Edit Events Interaction between Organ and Voice is Topic of 2016 EROI Festival

Tom Mueller is assistant professor of church music and university organist at Concordia University Irvine and associate organist at St. James’ in-the-City (Episcopal) in Los Angeles, California. He was the winner of the 2014 Schoenstein Competition in Hymn-Playing and is a member of The Diapason’s ‘20 Under 30’ Class of 2015. Mueller holds degrees from the University of Maine at Augusta, the University of Notre Dame, and the Eastman School of Music.

Since its inception in 2002, the Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative (EROI) has transformed the musical landscape of Rochester, New York, and its surrounding community by assembling an extraordinary collection of new and historic organs. The EROI festivals showcase these instruments and bring together scholars, performers, and audiences to explore facets of organ history and culture. Previous conferences have focused on such diverse topics as film music, improvisation, pedal technique, the works and influence of Felix Mendelssohn, and the legacy of Anton Heiller. The 2016 conference explored a topic relevant to every organist: interaction between the organ and the human voice. Areas of emphasis included historical practice in accompaniment or alternation, modern performance practice in hymn playing, and the cognitive, psychological, and spiritual aspects of communal singing. 

Wednesday, October 26

As attendees arrived for the afternoon registration session, they were greeted with a recital by Eastman faculty and students on the historic 18th-century Italian Baroque organ at the University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery. Housed in the museum’s Fountain Court, this instrument is complemented by a collection of 17th- and 18th-century European artwork displayed in the surrounding galleries—a feast for both eyes and ears!

The eminent sacred music scholar Robin Leaver gave the keynote address, which addressed the balance of power between organist and congregation. Citing historical sources and musical evidence, Leaver offered an overview of the evolution of congregational singing and accompaniment across denominational traditions, regions, and eras. Leaver’s presentation and ensuing discussion, informed by his many decades of research and reflection, was warmly received by the audience.

After dinner, attendees moved to Third Presbyterian Church for a hymn festival under the leadership of organists James Bobb and Aaron David Miller, with Peter DuBois conducting a combined choir drawn from local churches. The organists offered a varied selection of hymnody, ranging from Lutheran chorales to spirituals to Latin American hymns. The service included two hymns commissioned by Eastman’s George W. Utech Congregational Hymnody Fund: Scott Perkins’s setting of Timothy Dudley-Smith’s “What Glories Wait on God’s Appointed Time,” commissioned in 2014; and the premiere of composer Nico Muhly’s setting of Thomas Troeger’s “Lord, Keep Us Modest When We Claim.” For a composer with a substantial background in church music, Muhly’s angular hymn proved surprisingly unsatisfying. If anything, it demonstrated how deceptively difficult it is to write an enduring hymn tune.

Thursday, October 27

Thursday opened with a series of papers and demonstrations. The first of these, chaired by Eastman music theory faculty Elizabeth Marvin, focused primarily on aspects of psychology, cognition, and health in the act of communal singing. A second session of lecture demonstrations brought attendees to Christ Church, home of two notable organs: 1893 Hook & Hastings Opus 1573 and the Craighead-Saunders Organ, a process reconstruction of the 1776 Casparini organ located in Vilnius, Lithuania. Under the guidance of Kerala Snyder, these presentations focused primarily on issues of historical performance practice in the sacred music of France (Robert Bates), Italy (Edoardo Bellotti), and North Germany (Frederick Gable). A highlight of this session was Bates’s paper, “Alternation Practices in France during the Classical Period,” for which Bates was assisted by University of Houston graduate student Christopher Holman. Having spent his career engaged with the music of 17th- and 18th-century France as both a performer and scholar, Bates’s authoritative presentation offered a wealth of detail as well as questions for future inquiry. 

A short bus ride brought attendees to the village of Pittsford, a small outlying suburb of Rochester located on the Erie Canal, for a Singstunde—a traditional Moravian service consisting almost entirely of hymn singing. The First Presbyterian Church of Pittsford is home to 2008 Taylor & Boody Organbuilders’ Opus 57, an instrument based on the work of the early American organbuilder David Tannenberg. At the hands of Jack Mitchener, this organ proved exceptionally supportive of congregational singing. Mitchener’s masterful playing and sensitivity to both congregation and instrument was the high point of the conference. Moravian music scholar Reverend Nola Reed Knouse’s introductory lecture provided context for the service.

The final event of the day was a concert at Sacred Heart Catholic Cathedral by Eastman faculty members Nathan Laube, Edoardo Bellotti, and Stephen Kennedy, who were joined by the Christ Church Schola Cantorum under the direction of Kennedy and assistant director Thatcher Lyman. The emphasis here was chant-based repertoire, and the program included works by de
Grigny, Banchieri, Bach, Rheinberger, and Latry (among others), along with a set of versets improvised in contemporary style by Kennedy. Memorable moments of this concert included Bellotti’s rendition of Johann Sebastian Bach’s rarely performed Fuga sopra il Magnificat, BWV 733, and Laube’s assured performance of Olivier Latry’s Salve Regina.

Friday, October 28

The final day of the festival opened at Third Presbyterian Church with an unusual event: a hymn-playing masterclass. James Bobb began with a presentation on the accompaniment of multicultural hymnody at the organ, along with an overview of basic jazz harmony, idioms, and notation. He was joined by Aaron David Miller and Rick Erickson, who coached Eastman students Ben Henderson, Alex Gilson, Caroline Robinson, Chase Loomer, Oliver Brett, and Ivan Bosnar in a variety of traditional and non-traditional hymns. This was a fascinating opportunity to see both differences and similarities in the work of three master church musicians, with a wealth of concepts and ideas shared in a collegial atmosphere.

After lunch, attendees returned to Christ Church for a session of lecture-demonstration exploring the historical use of the organ as an accompaniment to congregational song. Papers by two well-established scholars (Frederick Gable and Kerala Snyder) were paired with presentations by Eastman doctoral students Jacob Fuhrman and Derek Remeš. While all four papers were outstanding, Remeš’s work to reconstruct the accompanimental practice of Johann Sebastian Bach using historical sources was particularly notable.

The festival concluded with an evening recital by Eastman organ faculty members William Porter and David Higgs at Christ Church. While the previous evening’s concert focused exclusively on the chant tradition, the program for this recital consisted of repertoire based on chorales and psalm tunes and included several congregational hymns. Highlights from this program included Higgs’s performance of Bach’s Partite diverse sopra il corale O Gott, du frommer Gott, BWV 767, accompanied by an insightful verbal program note connecting specific chorale variations with theological imagery in the chorale text; Porter’s majestic improvised prelude and postlude to the hymn, “New Songs of Celebration Render,” sung to Rendez à Dieu; and the congregational singing of the chorale Es ist das Heil to a multi-verse accompaniment composed by Johann Gottlob Werner (1777–1822) and published in his 1807 Orgelschule. The opportunity to hear Werner’s chorale setting (which includes through-composed Zwischenspiele and surprisingly variable textures and harmonic support) sung by a fully engaged audience and supported by the full resources of the Craighead-Saunders organ was a revelation, and a fitting end to the conference.

Hans Davidsson is general artistic and research director of the Göteborg Organ Art Center, GOArt, as well as artistic director of the Göteborg International Organ Academy. In 2001, he was appointed professor of organ at the Eastman School Music and project director of the Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative (EROI). In 2006, he was appointed visiting professor at the Bremen Hochschule für Künste, Fachbereich für Musik.

When the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester opened its doors in downtown Rochester, New York in 1921, its benefactor George Eastman made sure that the first class of organ students had facilities that were state of the art, and a superb faculty. In the early twentieth century, Eastman’s truly American vision of the pinnacle of the organ art even allowed that first class of students to choose whether to study “theatre organ” or “legitimate organ” playing. To meet twenty-first-century needs for organ education with the same energy, vision and commitment, Eastman has embarked on a program called the Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative, or EROI. EROI’s main goal has been to update and expand Eastman’s collection of instruments for the whole range of the organ repertoire, making it a global organ facility. EROI’s first major step was to install the largest Italian Baroque organ in North America in the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester in 2005. Its next project will be to restore the Skinner Organ Company’s Opus 325 at Eastman’s Kilbourn Hall to its original 1921 condition. The current phase, the Craighead-Saunders Organ, will be inaugurated in Christ Church (Episcopal) across from the Eastman School of Music on October 16 at EROI’s seventh annual organ festival.
The Craighead-Saunders Organ is a new two-manual, 33-stop instrument named after David Craighead and Russell Saunders, two renowned professors of organ at the Eastman School of Music. They will both be celebrated by faculty, students and alumni at the opening symposium of this year’s festival, including the presentation of a new biography of Russell Saunders by Martha H. Sobaje.
The Craighead-Saunders Organ is a scientific reconstruction of an organ from 1776 built by Adam Gottlob Casparini for the Holy Ghost Church in Vilnius, Lithuania, and represents a Baltic-North European building style from the height of Enlightenment-era Europe. The finished instrument is the result of a six-year interdisciplinary research project between GOArt (the Göteborg Organ Art Center) and the Eastman School of Music on the processes of eighteenth-century organ building. GOArt is an interdisciplinary research center at Gothenburg University in Sweden, devoted to the study of the organ and related keyboard instruments and their music. A basic idea shaping GOArt’s research environment is to study the organ not just as a musical instrument, but also as a visual object, cultural artifact, and technological construction, and to communicate its research results to students, scholars and builders. In this latest project, GOArt worked in collaboration with a reference group that included leading American organbuilders as well as key members of Eastman’s faculty. This reference group made decisions for the project by consensus through the entire design and building process.
The result is a new and fresh instrument that challenges us to listen to, look at, and interact with an aesthetic that hasn’t been experienced this way anywhere since the end of the eighteenth century. The instrument’s soundscape is made up of over 1800 carefully reconstructed pipes that have been voiced by Munetaka Yokota based on strict principles that follow the original instrument’s design and documentation. Its case, built following eighteenth-century methods, creates an object like a Baroque theater set, painted in egg tempera and gilded and hand-burnished by German experts and a small army of volunteers. The colorful instrument and its generously proportioned new timber-frame balcony will provide an opportunity to explore eighteenth-century vocal and ensemble music using a large organ as the main continuo instrument. The tonal resources will make it possible to explore traditional continuo registration practice in this repertoire for the first time in a century.
The Craighead-Saunders Organ’s potential to offer new perspectives on the music of J. S. Bach and his sons and pupils has inspired the two-day symposium at the heart of this year’s EROI Festival, entitled “J. S. Bach and the Organ.” This symposium, co-sponsored by the Westfield Center, brings together leading Bach scholars and performers from around the world. Highlights will include the 2008 Glenn E. Watkins Lecture delivered by Christoph Wolff, as well as a concert of Bach’s cantatas performed by members of the Christ Church Schola Cantorum and the Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Players.
On Saturday the festival continues with a final symposium, “Reconstruction as a Model for Research and Creation,” co-sponsored by the Organ Historical Society. A natural continuation of the EROI Festival in 2007 (“New Dimensions in Organ Documentation and Conservation”), lectures and panel discussions will address the complementary process of documenting the original Casparini organ and creating the reconstruction in Rochester.

Rochester participates in the AGO Organ Spectacular
The 2008 EROI festival will help celebrate the American Guild of Organists’ International Day of the Organ here in Rochester. A Sunday afternoon program co-sponsored by the Rochester AGO chapter, “Organ Spectacular—An International Organ Celebration,” will give alumni and registered participants the opportunity to experience the wide range of Rochester’s growing organ landscape. This year, two new organs in Rochester will have their inaugurations during the festival. Paul Fritts has just completed his Opus 26 for Sacred Heart Cathedral, and George Taylor and John Boody the new Tannenberg-style organ, Opus 57, in Pittsford First Presbyterian Church. Throughout the day, other participating venues and area churches will offer open houses, mini-concerts, and/or organ demonstrations by resident organists and Eastman students. This will take place in cooperation with the Rochester AGO chapter. For more information and a list of events and locations, contact Nicole Marane, event coordinator ([email protected]), or visit the EROI (www.rochester.edu/EROI) or Rochester AGO (www.agorochester.org) websites.
The inaugural festival for the Craighead-Saunders Organ at Christ Church will take place October 16–20 in conjunction with the University of Rochester’s Meliora Weekend and the Eastman School of Music’s Eastman Weekend. Registration materials are available online on the EROI website. For more information on the Craighead-Saunders Organ and recent photos, visit <www.esm.rochester.edu/EROI/c-s.php&gt;.

Spellings and capitalizations are all according to the original stop labels from the 1776 Casparini organ and the order is given according to the use of these capitalizations.

CLAVIATURA PRIMA
BOURDUN. á 16.
PRINCIPAL. á 8.
HOHLFLAUT. á 8.
QVINTATHON. á 8.
Octava Principal. á 4.
Flaut Travers. á 4.
Super Octava. á 2.
Flasch Flot. á 2.
Qvinta. á 5.
Tertia. á 1 3/5
Mixtura. á 5. Choris.
Trompet. á 8.

Claviatura Secunda
PRINCIPAL. á 4.
IULA. á 8.
Principal Amalel. á 8.
Unda Maris. á 8.
Flaut Major. á 8.
Flaut Minor. á 4.
Spiel Flet. á 4.
Octava. á 2.
Wald Flot. á 2.
Mixtura. á 4. Choris.
Vox Humana. á 8.
Dulcian. á 16.*

PEDAL
Principal Bass. á 16.
Violon Bass. á 16.
Full Bass. á 12.
Octava Bass. á 8.
Flaut & Quint Bass. á 8.
Super Octava Bass. á 4.
Posaun Bass. á 16.
Trompet Bass. á 8.

*This position was never occupied on the original windchest.
There is no information preserved about the type and pitch of the reed stop once planned for this position. The Craighead-Saunders Organ has a Dulcian 16?.

Accessories
Ventil ad Claviaturam Primam.
Ventil ad Claviaturam Secundum.
Ventil Pedall.
2 Tremulants
BEBNY. (Drum)
Vox Campanarum (Glockenspiel)
Gwiazdy. (Cymbelstern)
Kalilujactgo. (Calcant)
Shove Coupler (Claviatura Secunda to Claviatura Prima)
Pedal to Claviaturam Primam Coupler
Compass: Manuals: C–d3; Pedal: C–d1

The 2006 EROI Festival was presented by the Eastman School of Music and the Westfield Center October 12–15. The topic was “Aspects of American Organ Building in the 20th Century with emphasis on E. M. Skinner and John Brombaugh.”

The Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative (EROI)

When the Eastman School of Music opened its doors in 1921, it housed the largest and most lavish organ collection in the nation, befitting the interests of its founder, George Eastman. Mr. Eastman provided the school with opulent facilities and stellar faculty, creating an expansive vision for organ art and education in the 20th century.
Over the years, the Eastman School has built on this vision by offering one of the most distinguished organ programs in the world. In keeping with this tradition of excellence, the Eastman School of Music has embarked on a long-range plan, the Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative (EROI), which will extend George Eastman’s vision into the 21st century.
With the aim of making Rochester a global center for organ performance, research, building, and preservation, the Eastman School will assemble a collection of new and historic organs unparalleled in North America. An incomparable teaching resource, this collection will offer access to organs of diverse styles and traditions to talented young musicians from around the world.
Tourists, scholars, and music lovers will be drawn to Rochester to hear the varied sounds of these extraordinary instruments. The Italian Baroque organ inaugurated within the frame of the EROI Festival 2005 marks the first concrete milestone in EROI Phase One. A new instrument closely modeled after a Lithuanian organ built by Casparini in 1776 will be constructed and installed in Christ Church (Episcopal) by 2008, in cooperation with the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester.
The restoration of the historic Skinner organ, housed in the Eastman School’s Kilbourn Hall, and the restoration and replacement of the school’s fourteen practice organs, will complete the initial phase of this ten-year plan.
—The EROI Brochure 2006

See for information on Eastman, EROI Festivals, and for a PDF file of the 2006 Festival brochure, which has the complete festival program, biographies of participants, and detailed documentation of all the instruments played, with specifications and historical background for venues and organs. For information on organbuilders with links to E. M. Skinner and John Brombaugh, see .
Photo composition and text: Joel H. Kuznik Photo credit: Nicole Marane<.i>

Organs

At the opening of the EROI Festival William Porter, known for his traditional improvisatory skills, delighted attendees with an authentic performance on the mighty Wurlitzer Opus 1492 (1926, 121 stops, 12 ranks; restored by the Rochester Theatre Organ Society) at the Rochester Museum and Science Center.
Bozeman-Gibson Opus 24 (1984, 23 stops, 31 ranks, with gifts of Vox Humana by Paul Fritts, 2005, and Pedal 16' Posaunenbass by Flentrop Orgelbouw, 2006), modeled on Gottfried Silbermann’s instrument at Grosshartmansdorf, Germany. Currently on loan to Eastman and housed at Asbury First United Methodist Church.
“Gleason’s Dream Machine” designed by the legendary Harold Gleason for Eastman’s Kilbourn Hall, Skinner Opus 325 (1922, 6,030 pipes, 91 ranks, 83 stops), scheduled to be restored by 2010. Today it is Rochester’s largest organ.
John Brombaugh’s landmark 1972 Opus 9 (20 stops, 29 ranks), originally built for Ashland Avenue Baptist in Toledo, Ohio; now on loan to Sacred Heart Cathedral (RC), Rochester until 2008, when they receive a 52-stop Paul Fritts organ. The compact casework and pipework of extraordinary craftsmanship complement the remarkable sound.
Holtkamp organ (1962, 40 stops, 45 ranks) at the Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word, with its modern façade and neo-baroque tonal concept, typical of the mid-20th century.
Builder John Brombaugh discusses the concept of his Opus 9 and the importance of “vocale” voicing, inspired by his experience as a boy singer and found in old instruments throughout Europe, typically in Principal sounds to imitate the human voice.
Historic Pennsylvania Samuel Bohler organ (1869, 8 stops, 7 ranks), with a clear, crisp sound, at the Lutheran Church of the Incarnate Word. Built for Muddy Creek Presbyterian Church, Pennsylvania; restored by R. J. Brunner and Co. in 2006.
Console of the South End Organ, Aeolian Opus 947 (1904, 59 stops, 66 ranks), in the George Eastman House, where Harold Gleason played for breakfast each day and musicales twice a week with a resident string quartet. Still playable by rolls or console.
Computer image of the Craighead-Saunders organ to be installed in Christ Church (Episcopal) beginning July 2007, with completion in 2008. The organ is modeled on the exceptional Casparini organ (1776) at the Holy Ghost Church in Vilnius, Lithuania.
John Brombaugh and friends—how many do you know? Left to right: builder Martin Pasi, Aaron Reichert (Taylor & Boody), Munetaka Yokota (GOArt, Göteborg), John Brombaugh, builder George Taylor, builder Paul Fritts, Bruce Shull (Paul Fritts), Frits Elhout (Flentrop), and Mats Arvidsson (GOArt, Göteborg).