Paul Cienniwa new website

August 20, 1914, was the birth date of organist/composer Wilbur C. Held. The place was the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines, an address familiar, no doubt, to some readers of The Diapason! Earlier this year, as I began to think of possible repertory for my annual guest recital on the elegant C. B. Fisk organ of First Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I was drawn to Dr. Held’s variations on Veni Creator Spiritus (Come Holy Spirit), published in the Concordia volume Hymn Preludes for the Pentecost Season (1979); years ago, I had penciled in the composer’s date of birth in my copy. At a later point in the program’s gestation period it struck me that arriving at a composer’s centennial year while that person is still a lively presence among us is quite a rarity: perhaps one that should be noted, and celebrated!

Although there was always music in Wilbur’s home (his mother was an accomplished violinist) his own dedication to a musical future did not occur until his collegiate years at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, where he studied organ with Frank van Dusen, took theory classes with John Palmer, and for seven years was Leo Sowerby’s  assistant at St. James Episcopal Cathedral.

With both bachelor and master’s degrees from the conservatory and his invaluable experience with Sowerby, Held was hired to join the music faculty at Ohio State University in Columbus in 1946, where he ultimately became professor of organ and church music and head of the keyboard division. Additionally he served as organist-choirmaster of Trinity Episcopal Church in Ohio’s capital city. During these years he went on to earn his doctorate in sacred music from Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he studied organ with Vernon de Tar and composition with Normand Lockwood and Wallingford Rieger. There were also master lessons with Marcel Dupré and André Marchal during their various recital tours in the United States.

Dr. Held retired from his Ohio positions and moved to California in 1978, where he has continued his musical activities as composer, clinician, and organist.

My small tribute to Wilbur Held is not a unique happening: on May 4, Maxine Brechbiel, a friend and former student of Dr. Held, mounted a program of his compositions at her church, Trinity United Methodist in Pomona, California. She accompanied the Five Psalm Settings for soprano and organ, and invited Paul Hesselink of Las Vegas, Nevada, to perform a varied selection of solo organ works. Selecting pieces from each of seven decades, Paul showcased the variety and skill, as well as the “impeccable good taste” that he commented is “always to be found in a composition that bears the Held signature.” This celebratory program ended with Wilbur’s recorded performance of the Liszt Prelude and Fugue on BACH.

In a gracious letter to this writer (whom he graced with the title “Mr. Harpsichord”), Wilbur, an acquaintance from my Oberlin student days, wrote of the reason that a recording was substituted for his own live performance of the Liszt. Dated June 3, 2014, his letter explains:

I’m grateful to be in good health although my hearing has deteriorated very much in the last couple of years—not just softening in volume, but distorting everything—when I play the organ I hear different notes than the ones I’m playing. . . I have limited my playing to an occasional vesper service here at the [Claremont] Manor. After all, I know what notes I’m playing; I just ignore what I hear!

In a spoken introduction to the organ works he selected for the May 4 concert (see sidebar), Dr. Hesselink noted the difficulty of choosing 40 minutes of music from the more than 350 possibilities composed by Wilbur Held, and, in a particularly interesting paragraph, described a fortuitous event that resulted in the wider dissemination of one work:

Not only is the setting of Divinum Mysterium [Of the Father’s Love Begotten] beautiful in its own right, but I can claim some credit for its larger distribution. I was playing a recital at Third Reformed Church in Holland, Michigan and had programmed several short Held pieces. Dr. Roger Davis was at the church to work on a few minor repairs to their wonderful [Robert] Sipe tracker organ and in seeing the program he said, ‘It would be wonderful to have a Wilbur Held composition for my new organ method book. I like his things so much, but I don’t know him at all.’ I replied, ‘Well, I think I can fix that.’ The upshot was that Wilbur allowed the reprinting of this chant setting for inclusion in Davis’s The Organists’ Manual, an organ teaching method first published in 1985 [W. W. Norton] which has become one of the mainstays in the organ teaching world and has sold thousands of copies. So along the line, many developing organists have had the pleasure of learning and performing this beautiful setting.

On the very morning that I sat down to compose this commemorative piece, the first e-mail to be opened was one from the Organ Historical Society’s OnLine Store, in which the second item listed was a new issue from MorningStar Music entitled New Every Morning: Six Settings of Morning Hymns for Organ—simple and well-crafted arrangements composed by Wilbur Held. 

It is remarkable to arrive at the age of 100. It is even more remarkable if one still continues to be a productive contributor to the musical needs of one’s professional colleagues. Happy birthday Wilbur Held, and we wish you continued joy and musical fulfillment. 

Thanks to Paul Hesselink for his major contributions of text and pictures, and to Maxine Brechbiel for relaying my initial e-mail to Wilbur Held.

Campanologist Carl Zimmerman has for many years maintained a website with a huge amount of information on carillons and bells, an excellent reference site. He sent this information about tower chimes as well as a plea for information to keep the site as current as possible. Zimmerman has been a carillonneur member of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America for more than half a century, and a handbell ringer, change ringer, and researcher into the history and products of American bellfounders. His website, www.TowerBells.org, covers all these topics and more. It will eventually present technical details about every carillon, chime, zvon, and great bell (over 4 tons) in the world, as well as all rings and tubular tower chimes outside of the United Kingdom. It is already complete, as far as is known, in some respects for many areas of the world.

Many organists are familiar with the names of Deagan and Mayland, inventors of distinct types of organ chimes that are still available today, albeit not from the original manufacturers. Some may know that John C. Deagan also produced tower chimes, sets of 10 to 32 tubular bells weighing up to several hundred pounds each, made from the same material as conventional bronze bells. All have electric actions, and many were equipped to be played from the organ console as well as by other means. Over 400 such tower chimes were made by Deagan, and many of them are still in more or less regular use today.

The word “chimes” can be either singular or plural, depending on context. In the archaic singular usage, “chimes” means “a group of bells,” but there is no singular equivalent. Example: “I heard the chimes pealing out on Christmas Eve.” In present-day plural usage, “chimes” means “more than one chime,” i.e., more than one set of bells, which can be used to play melodies but are not large enough to qualify as a carillon. Example: “Our town has three chimes—one in each of the three principal churches.” Without the qualifier “tubular,” a chime is always assumed to be made of conventional cast bronze, tower bells, as a carillon is. With the qualifier “tubular,” it is important to use the additional qualifier of “tower” in order to distinguish such instruments from the sets of thin-walled tubular bells found in pipe organs, long-case chiming clocks, etc.

Prior to a discovery last year, it was not known that Rowland H. Mayland also produced tubular tower chimes, playable from an organ console. One such chime survives in a church on Long Island. Though it is no longer playable from the organ console, its original electric action still works, now under control of a modern clock mechanism. Mayland’s own descendants, while quite familiar with the organ chime business, were totally unaware of their ancestor’s work on tower chimes until this discovery was reported to them.

A single Mayland tower tube also survives in the great Wanamaker organ in Philadelphia. Its acquisition is undocumented, but there is speculation that it might have been submitted as a sample when the addition of a tower chime to that organ was being planned. In the end, a 37-note Deagan tower chime, the only one of that size ever built, became the present Major Chimes stop on that organ. There is also a Minor Chimes stop, which is a set of regular organ-style tubular bells.

Mayland’s work with tower chimes preceded that of Deagan, whose first such installation was in 1916. Very little is known of this period of transition from the manually operated tubular tower chimes of Walter H. Durfee and the U.S. Tubular Bell Company to the electrically operated tubular tower chimes of Mayland, Deagan, and possibly also McShane.

All tubular tower chimes that are currently known are listed and described at www.TowerBells.org. If your church has such a chime, or if you know of one nearby, you may be able to contribute to improving those listings and descriptions and the related history. Friends of tubular tower chimes will thank you!

Send items for “Carillon News” to Dr. Brian Swager, c/o The Diapason, 3030 W. Salt Creek Lane, Suite 201, Arlington Heights, IL 60005-5025; or e-mail [email protected]. For information on the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America: www.gcna.org.