Reflections on Life as an Organist

December 16, 1910-August 4, 2002

J. Bunker Clark is editor of Harmonie Park Press. He taught organ and theory at Stephens College (1957-59), was organist and choirmaster at Christ Church Cranbrook (1959-61), taught music history and harpsichord at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1964-65), and music history at the University of Kansas from 1965 until retiring in 1993.

William Osborne holds three degrees from the University of Michigan. He serves Denison University in Granville, Ohio as Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts, University Organist, and Director of Choral Organizations.

Haig Mardirosian is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Music at American University. He is also Organist and Choirmaster at the Church of the Ascension and Saint Agnes, Washington, DC, and a recitalist, recording artist, writer, and consultant on organ building.

Ronald E. Dean is on the faculty of Centenary College, Shreveport, Louisiana.

Robert Noehren died on August 4 in San Diego, California, at the age of 91. (See "Nunc Dimittis," The Diapason, September 2002, p. 8.) International recitalist, recording artist, author, scholar, professor and university organist at the University of Michigan, and organbuilder, Noehren enjoyed a long and remarkable career, and was clearly one of the major figures of our profession in the 20th century.

His many recordings and recitals evidenced a special kind of organ playing: the highest standards of musicianship, devoid of superficial excesses, quiet and controlled console manner; indeed, his technique seemed to become quieter and easier the more difficult and virtuosic the music became. He continued to practice the organ daily and record up until his death, carried on extensive correspondence, had plans for another commercial recording on his organ in Buffalo, was preparing a talk for the AIO convention this month, was working on a cookbook of his favorite recipes, and continued to enjoy music, art, fine wine, good food, and friends from all over the world.

Below follow tributes in Noehren's honor, by William Osborne, Bunker Clark, and Haig Mardirosian, and a review by Ronald Dean of Noehren's Bach CD which was released last year, in addition to a listing of his articles and news releases as featured in The Diapason. Requiescat in pace.

--Jerome Butera

Robert Noehren: A Remembrance

When Jerry Butera, Ron Dean and I shared a meal during the Organ Historical Society gathering in Chicago on the final day of June, we regaled ourselves with tales about and from the man who had had such a seminal influence on us and a host of others, assuming that he would endure virtually forever, little anticipating the shocking news of his sudden death only weeks later. He had suffered the loss of his devoted wife only months earlier, but on the evidence of telephone conversations had seemed quickly to reconcile himself to this new phase of his incredibly rich life, determined to get on with his latest passions, energetically practicing daily at age ninety-one on his electronic [sic!] house organ, wrestling with what he could possibly say to a conclave of pipe organ builders in Los Angeles during an upcoming invited lecture, listening intently to CDs drawn from his immense collection, having been recently attracted particularly to the playing of pianist Ivo ogorelich.

A consummate man of the organ, he was nonetheless not preoccupied with the instrument, always fascinated by a wide range of human understanding.  For example, when the Noehrens made the decision to relocate to suburban San Diego after a particularly harsh Ann Arbor winter, the significant tragedy of their transfer was a wayward moving van stranded in the desert heat of the Southwest, a delay that turned the man's substantial and valuable wine collection to vinegar. I suspect that in retrospect he might have preferred to express himself through a medium other than the organ, since he was constantly dissatisfied with so many examples of the instrument, especially his inability to make music on them to his satisfaction. In fact, he suggested that his students could learn more about elegant music-making by observing a fine singer, violinist or pianist, and, when time permitted, he practiced Chopin or Debussy at the piano, although never in public.

It seems a bit incredible that he retired from studio teaching at the University of Michigan more than four decades ago, and that at least a few of his students have preceded him in death. I, for one, found him a rather reluctant pedagogue. When provoked, he could be enormously enthusiastic and insightful, but one had to work to attract his attention. He loved to tell a story that he attributed to George Faxon, but which I suspect was meant to mirror his own predicament. Supposedly Faxon had in his Boston studio a very comfortable upholstered chair where he ensconced himself as he directed a student to play straight through a big Bach prelude and fugue. As the piece proceeded, he would brush the lint off his jacket, adjust his shoelaces, settle back, and gradually fall completely asleep. The student, having finished his performance, would turn expectantly, at which point Faxon would suddenly rouse himself and blurt out: "Bravo! Play it again!"

Robert Noehren also frustrated and even infuriated many in a profession rife with calcified credos by remaining in a constant condition of quest. I joked that it was impossible to ride a Noehren bandwagon because, as his would-be disciples were clambering on one side, he had already jumped off the other and moved on to some new position. Recall the man's seminal role in the organ Renaissance in this country. He was one of the first to study the classic European instruments to the extent that he was able to understand and explain what made the instruments of Schnitger and Cavaillé-Coll tick. Those of us privileged to experience his organ design course can vouch for that wisdom. It was also Robert Noehren who was crucial in bringing to this country in 1957 that groundbreaking von Beckerath instrument in Cleveland's Trinity Lutheran Church. I can remember driving from Ann Arbor to Cleveland in a snowstorm to experience the incredible revelations that it offered. So, how did a man devoted to the principles the Beckerath manifested become a builder of instruments based on direct electric action and incredible amounts of borrowing and duplexing? Hard to say, except to acknowledge that he later pretty much disavowed that facet of his career, although expressing annoyance over those attempts to redress some of the mechanical problems he bequeathed the instruments' owners. He did assert that his foray into organ building resulted from his failure to find an established builder who was willing put his ideals into practice. Recall also that the best of his instruments were and are ones of distinction, and that he was a pioneer in considering the possibility of computer-driven combination systems, even though the clunky, punchcard system that he and a Michigan Engineering colleague devised seems hopelessly antiquated now.

Even though he has left us physically, his legacy will surely survive in the form of his immense discography and the many provocative, sometimes quixotic writings published in this journal and elsewhere.

What will survive as well for those of us privileged to know him is the memory of a man with a generous sense of humor (I will never forget the look on his face when asked in a studio class by a pompous doctoral student how one properly mounts the bench); an immense, eclectic repertory (e. g., as I recall, virtually nobody on this side of the Atlantic was aware of Tournemire when Noehren began to champion the man); an intense musicality at his chosen instrument that nonetheless refused curtailment by any of the various performance "isms" by which the profession lives (Furthermore, I, as one who was privileged to assist him often, for example in the series of sixteen all-Bach programs he played in Hill Auditorium before such marathons became fashionable, was always amazed that, while he advocated marking scores extensively, he always seemed to play from pages untouched by a pencil.); an incredible range of experiences (e. g., as a young church organist in Buffalo being asked to play the two existing Hindemith sonatas for their composer, thereby indirectly provoking the writing of the last of the trilogy); a man of immense principle who retired from active teaching prematurely when confronted with a Michigan dean who asked him to create the country's largest organ department (he seems to have been prescient enough to have anticipated the future state of the profession and thus suggested as an alternative the country's finest, albeit compact organ program); and, last, but hardly least, the sense that organists are all too often insular in their perspective, encouraging all with whom he was associated to seek out and embrace the full  range of human experience.

RN, we will miss you.

--William Osborne

From his editor

"Gee, it's hard to play the organ, isn't it?"--cliché by Robert Noehren after hearing a student trying to play a difficult piece.

"Gee, it's hard to produce a book about the organ"--my cry in the process of working with Bob on An Organist's Reader.

Bob had been talking about doing a book for some years, but I'm proud of persuading him to begin in earnest in 1995. He sent a box two years later, and after two more years of phone calls and letters concerning the details, the box was sent to Harmonie Park Press in February 1997, and the result appeared in November 1999.

I'd known Bob since going to Ann Arbor in 1950, but after my piano days unfortunately never took organ with him. Nonetheless, I was lucky to audit several of his classes on the history of the organ--which, in retrospect, helped considerably in checking details of historic instruments. Even then, it was embarrassing to both of us to have a good friend point out the omission of thirteen pedal stops from the 1576 organ of  the Georgenkirche, Eisenach. (Harmonie Park Press has an errata slip, or get it at .) But this omission had not been discovered when that article had previously been published in the Riemenschneider Bach Institute's Bach no fewer than three times, 1975, 1985, and 1995! It's only logical that an organ associated with Bach would have more than two pedal registers, no?

He correctly defended Grobgedackt, against my proposal of Großgedackt. As for another detail, does one use the modern German "K" for Katharinenkirche, or the original spelling Catharinenkirche, Hamburg? (we used the latter). Lüdingworth has an umlaut; otherwise it would seem to be a village in England. So does the composer Jean-Jacques Grünenwald, even though he was French. The foregoing represents a survey of some 54 pages of letters on my computer, which also has comments on a trip to Italy; Eloise's new hip, fall 1997; and his bout with cancer, early 2000.

I had attended many of his Ann Arbor recitals, and have seen the two-story end of the Noehren living room in Ann Arbor which housed his Hausorgel. But Lyn and I really got to know Bob much better when he taught at the University of Kansas, fall 1975; we had Thanksgiving and several other similar occasions together. What a wonderful human being! I already miss our more recent phone chats, in which he described his interest in a proper diet (indeed, published as an article in these pages last year), in our mutual enjoyment of a pre-dinner drink, his interest in audio equipment and recent recordings (usually not of organ music), and in a joke. And I miss his Christmas cards (the design of one is on the cover of his book).

Bob Noehren was very modest--but a hard worker when preparing a recital. He was not vain, but I'm certain he was very proud of the discography and recitals (a representation of programs appears in his book). Above all, in spite of and perhaps due to, his quiet and unassuming manner, his playing never highlighted the performer, but always the music, as if to say "I've studied this piece hard, and here is what I found out."

--J. Bunker Clark

Letters from Noehren

I never met Robert Noehren, yet I am humbled to be able to call him a friend. In the last three years of his life, Noehren and I had corresponded regularly through a series of letters, a thread of correspondence initiated somewhat coincidently.

In my academic administrative capacity, I was at work during 1997 with a project team charged with drafting a self-study report to my university's regional accrediting agency. Our member from the university's publications office, Trudi Rishikoff, saw to the style and editing of the finished document. At some stage of the process, Trudi mentioned that she had learned that I was an organist. Did I know her Uncle Bob?

Uncle Bob, it turned out, was Robert Noehren. With what must have been obvious mirth at this serendipitous news, I told Trudi of my high esteem for Noehren, the thrill of having played a recital on one of his instruments, the honor of having reviewed several of his recordings for both The American Organist and Fanfare, but even more, of the inspiration that I had derived from listening to him perform, both on disc and live, early in my career. I asked Trudi to convey those sentiments and my kindest respects to her uncle.

About the same time, my editors forwarded for review a CD comprising reissues of various Lyrichord recordings by Robert Noehren. These amounted to seminal performances on several of his instruments (as well as others) and an assortment of repertoire attesting to the performer's all-embracing musical interests. The disc merited its title, "A Robert Noehren Retrospective."

Months later, a long letter arrived from Robert Noehren, the first of many in which we discussed issues of mutual interest--musicians, repertoire, organs. Noehren's beautifully composed and printed texts (for openers, I marveled at the deliberate care in writing these and his obvious fluency at computing, something quite remarkable for a man about to turn 90). The composition and printing mirrored what one heard in his meticulous musicianship and performance. His critical but calculated opinions about music matched his gifted and insightful interpretation of music. His thoughts about the music and musicians of his early years in particular bespoke his own deference to tradition, origins, and lineage in composition, organ building, and pedagogy. In sum, these letters represented valedictory notes to a new friend, but they were frank, surprisingly modest, and very generous in tone and spirit. Noehren, it turned out, had wanted to contact me for some time and he had done his research too. He had gone out and found recordings by his correspondent and he had closely read any number of reviews of books and recordings. He was sizing me up!

I had just released a recording of the Suite for Organ, by Paul de Maleingreau. I had not known that Noehren regularly played the toccata from it back in the 1930s. He clearly missed the piece adding that " . . . since it is no longer in my head I am glad to be able to hear it again . . ." Of our mutual interest in Maleingreau, he observed that "it [the toccata] is such a fine work and no one else seems to be interested in Maleingreau." A second little coincidence had sealed a friendship. With that our correspondence grew more personal as well with talk about his wife Eloise, and illness, and aging. He was very sympathetic and supportive at my family's story of senior care, and the intellectual and physical changes brought on with age.

A major part of our conversations concerned organs. For two years, Noehren and I exchanged many words on organ design, organ building, and organ builders. I had made the analytical (but not malicious!) observation in my review of his Lyrichord recording that certain of the organs he built were idiosyncratic. My observation was based on experience. I had played a recital at St. John's Cathedral in Milwaukee where, in preparation, I had spent hours punching out registrations manually on the IBM data cards that comprised the combination action's memory. I had also remarked on the various subunison registers that played only to tenor C. Noehren graciously observed that "It was right for you to comment on the design of my organ in Milwaukee." He continued with a treatise on the economics of organ building, tight budgets, and resource maximization. It may have been a musician/instrument builder speaking, but it was also the voice of someone who had taught at a university and worked for the church!

Noehren tempered economic exigency with art. "I designed the organ [at St. John's Cathedral] always thinking how it was to be used musically." Saving the cost of the bottom twelve pipes of the Great 16¢ Principal on that 1965 organ allowed Noehren to add a string and some mutations to the specification. "If . . . you look at the music of Vierne, you will often see that the Gambe on the Great Organ is required in many pieces. . . . Look at most American organs. There is rarely a string on either the Great or Positiv (or Choir) organs. Indeed, there is usually an Unda Maris set. To be sure, a beautiful sound, but not very useful in much serious organ music." He questioned both his own tonal choices and those advocated by others. Robert Noehren had taken this critic earnestly, drew no offense from the opinions in print, and used the opportunity to engage in a dialog on the merits of respective tonal choices.

I later asked Noehren about Paul Hindemith, adding that my own conception of the organ sonatas was formed mainly through Noehren's recording of them. That prompted a meticulous response concerning Noehren's association with the composer. He outlined meeting Hindemith in Buffalo, where the composer lived after arriving in the United States before going to teach at Yale University, and where the organist played at a small Episcopal parish. Because Hindemith would sometimes visit the church, Noehren eventually got to know the composer well. They spent many hours together discussing interpretation and registration of the then only two sonatas, for Hindemith had just begun composing the third.

I had commented about the respective merits of romantic, colorist and dryer, abstract interpretations of the sonatas. In fact, I told Noehren that I had rebelled against my own teacher's insistence on an orchestral approach to these scores. That rebellion led to my  willful imitation of Noehren's old LP recording. He replied, "Like your teacher, I had been playing them in a rather romantic way, and I have to thank Hindemith for helping me with my musicianship during those early days. I still remember how dissatisfied he was with my performance of the last movement of the first sonata."

Noehren also voiced curiosity about instruments on which I had recorded and consulted. I had asked him about a couple of stoplists on which I was working and received immediate, candid, and helpful responses. At the time, the new organ at my own parish, the Church of the Ascension and Saint Agnes in Washington, was under construction by Orgues Létourneau. I had confided in Noehren that our hope was for an instrument reflecting English tonal heritage and had sent him specs and scalings. In the end, when I sent him a recording of one of the opening concerts, his approval overjoyed me.

What was most remarkable about Robert Noehren in his last few years was the zeal with which he still played the organ on a daily basis. He had been hard at work revisiting the Orgelbüchlein, a book he felt "appropriate at my stage of life." He had just been diagnosed with serious illness and seemed to find particular comfort in the brief movements. But, he acknowledged their musical difficulties. "I might feel a bit safer in the great G-minor fugue than in the prelude on 'Heut triumphieret Gottes Sohn' with that wicked pedal passage at the end!"

While he missed access to a good pipe organ near his home in San Diego, he did own a custom electronic organ, and his curiosity and aptitude with technology had led him to electronically revoice that instrument and add several MIDI sound modules to it. This fulfilled both his need to play on a daily basis and his ongoing instinct to build "better" organs. He was carefully apologetic, but not defensive about this instrument. "I fear that you might be one who believes we have been poisoned by the advent of the electronic organ!" But, he added, that this instrument "assuages some of my frustrations." As proof--extraordinary proof--he enclosed a cassette recording of some Bach, Karg-Elert, and the Roger-Ducasse Pastorale as recorded on his house organ. Of the dazzling and poetic performance of the latter piece, made when Noehren was in his late 80s, he commented, "it is perhaps the most difficult work I have ever encountered, and it has been a constant challenge. It is technically difficult and choosing and executing the registration is no easy task." Of the thousands of organ recordings in my collection, this one, performed by an octogenarian on an electronic organ in his living room and recorded on his little cassette machine, is the most prized.

Robert Noehren had also published a book of memoirs that I had reviewed, and some of the letters to me may have well been an elaboration or gloss on the book. At one point, Noehren sent a long list of all his teachers--piano, organ, theory, composition. This early 20th century Who's Who of our profession contained several names that interested me greatly.

One of these was Charles Courboin for, as a boy, I would sit in the choir loft at St. Patrick's Cathedral and watch Dr. Courboin play for the 11:30 "organ mass." In those pre-Vatican II years, the Cathedral maintained the tradition of a low mass (rendered mostly silently by the priest at the east end) accompanied by organ music (rendered not at all silently by the virtuoso at the west end). I would, on my own, take the bus and the subway and travel down to 5th Avenue on Sunday mornings in order to hear the Solemn Mass at 10 o'clock. I would always remain for Courboin's organ mass at 11:30. It was a splendid dessert to the sung mass. Courboin would graciously welcome me to the gallery and even ask me what I would like to hear. Courboin's phenomenal memory was legendary and I don't ever recall naming a piece of repertoire that he could not simply rattle off.

One of the reasons that Courboin fascinated us both was his atypical profile for an organist. He loved fast cars and boats. He was dashing and, in Noehren's terms, "could have been mistaken for a government ambassador." While a student at the Curtis Institute during the early 1930s, Noehren had coached with Courboin. One morning, Noehren and his friend Bob Cato, Lynnwood Farnam's favorite student, were walking downtown. They ran into Courboin. "He behaved at once as if we were his best friends and suggested we all have lunch at Wanamaker's. It was then about 11:00 o'clock, and he invited us to meet him at noon at the front of the store. When we finally entered the dining room it became apparent that the luncheon had turned into a big party in a private room with at least 15 people. All I can remember of the food is that for dessert there was a great flourish as the party was presented with a huge baked Alaska prepared for the occasion."

Robert Noehren also recalled his meetings with Fernando Germani (with whom he became friends and who introduced him to Italian food and garlic), André Marchal (who influenced him musically but was "distracted by the ladies," such that, in a meeting along with Marilyn Mason, Marchal paid no attention to Noehren), Gaston Dethier (who had the most formidable technique of anyone and whose pedaling was "really phenomenal" although he eventually no longer took the organ seriously), and Lynnwood Farnam (whose playing "simply put everyone I had ever heard in the shade"). These reflections were all the more vivid as several of these legendary performers were still active in my own youth. As Noehren put it about our swapped recollections, "what a difference a generation makes!"

How does one summarize the enormous range and analytical insights of Robert Noehren? It is difficult task to be certain. His musical life spanned East Coast and West, with a long stop in between. He could be, at once, a Classicist and a Romantic. He studied old music and old organs, built modern instruments capable of playing the old, and championed scores by composers of his own day. He was the recitalist who built instruments to overcome the defects he perceived in the instruments upon which he had to play. He studied with the legends of his youth and passed that tradition on to generations of fortunate students in one of the country's most important universities. He agglomerated seemingly far-flung and inconsistent concepts, all the while making sense of their synthesis. His world was expansive and never shrank, for his all-embracing curiosity disclosed an adroit mind that slowed little even in its ninth decade. Robert Noehren zealously coveted the truth--truth as discovered, revealed, debated, or developed in theory and creativity. He grappled with and reconciled art and technology decades before such would become commonplace. He generously communicated his remarkable journey to a large audience in his writing and teaching, and even to a grateful correspondent late in his days.

Can all of this, then, amount to anything less than the absolute and comprehensive definition of professional and personal intellect, art, and, above all, integrity? I would argue not. Integrity, furthermore, takes courage, the courage to pursue truth and to assert the convictions to which one's work leads. As such, Robert Noehren was nothing less than a genuine hero. I thank God for having had a moment to know him. Requiescat in pace.

--Haig Mardirosian

Robert Noehren bibliography in The Diapason

Robert Noehren is organist and choirmaster of St. John's Church, Buffalo. November 1940, p. 22.

Robert Noehren takes up new work in Grand Rapids. September 1942, p. 3.

"Organ Building an Art Not to be Limited by Definite Styles." February 1944, p. 12.

Robert Noehren leaves Grand Rapids for war duty. March 1944, p. 23.

Famed Dutch Organ Used in Broadcast by Robert Noehren. November 1948, p. 2.

"Poitiers Cathedral Has Famous Cliquot Organ Built in 1791." June 1949, pp. 28-29.

Noehren appointed to post in Ann Arbor. September 1949, p. 4.

"Historic Schnitger Organs Are Visited; 1949 Summer Study." December 1949, p. 10; January 1950, p. 10.

Bach recitals by Noehren in Ann Arbor and Buffalo. June 1950, p. 40.

"Famous Old Organs in Holland Disprove Popular Fallacies." March 1951, pp. 8-9.

"Organ Cases Objects of Beauty in Past and Return Is Advocated." June 1951, pp. 14-15.

Michigan "U" course reorganized to make all-around organist. November 1951, p. 38.

"Schnitger Organs That Still Survive Teach New Lessons." December 1951, p. 24.

Robert Noehren on fourth tour of recitals in Europe. September 1953, p. 17.

Robert Noehren is winner of prize for his recording. November 1953, p. 1.

Robert Noehren to play in Duesseldorf. June 1954, p. 1.

"Commends Opinions of Dr. Schweitzer to Organ Designers." February 1954, p. 22.

Robert Noehren is awarded doctorate. June 1957, p. 1.

"How do you rate? Test yourself on this final exam." July 1959, p. 16.

"Music Dictates Good 2-Manual Organ Design." September 1960, pp. 12-13.

Robert Noehren . . . Northwest regional convention. April 1961, p. 16.

Noehren to act as judge at Haarlem Competition. December 1962, p. 3

"The Relation of Organ Design to Organ Playing." December 1962, pp. 8, 42-43; January 1963, pp. 8, 36-37.

Robert Noehren to give dedicatory recital on the Schlicker organ at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. March 1963, p. 24.

"The Organ and Acoustics." March 1964, pp. 26-27.

"Architectural Acoustics as related to Church Music." November 1964, pp. 40-41.

"Taste, Technique and Tone." April 1965, p. 49.

"Schnitger, Cliquot and Cavaillé-Coll: Three Great Traditions and their Meaning to Contemporary Organ Playing." November 1966, pp. 40-41; December 1966, p. 28; January 1967, pp. 48-49; February 1967, pp. 44-45.

Robert Noehren appointed Rose Morgan Professor of Organ for the fall semester of 1975 at The University of of Kansas. September 1975, p. 18.

Robert Noehren, professor of organ at the University of Michigan, retired in January 1976. June 1976, p. 2.

Robert Noehren named professor emeritus. January 1977, p. 5.

Robert Noehren elected Performer of the Year by New York City AGO. May 1978, p. 19.

"Squire Haskin--a tribute." February 1986, p. 2.

"The discography repertoire of Robert Noehren." March 1990, pp. 12-13.

"Robert Noehren at 80: A Tribute." December 1990, pp. 12-14.

"Organ Design Based on Registration." December 1991, pp. 10-11.

"A Reply to the Tale of Mr. Willis." January 1997, p. 2.

Robert Noehren celebrates his 90th birthday. December 2000, p. 3.

"Enjoying Life at 90." September 2001, pp. 15-17.

"Reflections on Life as an Organist." December 2001, pp. 17-20.

Johann Sebastian Bach: Organ Works. Robert Noehren, Organist. Previous unreleased recordings from 1980 issued in celebration of Robert Noehren's ninetieth birthday. Noehren organs of The Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and The First Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York. Fleur de Lis FL 0101-2. Available from The Organ Historical Society, P.O. Box 26811, Richmond, VA 23261; 804/353-9226; $14.98 plus shipping;

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Program: Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542; Wenn wir in höchsten Nöthen sein, BWV 668; Wo soll ich fliehen hin, BWV 646; Partita: O Gott, du frommer Gott, BWV 767; Partita: Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig, BWV 768; Fugue in G Major ("Gigue"), BWV 577; Prelude and Fugue in D Minor ("Violin"), BWV 539; Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 543.

This new issue, like the previous Robert Noehren Retrospective produced by Lyrichord (see this journal, December, 1999, p. 11), is the result of expert remastering by Hal Chaney of analog recordings done on tape many years ago. As in the CD mentioned above, this issue features organs designed and built by Robert Noehren.

For those who are familiar with Noehren's tasteful and flexible organ playing, this issue should come as a welcome addition to his already considerable discography. Noehren was never one to endorse or follow "trendy" or merely currently fashionable playing ideas; instead, he always makes the music come alive through thoughtful application of scholarship and study of the scores to determine both just the right tempos and appropriate registrations for convincing musical communication. These features are in abundance on this new issue.

Another important facet contributing to the pleasure of this CD is the fact that the same person is both the artist and the organ builder. His clearly articulated philosophy of organ tone (see An Organist's Reader, reviewed in this journal, September, 2000, p. 10) is demonstrated here all the way from gutsy and brilliant (but never strident) principal and reed choruses to subtle smaller ensembles and solo combinations appropriate to the musical requirements. One can imagine that Noehren was able to bring forth the very sounds that were in his "mind's ear" by performing on these two rather large instruments of his own design.

All the pieces except for the two chorale partitas are performed on the 1966 organ in the Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, while the partitas show off the varied smaller ensembles and solo combinations of the instrument in The First Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, built in 1970. Both instruments are of similar size, with the Buffalo instrument (somewhat larger) notable by its frequently pictured hanging Positiv division.

Seasoned players and students alike will be inspired by the apparently effortless execution of the more demanding works and should take note of the way Noehren uses subtle rubato to point up the structure of the various forms. His elegant approach to trills and other ornaments reveal that the artist regards these items as integral parts of musical expression and not simply as whimsical and mechanical additions to the musical line.

Blessed with both an astounding playing technique and impeccable musical taste, Robert Noehren's playing as revealed on this CD should bring feelings of recognition to those who have head him in past years and should also serve as a revelation to the younger generation. Highly recommended.

--Ronald E. Dean

Centenary College

Shreveport, Louisiana

I imagine that many of you here are wondering how it is to be 90 years old. You may be saying to yourself, "poor fellow, he'll be lucky if he lives another five minutes," and how right you might be. In contrast, think of the extravagance of years that many of you are enjoying. I remember my younger years when I didn't give a care in the world for the days, the months or the years as they passed by, and I certainly never gave a thought for the end of my life. Then again, I might just be as happy as you, regardless of your age. Why? Because I concentrate on living one day at a time, and I believe we make the mistake throughout our lives in not doing just that. I try not to think about tomorrow or even next week. When I awake in the morning, I realize I still have my health and senses, and I have the whole day ahead of me. I reason further I shall probably also have tomorrow and perhaps another whole week, but today is the day, and I am going to make the most of it, regardless of responsibilities or problems that I might have to deal with. I am determined also to have at least several hours to do as I please.

I have never suffered from picturing myself as an old man, and, in fact, I have never thought too much about my age, and would certainly never admit that I am an old man. Fundamentally I feel much the same as I did at 20, 40 or 60. I had even gone through most of my eighties rather innocently. The doctors put me together again on several occasions, and yet I assumed that life would simply go on. But now I was approaching 90! I thought again about today. How shall I make it as interesting as possible? I began to wonder, what about music? How do I listen to music? I asked myself, do I really ever listen to music simply for the pleasure it might bring me? Am I neglecting something that my profession never offered me? Perhaps I should make more of an effort to listen to music, not for any other reason than simply to bring me pleasure; these reflections finally introduced the idea of setting aside a given time each day just for the pleasure of listening to music.

Listening to music

I planned to sit in the comfortable luxury of my living room, make no effort to concentrate, select some music and simply be there with no distractions to divert my attention. During my career I had been so often irritated by incidents when music was carelessly listened to; I recalled how often I myself had been guilty of not listening to music attentively. I would be with a friend or a colleague talking constantly, often, of course, discussing the music as we presumably listened to it. I recalled too that on other occasions I might be alone reading, again often material about the music I was hearing, but I became more aware than ever that conversation and reading were always a distraction. I was not about to spend my life doing something that looked like more work, and decided with my new plan to listen to music only in the same spirit as if I were reading a detective story or playing a game of checkers. On occasion I might be tired and even fall asleep. If it so happened that the music passed me by, the hour still would be a time of rest and relaxation. I was intent on keeping the hour quiet, and to be in an environment that would at least encourage me to focus on the music. Within the limits of my quasi-discipline, I found this surprisingly easy and pleasant to carry out.

It has worked. I was behaving like an amateur and enjoying it. My interested often shifted to one of curiosity, reminding me of my youth. I began listening to a far wider range of music and constantly trying to find and enjoy the musical ideas and how they were being handled by the composers, not only great ones, but more often unusual or lesser composers whose musical ideas intrigued me. As I listened to music for pleasure I enjoyed many surprises and I was rarely bored. Listening to music every day in this way also served to expose me to music I had rarely listened to seriously.

Over time I stopped playing all of a large work. In suites, sonatas, or symphonies I found myself instinctively listening to one or two movements more interesting than others. I rarely listen to Mozart, although an occasional movement from a quartet or a piano sonata is sometimes refreshing. I was determined too to make my listening a constant source of pleasure. After all, it does take time to listen to music, and my interest in new music forced me to be more selective.

This plan for listening has brought music to me in a new and refreshing way. I have always believed that music is the most fascinating world of all, and I feel sorry for those people who are unable to know music as I have experienced it. Just think of the orchestra. It is unbelievable that there are now hundreds of good orchestras throughout the civilized world, and the sound of the best is dazzling. This compared to orchestras as I knew them 70 years ago. I remember an early recording of Bruckner in which the intonation of the orchestra was almost intolerable. I lived in Buffalo and the orchestra there was still largely made up of amateurs. Today it is close to being a major orchestra. Even the best orchestras those days were no better than second-rate orchestras today. I believe it was Stokowski with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the '30s and '40s who first raised the level of musicianship in the orchestra.

Ideas on repertoire

There are so many riches in music; many of them do not rank high on a musicologist's list. So many fascinating composers have come on the scene in our time; I think of Honegger, Messiaen, Korngold, Mahler, Hindemith, Dutilleux, in America Barber and Ruggles, in England, Bax and Walton and, of course, Reger and even Karg-Elert. Not necessarily Reger of the big organ fantasies, although there are exciting moments. Imagine instead Reger with the string quartet! He has written five and the best of them is wonderful music. And Reger wrote for the orchestra; a large and wonderful Serenade, and the beautiful Variations on a Theme of Mozart. There is nothing like it anywhere. Then there is Bruckner, still virtually unknown in America; one of my favorites of his is the last movement of the Fifth Symphony. It is an amazing work! Another is the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto. It is fairly well known but still not fully appreciated. It is a remarkable piece of music, and to this day, one of many works still often maligned by the critics.

But after I have said all this, I realize more than ever how narrow my musical tastes have been. For example, in recent years I have been exposed to the wonderful and diverse music of Boris Blacher, almost completely unknown in this country, and I continue to wonder why he has remained so obscure. A contemporary of Hindemith, they both at one time taught at the Hochschule in Berlin. I now have about 15 CDs of his music. Even after a lifetime as a professional musician, I can't tell you how this new approach to music has affected my life and virtually changed my outlook on music.

We can't be happy all day. Even when retired, as I am, there are still responsibilities to attend to. We have to take care of our families and ourselves as usual. Nevertheless, as I awaken in the morning, I am soon aware that I have something to look forward to--listening to music. It compensates for the music that we are compelled to hear in the outside world--background music, almost impossible to avoid. Hindemith aptly described it as "musical garbage."

Eating well

I have still more to help make my day. We all have one thing in common: we must eat to live, and I have thought for a long time that what and how we eat has a lot to do with our happiness; in fact, it has a lot to do with our psyche, our personality, our health, and our whole being. It is, after all, at the center of our lives. Now, like my hour of music, I have learned to anticipate and appreciate the dinner hour as another source of happiness in my life, and, in fact, I am able to enjoy over the whole day, breakfast, lunch and finally dinner in the evening. But dinner is the climax, and it has become an event to look forward to every day.

Strangely enough, just as most people do not really listen to music seriously, I believe there are millions in our society who have a careless attitude toward food and thus only eat to live. Much of the time they are only vaguely conscious of the taste of food. They eat to assuage their hunger, and it is mainly hunger which determines what they eat. This drives them to eat too much and too carelessly. Shopping for food is not easy and many folks are even afraid to go into the kitchen. They are torn between the fast food business, the supermarket and food supplements that the nutritionists, pharmacologists and doctors persuade them to take for their health. They suffer from worrying about food for their health, and this conflicts with their desire to eat for pleasure. The ritual of eating three meals a day has almost disappeared. Many Americans say they are not hungry in the morning and only drink coffee at breakfast and in their cars on their way to work, a practice that does not make it easy for their digestive system and, in fact, hardly contributes to their psychological well-being. Lunch is taken on the run at fast-food restaurants and dinner is again fast food on a tray as they sit at the TV. I often wonder if this careless behavior of eating and its psychological consequences have something to do with the great prevalence of cancer in our society. Who knows?

At the other end of the spectrum we have the gourmet restaurant which is gradually eliminating vestiges of simple food. Even if you speak French or Italian fluently you will often find it hard to understand the menu. Its language is neither English, French, Italian nor Russian. Basic ingredients are camouflaged, and often mixed together indifferently, while the chef is trying his best to overwhelm you with the thought that you are eating like a king. The waiter is a salesman persuading you to eat this or that dish as he tries to describe the menu. Many of the clients at such a restaurant are back in their usual routine the next day eating no breakfast, a fat hamburger at noon and the TV tray at night. The food on the tray may sometimes be good, but the diner is distracted by the TV and not in a receptive mood. Americans are eating badly and perhaps every third person you see on the street is overweight. There is little joy in their eating, and many are suffering through an unhealthy diet trying to lose weight. Often when they do eat, they temporarily forget they are on a diet.

My friends, eating well and sensibly is not easy to do. But I contend that eating good food, like art, music, or literature, can be a source of great happiness, and incidentally a boon to good health. I have become interested in nutrition during the last years. At first I was listening to the nutritionists, worrying about my health, but eventually was convinced that there is no easy solution to knowing what is good for us. One soon learns that there are a thousand different opinions and no one really knows yet what exactly happens to food as it passes through the digestive system. Notice that no one tells you in precise terms how much food to eat, or how to eat. The nutritionists are presumably concerned about your health and by some hook or crook they are determined to see that you will receive the necessary food and food supplements to make you the healthiest person in the world. Big business happily joins them in this effort. In the beginning I believed in a careful diet, but I gradually came to believe that it didn't much matter what we eat if our appetite approves, and concluded that our biggest problem is that we eat too much and rarely make a practice of enjoying our food. I now believe that these two facts may be the cause of so much poor health. Moreover, it seemed to me that my health would prosper if I encouraged my appetite to help me decide what to eat. If eating is to be an art, I believe that one must become more aware of the taste of food and to lessen the demands of hunger. Like listening to music, I concluded that I should simply eat for pleasure, that the secret for good health is to eat less food and vary my choices from day to day guided by my appetite. After all, why not make eating every day a constant pleasure? I became interested at first in the most basic foods. I eat small meals, taking care not to eat between meals, and to have no health-conscious taboos about any food that appeals to my appetite. (Sugar is perhaps not good for you, but it will also do you no harm.) It is interesting to note also that conclusions about the danger of consuming too much salt are still mixed. Likewise, there is nothing wrong with coffee if you don't drink it all day. To eat with a changing variety of food in small amounts, no one food is likely to have a bad effect on one's health. I am trying to make eating an art. I don't mean that I indulge in fancy foods. Quite to the contrary, I try to forget the word gourmet. Using the best ingredients, the flavors of basic foods can be wonderful and as enticing as the concoctions one often finds in a gourmet restaurant. I ignore the cookbooks and their complicated recipes. I think of the simplest of foods, and they require no recipes to prepare. I had forgotten the wonderful flavors of the simplest foods: a roast chicken, string beans sauteed in good butter, a baked potato, a fresh tomato, especially at the height of the season, a fine little tenderloin steak, broiled lamb chops, pork tenderloin, fresh asparagus, or raspberries with rich cream. This is all food that scarcely requires preparation. I have planned lunch and dinner over an eight-day period and my shopping to serve such a period. This then can be repeated for another eight days.

Relaxing is as important as eating; to promote good health, food needs to be comfortably digested, and this requires relaxation when we eat. A troubled person is not likely to be relaxed. To be relaxed, one must be content, at least somewhat optimistic and reasonably happy to enjoy eating. I believe living one day at a time is more likely to develop a constant approach towards relaxation and contentment. This may be the crux to good health--not what we eat. Relaxation and digestion are subjects rarely discussed by the nutritionists. To begin with, I look forward to a simple breakfast, an egg, toast and coffee, and take the time by rising early to enjoy a very relaxing hour, reading the morning paper over a second cup of coffee. The routine I have described here encourages me to take the time to enjoy a good breakfast, lunch and dinner, the basis for the relaxation I need. In sum, I try to think only of the enjoyment food will bring me. I believe then that my health will take care of itself.

A few last words

I have had a successful career, but I have also had failures and disappointments. I had hoped to write music, but I never made it. I wrote a few pieces that I like and belong to me, but I was never able to sustain the ability to compose. I built organs for 24 years and enjoyed it immensely, but this was an effort to assuage my frustrations with the organs I played during my recital career. They rarely suited my musical conceptions, so I tried building organs that would. I voiced all my own organs and believed that the art of a good organ builder is his ability as a voicer. I built some instruments that particularly reflected my style of playing and my conception of a good organ.

I admire perfection. In my listening I want to hear only the best performances and the best sound an instrument and its player can realize. From the beginning of my career I cared less for success than the constant satisfaction I enjoyed in an effeort to do the best I could. However, I do not set myself up as a paragon of perfection. I live comfortably with my shortcomings. They are part of my life. They do not bother me, and I accept them without regrets.

I am sure I might have been just as happy with less success. If you are like me as I was during my younger days, please observe my thoughts here. As organists, if you do not yet have the skill to play a Bach fugue, be glad that you can at least play the organ, but make your playing an art whether you are an amateur or a professional. Simply accept your talents and ability as they are and make the most of them. Choose simple pieces, even hymn tunes, and try to play them just as beautifully as possible. And only choose music you like. Be critical with yourself and make great effort to please yourself. Don't just play the organ, but focus on doing what you do with a concept of what perfection means. Try to play, whatever it is, a hymn tune or a simple piece, just as beautifully as possible. I believe you will enter into a new richness in your lives, and you will enjoy the effectiveness of your playing. Don't think in terms of practicing, just keep trying to play beautifully and you will be more likely to achieve good results. I could have been quite content as an organist in an obscure parish church playing small easy pieces perhaps limited by an average technical ability. My pleasure then would have been in the effort to play them just as beautifully as possible. I believe we are too easily carried away by the applause and kudos that we hope will eventually come our way. I soon realized that there might be greater rewards. In any event, I early on became interested in the pursuit of perfection. I remember in my first church position, I practiced the hymns every day of the week for the next Sunday's services. In those days I was not yet able to play a hymn tune with ease. I had to practice them. Even from a technical point of view, I was proud when I could get through a service without any wrong notes. Once I had a vision of what perfection meant, I practiced the hymns and voluntaries until I was sure they were done as well as I knew how to do them.

My friends, in this new year, I would hope each of you will make a wonderful little world just for yourselves. We all hope to be happy, but that is not enough. Don't only base your life on such a hope. Instead, really make an effort to be happy and optimistic, as I try to do. Use strategies, as I have, to make your day fulfilling, and make the most of every day of this precious gift of life. Living your life too with artistic purpose, with a sense for the meaning of perfection, I believe, is the best way to keep a healthy mental outlook on life in this difficult but amazing world.

About the Author

Robert Noehren celebrated his 90th birthday on December 16, 2000, and continues to be active as an organist and author. This past year witnessed the release of a remastered CD of his recordings on the large organ he built at St. John's Cathedral in Milwaukee (The Robert Noehren Retrospective, Lyrichord LYR-CD-6005) and the book, An Organist's Reader: Essays (Harmonie Park Press). Robert Noehren has enjoyed a career as recitalist, scholar, teacher, composer, and organ builder. He was for many years chairman of the organ department and university organist at the University of Michigan, has made more than 40 recordings, authored numerous articles, and built more than 25 pipe organs throughout the country.

Catching up with a well-traveled recitalist

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of THE DIAPASON.

Advocate and proponent of new organ music as well as transcriptions of older works, Stephen Tharp is one of today's most active concert organists, having already made over twenty intercontinental tours throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia since 1987. He has held positions at New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral and St. Bartholomew's Church, but at present forgoes a church position in order to focus exclusively on performing, recording and teaching. As a champion of new music, he commissions and premieres numerous new organ works--many of which are dedicated to him--including compositions by Thierry Escaich, Jean Guillou, Anthony Newman, Martha Sullivan, and Morgan Simmons. Stephen Tharp also promotes the transcription, having adapted, and often recorded, works from a variety of styles and eras, from Bach and Handel to Shostakovich and Stravinsky. The most recent of his six recordings, made at St. Sulpice in Paris, was the first commercially released recording by an American organist on that instrument. Stephen Tharp is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists.

We recently spoke with Stephen as he was preparing for another trip abroad.

JR: How did your interest in the organ begin? What was your early training?

ST: I first "responded to" music at the age of three, playing Christmas carols by ear on the piano from the radio and records. It was finally church music, however, that sparked the interest in the organ. I recall hearing this colorful, powerful instrument and thinking about how I absolutely had to learn to play it. Of course, my first teacher started me on the piano, which I think made me a little unhappy at the time. That was at the age of six. By age eight, the same teacher started me on the organ, and the two of us worked together on both instruments for the next several years, mostly at my home in Chicago.

JR: Age eight is an early start! --I'm thinking of the pedals here.

ST: I spent two years in piano. At age six I couldn't reach the pedals. By age eight, it was still a bit of a challenge, but I could start. My organ playing improved along with the piano playing. The transition time from doing one to doing both was actually kind of short. And at eight years old I was just barely able to reach the pedals too!

JR: So what things were you playing? Were you playing any repertoire, perhaps really easy things where you just had a pedal note here and there?

ST: I think the first real pieces of music were the Eight Little Preludes and Fugues, and not all of them. I've never practiced right hand, then left hand, then pedal, then do right hand and pedal, then left hand and pedal--because then you leave one out. You have to develop all three together. So I never did part practicing. No matter how long it took or how slow I did it, it was always everything at one time. Another thing was that I never went through method books per se, doing scales and things like that. There should be a musically relevant reason to attack any given technical issue. So if you have a particular technical challenge you want to hit, find a piece that targets it so that musically there is relevance to it.

By age eleven, I switched to a teacher named James C. Thunder, the director of music at Christ Church in Des Plaines, Illinois, again studying both organ and piano with him. It was Thunder who introduced me to a great deal of the mainline organ composers and their music, recordings of their music, and so on. After working with him for a few months, he made me a sort of "music assistant" at Christ Church, and in this capacity I learned and played on the organ many major anthem and oratorio accompaniments--Handel's Messiah and the Brahms and Mozart Requiems were among the first.

I stayed with James Thunder and Christ Church through 1985 when, at age fifteen, I became a private organ student of Wolfgang Rübsam at Northwestern University, perhaps to this day the person who, for many reasons, has had the greatest influence on my artistic temperament. It was Rübsam who introduced me to the discipline of intricate fingerings (somewhat ironic now, as I rarely ever write in fingerings at all), stylistic awareness and articulation in Baroque music and, most powerfully, the kinds of phrasing, rhapsodic gestures and rhythmic idiosyncrasies possible in Romantic music. I returned to Rübsam to do my graduate studies at Northwestern University in 1993, after four years at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois for my B.A. in music. There I was very lucky to work with two wonderfully musical, insightful and imaginative teachers: Rudolf Zuiderveld in organ and Garrett Allman in piano, accompaniment and conducting. So many of my thoughts on lyricism, projecting musical structure and balance, etc., come from my time with them, and I must say that at a small liberal arts school I had access to perhaps a wider range of study than might have been the case elsewhere. This proved to be invaluable later, especially as I began traveling more and more to Europe. It was also at Illinois College that my interest in new organ works began. I had many opportunities to play a lot of music that was unpublished at the time. One particular performance at Illinois College of William Albright's 1732: In Memoriam Johannes Albrecht for Organ and Narrator, with Albright himself narrating, stands out. Jean Guillou's Hyperion and William Bolcom's Gospel Preludes Book IV are two further examples. There are many others.

JR: You were based in Chicago and then moved to New York and held positions at both St. Patrick's Cathedral and St. Bartholomew's Church, respectively, over the course of seven years. You then made the decision to "fly solo" as an artist without any church job. What prompted this?

ST: My move to New York City came in 1995, when I was appointed associate organist and director of cathedral concerts at the Cathedral of St. Patrick, where I stayed for two years in a prestigious but very busy position. I decided to leave there when my own career became busier and busier, at that point maybe two or three trips to Europe per season interspersed with U.S. concerts. I can honestly say, however, that much of what really boosted the success I was having already in Europe to another level was the position at St. Patrick's, and the people I met while I was there. Booking all the solo organ recitals was part of my duties as concerts director; there were occasions when organists would reciprocate by extending to me performing invitations overseas, and it was then that perhaps three tours a year began turning into five and six, a schedule that I maintain to this day. In late 1997, I became the associate organist at St. Bartholomew's Church, but only in a part-time capacity, which allowed me to continue my concert schedule. Of course, as the church continued to grow, so did the size of the position, and eventually I became full-time. Altogether, I was at St. Bartholomew's for just over four years. The music program there--everything from Praetorius and Carissimi's Jephthe, to Christmas concerts with The American Boychoir and Jessye Norman, to the U.S. premiere of James MacMillan's Cantos Sagrados and the N.Y. premiere of Howells' Hymnus Paradisi--is truly staggering for a church of its size. Therefore, when I made the decision to leave there in 2002, it was far from an easy one. But my performing schedule became simply too large to manage alongside a full-time position. It came time for me to focus all of my artistic (not to mention physical!) energies in one direction instead of several.

JR: These days it seems your career is based more in Europe than in the United States. Is this by choice? How did it come about?

ST: It is ironic that, as an American organist who plays about 60 concerts a year, the majority of them are elsewhere in the world. This was never really intended, but strangely enough, it has turned out that way. For one thing, I began playing publicly on a large scale much earlier in Europe than I did here. My first European concert was in London in 1989 at The Royal Albert Hall. Subsequent trips to England, then The Netherlands, then Germany, then France, really got things going, and they continued like a domino effect.

There is also what is known as an "association factor." I think that without having something like a major competition prize or a well-known teaching post, you don't necessarily get the same kind of attention for what you do. In an ideal world, this should not be such an important factor, but marketing is never that simple. Thanks to JAV Recordings and the Organ Historical Society, especially their websites, all six of my commercial recordings are very easy to find and obtain. And it goes without saying how wonderful it has been with Karen McFarlane Artists since 1998. Of course, we live in an era when massive amounts of information are bombarding you from all sides.

JR: How much are you on the road? What kind of performing schedule do you keep?

ST: It really depends. There are factors such as how many concerts are a part of any given tour, how many different tours are planned close together, how much travel is happening back and forth from the U.S., and what is going on in between--in other words, is there "down time."

Let me give you an example of how extreme it can become by describing my activities during the fall of 2002. Fall seems to be the heaviest time for traveling and playing. Following late August recording sessions at St. Luke's in Evanston, Illinois, I began in early September (four days after the recording) by playing an organ and orchestra concert in Krakow (Bielsko-Biala), Poland, consisting of the Piston Prelude and Allegro for Organ and Strings, and the Jongen Symphonie Concertante. This was followed by a few concerts in the Czech Republic and Germany with a more "mixed" general program, including Mendelssohn, Handel, and Karg-Elert. Next was a concert at St. Laurent's Church in Diekirch, Luxembourg (the oldest church in Luxembourg) on a beautiful new North German-style instrument by the builder Seifert of Kevelaer, Germany. That concert consisted of Bach, Bruhns, Buxtehude, and Murchhauser. Three days later were two concerts as part of the Merseburg Organ Festival, but with all American music, which they requested. This particular invitation arose at the last minute, while I was in Chicago recording at St. Luke's. Karel Paukert, who had been scheduled to play but had to withdraw at the last moment, graciously recommended me as his replacement for the concerts. I was lucky because these two dates, back-to-back, happened to be within a gap between Luxembourg and the other concerts that followed Merseburg elsewhere in Germany, although it was now necessary to "cram" in music that, in a few cases, I had not actually played in quite a while, and with only two days to prepare before the first of the concerts. Those consisted of Buck, Paine, Parker, Hurd, Newman and Sowerby. The rest of the tour (which spanned three and a half weeks altogether) meant a great deal of train travel and concerts roughly every two days as far north as Norden and as far south as Frankfurt.

During October, I went back to Europe with a second fall tour that began at the Passau Dom, which houses the largest organ in Europe. The highlights there were the premiere of my newest commission at that time, Thierry Escaich's Trois Poèmes, and a superlative work by Jean-Louis Florentz called The Cross of the South. Two days later at the Arcore (Italy) Organ Festival, I played my organ adaptation of Bach's Goldberg Variations. Thereafter came more of the Passau program in Innsbruck, several cities in southern Germany and then Strasbourg. To conclude this trip, I was in residence for a week at the Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen, Germany, at the invitation of organ professor Christoph Bossert, not only teaching his students in masterclasses on Vierne, but then performing as part of a theatrical concert of live improvisational dance with the dance department students, featuring live organ improvisation as the incidental music "in reaction to" the stage improvisation.

In November, I made my second trip to Australia, playing in Sydney and Adelaide, and concluded everything with a December Christmas concert at Spivey Hall in Atlanta, the last of several U.S. performances between the trips to and from Europe and Australia. In addition, I have been "guest teacher" at the Hochschule in Stuttgart when in Europe but not actually playing somewhere, and also at Yale University when in the States for a longer stretch.

This is not always the norm, but when it rains, it pours, and my upcoming calendar already indicates that this kind of agenda will happen more frequently. A lot of that has to do with the freedom with which I can now plan my concerts without a regular church job. Usually, larger tours are put on the calendar as far in advance as two years, and so a festival or organization will say, "Oh, this is your date and concert? Well, this is our theme, so you will play this and this and that." Put enough of those close together for when you are in Europe at one time, and your schedule fills very quickly! But, I love it.

JR: Do you find any differences between American and European audiences? You've said that they are larger in Europe.

ST: Right. In general that's true.

JR: Can you talk about European attitudes and their appreciation of your playing the organ, and how you plan your programs for a European audience versus here?

ST: It's very interesting. Of course, everything you do has to be accessible to your audience, but I don't believe that we're beyond being able to educate someone or at least spark their interest in hearing things that otherwise they wouldn't have considered. You know, when you push envelopes, other people who want to do something similar don't necessarily stretch themselves as far as you might, but they'll stretch themselves farther than they would have otherwise, just because they see a bigger realm of what's possible. I think more of that is ingrained earlier on in European audiences. Consequently, I have found that overseas you can get away with a lot more experimentation, and that allows you to be somewhat more adventurous with new music or transcribing.

Transcribing can mean so many things; I've seen people do transcriptions of Schoenberg on organ. I saw someone--Bernard Haas, from Stuttgart--do a transcription of one of the Five Orchestral Pieces of Schoenberg at St. Eustache the same week I was in Paris doing my St. Sulpice recording, which was October 2001. And he did it from memory, with double pedal, triple pedal playing, all of these things that were so intricate, yet he kept the dynamic level very contained and small, based on the chamber quality of the original piece. And people just ate it up, and in a sense it was the most adventurous thing on the program, and while there were many organists present, there also were a lot of people who came because it said "organ concert"--but it was a very intensive 20th-century program, with some Webern transcriptions, and some of Jean Guillou's pieces, and then the Schoenberg in the middle, and people were just perplexed by it. But there were more comments, questions, and curiosity about that work than anything else on the program, and it certainly was the most envelope-pushing piece.

To try to do something like that over here, it depends on how you present it and how you talk about it first to your audience. But it seems that certain kinds of transcriptions are much more popular here than 20th-century music and yet in some ways 20th-century music, especially in certain circles in Europe, has always been more popular than transcriptions. You hear a lot against transcriptions with these kinds of dogmatic black and white ideas about what a transcription should be: is it necessary, why are we doing this if you have all this music of Bach, is a transcription anything compared to that? I've found that I can introduce a transcription to a skeptical European the way you try to do the same thing with modern music for an American audience, and if you do it the right way, I think you can sell something new or at least get people curious.

JR: Tell us your thoughts on commissioning new organ works.

ST: I had a very special experience while I was still in high school. My earlier studies, both organ and piano, engaged fewer pieces for longer periods of time than would be the case later as my technique advanced. So, when I worked on a piece, I really lived with it for a long time before it went before anyone except my teacher.

At one point, I had spent about a year with James Thunder on Aaron Copland's Piano Variations when, one day, after a lesson, Thunder said to me, "You know, Copland is coming to Chicago to give a lecture at the Cultural Center downtown. I made some arrangements this morning on the telephone--do you think you'd be up to playing this for him next week?" Well, I was not about to be stupid and say NO (which Thunder knew), although the idea scared me to death (which Thunder also knew). Even at that age, I could grasp what it meant to play something important for the composer himself, much less Aaron Copland! After six more days of polishing my memorization, I attended the lecture at the Cultural Center and was introduced to Copland afterwards by my teacher. A half an hour later, I sat down in a private piano studio some blocks away at Roosevelt University and, nervous as a ninny, played the work for Copland. He was extremely kind, complimentary enough that I still enjoy talking about it, especially about the fact that I was, as he put it, "crazy" enough at my age to have memorized it, insightful on tempi, some phrasing, and so on. But, the one major awakening was how incredibly inspiring it is to sit down with the source of a creation and share thoughts on it, the ideas that sparked it, concepts and such related things. That was a turning point for me, as it also spawned a real hunger for more music that was new, different, fresh, and intense, sometimes vehemently intense.

At that age, I found pieces that were off-the-wall, learned them, and played them in recitals because I felt a need to do so. What I began to learn was that, when you present something "dicey" to an audience, even knowing that all or many of them may be hearing it for the first time, you get further with that audience by talking to them about what they will hear and why they would want to hear it, even again and again, than you do by just handing them written program notes. Once you do this, the audience feels that there are good reasons for being curious about something that will be not only unfamiliar, but also likely push a few envelopes too, and that this is a positive and enriching thing! If you play down to your listeners, especially with your choice of programming, like they're dumb, then they will respond that way a lot of the time. If you show them that you trust their minds and ears enough to KNOW that they can be interested in what you are offering them, people tend to be more open-minded for you. Despite a lot of thinking these days to the contrary, when it comes to "modern music," I still find this to be unmistakably true, if you as the presenter handle it the right way.

Put all of this together with the opportunities to meet and work with more and more living composers that really began at Illinois College, and the result is a list of varying and remarkable works that I feel privileged to play as often as I can. There is a very challenging three-movement pedal solo work called Sequentia Pedalia by Chicago composer Morgan Simmons, which he gave me in manuscript just prior to my appointment to St. Patrick's in New York; Anthony Newman, one of my best friends in the world, and one of my most devoted supporters, has written three very large but different works for me of brilliant intricacy (these get played perhaps the most frequently and are always very well received); there is Jean Guillou's massive and intense seven movement symphonic poem called Instants (his second largest solo organ work), improvisational but thematically interwoven, written for my concert at King's College, Cambridge; and a jazzy, witty piece based on Bulgarian folk rhythms for organ, percussion and women's chorus called Slingshot Shivaree, composed for a program at St. Bartholomew's called "Organ Plus" by my friend Martha Sullivan. She is an especially talented composer whose star is on the rise, with her works being performed all over the U.S.; there is the haunting and nostalgic 4-movement Sinfonietta by Philip Moore of York Minster, England; and the most recent to date, the Trois Poèmes by Thierry Escaich, works of pure genius, contained electricity with balance and proportion. There are more to come, the next being in 2004 from Bruce Neswick.

JR: About your championing of transcriptions: You've recorded a number of transcriptions, including a good half-dozen of your own.

ST: Right.

JR: What originally got you on the transcription bandwagon? And how do you prepare these? Do you write them down note for note, or do you just sketch them out for yourself? Would you consider having any of them published?

ST: There are several issues here. I have not actually written down anything per se; there's nothing that exists in any formatted way. Usually the bigger transcriptions are the most complicated ones that would take the most work--things that are orchestral versus piano, like a symphony, the Shostakovich 5, or the Petroushka dances, which are all marked from the full scores. You go through and find the things that are more important in the texture, and then find out by process of elimination what you have to take out, because obviously with two hands and two feet there's only so much you can play. So you must decide what to keep and what has to go--and how to eliminate things in an orchestral score so that you can play it on the organ without changing the piece or leaving out something important.

Through looking at a score that I've marked up, I work it up slowly and memorize it, and then essentially play the transcriptions from memory. So none of them are actually written out; they're just marked-up adapted full scores.

In the end, as crazy a process as that sounds, it ends up being easier come performance time, because there's too much to follow and certainly to have an orchestral score in front of you, to have someone try to page-turn that would be crazy. It's very distracting to try to read ten lines of a score while playing and doing registrations and keeping your focus in front of an audience. Anything that limits other senses is more focused--in other words, by playing from memory, the other senses become more acute, because the visual distraction of looking at a page and reading something takes away from the ear, takes away from things that are tactile. So playing from memory certainly hones in on what you feel under your fingers, what you listen to, in a different way. This is never more important than in a very complicated transcription. That's one reason I've never actually written anything down.

Another reason is that a lot of the repertoire is not really of interest to publishers; they don't think it's mainstream enough to sell. So, no, at this point, nothing is published. I think at some point, if either a publisher decides they would like something specific or if I could get a couple of players who were interested in a certain transcription, then I would take the time to write something down.

JR: Your repertoire is very diverse and you strive to present each piece with a sense of stylistic awareness. What then are your thoughts on organ transcriptions vs. organ repertoire, and on performance practices? As a performer, how do you strike a balance among these?

ST: I have some very specific and passionate thoughts on this. To start with, I think that the art of transcription is very important, and it is ironic that it gets both incredible support and simultaneously a great deal of criticism nowadays.

Realize that when we say transcriptions, we are not just talking about Danny Boy, Ave Maria and Flight of the Bumblebee. We are also talking about large-scale, often mainstream repertoire that demands as much care and subtlety from an organist as it would from a pianist, a singer or an orchestra. Art at a very high level transcends its chosen medium. It is not just a matter of whether or not the organ becomes an orchestra, a piano, or anything else.

A successful transcription should not sound like it is a transcription, but rather be idiomatically adapted to the new medium while preserving the soul and stylistic context of the original in a carefully struck balance, and this is why transcribing is such an art form and anything but trite. I would challenge those who flippantly dismiss transcriptions as circus tricks as not understanding these ideas on a very profound level, nor having experimented with transcriptions enough personally to see what is really possible, and how. Consider the Bach-Vivaldi Concerti, several Liszt works that began on piano or organ and then went the other way, in the composer's own hand nonetheless, or the most obvious example, Mussorgsky's piano work Pictures at an Exhibition (transcribed later by other composers for a medium of immense color possibility, and now part of the standard orchestral repertoire). So, ultimately, we do accept transcriptions--we always have. Moreover, awareness of style must be applied here too--transcription does not always mean swell boxes, string divisions and tubas. Take for instance Bach's Italian Concerto or his Goldberg Variations. I have had as much musical satisfaction from playing these on organs by Fritts, von Beckerath, Gabler, Fisk and so on, as I have had sitting at a great E.M. Skinner with the Liszt B-Minor Sonata or something as monumental as the Shostakovich Symphony No. 5.

For me, all of this leads to a larger issue, and that is how we often see performers "mixing menus," which just confuses everything. I once heard an organist pull out stops at 8', 4'and 2' on a neo-Baroque organ and make his way through Elgar's Nimrod on that one sound, and briskly at that, like it was just this pretty piece to play for the audience, and that was enough. It was evident that the player did not understand anything about the intimacy of this music, or that perhaps this was not the right organ for it. On the flip side, I recently heard a Bach prelude and fugue played with all the swell shades flapping around like window blinds in a storm, with as many pistons as there were notes and Romantic rubato everywhere. Although the result was extremely musical in its own way, the total change of esthetic was so foreign to the score tha

January 18, 1914-September 19, 2003

Catharine Crozier died on September 19, 2003, in Portland, Oregon, at the age of 89. A complete obituary appears in the November issue of The Diapason ("Nunc Dimittis," page 10). The following tributes are presented In Memoriam.

Catharine Crozier--Paragon of our profession

A fond remembrance by Thomas Harmon

Long before I saw her or heard her play, I heard the name Catharine Crozier spoken with reverence by my boyhood organ teachers. It was not until my undergraduate years at Washington University in the late 1950s that the long awaited opportunity presented itself when she came to St. Louis to play on the university's recital series in Graham Chapel. I shall never forget seeing her walk gracefully in her stunning floor length gown to the console, front and center on the chapel dais. A radiant smile on her face, she was truly a vision of elegance and beauty as she ascended to the bench, parting the skirt of her custom-made gown and draping it in a regal train over the back of the bench. Even before she raised her hands to sound the first notes, she had me mesmerized. I was in the presence of royalty, and, as the recital unfolded from memory, piece by piece, so perfectly juxtaposed, meticulously registered, beautifully articulated and flawlessly played, I knew that I was experiencing greatness. Little did I know, when I stepped up in awe to meet her and gush my admiration following the recital, that someday she and her renowned spouse Harold Gleason would become dear personal friends during their California years.

Many times over the next four decades I was treated to a Crozier recital, and my experience was always the same--programming that was on the cutting edge in exploring both early and new music, remarkable stylistic versatility that was always historically informed and up-to-date throughout her long recital and teaching career, meticulous registration with appropriately applied artistic restraint and impeccable technique. My first opportunity to hear Catharine after that unforgettable recital in Graham Chapel came more than a decade later, after she and Harold had moved to California and I had assumed the post of university organist at UCLA. One of my first actions in that post was to oversee restoration of the 4-manual, 80-rank Skinner organ in Royce Hall, designed by Harold in consultation with G. Donald Harrison. Harrison did the tonal finishing, and Gleason played the inaugural recital in September, 1930. Thus, I had many reasons for inviting Catharine to play at Royce Hall in January, 1972. My wife and I invited Catharine and Harold to be our houseguests during her recital visit, and we spent a memorable time together getting to know each other. They kept us laughing with their favorite form of humor, limericks, at which they were both virtuosi. Harold contributed greatly to my file on the Royce Hall organ with colorful stories of his California days and his interaction with UCLA, E. M. Skinner and G. Donald Harrison. (I was later to capture this on tape in an oral history interview that I did with him in another of the Gleasons' visits with us in 1978.) Catharine enjoyed our new Hradetzky house organ and revealed her ingratiating personality and clever wit, complemented by her delightful chuckle, as well as her appreciation of fine food and an occasional glass of sherry before dinner. Her Royce Hall recital was, of course, a triumph and a special moment for Harold to whom we paid tribute as the designer of the organ.

Sue and I later enjoyed being the Gleasons' guests in Rancho Bernardo, near San Diego, and later in their second California home in Claremont. Despite their success and fame, they lived a disciplined, unpretentious life, committed to artistic and scholarly excellence. It was in their Rancho Bernardo home that I saw and heard for the first time Catharine's harpsichord and cherished house organ by Laukhuff, with its 2-manual, custom-built Aeolian-Skinner console, on which she did much of her practicing and memorization throughout her career. The organ was designed to fit comfortably in a normal 8-foot ceiling height and to be easily movable, quite fortunately, since I believe it was purchased in their Eastman days, subsequently moved with them to Rollins College in Florida, then to four different locations in southern California and finally to Portland.

The year 1980 marked the 50th anniversary of UCLA's Royce Hall organ, and I invited Catharine to re-create Harold's 1930 dedication program, an invitation that she was pleased to accept. By this time we had become dear friends, and I revelled in hearing stories about Catharine's then forty years as a major recitalist. We discovered that we had a mutual love of trains, and she told enthusiastically of her train adventures all over the country as well as her spirit of adventure in exploring, usually on foot, each new town or city in which she performed. Catharine's recital at Royce Hall on June 6, 1980, was a very special event, indeed, and in retrospect was given further poignance and meaning by the fact that Harold Gleason passed away just three weeks later. Harold's funeral in the Claremont church that the Gleasons had attended offered yet another example of Catharine's very special qualities as a human being. Her presence that day was a role model of  deep spiritual faith, personal strength and acceptance, and her decision on the music for the service was communicated by the simple printed statement that the organ would be silent this day in respect for the loss of Dr. Gleason.

Another memorable recital occurred sometime in the early 1980s, when she performed Ned Rorem's complete Quaker Reader at Whittier College Chapel, including narration by Hollywood actor Peter Mark Richman.  Rorem, a great admirer of Catharine who was a champion of his and many other composers' new music, was present. If I had to rank them, I would say that the greatest Crozier performance that I have ever heard, perhaps the greatest organ recital that I have ever experienced, was her program for the 1987 Far West Regional Convention of the AGO in San Diego. Flawlessly performed by memory on the First Presbyterian Church's superb 4-manual Casavant organ were three 20th-century works: Ned Rorem's Views from the Oldest House, Norberto Guinaldo's Lauda Sion Salvatorem, and Leo Sowerby's Symphony in G Major (a Crozier signature piece throughout her long career). Following her performance, I told Catharine that I had never heard her play with such flair and depth of expression, and in an example of her keen wit, she replied that she was just now beginning to feel in control of the instrument. A day or so after the recital, dear Catharine accepted my invitation to have lunch with me and take a cruise aboard my boat at the harbor in Oceanside, and I shall always remember her boarding the boat like a seasoned yachtsman and her delight in the sea world around us. She loved adventure.

When I made my decision in 1983 to step down from my position as organist at the First United Methodist Church in Santa Monica to take on the job of Chair of the UCLA Music Department, I approached Catharine, who had moved to Whittier after Harold's death, about the possibility of her serving as interim organist at the church while a search was conducted for my successor. She indicated that she might like to do this, and the end result was her decision sometime later to accept the church's hopeful invitation to stay on as the regular organist. Fortunately, she accepted, moved to the Santa Monica area and delighted the congregation with her marvelous service playing for the next nine years. I was on hand to pinch hit for her when she was away playing recitals, but she proved to be dedicated to the position and seemed to thoroughly enjoy being back on the bench playing services regularly. The choir adored her (everyone did!) and many stayed in touch with her as personal friends after she moved to Portland in 1992. At that time, I had just stepped down from the chairmanship at UCLA and accepted the church's invitation to return for what turned out to be another nine years. While she was there, Catharine had overseen the installation of new swell reeds and a new great mixture, making the organ better than ever. Typical of her exemplary pedagogical approach to playing the organ, the organ copies of the hymnal and anthems were lightly marked in pencil with her fingerings, pedallings, registration and manual changes. I learned a lot from them and respectfully left the markings for my successors.

Late memories: her stunning 80th birthday recital at the Crystal Cathedral (how could anyone but Crozier play such a huge organ with such grace and control at the age of 80?); her 85th birthday recital at the First Congregational Church on the world's largest church organ (by this time she was handicapped by the loss of vision in one eye, but she had no trouble finding her way around the maze of that immense console and tossing off the Liszt BACH as though it were easy); and, finally, her "Life Experiences" presentation at the 2001 Northwest Regional Convention of the AGO in Eugene. I noted that she had grown quite frail, as John Strege and I called for her at her hotel room to escort her to the venue for her presentation, but her radiant smile and warm greeting were not frail. Her presentation was deeply moving to me and, I am sure, to everyone present. It was the last time I saw Catharine in person, although we spoke on the phone periodically after that. I shall miss her presence and her friendship but will be nurtured for the rest of my life by happy memories and her supreme example of excellence.         

A tribute to Catharine Crozier Gleason

by Karen McFarlane

To read Catharine Crozier's recital reviews is to realize what a superb artist we have lost. "Catharine Crozier . . . may be an honored veteran among organ players . . . but she can still run rings around much of her younger competition, not only in interpretive style but in sheer technique as well." (New York Times) "At home in any style, the versatile performer captured the excitement of an accelerating fugue by Schumann, tossed off a Hindemith sonata with neat non-sentimentality and made sparks fly in a fiery virtuoso finale by . . . Milos Sokola." (The Plain Dealer) " . . . she always got to the heart of the music." (Los Angeles Times) Through the observations of music critics, we have a picture of some of the recitals she played.

Those who were in her audiences during the course of her 62-year career saw a slender, elegant woman walk "onstage" and instantly communicate a commanding presence. By her demeanor, one knew even before a note was heard, that she was an authority; as she played, the depth and range of her artistry simply confirmed it. Her discipline, her attention to detail and her high intelligence were all part of a persona "programmed" for a successful life and career as performer and teacher. In thinking over the 38 years I knew Catharine, several adjectives come to mind: elegant, shy, witty, hard-working, thoughtful, warm and yet also reserved. She was comfortable with solitude. One did not "buddy up" with Catharine Crozier, yet she had close friendships in her life which she greatly prized.

I have clear memories of Catharine. First meeting her in 1965 during a sweltering summer in New York City, I was struck by how cool and unruffled she was by the heat, how as she taught students whose fingers were nearly sliding off the keys, she seemed unaffected by a similar human malady! In my mid-twenties I had the good fortune to share some delicious and entertaining meals with Catharine, her husband Harold Gleason, and Fred Swann, three people who from my perspective were on towering pedestals. It was the first time I realized that the finest artists tend to also be marvelous people, a truism I have been interested to observe ever since. Although I remained in a certain awe of Catharine all the years I knew her, I came to see her as a human being rather than as someone out of reach.

At the opening of the Tully Hall organ, where she shared the program with E. Power Biggs and Thomas Schippers, I was thrilled by Catharine's performance of the Barber Toccata Festiva, from the moment she walked onstage till the moment she left it. I remember being riveted by her performance at The Riverside Church of "Mary Dyer did hang as a flag" (Ned Rorem's Quaker Reader), as she fiercely portrayed that condemned woman's death. Then, on her 80th birthday she played a dazzling recital (all from memory except for one piece) at the Crystal Cathedral, closing with the Widor "Toccata" as her smashing encore. Considering that she had awakened the morning of the previous day in a swaying 20th-floor hotel room during the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake, her performance was remarkable for its calm ease. She was always so well prepared and confident, that even an earthquake could not shake her performance.

One of my fondest memories is of the time Catharine, my husband Chick Holtkamp and I vacationed at Mohonk Mountain House. She would invite us to her room for sherry in the late afternoon and, beautifully attired, she would join us for dinner. Though she declined to go on strenuous hikes with us or swim in the lake, she treated us to a staid carriage ride, which was pleasantly old-world in its flavor. Her innate sense of formality in such a setting was utterly charming; she had a talent for quiet enjoyment in any place she inhabited.

I recall watching her teach a master class at Eastman during her late 80s, with her mind untouched by age in any negative way, her warmth toward the students genuine, her knowledge of the music complete. She was a total professional to the end of her life. I recall the time when I was astounded at hearing her play a certain wedding processional. When I expressed my amazement that "I never thought I would see the day when Catharine Crozier would play the Wedding March," she in turn surprised me by her retort, "It comes with the job!"

The last ten years of Catharine's life were among her happiest, mainly due to her appointment as Artist-in-Residence at Trinity Cathedral, Portland, Oregon. The high musical standards of Canon John Strege and his superb choir met her own on a happy level. I flew out to Portland on four occasions during her final decade, always dining with her in good restaurants (she had a fine time "researching" restaurants before choosing which ones we would go to) and of course going to church with her. Each time we would attend a service at Trinity Cathedral, she would lean over and quietly say "I just love it here!" The last time I heard her there in recital was the first day of April, 2001. She was, as ever, splendid.

In addition to Catharine Crozier's grace and intelligence, she was possessed of an optimistic nature. She was not immune to sadness, but she had that sturdy Oklahoma constitution that just goes forward in the face of any adversity. Even when she lost one eye in the last years of her life, she said "Well, I just go on." Indeed, after the loss of that eye, she played her 85th birthday recital at First Congregational Church, Los Angeles, to a packed church of admirers. Catharine had a funny story to relate about the eye trouble that caused her to stop driving. She started calling a local taxi company to take her to the cathedral to practice each day, then later back to her apartment. After about a week of this, the drivers stopped asking her destination and automatically took her to one place or the other! She was pleased at being such a celebrity among Portland's taxi drivers!

There are many good stories "out there" about Catharine. Upon her death, I received some touching e-mails from friends and admirers which related to first meeting her, first hearing her play, studying the organ with her, and so on. One man commented on the special quality of light which seemed to infuse her playing during her later years, and he was quite right. In the early part of her career she was well-known for her brilliant technique and effortless playing, but as she grew older she continued to build on that technique, bringing a complete artistry to her mature years. We are fortunate that she recorded several CDs during the last 20 or so years of her life, among them first-rate performances of Rorem and Sowerby. A supporter of the highest possible standards in musical performance, she remains an excellent model for today's young musicians to emulate. She would probably tell them to seek out a fine teacher, develop an infallible technique, practice diligently, learn your repertoire thoroughly, have a firm goal of becoming an artist, behave in a professional manner, and you will have a fine chance for a career. Catharine Crozier lived a full and interesting life. Her innate musical talent, her thoroughness in her work, and her consummate artistry gave us a person who was a living legend in the world of organ music. The immense regard her fellow artists the world over had for her is testimony to her great stature among them. On both a professional and personal level, our loss is deeply felt.  

Remembering Catharine Crozier

by Canon John Strege, Director of Cathedral Music, Trinity Cathedral, Portland, Oregon

Reflecting on Catharine Crozier's involvement at Trinity Cathedral as Artist-in-Residence these past ten years is a remembrance of graciousness, superb artistry, encouragement, and unbridled enthusiasm. When I was notified that Catharine was moving to Portland, the Dean of the Cathedral and I immediately wrote her asking if she would consider becoming Trinity's Artist-in-Residence. In what seemed like only hours, she quickly responded by saying that she would be most pleased to accept this position. So began my relationship with Catharine.

Catharine would practice most afternoons in preparation for occasional Sunday morning voluntaries, organ recitals, and in the first years, her out of town master classes and recitals. As we developed a friendship, I was always humbled by her enthusiasm for the music at Trinity. She embraced the magnificent Rosales organ, the liturgy, the Trinity Choir and Cathedral Chamber Singers, and the loving Trinity community.

In the later years, as we drove together, attended concerts, had lunches and dinners, I was privileged to sample her great sense of humor, her many opinions about legendary organists from the past, her reminiscences of her extraordinary career and life with Harold Gleason, and her timely words of encouragement for my work in the church. When I asked her if she could arrive a few minutes early for one of her practice sessions to hear an organ piece I was preparing, she responded with, "How about this afternoon?" With her generosity, these "brief" coaching sessions could last well over an hour. As I have frequently mentioned to my colleagues, having Catharine Crozier in the congregation on any given Sunday gave a new meaning to the preparation of organ voluntaries for the liturgy.

As Catharine lived out her final decade in our midst, her playing at Trinity evoked an unspeakable transcendence. Her life was lived in the realization of being in the moment, maintaining the integrity of purpose and spirit, and always looking ahead to new challenges and opportunities.

Of the many blessings in my life, I consider the opportunity of being with Catharine one of the greatest. I cherish our friendship and affection we had for each other. Her physical absence is a profound loss, but her spirit, musicianship and grace will remain with me for all time.              

Remembering Catharine Crozier

by Fred Swann

Many of us can identify a person who, by their influence and inspiration, has been paramount in the development of our lives and careers. Catharine Crozier was that person for me.

Although I had read about her and had heard one of her recordings, I didn't meet Catharine until the summer of 1949. I had just finished my freshman year at Northwestern University School of Music when she and her distinguished husband, Harold Gleason, came to teach and to lead a summer church music workshop at the university. I had been playing the organ since age 10 and intended to be "a good church organist," but that summer the Gleasons convinced me to commit to a career as an organist.

Catharine played a recital on the E. M. Skinner organ in St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Evanston as part of the conference. The combination of her incredible performance and that organ, one of Skinner's most remarkable and exceptional instruments, was so overwhelming that on that very evening my standards of musicianship and performance were set in stone for life. I became a Crozier "groupie"--wore out all her recordings as they came out, traveled huge distances to hear her recitals, and tried, pathetically as I look back, to emulate her playing style. In addition to the musical benefits, I was privileged to develop a cherished friendship that has lasted a lifetime.

That same summer I played the Langlais Te Deum for the Gleasons. It was then still new to most American organists, and even they had not heard it. It became one of "her pieces" and she would frequently remark about my bringing it to her attention. Despite her encouragement and interest in having me study with her at Eastman after completing degrees at Northwestern, I felt so inferior and in awe of her that I was terrified to take the Eastman audition. Fearing the humiliation of not being accepted, I chose to study at Union Theological Seminary School of Sacred Music in New York. Mrs. Gleason, as we called her then, became quite cross with me over this, but, as things sometimes happen, the decision to go to New York City turned out to be a fortuitous thing for my career and for our friendship.

Forgive me if I've written too much in attempting to establish the roots of my indebtedness with this wonderful lady and consummate musician. The stories and anecdotes would fill a large book, but here I want to pay homage to my mentor--for although I never formally studied with her, I have never stopped absorbing knowledge and inspiration from her.

You're reading a number of tributes in these pages, and very probably many of them have used the same words in describing Catharine. She could be stern in her expectations from students, but her compassion and humanity never stopped growing throughout her life. She was thoroughly professional and never failed to live up to the highest demands that she made upon herself. She was the personification of elegance in her playing, and just to watch her at the console was a lesson in grace and form. Posture, hand position, economy of movement and a complete involvement in the music all combined for incredible performances. She had a great thirst for continual learning that allowed her music making to remain fresh and vital whether she was playing one of the "old masters" or a contemporary work. She played in perfect style, and with the latest scholarship, everything she chose. She embraced new works of many composers, especially American. Her performances of these works was so compelling that she "sold" them to a profession and to audiences that were usually more ready to accept the latest from France and elsewhere.

A physically attractive woman who carried herself with poise and grace, she was a quiet person--but she never "missed a thing," had a wonderful, dry sense of humor, and an infectious laugh. She could often say more with a look than some people can with many words. She delighted in simple things, like being driven up and down Fifth Avenue in New York to look at all the lights at Christmas time. When young, she enjoyed fine food and fancy restaurants at times, but her own cooking abilities were limited. If she invited you to dinner the invitation often came with the question "Well, would you like the tuna casserole or the other one?"

Dr. Crozier kept performing until about a year before her death. People just wouldn't let her stop. I had to do some real arm twisting to convince her to play recitals on her 75th and 80th birthdays at the Crystal Cathedral, where I was in residence at the time. Each program was stunning despite her misgivings beforehand. When I greeted her as she left the console at the conclusion of her 80th birthday recital, she, having just finished a stellar performance of the Reubke Sonata on the 94th Psalm broke into a wide grin, cocked her head, snapped her fingers, and said "By crackey, I did it!" And she continued to "do it". Despite advancing age and physical handicaps that would cause most people to quit, she finally agreed after much cajoling to come to First Congregational in Los Angeles to play a recital on her 85th birthday--and what a wonderful time we had! Friends had come from literally around the country and even some from Europe. After that she slowed down gradually but still played Vesper recitals at Trinity Cathedral in Portland, Oregon, on the great Rosales organ she loved and recorded on so magnificently.

Because of the wonderful friendships with the cathedral staff, especially Canon John Strege and Kevin Walsh, and the loving care she was given, she almost reached her 90th birthday in a very content existence. When a handful of us gathered near the organ console in early October for a private service of blessing and commitment of her ashes, there were tears and sadness--but also enormous thanksgiving for a life that brought so much joy and inspiration to untold thousands of people over her long and distinguished career. Her influence will live on for many generations to come.  She is now at peace.  May light perpetual shine upon her.      

The Technical and Aesthetic Legacy of Carl Weinrich

In 1960, in an article about Glenn Gould for The New Yorker
magazine, Joseph Roddy harnesses Nietzsche's terms to describe a dichotomy he
perceives in the composition and the playing of piano music. Eighteenth-century
keyboard compositions "are Apollonian, adhering to classical formality and
reserve; those of the nineteenth century are Dionysiac, being notable for
poetic mood and emotional thunder." Keyboard compositions of the twentieth
century, "for all their involutions, have shown a tendency to return to
the Apollonian ideal."2 Rather than providing a clear example of either
Apollonian or Dionysiac tendencies, Glenn Gould's life and art enclose a
mesmeric opposition of both classical and romantic components: Dionysiac
frenzies during performance, behavior for which he became legend, and
Apollonian compositions and interpretations which are "essentially
dispassionate." It was Gould's interpretation of Bach's "highly Apollonian"
Goldberg Variations which established the young Canadian as a top-ranking
pianist. Playing the Variations, Gould accomplishes his technically flawless
performance, "lean, aloof and fleet," in ten minutes and twenty-one
seconds less than it took Wanda Landowska to complete her highly Dionysiac
performance of the same work.3

Joseph Roddy's description of Glenn Gould and his music
suggests a startling similarity to the Apollonian style and taste of Carl
Weinrich, organist and choirmaster of Princeton University from 1943 to his
retirement in 1973. There are, of course, many significant differences between
the two men.  Gould the pianist was
famous for his histrionics, swaying and singing and conducting himself as he
played. Weinrich the organist was just as known for a calm, classical manner,
an almost unnerving physical control which he exercised even during the music's
most intense passages.4 But, as we shall see, when Carl Weinrich compiled his
own canon of organ music, his choices were very like what the younger Gould
came to champion:  the music of
Sweelinck, of Bach, of Hindemith, of Krenek. In addition, few words could
better describe Carl Weinrich's playing than those applied to Glenn Gould:
"lean, aloof, fleet." And if Gould had his Van Cliburn, so, too,
Weinrich had his artistic antipodes. From his own era sprang the Dionysiac
Virgil Fox, whose preconcert foreplay, cavalier treatment of the printed score,
and wild technical high jinks asserted a violent contrast to Weinrich's
Apollonian creed. Most often compared with Weinrich was his exact contemporary,
E. Power Biggs, whose playing, though technically less precise than Weinrich's,
could hardly be called Dionysiac. Biggs's dedication to popularizing the organ,
however, eventually bred in him a Dionysian's taste, music of uneven artistic
merit from all periods, chosen because it appealed to the untrained listener.
In our own era, Anthony Newman, Simon Preston and Diane Bish are only a few of
the many outstanding Dionysiac recitalists.

Carl Weinrich's importance in American organ music, however,
reached far beyond the university where he made his home. Weinrich was both a
traditionalist and a revolutionary, the former because he chose to concentrate
his energies on the works of Bach, the latter because he was one of a group of
American organists who in this century thoroughly altered American practices of
organ playing and building.5 But what was Weinrich's method and how did he
acquire it?

Lynnwood Farnam: Beauty with Discipline

When Carl Weinrich began in earnest his study of organ in
the 1920s, instruments, the technique of playing, and attitudes toward organ
literature differed greatly from today's prevailing notions. Mechanically
sluggish consoles and the romantic organ's preponderance of 8¢ diapasons
and strings made intricate passages, particularly in the music of J.S. Bach,
difficult to hear and hence not rewarding to master.  Indeed, Bach's famous remark, "you need only to hit the
right notes at the right moment and the instrument does the rest"6
alleged, when Carl Weinrich began his career, not irony and understatement, but
impossibility. Lists of organ stops from those years read like a romantic
orchestral fantasy: flauto amabile, tuba mirabile, philomela. Weinrich was one
of a group of energetic, musically dissatisfied young organists who gathered
about the great teacher and player, Lynnwood Farnam, organist at the Church of
the Holy Communion in New York City until his death in 1930. Together they
reformed and refashioned American organ playing.7

As the first step toward unlocking music's subjective
components or its effect upon the soul, Lynnwood Farnam directed his students'
physical dexterity to the technical components or skeleton of organ music.8 To
approach music's aesthetic ends, Farnam first insisted upon absolute mastery of
the score, careful planning of fingering, endless practice of difficult
passages. Moreover, Farnam demanded an end to the physical pyrotechnics and
theatrical body thrusts which organists often affected at the console. Clear,
clean, precise playing soon brought a predictable dissatisfaction with the
sluggish, muddy sounds of romantic organs and led to an interest in Baroque
techniques of organ building, a return to the principles of construction,
design and stop selection practiced in Bach's era. Farnam's followers, then,
embarked upon a dual quest: more responsive instruments and clearer sounds to
convey more precise playing. Their vision for organ study proclaimed forcefully
the link between technical and aesthetic dimensions of music, the objective and
subjective components of art. And in his own practice, Lynnwood Farnam left
little to chance; before playing a recital, he insisted upon a minimum of
fifteen hours to prepare himself at the instrument he was to play.

In addition to his insistence upon technical perfection,
Farnam's notions of repertoire were built around the music of Bach. He
especially condemned the nineteenth-century custom of including transcriptions
or arrangements of piano music in organ recitals: études of Chopin or
Schumann, pieces such as Debussy's Clair de lune, Rachmaninoff's Prelude in
C-sharp Minor, and overtures and arias from opera. In a series of twenty
recitals, Farnam performed the complete organ works of Bach, a monumental
statement of his musical vision and a feat which his student, Carl Weinrich,
was to repeat many times. Weinrich's appointment as Farnam's successor at the
Church of the Holy Communion, following the latter's death in 1930, indicates
the high regard which Weinrich's playing enjoyed in Farnam's circle.

Weinrich's legacy to his students, and hence to all
musicians who followed him, is three-fold. First, he adopted, practiced, and
passed on Lynnwood Farnam's uncompromising standard of technical excellence as
the foundation of aesthetic satisfaction. Second, having at his disposal the
whole of organ literature, he offered to his students his own special views
concerning repertoire and its use. Third, Weinrich fostered in those about him
an artistic awakening, a refined musical judgment, the unerring aesthetic
sensibility which Plato attributes in the Republic, Book III, to a proper
education in music. Throughout his life, Carl Weinrich stubbornly refused to
practice or to perform any but the very best music composed for the organ.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> 

Legacy 1: Technique, Organ Design and Artistry

It is the first of these three legacies, Weinrich's efforts
to rescue organ playing from technical lassitude, which remains his most
difficult, his most heroic and his most far-reaching musical gift to us. To
begin with, Weinrich's Apollonian style rested upon an intense scrutiny of the
notes. His scores included extensive notations of fingering, and much of his
time with students was given over to searching carefully and slowly for the
best possible execution of difficult passages. Impatient with older theories of
fingering, Weinrich was an outspoken proponent of employing, whenever possible,
"the strong fingers," the thumb, index and middle finger of each
hand. He insisted that, especially in the works of Bach, one could always
devise a comfortable fingering for even the most difficult passages. He often
commented that "if the fingering of a particular passage isn't comfortable
when you practice it, the tension of a public performance will probably cause
you to stumble at that spot. A musical composition is like a string of
pearls--one weak knot, and the necklace breaks; one flubbed measure can destroy
the beauty and perfection which you achieve in all the others."

To be sure, a difficult measure or passage, properly fingered,
might require scores of repeated attempts to master. One should know a work
well enough to play each part separately, he insisted, and should practice a
piece for at least one year before performing it in public.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  As if to follow Bach's famous attribution
of his own success to hard work,9 Weinrich the student practiced at least eight
hours per day. At the time of his retirement, he still considered five hours
per day a minimum practice schedule for an active organist.

Weinrich's concern for precision even extended to noting
pedal passages with a "P.N." to remind himself which was the
"pivot note," the moment at which the body should shift its angle to
execute comfortably the pedal lines. 
And then, like Farnam, he allowed himself no other movement at the
console.  He was willing to discuss
diverse possibilities for phrasing, and hence for interpretation, only after a
student had demonstrated undisputed mastery of the work's skeleton. He liked to
say that his first concern was to help a student get the notes firmly in hand,
into the "strong fingers." "After that," he once said,
"we can discuss phrasing at our leisure.  My first job is to see that you can play these notes
correctly and with the same good fingering each time you approach this
piece."

It is natural that, following Lynnwood Farnam's first steps,
Carl Weinrich's tireless zeal to perfect the technique of organ playing led
him, as it had led Bach before him, to a careful evaluation of the instrument
itself, to the impact of organ design upon technical and aesthetic
considerations. Determined that musical lines must be clear to the ear,
Weinrich was an early proponent of spare use of the 8' registers, of eliminating
the heavy Diapason stops and of developing a full Rückpositiv division for
proper registration of the music of Bach. Together with G. Donald Harrison of
the Skinner Organ Company, Weinrich toured the organ lofts of Europe in the
summer of 1936 and studied carefully the instruments whose design and sound he
admired. While head of the organ department at Westminster Choir College
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  (1934-1940), he designed a Baroque
instrument for his studio, the celebrated "Praetorius Organ"
installed in 1939, one of the first instruments in this country built to
recover the clear tonal capacity and clean sounds necessary to the technical
perfection Weinrich sought.

After taking up his post at Princeton in 1943, Weinrich
began with Harrison a rebuilding of the University's enormous Chapel organ,
disconnecting many of the old, useless stops and adding the bright sounds of a
Baroque instrument.10 In later years, Weinrich collaborated with Walter
Holtkamp, Sr. in pioneering efforts to design organs following Baroque models.
The thirty-four stop, three-manual Holtkamp organ at General Theological
Seminary in New York, completed in October, 1958, is a monument to their
labors.11  Weinrich proudly used
this instrument for all of his later recordings with RCA Victor.

Improved technical articulation and improved organ sound
generated new possibilities for interpretation. Both inspired and enabled by
new instruments, Carl Weinrich began to play Bach's works at a far greater
speed than had been the custom. One need only compare Weinrich's early
recordings of Bach with those of Albert Schweitzer, a formidable Bach scholar
but a technically mediocre performer, to understand the very pleasing aesthetic
implications of superior technique, clear sounds and brisk tempi. Throughout
his life, Weinrich remained keenly interested in the relationship between tempo
and music's aesthetic effect. He checked himself regularly with a metronome to
ensure an accurate rhythmic rendering of each passage. He was forever warning
of the danger of rushing the sixteenth notes, even when playing with the
metronome. The margins of Weinrich's music, particularly his Bach scores,
contained a fascinating record of the diverse organs upon which he had
performed and recorded, and the tempi appropriate to each.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  But the happy marriage of superior
technique and intelligent organ design gave birth to unexpected musical
problems, unanticipated artistic discoveries.

In 1959, Carl Weinrich dedicated a new Holtkamp organ for
the First Presbyterian Church, now Nassau Presbyterian, in Princeton. Conceived
as an instrument similar to the organ at General Theological Seminary in New
York, the Princeton Holkamp included a complete Rückpositiv division,
three manuals and twenty-nine stops.12 Organist of the church for forty years,
Mary Krimmel was also Weinrich's brilliant student from his earliest days of
teaching, and she was determined that her congregation should enjoy the fruits
of Weinrich's research into organ design. But upon completion of the organ, a
problem which neither Weinrich nor Mrs. Krimmel foresaw quickly began to
manifest itself. Unlike the New York organ, First Presbyterian's instrument is
housed in an acoustically challenged space. Because First Presbyterian stands
approximately 150 yards from the Princeton Chapel, with its immense Aeolian
Skinner and endless echoes, the several organists who often performed on both
instruments experienced a technical, then aesthetic dichotomy. Detached, crisp
playing necessary for musical clarity in the cavernous chapel produced a
crumbly, thin, and altogether uninteresting effect in the church; stately tempi
suited to the chapel's great masses of sound became tediously slow in the
church. Each setting was an exaggerated circumstance: few rooms could be as
acoustically alive as the Princeton Chapel or as tonally unresponsive as the
First Presbyterian Church.

Efforts to find a technical solution to the aesthetic
dilemma surrounding these two fine organs led Carl Weinrich and Mary Krimmel to
undertake a search for improved articulation, an approach which would finally
produce aesthetically pleasing music in both the chapel and church. For
Weinrich, the subject was not a new one. Questions of how to achieve the best
articulation of a musical line began during his days under Farnam. Carl
Weinrich the student marvelled at his teacher's ability to play a legato line
as though there were tiny spaces of air between each note.13 In later years,
Weinrich often commented to his own students that he learned from Farnam the
secret of how to execute a singing legato without loss of definition and
clarity. Under no circumstances was the listener to sense a staccato touch.

The problem of fitting articulation to the instrument and to
its environment remained a matter of great interest to both Carl Weinrich and
Mary Krimmel to the end of their professional lives. It was my great good fortune
to be the student of both Weinrich and Krimmel and to prepare for many years a
weekly lesson on each instrument. What they learned and I absorbed from this
experience proved the most exciting and complete instruction possible in organ
articulation. Their endless discussions of articulation, of technical
exactitude, of how to execute the notes, would not have been novel in piano
pedagogy. For organ study, it was revolutionary. The following principles
slowly emerged.

First, neither strict legato nor detached, non-legato
playing satisfied the listener in either setting.  On both organs, a sensible alternation between detaching and
connecting notes produced the best effect.  Second, step-motion generally required a legato line, while
skips could be detached.  In the
church, the slightest change from a legato to a detached line produced an
immediate effect; in the chapel, only very pronounced, exaggerated articulation
reached the listener's ear. What in the chapel seemed to the performer a
slightly detached articulation became a singing legato as the sound moved out
to fill the nave. Finally, and most important, the same piece had to be
executed very differently on each organ. In the chapel, Bach's heroic Toccata
in F major had to be played at a tempo deliberate enough to allow an
appreciation of the work's massive chords punctuated by octave leaps and
cadenzas in the pedal. In the church, the Toccata had to move at much brisker
pace; sections following the second pedal cadenza unfolded most effectively if
the organist conceived of one beat, not three, to a measure.

Handel concerti proved to be the most difficult works of all
to tackle. In the chapel, a clearly detached line in all parts produced an
exciting interpretation; in the church, one had to cultivate a very slight
detachment, an articulation midway between staccato and legato, one which
obliged the organist to remain precariously perched on the edge of the keys.
Carl Weinrich, having thoroughly adjusted to the very live acoustics of the
Princeton Chapel, continued to employ a crisp, detached articulation; Mary
Krimmel, confronted with the dry environment, moved to a firm, legato style
made vital by a careful detaching of skips. The lesson is a clear one:
organists must approach each instrument, able to make even radical adjustments
in articulation to suit the organ's setting.

Legacy 2: Components and Uses of Repertoire

As he carried forward Lynnwood Farnam's technical legacy,
Carl Weinrich, like Farnam before him, exercised a formidable influence upon an
entire generation's notion of worthy repertoire for a superior organist.
Weinrich's clearest statement concerning organ literature came in 1950-51, when
Harvard University named him the Lamb Visiting Lecturer in Music, an honor
previously accorded Gustav Holst, Béla Bartók, and Aaron Copland.
For the first time, this prestigious post went to a performer, and the
compositions Weinrich chose for his series of eight recitals form what might be
called the Great Works for the organ.14 Weinrich's Apollonian tastes are never
more apparent: not one single work chosen for the eight recitals comes from the
nineteenth century.

It is here that the history of organ playing records an
accident, an irony, and an amusing juxtaposition. At the same time the
Apollonian Carl Weinrich was playing the eight Lamb recitals in Harvard's
Memorial Church, E. Power Biggs was continuing his custom, begun in the 1940s,
of broadcasting organ recitals from Boston's Symphony hall and Harvard's
Busch-Reisinger Museum. It would be an exaggeration to assert that these two
famous pioneers in organ study and building shared no common ground. As is
well-known, Biggs, like Weinrich, collaborated in the 1930s with his fellow
English ex-patriot, G. Donald Harrison, in the design and building of tonally
improved organs.  Biggs supervised,
in 1937, the construction of one of Harrison's early instruments, an organ for
Busch Reisinger Museum much like the "Praetorius Organ" Harrison
installed at Westminster Choir College for Weinrich. It is this instrument
which Biggs used for his famous broadcasts which began in 1942.15

Operating independent of both church and school, however,
Biggs's turf lay in the concert hall. Sensitive to that environment, he
cultivated a Dionysiac's taste and repertoire unlike Carl Weinrich's chosen
restraint. His programs, which contended with Weinrich's for announcement space
in the Harvard University Gazette of 1950-51, did include Bach, but also a
heavy offering of nineteenth-century music: Franck, Strauss, Schumann, and the
twentieth-century warhorse, Alain's Litanies. Biggs's Dionysiac programming was
conceived to make organ music accessible to untrained listeners, and to widen
organ repertoire to include all manner of popular and classical works.
Weinrich's Apollonian attitude gave no thought to popular taste or preference.
He was delighted with the environment which Princeton's chapel provided for his
recitals: absolute silence before the music began, and no applause at its
conclusion.

Among those Bach chorale preludes Weinrich played most often
were, from the Eighteen Organ Chorales, "O Lamm Gottes"; the
celebrated, double pedal composition on "An Wasserflüssen
Babylon"; and from the third part of the Klavierübung, a spectacular
little fugue, "Dies sind die heilgen zehn Gebot," and Bach's only
six-voice composition which has come down to us for the organ, "Aus tiefer
Not."

Perhaps the double pedal lines of "Aus tiefer Not"
and "An Wasserflüssen Babylon" appealed to Weinrich.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  Only an organist of superlative
technical accomplishment can handle these complex pedal parts, and at the same
time convey the sadness and deep feelings which pervade each piece. And his
playing of much smaller works reliably captured the same mystical quality of
more extended compositions; from the Orgelbüchlein, he often chose for a
recital's encore "In dir ist Freude," "In dulci jubilo" and
"Herr Gott, nun schleuss den Himmel auf"; each in his hands became a
small, flawless jewel.

Of Bach's great preludes and fugues, Weinrich played often
the Fugue in E-flat major ("St. Anne"), the Toccata and Fugue in F
major, the extremely popular Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the Prelude and
Fugue in A minor, the Fantasie and Fugue in G minor, the Toccata, Adagio and
Fugue in C major, the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, the Toccata and Fugue
in D minor (the "Dorian"), the Fantasie in G major, the Prelude and
Fugue in B minor, the Prelude and Fugue in G major and, curiously, the
strangely hybrid Pastorale in F. His playing of both the pedal and manual
ornaments in Bach's Toccata in F, the piece which for Mendelssohn "brought
down the roof of the church,"16 and his introduction of complex
ornamentation in Bach's subject for the Fugue in F major, perfectly executed
each time the subject appears, were spectacular examples of his technical
prowess.

Another of his favorites was the Concerto in A minor, Bach's
arrangement for organ of Vivaldi's double concerto for two violins.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  Weinrich performed the spare,
ravishingly beautiful middle movement at a very gentle, meditative pace,
employing a mournful reed for the solo passages, and then fell suddenly,
unexpectedly, with piercingly bright sounds upon the descending scale passages
which open the last movement. His breathlessly exciting tempo of this final
movement, notes spectacularly detached and perfectly articulated, formed a
thrilling contrast to the middle movement's careful legato touch and languid
mood. In addition, for the last movement of the concerto, Weinrich exploited
his talent for innovative registrations and the Princeton organ's resources,
employing two divisions located on opposite sides of the chancel; the result
accentuated the dazzling series of echoes and imitations for which Vivaldi's
music is famous, all played at a speed which no organist could match.

Weinrich regularly included movements from Bach's Trio
Sonatas in chapel services and on recital programs, and described playing these
most difficult of all pieces for the organ as "walking on eggs for twenty
minutes." He was, moreover, wonderfully inventive in selecting music for
the special needs of a university community. For the long academic processions
at all official university functions in the chapel, Weinrich chose, rather than
insipid voluntaries or marches, Bach's elaborately extended chorales and
chorale preludes on "Komm, heiliger Geist," from the Eighteen Organ
Chorales, and "Kyrie, Gott Vater in Ewigkeit" and "Kyrie, Gott
heiliger Geist," from the third part of the Klavierübung. Weinrich's
choice of Bach's most ornate four-part chorales for processionals at university
functions meant filling the chapel's nave with what are perhaps music's most
majestic chords, most ordered voices. It is hard to imagine a more perfect
blend of reason, sensual splendor, and art: the four musical lines moving
flawlessly toward their cadences as scholars of all ages and academic colors
process ponderously by.

While his primary interest and preference always lay with
the music of J.S. Bach, Carl Weinrich often commented that his favorite piece,
one which he played in public at least once each year, was Buxtehude's chorale
prelude on Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern!  And Weinrich's unbending fidelity to the score did not imply
monochromatic or uninteresting choices of registration. His daring, unexpected
use of reeds in Buxtehude's Wie schön leuchtet, preserved in a recording
made on the Holtkamp at General Theological Seminary, is a truly ingenious
interpretation of a masterpiece. He frequently performed Sweelinck's echo
fantasies and variations on Mein junges Leben hat ein End', Cabezón's
Diferencias sobre el canto del caballero, the preludes and fugues of Buxtehude
and Bruhns, Lübeck's Prelude and Fugue in E major, Noël #10 from
Daquin's book of twelve noëls. He recorded the Handel organ concertos,
Mozart church sonatas, and the Haydn organ concerto with Arthur Fiedler and the
Boston Pops orchestra. In addition, Weinrich released recordings of Baroque
Christmas music and organ music of the Bach family.

Although not as a group his favorite works, a few pieces
from Romantic composers appeared each year on his programs and among his
recordings; reviewers and concert goers frequently commented that it was
surprising to hear the organist famous for definitive renditions of Bach bring
such precision and sensitivity to later works.17 He played Mendelssohn's Sonata
I, Franck's Pièce Héroïque, and Brahms's chorale preludes
and Fugue in A-flat minor. The modern period received his enthusiastic study,
especially Hindemith's First Sonata for organ, Messiaen's Dieu Parmi Nous, and
Marcel Dupré's Cortège et Litanie, copied down when Weinrich was
a student of the great Frenchman. And Weinrich was very proud to have offered
the first public performance of Schoenberg's "Variations on a Recitativ,"
op. 40, a work which he edited for publication.

Weinrich's improvisations, or, rather, what we might call
Weinrich's theory of improvisation, deserve special mention. No Princeton
student interested in music could ever forget Carl Weinrich's spectacular
modulations and improvisations spun out between the organ's offertory and the
congregation's singing of the Doxology which followed.
style="mso-spacerun: yes">  Retaining the theme from his offertory
piece, Weinrich slipped adroitly through a succession of keys, adding ranks of
pipes with each phrase. Three special pieces reveal how he planned his
modulations or "improvisations," for in truth, Carl Weinrich was too
much a student of the classical principles of form, too Apollonian, to attempt
an unplanned or uncharted improvisation. 

The last movement of Mendelssohn's first organ sonata and
Bach's "St. Anne" fugue, two master works he especially favored for
offertories at Princeton, possess unmistakable, famous musical tropes which he
used to begin the improvisation and to establish its structure. The thundering
arpeggios of Mendelssohn's finale to his first sonata, the "St. Anne"
theme and the subject of the third movement's fugue--each became the germ for
an improvisation.  If the offertory
happened to include an anthem or composition by Mozart, Weinrich quoted the
great chords, dissonances, and dotted rhythms of Mozart's Fantasie in F minor,
K. 608.   Listeners awaited
the inevitable, climactic arrival of the dominant seventh chord, and then the
resolution in G major on which note the singing began. Because Weinrich never
played a preparatory phrase from the Doxology, one was obliged to listen
intently as the downbeat of an emerging tonic chord drew nearer and nearer.
Organists who must provide an improvisational bridge between an anthem and
doxology would do well to remember Weinrich's secret.  One should choose a theme or motif of the piece just
completed, and make that theme or motif the unifying idea of improvisation.

Legacy 3: Aesthetic Sensibility and a Life in Music

Carl Weinrich's third great legacy to organ study and
performance evolved from his decision, taken early in his career, to invest his
energy and effort in only those works he considered the very best compositions
for the organ. Having little patience with Romantic warhorses which merely
exploit the organ's capacity to sustain loud, rushing noise, Weinrich
withstood, in Apollonian fashion like Bach before him, many years of censure
from mediocre musicians and critics who felt him excessively inflexible,
narrow, and rigid in his adherence to Bach.

But Carl Weinrich's early recognition of those compositions
of greatest artistic value, and his fidelity to their study and performance,
widened his place in musical history from that of master performer to master
teacher. His dual authority, first over organ music's technical, then its
aesthetic, dimensions pointed students' interest and organists' labors toward
those composers and compositions capable of capturing one's imagination
forever. His life's work answers not only the question of how to realize the
full beauty of organ literature, but which portions of that literature merit
first, our endless technical effort to play accurately, and then, a lifetime of
sensitivity and reflection to interpret.

Perhaps because as a weekly performer for the Princeton
community, Carl Weinrich had to reclaim and defend his mastery of the organ
each time he sat down at the console, he retained throughout his professional
life both a student's wonder at the act of playing and a student's uneasiness
before the demands of the art. One could say without fear of overstatement that
Carl Weinrich remained, forever, frightfully respectful of the perils of
performance. It is not possible to over-practice great music or to arrive at a
definitive interpretation of its beauty, he liked to observe, nor does one ever
tire of returning "to polish once again an exquisite diamond."

As a teacher, 
Weinrich set before his students a three-pronged challenge which he
himself had answered: to identify within one's self a passionate devotion to
one field of inquiry and to remain forever its restless student; to train
discriminating eyes and ears to direct the efforts of imperfect hands and feet;
to recognize that mastery of a discipline is achieved only when one understands
that it is in the details of construction, in the skeleton, that all great art
is made. The process of intense scrutiny required to master a work's skeleton
teaches us that all art is not equal, all compositions not of a quality to
command one's study for life.

It is not surprise, finally, to discover that in his thirty
years at Princeton University's center, Weinrich's approach to the study of
music practiced the fundamental principles of a liberal arts college.
Princeton's president Robert F. Goheen, in his address to the Freshman Class at
Opening Exercises in the fall of 1965, insisted that a liberal education is not
merely to prepare one to earn a living, but also to open the mind to a field of
inquiry, a body of knowledge or learning capable of engaging the spirit and
intellect throughout life. In order to realize any of the great ends of
education, students must give themselves to a discipline, an intellectual and
artistic task which will command their life's attention, effort, and passion.

In music, a regrettable emphasis, often encouraged by
teachers, upon pursuing "what hasn't been done" occasionally leads
students to invest their time and talent in works or ideas too shallow for
repeated scrutiny, too jejune to sustain a mature spirit. By stating
unequivocally that organists should look to Bach, that the Master's greatest
works require a lifetime to execute and to interpret, that a life spent with
J.S. Bach is a life well spent, Weinrich's legacy can still spare all who will
listen from the sa

"English concert organist John Scott is recognized not only as one of his country's finest organists and musical leaders, but also as one of the most gifted of his generation of concert organists in the performance world today." So begins John Scott's biographical sketch in his management's brochure. Scott's stellar career includes serving as Director of Music at St. Paul's Cathedral and (formerly) Professor of Organ at the Royal Academy of Music, many tours and recordings with the St. Paul's choir and as organ soloist, and a dizzying array of other appearances and awards. In addition to an already demanding schedule, this year he served as a judge at the Dallas International Organ Competition, arranged an exchange with the choir of St. Thomas Church New York City in June, and is performing the complete works of Bach at St. Paul's in twenty-five recitals.

On his most recent recital tour to the United States, John Scott visited Glenview Community Church in Glenview, Illinois to play the inaugural recital for a concert series featuring the new Buzard pipe organ and to give a masterclass, "Accompanying the English Anthem." During the visit, he demonstrated a genuine love of his work and approached his tasks with the carefully-paced energy of a veteran performer. He is a most delightful person--confident but soft-spoken, business-like yet very polite, sincere and possessed of a slightly mischievous sense of humor. Following his electrifying recital performance, Scott was asked if constantly being praised for his work becomes commonplace. He responded simply with a smile, "I don't get tired of hearing compliments."

During one of our conversations, Scott began to reminisce about a childhood experience with organ music. That recollection became the stepping stone for a formal interview, an exchange during which he shared some of the details of his experience as a musician in a great English cathedral and how he got there.

MVO: During lunch on Saturday, you mentioned a recording that made a great impression on you when you were young--G.D. Cunningham playing the Bach D-minor Toccata and Fugue at Birmingham Town Hall. Was that one of your earliest experiences hearing organ music?

JS: Yes, I'm sure it was. It was a scratchy old 78 record that we had at home. When I was growing up the 78's were already out of fashion, but we had an old player at home that I was fascinated by--the wind-up sort of gramophone. I discovered this recording of G.D Cunningham and I was amazed that there could be such music. I had never heard anything like it. It was something entirely new to me and I couldn't stop listening to it. I think I wore the record out in the end.

MVO: How old were you at the time?

JS: I must have been about eight.

MVO: Were you already a chorister by then?

 JS: Yes, I became a chorister when I was seven. I had heard organ music, of course, but it was at about the same time that I discovered this recording.

MVO: At that time, you were singing in the choir at Wakefield?

JS: Yes. It was what we call a parish church cathedral--a church that had become a cathedral in the late nineteenth century. We had a very good choir of men and boys. All the boys were educated at the local grammar school where we had choral scholarships to help pay for our education. From an early age, I was exposed to a wide variety of good music.

MVO: When did you begin playing the organ?

JS: When I finished singing in the choir, I had already been learning the organ for a couple of years--first with Percy Saunders, who very much put me on the right lines and then with the new organist, Jonathan Bielby. He was a great influence on my playing. I studied with him from the age of fourteen to eighteen. He did more than anybody else to develop my technique and my stylistic awareness. He was a very fastidious and demanding teacher, and also a great inspiration. He had been organ scholar himself at St. John's College Cambridge under George Guest. It was he who encouraged me to go for that particular scholarship. I went to Cambridge at the age of eighteen and studied for two music degrees, leaving at the age of 21.

MVO: What were you studying in your lessons with Jonathan Bielby? Repertoire or accompaniment?

JS: A mixture of both. To begin with, the main emphasis was on accompanying. I was in the extraordinary situation of finishing in the choir one week, and the following Sunday I was drafted in to play for the services. I guess my organ playing had become suitably proficient. I went literally from being in the choir one week to accompanying it the next week. After a period of some months, during which I was being tried out, it became a regular process. I was eventually appointed assistant organist at the cathedral. I can remember that first Sunday because we sang an anthem by Basil Harwood called "O How Glorious Is the Kingdom," which has quite a difficult organ part. I dread to think now what it sounded like, but I must have been able to cope with it.

MVO: In the United States, organ study tends to be very repertoire-based, although the vast majority of organists are going to play in churches and need to accompany, not be solely concert artists. I have the impression that your training had an emphasis on accompanying.

JS: That's right. I was a pupil-assistant to Jonathan Bielby. His main job was to direct the choir; I would do most of the service playing. That meant it was in his interest for the success of the choir that the accompaniment be really well-rehearsed and moulded. We spent a lot of time in my lessons working on the cathedral music. That's not to say that we didn't do repertoire. I remember doing a lot of pieces during the four years that I studied with him. When I went to Cambridge, although I was expected to play for services and accompany the choir on a daily basis, I didn't have any specific instruction in that. My music degree was purely academic. I was working on harmony, counterpoint, history, orchestration--that sort of thing. For the first two years, my studies included no practical part whatsoever other than keyboard harmony. Only in my third year was the practical part significant. During that year I had to play a half-hour recital, but it only counted for ten percent of my final marks. During this time at Cambridge, I began studying with Gillian Weir. It was a profound and remarkable experience to study with someone of her eminence and inspirational quality. But it was very much left up to me whether I wanted to study with anybody and indeed, who that person should be. It wasn't a requirement for my university course at all. The same at Oxford. You could be an organ scholar for three years and never have an organ lesson. It's crazy.

MVO: That's incredible! Is that the way it is today?

JS: I'm not sure. I think things must have changed quite a bit since I was there. I think the whole syllabus is not quite so academically based. Practical musicianship has rather more emphasis now. It does seem strange, looking back.

MVO: Based on your experience as a cathedral musician, if you could design the curriculum, what would it include for those aspiring to do what you do?

JS: When I was at St. John's Cambridge, my main duties as Organ Scholar were accompanying and conducting when George Guest was away. As I say, there was no formal training as such, you were thrown into it in a way, and you either sank or you swam. With that in mind, it would be sensible for people who want to focus on church music to have courses in choral direction, service accompaniment, realization of orchestral scores on the organ, and of course guidance in repertoire.

You have to realize the distinction between the English university system and the conservatoire system. If you go to university, you would expect to take a music degree in which the greatest emphasis is on academic study, whereas in a conservatoire it's the other way around. You're basically being trained to be a practical musician, though a certain amount of theoretical study is necessary, of course. I chose consciously to go to university rather than conservatoire because I wanted the broader base that that experience could offer--the chance to meet with people from other disciplines and backgrounds. I found that to be more attractive.

Looking back again, in my first week at St. John's--I was overwhelmed by having this world-famous choir to accompany--I had the scary experience of playing for evensong on the first day of term with basically a new choir and Dr. Guest conducting. On the next day and the day after, he was away and I found myself standing in front of a choir, something I'd never done in my life. Nobody had told me what to do, I just simply had to get on with it. To some degree it's a very English mentality--a very dilettante approach. You make of it what you can and learn by your mistakes. If you're trying to conduct a choir and nobody can follow what you're doing, you have to refine your technique so they can. Of course, I had watched other people conduct. That's the great learning process--observing other people who are  experts. You take a lot of that with you. To this day, I've never had a conducting lesson in my life. It may seem very strange indeed, yet that's the way one functions. And I have the privilege of working with a fully professional choir and many times in the year with professional orchestras.

MVO: Would you say that your experience is fairly typical? Do you have other colleagues who have been similarly plunged into service?

JS: Yes, I think it is pretty typical. A lot of people do come through the cathedral tradition so they're immersed in it. They know the repertoire. Many of my colleagues who are cathedral organists were cathedral choristers. A lot of them have been to university and had very good organ tuition. The other practical skills are acquired rather than instilled. That has its own merits. In this day and age, we're much more concerned with building courses and curricula based on what people wish to do later. All of these things are being examined. In London at the Royal Academy of Music there's a church music course that's been running for ten years which does give people these basic skills which are required for the profession. It's by no means unique now, though it was unique at the time. There are many other establishments which are providing church music degrees which encompass not only the historical background but practical skills and knowledge as well.

MVO: Tell me about your transition from St. John's to St. Paul's.

JS: After four years in Cambridge, I went straight to St. Paul's. I moved to London. I had never lived in London and I was very excited by that prospect. London seemed to be the right place to go. I was invited to take the place of third organist at St. Paul's and assistant organist at Southwark Cathedral, just over the river. Southwark is the cathedral for the diocese of south London, only about a mile away from St. Paul's.  So I was number two at Southwark and number three at St. Paul's, basically playing three days of the week in each Cathedral, usually at Southwark on Sunday. That was a great experience. I did that for seven years--running back and forth over London Bridge. It was a great learning experience, I must say, being involved on the one hand with the professional choir at St. Paul's and the volunteer choir at Southwark cathedral. However two very different liturgical bases as well. St. Paul's at that stage represented all that was very "correct and proper," if that's the right expression--a very traditional form of Anglicanism, whereas Southwark was a more progressive and, dare one say, slightly livelier style of worship.

MVO: Were you working under Christopher Dearnley at St. Paul's when you began?

JS: I was working both with Christopher Dearnley and with Barry Rose who at that stage was in charge of the choir. Looking back, I did most of my accompanying for Barry because I tended to play on the days when Christopher was not there. I worked closely with Barry and learned a great deal. He's a phenomenal and inspirational choir trainer. That was a terrific experience at a time when the St. Paul's choir had made a great impact under Barry's leadership through recordings, developing a more public profile than they had previously had.

MVO: At that time Christopher Dearnley was mainly playing the organ?

JS: He was really. He was the Director of Music, having the overall say in the music program, but after the organ was rebuilt in 1973-1977, he very much wanted to concentrate on playing the organ, to develop its role in the life of the cathedral and beyond. He concentrated on playing the organ for the services and Barry did most of the choir work. I was gradually brought into that. After a while, I took the choir for one day a week.

MVO: So you moved more into Barry Rose's position eventually?

JS: For a year, Christopher took the choir again when Barry left. There's a very nice recording from that time on the Decca label, with Christopher conducting and me accompanying. After about a year, he wished to go back to playing the organ rather more. I think that's where he felt the most comfortable. I was keen to have the opportunity to take the choir on a more regular basis. Although I was sub-organist I found myself directing the choir more and more. I gradually stepped into that position.

MVO: Being in a high-profile position, you're probably under scrutiny a lot of the time. How do you handle that?

JS: To be honest, I don't worry about it too much now. I used to worry about it rather more. You're right, it's a bit of a goldfish bowl. There's never a day, even in the depths of winter, when there are fewer than a hundred people at evensong. You're always conscious that the daily choral office is something that is very visible. Certainly, in the summer months, many more people attend. In July we have visitors from all over the world when we do the orchestral masses. It is a very visible position in that sense. One struggles to maintain standards, but I'm very fortunate in the support and set-up that I have from my assistants, my colleagues and from the choir. We all strive to do the best. In recent years we've reached a pretty consistent standard which is there from day to day. Obviously, every choir has its off days, but they seem to be less frequent than they were when I first started doing the choir work. I'm more established in the position. I don't feel so much the weight of what went on before. I've been there long enough, made recordings and feel more comfortable about what I'm doing in the job.  Of course, I'm always concerned to see who's there from day to day and if they're people I recognize. There might be a day when you suddenly see George Guest or David Willcocks sitting in the congregation! If you worried about that too much, you wouldn't be able to get anything done. Just put your head down and get on with it.

MVO: Do you find the pressure to be a motivating force?

JS: Undoubtedly. The moment you began to relax, to rest on your laurels, is the moment to move on to something else. Every day has its challenge. There's no such thing as a routine week at St. Paul's. There's always something extra. Whether that's ceremonial services, memorial services or whatever, there's never a chance to settle back into a routine. A daily sung evensong is a challenge in itself because for the most part, you pick up the music with the boys first thing in the morning. You've got an hour in which to mould it in the morning, and half an hour with them in the afternoon before the men arrive. The men rehearse at 4:30 with the service at 5:00. As a full choir, we've really only got about twenty-five minutes to practice forty minutes of music. It's a lot to do. There isn't the oppportunity to work much more than a day at a time. On Monday, I try to look at some of the mass for Sunday, but generally we're living from day to day. There's a lot of pressure in that, just to get things done. We have to work quickly, efficiently, and professionally.

MVO: What is the rehearsal schedule?

JS: We rehearse every day except Thursday morning. The choristers are educated in the choir school, which is directly behind the cathedral. They're all boarders--they live there during the term. I see them from 7:50-8:50 every morning except Thursday, which is our day off.  Evensong is sung by the men on Thursday, and the boys sing evensong on Monday. Otherwise, it's full choir on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and three services on Sunday. That's nine choral services each week on a regular basis.

MVO: What do you enjoy the most about your work?

JS: Many things, really. I'm very fortunate being based where I am, having this wonderful building in which to work. It's always an amazing experience just to go into St. Paul's. Every morning I go in and think "wow." It's a building that completely overwhelms you. The sound of music in the building is very special as well. With nine seconds of reverberation, it's a unique acoustical environment in which to work. I'm very fortunate with the choir that I have--30 boys and 18 men--fully professional singers. It's a very dramatic and exciting group of singers with which to work. Of course, the organ  itself is tremendously thrilling. It's a fine instrument in every sense. The Willis part of the organ has great quality and refinement. The part built by Mander in 1973-77 added other dimensions that fit the building very well, further developing the potential of the instrument in a way unforeseen previously. It's a very exciting, versatile instrument. This year I'm playing all the organ works of Bach in twenty-five recitals on Sundays and I'm just amazed at how well it copes with that repertoire. It's been remarkably successful. Obviously, one has to register things in a very judicious manner, but many people have been amazed at how well it does work.

MVO: During your masterclass on  Saturday, I noticed that while you were playing you had a smile on your face. It seemed obvious that you simply love that music and love what you do. What is it all about for you? 

JS: It's very hard to define! I couldn't put my hand on my heart and say that I like this piece of music more than any other. I enjoy all the different styles of music that we sing. It's basically the English cathedral repertoire, of course, and a lot of eighteenth and nineteenth century music. But in the time that I've been responsible for the choir, I've moved the repertoire backwards quite a lot to encompass more polyphony and early music, music which I very much enjoy. The versatility of the group that I have is very great indeed. The men are not particularly challenged by anything you put in front of them as far as notes are concerned. They can basically read anything! There is little need for note-bashing. It's so much been a part of my musical life to be involved with this particular sort of music--Psalms, hymns, canticles, anthems--it's hard to imagine life without it, really. I've often considered whether at some stage in my life I'd like to be a free-lance organist. I'm not sure. That would have its compensations in many ways because I'm really not playing the organ so much at St. Paul's. But I can't imagine life without pieces like the Balfour Gardiner "Evening Hymn" or the Byrd Great Service. I enjoy them so much. Each time I come back to them I try and find something new and keep myself fresh in that way. I don't feel that I'm remotely tired of this music yet. I hope that in ten years time I can still say that. It's the sort of music that does really inspire me still.

MVO: What keeps that musical tradition alive? It's very easy for traditions to become frozen. 

JS: Yes, I know what you mean. Traditions can become fossilized. I think the tradition is continuously being enriched by music from other sources.    The fact is that we're discovering ne repertoire all the time. More and more music is being printed, most notably early music by some very good publishers in England who specialize entirely in Renaissance polyphony--pieces which have not been available before outside of collected editions. The market is being flooded by good quality material. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned, it's wonderful to encourage our best contemporary composers to write for the church. I'm glad to say that the Dean and Chapter support this endeavor. Part of our annual music budget is given over to commissions. For the millenium, we've pushed the boat out a bit. We had a big service on January 2nd which was televised nationally, attended by the Queen and the Government. We commissioned a setting of "Jubilate" from Sir Peter Maxwell Davies for choir, organ and brass. It was a good commission and will work well on its own with organ accompaniment, so we can do it liturgically. We commissioned some brass fanfares from another of our most eminent composers Sir Harrison Birtwistle. They were stunningly well conceived for the building with four different groups of brass playing around the building. It was really fantastic. Later this year, in July, we'll be doing a premiere of a work that we've commissioned from Luciano Berio, the great Italian composer. Our commissions in the past have been from English composers. I felt it was a time to bring in somebody else, so we commissioned Berio who seems keen to write for us. This is an important part of our life at St. Paul's--the church in its traditional role as patron of the arts must be seen to be lively and energetic. Over the years, we've commissioned pieces from John Tavener, Jonathan Harvey, Francis Grier, and William Mathias, among others. Most years we've had a commissioned piece. I've been very pleased and proud of that tradition.

MVO: You seem to view that as a responsibility.

JS: I do. It's all to do with keeping the tradition alive. On the one hand, I like to think that what we're doing is very much in the monastic spirit, as the monks of yesteryear. Our daily office of Evensong has evolved from that tradition. But it has to be renewed of course. We have to be always pushing the boundaries either forwards or, indeed, backwards. That's vital.