Statement of Solidarity

Students’ Listening II

Why should anyone ever listen to music?

That is, of course, a ridiculous question. It is obvious from history that listening to music is fundamentally human: a desire or even a need, and maybe a definitional part of human experience. Yet, I think it is important to continually remind ourselves that recordings, in addition to live performances, help us to strive to become better musicians. Musicians are often subject to self-doubt. (There is a cartoon that I see once in a while that shows a pie chart of the mind of a musician. The section labeled “crippling self-doubt” covers about 90% of the space.) That self-doubt comes from several questions, not the least of which is: “is this all worthwhile?” Yet, listening to great music provides us with an affirmative answer. The sort of self-doubt regarding the quality of one’s own playing can be exacerbated by listening—something that I will try to grapple with below.

One concrete reason for listening to music is to gain familiarity with diverse repertoire. This was the point of that “listening test” I encountered in college that I referenced last month. What repertoire? There are expanding circles ranging from music from a specific time period written specifically for our instrument to the entirety of written music. It is potentially frustrating and, for me, quite liberating to realize that it is impossible to know all of the music that is out there. Frustrating because of the inevitability of missing things that are wonderful. Liberating because, if we cannot experience everything, then we do not have to aspire to have experienced everything. We can hope to experience a substantial and meaningful subset of what there is.

How should any given student navigate the world of listening for learning about repertoire? Listening to music that you already know and like is a wonderful thing to do, but that’s not really part of this process. Going out in circles is always a good idea: if you love and listen to Brahms symphonies, try his chamber music; try symphonies by someone who influenced Brahms or whom he influenced. Then try their chamber music, piano music, and so on. If you like Schütz, listen to Gabrieli. If you like Beethoven, listen to Albrechtsberger. There need not be anything obscure, complicated, or subtle about constructing these circles. Fruitful connections can be found by perusing Wikipedia articles or CD booklets.

This is fairly obvious, and we all probably do it normally as we seek out things to listen to. But still, you should encourage your students to follow the process consciously, maybe in ways that are partly teacher-guided, perhaps with a written outline to keep track. But another idea is to seek out new things to listen to not by affinity but by opposition. If you love Brahms, listen to Wagner or Liszt. If you love Debussy, listen to a selection of music by Les Six, who consciously rejected his influence. If you love Bach, seek out the music of Marchand, who was apparently intimidated by Bach and fled from a possible competition with him. Or, if you have not already done so, listen to Handel, whose life, career, temperament, and music were so different from those of Bach.

Keeping a distance

Another way to find things to listen to is to search for music that is completely different from your norm. Whatever you have just been listening to and enjoying, move as far away as possible. If you have been listening to the Telemann Paris Quartets, find some late nineteenth-century Russian choral music. If you have been listening to a Bruckner symphony, find a clavichord performance of early seventeenth-century dances. This is a controlled randomness and guarantees avoiding ruts.

If a friend, teacher, critic, or scholar says that particular music is not worth getting to know (boring, pedestrian, unpleasant, lacking in importance), then try it out! This suggestion is not based on the notion that that friend or critic is someone of bad judgment or likely to be wrong. It is just a way of shaking things up. People of equal discernment and experience end up reacting differently to artistic experience as often as they end up reacting similarly, and that is just as true when they agree that they are people of similar tastes.

Some of my most important, rewarding, and long-term fruitful listening as a youngster came from LPs that an older musician had discarded as being of little or no interest. And the musician in question was someone from whom I learned a lot and whose taste and judgment I admired. We should never base our exploration on the assumption that any two people see things the same way.

When we talk about listening to music to broaden or deepen our familiarity with repertoire, we are mostly talking about listening to recordings. We expect to be able to find recordings of just about anything, whereas the concert offerings in any one locale can only cover a tiny amount of music, even over several concert seasons. The changes in the ways in which we encounter recordings that have taken place in the last several years are interesting to consider, especially as they influence the experience of students.

The revolution in the listening experience

In my experience, I would say that for at least five years now, 85% of the time that a student has come to a lesson and told me that they have listened to a piece, that listening has taken place on YouTube. A lot of listening is now done without any money changing hands. That opens music up to more listeners, though the effect on creators of performances is more problematic. I remember spending several days while I was in college agonizing over whether to spend, I believe, $4.99 on Ralph Kirkpatrick’s LP of four Bach harpsichord toccatas. I vividly recall going back to the Princeton University Store several times to look it over. (I did buy it.) Now anyone can find many performances of those pieces on YouTube.

When a student comes to a lesson and tells me that they have been looking into a particular piece by listening to a YouTube performance, I always ask who was playing. And never once in that situation has anyone been able to say who the performer was. Of course, that information is usually there to be found. And furthermore, all of the students in question have been extremely smart and clever people who pay attention to the world around them and care about artistic matters. It is just that expectations have changed; the ethos of how we listen has changed. YouTube is seen, for purposes like this, as a sort of neutral encyclopedia of music. It isn’t any more obvious that you would check on who was playing than it would be to dig into the question of who wrote a given encyclopedia or Wikipedia article.

Is this good, bad, neither, or both? I am not sure. I have an extreme interest in performers. Probably too extreme, in that it can get in the way; if I do not know who is playing, I have trouble feeling comfortable listening. But that is a foible of mine. If listening is being done only or mostly to learn something about what music is out there, then the identity or background of the player is perhaps best thought of as only one piece of information about what is going on, not necessarily more important than information about instruments, acoustics, recording technology, edition used, and so on. If a piece seems less interesting or compelling than you had hoped that it would be, it is often worth looking for a different performance before shelving your interest in that piece.

This modern paradigm has the effect of taking away some of the feelings of authority that we have traditionally bestowed on those performers who were invited to make recordings. Part of the dynamic of record listening over the twentieth century was that we assumed, by and large, that the recording artists were the most talented players and thoughtful interpreters. No matter how inspiring it can be to listen to great recordings, it can also be limiting. This limiting tendency has its feel-good side: getting accustomed to a certain undeniably effective performance approach and experiencing the satisfaction of absorbing and then perhaps recreating it. I would argue that the limiting nature of this outweighs the good feeling that it engenders. But even worse, there is the outwardly discouraging side: feeling intimidated by the reputed greatness of the recording artists, not just by liking their performances better than you anticipate liking your own, but being daunted by their celebrity and publicly heralded greatness. It is possible that the more democratic performance model that has taken hold now will have the psychological effect of freeing students to include themselves more easily in the universe of those whose performances are valid.

Listening to interpretation

In former days, a student might ask, “how can I hope to play as well as Marcel Dupré, Helmut Walcha, Fernando Germani, Marie-Claire Alain, etc.” Now we can say “you don’t even know who that player was. It could just as easily have been you. You can do that just as well!” This is an over-simplification, but not an unrealistic or inapt one, based on what I have seen.

This brings us to another major aspect of listening: to learn interpretation. As anyone will know who has read this column over the years, I am a strong believer in encouraging everyone to feel free to play as they want. This includes students, to such an extent that I want even beginners to make their own interpretive decisions. That is a big subject, and this is not the place to go into it fully. The role of listening to recordings in shaping interpretation or in learning how to think about the art of shaping interpretation is essentially two-fold. On the one hand, anyone’s playing can be a direct source of ideas about playing. There is nothing wrong with listening to someone else play and thinking about what that player did, the choices that he or she made, the effects that those choices seemed to have, etc. If a student is doing this as a conscious choice then it can be used in the ways that the student wants, with whatever guidance from the teacher seems useful. The teacher might do well to remind the student that anything heard in someone else’s performance is just one person’s choice.

But there is only so much that we can do by taking hold of this sort of listening consciously. To a greater or lesser extent from one person to another, but to a significant extent for almost everyone, performances heard repeatedly exert a subconscious influence, sometimes a very strong one. If we have heard a passage or a piece exactly the same way over and over again, our minds can define the piece as being what we heard as much as we define it by the notes on the page. This is true not only as defined by performance gestures—tempo, articulation, timing, etc., but also about registration or the often-irreproducible effects of acoustics. I recall an earnest conversation that I once had with an organist a bit older and more experienced than I was about what the registration “should” be for the middle section of a certain piece. I was arguing that the nature of the music called for something clear and light; he was equally sure that it needed a more “quinty”-rich sound. It turned out that each of us had had as our favorite recorded performance of that piece one that led us to these diverging conclusions. The point is not that we each liked the sound we were used to, but that we had absorbed it so deeply that we were prepared to argue that it was part of the definition of the piece.

As another example, I love the piano music of Schubert. However, I have lately realized that I so deeply absorbed Alfred Brendel’s approach to that music growing up that I have a hard time listening to anyone else playing it. For years I have sought out records or occasional live performances of Schubert by pianists whom I admire greatly. But I always react as if something is just not quite right—an interpretive/rhetorical analogue to pervasive wrong notes or bad tuning. I consider this a loss for me, and it may fade or otherwise change someday. It is not a big deal; rather, it is part of the give and take of life. But if I were trying to play that music, I would have the following bad choice: either I would play in a way that was a copy of someone else, or I would not like the way I played.

So the first antidote to getting one performance approach stuck in one’s head is to listen more or less equally to multiple performances. If you have heard each of five or six performances of a piece approximately the same number of times, then it is quite impossible that one of them can have established itself in your mind as the very definition of the piece. But this is also part of the give and take of life. If we listen to half a dozen performances of every piece that we might want to play, then we have that much less time to listen to other things. It is a question of managing what we want to do. I personally focus on pieces that I am actively working on or feel sure that I want to play some day. I solve the problem for those pieces by not listening to them at all. That is the opposite solution to listening to multiple performances. They both work for this purpose. For other music I sort of let the chips fall where they may.

Most of us spend much less time listening to live concerts in person than we do listening to recordings. Probably the major advantage of live performance is that when all is said and done, the sonorities, the effect of acoustics, and the spontaneity are simply different. A recording is not an “I couldn’t tell the difference” recreation of a concert or other live performance, and it is at least a common experience that concerts at their best are even better than recordings. This is kind of a cliché, and in this case it is only sometimes true. A given concert even by a great performer can happen to be uninspired, or something can go wrong: noise, tuning, acoustic. But there is a particular advantage to live concerts. If you hear a piece in concert and are intrigued or excited by it—a piece of the sort that you might want to play—then the chances are that you will not remember all specifics of the interpretation well enough or in enough detail to be overly influenced by them. They certainly cannot imprint themselves on your subconscious with the weight of authority that comes from repetition if that repetition has not happened.

There is a lot more to say about all of this, and I will come back to it. For the next column, I will turn to J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Some of the features of this piece that make it particularly interesting inspire me to think and write while working on creating a performance of it, as there are some important things about the work that we do not know. For instance, we do not know the order of the movements, what instrument or instruments it was intended for, what title the composer meant for it to have, or, since it is incomplete, how it was meant to end. We do know that Bach worked on it for years, right up to his death, and that his heirs worked thereafter on getting it published. As to all of these things that we do not know, we can make highly educated guesses or assumptions—enough to make it interesting to discuss and to be getting on with for performance.

Joyce Johnson Robinson is a past editor of The Diapason.

Katelyn Emerson is a member of The Diapason’s inaugural 20 Under 30 (2015) class, an honor bestowed prior to receiving her undergraduate degrees from Oberlin. She had already earned top prizes in numerous competitions in the United States, France, and Russia. She teaches in her private studio and performs nationally and internationally. Katelyn Emerson is represented in North America by Karen McFarlane Artists, Inc.

Katelyn, what were some of the first instruments you played? What led you to prefer the organ?

Growing up, I was drawn to voice, piano, flute, and organ. Singing was integral to my childhood as my whole family sang in a church choir and my older brother, Andrew, and I both sang in the Sandpipers Seacoast Children’s Chorus, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 

When Andrew turned ten, he began piano lessons. Naturally, as a six-year-old enamored with everything he was doing, I began to sightread through his piano music, and my parents sought a piano teacher to spare them from the cacophony coming from the keyboard—and so that I wouldn’t learn bad habits. 

Four years later, all I wanted for my birthday was flute lessons as I had watched my mother play and loved the sound of the instrument. Flute and voice ultimately allowed me to join both local and all-state youth symphonies and choruses. 

Dianne Dean, director of the Sandpipers Chorus, first introduced me to the possibility of playing the organ. I had plunked out a hymn or two at my parents’ church but thought this imposing instrument out of reach for a small girl. However, Dianne had been instrumental in founding the Young Organists’ Collaborative, an organization that introduces young people to the pipe organ and funds their early studies. She encouraged me to audition for a scholarship, and upon receiving it, I studied piano, flute, and organ through high school.

The “lightning bolt” moment was during the Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, opus 78, of Camille Saint-Saëns. I was principal flutist of the Portland (Maine) Youth Symphony Orchestra, playing at the heart of the ensemble while my then organ teacher, Ray Cornils, played the Kotzschmar organ in Merrill Auditorium. There had been no time to rehearse with the organ prior to the concert, so those brilliant C-major chords of the final movement came as a complete shock. I realized the organ could be all the musical instruments I loved—and that it could even keep pace with a full symphony orchestra! This could be my instrument.

Tell us about your experience with the Young Organists’ Collaborative.

The Young Organists’ Collaborative (YOC) was founded in 2001 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when a new Létourneau organ was installed in Saint John’s Episcopal Church. When Bishop Douglas E. Theuner came to bless the instrument, he donated $1,000 seed money with the charge to find a way to bring young people to play the pipe organ. Chosen students received a year’s worth of lessons and a small stipend for shoes or scores. Today, students come from around the seacoast—Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, etc.—and are paired with an approved local teacher who can help find practice spaces. They are required to play at the end-of-year recital and are invited to take part in a masterclass with a professional organist partway through the year. The YOC can fund up to three years of study and offers additional scholarship competitions.

I received one of these scholarships in 2005 and began studies with Abbey Hallberg Siegfried, who worked at Saint John’s. When she went on maternity leave a year later, Abbey connected me with Ray Cornils, municipal organist of Portland, Maine, whose teaching included practice techniques, patience, and good humor that form the foundation of my playing and teaching. 

When and where did you give your first recital? What did you play?

It’s difficult to recall my first recital! I do remember my first organ masterclass vividly, when I had only been studying for about six months. This class, sponsored by the YOC, was with Ray Cornils, whom I was meeting for the first time. I played the “Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Major” from the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues attributed to Bach. After I played through the work in its entirety, Ray quietly asked if I realized which pedal note I had missed in the prelude. While I can’t remember now which note it was, I do remember him guiding me through the process of identifying the reason for the mistake. That detective work set the standard for how I problem-solve in my own practice and how I work with my students to do the same.

You earned your degrees at Oberlin and subsequently studied in France and Germany. How did each of these experiences form you?

During my first semester at Oberlin, my assigned teacher, James David Christie, went on sabbatical. While usually a cause for chagrin, this was an extraordinary stroke of luck: he swapped positions with Olivier Latry. 

I have always learned repertoire quickly, but Professor Latry’s demands put me into high gear. At least one new piece each week was expected, which meant that I had expended the music I had prepared over the summer halfway through the semester. After panic-learning Duruflé’s Prélude et fugue sur le nom d’Alain in five days, I finally mastered “the back burner”; with two dozen or so pieces in progress at once, each at a different stage of learning, a new one would hit the “lesson-ready” point just at the right moment. Professor Latry also expanded my arsenal of practice techniques, and I would credit nearly all of my inherited practice methods to him and Ray Cornils.

Professor Christie’s preferred pedagogical approach was almost perfectly opposite: rather than covering new music every week, he preferred a lengthier study of style, working through a half-dozen pieces over the course of a semester to develop deeper understanding that could be applied to other music of that genre. I have grown to appreciate this more than I did as a teenager and to balance learning notes quickly with understanding and translating the music. 

My love affair with all things French had begun only two years before university, and fortunately additional academic scholarship was available if I pursued the double degree program at Oberlin (a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Music after five years), so French language and literature was the natural choice. I remember asking Professor Latry about studies at the Conservatoire de Paris within our first few lessons together, likely to his amusement!

My first solo trip abroad was in 2011, between my freshman and sophomore years, for the last iteration of the Summer Institute for French Organ Studies, led by Jesse Eschbach and Gene Bedient. Aided by a scholarship, I traveled to Poitiers and then Épernay, wondering if I could handle being alone abroad. Wandering the cobblestones of Poitiers, reveling in that 1787 Clicquot, and then the 1869 Cavaillé-Coll of Église Notre-Dame in Épernay, and getting to know the other students from Indiana, Utah, and Canada, I discovered that I thrived on travel. 

During my sophomore year at Oberlin, Marie-Louise Langlais came to teach. In contrast to Professor Christie’s detail-oriented teaching, Madame Langlais emphasized beautiful broad lines, Wagnerian long phrases, and propelling the music forwards no matter what.

At Oberlin, one of my most impactful teachers was not an organ professor. David Breitman remains head of the historical performance department and teaches fortepiano. After I carelessly ran through a Mozart sonata in one of my first fortepiano lessons, I remember him asking, “Now, this is an opera. Tell me about the first character. What else was Mozart working on while composing this?” Ray Cornils had planted the first seeds of exploring musical character in my mind (“If you met this piece walking down the street, what would it look like? How would she feel? Where would he be going?”), but I hadn’t applied this inquisitive curiosity more broadly. Professor Breitman’s similarly Socratic method of teaching was a continuation of Ray’s. Neither teacher ever dictated interpretation. Instead, they posed questions that led a student to make informed decisions and arrive at possible conclusions themselves through a contextualization and personification of music that has become a cornerstone of my playing and pedagogy. 

The formative experiences and broad education I received from Oberlin continued to feed my curiosity. I took classes in psychology, astronomy, anthropology, rhetoric, French literature, and more. 

Upon graduating, I won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Toulouse. I documented a fraction of that year in France on my blog (katelynemerson.wordpress.com), but spent most of it on road trips to see untouched instruments in the countryside, locked into Saint-Sernin at night, scrambling for practice time, being clapped at because nobody had mentioned a noon Mass, stopping by the marché for bread and a bottle of wine for a picnic, and showing up at the Conservatoire to discover there was another strike and it was closed. Life had a different pace. Concerts were a train ride away, I performed on instruments sometimes wonderful and sometimes frightful, and I met brilliant colleagues and lifelong friends. 

My teachers in Toulouse, Michel Bouvard and Jan Willem Jansen, once again revealed how contrasting teaching styles can enrich study. With Michel Bouvard, I delved into the French Romantic, allowing the instruments to inform how the repertoire can really be played. His relaxed technique and unpretentious approach to this music gave it space to sing. Jan Willem Jansen had extraordinary attention to detail. After hearing me play the “Allein Gott” trio from the Clavierübung, he rightfully informed me that the fourth and fifth sixteenth notes of measure 27 had rushed. I doubt my ears will ever be so attuned to proportion, but I still strive for it nonetheless!

As my year in France concluded and I prepared to pursue further graduate studies, I was offered the associate organist and choirmaster position at the Church of the Advent in Boston, which I simply couldn’t turn down. I had worked with music director Mark Dwyer for several months while at Oberlin and was in awe of the program, liturgy, and choirs. Mark remains a dear friend, colleague, and teacher, and his attention to detail emphasized the importance of every part of music—from note to silence. 

The itch to live abroad is difficult to scratch, so I’m particularly grateful to make a living based on travel! Having heard that Ludger Lohmann would retire in 2020, I applied for a German Academic Exchange Scholarship (DAAD) to pursue the Master Orgel at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart. It broke my heart to leave Boston but I looked forward to two years in Germany.

Navigating life in France had been fairly easy given my comfort with the language. I had enough German to be dangerous—enough so that people assumed I understood. Thankfully, I avoided extreme disaster, realized the meaning of halb zwei in time not to miss my lessons, and discovered the delicacies of southern German cuisine. Lessons with Ludger perfectly balanced churning through new repertoire, exploring historical context, and receiving a list of sources (often primary) to consult. When the pandemic disrupted studies, we met at his beautiful home on the border of Switzerland to indulge in cake and then play and discuss Reger on the three-manual tracker in his living room.

I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have mentors, human and instrumental, that have each shared perspectives and ideas for ways to approach both music and life. This is but a small sample of those who have shaped my understanding, and I hope those not mentioned will still feel my appreciation and forgive the oversight, due solely to lack of space.

How has your knowledge of foreign languages and your living abroad given you insights into the music of those countries’ composers?

Music is inevitably tied to the social, historical, and cultural context in which it was conceived, even while its nature as organized sound allows it to have meaning outside a single context. My understanding of different languages and sensitivity to ways of comportment have helped me to get to know people all over the world, and I continually strive to connect with and understand them better. As an interpreter, I try to delve into the composer’s influences as well as my own, linking both to the present listeners as we undertake the aural tour of emotive depth and structure that is music performance. To do this, I strive to learn as much as I can of the time, place, and people that surrounded the music’s conception to make interpretative decisions that both link and are drawn from the past and present. The more I learn and study, the richer and more complex these relationships become, which results in further exploration and endless excitement!

Tell us about your recordings—those already made, and those planned for the future.

I have released two recordings on the Pro Organo label, working with Fred Hohman. The first of these, part of the prize package from the American Guild of Organists’ 2016 National Young Artists Competition in Organ Performance, was recorded on the glorious 1935–1936 Aeolian-Skinner at the Church of the Advent in Boston where I was working. These winners’ CDs are typically variety programs, so I sought to showcase how this liturgical instrument can play a variety of repertoire brilliantly, with music by Bruhns, J. S. Bach, Mendelssohn, François Couperin, Alain, Vierne, Tournemire, Thierry Escaich, and Howells. The album title, Evocations, comes from Escaich’s Évocation III (this was its first CD recording). Two years later, Andover Organ Company approached me about a new recording on their magnum opus, Opus 114, at Christ Lutheran Church in Baltimore in honor of their company’s seventieth anniversary. For this CD, Inspirations, I played Rachel Laurin’s Finale, opus 78 (this was the first recording), Horatio Parker, Rheinberger, Buxtehude, Bairstow, de Grigny, Langlais, and Duruflé.

Over the last two years, recording has become more essential than ever. I now have my own video and audio recording equipment and, while none of it equals commercial-level recording equipment, I can use it to pre-record recitals for venues that want to “premiere” the recital on YouTube or Vimeo, particularly if they don’t have their own equipment, and I can also make recordings for my channels. I have a huge “dream list” of instruments on which I would like to record CDs and frequently tweak ideas for programs on them. One idea would juxtapose commissions of living composers with previously composed repertoire related by inspirational source or another contextual consideration—an idea that will hopefully come into being in the next few years!

Who are some of your favorite composers?

My favorite composers are those who wrote the music I’m currently playing! Similarly, the best organ in the world is the one on which I will perform next or am currently playing, and the best piece in the world is the one that’s on the music desk right now. While this might seem to be a cop-out, it’s a simple truth: we play music better when we like it—so we must like what we are working on in order to play it well.

When push comes to shove, I am happiest playing a variety of music. My music bag currently contains music by Parry, Bach, Taylor-Coleridge, Dupré, Demessieux, Reger, Sowerby, Alcock, Laurin, Duruflé, Price, Widor, Whitlock, Franck, and Scheidemann, as well as a few others.

Tell us about your teaching.

After beginning at Oberlin, I was asked to help guide incoming students as an academic ambassador, explaining the sometimes-overwhelming collegiate administration and helping them to choose courses that would feed their curiosity. I tutored French, music theory, and organ at Oberlin, and taught music theory at the local community music school.

Since graduating, I have continued teaching, both privately and in masterclass and lecture settings, holding general question-and-answer sessions that follow tangents of interest as well as structuring courses that focus on specific topics. I enjoy connecting sometimes disparate ideas and exploring possibilities, discussing why decisions can be made this way or that, and, above all, searching for the many nuanced ideas that make an individual “tick.” 

My teaching studio is loosely divided into three groups: those working on interpretation, those seeking to improve practice strategies, and those learning about injury prevention or working to recover from injury. Of course, most are tackling all three! 

Interpretation, at its core, requires working with ideas, examining options, and then seeking physical means to translate them convincingly into sound. Since we organists cannot modulate volume with touch as pianists can, nor can we swell or diminish sound via the breath of wind or the bows of string players, much of our playing is about manipulating smoke and mirrors to turn our intention into aural reality. Since we can now so easily record ourselves, I hold even greater admiration for how players listen in the moment to what is going on, and particularly for how each of my students has a different way of perceiving the sounds swirling around them. Couple this with learning about the context of the composer, their influences, the instruments they may have known, and the time and place in which the piece was composed, and we have rich, unique “readings” of the repertoire that can link to the interests of any student, all while we explore techniques to help bring that perspective to reality. 

Time is short for everybody, and practice must be as efficient as possible. Having studied with excellent teachers of practice methods and having experienced fairly limited practice time during study and travel, I continue to explore ways to break down repertoire for efficient practice. I often make a game of turning difficult sections into manageable chunks, isolating them from the context that can distract from them. Sometimes, I encourage a student to leave it in that “practice mode” for days or even weeks, which allows the subconscious mind to digest novel movement. The best part of this technique is the excitement with which a student brings me new ideas for this “game,” ideas that I can then share with others when similar sections come up!

Surveys indicate that somewhere between 60% and 90% of professional musicians in the United States have experienced some kind of performance-related musculoskeletal disorder, most often due to overuse. The enthusiasm with which the work of pedagogues such as Roberta Gary and Barbara Lister-Sink has been received, the many stories shared by colleagues and students, and both the unnatural perch on the organ bench and the similarity in how organists use their hands and upper body to that of pianists all make me suspect that this prevalence is much the same in organists.

At age fourteen, I developed bilateral tendonitis in my wrists and forearms. Giving music up was not an option, so I undertook technical retraining with Arlene Kies, late professor of piano at the University of New Hampshire. Arlene helped me to completely rebuild my technique, as I had had almost no technical training in my six years of study. Through her work and that of my mother, a certified hand therapist and occupational ergonomist, I regained my ability to make music and developed a deep respect for my body. By paying attention to its abilities and limitations, I overcame many flare-ups throughout the next decade (including several during competitions). 

This firsthand experience with how playing and practice techniques can couple with contributing factors for tragic consequences inspired me to deepen my understanding of these complex issues so I can work with musicians, particularly organists, to prevent injury and, when injury happens, collaborate with the individual and their medical specialists to work towards recovery. We discuss healthier practice techniques that utilize mental involvement to balance out physical repetition that can lead to overuse, review postural considerations, and discuss ways to give whatever part of the body that is most at risk a little relief, whether avoiding using force when opening jars or cans or making small changes to computer and office workstations. If a student is experiencing pain or discomfort or is recovering from an injury, I always strongly recommend that they work with a medical professional for treatment in addition to exploring adjustments at their instrument.

Being a teacher and being a student go hand in hand. We teach ourselves while in the practice room, but the added variable of joining another person on their journey of learning means that we are continually exposed to different vantage points and ideas. 

How have things been for you during the time of covid?

In spring of 2020, I was based in Germany, but, when rumors that international borders might close began to proliferate, I was on tour in the United States. Fortunately, I made it back to Baden-Württemberg just a few days before flights were grounded. Despite the restrictions, I was able to complete my final semester of my master’s study, performing a program of Froberger, Messiaen, and Reger to an audience of fourteen (including the jury) in the Stuttgart Musikhochschule’s concert hall. That summer was spent waiting and then moving quickly as restrictions changed, but my husband, David Brown, who then worked for Glatter-Götz Orgelbau while I completed my studies, and I managed to return to the United States in September 2020 so he could resume work at Buzard Pipe Organ Builders.

Many people I have spoken with have described challenging months, yet they have almost always also shared silver linings like cherishing time with family and friends or pursuing new projects. My 2020 and 2021 were the same: over seventy concerts were postponed (incredibly, very few canceled entirely), which broke my heart, but my time was filled with writing articles, teaching in person and over Zoom (which I had been doing while traveling, even before 2020!), and learning new repertoire. I also took a course in occupational ergonomics to support my teaching of injury prevention. The world felt like it was on hold for so long, but hope was always on the horizon with wonderful events scheduled for the future—many of which are taking place now! 

What are some of your hopes and plans for the future?

We live in such an exciting time. No previous generation has had so much information at their fingertips, just a click away. The work of thousands of previous performers and researchers—and the life experiences of millions of human beings—is there for our perusal and for us to build on. 

It is incredibly easy to pour through stacks of music and literature, both physically and online, and I’m constantly noting repertoire that I want to learn and share with people. Including some of this less-familiar music in programs requires that I show why this music matters and why audiences should care about it. Without knowing the context or inspiration of a particular piece, how could a listener attending a concert after a busy workday be expected to respond to it? They often have nothing to hold onto, particularly with a longer or more esoteric work, so why should they come back to hear more? Highly aware of this, I seek to share my passion for each piece, proposing some ways through which to relate to it. Connecting a particular piece of music with the heart of the listener has become one of my highest performance priorities.

I would also like to help to evolve the definitions of success for us musicians and organists. I have spoken with so many who did not experience their “big break” before age thirty and who desperately strive to feel successful. We are so often told what success should look like that we can no longer hear our internal voice showing us how our unique skills could create something quite different. This leads to discouragement, depression, and sometimes a heartbreaking lack of self-compassion. I tackle this with my students and work with musicians in all stages of life to help curate their unique careers and pursue whatever they hope to achieve. My own path has been rather unusual, with several gap years that opened Europe and Asia for performance and study, and with my primary income from performing and teaching. The latter is integral to who I am as a person and a musician, as is writing articles that continue conversations about a diverse range of ideas.

While I don’t yet have the answer to this challenge, I try to work with my students and colleagues to explore ways to find our place in a world large and varied enough for all of us. We all may play the pipe organ, but our unique backgrounds—culture, language, family, and everything else—cause us to approach life and this instrument so vastly differently that each of us have the potential to fill a gap that the field didn’t even know was there.

It just takes listening.

Thank you, Katelyn!

Katelyn Emerson’s website: katelynemerson.com

An idea or two

This month I follow on a few loose ends from last month’s column, about the word “performance” and related words, and then discuss a few more aspects of the relationship between musical performance and other forms of performance. Recently I overheard someone say in passing, “Yes, that was performative.” I heard enough of the surrounding context to confirm what I would normally assume from the word “performative;” the suggestion was that something was being done for a reason other than the ostensible one. There was something manipulative or hypocritical going on. Things were not as they seemed. 

To put it a bit less judgmentally, the person who had engaged in the action that was designated “performative” did so in order to get something across that was not the same as what they were ostensibly trying to do or convey. Perhaps this is performance where there should not be performance. But two lines that run through certain uses of the word performance, related but separable, are falseness and negativity. Referring to my example from last month about the person who berated his companions and stalked off, if that person had stood up and said, apropos of nothing in the prior conversation, a lot of extravagantly complimentary things about the others in the room and then departed, no one would have said, “That was quite a performance.”

I have a really strong aversion to being misrepresented. For this purpose, I am not talking about misrepresentation along major societal grounds. Nor am I talking specifically about important things—just ordinary encounters. For example, if someone hears me comment that I do not like eggs but mishears and thinks that I especially love eggs, that really bothers me—not particularly because they might serve me eggs, but just as a matter of principle. The misrepresentation does not have to be negative or neutral. If someone kindly held a door for someone else and the latter person looked around and thought wrongly that it had been I who did it, that would make me uncomfortable. I have a fairly traditional fear of airplanes and flying, but I do travel around a fair amount, mostly by car. If someone knew the latter about me and said, “Gavin must really know his way around all the airports,” that would bother me in this manner, even though being afraid of flying is in itself unfortunate and something that I would love to get over. 

I believe that this is one of the reasons, and perhaps the fundamental reason, that I am so intent on playing pieces the way that I really want to play and feel them. More importantly, it is the reason that I am extremely reluctant to ask a student to do something that does not come from inside them even as a stage in learning. Does this way of looking at it suggest that it would be good, even better, to ease up on that standard a little bit? Would students tolerate more than I can in a sense “misrepresenting” themselves as part of learning? If so, is it then a good idea to let that happen or is it still better not to? Is my concern in fact well grounded in everyone’s psychology, or is it more specific to me than I have realized? I should muse about all of this. This may be a bit of a digression, but since it is this notion that “performance” can sometimes be false—indeed that sometimes the word itself has that connotation—that put me in mind of it, perhaps it is not irrelevant.

As another random observation from theater and music, there are many performing groups that use the word “Players” in their title. Just a few days ago I attended a very fine performance of Othello by the New Place Players in New York City. Near where I live in New Jersey there are theater companies called Spotlight Players, Broad Street Players, and Somerset Valley Players, and the Baroque ensemble, The Raritan Players. At the beginning of the Jethro Tull album Minstrel in the Gallery there is the line, “We have fortuitously happened upon these strolling players.” It is very hard, though, to find performing groups or ensembles that are “The so-and-so Performers.” (I just tried and didn’t find any.) And the Tull line would seem very different if they had written, “We have fortuitously happened upon these strolling performers.”

Willing suspension of disbelief

I have pondered the expression, “willing suspension of disbelief.” Continuing to follow these columns’ premise of looking at words and their history, not just concepts as we think we have received them, I have discovered that this phrase was first used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817. When he used it, he appeared to mean primarily the suspension of disbelief, in the context of reading literature, especially poetry, regarding things that would be false in real life—that is, a fantasy, mythology, or various sorts of surrealism. However, the concept has always been used in a different way, to mean the willing suspension of the awareness that fiction is fictional. We know at some level that Nero Wolfe, Elizabeth Bennett, or Basil Fawlty “don’t exist,” even though each of them could exist, unlike, say, Gandalf, Morgan le Fay, or Sabrina Spellman. But during the time when we are engaging with the fictional world in which such characters are presented, we palpably feel as if they do exist. I have countless times sat on the edge of my seat in front of the television desperately scared that someone who does not exist will do or say something that is against my wishes. At times, I can even tremble at the situation. If it goes the wrong way, I can have trouble sleeping that night. I suppose that the only thing that I am really discovering when the story reveals the fate or behavior of the characters is that a writer or show-runner was of a mind to make up that particular story. Yet we do not react in this real-world meta level.

There was a period when I was having trouble reading. This was not an eyesight issue, but rather a lack of mental focus, and it manifested itself in part by a suspension of disbelief. I would read a sentence such as, “Sarah came down the stairs at a trot, alarmed by what she thought she had heard,” and think, “No she didn’t; there is no such person. Why did someone write that?” I do not know why this started, and I do not know exactly how or why I got over it—though I definitely did. It never applied to fiction being performed—television, movies, theater. It did not apply to music—not to listening, not to practicing and playing.

In drama, part of “performance” is the ability to lead viewers into this state. I have noticed that some commentators maintain that “willing suspension of disbelief” puts the burden of making fiction work on the audience-member or reader. I suspect that this is only partly true. As my experience recounted above shows, the state of mind of the person receiving the fictional content can matter. But the content matters just as much; it has to be “convincing.” In writing this comes mostly from the author, though typesetting, illustration, and other design features might play a part. But with performance-based arts, though composing plays a significant part, it comes mainly from the performance. A corollary of this is that the willing suspension of disbelief is not always fully willing. Of course, you can always opt out—put down a book or leave the theater. Meanwhile, the content that you are taking in is supposed to be in itself strongly pulling and pushing you toward that state of non-disbelief.

Is there anything comparable in music to the willing suspension of disbelief? Let’s leave aside for the moment vocal music that has fictional characters in it—there the phenomenon of the “music” as such and the verbally mediated concrete images are separable, and the latter can be just as susceptible to this matter as any other verbally delivered fiction. But what about music in and of itself?

In Examples 1 and 2, is there something that can be believed or disbelieved? Clearly not, I think. So, is there anything comparable in music to the concept? One way of looking at that is that the “willing suspension of disbelief” is probably usually better described as “willing choice to be affected as if one believed.” And with instrumental music the corresponding phenomenon is perhaps the willing choice to be affected, just as such—to let the music inside of one’s self and one’s emotional life. Perhaps one of the roles of performance is to help nurture that willingness.

Playing a character

I keep returning to this notion of playing a character or not. It is in drama that “playing a character” can be most clearly what is going on. It is the norm. When Patrick Stewart plays Vladimir in Waiting for Godot he is playing a character; likewise, when he plays Jean-Luc Picard in the Star Trek franchise. Stephen Colbert played Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report. (I once had the good fortune to hear Stephen Colbert doing a long Q&A—out of character—in front of an audience. Someone asked him, about some little routine or shtick that the character Stephen Colbert occasionally did on the show: “Do you ever just do that in real life?” Colbert just laughed a bit and said, “No.” No complicated explanation, he just is not his character.) How much “in character” is Stephen Colbert as host of The Late Show? In that capacity he is not ostensibly fictional. How identical is he to the person that he is when he wakes up at home and has breakfast each morning? How much is Patrick Stewart in character during an audience talk-back after a play or during a non-fiction personal appearance with audience questions?

It is a habit of audience members and fans to conflate the character and the actor, and this probably is not something that happens with performers of music. There is no character with which to conflate the player. And what of the composer? If anything, listeners retain a very strong awareness that the player and the composer are very different (leaving aside relatively rare cases where they are literally the same). This is why the question of how well a performer realizes a composer’s intentions not only exists as a question at all, but often looms very large; sometimes it is given as almost the definition of performance.  

I have mentioned over the years that I sometimes attend immersive theater, in which the performers and the audience intermingle and interact. The setup is different from one production to another, but it is not uncommon for there to be moments where by design or by chance an audience member is alone with a performer/character, with the latter acting out a scene. I wonder how many people there are in that room? I think that I can count five: the character, the performer him- or herself, the audience member as a “regular” person, the audience member in whatever slightly different persona they feel themselves to be in, in this artificial setting, and sometimes the audience member in a role that the performer is temporarily casting themself into via the content of the scene being played out. (For example, I have had a character in a play greet me as if I were her son and talk to me in that vein for a while.) 

Am I exactly the same person when I perform in concert as I am when I stroll into my kitchen alone to make a cup of tea or when I sit on the porch in the sun for an hour reading? How about when I am sitting and typing this column? On the one hand I see a clear distinction—an actor playing a part is in character, and everyone else is not. Given this clear distinction, I see a question: is “performance” that does not involve playing a character the same thing as performance that is all about playing a character? I am actually more interested in the areas in between. If we are not exactly the same person while we are performing that we are at another moment, does that help or hinder our ability to present our performance? How does that relate to the notion that performance should be “authentic?”

Since that word is used to mean all sorts of things, some of them even possibly in conflict with one another, I will say that I am talking about “authentic” meaning both “true to oneself and one’s own vision” and “convincing,” having an air of authenticity that in itself tends to create communication. I am not talking about “authentic” in the sense of “what the composer would have done or wanted.” That is also often important, but different. It is possible that when either or both of these two forms of authenticity are perceived to be present in performance, that creates an ability on the part of listeners to trust the performer and also the composer.

The other idea is one that appeals to me and that I have written about before: that when we perform music that someone else has written, we are in a sense playing the character of “someone who could be improvising this music.” It feels more subtle to me than trying to feel like we are playing the character of the actual specific composer of the piece. I would in a sense hesitate to suggest this idea to a student. Or more accurately, since I have shared it with students fruitfully, I would try to be very careful to make it clear that I do not believe that it is necessary or something that any one player would find fruitful—I just happen to. It seems to be a technique that I can use to feel committed to music and my own vision of it and to justify to myself that feeling of commitment. It seems to help with the question of whether I am exactly myself while performing or playing some sort of part. It is very important to hold onto this idea lightly, not to make it too serious or literal.

The Art of the Fugue, part 5

This month I continue my discussion about the process of performing Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. The connection of all of this to teaching is tangential, perhaps, but very real. As part of the act of working on a project that is especially important and challenging to me, I find myself trying to delve more deeply, accurately, and honestly into understanding what is most important and meaningful to each student.

Yet it can be hard to figure out what is important to oneself and why. In my recent attempts to look closely at that, I have noticed that a majority of the artwork that I care about the most is either big in scale or possesses a convincing overall arc that gives it a spacious feeling regardless of the literal size or length. That arc is a significant part of what is artistically important about the work.

I recently made a list of the five specific artistic entities that mean the most to me or have meant the most to me over my life. This was not in connection with The Art of the Fugue project, though coincidentally, they all have this quality. Just for the record, the five entities are, in no particular order, as follows: The Art of the Fugue; Handel’s Messiah; Hamilton (the current Broadway musical); the Jethro Tull album-length song Thick as a Brick; and the off-Broadway immersive theater piece Sleep No More. All are in the category I have described. Each of you reading this could probably make such a list; it would surely be very different from mine. The same is true for each of our students. But I could also make a list of moments, bits of music or theater or other narrative, say no more than ten or fifteen seconds long, that are in themselves deeply important to me.

Presumably a work of art that moves through time, like music or a play, cannot have a convincing and important overall arc unless each constituent part of that arc is convincing in itself. Some of those constituent parts may be the ones that strike a given person as especially intense, important, or moving. Others may be just part of the moment-by-moment flow. Something about the relationships of those details to one another, ones that are adjacent in time and ones that have to rely on memory to be connected, has to be convincing in order for the overall arc to be convincing. Is it important to think, in shaping each detail, about how it relates to the overall arc? Or is it possible to trust that if each detail comes out the way that you want it to (on its own terms) the overall shape will take care of itself? Does this differ from one piece to another? Are there many possible ways of dealing with this effectively, and do these arise out of and then shape the interpretive stance of different performers? It seems that, among other things, it would have to vary from player to player, based on different fundamental feelings about the relative importance of overall arc and moment-by-moment experience.

Why is the overall arc so important? I do not have one specific answer, though I think there is value in asking the question. I believe that one answer that is highly personal and significant, but that also risks sounding cliché, is that it relates in part to the quest to understand what it means to experience the arc of a life, and thereby to come to terms with death. Of course, The Art of the Fugue has a special role in this regard due to its unfinished nature.

The longer a work of art is, and the more compelling its shape, the more it feels to me like a place—perhaps a place into which one can escape for a while. (That is significant even without anything from which to escape. The sense of being elsewhere for a while is enticing and refreshing in and of itself.) I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and spent a lot of time as a small child roaming around some of the buildings of Yale University. Many of these structures are maze-like and are imbued with a strong feeling of being places unto themselves, hidden and self-contained. This was perhaps especially so to a child for whom they are frighteningly big. This shaped some of my taste in architecture, but I believe it spilled over even more powerfully into my taste in music and in theater. It is relevant to all of the works of art I mentioned above, but most especially to Sleep No More. It is also a source of my love for golf, since a golf course is also this sort of place. (If you count the movements of The Art of the Fugue one particular way, the number comes out the same as the number of holes on a golf course.)

I am finding (or re-confirming for myself) that because of my propensity or craving for long structures, it actually is not a challenge for me to play from one end of The Art of the Fugue to the other. Encompassing the whole of it in my focus seems to be the aspect of working on it that comes the most naturally to me. The challenge—the part where I have to be honest with myself and not let myself indulge any laziness—is making sure that that overall shape is as convincing to audience members as it is to me. This is a place where the questions I posed above about details become critical.

To have an intermission or not: that is the question . . .

Here is a consideration that arises from the length of this work taken in conjunction with the desire to make the overall shape convincing and powerful: intermission. I do not yet know exactly how long my performance of The Art of the Fugue will be. I am sure that in my graduate school performance the music itself took about an hour and forty-five minutes, in addition to an intermission. Subsequent performances have varied in length. My recording on two harpsichords with George Hazelrigg used faster tempi still. It lasts about 78 minutes and just fits on one CD. I think that my planned solo harpsichord performances will be somewhere in between. It is rare for a classical concert lasting over an hour and a half to lack an intermission. On the other hand, an intermission interrupts the flow of the piece significantly. But so will listeners’ impatience and need for a physical and mental break. We go to movies that are longer then that, without needing to take a break. Plays lasting ninety minutes with no intermission have become more and more common. But as I ask people about this—concert patrons among my friends, students, etc.—I get a pretty strong consensus that an intermission is a necessity. I am very reluctant to go along with that, so I am conflicted. Perhaps some performances will include an intermission while some will not.

Playing a work as if improvising

I have written in previous columns that it can be useful to pretend that you are improvising the piece that you are performing. This is not a literal idea, since I am not a particularly adept improviser, yet it is an image or a way of mentally organizing the quest for spontaneity. How does that relate to The Art of the Fugue? After all, the piece is so complex contrapuntally, and we know that Bach worked on it over a long period, so we can safely assume it was not improvisatory in origin. Yet, it might be all the more necessary to try to have that improvisatory feeling as a corrective to the tendency to be over-awed by that structure, formality, and complexity.

It is a myth that improvisatory means unstructured, free, or rhapsodic. Improvisation can be of that sort, but it can also be highly structured, contrapuntal, well planned motivically or harmonically. A few times over the years I have heard an improvisation that was begun by a player who did not know how long the improvisation needed to be, but who ended up producing an experience that seemed to have a convincing overall shape. It seemed to me listening as if the expectations shaped by the beginning determined the rest, including the timing of the end. How is that even possible? Of course, I am only reporting my reaction, not anything scientific or measurable, and I do not have recordings of these moments to study objectively. But those experiences have always been in the back of my mind as a paradox that probably has something to say about musical shape. I will return to this next month in discussing the state of my thinking about the structure of The Art of the Fugue.

After practicing on different harpsichords recently I have noticed that in the four-voice mirror fugue there are passages in parallel tenths, a rarity in Bach and other Baroque keyboard music. However, these passages disappear when one voice is in the pedals, so their existence as an unavoidable technical matter is harpsichord-specific; and I can reach those notes on a harpsichord with a 61⁄4′′ octave, but not on one with a 61⁄2′′ octave! So as a very practical matter, this defines or limits what instruments I can successfully use for an Art of the Fugue performance on harpsichord. This is another example, specific to me, of the ways in which this work is playable, but just barely.

It’s all in the name.

There is no evidence that the name The Art of the Fugue or its original in German, Die Kunst der Fuge, came from J. S. Bach himself, or that he even encountered it. It is found on the title page of the first edition, published under the supervision of members of Bach’s innermost circle. It is entirely possible that the choice of that title reflected something that they knew about what J. S. Bach intended or wanted. But it is also possible that it did not: that he had not said anything about a title by the time he died, and that therefore they just had to come up with something.

I believe that the name has tended to move us toward thinking of the work as being more academic—more of a treatise or exposition about something—than the music itself gives us any reason to think that it is. In fact the younger generation circa 1750 might well have seen it as old-fashioned in a way that seemed to make it into something academic. C. P. E. Bach certainly seems to have revered his father. But he also lived surrounded by musical aesthetics that would have been foreign to his father. If J. S. Bach himself had meant to call this work something very different, say The Mysteries of Harmony or Grand Passacaglia in D Minor or The Strife of the Gods, would we see the piece differently? Would the tradition (quite weak now, but prevalent for many years) of thinking that this work was only suitable for study, not for performance, ever have formed?

We do not really know how much any child understands about the work or indeed the character of a parent. It is convenient to assume that what C. P. E. Bach says about J. S. Bach, or what he implied by engraving a certain title on a piece, is valid. No one would suggest that it be arbitrarily dismissed. But it is just not accurate or intellectually rigorous to assume that it is correct or that it could not be misleading. I know that when I myself try to understand the work or the intentions of anyone of an older generation whom I knew well, I am under very strong internally derived pressure to make the kind of narrative out of that story that I would like it to be or that I can in some way admire or relate to. I resist that, but I do not think that I can escape from it. A composer’s children and students belonged to a different generation from that composer and grew up with different artistic assumptions.

Talking about study

I have found myself slightly more inclined to look over The Art of the Fugue away from an instrument than I normally do with music that I am working on. All of the analytical work that I do with pieces is usually done at a keyboard, teasing out voices and actually playing them, looking at aspects of harmony, rhythm, melody, and so on, either while playing them or in a position to play on the spur of the moment any or all of what I am trying to analyze. Why am I spending time with my Art of the Fugue score in front of me at a table or seated in a comfy chair? I am not sure. Should I suspect myself of being subconsciously influenced by the age-old classification of the piece as one suitable for study? I do not quite think so. I believe it is two things: that I want or need to spend more time thinking about the piece than I can or should spend playing, and that I am just plain interested in it. I think that some of the time that I am spending reading The Art of the Fugue sitting in a chair is taking the place not of practicing it more, but of reading a novel or the newspaper! Needless to say, I am rethinking the ways I encourage my students to study away from the instrument!

Next month I will write more about the structure of The Art of the Fugue, in particular, the ways in which the overall shape makes sense even though the piece is incomplete and even though we are not certain about the order of the movements.

To be continued.

Stories and conversation

In mid-March, when I last sat down to write a column, the current health crisis was at a relatively early and very uncertain stage. I wrote that I hoped that by the time that column appeared in The Diapason things would be much better. I sit here writing now a week or two after that last column appeared, and this one will not be read for nearly another six weeks. It seems accurate to say that the situation remains dire and that the sense of uncertainty remains as high as it was then. While society is slowly starting to reopen, we will not know the effects of this action for quite some time. This very morning there are hopeful headlines about a vaccine, but we have no idea whether that hope will pan out or, if so, what sort of timeframe this will take.

I still cannot consider it prudent to schedule concerts. I wrote in my March column (written in mid-January) that I did not have any concerts scheduled at all, a first in nearly thirty-five years. I stated that that was “odd: simultaneously peaceful and eerie.” Today it feels more eerie than peaceful: the latter has been partially replaced by impatience and the fear that it will never seem right to schedule events. Looking back, as of a couple of weeks ago I have not played in public for over a year. That arises out of a chain of mostly unrelated circumstances: first I kept my schedule clear for several months so that I could practice for planned performances of J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue; then I had to deal with my shoulder surgery and recovery; then the current phase in the history of the world set in. The last time that I went more than a year without playing in public was prior to 1980. 

Over the last several weeks there has been a lot of discussion, much of it deeply anguished, about choirs and choral singing. This does not affect me directly at this point in my life except as a listener, though I know it is deeply affecting many of my friends and colleagues. In fact, it may be two years before widespread choral singing will be possible again. I hope very much that by the time you are reading this that hypothesis will have turned out to be overly pessimistic.

There is a lot of variation in how people react to this uncertainty when it comes to the parts of their lives and daily activities that are subject to discretion. Some colleagues are using their extra free time to learn new music or new skills—the technique required to work on new and unfamiliar repertoire or even a new instrument. Some are taking up new activities or hobbies—perhaps ones that they have always meant to pursue. So far, I have done none of the above. My reaction to the situation has been to put much of my motivation to tackling preexisting projects. I mentioned in my previous column that I needed “to take a deep breath.” At that point, early in this whole scenario, I felt that my students needed that as well, and that it was a good thing for all of us. Shortly after writing that, I did start to offer various forms of remote lessons or consultations to my students. However, I have not felt my own motivation returning, either to plunge back into practicing or to explore anything new. Most of what I have been doing has been “comfort food,” as we have been baking a fair amount of bread and cooking a bit more elaborately.

I am not certain why this is. It may be partly a direct reaction to the sadness and difficulty of what is happening. If so, it is not necessarily entirely a depressive reaction or a reaction of feeling indifferent. I suspect that in the face of so much tragedy right around me I am afraid that I will find the music that I might normally be playing too intense. That has been my reaction to the little bits of playing that I have done and also to much of the music that I have heard. Also, I have always had better practice habits when I have performances coming up. That impetus is gone for now. I do feel certain that the motivation will come back. But the main point is this: that any such reaction is okay. I am overjoyed that so many of my colleagues are, for example, posting videos of performances from their homes. That is generous and helpful. I have been an avid viewer and listener, and that is helping me get through certain days. However, I believe it is important that no one feels pressure to cope in ways that are unnatural. In general getting a lot done is more admired in society than not getting anything done. And I am confessing to embracing the latter, though just for now, and claiming that I am within my rights to do so. 

But if it is self-serving, it is not selfish since I hope very much to help persuade everyone to give themselves the same leeway, as much as they need. Doing the things that we have to do is enough as far as fulfilling obligations is concerned. 

At the same time, I have been thinking about counterpoint and The Art of the Fugue. It feels like the odd times in which we live are encouraging me to engage in ever more speculative thinking. Rather than indulging in the technical aspects of counterpoint, I have been pondering more about images and ideas around the concept of counterpoint. Ideally the images and ideas will inform the way that I think about the technicalities. 

One very powerful idea about counterpoint is that it is related to conversation. If two musical entities are engaged with one another, doing different things at the same time, it is natural for us to hear what is happening as analogous to human verbal conversation. This is not an idea of mine, but has been the subject of articles and books as well as informal discussion. It is intuitively convincing. When counterpoint is being produced by separate instruments the conversational aspect is enhanced by the visual and the conceptual: we see and are aware of a different source for each musical line, just as we see and are aware of each different speaker in a conversation. In vocal counterpoint, we see and hear something that is remarkably similar to conversation, down to the humanity of the sources of the sound and the expressions and gestures. At a keyboard instrument the conversational aspect is something that presumably arises solely from the sound. Visually, and often spatially, everything comes from pretty much the same place. The extent to which it is up to the performer and to performance choices to make the conversational aspect of the music convincing is not necessarily very different from the parallel concerns with ensemble counterpoint.

For the performer, one of the great strengths of conceptualizing counterpoint as conversation is that it brings home the need to make each line in and of itself an effective piece of communication—something that has “meaning” though not dictionary or visual-image based meaning. At a minimum this is psychologically helpful, even inspiring, for many performers. For me it serves as a reminder to behave as if every note matters. In conversation every word matters, in that it can be heard by someone and may affect that person. That does not mean that every word is serious, solemn, or weighty. Some are funny, light-hearted, rhetorical rather than meaning-laden. But they are all there and all have an effect.

I have a few caveats about counterpoint as conversation. For one thing, it seems important to me to remember that, as I just mentioned, music in itself does not have dictionary meaning, semantic, idea-based meaning, and that it does not mean anything that can be encapsulated in a visual image. It is liberating and powerful to accept that Example 1 means exactly what it says and nothing else. This freedom from word-like meaning gives a line of music the ability to do things that words cannot do and the flexibility to be used in ways that words are not used. 

Related to that is the first major difference between verbal conversation and musical contrapuntal conversation. In the latter, we not only allow but expect material to be used multiple times. Although the essence of counterpoint is found in two different things happening at the same time, it is habitual for identical or similar things to happen at different times. This can be recurrence, repetition, echoing, answering, returning, and so on. But all of these techniques play a minor role in anything like normal conversation and a limited though sometimes important role in poetry, drama, and literary narrative. They are pervasive and important in music.

In verbal conversation, we do not expect many voices to be sounding at the same time. We expect them to take turns and occasionally overlap, which is fascinating in verbal conversation. Sometimes, it functions to create continuity and an overall arc. At times it is an interruption, which can be a sign of enthusiasm and can constitute rudeness. It is common and normal for interruption to take the form of one person’s finishing another’s thought—not necessarily in the way that the first speaker would have finished it. It is not normal for two or more people simply to talk steadily at the same time as one another for a substantial amount of time. This would cease to be conversation. But it is the norm for musical contrapuntal conversation. 

With words, we do not expect to be able to follow even two let alone three or more lines of thought at the same time. With counterpoint, that is exactly what we expect to do: it is a major concept of the exercise. It is not necessarily easy, and it is not necessarily something at which we always fully succeed. It is almost certainly both common and unproblematic for some of that following to be subconscious or subliminal. People differ in the extent to which they are consciously, specifically aware of following and really parsing the separate lines of counterpoint as it goes by. And, of course, different performances of the same piece or passage can seem to make it easier or harder to follow in that way. (And interestingly different performances can seem different in that respect to different listeners.) I think that it is a pitfall of the counterpoint-as-conversation idea that it can tempt us to try to make the analogy fit even more closely than it naturally does. This might involve downplaying the significance of the simultaneity of lines or even denying that following multiple lines at once is possible. I have heard people suggest that the way we listen to counterpoint should fundamentally involve switching focus from one line to another, as we would presumably have to do if we were trying to listen to two or more people talk at the very same time. 

Questions of how many lines we can listen to simultaneously are complex. Does it vary from one person to another? If so, is that somehow intrinsic—or of life-long standing—or does it arise specifically from music-based training? Can almost everyone follow two voices? Can anyone really follow six? eight? forty? Do people mainly listen to or notice the beginnings of notes, or are the sustained portions of notes important as well? In counterpoint is one line ever more “important” than another, and, if so, what does that mean and what should a performer do about it? Whatever these questions are, I believe it is important not to let the speech analogy influence our answers to them, or how we frame them, more than it should.

Another concern about the conversation analogy is that musical conversational counterpoint is mostly experienced by listeners, whereas verbal conversation is fundamentally experienced by those who participate in it. We who love counterpoint love playing it. It is interesting to contemplate how much we function as listeners while we play and how much of our experience is the pure experience of playing. But the vast majority of music listening is done by listeners. Listening to a spoken conversation in which you have no part happens and is perfectly normal, but not the most usual or common.

The completely different model of counterpoint that has come to interest or even preoccupy me over the last few years is one that is harder to encapsulate in words: counterpoint in music is a model for the whole phenomenon of the existence of the universe. This model was suggested to me by some of my experience as a theater attendee.

Over the last several years I have attended quite a few theater events that are organized in what amounts to contrapuntal layers: different parts of the story going on in different or overlapping spaces, perhaps threads sometimes coming together in one space or passing near one another, sometimes remaining separate. Together they all add up to the complete story. Some such pieces that I have experienced are Sleep No More, Then She Fell, The Grand Paradise, Ghost Light, Here, Seeing You, and versions of Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

I was initially puzzled by why I found this sort of story-telling so powerful. Events of this sort seem very much like closed worlds: nothing from the outside gets in or interferes. This helps the audience to concentrate and stay committed. It also means that the world built up inside the walls of the event has the chance to feel complete—it is temporarily defined as being all that there is, and it is structured according to its own content.

I realized after a while that the structure always felt, through a number of different styles and each time with a different story, like an analogy to the “real” world: layered and complex enough for that analogy to seem valid and emotionally convincing. 

At some point I realized that the experience of being at this sort of show reminded me strongly of closing my eyes and becoming totally absorbed in a piece of contrapuntal music. In such a piece of music there might be only three or four component lines; in a show such as the ones that I am talking about there might be any number of component storylines weaving their ways around one another. In the universe as a whole there are infinite numbers. But the analogy still seems to hold.

This image neither contradicts nor directly complements the conversation analogy. It is simply another angle and one that I along with some of my students have found particularly interesting and powerful.

It is my intention—uncertainties aside, for the moment—to return next month to some nitty-gritty motivic analysis of The Art of the Fugue, not without some speculation about the role of memory in creating structure.

Orgues Létourneau, St-Hyacinthe, Québec, Canada:

A new chapter begins

This isn’t the article we had intended to publish in this issue of The Diapason. As with so many other things this year, the completion of a pipe organ we had anticipated sharing here has been delayed by complications arising from the coronavirus pandemic. We will provide details about our 75-rank instrument for First United Methodist Church in Lubbock, Texas—the rendering of which is featured on the cover—in a later issue.

Nonetheless, we felt this is an opportunity to detail some of the recent changes at Orgues Létourneau. The news of Fernand Létourneau selling the company last November to Dr. Dudley Oakes was publicized widely but was necessarily brief. 2019 was Orgues Létourneau’s fortieth year of continuous operation. Over this time, the company has built over 140 new pipe organs around the world and has rebuilt or restored countless others.

The sale of an organbuilding enterprise is delicate, as is surely the case with any business providing personalized products that are evaluated subjectively. This sense of risk is heightened in our unique industry, thanks to some well-known collapses, even if they were decades ago. Then again, there are examples of well-planned and orderly ownership changes, including the recent transition at Dobson Pipe Organ Builders. Any success-fail probability equation would involve changes in the quality of the product post-sale, the circumstances of the sale, the actors involved, the overall economic climate, and broader trends in the pipe organ world. The role of simple luck can’t be overlooked either.

Despite the global uncertainty at present, we are thankful that our organ building team at Létourneau will be busy well into the future. The aforementioned instrument for First United Methodist Church, Lubbock, will be followed later this year by a 36-rank instrument for Alumni Chapel of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. The Aeolian-Skinner/M. P. Möller pipe organ from Market Square Presbyterian Church of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is currently in our workshops where we are hard at work transforming it into our Opus 136 (IV/83). Létourneau’s Opus 127 from St. Mark’s School of Dallas, Texas, has also returned to our workshops; this 61-rank instrument suffered considerably last fall when a tornado tore through the school’s North Dallas neighborhood. We will be comprehensively rebuilding the organ, including a new case and console. There are a number of other exciting projects we look forward to sharing with you in due course, including a major concert hall instrument.

In the meantime, we trust you’ll enjoy the following conversation with Fernand Létourneau about his early days and an introduction to company’s revamped management team. We finish with a preview of what’s ahead from Létourneau’s new president, Dudley Oakes.

—Andrew Forrest

A conversation with Fernand Létourneau

Fernand Létourneau began his organbuilding career at Casavant Frères in 1965. He worked briefly in nearly every department, but his excellent ear—honed as a trumpeter in a local band—led him to the voicing department where he apprenticed under Paul Proulx. Proulx was known internally as Larry Phelps’s protégé, showing unusual finesse voicing flue pipes with open toes and unnicked languids. Fernand also learned reed voicing from his uncle, Jean-Paul Létourneau, who was regarded as the company’s finest reed voicer for much of the twentieth century. Having the benefit of two exceptional instructors, Fernand was soon a skilled voicer for both flue and reed pipes. This versatility kept him on the road as a tonal finisher, and by the end of the Phelps era he was the company’s top trouble-shooter.

Gerhard Brunzema came to Québec from Germany as Phelps’s successor in 1972. Fernand credits Brunzema for having taught him a great deal, especially in the area of mechanical key actions. Brunzema soon invited Fernand to serve as assistant tonal director, a role that drew Fernand into the company’s most prestigious projects and allowed him to continue as the company’s top problem solver.

Events over the next few years, however, caused Fernand to realize that further advancement at Casavant was unlikely. He pondered starting his own company, but more immediately, he planned a study trip to Europe with Brunzema’s tacit support. Fernand was successful in obtaining a grant from the Canadian Council of the Arts of $2,700 CAN in 1978 for the study trip, and consequently, Fernand resigned from Casavant. Soon after, he was on his way to Europe to study the voicing techniques in unaltered historic instruments.

While he mentions the Schnitger organ of Alkmaar and the Müller organ of the St-Bavo Church in Haarlem, Fernand singles out the 1790 Clicquot organ at the Cathedral in Poitiers as the one that perhaps impressed him the most. Here, he met Jean-Albert Villard, the titular organist, whom he remembers as being extremely kind. After introducing themselves, Fernand recalled the two men went into the instrument, and after a few minutes of Fernand looking closely at the pipework—but being extremely careful not to touch anything—Villard looked at him and exclaimed impatiently, “Well, come on then, pick up the pipes!” As Fernand recounts the story with a laugh, “Needless to say, he didn’t have to say it twice!” The two men stayed in touch, with Villard writing a letter to Fernand the following year with the question, “Aren’t you a little young to start out as an organbuilder?”

Tender age of 34 notwithstanding, Fernand Létourneau launched Orgues Létourneau in January of 1979 from his home in Ste-Rosalie, Québec. He continued to take on freelance voicing contracts but was soon invited to put forward a bid for a practice organ at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Hull (now Gatineau). It turned out to be the company’s very first instrument, with Fernand recalling the director, Monsieur Aimé Lainesse, asking him, “Have you ever built an organ?”

“No, this will be my first,” replied Fernand with some trepidation.

“Oh yes? Well, if no one gives you a chance to build your first instrument, you will never build your second. Monsieur Létourneau, I will give you that chance, you will build your first instrument.”

The next three Létourneau instruments went “down under,” thanks to Fernand’s work on a Pogson pipe organ at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music prior to the construction of Opus 1. Fernand’s revoicing of this instrument won the acclaim of the late Australian organist David Rumsey, who then enthusiastically supported Fernand’s proposals for St. Alban’s Church in Epping (Opus 2), for the residence of Dr. Neil Cameron of Sydney (Opus 3), and for the Sydney Church of England Girls’ Grammar School in Darlinghurst (Opus 4).

Each of these instruments was built in Fernand’s basement with another former Casavant employee, the cabinetmaker Noël Bilodeau. Also assisting were Yvan Blouin and Sylvain Létourneau, both of whom are still with Létourneau today. Fernand smiles when describing the unremarkable tools they used in those days, though he notes that he allowed himself one new woodworking machine with each new contract.

Fernand also highlights the importance of a publicist and supporter, Maurice Roy, in those early years, who wanted Fernand to advertise his skills. Fernand was reluctant, telling Maurice advertising was expensive and it wasn’t worth it. Maurice ultimately carried the day, arguing, “Come on, Fernand! If you’re excellent but you’re the only one who knows it, that’s not worth five cents!” Indeed, Maurice Roy was unflagging as a publicist for the company and its work, from those early days through the late 1990s when his health began to fail.

While he had initially planned to build a workshop on the land behind his home, Fernand decided in 1983 to buy a building at a bargain price from the City of Saint-Hyacinthe. The building, the company’s headquarters to this day on rue Savoie, was a redundant water treatment facility. With its multiple levels and 18-inch-thick concrete walls, Fernand notes its transformation into a workshop for organbuilding cost over four times its purchase price.

As the conversation nears its close, Fernand looks back and acknowledges he had something to prove in starting his own company, that he wanted to create something remarkable. He remains surprised nonetheless at the extent of his success, “If someone had told me forty years ago that the company would be what it is today, I wouldn’t have believed them.” He also notes how far the team of organbuilders currently at Létourneau has come: “I am proud that many at Létourneau today are really specialists in their fields. Some of our people today are among the best I have ever worked with.”

Asked what advice he might offer his successor Dudley Oakes, his closing thoughts are in a similar vein: “I have great faith in Dudley and in the company going into the future. Dudley takes care of his customers, and I am delighted he wanted to step up and guide the company through its next chapter. I would tell Dudley to trust his team; you can’t do it all, and they want to keep you happy, they won’t let you down.”

The preceding text is an edited transcription of a conversation that took place in French between Fernand Létourneau and Andrew Forrest at the Létourneau home on July 20, 2020. 

A look ahead from the president

I have always been fascinated with the pipe organ. At the age of six, I begged my parents to allow me to play the organ but had to follow the usual course of studying piano all through elementary and secondary school. Eventually, the time came when I had sufficient piano background to have a seat at the organ console of Trinity United Methodist Church in Richmond, Virginia. I will never forget the sheer excitement; it was an electronic organ, but little did this kid care!

I later had the opportunity to visit Second Presbyterian Church in downtown Richmond, where a high school friend was a member. There I experienced a three-manual pipe organ that produced some of the most amazing sounds I had ever heard. I graduated from high school in 1973 able to play all of the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues by Bach (or whomever wrote them). Ignoring the objections of my business-oriented father, I proceeded to earn a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Richmond and followed this immediately by immersing myself in the organ program of the University of Michigan.

At Michigan, it was magical. I was flooded with all the goodness imaginable by four competent, compelling, and selfless teachers for whom a student’s progress was their raison d’être. I learned about the organ, about music, and about life. I was primed for a lifetime ahead as a musician by the likes of Robert Clark, Marilyn Mason, James Kibbie, and Robert Glasgow. I also had the opportunity to compete for le Grand Prix de Chartres twice, and while I didn’t win, the value of those experiences far outweighs any disappointment.

My love for the organ has always gone beyond playing it; I am fascinated by the variety of sounds available and the manner in which sound is made. I have an innate love for objects of beauty and integrity that extends well beyond pipe organs. Such objects typically include gorgeous woods, beautiful metals, exquisite craftsmanship, a keen eye for detail, or are simply of the highest order because of their perfect execution. The pipe organ just happens to combine all these things to create a world that I adore.

I joined with Létourneau in 1987 when I had finished my Doctor of Musical Arts at the University of Michigan. Fernand Létourneau was looking for an organist to represent him in the United States; his staff at Létourneau at that time was technically superb but only a few were musicians. In my student days, I was one of sixty organ students divided between three studios, and while U of M was one of the bigger schools, there were others as well. Organists like me were being trained and educated across North America, so it seemed clear there would be a need for better instruments in time.

In those early days, I was doing church music ministry, teaching music at a college, and representing Fernand’s company. I was also the only native English speaker at Létourneau, so I inevitably worked on the company’s documents for English-speaking clients, whether it was my project or not! In this way, I found myself in the middle of projects with
H. M. The Tower of London, St. Andrew’s Anglican Cathedral (Sydney, Australia), and Pembroke College (The University of Oxford) among others. This was a great vantage point from which to learn about the instrument and the company’s approach to organbuilding.

The company’s profile in the United States grew quickly in the early 1990s, and I enjoyed my work; I loved telling people that I was the luckiest person alive. I was able to play the organ, to teach students, and to work in organbuilding almost every day. Really, who could ask for more? Over the past three decades with Létourneau, I have seen joy countless times on the faces of congregants when they hear their new instrument for the first time. I have heard stunning recitals on our pipe organs by renowned artists. I have heard the extraordinary choir in the chapel of Selwyn College at the University of Cambridge accompanied by our Opus 95. In many cases, I have performed concerts on these same instruments. The one constant through all these experiences has been that our lives are all immeasurably richer because of the beauty that these pipe organs provide.

One of the great successes I have observed within the Létourneau company over three decades is the talented and experienced group of artisans that work for the company today. This team is a tremendous source of encouragement to me. Fernand understood that a strong team would lead to repeated successes, so he set out to surround himself with talented and hard-working individuals. With the team I have inherited and some strategic additions coming in the future, we are poised to realize some thrilling organ projects in a climate that demands our best mechanically and musically. It is reassuring to receive inquiries from around the world and to know that Létourneau is truly equipped, as one of the finest shops in North America, to respond to a variety of challenges.

I can predict the next three years or so as much of that time is already committed to some exciting projects. We know we will be going “all out” to satisfy clients in Texas, Utah, Michigan, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, Ontario, Tennessee, and Alabama. I am confident that other contracts will come forward as well, but I expect the needs of our clients will influence where we go and what we do over the medium term and beyond.

Why did I buy the Létourneau company? That’s easy; it was because I love what we do. Fernand built the company for forty years, but we’re also friends, I knew he wanted to retire. I have never known a harder working man, and he has earned the right to step back and enjoy his golden years. With my experience and knowledge of the company, it is an honor to step in and take the company in some exciting new directions. In fact, Fernand set a standard decades ago when he remarked that each Létourneau organ should somehow be better than the last one. It is a noble idea and one we will continue to follow as long as I own the company.

In terms of changes since I took over, we’re working hard to perfect what we already do, to keep making our instruments and our team better and better. Our relationships, from initial meetings through installation and tonal finishing through the organ’s dedication, are crucial to our success. Our instruments need to reflect our best work, whether that work comes from our hands, our minds, or our hearts. We love what we do and we want those who experience our instruments to feel that too.

More broadly, the pipe organ industry will endure ups and downs, but I am certain organbuilding will always have a place in the world. So long as there are people who play the organ musically, there will always be the need for our instruments.

In the end, superb pipe organs are our goal. One question I always ask when talking about our pipe organs has nothing to do with the number of pipes or ranks. Rather, what I want to know is, “Is it musical?” This renewed pursuit of musicality is, I feel, the best way to honor Fernand Létourneau’s legacy going forward.

—Dudley Oakes

Builder’s website: http://letourneauorgans.com/

Dudley Oakes has served as a liaison for over thirty years between the company and hundreds of clients throughout the United States. Having purchased the company in November 2019, Dr. Oakes is currently dividing his time between the company’s workshop in Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec, and his home in Winchester, Virginia. He received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Michigan in 1987 and has subsequently held positions at several prestigious churches across the United States. A distinguished concert organist and teacher, Dr. Oakes has lectured and played recitals across North America as well as in Italy, France, Germany, England, and Russia.

Andrew Forrest began his organbuilding career with Létourneau in February 1999, was named Artistic Director in 2008, and was appointed Vice President of the company in 2019. He oversees the company with a focus on individual projects, including meeting with clients, preparing proposals, setting artistic benchmarks, and directing tonal finishing. An organist himself, Mr. Forrest’s interests include the art of pipe scaling, mixture compositions, reed shallots, and other details that go into tone production. He was elected President of the Associated Pipe Organ Builders of America (APOBA) in May 2020. Mr. Forrest holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Carleton University.

Georges Trépanier holds diplomas in administration and international commerce from Montréal’s prestigious HEC business school. After overseeing the company’s accounting for over a decade, he was named General Manager in March 2015. In this role, Mr. Trépanier ably manages the company’s financial affairs as well as relations with the various levels of government. As a boy, he studied piano for seven years, which translated into his interest in organbuilding. Over the years, Mr. Trépanier has participated in several pipe organ installations across the United States and Australia.

Dany Nault began his organbuilding career at Létourneau casting pipe metal at the age of 18. He rose quickly to the position of chief pipe maker and oversaw the production of hundreds of ranks of pipes over a twelve-year period. Mr. Nault decided in 2013 to study industrial engineering on a full-time basis, and upon completing the program, he worked as a technician and later manager in the manufacturing sector. In February 2020, Mr. Nault returned to Létourneau as Director of Production. His responsibilities in this role include overseeing production schedules, enhancing productivity, developing departmental quality improvement plans, and raising safety standards.

Létourneau’s goal with visual proposals is to offer a realistic sense of how an instrument will look once installed. As Artistic Designer, Claude Demers is the creative mind behind each instrument’s visual concept, designing each organ case in AutoCAD and overseeing its transformation into a three-dimensional illustration. He holds a diploma in architecture as well as a certificate in electronics. Mr. Demers is an accomplished wood carver, having sculpted the wood carvings on many of the company’s instruments over the years. He has been with the company since 1988.

François Carrier began at Létourneau in 1989 after training as a cabinetmaker. Over the years, he gained experience throughout the company working as a cabinetmaker, wood finisher, voicing assistant, installer, and windchest builder, serving as head of this last department for a decade. His interest in design led him to complete several intensive courses in architectural drafting and AutoCAD; he was promoted to the position of Technical Designer in 2008. Working closely with Mr. Demers and Mr. Forrest, Mr. Carrier translates the initial designs for each instrument into completed production drawings to enable construction in our workshops.

Photo: Fernand Létourneau and Dudley Oakes sign paperwork marking the sale of Orgues Létourneau in the company’s 40th year (photo credit: Orgues Létourneau)