iridescent surface of the fruit is represented in paint applied by human hands is the art part. That still life is art because of its beauty more than its emotional power, while Starry Night is all about emotional power.

A painting that depicts a historical event, a battle, or an armistice for example, would be non-fiction. But what about a painting of a biblical scene? Asking whether The Last Supper is fiction feels like a great way to start an argument. I am guessing that most texts that have been set to music are fiction. Most operas and most art songs are fables, allegories, stories, or poetry. I am afraid to categorize sacred music that way. Like The Last Supper, it feels a little dangerous to ask if the Latin Mass is fiction.

But what about a trio sonata, a symphony, or a piano concerto? Can they be defined as fiction or non-fiction? There is something abstract about the concept of music, even tonal music that is controlled and defined by complex sets of rules. It is sound that is organized vertically in chords, all of which are ultimately derived from the overtones that are the structure of any musical note, and it is sound that is organized in time. How chords progress from one to another, how counterpoint allows multiple independent lines of music to intertwine, converting melody into harmony is somehow both logical and mystical. Could that oxymoron be the definition of why music is art?

Michelangelo rendered human flesh, including sensitive facial expressions, in marble. Rodin left us a fleet of sensual and sensuous images in bronze. Manipulating such dense materials with such sensitivity is the essence of art, images that transcend the inanimate quality of their materials.

Music as art is magical because it is fleeting. It happens at the present, and the present is infinite. Each nanosecond is another right now! The motion of a piece of music is like the bow wave of a boat, moving relentlessly through an infinite series of “right nows.” As we play or as we listen, we store up the memories of those infinite moments and assemble the progression of sound into our perception of the music. There is a wonderful photograph of Pablo Picasso tracing the outline of a bull with a flashlight, captured on a long exposure. That seems the closest link between pictorial art and music.

We have invented a recognizable written language to record music, so the creation of the composer can be saved for reproduction. Music is an art, but unless there is a performer who can realize it, is it anything more than notations? We consider a performer to be an artist, but unless the performer is improvising, inventing music on the spot, the art of music is the interpretation of someone else’s inspiration.

We talk about artistic temperament. The phrase is sometimes used to excuse someone’s bad behavior, but at its best, artistic temperament is a frame of mind for expressing beauty or powerful emotions. The splendid Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who died at the age of fifty-five in November 2017, could express the full depth of human emotion with a twitch of his lips. Before he sang a single note, you knew you were in for something special. I strongly recommend treating yourself to twenty minutes on YouTube, entering his name in the search bar, and watching his every move. Musicianship and artistry do not get any better.

§

Last week, sitting in the hundred-fifty-year-old second-floor theater (complete with tin ceiling) in downtown Damariscotta, Maine, Wendy and I saw John Logan’s play, Red, as filmed in a live performance at London’s Wyndam Theater in the summer of 2018. It is a ninety-minute production with five scenes, performed without intermission, portraying a two-year period in the life of artist Mark Rothko. Rothko and his assistant, Ken, are the only two characters, and those two years exactly span Ken’s employment in Rothko’s studio. Ken’s entry to the stage a few moments into the play is the moment he is hired.

The play is set in 1958–1959 in Rothko’s studio at 222 Bowery, an abandoned gymnasium. The title is derived from the commission Rothko is working on, a series of monumental murals for the new Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City’s Seagram Building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Phillip Johnson. Rothko makes no secret of the fact that he views this commission as the opportunity of a lifetime. He is being paid $30,000 for it, which he feels is a huge amount of money. Ken is expected to be very impressed by that. Rothko is crushed to learn that Jackson Pollack is Ken’s favorite artist, and throughout the play, the action circles around Rothko’s enormous ego.

Rothko denigrates Pollack, saying that success is the worst thing that ever happened to him, and ridiculing him for owning an Oldsmobile convertible. Racing around Long Island in that car was the antithesis of art. Pollack died in a drunken crash in that car, and Rothko called it a “lazy suicide.” He continues, “believe me, when I commit suicide there won’t be any doubt about it.” (In fact, Rothko did commit suicide with a combination of barbiturates and razor blades. There was no doubt about it.) He goes on to criticize Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtentstein, and Robert Rauschenberg for selling out to commercialism.

The irony of all this, given the $30,000 commission, is not lost on Ken. Rothko is obsessed with the progress of the work and of his greatness, until late in the play, Ken explodes in pent up fury and frustration. “Not every painting has to be so . . . important all the time! Not every painting has to rip your guts out and expose your soul! Not everyone wants art that actually hurts! Sometimes you just want a . . . still life or landscape or soup can or comic book.” The fight continues until Ken bursts out with, “Just admit your hypocrisy: The High Priest of Modern Art is painting a wall in the Temple of Consumption. You rail against commercialism in art, but pal, you’re taking the money.”

The last scene opens with Rothko arriving at the studio the following morning. He tells Ken that he went there. Where? The Four Seasons. He is horrified by the experience, the naked consumerism, the spectacle of the city’s wealthiest people trying to impress each other by spending too much on dinner. He picks up the telephone, dials a number, and asks for Mr. Philip Johnson. “Philip, this is Rothko. Listen, I went to the restaurant last night and lemme tell you, anyone who eats that kind of food for that kind of money in that kind of joint will never look at a painting of mine.” Ken is pleased to have made his point so dramatically, but two lines later, Rothko fires him, and the play ends.

Rothko is the big loser in this story, and the eerie foreshadowing of his suicide is a poignant part of the play. Alfred Molina created the role of Rothko and repeated in the revival production we saw. Eddy Redmayne was the original Ken—in this production we saw Alfred Enoch playing Ken. Red won a Tony Award for Best Play in 2010, and Eddy Redmayne won a Tony that year for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play.

Red was screened in theaters in the United States and the UK on November 7. I do not know if there are plans for it to be screened again. Perhaps it will be available through Netflix or Amazon? Keep your eyes open for it. It is a profound lesson for any artist.

§

Who among history’s great artists had a Rothko-esque ego? Rembrandt? Picasso? Michelangelo? Turner? And who among composers? Mendelssohn? Vivaldi? Gounod? Bruhns? It is easier to name performing musicians. Kathleen Battle’s early career was crammed with magnificent performances and recordings, but twenty years later, she had developed a terrible reputation for her elevated ego and poor treatment of the people around her. After a performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1992, The Boston Globe reported that she left behind a “froth of ill will.” And in February 1994, Joseph Volpe, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, fired Battle from her leading role in La Fille du regiment, citing “unprofessional actions during rehearsal . . . conduct profoundly detrimental to the artistic collaboration between all the cast members.” Time magazine reported that the cast applauded when informed of her dismissal. She never returned to the opera stage.

§

I know many organists who have been badly treated by clergy. For example, it is pretty common to hear tales of woe about priests who felt overshadowed summarily dismissing successful musicians. But I am troubled by haughty attitudes I often encounter among musicians. A stopknob engraved “Rector Ejector” may be a cute gag, but the thing can get out of hand. I see all sorts of complaints from church musicians on social media, dismissing people who think the organ is too loud, making snide remarks about clergy, and chiding the “ignorant” congregants as if they are not worthy of your music.

I was a regular church musician for about thirty years and gave up the bench twenty years ago when I joined the Organ Clearing House because the travel schedule was not compatible. That means I have a lot more chances than most organists to sit in the pews as a worshipper, and you know what? The organ is often too loud. As much as I love the sounds of a powerful organ, I find it tiring. Every verse of every hymn does not need to include Mixtures. It is refreshing for the congregant if the organist mixes it up a little, changing colors between verses, and saving the big guns for the right moment. If you are playing a gentle hymn, play it gently. When a hymn starts with a huge crash, it can be jarring for people who did not know it was coming. The organ is a musical instrument, a living, breathing thing that encourages people to sing if you do not frighten them.

Ken accused Mark Rothko of acting as though no one was good enough to view his paintings. According to Rothko, museums are mausoleums and art dealers are pimps. Rothko railed against the client who asked to commission a painting that would “go” with a certain couch, and he used the term “overmantle” to denigrate the client who wanted a painting simply to fill a space.

Music is a public art that requires both composer and performer to make it happen. And, of course, it requires listeners who are engaged and who participate in the act of music, especially when they are invited to sing and be part of the performance. A bumper sticker popular among people who race sailboats says, “Have you flogged your crew today?” One for organists could be, “Have you flogged your congregation today?”

Ultimately, Rothko realized that he could not control a commercial space with his paintings. Unfortunately, he was so tied up in his high opinion of himself that suicide was inevitable. He mentioned it himself in a Freudian slip.

Organists: what you do is special. It is an unusual art and a special gift. Invite the people of your church in. Share the majesty and the mystery of your instrument with them. Teach them to appreciate the art as you envelope them with beauty. Never forget that they paid for the instrument that it is your privilege to play. Show them that it was worth it.

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

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

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

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

And you are also on faculty there?

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

How long have you been playing the carillon?

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

Were you aware of the carillon during your childhood?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell you what it wants to play?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you tell me more about what that means?

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

What else inspires you in your writing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

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

To continue telling the stories that people need to share.

Yes, exactly.

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

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

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

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra’s website: pamelaruiterfeenstra.com