Wilbur Held dead at 100

Henry S. Fusner, Nashville resident from 1970 to 2015, died February 2. He was 91. Born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, in 1923, Fusner grew up in New Jersey, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Juilliard School and a doctorate from the School of Sacred Music of Union Theological Seminary. His teachers included Gaston M. Dethier in organ and piano, Peter Wilhousky in conducting, Vittorio Gianini and Normand Lockwood in composition, and Clarence Dickinson in organ study.

Dr. Fusner held church positions in the New York City area, including the Church of St. Edward the Martyr in Manhattan and Emmanuel Baptist Church, Brooklyn. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1956 to be organist and choirmaster at the Church of the Covenant and teacher of organ and church music at the Cleveland Institute of Music. In 1970, he moved to Nashville to assume a similar position at First Presbyterian Church and as a teacher at the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University. Henry S. Fusner is survived by his niece, Dr. June Fusner Leyland (Gary), and nephews George R. Fusner, Jr. (Myra), and Neal Henry Fusner (Annaliesa).

Wilbur Held, 100, died March 24 in Claremont, California, a few months shy of his 101st birthday. Born August 20, 1914, in Des Plaines, Illinois, Held was an accomplished organist best known for his prolific compositions of sacred music in many forms. (See Larry Palmer’s article, “Celebrating Wilbur Held,” in our August 2014 issue, page 25.) In this issue, Nancy M. Raabe provides a remembrance on page 26. 

Paul Jordan, 75, organist, composer, and former professor of music, died March 1. He was born in New York to Dr. Henry P. Jordan, a German diplomat who took refuge in the U.S. to avoid serving the Nazi regime, and Irene Brandt Jordan, linguist and physical educator; the family lived in Germany from 1952–55 upon Jordan’s father’s reinstatement in the German diplomatic service. Jordan attended Harvard University and Columbia University, and received graduate degrees from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Frankfurt am Main (where he studied under Helmut Walcha), the Yale School of Music, and the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago (DMA). Jordan was organist and music director at the United Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut, and starting in 1973, a professor of music at Binghamton University (SUNY), New York for 20 years, where he taught organ, harpsichord, recorder, directed the Collegium Musicum, conducted the University Orchestra, and coached singers on German pronunciation. He also designed the organs in the United Church on the Green and Binghamton University, Anderson Center for the Performing Arts. 

In his early career, among the first generation of musicians in America involved in the revival of early music, Jordan played recorder in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 with the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein. He also performed extensively on recorder with New York Trio da Camera (Grace Feldman, viola da gamba, Edward Brewer, harpsichord), and sang under Noah Greenberg.

As an organist, he performed at churches, cathedrals, and such halls as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. Known as a Bach specialist, Jordan also studied the works of Dieterich Buxtehude, whose works would influence J. S. Bach himself; he conducted a series of concerts in 2007 (the 300th anniversary of Buxtehude’s death) called “The Buxtehude Project.” 

As a composer and arranger, Jordan wrote many endings to J. S. Bach’s unfinished masterpiece, The Art of the Fugue. He was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to commit the work to memory, and recorded the piece with his own ending (www.brioso.com/covers/BR128.htm).

Jordan published articles in magazines such as The American Recorder as well as a three-part article on Helmut Walcha, in celebration of Walcha’s 100th birthday, in The Diapason (October, November, and December 2007 issues); in the Peters Edition, Vol. II of Helmut Walcha’s Chorale Preludes, Jordan supplied the official translation of Walcha’s Notes on Interpretation. Beyond the realm of classical music, Paul Jordan was also passionate about more modern artists and works. He often played and promoted the music of Moondog, a renowned blind street musician and recording artist. In addition to his position at the United Church on the Green in New Haven, Jordan served as organist and music director in several Connecticut churches, including the First Congregational Church of Guilford, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Madison, and the First Church of Christ, Scientist, Westport. 

Paul Jordan is survived by his wife, Xilin Jordan, son, Libai, and brother, Don F. Jordan. Paul Jordan will be laid to rest in the family grave in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. A celebration of his life will be held on Sunday, June 7, 3:00 p.m., at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Killingworth, Connecticut. In lieu of flowers, please send contributions to http://www.tibetfund.org.

(See Gavin Black’s tribute to Paul Jordan on pages 18–19 of this issue.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nancy M. Raabe is an associate in ministry at Luther Memorial Church, Madison, Wisconsin, and an author, worship leader, and composer of church music.

Wilbur Held, composer, teacher, and servant “gentle and humble in heart” (Matthew 11:29), died on March 24, 2015, in Claremont, California, a few months shy of his 101st birthday. A deeply thoughtful and meticulous musician, Held crafted elegant preludes, postludes, and hymn settings that remain central to the repertoire of church organists around the globe. Substantial yet accessible, his music reveals the truths of Scripture in the shape of a line, the content of a progression, the evolution of an idea across a work, and in the attitude of humility they embody. His musical language reaches back through the centuries and brings those influences to bear in a style that is distinctively of our time. 

Published mostly in seasonal or themed collections, Held’s music is also widely popular for its appeal to beginning- to intermediate-level players. “Wilbur Held makes organists of even moderate ability sound good,” an admirer recently noted. “And he also turns even garden-variety hymn tunes into great musical settings.” 

Held’s first collection, the still-popular Nativity Suite, was conceived for his students at the Ohio State University as a colorful alternative to the dreary exercises in common organ methods of the day. “I thought of these kids going back to the farm at Christmas time,” he once said, “and Dad takes them over to the church and says, ‘And what will you play?’ ‘Well, how about page 34 in the Gleason book?’” 

Students and colleagues urged him to submit the collection for publication, and to his surprise it was accepted. This led to a demand for more, and his catalogue grew rapidly over the next half-century. His final collection, New Every Morning, was released in 2014 by his longtime publisher, MorningStar Music Publishers.

Held’s final composition is a prelude on Old Hundredth for the Concordia Hymn Prelude Library’s Volume 8 (forthcoming in December), an assignment that proved to be particularly challenging. “My chief headache these days is Old Hundredth,” he wrote in a July 2014 letter, as plans for his 100th birthday party the following month were in full swing. (He did not recognize the coincidence of the assignment and his approaching milestone until that was pointed out.) “I thought I had a pretty good first page, but then a blank brain after that and lots thrown away. Finally I came up with a pattern that saved me.” 

Held has said that the gestation of every piece starts with an idea. “I’ll take the hymn and look for distinctive lines in the melody that could be worked into some kind of sequence that would indicate the piece,” he said. “Often there’s a phrase that repeats itself, or maybe it’s just the starting phrase that is distinctive. As the piece develops you can kind of railroad in that starting phrase or sequence.” Held has always been deferential about his music, even with all the success it has enjoyed. “I hope there’s something kind of original about what I’ve done,” he reflected two years ago. “But I don’t think I have much of a claim, really, for originality. Everybody’s done what I’ve done. It’s more a matter of emphasis than originality.” Typical was his response to praise for “When Morning Gilds the Skies” in New Every Morning: “Well, it has some good measures.” 

Wilbur Held was born on August 20, 1914, in Des Plaines, Illinois. He studied piano as a youngster and became serious about the organ in high school, going on to attend the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago where he studied organ and began to develop his compositional voice. 

A conscientious objector, Held spent the final years of World War II cooking food without vitamins for a path-breaking project on nutrition now known as the Minnesota Semi-Starvation Experiment. Its findings were later published as The Biology of Human Starvation. 

In 1946 Held was named professor of organ at the Ohio State University for what became a 30-year tenure. His organ studio grew quickly. Former students recall him as detailed and thorough, patient and kind. Hospitality was the order of the day as Held and his wife, artist Virginia Held, frequently hosted students in their gracious home. 

After years of summer study in liturgy and hymnology at Union Theological Seminary, Held was able to significantly expand the church music program at OSU. Sadly, both the organ and church music degrees were phased out after his retirement. 

The Helds then moved to Southern California. In 1997, following Virginia’s death, Wilbur moved into the Claremont Manor, a retirement community in that college town. He was beloved by all for his warmth and his delightful sense of humor. A few years ago the list of his “Responses” once again made the rounds. They include: “Preferred: Aye, aye; Nay, nay; Well, well (not Biblical). Acceptable: Piffle, Pshaw, Heavens above, Goodness gracious. Questionable: Fiddlesticks, Shoot, Holy Moses (Moley Hoses is not quite so bad). Absolutely forbidden: Gosh, Darn, Heck, What the Devil, Holy Smoke, Ye gods (better with ‘and Little Fishes’).”

Visitors to Held’s apartment were often regaled with stories about his extensive collection of Southern California Caliente pottery, crafted in the 1930s and 1940s and distinguished by warm glazes and flowing lines. The line had fallen into obscurity at the time Wilbur and Virginia stumbled upon it. They were captivated and eventually devised an intricate cataloguing system for their ever-growing trove. With extensive annotations, the catalogue was published as Collectable Caliente Pottery in 1987 with an updated edition in 1997. Through their efforts the couple’s painstaking work restored public awareness to this important part of California’s artistic heritage. 

A few years before Held moved in, the Claremont Manor had acquired a Rodgers organ for its main gathering space. In a letter last year to Manor executives urging much-needed renovation, Held included the poignant note that “the presence of this instrument has been an important factor in my happiness at the Manor.” Privately, the organ allowed Held to put the finishing touches on pieces first drafted on his digital piano. Publicly, he was at the organ for Wednesday Vespers services nearly every Wednesday and gave periodic recitals, including one to mark his 95th birthday. But most importantly for that aging community, Held played for virtually all memorial services, most recently in February. 

There is a familiar saying around the Manor that has long rung true: “First you go to the hospital, then you go to the Care Center, and then Wilbur gets you.” Now, who gets Wilbur? None other than our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God for the long and fruitful life of Wilbur Held, and for a musical legacy that will endure.

The 2012 inaugural meeting of the new Historical Keyboard Society of North America (HKSNA), formed by the merger of the Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society (SEHKS, founded 1980) and its slightly younger sibling, the Midwestern Historical Keyboard Society (MHKS, organized 1984), was an historic event in itself. The late March gathering in Cincinnati included both the seventh iteration of the Jurow Harpsichord Playing Competition and the eighth occurrence of the International Aliénor Composition Competition, plus scores of scholarly presentations and short recitals, loosely organized into ten sessions, each with a general connecting theme.  

For my contribution to Session Seven (The Old Made New) I attempted to craft a title enigmatic enough that it might pique the curiosity of a few potential auditors, but with the higher goal of providing information about some of the earliest and relatively obscure “new” compositions for harpsichord from the early 20th-century. I hoped, as well, to underscore, at least by implication, the major stimulus for a continuing creation of new repertoire that has been provided by the Aliénor’s prizes, performances, and publications since its inception in 1980. 

Woodhouse plays Cecil Sharp

As early as July 1920, Violet Gordon Woodhouse, the most prominent and gifted of early 20th-century British harpsichordists, recorded three of folksong collector Cecil Sharp’s Country Dance Tunes. Thus Sharp’s 1911 piano versions of the tunes Newcastle, Heddon of Fawsley, and Step Back serve as the earliest “contemporary” music for harpsichord committed to disc.¹

These were followed, in 1922, by recorded performances of two more Cecil Sharp transcriptions, Bryhton Camp and the evocatively titled Gathering Peascods.² While the 1920 recordings were already available in digital format, courtesy of Pearl Records’ Violet Gordon Woodhouse compact disc,³ I had never heard the 1922 offerings. Peter Adamson, an avid collector of these earliest discs, assured me that he could provide the eponymous work listed in the title of this article. Both of us were surprised to find that Gathering Peascods was never issued in the United Kingdom, but Peter was able to send me some superior dubs from the original 1920 discs, as well as a few seconds of authentic 78-rpm needle scratching. Combining this acoustic noise with Sharp’s keyboard arrangement, quickly located online via Google search, made possible the restoration of Peascods to the roster of earliest recorded “contemporary” harpsichord literature. It is equally charming, though perhaps less historically informed, when performed without the ambient sound track. 

Thomé

New harpsichord music composed for the earliest Revival harpsichords⁴ actually predates any recording of the instrument: Francis Thomé’s Rigodon, opus 97, a pièce de claveçin, was written for the fleet-fingered French pianist Louis Diémer, and published in Paris by Henry Lemoine and Company in 1892.⁵

The first 20th-century harpsichord piece?

There are currently two contenders for “first place” in the 20th-century modern harpsichord composition sweepstakes. The first may be Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s English Suite, originally committed to paper in 1909 during his student years in Florence, then recreated in 1939 shortly after the Italian composer’s immigration to the United States. That version, sent to prominent harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick in 1940, seems to have been ignored by the artist, but it was ultimately published by Mills Music in New York in 1962.⁶

A second contender (dare we call it a “co-first”?), which is, thus far, the earliest published 20th-century harpsichord work, is Henri Mulet’s tender and charming miniature Petit Lied. Mulet is most often remembered, if at all, for his ten Byzantine Sketches for Organ, a set that ends with the sometimes-popular toccata Tu es Petrus (Thou art the rock). Comprising a brief seventeen measures, Mulet’s “Little Song” is dedicated to fellow organist Albert Périlhou, who was characterized by his more famous contemporary Louis Vierne, as “a composer of the 18th century.” So perhaps this delicate, nostalgic work, published in 1910 “pour claveçin [ou piano]” was intended to pay homage to Périlhou’s antiquarian tendencies.⁷

Busoni

1916 saw the publication of Ferruccio Busoni’s 1915 Sonatina ad usum infantis Madeline M.* Americanae pro Clavicimbalo composita⁸—a strange, but ultimately satisfying keyboard work that, with some imaginative editing, is playable on a two-manual harpsichord, which one assumes the composer did, since he was also the proud owner of such a 1911 Dolmetsch-Chickering instrument.⁹   

Delius

Often described as “unplayable,” the very original Dance for Harpsichord (for piano) by Frederick Delius came into being in 1919, inspired by the artistry of Violet Gordon Woodhouse. Kirkpatrick included it in a unique program of 20th-century harpsichord music presented at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961¹⁰ and Igor Kipnis recorded it in 1976.¹¹ I have occasionally enjoyed playing Delius’s purple-plush harmonies in a shortened version arranged by Baltimore harpsichordist Joseph Stephens. Each time I play the work I find fewer notes to be necessary, and decide to omit more and more of them, often an approach that best serves these piano-centric harpsichord refugees from the early Revival years. Since Delius surely ranks among the better-known composers who attempted to write anything at all for the harpsichord, it seems worth the effort to forge an individual version that serves to bring this quite lovely piece to the public.

Grainger

Inspired by the recent anniversary year (2011) of the beloved eccentric Percy Grainger (he died in 1961), it seemed fitting to rework another of my own arrangements, that of his “Room-Music Tit-Bits,” the clog dance Handel in the Strand, particularly after coming across Grainger’s own mention of the harpsichord’s influence on his compositional career. In a letter to the pianist Harold Bauer, Grainger wrote:

. . . the music [of my] Kipling Settings . . . [is] an outcome of the influence emanating from the vocal-solo numbers-with-accompaniment-of-solo-instruments in Bach’s Matthew-Passion, as I heard it when a boy of 12, 13, or 14 in Frankfurt. These sounds (two flutes and harpsichord . . .) sounded so exquisite to my ears . . . that I became convinced that larger chamber music (from 8-25 performers) was, for me, an ideal background for single voices . . .¹²    

So why not present Grainger’s Handelian romp edited for one player, ten fingers, and two manuals? Grainger’s own arrangement (“dished-up for piano solo, March 25, 1930, [in] Denton, Texas” according to the composer’s annotation in the printed score) provides a good starting place.¹³

Persichetti and Powell

Two major solo works from the 1950s composed for the harpsichordist Fernando Valenti deserve more performances than they currently receive: Vincent Persichetti’s Sonata for Harpsichord (now known as that prolific composer’s Sonata No. One), still, to my ears, his most pleasing work for our instrument, and Mel Powell’s Recitative and Toccata Percossa—another wonderful work included on Kirkpatrick’s contemporary music disc.¹⁴

Duke Ellington

For aficionados of jazz, the 44 measures of Duke Ellington’s A Single Petal of a Rose comprise three manuscript pages now housed in the Paul Sacher Foundation (Basel, Switzerland), available only as a facsimile in Ule Troxler’s invaluable volume documenting the many commissions bestowed on contemporary composers by the wealthy Swiss harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer.¹⁵ About Ellington’s unique work, Mme. Vischer wrote to the composer late in 1965: 

Just on Christmas Eve I received your marvelous piece . . . I am very happy about your composition and I want to assure you of my greatest thanks. . . . could I ask you the favour to give me the manuscript with the dedication to my name as all other composers are doing for me, with a photo from you who always belong to my collection . . .¹⁶  

When Igor Kipnis asked whether I had any idea as to where he might find this score, I shared the citation information with him. Some years later he reciprocated by sending an arrangement made in collaboration with jazz great Dave Brubeck. A damper pedal would certainly make playing even this somewhat more idiomatic keyboard arrangement easier, but the gentle beauties of Ellington’s only “harpsichord” work deserve to find their place in our repertoire. In the spirit of jazz improvisation, I suggest adapting the written notes to fit one’s individual finger span, as well as assuming a free approach both to some of the notated rhythms and repeats, and not being afraid to toy with the tessitura by changing the octave of some notes in order to achieve a more lyrical legato line on our pedal-less instrument.

Prokofiev (for two)

In 1936 Sergey Prokofiev surprised the western musical world by forsaking Paris and returning to live out the rest of his days in his native Russia. One of his first Soviet musical projects was the composition of incidental music for a centenary production of Pushkin’s play Eugene Onegin. In this dramatic and colorful orchestral score a dream scene is integrated with the house party of the heroine, Tatyana. 

In his recent book, The People’s Artist, music historian Simon Morrison writes,

The party scene opens with the strains of a . . . polka emanating from a distant hall. Aberrant dance music represents aberrant events: much like Onegin himself, the dance music offends sensibility. It sounds wrong; it is a breach. Prokofiev scores the dance (No. 25) for two provincial, out-of-tune harpsichords, the invisible performers carelessly barreling through the five-measure phrases at an insane tempo—a comical comment on the hullabaloo that greets the arrival . . . of a pompous regimental commander. There ensues an enigmatic waltz (No. 26), which Prokofiev scores first for string quintet and then, in a jarring contrast, for the two harpsichords . . .¹⁷   

One wonders just how many provincial harpsichords there were in mid-1930s Russia, but this Polka from Eugene Onegin, played at a slightly more moderate pace, has served as a delightful encore for performances of Francis Poulenc’s Concert Champêtre when that enchanting work is performed as a duo with piano standing in for the orchestral parts, just as it was presented by Wanda Landowska and Poulenc in the very first, pre-premiere hearing of Poulenc’s outstanding score.¹⁸   

The Old Gray Mare, at last

Having fêted a pompous general with Prokofiev’s Polka, it is time to explain the reference to The Old Gray Mare. American composer and academic Douglas Moore composed a short variation set based on the popular folk tune to demonstrate the culminating amicable musical collaboration between the previously antagonistic harpsichord and piano, a duet that concludes the mid-
20th-century recording Said the Piano to the Harpsichord. This educational production has had a somewhat unique cultural significance as the medium through which quite a number of persons first encountered our plucked instrument. While Moore’s variation-finale remains unpublished, it is possible to transcribe the notes from the record, and thus regale live concert audiences with this charming entertainment for listeners “from three to ninety-plus.” 

Other musical examples utilized in this clever skit include a preludial movement, the mournful Le Gemisante from Jean-François Dandrieu’s 1èr Livre de Claveçin [1724]; the violently contrasting Military Polonaise in A Major, opus 40/1 by Fréderic Chopin, in which the piano demonstrates its preferred athletic and happy music and then goads the harpsichord into a ridiculous attempt at playing the same excerpt, sans pedal. That confrontation is followed by Jean-Philippe Rameau’s ever-popular Tambourin, which manages to sound nearly as ridiculous when the piano tries to show that it “can play your music better than you can play mine!”—an attempt heard to be futile when the harpsichord puts that notion to rest by playing it “the way it ought to sound.”

The 2012 Aliénor winners chosen by judges Tracy Richardson, David Schrader, and Alex Shapiro from some 70 submitted scores: Solo harpsichord (works required to emulate in some way the Mikrokosmos pieces by Béla Bartók): composers Ivan Božičevič (Microgrooves), Janine Johnson (Night Vision), Kent Holliday (Mikrokosmicals), Thomas Donahue (Four Iota Pieces), Mark Janello (Six Harpsichord Miniatures), and Glenn Spring (Bela Bagatelles). Vocal chamber music with one obbligato instrument and harpsichord: Jeremy Beck (Songs of Love & Remembrance), Ivan Božičevič (Aliénor Courante), and Asako Hirabayashi (Al que ingrate me deja).¹⁹ ν 

Notes

1. Jessica Douglas-Home, The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse (London: The Harvill Press, 1996). Discography (by Alan Vicat), p. 329. 

2. Ibid. Matrices issued in France with the catalogue number P484.

  3. Great Virtuosi of the Harpsichord, volume 3. Pearl GEMM CD 9242 (1996).

4. Three newly constructed two-manual harpsichords built by the piano firms Érard and Pleyel, and by the instrument restorer Louis Tomasini, were shown at the Paris Exposition of 1889, and heard in performances at the event. The modern harpsichord revival is often dated from that year.

5. See Larry Palmer, “Revival Relics” in Early Keyboard Journal V (1986–87), pp. 45–52, and Palmer, Harpsichord in America: A 20th-Century Revival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; paperback second edition, 1993), pp. 4–6; page six is a facsimile of the first page of Rigodon.

6. See Larry Palmer, “Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s English Suite for Harpsichord at 100.” The Diapason, December 2009,
pp. 36–37.

7. See these articles in The Diapason: Donna M. Walters, “Henri Mulet: French organist-composer,” December 2008, pp. 26–29; Harpsichord News, August 2010, p. 11; and, for a complete facsimile of the original publication, the issue of January 2011,
p. 12. 

  8. Edition Breitkopf Nr. 4836 “for Piano Solo.”  

9. See Larry Palmer, “The Busoni Sonatina,” in The Diapason, September 1973, pp. 10–11; Palmer, Harpsichord in America: “Busoni and the Harpsichord,” pp. 25–26; the first harpsichord recording of this work is played by Larry Palmer on Musical Heritage Society disc LP 3222 (1975). A fine 2002 digital recording, Revolution for Cembalo (Hänssler Classic CD 98.503) features Japanese harpsichordist Sumina Arihashi playing the Busoni Sonatina, as well as Delius’s Dance, Thomé’s Rigodon, and other early revival works by Ravel, Massenet, Richard Strauss, and Alexandre Tansman.

10. The list of included composers is given in Palmer, Harpsichord in America,
p. 146. Kirkpatrick also recorded this program in 1961. 

11. “Bach Goes to Town,” Angel/EMI S-36095.

12. http://www.percygrainger.org/prog not5.htm (accessed 20 October 2011).

13. Published by G. Schirmer.

14. Persichetti’s ten sonatas for harpsichord are published by Elkan-Vogel, Inc., a subsidiary of the Theodore Presser Company, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010; the First Sonata, opus 52 (1951), was published in 1973. The Powell work remains unpublished.

15. Ule Troxler, Antoinette Vischer: Dokumente zu einem Leben für das Cembalo (Basel: Birkhäuser-Verlag, 1976). Published by Schott & Co. Ltd., London; U.S. reprint by G. Schirmer.

16. Ibid., pp. 99–100. 

17. Simon Morrison, The People’s Artist—Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The quotation is found on page 130. I assembled the two harpsichord parts by cutting and pasting them from the orchestral score of Eugene Onegin (his opus 71).  I am unaware of any other published edition.

18. Personally I find the balances for the Poulenc much better in duo performances than in live harpsichord and orchestra ones. Another interesting possibility, at least as demonstrated by a recording, may be heard on Oehms Classics compact disc OC 637, where harpsichordist Peter Kofler is partnered by organist Hansjörg Albrecht and percussionist Babette Haag in a compelling performance, recorded in 2009 in Munich.

19. For more information about Aliénor and its history, consult www.harpsichord-now.org.

2012 marks the 50th anniversary of harpsichord editor Larry Palmer’s first published writing in The Diapason: a brief article about Hugo Distler in the issue for November 1962. Since those graduate student days he has taught at St. Paul’s College and Norfolk State and Southern Methodist Universities, served as President of SEHKS from 2004–2008, and is a continuing member of the advisory board for Aliénor. At the Cincinnati gathering in addition to “Gathering Peascods” he played Glenn Spring’s Bela Bagatelles at the Awards recital and chaired the Sunday session devoted to “Swingtime—The Mitch Miller Showdown.” 

Nunc Dimittis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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