June 2007
Dobson Pipe Organ Builders,
Lake City, Iowa
University of Delaware,
Newark, Delaware
For years without a pipe organ on campus, the University of Delaware in Newark is now the home of Dobson Op. 74, a two-manual mechanical-action instrument…
Russell & Co. Organ Builders,
Chester, Vermont
First Presbyterian Church, Ithaca, New York
From the builder
The term magnum opus is often used in the organbuilding trade to denote the apotheosis of an organbuilder’s career. It is an…
In the 1980s I was a graduate student in Rome, doing research on oratorios in the archive adjacent to the sanctuary of the Chiesa Nuova (Santa Maria in Vallicella). That church, established by St. Philip Neri, witnessed the flourishing of…
For many years I taught a college course entitled “Form and Analysis,” and one of my favorite lectures was one in which the students and I discussed the organization of the ostinato principle in the Crucifixus from Bach’s Mass in B-Minor,…
My past article on the “Seven Golden Rules of Organ Practicing”1 started with the provocative statement, “Let’s not beat around the bush,” and it fits so well again in this controversial context. Let us admit it again: we are often too…
Size matters, part two
First assignment: Please reread In the wind . . . in the May issue of The Diapason. Thank you.
Robin Hall is a very cool man. I met him in his office on West 34th Street in New York late on a February afternoon. A…
Organist, choir director, composer, and teacher Roberta Bitgood died on April 15 at Lawrence and Memorial Hospital, New London, Connecticut, after a brief illness. She was 99. Dr. Bitgood, formerly of Quaker Hill, had been a resident of…
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